Beholding for Generations - the Art of Becoming
2025 Commencement Address at Gordon College
Thank you President Hammond, Board of Trustees, faculty and staff, and graduates and family.
Ephesians 2:8–10
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork (poiema), created in Christ Jesus to do good works (ergon), which God prepared in advance for us to do.
This is a painting by your Bruce Herman, the founder of your art department.
No, it is not portrait of me...
It is a portrait of my father, Osamu Fujimura—painted for "Ordinary Saints" project which flowed out of our "Qu4rtets" collaboration which will be exhibited here at the Barrington Center for the Arts in the fall. "Qu4rtets" is a meditation drawn from T. S. Eliot’s "Four Quartets", those indelible poems written, in part, by the sea in Gloucester.
I was born in Boston while my father was completing postdoctoral research with Noam Chomsky at MIT. A leading speech and hearing scientist, he helped carry Generative Grammar theory across the Pacific, bringing it into the nascent field of Speech and Hearing sciences in Japan. I came back to US as my father continued his research at the famed Bell Labs.
My father the scientist loved the arts—loved artists and music and beauty.
When I found the courage to tell him I wanted to become an artist, sometime in my first year of college, his response was unexpected:
“Oh. That’s what I wanted to become. I am glad you are pursuing that! ”
I don’t know what I was hoping he’d say. But what he said was an exhortation that I still carry with me.
He recognized that the work of imagination—the labor of beauty—is as valid, as sacred, as anything a scientist may discover or build.
There is a generational blessing flowing into this May morning.
This story—mine and my father’s—is not merely personal recollection. It is a communal invocation. It is an invocation of generosity. This is your day, dear graduates, and this is also an opportunity to celebrate the person who first believed in you, who stood in your corner, who made sacrifices for you to be here.
So before we continue, let us pause together.
Take a breath. Close your eyes, just for ten seconds.
And as you breathe in, I invite you to think of one person you wish were here beside you right now.
Silence
That moment of stillness—that invocation—was inspired by Mister Rogers. When Mister Rogers accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emmys, he used his precious seconds on stage not to speak of himself, but to ask everyone in that room of stars and celebrity to stop and remember someone who helped them along the way.
It may have been the most powerful moment of public theology ever aired on television.
Mister Rogers—himself a Presbyterian minister—said:
"Whomever you've been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they've made. They're the kind of people television does well to offer our world."
Dear graduates, family, and friends—"Whomever you've been thinking about, they're the kind of people" your education, your perseverance, and this milestone does well to offer the world, and our lives.
You and I are here today because of a generational, and communal, blessing.
And you, in turn, are now part of stewardship of that blessing.
My father passed away in 2017. There isn’t a day I don’t think of him. But thanks to Bruce, and this portrait, he is beside me.
And you too might imagine a portrait—not necessarily of paint and canvas—but of memory and gratitude. Of presence, woven through your life in the colors of delight and the textures of grace.
To "paint a portrait" is not always the task of an artist. Sometimes it is the quiet work of becoming—of living a life textured by love, mercy, and awe.
Gratitude is the fruit of such love. And that love surrounds you today.
To “graduate” means to "rise above".
To rise above schisms and cynicisms, above despair of our culture war filled days.
To behold your memory of love, and let it lift you.
You are not just crossing a stage today. You are "rising above"—inheriting a calling. That is what education is about.
And we are fortunate.
We do not stand upon shifting sands of the confusion of our age. I do not need platitudes to uplift you.
We stand on Solid Ground of Christ—the foundation not built by anxiety of trends, shadowy conspiracies or of passing fancy.
You are not tasked with chasing the wind, to be caught up by the tempest of our time. You are called to create the future beyond the storm. The future is build by love, not by power of darkness threatening us with fear. Sinister forces may indoctrinate by anxious powers to gripping us, but it is the seed of sacrifice love that generate a future. It is in integration of knowledge to hearts and souls that the future of humanity is built.
Christians, you see, are "futurists". We are to create in, for and by love. That is the ultimate call of a liberal education.
To follow Christ is to become artists to rise above the erected walls of hate, erected to threaten to separate and segregate, erected to force us to bend our knees to a cold world of grey scarcity, a zero sum game of ever shrinking inevitabilty. Against all odds, a Christian is an artist of impossibilities.
To be an artist is dare to shape the unseen: to give form to grief, to whisper hope, to weave beauty into fractures.
