(2017 Mars Hill Graduation Address)

I want to focus on one word today: gratitude. Gratitude for what we have as a community in Mars Hill. I’m tempted to go on and on about the outstanding academic achievements of this school—our ACT scores, the performance of our graduates in college, and what they go on to do—but I won’t. I’ll just share one example. Years ago I had a student at Mars Hill who was—how shall we say it—near the back of the pack. I had this student, however, as an Asbury student later and realized that she was head and shoulders above the other students in her college class. I took a second look at the essay that she had written for my class and realized that it wasn’t really any better than what she had written for me at Mars Hill. Compared to her peers at Mars Hill she appeared to give poor work, while compared to her peers at college coming out of a progressivist school environment she appeared to be someone who could actually write grammatically complete English sentences. And not just that: she actually knew what an argument was and how to form one. I won’t go on and on about how we should be grateful for the academic advantages of Mars Hill because this really is not Mars Hill’s greatest strength. I was talking to Martin Cothran on Thursday night about the massive flowering of classical schools across the country. More and more these schools are forming their own accreditation agencies, their own college tests, and more and more colleges and employers are courting their graduates because the results are clear and decisive. Next to these schools, Mars Hill is merely one among many who do it better than we.

Instead I want to encourage a profound sense of gratitude on the part of everyone here today for the thing that I believe Mars Hill does best: community, a common life lived together in genuine love. I do not think that we are unique in this, but we are atypical. When I look into the dank cramped cave of the human heart I find ugly little blind fish that eat away at community. The Christian tradition calls these little blind fish “the passions”: greed, sensuality, pride, selfishness, rebellion, lust, self-absortion, conceit, idolatry. These things and others like them are called the “passions” from the Latin word passio because they are diseases of the soul from which we suffer. The Greek equivalent gives us our word “pathology.” What Christianity has always tried to overcome, many forces in our world today would now try to exploit in order to gain your dollars or your votes. What our education tries to slowly eradicate in the soul, progressivist education tries to cultivate. In such a world, it is no wonder that real community is hard to find. We should be grateful, then, for what we have because it is rare.

In place of broken homes we have strong marriages that nurture children. In place of parents seeking their own toys, we have parents laying down their lives for the upbringing of their children. In place of a principal that took this job as a way to advance his own career, we have a headmaster that we don’t pay who loves each of these graduates individually and sacrifices extraordinary amounts of his time to dig into the real spiritual battles of their lives. In place of cliques and bullies we have a single, unified senior class that loves one another and holds one another accountable. In place of the back-biting politics of PTA and sports-team boosters, we have families that come together around a common vision. In place of teenagers, we have men and women. In place of rebellion, we have submission. In place of kids who are absorbed in looking cool, we have Kyle and Mason.

But all this is not possible. It is not as though the parents and teachers and students that I see here never had a dank cramped cave in their hearts where they fed tidbits of community to their own little blind fish. The dynamics of love, sacrifice, and commitment that I see here should not be possible for beings such as these. What I see here is literally miraculous, a rupture of the order of things only possible because Omnipotent Love has torn it open. Two thousand years ago our king allowed nails to be driven into his hands and his feet and he allowed a spear to be driven into his side. From that torn open side still flows a river of blood and water that tears open our cramped cave and kills the fish that swim there. Only the death of God and his victory over death through the power of an indestructible life make this impossible Mars Hill possible. And the appropriate response in our hearts to this is gratitude.