Ordinary Faithfulness in a World Gone Mad: Beacon Hill Classical Academy Commencement Speech 2023

The following speech was given at the Beacon Hill Classical Academy 2023 Senior Graduation.

Throughout the history of the people of God, there have been great men and women whose names we can recount, recite, and remember. In the Old Testament record, we recount names like Moses, Miriam, Abraham, Joseph, Elijah, and David. After the coming of the Christ, names like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and Barnabas ring in our bones and pierce our memories. From the Early Church to the year of our Lord 2023, names like Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Sproul and many more leave their mark.

And yet, there are many whose names we can neither recite nor recount, and there are many people of whom we have never heard. Their names are not recorded in the annals of history, in the encyclopedias, nor on Wikepedia. Nonetheless, their lives echo into the very fabric of eternity.

Consider the 120 followers of Christ praying with the 12 disciples on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, we don’t know their names. Or perhaps, recall the 7,000 men of Israel who would not bow the knee to the false God Baal in 1 Kings 19. While we know there were 7,000 we don’t know who they were, what they said, or what they looked like. Consider the Protestant believers & regular church members at the dawn of the Reformation who were willing to cling to the word of God though it could cost them their very lives. Remember – Luther and Calvin’s ideas were dangerous to the church establishment and yet myriads of common people clung to them because those people longed to stand on the truth of the Word of God. Consider the thousands upon thousands of believers scattered throughout the world today who face constant persecution for living out their faith. Consider the modern Christian who shares his faith with someone at his workplace – and that co-worker’s life is changed for eternity.

History belongs to our God. And much of history marches on through the lives of faithful men and faithful women whose names we will never know on this side of eternity. I would like to call attention to the ordinary faithful – those who lived steadfastly according to God’s truth not for fame or prestige, but simply out of obedience to their God and commitment to God’s glory. Though ordinary faithfulness is not extraordinary in the eyes of man, it’s ordinary faithfulness that changes the world.

My exhortation tonight is by no means a new message. It’s not flashy, trendy, or based on culturally-approved methods of “social-scientific reasoning”. Instead, it’s an old path. In the chaos of our current era, we have to do the work of clearing the overgrown brush of postmodern, secular thought which distorts and hides the ancient road - we need to remove some weeds, and begin to take steps where those who have gone before us have walked.

This evening, my exhortation is as follows: In a world gone mad, we are called to pursue ordinary, everyday faithfulness.

We live in a world obsessed with self-promotion. As soon as we open the social media app on our phone which we long to delete yet never bring ourselves to do so (thereby embracing a self-imposed slavery), we are bombarded with a constant barrage of invitations to promote our self – to put forth ourselves as an idol which other men and women are summoned to worship.

“Look at me. Look at what I can do. Look how influential I am. Look! I’m changing the world! I’ve made it! I’m an ‘influencer.’” Yet, it does seem to me that often the legacies that seem to last are those that do not need to be promoted. As Tolkien’s Aragorn says, “Deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.”

Friends, the Christian life is a calling to live for something and in light of something that transcends ourselves – something that goes far beyond you and me. Imagine you were a common craftsman living during the High Medieval period (I’m sure you’ve imagined that before!). Your task was to work on a cathedral by laying stone after stone after stone after stone. The thing is – medieval cathedrals would often take hundreds of years to build. That craftsman would never see the cathedral completed, and yet the work was still worth it to him. Generations of craftsmen would leave their mark on something that their descendants to come would reap the fruit of.

In our “secular” (yet religious-as-ever) age, thinking ourselves to be gods we demand immediate results and instant gratification (with our short tik tok attention spans and our need for same day delivery Amazon prime). If it’s not instant, is it worth it? What if instead of being slaves of the immediate, we were free men and free women willing to patiently trust the providence of a God who is working in the world, calling us to work for Him wherever He has seen fit to plant us? What if instead of seeking instant glory for ourselves, we lived like those medieval craftsmen — faithfully laying down stones even though the finished cathedral may not be completed for generations to come. This sort of steadfast and hopeful plodding requires faith, and calls for a life of faithfulness.

Do you want to see the world actually changed? Lay the next stone.

We must realize that we exist for more than ourselves. We exist for the Glory of God and the good of His Kingdom. Do you know how the Lord of all things — the one who hung the constellations in the heavens and molded the mountains and valleys of the vast ocean floors and instills breath in the lungs of the birds of the air — how that Lord has seen fit to transform the world so that the glory of Yahweh might cover the earth? Through His people throughout history – those people often forgotten by the world: the ordinary faithful.

So - In a world gone mad, pursue faithfulness.

Faithfulness will look like not wavering from the truth even as culture disparages you, mocks you, and derides you.

Faithfulness will look like gathering each Lord’s Day to exalt the Triune God in a community of believers while the world tries to convince you that you are far too busy and important to worship.

Faithfulness will look like honesty in the little things (including not using ChatGPT to complete your homework assignments)

Faithfulness will look like rejecting positions of authority and prestige which would cause you to compromise. Why? Because God’s Glory matters more than worldly fame.

