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Note: The following is the baccalaureate address delivered by Gail O’Day, professor and associate dean of faculty and academic affairs at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She spoke at ������Ƶ 187th commencement.
President Chopp, members of the Board of Trustees, ������Ƶ faculty and staff, family and friends of the graduating class, and–most importantly–the women and men of the Class of 2008:
Today is your day, and I am honored to share in it with you. As you will experience this afternoon, there is something overpowering and humbling about hearing your family and friends applaud and cheer as they congratulate you for all that you have accomplished. And even though today marks the completion of your time at ������Ƶ, we celebrate commencement, not conclusion. For all the endings that accompany today–leaving this place, leaving your friends–today is ultimately about new beginnings and fresh possibilities.

This baccalaureate service provides an occasion to reflect through a religious and spiritual lens on these new beginnings and the promise that your accomplishments hold for the world. I am honored by the invitation to deliver the baccalaureate address and honored that after today, I, like you, will have a ������Ƶ degree.

Gail O’Day, professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, was among six honorary degree recipients at commencement. Helping her is English professor George Hudson; at left is President Rebecca Chopp. (Photo by Susan Kahn)

The lesson we have heard from the Jewish Scripture begins very abruptly, “Elijah said to Ahab.” The person of Elijah has not appeared previously in this story, his name has not been mentioned anywhere, but the story begins as if the reader already knows who he is and has been waiting for him to appear. By contrast, Ahab is already known in the story–as the king who did “evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him,” “who did more to provoke the Lord to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.” Ahab is such an evil king, in fact, that whenever the storyteller talks about him, he only calls him “Ahab,” never “King Ahab.” He has so discredited his office that the storyteller will not give him the courtesy of his title.
Ahab’s offense is simple and all too common–he has substituted his own desire for power for reliance on God’s providence, has turned to gods and idols of his own making instead of acknowledging his dependence on the grace and mercy of his God and of his fellow human beings. Ahab has constructed a world in which he only talks to those who support his power, never to those who ask him to look at the world and God’s hopes for creation differently. Ahab lives in an insular world in which his power is always aligned with God’s power and his might is always right. A conversation with a king like Ahab would be a risky undertaking–but it is just such a conversation that sets Elijah’s story on its course.
Elijah’s words to Ahab are straight forward, direct, and harsh–“there shall be neither dew nor rain these years.” Elijah does not curse Ahab with a drought; rather he confronts Ahab with the inevitable consequences of his disregard for creation in his pursuit of power. Ahab’s grab for wealth and personal power has come at the cost of creation. The earth is parched, water supplies are low, and famine will be the inevitable result of a lack of water. Creation will no longer be a silent bystander to the empire’s excesses; Elijah speaks on creation’s behalf to the king. When Elijah speaks to Ahab, we realize that we have been waiting for him to appear, that we recognize him because he speaks the truth we have been longing to hear.
Perhaps Elijah speaks up for creation because he has uncommon bravery and uncommon sense in the face of the king, but I like to think that Elijah speaks up for creation because he has common sense and uncommon grace. He has heard the groans of creation, he has noticed the dimming of earth’s colors, and his love for God’s created order propels him to confront the king.
As if to underscore that Elijah is indeed giving voice to creation’s groans, God instructs Elijah to move even more deeply into creation, to seek refuge from the king in the heart of the wilderness. In the wilderness, Elijah’s only hope for sustenance is water from a brook and the rather dubious sounding promise that he will be fed by ravens.
The promise of food provided by ravens seems absurd, and it seems even more absurd to trust such a promise, but Elijah does just that. There is something absurd in every act of grace, every act of hope, every act of courage; every act that trusts beyond what is visible to what might yet be. These very acts of absurdity hold the key to our future and the future of creation, because they announce that we refuse to resign ourselves to what convention dictates is possible.
