GRADUATION DAY:
A Sermon on Pentecost
Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church NYC

May 19, 2024

                  Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, dramatist and humorist is one of the major authors who enriched my life through his books.  I stumbled on The Deptford Trilogy by sheer good fortune, and then, some months later, found a first edition of my favorite of his books, Fifth Business, in beautiful condition, abandoned on a curbside in Brooklyn a long time ago, and that copy came home with me that night—and, yes, I still have it.  Fifth Business was my entry point into Davies’s works, and its sequels were compelling, as were his later books, which were loosely linked to his earlier novels.   

Robertson Davies’s novel What’s Bred in the Bone tells the life story of a man who almost literally paints himself into a corner. Francis Cornish is, at the time of his enigmatic death, a wealthy patron of the arts with an extensive art collection, known as a superb art expert who famously exposed a faker of genius. Yet his friends and relatives never understand why this brilliant and talented man—once a talented enough young artist himself to become the apprentice of a great (if probably dishonest) artist—dried up into a possessor of others’ works, a man who supported artists with money and advice, but laid down his brush with no body of work of his own.  We the reader know better, as we are told the story, by two narrators. The first is the Lesser Zadkiel, the Angel of Biography, and the second is the Daimon Maimas, whose job it was to lead Cornish to make the most of himself. 

In their telling, Cornish became an apprentice of the Italian artist Tancred Saraceni in the last years before the Second World War broke out.  And what did Saraceni do in those years?  He took worthless, but genuinely old paintings, and faked them up to seem like the work of Old Masters, and then, with his partners traded them on the black market to recover genuine masterpieces from the Third Reich for their real owners—for a profit, of course, but also with genuine enjoyment of the game of fooling high ranking Nazi’s by flattering their nonexistent taste, leading them to trade away the superior paintings in return for Saraceni’s and Cornish’s cleverlry altered tat.

As Saraceni’s his apprentice, Cornish excelled. But Saraceni warned him, he was being tested, always tested, to see if he would be Saraceni’s successor-in-art, or just a perpetual apprentice. Whether he would be ready to face the world as amici di Saraceni rather than the lesser alunno di Saraceni. That is, “friend of Saraceni” as opposed to “student of Saraceni.”  
     In the last year before the Second World War broke out, Saraceni left Cornish his final examination: to do a new painting in the old manner, unsupervised and undirected—merely given an old canvas. 

With six months of isolation, Francis first creates a portrait of a dwarf jester in of the Middle Ages, based on a man Francis knew in his youth.  But then Francis excels himself: He creates a triptych of the Wedding of Cana, one that incorporates the mythic pattern that underlies his own life up to this point, and yet is recognizably done in “in the final accents of the Gothic voice.” 

And, as he has done with his other work, he uses recipes for antique paints, mixes ancient dust from the castle in which he and Saraceni  have been working, and adding carefully manufactured artificial cracks mimicking those that occur as a painting ages. Cornish creates at once a work intensely truthful, and yet gloriously fake. 

When Saraceni comes back, shortly before the outbreak of war, he views the tryptich, glaring at its every inch, and, impressed, finally addresses Francis as “Maestro.”

And so his apprenticeship is over. Francis is welcomed as a friend of Saraceni, not merely a student. No mere technician, or even gifted fraud, Francis has created his masterpiece—the work that establishes him in his own right. 

Unfortunately, when it is found by the Allies after the War, it is hailed as an authentic last flowering of the Gothic world, the work not of Francis Cornish, but of the so-called Alchemical Master to whom the art world assigns its creation.  Francis can never claim it, without destroying its standing as an Old Master’s work.

 So he stops painting, for fear of reducing his great work, his self-summation, to a discarded fake. The rest of his life, he develops talent in others, and assists those whose talent he respects to enliven the arts as he has done.   

Davies was an Anglican, and while seldom directly didactic, his novel, with its supernatural narrators, parallels today’s Gospel reading, but to get the context, we have to include a little bit more of the text than is called for in the reading.  

In speaking to his disciples, Jesus tells them “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. [Jn: 15: 26-27]. When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.  You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.

