Abbot Michael Brunner gave this homily at the Graduation Mass for the Class of 2024, celebrated on Sunday, May 26, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

Graduation Mass 2024

The reason we are here today is to begin to celebrate a graduation, so my words this morning are primarily directed to the graduates. Saint Matthew’s gospel passage today are Jesus’ final words to his Apostles, words focused on his love for them. At the time Jesus spoke them, those words confounded the Apostles. The Gospel says they had doubts. They did not realize he was about to leave them. We hear his words today with the benefit of hindsight and understanding.

At this important moment in your lives, perhaps some of the things you have experienced here, and many of the things said to you today, don’t make sense to you right now, but will someday, with the benefit of hindsight. Much of our life experience makes sense to us only afterwards. In life, it is all right to look backwards to get your bearings, but never try to go backwards in place or time. You must always look ahead and look forward. Life is always changing. No matter how far away landmark events of life may seem, they come quickly upon us. So today a change comes upon you and a promise is fulfilled. Your years-long journey as high school students officially comes to an end.

It is very appropriate that this graduation occurs on Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate the unique revelation to us of the One God to be a trinity, a community, of three persons. You as a class, as a bonded community of unique individuals, unique manifestations of the divine presence, of goodness, beauty and truth – you will disperse today, much as the apostles did after Jesus left them. As a community you are a face of God, because community is one of God’s faces, the face of Trinity. But you are one face of God that after today we cannot keep with us and we will no longer see. You have done what Saint Paul, the great founder of communities, urged his people to do: “to live in a manner worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” We hope that while you were here with us at Portsmouth Abbey, you came to better understand yourself, your best self and the God-ness within you, but most importantly, we hope you encountered that primary face of God – the One, the Only, the Holy, and Totally Other, the perfect community of persons – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, whom we worship here this morning. This 3-person God is the mirror in which we see and find our best selves. We truly hope and pray you will meet and recognize a new reflection, a new face of God in a loving community at the college or university to which you will now be going.

Picking up where St Matthew’s Gospel left off, the Gospel of St. Mark concludes saying that after Jesus left them: “they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.” Today you are going forth, out into new and different parts of this country and the world, and you will carry with you signs of what you have learned, stand for and believe.

I hope you will take to the places you go and to the people you meet all that you have learned here. And you have learned more than you realize, as you shall soon see for yourselves. If you truly learned how to form and be a community, you have learned something truly important. This kind of unity and harmony does not come easy to people. You just have to look at the world to see how difficult it is for human beings to live and work together in community, in harmony and peace. The Risen Jesus always greeted his disciples with those words we heard in every Eucharist: Peace be with you. And how poignant that greeting is on this Memorial Day weekend, when we remember those who gave their lives to restore peace. As we briefly explored the religions of the world this year, you saw that the search and longing for peace is a universal characteristic of the human heart, a blessing all peoples and religions seek. If love is the certain way to happiness, peace is the landscape through which this way is straightest and surest. Jesus Christ has given us peace, and we experience peace in Jesus Christ, celebrated in every Eucharist, moved by the Holy Spirit, who at Pentecost graduated the Apostles and sent them to gather and unite the human family in peace. Those recipients of the Holy Spirit, that first Christian community, were open to all peoples, gathered together as one at the Eucharist. The Holy Spirit and the real presence of Jesus Christ have brought the hope of unity and real community to all people, to be united through God's Spirit in the one Body of Christ. With the coming of Jesus Christ, God as man, and the coming of the Holy Spirit working in and though us, God is alive and active in the world today.

Abbot Michael delivers homily

As permanent and grinding as the problems of our time seem: a struggle for dominance by a few powerful economies; poverty shackling most of the world’s peoples; depletion of the earth's resources; destruction of the environment; continual violence, war and small genocides; the displacement of millions of refugees – nevertheless, today we remember and celebrate God's continual presence with us as we work to heal and help forge a Spirit-inspired unity among all people, a unity you can help build. In just a few years, our time, the time of this world will be truly your time. In the letter he wrote to the Church, Saint Peter tells us: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” The world desperately needs you to explain your hope and the reason for it. The world desperately needs you and your gifts. It needs you to grow them and produce fruit in larger fields. As you have shared your gifts with us, and we have shared our gifts with you, share the gifts each of you has for the needs of the world that Jesus came to save. The world needs the gift of your faith, your witness to the eternal truth of God’s love, because the world needs true love more than anything else. And faith in that love is the best possible witness, because the world you are going into has little regard for what cannot be proven or demonstrated by science or that cannot serve utilitarian principles; and you cannot prove love or God in laboratories.

The greatest commandment is to love God with your whole being and to love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is the image of God. The world needs good, loving neighbors. The world needs you to confirm the word of God’s love in your lives. The world also needs your gifts in the sciences and the humanities, because science and the world are always in danger of and from inhumanity. The world needs your courage. There’s a very good reason that the nations of the world use young men and women to fight in their wars. It is because you do have courage, strong hearts. The world needs you not to give up your life for some cause, but to live your life for a reason, beyond yourself. And to do that takes real courage. That’s the reason that the apostles were relatively young men, some very young, because they found the best reason to live and love for, and yes, even die for. A love that is not worth defending unto death when and if necessary is not a love worth living for.

Read the scriptures: young Jacob, Joseph, David, Samuel, Esther; young Mary, Peter, Paul, and young Saint John all had dreams which changed their lives and the world. Young John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nelson Mandela all had dreams too. The world has seen many dreams, and nightmares, come true. Nazism, Auschwitz, poison gas, biological warfare, nuclear weapons and the destruction of the World Trade Center were all once just somebody’s dreams. But so were ecumenism, civil rights and racial equality, freedom in South Africa and in the United States, the Bill of Rights, a U.S. President of African descent, and even this school. All were once just dreams, too. The world needs your dreams and visions, because the dreams that individual talented men and women pursue are the dreams that come true and become reality for everyone. Now your time is coming as you enter college, to focus sharply your sights on your dreams, dreams which you will spend your lives in bringing to reality. I hope you find that the seeds of those dreams were planted or at least watered here at Portsmouth Abbey.

My generation, the generation of your parents and your grandparents, all generations before you that have come of age, faced similar challenges in a problematic world, always vexed by the apocalyptic four horsemen of war, lack of food, disease and premature death. You have earned the opportunity to better us all, to build higher and stronger upon our foundation. May what you have learned and experienced here at Portsmouth Abbey guide and protect you for the rest of your lives. Know that this family, this Abbey family, your family, is always here for you. This school’s motto – that word “veritas”, truth – means that we know firmly where we stand in reality: in relationship to God, to his gift of life and to this world, and we express this stance with and in our lives. We stand in faithful adherence to eternal and enduring truth; to the truth of faith certainly, but to all truth, for all truth is of God. God and the world expect from all of us, and now from you, in proportion to what we each have been given. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus speaks that powerful truth: Everyone to whom much is given, of that person much will be required. You do have so many gifts which you have been given and which you have nourished and grown, so may you bear much fruit. And so finally, we pray with St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him. May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call.

Be men and women full of hope: May the Lord bless you and keep you, May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. And may you be loving and beloved, happy and wise.
 

Reception of the Gifts