Elijah trusts, and what follows from his trust also seems absurd, “And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening” (v. 6). Ravens sharing food with a stranger? We might be tempted to dismiss the ravens’ role in this story as simply a Walt Disney effect, something straight out of Bambi, Cinderella, or Enchanted, but before we do, let’s give your liberal arts education a commencement day workout. A little over a decade ago, the noted zoologist and nature writer Bernd Heinrich studied ravens in the fields and meadows of northern New England. He wrote about his study in a book entitled Ravens in Winter, where he observed the following about the feeding habits of ravens:
In some of the same fields and woods where I had made the observations about the bumblebees, I had often noticed a pair of ravens. I now saw the birds, which had always seemed to me to be solitary animals, doing something solitary animals are not “supposed” to do: They were sharing valuable food–those who had it, it seemed, were giving to those who needed. It was the most left-wing behavior I had ever heard of in a natural system. Furthermore, it did not make sense.
The driving question for Heinrich’s research, over five years of field study of ravens, was this, “Do common ravens . . . actively disclose to strangers of their species the valuable and rare food bonanzas that one of them is lucky enough to find?” The answer to Heinrich’s study turned out to be “yes.” His research, carefully documented in Ravens in Winter, turns on the discovery that ravens have evolved patterns of cooperation and sharing that serve to secure the continuance of the species. The sharing of food is not completely altruistic–to share food bonanzas enhances the raven’s status in the community and facilitates finding a mate. Yet the food sharing is nonetheless remarkable–one of the underlying principles of raven life is cooperation with strangers and the sharing of resources, not fearful conflict and competition.
I do not mention Heinrich’s research on ravens in order to prove that Elijah really could have survived on raven’s food; such an insistence on scientific and historical verisimilitude obscures the point and power of the story. Rather, I mention the ravens to show that Elijah’s absurd trust that food will be provided for him in the wilderness may be no more absurd than the ravens’ unexpected acts of sharing food with one another. The ravens, who feed strangers, who work together to share their resources, are more than mere props or special effects in this story. The ravens provide a metaphor for sharing and cooperation for the good of creation that gives an added dimension to Elijah’s act of trust in going into the wilderness. To compete and engage in endless conflict over limited resources will only end in Ahab’s promised drought. Elijah models another way. Elijah accepted the fragility and interdependency of life in the wilderness, food available quite literally only by a wing and a prayer.
If “we are what we eat,” then Elijah’s food in the wilderness marks him as a man of mutuality, grace, and courage fueled by absurd trust. It is an absurd act of faith, hope, and courage to believe that if there is no bread, ravens will bring bread, but such absurd acts keep the door to a new future open.
If “we are what we eat,” then what have we eaten lately? How have we been fed? Do we trust that there is food available to us beyond conventional expectations, or have we stopped looking for the ravens who will fly the food of new life to us?
I would like to suggest to the graduates that in your years at ������Ƶ, you have indeed been fed by ravens, that you have received food for your life in unexpected places, at unexpected times, when you needed it most and had to trust deeply to receive it. You may not have heard the ravens’ call or felt the air from their flapping wings, but they fed you anyway, even if you did not notice.
You came to ������Ƶ expecting to be fed in your classes. You expected to learn new things and to amass vast expanses of knowledge, and that has happened. But while you were studying and your professors were teaching, the ravens also were at work–feeding you so that you not only amassed knowledge, but also learned to think anew. You learned new ways to see the world, new ways to see yourself. In classes ranging from anthropology to zoology, you lived for awhile in an intellectual discipline and perspective other than your own, and you learned new questions and perhaps a few new possibilities.
If the ravens did their feeding rightly, you learned that a ������Ƶ education matters not because it makes you smart or successful–which of course it does!–but because it invites you to transformative ways of thinking about the truth and risky ways of letting the other into your life. It has helped you to see humanity at work and at play, at our creative best and our destructive worst. It has opened to you both the wonders and frailties of creation, and has given you the tools and resources you will need to decide where to come down on the urgent questions of our day. The ravens have been at work while you worked, feeding you so that you do not confuse knowledge with certitude, so that you learned that your education is a gift built on trust and transformation, not power and control. The ravens have fed you so that as a result of your education, you, like Elijah, can speak aloud the urgently needed words of creation’s woes. With the taste of ravens’ food in your mouth, you can find a way to mend the planet that so far is eluding your elders.