We are at the Last Supper, once again—today’s Gospel reading from John, Chapter 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15, is part of that final discourse. 

In other words, the disciples have all passed their final exams.  

Well, not all.  Jesus, praying for his erstwhile disciples asks the Father to protect them, and adds that 

“While I was with them, I protected them in your name . . . and not one of them was lost, except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.  But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy complete in themselves.  

And so Jesus takes the time to tell the disciples something they desperately need to hear, something to tide them through the horror to come, and the guilt that will only be dispelled when they meet again on the other side of the Empty Tomb: Their apprenticeship is over. They are amici di Jesus, friends of Jesus, not the lesser alunno di Jesus.
How can this be? We know that the disciples are yet to pass their final exams, are yet to demonstrate their worthiness—and yet Jesus tells them that “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
That’s all.
He doesn’t ask them to be true to him, to die for him.
He doesn’t ask Peter to avow his love for Jesus, and risk execution himself. 
He asks them to be true to each other, to be willing to die for each other.
Not for him.
Because Jesus first has to show them how to do it, at Golgatha.   
And then they do what he asks. After Judas’s betrayal, there are eleven men hiding in the upper room, afraid but united. After he appears to them, twice—Thomas misses the first appearance—there are eleven men, and an unknown number of women, who begin to bravely speak their truth.  People who tell the story of the love of God for women and men, a love so great that God will stop at nothing in order to make that love clear, so clear that a movement will form to spread the awareness of that love to all people.  Everyone. Not just the children of Abraham by blood, but as the first letter of John says, quite clearly, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.”

Now some will tell you that those who do not formally receive the news and avow themselves followers of Jesus do not warrant such love. But think again of what Jesus says: “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
And what is the command?
Simply this: Love one another as I have loved you.
As C.S. Lewis and Karl Rahner point out, this commandment, and not the name in which the commandment is performed, is the vital part in reaching graduation day. As Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, God doesn’t play by rules—or fairly. Just ask the laborers in Jesus’s parable who start at the beginning of the day, only to receive the same wages as those arrive at the very end.
No, it’s not about rules, or fairness. It’s all about love. Sacrificial love, an offering of the self. And passing it on. Telling the story, as it caught you. Sharing experience, strength, and hope. 

And in so telling, these Eleven, and those whose lives they touch, create what our Presiding Bishop calls the Jesus Movement, a wave of humanity from 2,000 years ago crashing on the rocks of these hard, bitter times in our world with simple message: Love one another as I have loved you.
The fictional Francis Cornish in Davies’s novel has to protect his great vision by making himself effectively invisible, and empowering others to tell their truth through their own eyes. 
Jesus, too must leave us, so that we can complete out transition and receive the Holy Spirit, move from alunno to amici. And in so doing, tell the story as best we can. 
But not just our own story. 
To graduate, we are called to love one another, even when it’s risky, even when it hurts, even when it makes us vulnerable. Jesus’s love is both the spark that lights the paschal candle, and the flame that we pass, one to another, in the Easter Vigil. By accepting that love, and symbolically passing that flame, we are echoing the acts of the apostles—disciples no longer—and declaring our willingness to embrace that love. 
That message makes tyrants afraid, because love casts out fear. Safe to worship in our faith communities, to gather together and share the stories and the sacrament, to love one another, as community, as sisters and brothers in Christ. We should remember that such sacrificial love in other places, and in other times, has been and remains acutely dangerous. 
Here, in divided America, that commandment is an antidote—perhaps the antidote—to the increasing suspicion and anger that mar our exchanges. Because love doesn’t stay confined. It spreads out, from those who are consciously following the commandment to love to those who find themselves surprised by an unexpected kindness, a shared moment across an ideological divide, a class divide, a racial divide. 

So we hope. So we believe. And so we try to live.
But that hope should gain strength from the fact that we are here, tonight, in this chapel. Though empires have risen and fallen, as wealth has been built up, stolen, and squandered, as we have seen revolutions and counter revolutions sweep the globe, that simple command, difficult though it is to live up to, continues to echo, and to bear fruit. And every day we are presented with the opportunity to live up to our high calling of being friends, not servants, of Jesus of Nazareth.