The Class of 2021

The Graduates

Master of Arts in Ministry Practice

Danita Myrlane Nelson

Master of Arts (Theological Studies)

William Henry Luedecke

Patrick Ryan McCarthy

Charles Arthur Mencio Jr.

Master of Arts in Youth Ministry

Aymara Melvina Margaret Albury

The Sam O. Morris Youth Ministry Award

Justin William Bowers

Alex Danielle Cato

Jackie Jones Flores

Sarah Bush Henson

Jesse Kenneth Parker

Conor Dean Peters

Oksana Louise Schwack

Master of Divinity

Samantha Suzanne Bell

Christal LeMay Borchelt

Kelly Jo Bratkowski

Promise Award

The David L. Stitt Fellowship

Audrey Phyllis Burnett, Dual Degree MDiv/MSSW

Crawley Fellowship

The Janie Maxwell Morris Fellowship

Luke Allen Donahue

Jonathan Pearson Freeman

Promise Award

Rachel Henderlite Award

Carl Kilborn Book Award

Dickson Resident

Katherine Ann Graham

James A. “Buddy” Davidson Scholarship

Donald Capps Award in Pastoral Care

Ethel Lance Human & Civil Rights Award

Kailey Noel Gray

Jesse Dean Hinds

Trull-Herlin Fellowship

Chidester Preaching Award

Hendrick-Smith Award for Mission & Evangelism

Gus Kaderly Lott III

Jean Brown Fellowship

Addison Parker Lucas

Dickson Resident

Stephen James Milburn

Jean Brown Fellowship

The W.P. Newell Fellowship

Jacob Wesley Naron

Johnston Family Fellowship

The Alsup-Frierson Fellowship

Caitlin Marie Parsons

Betty Wilson Jeffrey Fellowship

The Pile-Mogan Fellowship

Kimberlee Christine Runnion

Elizabeth Currie Williams Fellowship

Max Sherman & Barbara Jordan Fellowship

Kimbol Dianne Soques

Charles L. King Preaching Award

John B. Spragens Award

John Crandon Weller

Jean Brown Scholarship

Charge to the 2021 graduates

By President Theodore J. Wardlaw

Today, for the nineteenth year in a row, I am honored—almost beyond words … almost—to have the special privilege of offering a charge as you now prepare to leave this place and to step into what’s next. A parish or more graduate school or a youth ministry setting or a chaplaincy or a non-profit or some other form of service. And, at this moment in every year that I’ve been here, it is my privilege to send you, the Class of 2021, out into some corner of the world that needs nothing quite so much as you.

But I do need to warn you that, precisely because you are the Class of 2021—whether it’s a class graduating from a seminary or a university or a medical school or a business school or a law school or whatever—because you belong to the Class of 2021, somebody’s eventually going to say to you, “Well, that’s the COVID class.” And just that remark will carry with it a host of assumptions.

The COVID class. You entered this place, most of you, when we didn’t know what the word “COVID” meant. When the COVID-19 pandemic could not have been imagined. Who could have dreamed this scenario fifteen months ago? Who could have forecast, let’s say in February of last year, the encroachment of a cumulative effect of so many deprivations and horrific scenarios piling up on top of one another? The isolation as we all quarantined, the backdrop of a national political meltdown, the painful demonstrations of ongoing discrimination and violence toward people of color, the stress, the fear of getting sick, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the way in which every day felt like Groundhog Day, all of it accumulating into a feeling that wasn’t necessarily depression, but more like what David Brooks described a few weeks ago in the New York Times as “lassitude:” a state of mental or physical weariness; a lack of energy.

You would walk into a room and forget why you’d gone in there and what you were searching for. Over time, it was like the wilting of muscle memory. You would forget the names of people, you would forget the places and the names of streets beyond your COVID bubble, you would forget at night what you were supposed to do the next day. Even if we managed to avoid the illness, we could not escape the flatness, the solitude.

So what do we do now, as it looks like things are lightening up?

David Brooks again: “I’ve been surprised,” he writes, “by how much it feels like not just a social problem but a moral one. We say we feel a sense of purpose and mission when we are serving a cause larger than ourselves. But I’ve learned this year, how much having a feeling of purpose depends upon the small acts of hospitality we give and receive each day, sometimes with people we don’t know all that well.”

Small acts of hospitality that we give and receive each day.

Certainly you, the COVID class, have seen, from time to time across this year, such small acts of hospitality. In that horrible winter storm that came through Austin and froze up our campus, your apartments, and the homes and families of our faculty and staff; there was so much disruption. And, in its wake, such fear and despair. But there was something more redemptive than all of that. There was also kindness. In the midst of all of the frightening chaos, one of our students managed to distract some of the children of our campus by teaching them how to snowboard. Others of you left gifts at the doors of your neighbors’ apartments—cookies, hot chocolate. And in that horrific experience that went on for days, so many of you managed to access a courageous kindness.

I believe that the aroma of such kindness still lingers on our campus—long after the effects of the storm. And I want to commend the relentless practice of kindness— even in a coarse and disheartening world—as one Christian virtue that has the potential, nonetheless, to change the world.

In Luke’s gospel, there was an occasion when an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What’s written in the law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”

The man answered well because he knew his Bible. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But the man wanted to push the matter. He knew his Bible, but he also knew his comfort zone; and he wanted to test the outer limits of correctness, and so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” There’s where the rub always is, isn’t it?

In his reply to the man, Jesus gave us one of the most fetching parables in all of the gospels. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers who stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. A United Methodist seminarian happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he feared that he might be an Episcopalian and so he passed by on the other side. So too, a Presbyterian seminarian, preoccupied with the polity portion of his ordination exams, saw the man and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan—someone who probably could not have been admitted to Austin Seminary—came where the man was; and when he saw him he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” said Jesus.

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

I read the news every morning, like I’m eating a dog’s breakfast, and sometimes it breaks my heart to see the latest evidence of the cruelty in the world. But we are shown throughout scripture a stubborn compassion, a relentless kindness, that shows us how to overcome the world. I charge you today, as you go out to engage that very same world, to practice a relentless, non-discriminating kindness.

I’ve read that the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder was once challenged by a Gentile to teach him the entire Torah while he, the Gentile, stood on one foot. Hillel the Elder fulfilled the challenge in one short paragraph. “What is hateful to you,” he said, “do not do to your neighbor. That’s the entire Torah; the rest is commentary—now go and study it!”

That, friends, is the Gospel. So go from this place with our blessing, and study it! And practice, for as long as you draw breath, the radical grace, mercy, and peace of our faith.