Leading with Hope
06-07-2021
On Saturday, May 8, 2021, McCormick Theological Seminary celebrated its 187th Commencement, the second during this pandemic era. The second that was virtual. For our first 185 years, our graduation exercises were witnessed by gatherings ranging from a handful of witnesses to perhaps 400 faculty, staff, friends, and family members. Our last two virtual ceremonies were streamed on Facebook and YouTube and have been viewed by thousands of people around the globe. If you missed it, you can view it here.
This year’s Commencement speaker was the legendary South African liberation theologian and prophetic leader of the anti-apartheid movement, Rev. Dr. Allan Aubrey Boesak. Of Dr. Boesak’s many books, one of my favorites is Dare We Speak of Hope?
There he writes:
Our capacity to hope is truly astonishing; it is something, deeply, intimately, uniquely human. It affirms in the most emphatic way our connectedness to the divine; for God, in whose image we are made, cannot be a God of love and mercy, of justice and peace, or of endless compassion and infinite grace if God is not also, in the most emphatic way, a God of hope. That we dare to hope—in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s famous phrase, have the audacity to hope—is even more remarkable. It says as much about our woundability as it does about what South Africa’s Steve Biko called the “righteousness of our strength.”
In this year that has seen so much suffering, we have cried, and we have mourned, and we have yearned for an end. Yet Commencement was a day that we rejoiced. We have seen through countless virtual and real-life gestures of kindness, support, sharing, and caring those “ripples of hope” emanating outward into our communities in food drives, hospitals, nursing homes, and mass vaccination sites. We have seen it in virtual classrooms, study groups, and support sessions. We have seen it in the contributions to support purchases of personal protective equipment and direct cash support for our students at Cook County Jail. We have seen it in the love and support students, staff, faculty, trustees, and alums have poured out and into one another. We have seen it as our communities at the height of the pandemic marched in the streets of this city and others to call and work for an end to policing as we now know and see it, and an end to the killing of young black and brown men and women for being young, black, and brown.
Commencement Day and each day since have been important days for us all. As more and more people are vaccinated, we can look forward not to a “return to normal,” but to a future forged in COVID’s crucible. It is indeed a new day, a new beginning, a new hope for a better tomorrow. On May 8th, we conferred degrees for the 187th consecutive year, and 50 new McCormick graduates were charged to go forth and change the world. They will touch countless lives here in Chicago, across the country, and around the globe.
Dare we speak of hope? The answer, thanks be to God, is a clear, emphatic, and audacious yes.
You and the thousands of generous donors who support our work make that hope possible. If you have given before, we thank you and ask that you include us again in your giving plans. If you have never contributed before, we ask that you consider a gift, small or large, so that we can continue to share God’s healing love in the countless communities we serve.
Please also take a few minutes to visit our website, www.mccormick.edu, so you can see for yourselves the recordings of the extraordinary work we are doing every day. What I hope you will see is what Dr. Boesak witnessed when he joined us from his home in South Africa for the livestream of our Commencement. In a note he sent following the ceremony he wrote, “The start of the service already I found emotional: opening the service in the three languages and doing that right through. I thought, there really is nothing like the church, being the body of Christ that brings us together across all those cultural, racial, and national borders. And I thought how McCormick is impacting all those different societies in ways we cannot even imagine.”
This is your seminary. This is McCormick. Thanks be to God.
David H. Crawford
President
“We have seen through countless virtual and real-life gestures of kindness, support, sharing, and caring those “ripples of hope” emanating outward into our communities.” President David Crawford