Sermon for Encaenia 2015
“How readest thou?”
“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. And perhaps, you and your parents, grandparents and guardians, too, are asking yourselves that very same question. How did you get here? How did you do it? For you have done it! Today you step up and step out. In a short while you will be no longer students but graduates and alumni!
You have done it, to be sure, but how? Simply on your own? Because it’s just you? Think again. Prospero answers Miranda’s question with a wonderfully profound phrase. “By Providence divine.” Something good and wonderful, “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” has happened in spite of the vagaries of time and experience, in spite of our own follies and mistakes, even, as the play reveals, in spite of human wickedness and sin, of betrayal and deceit. And that is the wonder. Miranda is a wonder – both our Miranda, to be sure – but all of you are the wonder on this day. Not just because of each of you by yourselves but because of the wonder of all of you together in the purpose of this place, in the wonder of the education that belongs to the School. “By Providence divine,” indeed.
The events of this day might seem to suggest an ending but the term for this service is Encaenia from a Greek word signifying something new and fresh, a kind of beginning (εγκαινια: εν & καινος). The term is used for festivals of dedication in which there is a renewal of devotion, commitment and consecration to the defining principles and ideas that belong to institutions in their truth and integrity. Originally used for the anniversary dedication of temples and churches, it is associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and by extension to schools and colleges, such as King’s-Edgehill, founded upon those traditions of learning. Sometimes known as Commencement, it means that something begins, not just ends. That, too, is all part of the wonder of this day.
“How readest thou?” In some way or other the wonder has entirely do with our reading and understanding. Ideas have been presented before you, not altogether unlike the story of Ezra reading from a newly discovered book of the Law, probably, Deuteronomy, in the lesson from Nehemiah which Cooper read. That sense of being gathered around words proclaimed and ideas presented is a feature of Judaism, Christianity, and of course, Islam, not to mention the schools of ancient philosophy. There is a sense of awe and wonder. All the people stood and listened attentively to the proclamation of the Word and to its interpretation. I am not going to ask you when was the last time you heard a lesson from The Book of Nehemiah! Suffice to say this is probably the only encaenia service in the world where such a text has been read! Yet how profoundly it captures the wonder of your education. The challenge is about your understanding, about the way in which you have made what has been presented to you your own.