Baccalaureate: What are You Doing after Graduation? Genesis 45:4-8a
By William H. Willimon
It raises a question: What if your life is not just yours? What if it's not your parent's?
I have seen this among you. Some of you have taken twists and turns, odd lurches to the left or to the right, that simply cannot be explained by reference to your psychological makeup, or your sociological background. It is as if someone, something, got hold of you, moved you to some new place not of your own devising.
People of faith tend to explain this inexplicable phenomenon by reference to God. Maybe we're actors in a play, and the playwright is greater than ourselves.
Augustine once said that when you look back over your life, the steps you have taken can first appear like chicken tracks in the mud, little chicken tracks going this way and that in the muddy chicken yard, without direction. But through the eyes of faith, sometimes those seemingly purposeless tracks take on pattern, a direction. We begin to see that they are going somewhere. They suggest the hand of God. And it is then that you realize that the life you're living, the meaning that you mean, is not all that there is. We are busy, meaning this for evil, or for our selfish ambition, but God is busy meaning this for good.
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The great Commencement question must be refrained. It is too simple to ask, "What are you doing after graduation?"
A more complex, faithful question, "What is God doing with you after graduation?" There is an old theological word for it - Providence. That time you are able, like Joseph, to look back on your life, maybe by your twentieth reunion, and see that the times, the bad times as well as the good, had in them a sense of direction. While you were busy making your choices and decisions, God was also busy. Weaving. Creating.
I know somebody who is incredibly smart in physics. "Were your parents good in physics?" I asked.
"No."
"It is great that you have such an aptitude for physics," I said, "and that you have developed it so well."
"True," you said, "It's also a great responsibility. I have been given a gift. A lot is expected of me."
I thought that you had it just about right. There is a claim on you. We have a word for it - Vocation.
What the world calls mere natural endowments, are gifts. Every gift is also an assignment. Or as the poet Maya Angelou told you, right here, during your first week at Duke, "We have given you everything this society has, the best of it. You are the beneficiaries of the best of our educational system ... Now you owe us!"
Keep looking over your shoulder as you go forth. Be open to the possibility of an unseen hand. The life you live may not be exclusively your own.
So congratulations, dear graduates. God has done great things through you, given great gifts, and means to do greater things even yet.
There is a claim on your life. You live not just for yourself. We have a word for it - Vocation.