Chris Anderson

December 7, 2018

St. Ambrose

Psalm 27; Matthew 9:27-34

Today on the memorial of St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, I think of his reputation for flexibility when it came to the liturgy.

You know the old joke.  “What’s the difference between a terrorist and liturgist?  You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

But St. Ambrose wasn’t that way.  He refused to give in to the demand that the liturgy be made the same in every parish and every church.   As he told his protégé, St. Augustine, “When I am at Rome, I fast on a Saturday; when I am at Milan, I do not.  Follow the custom of the church where you are.”

In fact, a version of this advice has come down to us in English in the famous saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

The fundamentals of the mass must remain the same, of course:  the structure of the Eucharistic Prayer, the words of consecration, the overall logic and sequence of the celebration.  But as for styles of music, St. Ambrose taught, or vestments, or certain liturgical gestures:  it doesn’t matter.  Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.  The mass must be reverent.  The mass must be in keeping with the tradition. But there are lots of ways of doing that.

“One thing I ask of the LORD,” as the Psalmist says today.  “This I seek:  to dwell in the house of the LORD / all the days of my life, / That I may gaze on the loveliness of the LORD / and contemplate his temple.”  And we cangaze on his loveliness.  We are, right now, as we reflect on the scriptures–and we will be again in a few minutes, when Father elevates the host.

We dothe dwell in the house of the Lord.  This is it.

Today let us pray for the intercession of St. Ambrose to help rescue us from our petty concerns—all of us, whatever our preferred styles and ways of going about things.   Let us not be blind to what really matters, and not just with the liturgy but with the way our neighbors do things or our kids or our coworkers, however much it might irritate or offend us.  The Lord is present in the scriptures, the Lord is present in the Eucharist, the Lord is present in the faith and the actions of the people.  He is here, in this place, and he is here in our lives, and nothing any of us can ever do can change that or diminish that or dilute that even one degree.  His grace is pouring down on us, and it always will be.  He will be with us always, even unto the end of time.

Luke 21:12-19

When I was a little boy my dad used to cut my hair.  I’d sit in a high chair and he’d shave me down almost to the skin.  I’ve got a picture of him bending over me with the clippers.  You can see my little toy gun sticking out of its holster underneath the towel he put over me.

When I was in high school of course everyone wanted their hair long.  We all wanted to look like George Harrison in the Beatles, at least I did.  There’s a picture of me in the yearbook with hair as long as dad would let me grow it, over my ears anyway.  I’ve got fuzzy sideburns, too.

And then there’s a recent picture of me, in Jerusalem, at the church in the Garden of Gethsemane, kneeling by the stone where tradition says Jesus knelt the night before the crucifixion and asked that the cup might pass from him.  I don’t remember who took it but he or she was looking down on me from above.  You can’t see my face, just the top of my head, and the way I’m balding up there. I hadn’t realized this before, until I saw the picture.  My hair is so thin on top you can see all the way to my crown.

And here’s the amazing thing.  Here’s why I’m telling you this.  Who cares about our hair?  Your hair, my hair?  Who cares about all the silly stuff in our lives?  God does.  Jesus does. He tells us so today, explicitly: “not a hair on our heads will be destroyed,” even in the midst of all our trials and tribulations, even at the end of the world.  The amazing thing about our faith is the conviction that no matter what happens, God is with us—that Jesus himself is our truest and closest friend, unable to be bored by us, unable to be offended by us.  Things willfall apart.  The world willend, again and again.  But God will never leave us, and we need never be afraid.

Here’s a lovely, lovely prayer by the seventeenth century Jesuit St. Claude de Colombiere:

Jesus, you are my true friend, my only friend.

You take a part in all my misfortunes:

You take them on yourself;

You know how to change them into blessings.

You listen to me with the greatest kindness

when I relate my troubles to you,

and you always have balm to pour on my wounds.

I find you at all times.  I find your everywhere.

You never go away;

if I have to change my dwelling, I find you wherever I go.

You are never weary of listening to me.

You are never tired of doing me good.

I am certain of being beloved by you if I love you;

my goods are nothing to you,

and by bestowing yours on me you never grow poor.

However miserable I may be,

no one nobler or wiser or even holier

can come between you and me,

and deprive me of your friendship;

and death, which tears us away from all other friends,

will unite me forever with you.

All the humiliations attached to old age

or to the loss of honor will never detach you from me.

On the contrary, I shall never enjoy you more fully,

and you will never be closer to me,

than when everything seems to conspire against me,

to overwhelm me, and to cast me down.

You bear with all my faults with extreme patience,

and even my want of fidelity and ingratitude

do not wound you to such a degree

as to make you unwilling to receive me back

when I return to you.

Isn’t that at wonderful prayer?  And here, listen to this, this final part of the prayer:

Jesus, grant that I may die praising you,

that I may die loving you,

that I may die for the love of you.

Amen!

October 14^th, 2018

Titus 3:1-7

Sometimes scripture is obscure, full of levels and layers and complications. Sometimes it isn’t.

And this is one of those times when it isn’t.

We are “to slander no one,” St. Paul says to Titus.  We are “to be peaceable, considerate, exercising all graciousness toward everyone.”

Graciousness to “everyone,” not just to the people who belong to our church, not just to the people who are citizens of our country or whose skin is the same color as ours, not just to the people of our own political party.

Everyone.

Slandering “no one”–not even the people we don’t like, not even the people we don’t respect, not even the people we don’t understand.

No one.

On Facebook, in letters to the editor, in public debate, in private conversation, in our own thoughts and prayers:  we must be “peaceable.”  We must be “considerate.”

