BSC Trustee Rev. Brian Erickson ’97, senior minister at Trinity United Methodist Church, spoke at BSC’s baccalaureate service for the Class of 2023. His remarks have been gently edited for length.

Even as someone who leads ritual for a living, I have not always appreciated our graduation customs. 

Whenever human beings are faced with great uncertainty, with overwhelming change, faced with our own frightening and inconceivable ignorance of what is to come, we get dressed up.  We set out cookies and punch. We give each other gifts. We purchase greeting cards for one another, hoping that Hallmark will somehow make sense of everything for us.  

Today is one of those days. You graduates, who have stayed up all night studying, or pretending to study, who have frustrated yourselves over the search for the “right major,” which of course is always a compromise between what you really think you might want to do and your parents think might actually get you a job; you graduates who now face an unknown tomorrow, an uncertain future, and no longer have a meal plan to at least ensure that you’re fed on a semi-regular basis—we have gathered here for you.  

And we have all gotten dressed up. This should concern you.  

In case you didn’t realize it, you are in the middle of one of at least two inspirational talks you will receive over the next few days, where you are given simple bits of wisdom like “don’t give up” or “seize the day” or “never stop being a student.” Things like that. This is a day of commissioning, where we send you out into the world beyond Arkadelphia, cross our collective fingers, and hope for the best. We try and have enough pomp and circumstance to make you feel as if this were not a graduation, but your coronation. After four or more years of classes and readings and papers, we try and now reveal to you the secrets of successful living, pretending that any of you might still be listening.  

Because any time you have a commissioning, there is some unknown. Think about it: You don’t have a commissioning for just anything. There is no commissioning for getting out of bed and putting on your clothes every morning, though for some college students that is clearly a feat in and of itself. 

No, the kind of things that usually involve commissioning require some great unknown. What I mean by that is that the things we get dressed up for, the things people get commissioned to do, usually have some inevitable risk attached to them. That is a commissioning.  

Or the breaking of a champagne bottle against the hull of a new boat, which seems like an incredibly silly thing to do, if you use your well trained liberally-arted minds to think about it for any length of time. At the very least, it’s a waste of perfectly good champagne.  

But then again, if you are one of the sailors who will trust your life to that little bundle of wood and nails, who will trust your life to those waves out on the sea, maybe it’s not so strange after all. Maybe breaking that bottle, well, maybe that silly little ritual is the only thing you can do, because there just aren’t words big enough to hold all that you’re feeling. 

So here we are, having come from all over the country, dressed in our finest clothes, surrounded by all pomp and circumstance the college can muster, with our gifts and beautiful music and the faces of friends and family. Later this week, you all will dress in some shiny nylon robes, wearing a flat board on your head that no one has ever looked attractive in, march across a stage and be handed a piece of paper.  

And to an outsider, I imagine that this might all be a little strange, even a little silly. But then again, it makes perfect sense. Because I imagine that the reason they break those bottles against new boats is that they hope when the storms come, when the waters rise, when that ship is tested against the waves and the hardest job in the world is to be a sailor—they hope that all those on board will remember how many people love them, how many people are praying for them, and all the reasons they started out in this direction in the first place. You see, we too are here to send you on your way. We have gathered to commission you for life itself.  

But you are different than most, class of 2023. I am mindful that when you arrived on campus, when you took your first classes as freshman on August 28, the year was 2019, as in, the year before normal died.  

College is supposed to be an ivory tower, four years of distance from the so-called real world, for you to wrestle with questions of meaning and soak in the wisdom of your professors. Part of the burden of expectation we put on folks as they begin college is this sense that these are meant to be the best four years of your life, which is tremendous pressure, sort of like Smokey the Bear telling you that only you can prevent forest fires. 

But the message is that this is sacred time, protected time, time for relationships and exploration and questions, equal parts freedom to make foolish decisions and wisdom born of the ages.  

This is what we promised you in all the brochures, profound conversations on a manicured quad, life-long relationships with people who know the real you, an engagement with all the things that make a life good and holy and worth living. 

Instead, class of 2023, you got a Zoom call. Often a Zoom call in which you had to instruct your Ph.D-laden leaders how to unmute themselves.  

Instead of those effortless relationships, you got isolation in a single dorm room and social distancing. You got friendships where you didn’t know what half their face looked like. 

Instead of carefully proctored conversations about difficult things, you got a world of unrest, anger and rage and misunderstanding mingled with the restlessness of injustice and inequality. 

And just as a new and admittedly more tenuous normal began to emerge, in the year that should be your victory lap, you wondered if you would be the last class to graduate from this beloved school. 

So I guess I want to say I’m sorry about that. To be clear, I am not personally responsible for all of it, but I am sympathetic. 

I was chatting with a friend the other day and we were trying to imagine walking through what you’ve been through as a class. My friend, who is brilliant and accomplished and a tremendously hard-working person, said without hesitating, “I would have quit. I have zero doubt about that.” 

A lot of what my generation assumed was permanent has been revealed to be quite fragile in these last four years. You’ve not had the luxury of permanence or security or even stability. 

And here today, in this worship service, in which we wear robes and mark this transition and speak of God in the same breath as we name your accomplishments and look to your future, I wonder what you will become now. 

Because, in my experience of working with people, the experience of pain usually produces one of two reactions. When we human beings find our world coming apart, our plans undone, our hopes and dreams sidelined, we usually respond in one of two very different ways.  

For most of us, there is bitterness. It seems like the easiest emotion to come by when we are grieving a loss—the world took something from me, and I am going to be defined by what was taken from me for the rest of my life. 

Ironically, bitterness is often born out of expectation. Disappointment only exists where there has been expectation, disappointment requires us to believe we are owed something that we have not received. And understandably, that leaves us either determined to fend for ourselves, to isolate ourselves even further from anything that might hurt us, or even to wish for others to lose what we have lost. 

The less popular, but I would argue, more satisfying option in every way, is to find purpose. My religious tradition often refers to it as calling, a sense of direction, of urgency, born out of the very thing that breaks your heart. 

In the lesson we heard from the Hebrew Bible today, God speaks through the prophet, Isaiah, and makes a tremendous promise: 

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; 

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; 

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, 

and the flame shall not consume you. 

These are some of the most beautiful and hopeful words of comfort ever spoken, emerging from a season of tremendous disappointment and loss. But too often, we read them too quickly and miss what God is actually promising. 

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” is not only a promise about God’s presence; it’s also a promise that there will be floods and rivers that seem to overwhelm.   

It’s not “if you pass through the waters,” or better yet, “Because I am with you, you are exempt from water passage,” but in the very moment your own strength and resolve is inadequate, the moment that is guaranteed with a life of purpose, there you will discover the God who has not abandoned you. 

Maybe you were on the swim team, and the whole “pass through the waters” doesn’t bother you much, but unless walking through fire is a D3 sport now, maybe we can at least agree all of us prefer walking around fire rather than walking through it. 

And whether we like it or not, it is generally true that God uses broken-hearted people. 

I don’t mean sad people. God certainly cares for those who are sad, but God uses the broken-hearted people. In fact, if you read the scriptures, most of the time, the call of God will not come with goosebumps and warm fuzzies. It will come with weeping and heartbreak. 

Because the thing most likely to break your heart is the feeling that the world is not what it could be. 

You can numb yourself to it, you can close yourself off to it, or you can care, you can love, and if you make the choice to love, your heart will be broken.  

When you love, you put yourself in danger of a broken heart, because you will always have an awareness of what could be, of what should be. And when you love, you will also see the distance between what could and should be, and the reality of what is. 

Because the most deceptive lie this world tells us is that we cannot do anything about it. That it’s not our business. That this is the real world, this broken, inevitably corrupt and disappointing reality, and the best we can do is mind our own business. 

Sometimes a broken heart is the voice of God, calling you to something new. 

To believe that God is asking you to do something about the gap between what the world is and what it could be. To go and do something about the suffering of the world. To pray that God would carry you into the heart of the world’s pain, rather than deliver you from it. 

Several years ago when I was the chaplain here at BSC, I took a group of students on a trip to one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, in a portion of Harlem where only 7 percent of the neighborhood kids graduated from high school. 

We worked with an inner city school, painting, tutoring, doing what little we could. It was a great experience, but it was a hard experience. The kids left our care every day and went back to the streets, or parents who were drug dealers, or no one at all. 

When it was time to come home, I was more than ready. Ready to get back to my office, my own bed, my comfortable routine. 

One of the young women on the trip, whom I’ll call Karen, was bright and had a couple of grad schools to choose from when she graduated at the end of the year, and she came into my office a few weeks after we got home. 

I figured she probably wanted a recommendation letter for school, and sure enough, she says, “Brian, I need a recommendation letter.” 

I say, “Sure. What school is this for?” 

Karen looked at me.  “Public School #391.” 

“What?” 

“I’m going back. I have to go back.” 

“Karen, that’s not the way this works. See, you’re supposed to take the trip, take lots of good pictures and all, but then you come home and it’s over. What do you mean you’re going back to Harlem?” 

“Who else is going to care for those kids, if I don’t?” 

Her parents didn’t speak to me at graduation, by the way. 

Class of 2023, you have every right to retreat, every reason to proceed cautiously into this broken world, no one would blame you. But I wonder if there aren’t some of you who will be a little more reckless, who might believe that the very thing that was taken from you, the very valley you’ve walked through, is and forever will be a part of who you are and who God has called you to be. 

Give someone else what you’ve lost. 

Go into all the world and show them why we need Birmingham-Southern. 

May you move forward, ever, but in the off chance there are also pauses and rewinds and holding patterns to come, may you know deep within the fabric of your soul, that there is ever more, an inexhaustible well of new and holy and true. And those willing to be learners, those willing to be open to it, even long after these nylon robes have lost their sheen, will be ushered into a truth too great to tell: 

That in the overwhelming places, the uncertain places, in the fire and the flood, we are not alone, and we never have been. For there is another there, standing with us. And that will always be enough.