Charge to the Class of 2022

President Ted Wardlaw after Commencement with his spouse, Dr. Kay Bryant

By President Theodore J. Wardlaw

Well, friends, it’s almost over now, this Commencement service. But before we’re finished, it is a longstanding tradition here that the president gets to offer you a charge. It’s a high privilege, and I have been looking forward, as always, to this moment.

And here’s my charge to you. I’ve boiled it down to three words— three very important words—and I hope that you will think about these words, even amidst the overload of events and important matters that crowd in upon you today. Here it is: Tell the truth. That’s my charge in a nutshell: Tell the truth.

I wonder if there’s anything in shorter supply in our culture right now than truth-telling. Do we even know what truth-telling looks like? Tom Long is now retired, but he’s still one of my favorite homileticians. Across his career, he taught at Columbia Seminary, and then at Princeton Seminary, and finally at Emory University; and just a few years ago he came here to give the Currie Lectures. In one of his books, he lifts up the comedy film “Crazy People,” in which this advertising executive comes up with an outrageous new advertising idea: telling the truth! And so, instead of just lying for a living, he begins to write ads that are ruthlessly honest. He stops writing those ads that suggest that this or that product will make people happier, thinner, sexier, richer, and begins instead to write ads like “Volvos—they’re boxier but they’re safe,” and “United Airlines— most of our passengers get there alive.” Well, as the plot goes on, this advertising guy gets shipped off to a psychiatric hospital, but while he’s there the ad agency mistakenly releases his ads to the public, and they are an overnight sensation. The public is so delighted by hearing the unvarnished truth for once, that sales skyrocket.

It’s a picture of how we all hunger for the truth. And yet, all the same, we have an uneasy relationship with the truth— especially the sort of truth that, to put it theologically, threatens the hell out of us before it makes us free.

I love the way journalist Bill Moyers put it a few years ago when he was giving an address at a conference here in Austin on media reform. “An unconscious people,” he said, “an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirms their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions, and be skeptical.”

Some of those people may be sitting in the pews of the churches in which you will serve or worship. In fact, chances are they’re waiting for you right now; they’re getting ready for you. So know, for sure, that there is a huge risk in truth-telling. If I were charging you to simply get out there and survive, I would probably urge you

against truth-telling. But I’m charging you to be faithful, and so I will say it again. Tell the truth. Because there are those people, too, who sense the power of the struggle between deception and truth; and they, too, are out there in those pews—waiting and praying for someone like you to be as good as your word, to be as good as God’s word.

When, for Heaven’s sake, did that struggle begin? That struggle between deception and truth? Was it after the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol last year? Was it after the emergence of the red state-blue state world that we live in these days? Was it the arrival of pluralism, or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.? When did this struggle begin—this struggle for truth?

I think it began way back in the Garden of Eden. The common take, of course, about the Garden of Eden is that it’s a story about temptation, but I throw in with those who suggest that it’s really more of a story about truth and trust. We think it’s about a serpent who slithers up to Eve and tempts her with a shiny red apple. In our foyer at the President’s Manse, we have a folk-art sculpture of a serpent wrapped around a small tree and holding out a pitchfork with an apple on it. The artist—a feminist— titled the piece, “Go ahead, take a bite; if anything happens we’ll blame it on her.” That’s what we think is going on in this story—temptation. But since you all passed your Old Testament classes, you know that the serpent didn’t tempt Eve with an apple like that. In fact, the snake was not interested in apples; the snake was interested in words. Slippery, lying, weasel words.

Go back and look it up. As the snake talks to Eve, the snake says, “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” The serpent doesn’t exactly call God a liar. He just nuances the tone of his voice and plants a little seed of doubt there in her mind about God’s words. It’s not really a direct challenge to God’s words—it’s just a clever little insinuation: “Did God say that?”

That’s where I believe it began. And ever since, we’re forever being tempted by weasel words.

It started, I believe, when that serpent just began teasing away at the fabric of truth; and everything the serpent said was kind of true. But by the end of the conversation, truth was leveled and twisted into a pretzel and buried under weasel words and, from there on out to this good day, everything is up for grabs.

So how should Christian pastors talk out there in the world? One way to put it is that we should talk

the way Adam and Eve talked in the Garden of Eden before the snake tied human language into knots. If we’re going to be counter-cultural, perhaps the most counter-cultural thing we can ever do is to talk to each other in ways that can be trusted. We should tell the kind of truth that is measured not only by what it is but by what it does; and if what it does is to divide us and create suspicion among us and make us angry at one another, then there’s a good chance that it’s not the truth. We should use our truthful words not just to lacerate relationships, but to redeem them. In a church in which our words are often sharpened, poison-tipped weapons that we throw at each other in theological wars, I charge you this very afternoon to lay those weapon-words down and do not pick them up again. They are toxic and they will embitter and poison your ministry. But when it comes to what you will say, bravely speak with words that presume relationship, that express the love and belonging and, yes, the majestic worldchanging disruption of our big God, that create the possibility once again for people not to be fed by junk food but to fed by the truth that will make them free.

That’s what I charge you to do, members of the Class of 2022. Look for the hand of God at work in the world, and in the church, that is always such a luscious and bodacious sight that, just naturally, you will not want people facing in some other direction to miss it. So whenever and wherever you see evidence like that of the glory of God, point it out to your people and invite them to look.

In other words, tell the truth. Tell the truth.