Like the post-Easter story of Thomas, we may ask, “Where is the proof?” of such a infinite possibilities of love. The world has indeed grown cold; we are resigned to our darkened cave with our rations of humanity running out.
But as soon as we dare ask of proof of that love, Christ appears in front of Thomas, as if to answer the challenge. He gives of himself, again and again revealing in a glorified human body, full of wounds.
"By His wounds we are healed."
And by His wounds we are taught how to behold and worship—not in striving, but in grace. This we are saved by grace.
This is where Paul’s words matter in Ephesians
We are God’s "poiema"—God’s workmanship, God’s "poetry".
Created in Christ to do "good works"—“ergon” is the Greek word there.
These words—"poiema", "ergon"—are the rhythm of your life now.
Poiema tells us that Creation is spoken and sung into being.
Yes, “workmanship” is a fair translation here - “you are God’s workmanship”. But I prefer “We are God’s Masterpieces.”
You are God’s poetry.
You are not mass-produced.
You are not accidental.
You are handcrafted, and now, handed, on this graduation day, a life to craft.
This means you are artists, whether or not you hold a brush.
To live as a Christian is to live generatively—to participate in the divine continued act of creation.
"Ergon."
We have work to do.
Not to earn salvation, but because we have been "freely given" a future to build toward the New Creation. We are invited to co-create. We can only do certain work on this side of eternity, to mend, to comfort, to challenge, to seek mercy and work for justice, to share the good news - the gold that flows in the fissures of our broken world.
And that work is often hard and intense. It may even be painful as God rearranges not only the “furniture” in our hearts but reorients and transfigures our hearts made fit for a King.
It will seem impossible now.
In the cynicism of our world, you will be told your vision is too idealistic, if you start to share your dreams, to share with your scientist father that you want to try to make it as an artist.
“There is no budget for that . There is not the luxury of time. Do something more practical!” That’s what we expect to hear, and what we indeed hear from the world, and from my father. Are we a fool to say “I have a dream”?
Dear graduates, I advise you as an artist: press in and press forward anyway.
If all you can offer is a mustard seed, offer it.
God multiplies even that, especially a small offering of a widowed heart, done in faith, into the New Creation.
But in order to have such a faith, we have to see the Easter differently.
Easter is not the ending point of the gospel narrative.
Easter ushers in our new beginnings, continuous Genesis moments.
The resurrected Christ invites us into a resurrected vocation of impossibilities.
And here is the scandal of glory:
Christ rose in a "human body".
Not a domineering power. Not a gnostic, ghastly spirit.
A glorified body that was broken.
A body that was glorified—"and yet still wounded."
Jesus chose to bear his wounds forever.
And, again, it is through those wounds that we are healed.
It is through our own wounds, and our weaknesses, that God’s power is made perfect. Perfection flowing out of Jesus’s wounds of love.
We are God’s poems, and we have hard work ahead of us. Scriptures tell us that we are also God’s poets.
James 1 tells us to be "doers" of the Word. This passage is usually preached to exhort us to be activists of our faith convictions. But the Greek there—poietes—has another resonance: “Become a poet of the Word".
What does it mean to become a "poet" of the Word?
It means listening deeply.
It means beholding carefully.
To craft with nuance from God’s Word into the heart of a fractured world.
It means allowing God’s Word to shape the inner architecture of your life—so that what you do in quiet is obedience becomes a life to create beauty.
We will remember what we hear deeply.
And what we behold, we will become.
To be a "poietes" is to look in the mirror and see the world refracted through God’s grace—
Not as how we see ourselves, as how God sees us - as Christs wounds glorified paints us to be.
To be portrayed by God’s gaze, with God’s delight, and be sent out to take risks to love and create into the broken world.
As Eliot wrote:
“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
To see ourselves in God’s gaze, is to step into the unknown.
So go—as you walk the steps to this stage.
May each step become a prayer, a new beginning, to know the world for the first time.
This is your Genesis moment.
When you step off this stage, you descend into a world of scarcity mindset and chaos, but you graduate into, to rise above, into a world of abundance that God is provided for you.
You have been given wings to be a "poet of the Word".
You are an artist of the Kingdom.
And in this vocation, your wounds will mingle with Christ’s.
Your tears with His.
Your sacrifice melds into His greater Sacrifice.
And from this communion—wounds transfigured into glory—will come New Creation.
You will be the ones to break cycles of violence and exploitation.
You will bless a thousand generations.
You will become, in time, a portrait of grace for someone else.
Go now—into the art of becoming.
You are the poem. You are the painter. You are the beloved.