Our most precious gifts are secret and our Father in Heaven who sees in Secret receives them as such, as do those around us. And He shall bestow that secret upon us in Heaven when he shall gives us a stone, upon which is written that name which none other knows.
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise (Psalm 51:15).
Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near (Matt. 4:17)
Let’s take a moment and plan our work this year.
I want to expand on Mr. Wilbur’s introduction and consider what we might seek together.
This is a college. We are first and foremost a learning community. Our chief object then is to seek, to know, and to love that which is true.
Christ is the Truth, and when he speaks in us, we hear the truth. When he works in us, we are made true.
Our efforts in relation to truth then, need not be in vain because we worship the God who Speaks.
He has spoken to us. Let us then lay down our weapons of defense and hear him. Let us receive the Word of Truth.
Lift up your heads, O gates! And lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in (Psalm 24:9).
I have called this talk The Rhetoric of Love: An Offering of the Whole Person because I want to encourage us to make an offering—to communicate with one another in a new way, by means of a distinct rhetoric made available to us in Jesus Christ.
Let us become letters and syllables formed in the mouth of God: born in the heart of the Father, breathed out by the Holy Spirit, articulated in Christ, so that passing through his lips, we might take on the pattern of the divine Word.
This distinctive rhetoric is repentance. It is the soul’s turning and returning to God. Speech impressed by this new pattern is a gift. And yet, this language of the heart is merely the lingua franca of the Kingdom of the Heaven.
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise (Psalm 51:15).
This kind of speech arises from what is innermost to a life, that which is most private, most hidden in God. Kingdom-speech is also surprisingly that which is most capable of being shared, for it abides in the principle of all unity. It is the rhetoric of love, simple, humble, clear, gracious in all her ways.
Love elicits this koine-language of persons discovered and recovered in Christ.
What we are considering then is the trivium, insofar as the trivium is concerned with communication. Rhetoric and the trivium are, in this respect, part of the culmination of a Christian education.
Keep in mind that to communicate is to make common. It is to share something. It requires an offering, and we are reflecting on the offering of the whole person.
As a college, we are deeply interested in the trivium. Some of our newest colleagues are here precisely for this reason, that they might labor alongside us, as we learn to speak this Kingdom-language together.
So why this trivium project?
It is not because reading cliches, vague introductory paragraphs, essays written merely to meet course requirements pierce us as with a thousand swords of sorrow.
It is not because good writing means good reading and vice versa, or even because students who cannot write or speak well often see what we do here as a kind of museum tour, when it is instead an invitation into the living tradition of Christian intellectual life in the service of God.
Sparing your teachers sorrow, learning to read well, preventing college from becoming a tourist trip through the history ideas, these are good goals. But there is a further consideration which calls us deeper. We are to bring forth fruit worthy of repentance (Mtt. 3:8).
What you do in composition, in logic, in rhetoric, what you do for your final essay in Moral Philosophy, how you answer a question in class, or exegete a passage of Scripture for theology, these are signs of our fundamental work.
We wish to learn together a rhetoric which extends beyond the classroom into our whole life. Rhetoric, so envisioned, is the loving communication of what is good and true. It is simply language governed by the love of God and the love of neighbor.
Rhetoric, in this respect, is not merely clothing for ideas or the arrangement of words. It is the real existence of the idea. It is the inner word of the heart communicated and made present in physical form.
Rhetoric is bound up then in Christian service and is therefore at the heart of our mission at New College Franklin. The trivium, the communication of love, is cross-curricular.
Let’s unpack this and why this means repentance (and therefore spiritual fruit).
To begin a school year is not like firing up a machine at a factory whose wheel will then continue to turn, needing only some oil or fuel.
Nor is school like stepping onto a moving treadmill which has an energy of its own. In fact, the first treadmills were from the Victorian era, used to punish criminals and compel them to do manual labor. Men took one tedious step after another, crushing grain that they might not be crushed by the machine. I hope this is not school for you.
The real driving power of education, as Simone Weil writes, is spiritual and related to the form of attention one gives it. Learning therefore needs quiet, reflection, rest, and must have its roots in love, play, even in joy.
Attention is by its very nature not something mechanical. To put it another way, our work here, if not done with a waking intention toward God, will miss the mark.
What does such an intention look like at school? What are its challenges?
A prisoner is someone whose circumstances impose themselves upon him or her. Their circumstances are felt as alien, arbitrary, cruel, and impersonal.
Again, we hope your time here does not seem like a form of incarceration. Nevertheless, it is easy to lose sight of our work when the going gets tough, when it the demands of college life seem forced upon us. It can begin to feel as if we are mechanical, rather than spiritual.
And when we experience ourselves as mechanisms, we often long for freedom. But if we are not careful, having grown to hate that which seems alien and impersonal (schedules, assignments, deadlines, weird books), we may misread our vocation. We may fail to grasp what a truly spiritual life actually incorporates.
That is why I am calling you to repent with me, not just today but throughout this year! We all must repent of middling attempts to live out God’s call. I say middling because so often I search for the real spiritual work and reject what God has placed at hand, our God who has drawn so near.
For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14)
What do I mean by all this? I mean that, the Kingdom of Heaven is among you (Luke 17:21).
The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near; it is in your midst.
I long for meaningful work, but I am too busy to do the work before me, too distracted to see it, too frightened to look.
I am too far from God’s Sabbath.
I fear, like Ivan Ilyich, that I might smell of corruption, that I might know myself as mundane, mortal, even mediocre.
Am I not called to something greater, to be a philosopher or an musician, to establish justice among the nations, or at least to have a successful business, or a big happy family—to be terrible in splendor, mighty in power?
There is a refuge from this madness. But the only way I can rise above the tyranny of necessity on one side (that is the tedium and demands of life), and ego on the other, is actually the very same refuge as the prisoner—the only true refuge of man, man who has not a place to lay his head.
My refuge from myself, from the constraints of life and the demands of ego, from isolation, grandiosity, and mediocrity, is Jesus Christ and the work he sets before me.
But why belabor the point?
What I am urging us to repent of is treating Jesus or spiritual work in the way that a prisoner might dream about a tropical island, a place to which he might like to flee and escape reality.
There are times when we perhaps need to dream such dreams, but we must learn to live by better dreams. We must, if we are to live well, put away childish things and repent of the illusion of escape, which even the great pagans knew to be a kind of impiety. Let God be our hiding place.
Christians have long held the belief that our work and calling cannot be frustrated by the world. Wherever we find ourselves, whatever our conditions, it is possible to bear fruit. It is always possible to rest in God.
In this respect, this exhortation is one that could be given anywhere. New College Franklin is not the exclusive locus of grace.
The true Christian mystic, the genuine servant of God, meets Christ in the most ordinary courses of life. And there he finds his work, whether in the market, at home, abroad, in the Temple, or in the Colosseum.
Therefore, John the Baptist can insist that we bring forth fruit worthy of repentance (Mtt. 3:8). And God brings forth our first fruits in Christ.
The call to repent and to be fruitful is within the reach of every prisoner, and it is near to us. The man working in a cubicle, the woman who sits upon the judge’s seat, the doctor, the father and mother, the student, even the teacher, every one of us who has received God’s Word has received a call which can be fulfilled. We have work near at hand.
The Kingdom of Heaven is in our midst.
We don’t even have ask when or where the real work may begin. We don’t have to seek out rivers to pass through or fire and flames to brave. God will see to that.
Peter thought himself ready to go with our Lord even unto death (Luke 22:33)! Eventually, he did. He was lead where he would not of his own power lead himself. It was enough for him at first simply to acknowledge before Christ his love.
What will our zeal move us to? What shall grace accomplish?
Will it move us to do our homework? To reflect carefully on a reading, to seek quiet, rest, God? Will it constrain us to speak with kindness or to listen? We need souls strong enough to abide in silence. Every community does.
Will our passion teach us self-control and patience? To edit our writing?
Perhaps our zeal might direct some of us to seek advice, to ask for help, to practice the means of grace available.
Perhaps for the love of God, we might humble ourselves so that the common good of this Christian community can be realized.
We will either seek the good of those around us, or,
at best, merely be moved about by the social-current, afloat on the surface of things, unconscious of the real obligations and joys of friendship. At the worst, we do direct violence to those around us.
Don’t just be part of the machinery, however charming its motions. Don’t be Christian tourists. Be God’s pilgrims. Orient your face toward the Day which God has made.
I hope the elevation of this talk is not misleading. I am not calling us into an anxious piety, or, God forbid, to become a bunch of unctuous, uptight, interfering busy bodies.
I am actually suggesting we simplify things, that we pray, read scripture, that we ask God each day what our work is, what he would have us see and do. When you walk into a house, do briefly ask him how you might serve those within? Do you offer up a brief prayer to be about his work?
Let’s make this practical and bring before our minds some of those works once thought to characterize a Christian, the seven corporal works of mercy:
- To feed the hungry.
- To give water to the thirsty.
- To clothe the naked.
- To shelter the homeless.
- To visit the sick.
- To visit the imprisoned, or ransom the captive.
- To bury the dead.
As well as the Seven Spiritual works of mercy
- To instruct the ignorant.
- To counsel the doubtful.
- To admonish the sinner.
- To bear patiently those who wrong us.
- To forgive offenses.
- To comfort the afflicted.
- To pray for the dead (or we might say, one’s neighbor)
I am arguing that at least some of these are always and everywhere close at hand.
As a student, as faculty, as staff, we each will be busy and may be tempted to think we do not have the time for these things. We will be tempted to think our work here actually conflicts with God’s service.
If it did, we could not in good faith ask you to be here. Thankfully, it does not!
While you are here, whatever life throws at you, that is, whatever God’s providence has ordained, your reasonable worship cannot be impeded.
If we think we are too busy for the service of God, we have probably not entered into the real liturgy of our day.
What is my work today, Lord? Father, what would you have me about? Show me a small way to serve you.
I can pray this even as I meet a friend for coffee, when I walk into the classroom, when I sit to read.
