The following remarks were offered at the orientation for new students held on August 31, 2010:
It is my privilege to welcome you on this glorious morning as we prepare to begin the 185th academic year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. I hope this will be a good year for each of you. I pray it will be a great year for us as a community of worship and learning, of fellowship and the mutual consolation of the saints as needed.
You sit today where I sat 38 years ago when I arrived as a first year student of this Seminary. Throughout my entire ministry, I have cherished and built upon the foundations laid in this place. We had a great faculty back then, none of whom teach any longer save Dr. Jerry Christianson and Dean Emerita Norma Wood, both of whom still offer courses from time to time. In spite of how good things were back in those “good old days,” however, I am a bit envious of you who begin your studies at this juncture in the Seminary’s history. How I wish I could join you sitting in classes and studying at the feet of our current superb faculty! Learn from them not only in the areas of their academic expertise; but ask them to teach you from their life journeys and their ministry experiences. How blessed you are to have the kind of technological tools at your fingertips that were quite unimagined in my student era.
My overarching hope for you is that your experience here will be as rich and full and life-changing as was mine. I have no easy prescriptions to make it so. I do have three personal hopes and presidential anticipations for you:
- That you be constant in your prayers for and stewardship of our community life together. We have different rhythms to be sure; some of us pray in solitude more readily than in corporate worship. But personally I hope to see you often here in the chapel, as I try to be regularly when I’m not away from campus representing the Seminary in the many circles where I must travel. You are not here as a consumer of the commodity of education; you are here as a called servant of the Church; and the assembled, ensembled Church finally cannot be a solo performance.
- That you be open to, even eager to be surprised! I came here nearly four decades ago expecting to become a small town or rural pastor. My first call was in the very heart of downtown, inner city central Los Angeles. My CPE was to be in a general hospital setting; a sudden change of supervisors meant also a change to a chemical dependency recovery unit of a state hospital. My preferred internship was in a quiet New England community; I ended up in the South American capital city of Santiago, Chile in the midst of a repressive revolution. At each turn, both in seminary and since, I have been surprised, even amazed at how and where God and the Church have called me to serve. I hope you can embrace and welcome the surprises that inevitably will come your way.
- That you seek out moments to learn the lore and rhyme with the rhythms of this place. A number of you who studied Greek and met with us a week ago expressed it: there is something about the place; its history and its presence at the crossroads of history and hope; at the intersection of church and world; the scholarly academy and the Eucharistic body of Christ; the community of memory and the purveyor of new possibilities. Take time to read a short history; to walk at dawn or twilight these hills; to visit the archives over in the library; the Adams Co. historical society museum in Old Dorm. Do not do as I did in my student days when I went out from this place unversed in its history, for as we learn about its past we may discover our own futures in new ways. Remember that you too are making history on this hill; that you will soon join the long line of those who have gone out from this place and blessed the world with their witness.
Now as we’re about to get started, let’s have a great year here on holy hill!