This morning, our community gathered to mark a major milestone as our Year 12 students finished their official school days. As they prepare to begin their HSC exams, here is a transcript of what I shared with our graduates and their families.

We gather to mark an important moment in the lives of our Year 12 students and their families. We gather as a whole community, because it has taken this whole GPCC village to get our young men and women to where they are today.

Parents, I want to begin today by pausing on you for a moment, because while we are here to celebrate our graduating class, they wouldn’t be here without you. From the nappies and solid foods to the day care, Preschool and Primary School. The activities, the sport, the camps and the driving. Yes the driving, pick ups, drop offs, repeated and repeated and repeated. These small acts of love and support compound and made the core contribution to the formation and shape of these young men and women here today. Thank you for partnering with us in the journey.

Year 12, I have really valued the contribution you have made to the community here at GPCC. It has been a great week this week celebrating you and seeing your gifts on full display in chapel and at your final assembly. I am sorry the teachers ruined your final week by trouncing you in the teacher student sport competition. 

I have been on a Ski Trip with you and had a precious time at prefect camp with you. You are a deeply capable and thoughtful year group and I look forward to seeing your impact on the world.

I have been giving graduation speeches for over twenty years. At Tyndale in Western Sydney. At Marrara in Darwin. And now here. Different students, different states, different decades. In 2007 I told a group of graduates to be stamps, to stamp God’s wisdom and love on every place they went. In 2015 I told another group to be wise restorers, to heal the little corner of the world God placed them in.

Twenty years of watching where those students ended up has only made me more sure of it. So you are getting it again.

But first, let me tell you about my dad and a bucket of bent nails.

My dad grew up in western Sydney, and when he was a young man they wanted to start a Christian school in the church community his family belonged to. There was very little money. The buildings went up as fast as volunteers could raise them. So somebody handed my father a hammer and gave him a job.

His job was to straighten nails. Bent nails, pulled out of scrap timber, hammered flat again so they could be used a second time.

I want you to sit with how small that job is. Nobody puts your name on a wall for straightening nails. Nobody calls you up at a ceremony.

And yet there are buildings that allowed a school to begin because of the nails a young man hammered straight because somebody asked him to.

I have thought about stories like my dad straightening nails for most of my working life.

Year 12, over the next six months you will be asked one question more than any other. What are you going to do? And underneath that question, most of the time, sits a narrower one. What will you earn, where will you live, and what will you have.

That is not a bad question. It is just a small one.

Here is what I want you to notice. Nobody is ever going to stand up in front of you and argue for a life pointed at yourself. Nobody is going to make the case for ease. They will not have to. A life organised around your own comfort is not something you choose. It is our culture’s default setting, and almost everything around you is built to keep you there. The feed that shows you only what you already like. The delivery that removes the last bit of friction. The quiet assumption that a good life is a comfortable one, and that pleasure is what a life is for.

But pleasure is thin. It is a brittle crust over the depths beneath it, and it will not hold your weight over the long term.

We have just heard a letter read to you, and I want you to know who it was written to, because it changes everything about it.

It was written to a group of displaced exiles. Jerusalem had fallen. They had been marched across the desert to Babylon, a city they did not choose and did not run, and they were sitting there waiting for it to be over. There were prophets among them promising it would be over soon. Those prophets were lying to them.

So Jeremiah writes to them, and his letter does not say what they want it to say. He does not tell them to hold on. He tells them to unpack. Build houses. Plant gardens. Have families. You are going to be here a while, so stop waiting for your real life to start, because this is it.

And then he tells them to do something that must have sounded close to treason. Seek the good of Babylon. Pray for the city that took you. Because when it does well, you will do well.

The word underneath that is shalom, and peace is far too small a word for it. Cornelius Plantinga puts it this way. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight. Shalom, he says, is the way things ought to be.

So Jeremiah is not asking them to be pleasant to Babylon. He is asking them to work for the way things ought to be, in a place they did not pick, among people who were not theirs, for a harvest somebody else might well eat.

Six centuries later, God did the same thing himself, and he went further with it.

Jesus did not stand at a safe distance from a world that had gone wrong and call out instructions. He came into it. He was born in an occupied country, in a town nobody rated, under a government nobody had chosen. He worked with his hands. He went to weddings. He ate with the people everyone else had written off. And when the people he had come to save turned on him, he did not withdraw from it. He let it break him, and he prayed for it while it did. And on the third day he rose, which is God telling us that the mending of this world is not wishful thinking. It has begun, and it will hold.

That is the pattern. Not rescue from a distance. Presence, at cost, for the good of a place. For the good of others. 

Which brings us to here, and to now, and to you.

Year 12, you are clearly not exiles. We live in one of the most comfortable corners of the world at one of the most comfortable moments in its history. But you know this Coast. You know which families are doing it hard. You know what the phone in your pocket has done to people your own age. You know this world is not the way it ought to be. None of that is somebody else's job.

In a few weeks most of you will be carried somewhere else. A campus, a workplace, a trade, a share house. You did not choose it and you will not run it. The word this morning is not to wait it out. It is to unpack. Plant something. Seek the shalom of that place, beginning with the street you live on.

There is an old Jewish saying: it is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to walk away from it.

You are not going to fix the world. Christ is doing that. You are invited to work alongside him. That is a smaller job and a far better one, and you can do it on a Tuesday with nobody watching.

So build. Plant. And when somebody hands you a hammer and a bucket of bent nails, take it.

In thirty years there will be people whose lives are better because of something you did and thought nothing of at the time. You will never know their names. That is not a consolation prize. That is the job, and it is a good one.

Dear heavenly father, We thank you for our year 12 graduates. We thank you for the contribution that they have made to this community. We thank you for their unique passions, gifts and abilities. 

As they graduate today, we pray that you will remain close to them and continue to guide them. 

We pray that they will continue to develop and grow in wisdom and that they will use their gifts to honour and glorify you and to serve the communities in which you will place them. 

Lord we pray that you will bless them and keep them, we pray that your face will shine upon them and we pray that they will know your peace. 

Amen