Message during High School Thanksgiving Convocation

The Lion and the Mouse
TEXT: I SAMUEL 16:7

It is nice to see you all in church today. In Silliman, going to church is part of our education. Silliman education includes strengthening our faith in a Creative and Caring God who gives worth and value to our humanity.

Silliman education offers a pentagon of opportunities for learning.

• The first is learning in the classroom. This means acquiring the education on a variety of human concerns: science, mathematics, literature, arts and music, and other skills needed to live productive lives.
• The second opportunity is learning in the courts. I mean here athletics and sports. Silliman teaches the value of play and of competition like tennis, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and swimming.
• The third is learning of culture. Silliman offers many opportunities for students to see concerts, theater, art exhibits, and being in bands or singing clubs.
• The fourth opportunity is learning from communities. We regularly get our students to go out of the campus to be with real people in real places facing real problems in life. We learn from them and how they cope and overcome, how they create opportunities for themselves and carve a better future for their children. And we celebrate our friendships within the campus as a community of peers.
• Finally, Silliman offers learning in church. It is an evangelical Christian institution that is proud of its faith. Silliman does not seek to make Protestants out of its students or faculty and staff who may have different faith traditions. But it seeks to live its faith as best it could to affirm the value of faith in the life of any person.

Five Cs – classroom, courts, culture, communities and church. When a person graduates from Silliman, this person sees all the five Cs as integral parts of his or her sense of self. All five Cs converge to produce a person of competence, character and faith.

For sure we often get snagged by challenges and conflicts – two negative Cs if you will. But with competence, character and faith we acquire a treasure chest of creativity and caring that allow us to overcome most challenges and conflicts.

So, this Thanksgiving Convocation, I invite you to first of all thank God for the opportunity to acquire a Silliman education. Many other schools promote one or a few of the five Cs. But Silliman gives you all five to the best it could.

Let us pray: Thank you God for your grace and mercy. Thank you for parents who work so hard that we could have the best education we could get. Thank you for bringing us to Silliman, a school that, even if faced by many limitations, strives to give us the best education we could have. Thank you for this time together in church, to learn of your grace and glory. Amen.

The Bible passage read earlier today tells of a story that I think fits your learning theme in this convocation. Your theme of “Descending into Greatness” is a carry over of our theme last Founders Day. I think it is good to keep meditating on greatness and how this is anchored on humility and character, and today, on why this is a good foundation for our continuing thanksgiving for a truly great God.

Our passage tells of the time that the prophet Samuel was asked by God to look at the sons of Jesse to select from among them the next king of Israel. Samuel saw the big boys of Jesse who were fine looking, strong and certainly all fit to be king. But every time he thinks that one of these sons could be king, God tells him, no. You see, Samuel was looking for a man who could fit the usual people’s expectations of a king: fine looking, strong, capable to lead an army, and physically exceptional. He wasn’t looking for a small shepherd boy that was Jesse’s last son, David, who could not possibly win an Israeli village election.

God tells Samuel: “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature… for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Doesn’t this passage of the scripture speak to many of us today? All day in our life, in school, at home, among our friends, or at church, we often strive to be the best looking, the most able, and certainly of having the highest stature among all others in our crowd. We see ourselves as most humans do, who measure our standing and stature on being better than most.

We seek to be the best in everything, and have the best things. We want to have the best dress, the most powerful motorcycle, the biggest wallet, be the brightest in class, and be the most desirable person to have as a friend.

There is certainly nothing wrong about being the best or in having the best. In fact, to be the best is among the fundamental stresses of Silliman education. We celebrate being the best in Silliman. But what we need to watch out for – which is what our scripture today is telling us – is when our drive to be the best and to have the best gets us to lose our character and makes us proud, haughty and overbearing on others. These lose our potentials to be good kings in our lives.

Being the best and having the best are probably not problems so far as God is concerned. He certainly seeks to endow us with blessings. The problem is when the desire to be the best and the lust to have the best darkens our hearts and erodes the holiness of our souls.

And it is the heart that God sees, and what God uses to qualify us to serve His purposes. We may be the best and we may have the best in all outward appearances. But we could not be Kings of Israel or Queens of anything if our hearts are darkened by desires and envy.

In the eyes of most people, what makes us great are what can be seen. But in the eyes of God, what makes us great is the glitter of our hidden character.

Strive to be great. But remember that greatness to God is not in the brilliance of our outward appearance, but in the sparkling gem of our inward soul. Greatness to a God that Himself had showed His greatness by sending His only Son to a shameful death on a cross, when He had all the powers to create and destroy the universe and to certainly wipe out His enemies, is to do exactly what He did: to humble one’s self to serve and redeem others.

A story is told of a lion sleeping one day in the forest. His sleep was rudely disturbed by the squeak of a mouse. He swiped the mouse with his great paw and was ready to kill it. The mouse pleaded: O great king of the jungle let me live and I shall one day serve you. The lion, seeing itself a much more powerful beast than the mouse, thought it comic that such little creature like the mouse can be of any service or use to him. So, if only to humor the mouse, he let it go.

One day, the lion was strutting proudly in his jungle domain when he got snared in a hunter’s net. In panic, he let out a loud growl, which the mouse heard. The mouse went running toward the lion and said to the huge beast, “patience, lord, I will free you from the net.” The mouse proceeded to bite and gnaw at the ropes of the net and made a hole big enough for the lion to escape.

For most people, and certainly for the lion, the lion is the greater beast. It had the size, the bearing, the great paws, and the bigger teeth. In all outward appearance, it was certainly more powerful than the mouse. The mouse was puny, very small, and had very small teeth. But you see, it had character and the integrity to keep its word, to come to aid a friend, even if it had very limited capabilities. Using what little teeth it had, it worked to free the huge king of the jungle from a snare that it, the much bigger and more powerful lion, could not free itself from.

Which of the two – the lion or mouse – proved to be the greater animal?

“Descending into Greatness” is to be great in being low. It is to be the best because you have the capacity and the readiness to be humble. It is about finding power in what small things one can do.

And so I invite you to think about the lion and the mouse: which of the two proved to be greater in a situation of life and death? Did size and physical might matter? Or was it integrity and strength of character that powered an otherwise lowly creature?

I invite you to think about what God told Samuel: “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Let us praise and thank our God who sees not what we pretend to be, but who sees and loves us for who we really are in the depths of our inmost souls.

Let us be grateful for a God that powers the universe, but who has the humility to die for us so that we might live forever in His glorious kingdom.

It is easy to pretend to be a lion. But it is a real challenge to find power from being a mouse.

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- Philippine Crocodile Conservation in the Philippines
- Inaugural Speech
- Reaction to “The Role of Equity in Development”, World Bank Forum
- Commencement Message, Villaflores College, Tanjay City
- MEA Paper, presented in Sabah, Malaysia