Headmaster Byron Hulsey delivered the following sermon on April 23, and April 30, 2022 in St. Andrew’s Chapel during the Reunion Weekends.
Not long ago the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a searing critique of American culture in The Atlantic. Entitled “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt describes a national culture riven by discord and disunion, one that is fragmented and paralyzed as tribal groups rip into each other for any perceived slight or alleged wrongdoing. Haidt uses the Genesis tale of the Tower of Babel to press his case. You may remember the narrative: God is disgusted by the arrogance of humanity, and to teach us a lesson, He jumbled up our languages, making it impossible for us to understand and communicate with each other.
From Haidt’s perspective, we’ve scrambled our own common vocabulary and our own civic connectedness through powerful social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Motivated by a desire for profit, masterful programmers have weaponized these platforms through the “Like” button and the retweet and comment functions. In today’s America many of us have found an online tribe, while at the same time growing increasingly distrustful of our institutions — namely our churches, government, our schools and universities, museums, professional associations, and even our doctors, our local leaders, and our caregivers. Most toxic and disorienting of all, we’ve lost trust in our neighbors and our fellow citizens. Jonathan Haidt says we’ve lost our collective sense of community and the common good.
It’s a bleak view of contemporary American culture, and maybe one that you don’t share. Even if you don’t, I think we can all agree that in the years since we graduated from Woodberry, a lot of life has happened. For sure there have been achievements and accomplishments, times of sustained joy, meaning, and happiness. But for most of us, we’ve lost a lot, too. We come back to Woodberry battered and bruised by the twists and turns of life. Maybe we’ve lost a loved one, or even a child, perhaps a marriage or a family business or a job that we loved and really depended on. In the vagaries of life, every one of us in our personal lives has been thrown to the ground, leaving us feeling like we were an isolated Babylonian, unable to understand or communicate with those we care most about, sometimes unable to communicate even with ourselves.
This morning we gather in St. Andrew’s Chapel to celebrate the ties that bind, the fact that here we have a community with a common language, one with sufficient reserves of social trust, and one that defines itself with the abiding pillars of moral integrity, intellectual thoroughness, good sportsmanship, and a reverence for things sacred. We aspire to be the kind of place that pushes back against the pressures that fracture the world beyond. Instead, we aim to be a place that provides a boy with the chance to take responsibility for his life and to live in a community that matters more than his individual preferences or his momentary conveniences. We seek to be a community that brings each of us as individuals together into a community where our boys will be known, challenged, and loved. And this weekend, we want to be for each of you, exactly that community, a place where we can be ourselves and enjoy the presence of friends and teachers who’ve made us better than we would have ever been on our own.
We get a taste of that vision in the reading from Revelations, which to me serves as the direct counterpoint to the Tower of Babel. In our reading this morning, John reports that “out of the great ordeal…there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” Unlike the broken and alienated individuals after the fall of the Tower of Babel, you’ve come “out of the great ordeal” from all over the country home to Woodberry at a special time in your life and in the life of our community. Here we are one, and we are at peace with ourselves and with each other. I hope that this place sustains you emotionally and spiritually, just as it has sustained me.
As much as I love Woodberry and believe in our ideals and values, I know, too, that we are a very human community and full of flaws and blind spots and men and women and 400 boys who blunder every day, despite our best intentions. Woodberry will never be an end in itself and a place that makes all the crooked places straight. Disappointment and grief and loss and momentary alienation will be part of us for as long as we live. Knowing that is part of what it means to be fully alive. And as we celebrate together this weekend, we come here this morning to remember our brothers who are no longer with us, those who’ve died and made their way beyond the veil. It’s a reminder of loss and a reminder of the precious gift that life is for each of us, even when, especially when, we blunder and struggle, and fail and come up short.
Through the gift of God’s grace we’re reminded by John that there is, in this season of Easter, life in the midst of death, regeneration and rebirth and resurrection after Good Friday’s brutal crucifixion. We know through the promise of God that one day the great mystery will be made known to us, and that one day we too, perhaps momentarily here at Woodberry but eternally in God’s kingdom, we will forever be among the great multitude where “they will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” Amen.
What Matters Most 