“You Must Go”

On May 22, I had the honor of speaking to the graduates of Concordia Theological Seminary at Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’d like to share with you a few of the remarks that I shared with these remarkable men and women. Like these seminary grads, each one of us has a call, and a responsibility, to go into the world and make a difference. The way we do that will, of course, be different for each of us depending on our own unique talent and vocation – but into the world we must go.

It’s a well known fact—and sometimes an excuse used by those who “drop out”—that the world’s wealthiest man never completed his college education at Harvard. But not finishing college was not Bill Gates’ biggest unfinished business, according to him.

“I do have one big regret,” the Microsoft man has remarked. “I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world, the appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemn millions to lives of despair.”

The Gates Foundation is now making a huge difference. And at LWR we work with them.

But we desire to work more with you, also—with the church. Because you posses something unique: You go into the world—as women and men, splashed in the strong name of the Three-Person God, therefore, the transcendent dignity of every human person is not a question for you. People living in oppression need your theology-on-the-go, and your theology, in order not to become docetic, needs them.

Even as you walk across this center stage, you walk out into a world that’s more like the world the founder of this seminary found than you may at first realize. When he arrived at the village of Fort Wayne 150 years ago, Wilhelm Sihler found a place that was “primitive and life expectancy was short.”

You are going into a world of immense suffering; a world with H1N1; a world with an economy that, economic experts say, … sucks; a world, where, as the prophet Isaiah says: “Justice is turned back, righteousness stands at a distance, and truth stumbles in the public square” (Isaiah 59:14).

But, there’s something about this world that’s non-negotiable for church-workers like yourselves according to the founder of this venerable institution: Into such a world, “you must go!”