A Final Charge
to the Graduates

An Address by Dr. Roy Alden Atwood
Dean and Senior Fellow of Humanities
at the College's Seventh Commencement

May 12, 2004

Members of the New Saint Andrews College Class of 2004:

Congratulations on finishing your studies here at New Saint Andrews, and for finishing strong. You have done well for yourselves and deserve hearty congratulations. 

I also want to congratulate and thank your parents here today. Parents, your children have done well and they have been such a blessing to us. You have every right to be pleased and proud of your sons and daughters’ before you. They have honored your name and the name of their Lord and King. 

The College is very grateful to you parents for having entrusted your children’s higher education to us. Thank you for giving us the privilege both to teach them and to learn from them, for keeping us all in your daily prayers, and for your constant encouragement to the work and ministry of our College. 

We are very proud of them, too, and we will miss them a great deal. For us, their departure today is not unlike what you probably faced that day they walked out of your home and headed off to their Moscow captivity. Their leaving the College leaves us with that same unsettling blend of pride and emptiness. You equipped them well to leave home and to make you proud, and it is our hope that we have done the same as they leave our academy. 

Graduates, you have been an outstanding class. You have been a well rounded and cohesive group. Many of you have distinguished yourselves by your generous service to the college, the church and our community. Many of you are smarter than you realize and more talented than a good many of us on this stage. You have set a high standard for the students of New Saint Andrews who will follow after you. You will be missed and long remembered. 

At the same time, we are pleased to welcome you to your new status as alumni of the College. You are now numbered among our first 78 graduates. I hope your service to your Alma Mater will surpass the service you rendered while you were matriculating students here. In fact, one of your own, Miss Sara Ramsey, will be joining the College staff next year in alumni relations to make sure you do. Isn’t that right, Miss Ramsey?

Now, before we send you off, I give you, the New Saint Andrews Class of 2004, three final charges::

First, glory in the days of small beginnings.
You are graduates of one of the country’s dinkiest colleges. When most of you first came to New Saint Andrews, we met for classes in a sitting room at the Schlects home, and we had a massive three-bookcase library. Elizabeth and Bennett bumped into our ankles between classes back then. We weren’t really a college; but a strange extended family. Cherish those memories of our small beginnings together, and always be gracious and patient with those who are smaller or less gifted than you. God has done amazing things with the small and lowly of this world. Remember your humble beginnings at New Saint Andrews and pride yourselves only in what glorious things God has done and is doing among us. 

Second, smile every time you hear the words truth, beauty and goodness, chiasms, incarnational, and Trinitarian and all the other terms we seem to overuse here at NSA. Smile because you know that these are not buzzwords, as some would suppose, but treasure chests filled with biblical wisdom and spiritural riches. Let those words remind you of your time here at New Saint Andrews and remeber to pray for us with a smile on your face.

And finally, honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise and it is especially important at moments like this, when you receive honor, to honor those on whose shoulders you stand. So honor your heavenly Father who redeemed you when you were less than nothing and Who has given you a name and an inheritance more precious than anything in the whole Creation. Honor your mom and dad, who have given their lives for yours, and sacrificed their all that you might stand here now in the place of blessing and honor. Return their love for you ten-fold and begin today when you walk off this stage. Honor your spiritual fathers, your pastors and elders who have nurtured and guided you in Word and sacraments at home and here at college. Give thanks for them and pray for them for these are challenging and promising days and they need your love and encouragement in their labors for Christ’s kingdom. And honor your intellectual fathers and mothers, your teachers who have introduced you in a some small way to the kaleidoscope of truth, beauty and goodness. Every time you

·  spot a chiasm in the Scriptures
·  sing new psalm
·  recite a poem
·  gaze at the stars
·  solve a thorny geometry problem
·  puzzle over courtship
·  recognize a painting in a book or museum
·  wonder what God was thinking when He made all those nasty snakes
·  laugh at a sarcastic comment
·  recognize the Latin or Greek root of an unfamiliar word, or
·  have an interview with a sterned faced guy in a tie across a table from you, then

remember your teachers and the pleasant hours we shared together learning about God’s world simply because it was true, beautiful, and good.

Honor us all by loving what we have loved and teaching others what God has given to you. 

Go now with your Alma Mater’s blessing, her love and her prayers, and travel the paths the Lord has prepared for you, and may our Triune God bless you, and keep you, and make His face to shine upon you, now and forever.

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