Dr. Byron Hulsey delivered this sermon at the opening chapel service on Sunday, August 30. Because of social distancing rules, boys gathered by cohort and participated in the service virtually.
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This famous passage from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians provides us with an inspiring and fulfilling vision for what it means to live in community and in brotherhood. As we welcome our new boys and new faculty and launch the 132nd year in the history of Woodberry Forest, we need love in a time when fear, anxiety, loss, dislocation, isolation, and suffering spill into and hover over our communities, the nation, and the world.
Earlier today I shared with the parents of our new boys that our greatest aspirational goal as a faculty at Woodberry is that every boy in the Tiger Nation will be known, challenged, and loved. Over the years I’ve repeated this phrase so often that some of the skeptics and cynics among us roll their eyes a bit, but it is exactly what I believe great teaching demands and what shapes the kind of moral communities that are bigger than we will be on our own. And it is clear to me that love is demanded from us now more than at any point in Woodberry’s history. Given the challenges that we face, every single one of us is needed to know, challenge, and love each other for the good of the community and for all of us who make it whole and are made more complete in return.
Paul makes clear that among the virtues of faith, hope, and love, it is love that stands supreme. Love stands apart because it is the engine that animates the enduring virtues of faith and hope, and love is the only redemptive virtue that blunts the paralyzing force of fear. Love lets in the light and makes the crooked places straight when we blunder in good faith, or ask for forgiveness when we make a mistake, or come up short in an effort to show that we have understood what we can’t yet understand. Love binds us together when everything else can pull us apart.
By love I don’t mean the fluttering heart you can get from a crush. I don’t mean what we romanticize or fantasize about, or what or whom we idolize. I don’t mean who you follow on your socials, or who you think is most attractive. And in this vein I’m not concerned about whether or not you favor Carolina or Duke or Virginia or Tech, whether you’re for the Panthers or the Cowboys or the Lakers or the Bucks. I’m a fan, too, but I’ve come to know that you can’t, in the most redeeming way, love what or whom you don’t know. To be loved we must be brave enough to unfold ourselves for others so that we are known for who we are. And just as challenging, we must love others for who they are and not for who we might want them to be. Paul makes it clear that to be known isn’t as easy as it may sound: “For now,” he says, “we see in a mirror, dimly, but then (suggesting some point in the distant future) we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
Because vulnerability is so risky, most of us, most of the time, pull back from allowing ourselves to be fully known. We live with figurative masks to match the literal masks of COVID-19. We pose and posture, bicker and squabble, tease and critique — most of it in an effort to feel better about ourselves by hiding our inner selves from our outer selves. When we live in the ruts of this veiled life, we might protect ourselves in the short run, but we drain potential from the generative power of community and the animating source of sustaining love. We’re never fully known, and we never really know each other.
Living a life of love often starts with telling our stories, and listening to the stories of others. Sharing stories about ourselves is a goal that I have for Woodberry this year. That’s why I asked the community to read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. It’s a book about the community of Port William, Kentucky. It’s a novel of collected stories about the people who animated that community. And through the stories that Jayber shares about those in the community he comes to know, it’s a book about love.
It starts with being known. You might remember that Jayber was orphaned at a young age when both of his parents died. He lived with Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy briefly, but then they died, too. He endured several desolate years in the church orphanage called The Good Shepherd. And then he wandered into Pigeonville College thinking he might want to be a preacher. At one point a wise professor named Dr. Ardmire helps Jayber take off the mask of believing he might be called to preach. Knowing that he had far too many questions with no apparent answers, Jayber strikes out on his own and begins taking the path back home.
After a stint as a barber in Lexington and as a part-time student at the University of Kentucky, Jayber returns to his roots in Port William and is reunited with Burley Coulter and meets Mat Feltner. In a climactic scene upon his return, he’s offered the chance to buy the downtown barber shop, and after the banker Mat Feltner makes the offer, Jayber shares how powerful it is to be home and to be known, to be truly known, for the first time since he was a child: “You will,” he offers, “appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child.”
Even though we see dimly, and even though we are now wearing actual masks, I have the abiding hope that you will be known here at Woodberry, and I hope that we all come to know each other. To know and be known are essential for authentic respect and necessary for enduring love. This won’t be easy, because the love of which I speak is demanding and sacrificial and uncomfortable. It requires that we are brave enough to be vulnerable so that we might be known, and then courageous enough to know each other more completely. Genuine love is always demanding, especially in the midst of a global pandemic that spawns anxiety about health and welfare and in the midst of social, cultural, and racial strife that separates us one from another, and all of it in anticipation of a contentious national election that threatens to divide us one from another.
The only answer to these travails is love, but this kind of love can often feel like more than we are able to deliver. In tonight’s Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus calls on his followers to sacrifice their selfish interests, “to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” It’s an ideal not too far removed from the charge in the “Boy’s Prayer” to “keep me ready to help others at some cost to myself.” Small, even unseen, acts replicated every day generate the kind of love Jesus calls for in the Gospel according to Matthew.
The Woodberry veterans amongst us — staff, students, and faculty — know what it means to sacrifice for the good of the whole, but the demands of today feel overwhelming: COVID tests, brain-tickling nasal swabs, masks, cohorts, quarantines, distance, sanitation, and more testing. And there is no guarantee, no promise of what we might want the future to hold. We can still get infected and still get sick. Given these challenges, why not stay at home, sit on the couch, dig into the refrigerator, and hunker down?
Because love demands more. We need each other, and we are needed, even when, especially when, it is hard. This kind of open-hearted love requires genuine sacrifice for others and the emotional vulnerability of it all risks significant loss and the pain of a broken heart. Jayber Crow speaks to this, and his language near the end of the novel is so close to biblical that it almost feels beyond our reach: “Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of his creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, he must allow it to not exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering, also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.”
Are we strong enough to love one another and love this community and risk a broken heart? Can we respect, truly respect, those brave men and women on the staff who have faith enough in Woodberry to have prepared the campus for our arrival, and those who are here today, masking and cohorting and keeping space and choosing, out of respect for others, like the “Boy’s Prayer” demands, the hard right over the easy wrong? The challenges and obstacles in our midst are as unprecedented as they are formidable. Keep calm and carry on. It is kindness and faith and hope, and most of all, it is love, that will see us through. Amen.
What Matters Most 