Baccalaureate speaker Walter E. Fluker (GRS’88, STH’88, Hon.’24) told Boston University’s Class of 2024 graduates Sunday to follow the example of BU’s most famous alumnus, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), in striving for peace and justice. Photos by Kelly Davidson

Commencement 2024

“We Are Called, My Friends, to Be Peacemakers,” Rev. Walter E. Fluker Tells Boston University’s Baccalaureate Audience

BU theology professor emeritus invokes alum Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59)

An 18th-century Jewish parable tells of an astrologer-king who read the stars and foresaw that the coming harvest was tainted and would drive any who ate it mad. One version has the ruler ordering his counselor to shun the grain and remain a hungry beggar, who could remind the king and citizens of their madness. In another version, both men consume the harvest, but mark their foreheads first with a sign that reminds each that he is mad.

Both versions, Boston University Baccalaureate speaker Rev. Walter E. Fluker told graduates Sunday, remind us that “in times of collective madness and chaos, we are called to remember and to act… We are called, my friends, to be peacemakers.”

Addressing the hundreds gathered in Marsh Chapel, Fluker (GRS’88, STH’88, Hon.’24), Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership at BU’s School of Theology, warned of today’s “potential for madness—moral, spiritual, psychological, collective chaos,” evidenced in the “social and geopolitical” strife engulfing the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and other nations.

To leaven any sense of doom, Fluker sang and then led the congregation in a brief, impromptu hymn, “There’s Hope for This World.” Fulfilling that hope, he continued, requires following the embrace of “holy madness” by the late BU professor and Holocaust survivor/chronicler Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74)—the insistence on human rights in a world that often denies them.

For a concrete example, Fluker directed his listeners to look no further than the man memorialized in the abstract sculpture outside on Marsh Plaza. At the end of his life, an unhappy Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) denounced what he called the “madness” of the Vietnam War and campaigned as well against poverty. In pressing for peace and justice, Fluker said, King “was not, and nor should we be, ‘satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’

“He paid dearly at the crossings of madness and hope, but he left us a sign… We are called to be signs of peace in a world that is on the brink of chaos.”

His voice crescendoing with the cadences of a trained preacher, Fluker thundered: “Politics can’t legislate it, poverty can’t define it, racism can’t destroy it, religious bigotry can’t condemn it, sexism can’t vanquish it, water can’t drown it, fire can’t consume it, death can’t kill it, hell can’t hold it!” His listeners erupted with applause.

The music of the service doubled down on the theme of peace, as the congregation—led by the Marsh Chapel Choir and organist and associate music director Justin Blackwell (STH’07, CFA’09), and accompanied by the Boston-based Majestic Brass Quintet and timpanist Robert Schulz—sang a hymn of praise “for the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child/friends on Earth and friends above, for all gentle thoughts and mild.”

The day’s storm clouds served as metaphor for the global ones preached about by Fluker, a prominent scholar of the lives of both King and Howard Thurman (Hon.’67), Marsh Chapel’s dean from 1953 to 1965 and the first Black dean at a predominantly white US university. While on the BU faculty Fluker oversaw the completion of Thurman’s five-volume collection of writings and letters.

Later Sunday, Fluker received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at BU’s 151st All-University Commencement. Fluker, Distinguished Professor of the Howard Thurman Center at Hartford International University for Religion & Peace, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi numbered among the recipients of the Roosevelt Institute’s 2023 Four Freedoms Award of Worship. Fluker earned his BA from Trinity College and a divinity degree from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

The Baccalaureate service traditionally features readings by BU’s president of Romans 12 and by the provost of Ecclesiastes 3. This year, it was Kenneth Freeman, BU president ad interim, who read, for his first and last time as BU’s leader, St. Paul’s exhortation from Romans to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The reading from Ecclesiastes by Kenneth Lutchen, provost ad interim, “for everything there is a season,” resonated particularly in this season of changing leadership at the University, with Melissa Gilliam to become Boston University’s 11th president on July 1.