On June 5th last year our school had its first graduation. It’s taken me until now to post my notes. Hahaha!

Good evening to our (almost) graduates, their parents and families and friends, and to all of our guests. Good evening to our teachers, along with the younger Raggants here to see what this graduation thing might look like for them in two (to twelve) years. Thank You to the Board for allowing me the privilege of giving this first commencement address.

Many schools have started for many reasons. Whether parents school their children at home or find a trustworthy school nearby or pool their resources to begin a cooperative work, children have been being taught for a long time in many places. It’s a present perfect progressive sort of thing.

In this place, a small group of parents with a growing conviction about one principle decided that we could not sit still. This principle is as simple as an ocean wave. The principle is as small as a mustard seed. The principle is like oxygen, always present, not always appreciated, and flammable under certain conditions. The principle is: Jesus is Lord.

According to God’s Word through the apostle Paul, to be a Christian requires one to make this confession. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be” schooled. Ah, it seems I’ve misquoted the epistle to the Romans. Mea culpa. But I wonder if the change in verb might help us meditate on the work leading to (ad), and leading away from (ab), the commencement tonight.

Paul actually wrote in chapter 10 that all those confessing Jesus as Lord will be saved. The Greek word is a form of sozo, and the Latin translation is a future linking verb with the predicate adjective salvus from which our English word “salvation” derives. Confess and believe and be saved.

But saved from what? Saved for what? This is what the E in ECS is good for. This is the Big E. The evangel is the good news that every bitter and blinding separation caused by sin is overcome in Jesus. You are saved from separation from God, reconciled to the Father by the Son. This reconciliation is supernatural, eternal, and effective now. You belonged to the domain of darkness, you were outside the kingdom of the Son of God’s love, now you have been brought in. “Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.”

For what? You are redeemed for life. Life is when separated things are united. This includes your soul being united to God along with your mind and your body. In Romans 12 the apostle urges the Christians to present their bodies as living sacrifices for the Lord and to be renewed in their minds for discerning what is good and acceptable and perfect to the Lord.

The presenting of our bodies and renewal of our minds do not take place automatically. They require the Spirit and the Spirit grows us up into salvation. We who “were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which [we’ve] been committed” (Romans 6:17). Confessing Christ as Lord is the beginning and the ongoing motivation. Jesus is Lord is a first principle, not in isolation like a bookmark that keeps track of what page you’re on, but like the spine that holds all the pages together.

This principle motivated Abraham Kuyper to help open the Free University in Amsterdam in 1880. In his inaugural speech he said this:

No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically (airtight or insulated) sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, “Mine!”

As the graduates have heard, and hopefully will remember forever, the translation of “a square inch” is not the most powerful image, or even the most accurate. Kuyper said there is not an een duimbreed, better understood as “the width of a thumb.” You cannot frame or feel anything that falls outside of Christ’s sovereignty or His interests.

Every Caesar is dead. Just ask Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Tacitus, or even Shakespeare. But Jesus lives. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Dominum Jesum. Jesus reigns. He sits at God’s right hand and before He ascended He said that all authority in heaven and on earth were given to Him. In Him are all the treasures of wisdom. So we make students in His name.

Kuyper saw in his day that schools were not starting with Jesus as Lord. He said, “To put it mildly, our undertaking bears a protest against the present environment and suggests that something better is possible.” Something better is possible. You’ve tasted it.

The world crisis involves not inequality, self-interest, or justice, but a *living person*—involves Him who once swore that he was a King and who for the sake of this royal claim gave up his life on the cross of Golgotha. (Kuyper)

Every person, every school, every graduate, every government, will either confess or contest that Jesus is Lord. That is either reality or delusion. You will believe it to be the key to the development of human life or to its destruction. Your schooling has pointed you like a arrow to be true.

You must do more than be able to agree about the sovereignty of God, you must acknowledge it in your moments. The lordship of Christ should be a point of humility, not of pride. The hostility between the seed of the woman and the seed of there serpent will either be a theory, a theology, or a conviction.

When presidents offer to be your savior, when money offers to be your security, when others offer to provide you will approval and acceptance, you will know that these are useless apart from the Lord.

Jesus is Lord of every public sphere: the scientific world, the business world, the world of art, the world of politics. But also over every sphere of your life: your conscience, your faith, your reason, your talents, your time, your will, your work, your words. All things, visible and invisible, are for Him.

You will miss the daily reminders of our responsibilities to love our neighbors by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. You will miss the Creed and the Cantus. You will hear about Mr. Bowers “accidentally” falling on a 2nd grader from Facebook rather than after recess. No one will read great books to you while you eat lunch. These are just some of the unique enculturation flavors you’ve tasted at ECS, and they are all for the Lord.

The principle that motivated the start of this school is the principle, the passion, we hope you’ll carry into any further schooling you pursue, any work you do, the families you begin.

The breath of Kuyper’s address applies tonight:

Only by ever focusing on our sacred principle each time the waves crashed over us did our weary head raise itself bravely from the water. If this cause be not of the Mighty One of Jacob, how could it stand.

The school has survived four years. You have survived your years here. But this work is “worth people risking their own lives for and disturbing the lives of others.”

We pray that our students:

won’t be embarrassed by old-fashioned virtues, like hard work and discipline. They will respect authority and defy the authorities. They won’t get fired from jobs because of laziness, and they will get fired from them because of something they said about homosexuality. They won’t resent money and success, and they won’t be dazzled by money and success. They will laugh at the hipsters, and they will laugh at themselves laughing at the hipsters. They will loathe the enticements of corrupt entertainment, and they will love a true story. They would rather die than become one of the cool kids. They will be cool. (Douglas Wilson Rules for Reformers)

You may be free from your responsibilities at ECS, but you are not free from responsibility for the gifts of enculturation that were given to you at ECS. You are free to serve the Lord. This is the starting principle of all you do, it is the goal of all you do. Jesus is the beginning and the end.

I can say on behalf of the school board and teachers, we love you—Dineke, Andrew, and John—we are thankful to God for you, and we pray that you—as the very first raggants trained and released into the world-wide wild—will risk your lives and disturb the lives of others in the name of the Lord.