This past weekend, many high school seniors celebrated their 2020 graduation. It was done virtually cost-free and was not even remotely downplayed.
In a remarkable act of unity CNN, MSNBC, and even FOX transmitted a commencement address from President Barack Obama along with appearances by Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson, the Jonas Brothers, LeBron James, Pharrell Williams, Megan Rapinoe, and lots of others.
According to CNN, with pomp and pandemic circumstances schools are now finding creative ways to honor graduates. Speedway High School in Indiana, “located just a few blocks from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500, will give out their diplomas at the racetrack’s famous ‘Yard of Bricks’ finish line. Each student and their family will be allowed one car, in which they will get to drive onto the speedway and get out at the finish line to receive their diploma.”
At Hanover Area High School in Pennsylvania, the graduates will attend a ceremony at the Garden Drive-in Theater. The 141 seniors and their families “will watch from their cars as prerecorded speeches, photo slide shows and individual acknowledgments project onto the theater’s screen.”
Other schools are adopting an even more personalized approach, delivering diplomas directly to the door. As one principal notes, “This might be something that Dohn High School just does [in the future]. You know, once you come to Dohn and graduate, we’re going to bring the diploma to you.”
Here in San Luis Obispo we still anticipate high school and university graduations. But in a time of far-reaching fear and sorrow, the question could be asked: Why should we celebrate?

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When I taught college Public Speaking, some students would implode up front nearly to knee-knocking incoherence. As their communications professor, I offered a potent salve for their fear.
Celebration.
I told them, “After each speech, you will applaud feverishly for one another. You will also yell, whistle, pound desks, yodel, holla, stomp, and screech until there commences such a din, uproar, cacophony, and tumult that every person in the entire building—verily, in the entire hemisphere—knows for a certainty: ‘Yes, another speech has finished.’”
Imagine what it’s like for these hesitant first-year students to complete a flawed presentation and receive this raucous, unrestrained approval.
So it is in heaven.
We are called to celebrate the grace of God who so enormously nourishes, liberates, and delights us. Of course, celebrations didn’t come naturally for early Adventists. We would be a much different church had we originated not in New England but in New Orleans.
Yet celebration is our biblical mandate, our holy calling. God created festivals (think: “Kosher Party!”) such as Feast of Unleavened Bread (Passover), Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), Feast of Tabernacles (Ingathering), the Blowing of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah), and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).
Herman Melville declares, “The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.”
God counters this drab, soulless impression with heaps of celebrations, and asks God’s children to do the same. “Holiness” is not principally avoiding sin. As Dag Hammarskjold wisely observes, “The road to holiness necessarily runs through the world of action.” Jesus asks us to bear fruit, not avoid leaf fungus.
Holiness is found in following Jesus. His lifestyle is proactive, not antiseptic. Just as light is more than the absence of darkness and love is more than neglecting hate, Christianity is more than arriving at death safely. The purest Christians celebrate every sacred molecule of life grandly—their heartbeats pulse gratitude each risen morning of incarnational life.
Following Jesus changes our perspective on what is celebration worthy. Poet Randall Jarrell points out, “If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.”
As Adventists, we live by grace, in peace, for love, with joy. Joylessly serving God is like peeling a grape—so little return for so much effort.
So though we live in a time of global fear and sorrow, we will rejoice continually, even in small triumphs, and particularly when a brother or sister chooses life. Then, as it is in heaven, we applaud and yell and yodel until there commences such a din, uproar, cacophony, and tumult that every being in the entire universe—verily, in all the spheres—knows for certain: Yes, another child of the Master has entered eternity.
Eternal life begins now. Now. Now.
Enjoy the journey.

—Chris Blake