Faithfulness will look like one day (if God so wills) embracing the blessing of Godly marriage and childrearing, because flourishing families are a glorious gift from a glorious God. Indeed, the Psalmist pushes back against the anti-family and anti-children sentiment of our age when he reminds us, “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.”

Faithfulness will look like refusing to exchange the abundance of wisdom of the ancient paths for modern beliefs seeped in the suffocating and demonic ideologies of rationalism, secularism, and darwinism. Don’t forget the ancient paths, in them you will find rest for your souls.

Faithfulness will look like living a life of integrity in a world of facades, lies, and masks.

Faithfulness will look like putting on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Faithfulness will look like working heartily (whether you're in the classroom, workplace, or in the home), knowing that ultimately you are working for the Lord and not for men.

Faithfulness will look like fulfilling Adam’s calling of naming things rightly as God’s vice regents, not bowing to the pagan gods of culture who want to redefine gender, humanity, and the good.

Faithfulness will look like loving the Lord with all your heart, soul and mind, and strength.

But be warned. This type of faithfulness isn’t very glamorous or even noteworthy in the eyes of the onlooking world. Instead, it invites ridicule, persecution, scorn, misunderstanding, and obscurity as the nations rage against Yahweh and His anointed one. Indeed, we follow the Christ —the one who told his disciples that they would be hated because the world hated him first.

And yet – And yet – this ordinary, everyday, simple, steadfast faithfulness is the very means by which God uses us to change the world. You know the Christian mom who spends her days changing diapers? Her faithfulness in changing diapers for an immortal soul echoes into eternity as she lives out the glorious calling that God has placed on her life. You know the Christian plumber? His work can be just as God honoring as the work of the vocational missionary. As Luther remarked, “Every occupation has its own honor before God. Ordinary work is a divine vocation or calling. In our daily work no matter how important or mundane we serve God by serving the neighbor and we also participate in God's on-going providence for the human race.”

You see — Our God takes ordinary things and makes them sacred. Let me say that again: Our God takes ordinary things and makes them sacred. Like water. And bread. And wine. And words. And he does the same with our very lives.

He takes our ordinary tasks and uses them for his extraordinary purposes.

Truly, the Church today needs less people trying to promote their own name, and more people trying to promote the name of the Lord - who made heaven and earth.

We need to see the bigger picture.

Beyond the Latin roots, the informal fallacies, Aristotle’s canons of rhetoric, the-seemingly-never-ending-list-of-primary-sources, and senior theses, Classical Christian Education teaches us that there is a story that God is writing that is far bigger than ourselves. Thus, we can know that wherever God has placed us and whatever God has called us to is for his Glory and our good.

So how then shall we live?

Be builders – building lasting things that will not only benefit you, but the generations to come. Build families, businesses, churches, and careers which like cathedrals point all those around you to the heavens.

Be farmers – tilling the soil of whatever field that God has given you to grow and produce. Faithfulness begets fruitfulness.

Be voracious, insatiable readers – there’s much more to learn. And I hope the books you read while at Beacon were just the first of many times you will read those books. I agree with CS Lewis when he said “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” Read great books, and especially spend your days reading the greatest book.

Be relay runners – Christians have been passing the baton of faithfulness for centuries – cling to it, don’t let it go, and run the race with endurance. There is a great cloud of witnesses who has gone before you. Do n’t invent a new race, keep running the old one — and pass it on.

Be monastics — slow down, live a liturgy-shaped life, and meditate on God’s word and in prayer while our modern culture exalts busyness, chaos, anxiety-driven-work-to-the-point-of-exhaustion, and the grind.

Be hospitable hosts — inviting all those around you to delight in and dine on the richness of the Great tradition and wisdom you have received.

Be warriors – like the medieval missionary Boniface who chopped down Ol Donar’s Oak — a tree whom the Norse pagans thought to be sacred — thereby convincing them of their need to believe in Jesus as Lord. Be willing to stand for what you believe in no matter the cost. Be willing to die for your Lord. Fight the good fight of faith.

Be theologians — rightly understanding and applying God’s Word in the world.

Be faithful followers of a Savior whose path to victory was through the cross and is coming again to judge the living and the dead.

In the coming days, months, and years, you’ll be bombarded with questions – So what are you gonna do with your life? What are you gonna study? Where are you going to work? How are you going to contribute to society? What is your legacy going to be? The list will go on and on.

Class of 2023, your ability to glorify God is not contingent upon your answers to these questions. They may seem like important questions, but we are to realize that there is a far more important question for us to answer:

How are we to live in light of the grand story the Triune God is writing in the world?

When we answer that question first, everything else can be rightly ordered.

My exhortation to you all this evening is simple, yet radical: pursue ordinary faithfulness (which I guess isn’t so ordinary after all) and watch God use your story — however glamorous or unglamorous, notable or not notable it may be in the world’s eyes — for His glorious purposes.

While our names may be forgotten by generations to come, our simple faithfulness in the hands of a sovereign God will echo and reverberate throughout eternity and we — with all of God’s saints in a renewed creation, with those whose names we’ve heard of and those whose names we’ll only learn in the age to come – will be able to testify to the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 72:

Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, Who only does wondrous things! And blessed be His glorious name forever! And let the whole earth be filled with His glory.

Amen and Amen!