2025: Baccalaureate Speaker Reverend Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson

If you would indulge me for a moment as I take a picture of you in my heart, the images of your faces I’m storing for whatever might be the days of challenge ahead. I know that when I call to mind your faces, I will remember that we have all we need to turn the world right side up again. So just indulge me for a moment with this Class of 2025.

I give thanks also to all of your family. All that you have done. All that you have sacrificed. Your prayers. Your money. Everything that you have done to make it possible for these scholars to sit where they sit and to begin to do, to imagine what they will do. And to the Wake Forest family, to this community, to Dr. Wente, to all of you, I give God thanks and praise for you.

Graduation season is such a special time. Folks are filled with hope and memory. And I’m included in that: filled with hope and memory. And I have been remembering my amazing Aunt Doris.

I talk about her a lot because of the impact that she has had on my life. And so I just want to share with you this morning from the subject of leading with love in the age of monsters and from scriptures that are dear to my tradition and scriptures that my Aunt Doris shared with me.

My Aunt Doris was definitely not a warm and touchy-feely person. In fact, she never expressed a lot of emotion. In all of the years that I knew her, I never heard her say the words, “I love you” to anyone. She just lived it with her presence and with her action. She was a perfectionist. You did not bring home a B or a C to my Aunt Doris.

We used to call her El Excellente. Behind her back of course. Because she was the original gangster. She could communicate with me just by lifting an eyebrow. I knew when I had said too much. I knew when it was time to sit down. I knew when it was time to shut up.

She was a woman of few words. However, when she did talk, she usually had something to say that changed my perspective.

So when it came time for me to go off to college, Aunt Doris called me to the kitchen table for a conversation. I learned so much at that kitchen table. And for a while we sat in silence. She was the queen of loud silences. She just let me sit there in my feelings for a bit and said nothing.

And she had a few torn pieces of paper and envelopes in her hand as we were sitting at the table. And she was folding them and unfolding them and refolding them again and just fiddling with these pieces of paper. And I looked closer at what she was folding. And they were the stubs from her disability support checks. It was as if the whole world stopped for me and I was hit with waves of emotion.

I knew that whatever she was going to say was going to be important. And so she leaned in and she said, and I quote, “Don’t be stupid.”

This was the woman who had done so much for me. Never steered me wrong. Stepped to me in love when I got out of line, which was often. Encouraged me when I was down. Kicked me in the pants when I got down on myself.

And now I’m sitting here in front of her with the realization that I was preparing to go to college – the first in my generation – in part because she had saved a portion of her disability payments each month for me. And I was overwhelmed.  But not too overwhelmed to lean in a bit further into stupidity because I quickly recovered from my being overwhelmed. And I said, “But Aunt Doris, I’m not stupid. I was admitted into all of these colleges and universities and I’ve won these scholarships and I’m about to break a generational stronghold. I’m about to do something no one else in my family has ever done. I’m about to and I’m about to and I’m about to.”

And she said, “Mimi, here’s how you finish that thought: ‘I’m about to be stupid.’ I. I. I. If you think that God has moved heaven and earth including my crusty old behind” – that wasn’t the word she used, but I’m editing – “for ‘I’, then you are about to be stupid. None of this that you are about to do is about you and you alone.”

So she pointed to the papers that were on the table, and she said, “This is how God uses us for something that is even bigger than us, for something that is about more than us, for something that will benefit more than us. So don’t be stupid.”

And she was the right leader to show up in that liminal space between what was my world and what could be my world because she showed up with love and she challenged me to love bigger. No excuses. She knew intimately the fullness of my life, all of my challenges and everything that I had experienced and overcome. And still no excuses.

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci called that liminal space, the space between what was and what’s about to be, “the age of monsters.” He said, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.”

Now is the time of monsters. When you see the impact of the unchecked power of leaders on the vulnerable and the economic exploitation, the injustice, the ecological collapse rampant because fears are cultivated, it’s monster time because something has died and something has not yet been born. When you witness in real time how disinformation and half-stories undermine truth and trust in history. When individual rights are claimed to both hold and act on dehumanizing ideologies. When elephants dance, no one cares that the grass cries.

These times call for resistance and courage of course, but they also call for something more, something that my Aunt Doris was calling me to: love. Love. Love will guide you as you try to discern what to do with this education you have earned. As you look out on a world where ideologies trade fear for power, where truth stumbles down the street and says those dreaded words that we are not allowed to say. Unjust systems crush your neighbors and the people you love and call it right.

