Prior Administrator Very Rev. Michael G. Brunner’s graduation homily from the celebration Mass, Sunday, May 24: Today we celebrate the graduation of our class of 2020, in a very different way than any of us planned or wanted.
There was Philip (from the same town as Peter and Andrew,) also a follower of John the Baptist, who then roped in Bartholomew, and introduced him to Jesus. And there was Matthew, a despised extorting tax collector who cooperated with the Romans.
The Book of Ecclesiastes says: “Consider the work of God. Who can make straight what God has made crooked? On a good day enjoy good things, and on an evil day consider: Both the one and the other God has made, so that no one may find the least fault with him.”
There was Thomas, the skeptic. There was another James (also a cousin of Jesus) son of Alphaeus, and Judas the son of James, not the Judas the apostle who turned against Jesus. And finally Simon the Zealot, a devout pharisee and Jewish nationalist.
God knows better than we do what is best, and can bring good out of what we only see as bad. God loves to surprise us, and perhaps today is a day of surprises.
In the Gospel today Jesus says about these Apostles in his prayer: I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world.
The first reading today names Jesus’s prized students, his apostles, and speaks about them right after their graduation, as it were… Jesus’s Ascension. That was the moment Jesus their teacher left them so they could put into practice what he taught them. They weren’t promising material to start with. There were two clusters of them….fishermen from Galilee and followers of John the Baptist, also from Galilee, which was where Jesus was from. Galilee was not where the beautiful people were from; it was not known for scholars; it did not have tier 1 rabbinical schools; it did not even have tier five rabbinical schools. It and its people were rather like the way we used to view Appalachia in this country. There was Andrew, brother of a fisherman and a follower of John the Baptist; he was perhaps the first to recognize who Jesus was, and he roped in his brother Peter, a married man who owned Know that this his own fishing boat.
Today you graduates too are going out into the world, a different world than the one you have known here, a world in which you will have more freedom and responsibility …and more opportunity... to build upon what you have learned in your time here. It would be sad if you have not now become different from what and how you were when you first came here. Those apostles had changed from when they began, but on the first days when they were left on their own, they were hesitant and frightened. Jesus knew that they would be, so he told them to wait. In a short ten days they were overcome by the Holy Spirit and they became men on a mission and they changed the world.
family, this Abbey family, your family, is always here for you.
There was James and his younger brother, John, from a family of some means but still sons of a fisherman and who worked on his boat; they were first cousins of Jesus; Jesus called them sons of thunder; they were loud, precocious, ambitious and their mother thought them very special. They too were followers of John the Baptist who left to follow Jesus for a while and then went back to fishing, before suddenly giving it all up and suddenly quitting their jobs and their father on the boat.
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How have you changed and how will you change the world? We hope that while you were here with us at Portsmouth Abbey you came to better understand yourself, your best self and the God-ness within you, but most importantly, we hope you encountered that primary face of God – the One, The Only, The Holy, and Totally Other, the perfect community of persons – The Father, Son & Holy Spirit, whom we worship here this morning. That God is the mirror in which we see and find our best selves.
P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL
