It was an honor to offer the first commencement address for the Institute of Lutheran Theology's graduates from Christ School of Theology and Christ College on Thursday, June 16, 2022. There were 14 students who walked last week. Congratulations all!
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Grace and peace to you in the Name of the Risen Lord!
You made it! Some of you made it just this last semester, and some semesters long ago. Regardless of when you completed your programs, we are proud of you!
We just completed the ILT Board Meeting this morning. We talked about operations, policies, budgets and the future. And we talked about you! You are so very important to us, and I want you to remember this throughout what I shall say today.
This summer some of my PhD students are reading two very important books from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. Levinas in these texts does something bold and new. He claims, in fact, that most of the western intellectual tradition has simply missed what is completely obvious: There is much more to things than just our thinking about them, our categorizing, explaining and knowing of them.
There is the Other, he argues, that which is truly not-I, but is irreducibly more than merely not being I. Levinas claims, in fact, that the Other is infinite; we can never think deeply enough or sense precisely enough to be able to grasp the Other as other than my grasping of it. We have an inexorable Desire for this Other, says Levinas. We want to escape our world and flee into it.
This Other, declares Levinas, resists the Totality of the Same. It halts every effort to comprehend it. It confronts my life of freedom with demand. I encounter the Other though the human Face. The Face and eyes of the Other place a demand upon me that limits the freedom of the world I have built and in which I dwell. According to Levinas, the Face of the Other is a trace of God. Accordingly, religion pertains to the irreducible, unbridgeable gap between my activity and my projects and the Face of the One whose meeting cannot be comprehended in and through my activity and my projects.
The Other meets me as demand, but every fiber of my being wants to deny the pull of the Other and to make the Other into the Same, that is, into more of me. Accordingly, I who am drawn to the world of the Other, want a world without an Other, for I can dwell comfortably in such a world. I am quite at home in the sameness of my world until the Other’s nomadic sojourn, until this Stranger arrives. The Other announces itself to me in and through my discomfort. Now I, who am no longer at home, must have a face-to-face encounter with one who is not of my world.
Levinas has a particular take on the philosophical notion of transcendence. His teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thought mightily on this topic. Husserl believed that the I transcends itself when it knows what is not it. Because consciousness is directed toward an object, conscious life is ecstatic. To be conscious, to be self-conscious, is to be conscious of that which is not the self. In Husserlian talk, every noetic act has noematic content, and all noematic content presuppose a noetic act.
His student Heidegger too was concerned with transcendence. Human being is that “being-there” which is being-always-already-in-a-world. To be is to have a world in which to be. Human existence for Heidegger is thus ecstatic. To be is to be always already outside oneself. There is no bare identity to the self. The self is the self in being other than a mere self. It is what it is in the world which it is not.
Levinas thought that both Husserl and Heidegger were not bold enough in conceiving transcendence. He argued that both philosophers ultimately tried to understand the Other on the basis of the same, and thus never really go to the Other at all. Instead Levinas opts for a real encounter with the Other, an Other that can be no part of the Same. We live, dream, plan and execute in the Totality of the Same. Our lives, dreams, plans and deeds are the deposits of our own freedom. We are comfortable. Then comes the Other from a place outside the Same, an Other that pushes us beyond ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Same. We transcend toward the Other.
In the Face of the Other, in the vulnerability of his or her eyes, I am lifted beyond my own projects. I am no longer the one I seemingly inescapably am, no longer the one trapped in the freedom and comfort of my self-narrative. The Other grants me an ecstasis beyond being all I can be, beyond being who I authentically am, beyond being the one who in its being lives the possibility of no more being. The Other seizes me and all my dreams of self and Same are shattered.
So what does the relation between the Same and Other have to do with you who graduate from ILT? Why have I started my commencement speaking by speaking in such a way?
You have all been to graduations, and you know the drill. Graduation day is the day to talk about the graduates, their lives as students, their overcoming of adversity, their accomplishments, skills, dreams, and opportunities. Graduation Day celebrates the student after years of emphasizing the professors. Graduation day is pregnant with future possibilities.
But the President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology cannot talk about you in this way. Why?
Because you are neither your possibilities nor your actualities. You are, in fact, not you. You are beings who in your being are ecstatically connected with something not of your world. Accordingly, you are beings who shall preach and teach without a career. You are beings who shall pray and serve in denial of searching for or finding yourselves. You are beings who are not who you are, but are only in pushing beyond to what you are not.
Let me make this clear. ILT has not prepared you to live fully, but rather to come and die. ILT has not offered you opportunities to get ahead in life, but has pushed you to the edge of life. ILT has not given you courage to be yourself, but has robbed you of the illusion of self. Why say such things on this day of days?
When Christ calls a person, He calls that person to come and die. This death is the death of the self, the end of the Totality of the Same, the abnegation of the creaturely life of enjoyment within the Father’s creation. This Call from the Stranger, from the One who perpetually sojourns, is a call to live outside the self and upon the boundary, it is a call back from the monotony of being into the rupture of meta-physics, a call to that which is beyond physics and all its being.
Let me make this even more clear. ILT is not about its students, its faculty, its curriculum, its staff, its Board, its alumni or its donors. ILT is not about ILT. ILT is not at all about the Totality of the Same, but rather about the ecstasy of the Other. ILT is about that which ruptures all of its own projects. ILT is in the call toward what is not. ILT is about the Christ.
Graduates of ILT, you have been called to extraordinary lives, because you are called to a life that ends your life. You have a serious task at hand, a task much more serious than your life. Your task is witness to that Other who displays His traces in the eyes and faces of those you encounter. The master lives in his own house, but the servant lives in another’s. You servants who face Faces of divine traces, have ultimately one and only one otherworldly task. You must listen!
You, whose lives are not your own, you, who have no careers, you, who live the discomfort and displacement of all that makes you you, you must listen to a Word that cannot be your word, a Word that destroys your illusions to lead, a Word that annihilates the deepest pleasures of Creation itself, a Word that seizes you, strangles you, and suffocates the last vestiges of your own freedom, a Word otherly distant but proximately fascinating.
What advice can I give graduates of ILT?
Live in the ecstasy of this Word. Dwell not in the meadows of the Same, but rather in the desert of the Other. Listen to this Word from that place beyond being that calls you to a deep service of your neighbor, a call not built upon the reasonability of such service, but rather gifted by the absurdity of the call itself. Live, hearing the Word that propels you to the ultimate boundary of this world, live the Word that demands, but loves in and through those demands.
What advice can I give to graduates of ILT? “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom.12:2), a renewing that can never be of this world, but can be only in being otherwise than being, can be only through the free grace of Jesus the Christ. What I am saying should now be clear. Hear the Word that loves, graces, frees, transforms, and renews; hear this Word not as words about the Word but as the Word itself, as the Word that assumed flesh and dwelt among us. Hear the Word whose doing in you drives you away from yourself and towards the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who will ultimately equip you for ministry.
Graduates, we have learned from you and have been changed by you. Your faces among us have made us more than we are. Your time here was precious for us. We know that you are not ours, but His. We now wait, listening for the Word that words in and through your words. We wait as you preach, teach, and witness to that Other, an Other that sounds forth from where we ought to be, but can never find ourselves. We wait as the Word that words in your words reclaims the Same for service of the Other, an Other who is wholly holy.
We are created as nomads who profoundly prefer to wander in the labyrinths of the Other than settle in villages of the Same. But we have exchanged our birthright for a mass of pottage (Gen 25:29-34) and have become squatters upon the Same, thus erasing and defacing the Other. But then the Word spoken by your lips, graduates, speaks Truth. You are not your own, but His, so you need no longer worry about being you.
So what ultimate good could come from the goodness of life when compared to wandering in the wilderness of the Holy?