The ravens have been feeding you food for a new day in the dailyness of your life in this diverse community. You have found yourselves in conversations and situations that you could never have imagined in your first semester, and you have grown in those situations as you were able to embrace something you had never before thought possible. The ravens have brought you food in the late night conversations in the dorm, in impassioned arguments at the dinner table. The ravens have fed you each time you found yourself in conversation with someone different from yourself and you were summoned to new life decisions and possibilities. When you have worked on a service learning project, teaching a small child to read or helping a senior citizen with a tax form, you have shared in the ravens’ food.
You have tasted the ravens’ food as each of you has grappled with the questions of what it means to be human, of what it means to live and work in and for community. When we are willing to trust the possibility of a new future, marked by love, justice, and dignity for all people and all of creation; when we are willing to risk the possibility of personal and social transformation, then the ravens are hard at work among us, dropping food into our mouths and nurturing us in hope.
The way that we have been fed models for us the way that we are to feed and nurture others. After awhile, Elijah had to leave the ravens, because the brook was dried up and there was no more water. Elijah is sent even farther away, to foreign territory, where God tells him that a widow will feed him. A widow–one of the most economically powerless, socially marginal members of society in Elijah’s day. The promise that a widow will feed him is at least as dubious sounding as the promise that ravens will feed him, but once again Elijah trusts the promise. When he arrives at the widow’s home, the situation is desperate. Elijah requests a morsel of bread, but the widow has only enough meal left for one last supper for her and her son. They will, she says, eat this one last meal and then die of malnourishment. Elijah does not despair when he hears the widow’s words–he has been fed by ravens in the wilderness after all. Instead he instructs her to share what she has with him, with the promise that there will be food for all. Another absurd promise–and again the promise is trusted.
Elijah and the widow practice what has been modeled for Elijah by the ravens: cooperation over limited resources in order to feed strangers. The widow supplies the raw material, which Elijah multiplies, and through their mutuality around resources, strangers drawn together by need have enough food. The sharing of resources between the widow and Elijah continues the trusting transformation that began with the ravens. The act of feeding, of sharing limited resources, of practicing hospitality to the stranger, all promise new life for creation.
We have read the story of one more feeding this morning. Five thousand hungry men and women were fed from the contents of one small boy’s lunch. Absurd? Of course. The disciples thought it was absurd, too. Faced with five thousand hungry people, they said, “Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” The disciples belong to the world of the bottom line, market analysis, profit margin. In that world, there are not enough resources to meet human needs. All we have is one small boy’s lunch–how can we provide food for five thousand? Shelter? Health care? Education? How indeed?
Who knows how the little boy arrived there that day. Perhaps he had come with his parents because they couldn’t find a babysitter. Perhaps he had set out on his own for a day of exploring with what would have been a very substantial lunch for a small boy, five loaves and two fish. Perhaps while he was exploring he had seen a crowd of people that had peaked his curiosity. However he got there, in my mind’s eye I see him moving to the front of the crowd; I see him ignore the disciples’ objections and offer his lunch to Jesus, “Maybe my lunch will help, Sir.” Like the ravens, he would share his bread and meat with strangers. The little boy, like Elijah, like the widow, was capable of absurd acts of trust and hope. The little boy trusts that hungry people can and will be fed, regardless of the odds, and so he offers his own lunch as a starting point.
Because of one little boy’s absurd act, five thousand people were fed that day. In hearing the story of the feeding, you may be tempted to be distracted by the miraculous multiplication of the food, but don’t be. Keep your eyes on the little boy. The scope of the feeding is fascinating, but it is the little boy’s trusting confidence in the face of human need that makes the miraculous feeding possible. The five loaves and two fish that he pulls from his lunch box are ravens’ food, offered to meet human need in unexpected places, in radically transformative ways. This nameless little boy is the true heir of the ravens, the true child of Elijah, the true son of the widow.
Ravens, Elijah, the widow: that is the boy’s inheritance. But what is his legacy? What is his future? We are his future. We are his children when we listen carefully for the sound of ravens’ wings as they bring us food for a new day and when we feed and nurture God’s creation as we have been fed.