We are
- To feed the hungry.
- To give water to the thirsty.
- To clothe the naked.
- To shelter the homeless.
- To visit the sick.
- To visit the imprisoned, or ransom the captive.
- To bury the dead.
We are
- To instruct the ignorant.
- To counsel the doubtful.
- To admonish the sinner.
- To bear patiently those who wrong us.
- To forgive offenses.
- To comfort the afflicted.
- To pray for our neighbors
These things really are done here! Praise God.
But what does all this have to do with Rhetoric? I will try not to belabor this.
When the servant follows in the steps of her Master, whom does she come to look like?
When the disciple instructs as his Teacher, what does he teach?
When we give what we have received, what is it that we give?
A cup of cool water, well-ordered words, each communicate Christ and are therefore authentic Christian Rhetoric. Let us not fail to speak the Gospel in all its forms.
Jesus Christ is the rhetoric of God, the eternally begotten Word communicated—the divine Word offered on our behalf.
He is a divine Logos, ethos, and pathos, and all the canons of rhetoric take their measure from him.
For he is the Word made flesh.
His humanity, his history is not merely an outer garment we can cast aside if we wish to know the true Christ. Christ’s assumption of bodily existence is not merely a garb, merely skin deep. It is the enfleshed reality of divine Life. He is God offered for us and to us. What unfathomable communion and communication in his offering.
The Incarnation is the supreme declaration of divine nature and human nature. And this declaration has the form of a cross. It also has the character of vocation, for he is Adam and we are his offspring.
Therefore, God calls us to realize in our own flesh something which the flesh, from the beginning, has been made to declare. We are to enflesh the grammar of Divine Life. There is no authentic communication of God which does not ultimately pass through Christ and the cross. And those who confess him, shall on the last day rise.
What is matter, what is flesh, but a real manifestation of being? Flesh is. But flesh is also a veil.
God speaks to us by making many veils, by giving being to things. A veil is a real thing. But it is a real thing which stands before that which is yet more substantial.
Our body, our flesh is a sign, an embodied word which points to invisible things.
Don’t forget, God spoke to us in these last days by Christ, even by rending that sacred Veil—the veil of the true Temple, of which the temple of stone was a sign. God rent the veil of flesh, that we might enter in. What communion that rending offers!
Will your flesh become a sign of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection? We must learn his transfigured language.
I don’t mean to carry us into flights of fancy. My words make complicated what is meant to be simple.
Repentance always has a flavor of simplicity. The day of small things is not to be despised. Saying sorry; I was wrong; cleaning up, saying good morning; giving thanks; returning a call; talking to someone you might not normally choose to. Those who shall inherit God’s Earth know these words.
As we give thanks for new faculty and old, as we rejoice in new students and old, let it be Christ who is in our mouths and on our lips. Let us repent and bring forth fruit worthy of repentance. In doing so, we will find that the Kingdom of Heaven truly is near. It is in our hearts and on our lips, we shall have bound it upon our hands, and made it as frontlets before our eyes.
Your predecessors have sought this fruit. Students and faculty have over the years taught me Christ again and again.
Your peers here have done it, giving of themselves and their resources.
You yourself have surely done this and will do it. All those who are God’s are called to live according to this New Law, the true law of liberty, which Christ has fulfilled for us.
This is not flipping a switch, nor a Christian treadmill. May God’s peace and Sabbath protect us!
This is learning a new language, one you have already begun to love. All languages are first learned by listening. For we cannot share what we have not received. This language we are learning is Christ. It is to walk in the Spirit and offer oneself to God.
O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me (Psalm 70:1).
I will say one thing more.
To become like Christ is to live in prayer and expectation of his aid. And at the core of prayer is silence. For he calls us out sin as Lazarus from the dead. He heals our deaf ears. And he speaks to us graciously, ever ready for us to repent and begin again.
In the beginning (bereshit), he begins. For our God loves to see things brought to perfection and loves to see his power made perfect in weakness, even in us who once were not, but now are, who once were darkness but now are light.
What else is the beginning of all things, but Christ. Our God is a God who begins his work again and again, and he will not cease until he is finished. For in the beginning is our end. This Lord of the growth, this lover and conceiver of process and time, is the King of Eternity, and he is our Father. And today again in Christ, he has begotten us.
And when I forget this, what is it that He does?
Gracious Love calls me to turn and again behold the one pierced for my transgressions. This turning and looking is our Master’s great correction. He turns our eyes back to what is reflected in the Law of Liberty and He instructs us in Christ.
What mercy! What a cause to rejoice!
For when we look into that law of liberty, when we look into that mirror again and again, we remember who we are.
But what do you think it means that when we look into that perfect law, we look as in a mirror? Who does one see in a mirror?
And so, who is it we shall see and whose countenance shall we bear at the end of days?
Do you wish to learn this language, to become the letters and syllables which Christ forms in his mouth and speaks with the breath of his Spirit? Let us commit ourselves to this study.
Learn faithfulness in small things. Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is near, it is in our midst.
Lord have mercy, bind the Evil One from our midst and abide with us, Amen.
Same & Other 