Never, Never, Never Forget

An Address by Tyson Dean Rallens
B.A., Summa Cum Laude, Class of 2006
at the College's Ninth Commencement

May 10, 2006

Members of the faculty and staff, parents, families, and friends, on behalf of the Class of 2006, I’d like to thank you all for coming to our Commencement.

I am standing before you all today because, unlike most of my fellow graduates, I never had to take classes from Mr Appel, Dr. Wilson, or Dr. Stokes. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have to say will be meaningful to you, my fellow graduates, and edifying to everyone here.

As this is a formal event, I promise not to say anything that Mr. Schwandt would not feel comfortable saying in Disputatio.

Fellow graduates, today we stand upon the height of our achievements over the last two, or four, or however many years. From this vantage point, we can look both toward the future and back at the past. Although this ceremony is called a “commencement,” a beginning, we are already in the middle of the story. This is an early climax, which sets the stage for future plots, conflicts, and resolutions within the narratives of our lives. The chapter that is ending today, like all good first chapters, has introduced the elements and ideas that are fundamental to the rest of the story. Therefore, I would like to call your attention to a few of the themes we graduates should remember from our time here.

First of all,

Never forget that you graduated from New Saint Andrews .

This is not just any college, nor do our diplomas represent any ordinary degree. We did not come to NSA just to put the letters “B.A.” on our job applications. NSA does not teach mere facts and figures. No. At NSA we have obtained a Christian, classical, liberal arts education. The “classical, liberal arts” part means that we have been given all the tools necessary for a man or woman to be free ‑ intellectually, politically, and economically ‑ from the domination of other people. The “Christian” part means that we have been taught to submit these tools to the lordship of Jesus Christ in all areas of life, which is the only true kind of freedom.

We ourselves have helped to define the nature of New Saint Andrews College . We arrived as part of the college’s adolescent growth spurt. When some of us visited as prospective students, classes were still being held in cramped quarters at the Schlect’s home. We were admitted as freshmen back in the “B.B.” era – Before the Building. Someday, when the class of 2050-odd donates a major renovation to the school, the messages we wrote inside the walls of the Augustine and Calvin classrooms will be found and students will squint at our faded class picture in the basement, trying to match faces with signatures on two-by-fours.

We’ve influenced NSA in other ways too. Our class has broken in five new faculty members and helped create a need for several new staff positions, including the Director of Student Affairs. We even remember when President Atwood was just the Dean. We’ve been here as NSA has matured into a solid institution and has earned the acclaim of many across the country and around the world.

As much as we have affected the school, NSA has affected us more. We are the product of a unique curriculum. Through all the classes on history, philosophy, theology, C.S. Lewis, Anglo-Saxon, and aesthetic gastronomy, NSA has taught us to love truth, goodness, and beauty, and to pursue wisdom at any cost. We’ve been given the rare chance to appreciate things that many people never encounter. With trained minds, we are ready to burst forth upon the world in so many different areas. We will apply all of our hard-earned knowledge for the glory of God as teachers and parents, as businessmen and musicians, and as pastors and elders, to name only a few possibilities.

All of this magnifies the significance of the charge we will soon recite: “To whom much is given, from him much is also required.” In our pursuit of wisdom, we must also:

Never forget the importance of humility.

We have learned enough to realize that we know very little. Studying at NSA is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Sure, we’ve all read more books that we thought was humanly possible and we’ve written quite a bit too, especially in our theses. But the real point of the fire hydrant metaphor is that when you try to drink, you get really wet, but you don’t swallow much. It would take multiple lifetimes just to explore the realms we’ve been exposed to here at NSA. And that alone should give us pause.

We’ve learned about more than just intellectual humility though. Real humility takes action, like picking up trash downtown and donating blood. Real humility sometimes means saying nothing when slanderers post lies about you all over the internet. Other times it means saying something. It takes wisdom to decide.