Love will lead you to be a student of history, not just a consumer of what is right now. It will cause you to be present with your neighbors and to retire phrases like “now more than ever” or “in such unprecedented times” or “this is not who we are.” Retire those phrases because our time is not uniquely broken.

There is nothing more broken about the time we are living in right now than 25 years ago and 50 years ago and 75 years ago. And no, we can’t believe the headlines and we’re horrified by videos and we’re disappointed in our leaders and in ourselves and heartbroken to see that our communities of course fracture along the lines of race and class and faith and identity. And it feels monstrous, and it is.

But we have always lived in the time of monsters. And the story of Jesus is that we have always needed leaders to transform the age, not just survive it. We’re not called to survival. We’re called to build a thriving world where all of us belong. We’re called to transform the world. We’re called to open ourselves to transformation. And that transformation is not about having the right political strategy or the most weapons. That call is about love.

How do I know that? Because I can ask my enslaved ancestors, who sang songs of freedom while bound in chains. And they didn’t just sing for themselves.

I know that because I can ask those who marched and rallied and resisted in every age for all of the issues that affect all of our lives. And they did that not just for themselves but for all of us.

I can ask our grandmothers, who held our communities together with prayer and protest and pots of everything soup.

From the auction blocks to the burning crosses, from Japanese internment camps to forced separation at borders, from the trail of tears to mass incarceration, the powers of monsterhood have always been magnified when love and justice have been withheld. But in every age, in every age, love and joy has turned the tide.

So I won’t say to you what my Aunt Doris said to me, but I will call your attention to Jesus’s words spoken in a liminal time. His words are situated in the context of a long goodbye in the Gospel of John, where he’s preparing his friends to live and lead in the monstrous in-between times. And he says, “I give you a new commandment that you love one another just as I have loved you. Love one another.”

That is our charge in every monstrous age: to lead with love. Love is our power, and the collective witness of my Aunt Doris and Thich Nhat Hanh and Vincent Harding and Martin Luther King and Sojourner Truth hover over us to remind us that love is not sentimentality. You don’t have to like me to love me. Love is not tolerance. How dare we tolerate each other when we have all been made in the image of God, who loves us fiercely. Love is defiant action. It’s unbreakable. Solidarity. Love endures. It does not die. It cannot be buried in a borrowed tomb. It will have the last word.

To lead with love means to refuse to become what you fight against. Leading with love is the work of building and healing and protecting and connecting and bridging divides and telling un-weaponized truths and reweaving the fabric of community until the fabric stretches for all of us.

And leading with love requires you to know who you are. Jesus could lead with love and with vulnerability because no one else could define him for him.

Who are you? Who are you is the question.

Leading with love means anchoring your identity not in your titles, not in platforms, but in the truth that you are made in the image of God and that you are adored and so is everyone else you set your eyes upon.

Leading with love is about choosing. It’s not about feeling; it’s about choosing, as Vincent Harding says, to seek the wellbeing of the other, to engage in the work of creating a social order, not just where you can experience equity and justice, but a social order in which all of us and all of our children and our children’s children will find wellbeing. The wellbeing that God has intended for us.

Today’s justice for me is not enough for me if it does not lead to a transformed world for all of us. And wherever your life’s vocation calls you – to ministry, to education, to science, to medicine, to business, to caregiving, to politics, wherever it leads – understand that leading with love is about making a life worthy of the prayers of your ancestors, worthy of your own dreams and worthy of the children who will inhabit our tomorrows.

My question for you is not what injustice you plan to conquer, not what movement you plan to build, to lead. My question for you is: How big is your imagination for a world that thrives, a world that includes all of us? No one left out, no one left behind, no one discarded, no one exploited.

The prophet Ezekiel imagined that world as one where the streets of the city were filled with elders present and living among us and children playing among them. John the Revelator imagined that world as one where every tear is wiped away as a profound act of the healing presence of God. It seems implausible, but it’s possible.

And if it seems other worldly and unrealistic and not logical and not worth the effort to live as if that world exists right now in the here and now where love is the social order, then I send you out with homework. The same homework that Jesus gave to his disciples: to keep stretching and keep connecting and keep listening and keep showing up and keep pursuing relationships beyond your own circle; to keep drawing your circle wider; to keep learning; to keep letting your heart break open; to listen to children laughing until what happened with Jesus, with the prophets, with our ancestors, with my Aunt Doris happens with you: that a love that seemed implausible and ridiculous for you becomes the only love that matters.

I lift up blessings for each and every one of you. And in the name of the Creator who has known us from head to foot, in the name of the Spirit that accompanies us and strengthens us, in the name of our family members who love us, I give thanks for the hope that you are.

Lead with love. God bless you.