Finally, and most importantly, we have learned about humility before God. When we came to NSA, none of us could possibly have understood what we were in for. Each of us probably picked NSA over other colleges or jobs, not knowing at all how incredibly rich this experience would be. Looking back, it’s scary to think how easily we might have taken a different direction. But the decision was not up to us. God brought us here on purpose and according to His plan. We can only feel gratitude for how He has perfectly guided us to this point when we would have messed up everything on our own. Furthermore, we’ve been shown just this term how much we depend on God not only for guidance, but for our very lives. We get to graduate with Brent today only because God protected him from the contamination his ruptured appendix was spilling into his body for two weeks before it was detected. What a clear reminder that every minute we live is the gift of our loving God.

God’s love for us is constantly revealed in His providence for our lives. The only natural response is to worship God faithfully. This is another theme from our time here in Moscow :

Never forget to make worship the center of your life.

Over these years, we have learned to put the church service, including the Lord’s Supper, at the center of our weekly schedules. More broadly, we have started to use the church calendar, rather than academic terms and secular holidays, to organize the year. We have seen what it is to really feast on the Sabbath. And we have come to love singing the Psalms, in church, and at gatherings, and while we are washing the dishes. We have seen children who can sing Scripture before they can read it. And we have been trained to apply our theology to every aspect of our practical lives.

By now we have been here long enough to see the effects of right worship. One result is that God has blessed our churches, our schools, and our families abundantly. We have seen the successful planting of Trinity Reformed Church. We have seen God establish NSA as the cornerstone of downtown Moscow . And we continue to see God’s blessing of new children and families in our congregations.

The other result is that enemies have attacked us more and more viciously. But God has warded off these attacks Himself while we refuse to let them distract us from our worship. When we first arrived, self-appointed gatekeepers were clamoring that NSA was not a legitimate college because we were not accredited. While their ravings were false, now God has vindicated us even according to their secular standards by bringing TRACS accreditation and honoring our faculty with further degrees and recognition from other institutions. Likewise, the bogus charges of racism and heresy from a few years ago have all but died away because God has unmasked the empty posturing of our accusers. We watched this year as the Zoning Board of Adjustment dismissed the railing of a few vitriolic activists and granted NSA a conditional use permit for downtown. God won that victory for us while we basically sat quietly in our seats. Most of the testimony that night came from outside members of the community whom God raised up in our favor. Even though new attacks constantly spring up, like the boarding house controversy, we can be confident that God will deliver us just as surely as He has in the past.

These conflicts have shown us that our main defensive and offensive weapon is our weekly joint worship and daily individual worship of Christ. Intoleristas will always oppose us, here and other places. In spite of this, we do not need to worry about politics or agendas; we just need to keep doing what’s most important, worshipping God; and He will faithfully defend us from external and internal attacks.

As I’ve mentioned, worship involves being together as a church. For worship to be effective, we have to be with other Christians much more than just on Sundays. Here in Moscow we have experienced a church body that loves fellowship. When we move on, we must:

Never forget how to live in Christian community.

Remember the families who invited you over to dinner, even though you were a total stranger. Remember how much hospitality we have been shown at parish parties, after-church picnics, and those evenings at the Wilson ’s. And the boarding families have given us so much, either directly or through friends who boarded. They have opened their homes, their dinner tables, and their families to welcome us students into fellowship with them. And now our boarding families are fighting for us on the front lines as they have become targets of legal manipulations by enemies who want nothing more than to disrupt, damage, and destroy our community because they are incapable of building their own.

This community has blessed us beyond imagination. At least, let us honor them by carrying the same values of hospitality and fellowship into our own households. The first step in building community is having strong families. Love your spouse and your children. Then let your love spill over to everyone else. Invite people over for dinner. Adopt students who are away from home. Throw parties. Take boarders. Do whatever you can to make other people important in your lives.

And don’t check to see whether “Christian community” is in the zoning code first.

Lastly, as you work and study and worship and celebrate, I charge you to do one more thing.

Never, never, never forget that the diplomas we’re about to receive, and this ceremony today are meaningless, unless we take what we have learned here at New Saint Andrews and apply it all to the rest of our lives.

Thank you.

.

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