If we’re not, we have to stop and really think about ourselves.

If we’re not, we really can’t call ourselves Christians.

November 7^th, 2018

Philippians 2:12-18; Psalm 27; Luke 14:25-33

I’m married to someone who hardly ever “grumbles,” this word that St. Paul uses in Philippians today.  “Do everything without grumbling,” he says, and Barb is really like this.  When we travel she doesn’t complain about the food or the beds or standing in line.  She makes the best of it.  When she does things at home or takes care of her parents, she just does it, just goes about the task.

And maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal, and maybe in a way that’s the point. In the Gospel today Jesus asks us for everything, asks us to be heroes, to sacrifice it all and to join him, and that can seem so intimidating that we don’t think we can ever do it.  It’s too much.  And so we don’t do anything.  We give up. But as Pope Francis says in his latest apostolic exhortation, Rejoice and be Glad, “the holiness to which the Lord calls you will grow through small gestures.”  Not grumbling, for example.  Or gossiping. Or telling little lies.  “We are called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves.”

Last Sunday at mass I loved seeing some of the children dressed up as saints. They were wearing habits or robes or crowns.  But they could have come dressed as their parents, too, or the person next door, because holiness happens in our kitchens and our cars, too, in our own backyards, in small ways, all the time.

Besides, as a master grumbler myself, I don’t think these little things are that easy anyway.  The big, dramatic sacrifices, the great heroic deeds–they get us all this attention, all this glory, but the little things usually go by unnoticed, unrewarded. No one sees us doing the work we have to do.  No one knows. It’s so hard to control our impulses anyway, so hard to say no to the second cookie or glass of wine, so hard to bite our tongues.  What’s the point if we’re not going to get any credit?  What the heck?

That’s the challenge, the hardest challenge of all.  There’s the speech we give when we accept the Nobel Peace Prize, and then there’s emptying the garbage or taking the dog for a walk.

And in the end, Paul is saying, emptying the garbage can make an enormous difference. In the end the little things arethe big things.  Look at the world.  It’s defined by grumbling:  by snotty little remarks, by little cuts and digs, by labeling, by dismissing, by all this worrying about this petty thing or that petty thing, because that’s what “grumbling,” implies, not genuine resistance to real problems, not real speaking out against injustice, but just mumbling under our breath about whatever interferes with our own little daily enjoyments or patterns or routines. That’s the whole world now.  It’s structured by grumbling.  We have all these grievances but we never grieve. All our indignation is for ourselves, never for others.

But if we try to do everything without grumbling and complaining, without calling attention to ourselves, St. Paul says, we will “shine like lights in the world,” “in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.”  For not grumbling?  Shining like stars?  Yes.  To do everything without grumbling is the first small step towards dying to self, and through it Jesus can begin to do his work of transforming the world.

I don’t know how you feel about the results of the midterm elections.  We have different feelings, I’m sure, depending on our own politics, and the results are mixed anyway.  Maybe you don’t care—maybe you’ve been trying to ignore it all. But what if as Christians, as followers of Christ, we set out in the aftermath of the elections not to grumble and complain, under our breath or in our hearts or in any other way, if we treated other people with kindness and gave them the benefit of the doubt—if we practiced peace, in our own hearts, in our own small behaviors?  And what if when we have a real issue to stand up for, something we really care about, we stand up for it, directly and honestly, with courtesy, with courage, not holding it in or half-letting it out so that it just festers, just turns into a private bitterness?

After all, “the Lord is our light and salvation. / Whom should we fear? /   The Lord is our life’s refuge. /   Of whom should we be afraid?”

November 12, 2018

Veterans Day

Luke 17:1-6

In The Odyssey, Homer’s great epic poem, Odysseus goes off to war as a brash young man, full of confidence and bravado.  But after ten years of fighting in Troy, and ten years battling gods and monsters trying to get home, he comes back a different man.  He’s seen too much.  He knows that good people die and that the people on the other side are people, too, and that life is a lot more complicated than he thought it was when he was young.

This is the hero’s journey for all of us, Joseph Campbell says, in all the great stories and in the stories of our lives.  The hero isn’t the one with power but the one who realizes he’s powerless, and accepts that, embraces that—who overcomes what the Greeks call hubris, or arrogant pride.  And, of course, this is the Christian story, too, the story of Christ, who humbles himself even to the point of death, death on a cross.

I’m not a veteran—I never served in the military—but I’m the father of a veteran. My oldest son served in the Oregon National Guard and is a combat veteran of the war in a Iraq, and I’ve seen the heroism in him, the heroism he’s earned, partly by refusing to accept the false and idealized images of what a hero is supposed to be.  He’s like Odysseus.  He knows how random war can be, and how no one is safe, and how there is goodness and humanity in the enemy, too.

It’s so odd to be the father of a man who has that look in his eye, who has seen things I can’t imagine.

And this is what I want to celebrate and to honor on this Veteran’s Day, not just the willingness of soldiers to give their lives, not just their strength and their excellence and their skill, but even more, two things I’ve seen and deeply admire in my son:  humility and compassion.

My son has never once bragged about his exploits, never once told stories to make himself look good or to shock us.  That’s how you can tell who’s really fought and who hasn’t:  the people who’ve actually been in combat don’t talk about it. And my son has never once demonized the Iraqis or the Muslims or anyone else he encountered in his two tours, never once oversimplified his experience, never once made it into something black and white, bad versus good.

In this sense faith and soldiering, Christianity and the military, have something deeply in common.  “If your brother wrongs you seven times in one day, and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’” Jesus says, “you should forgive him.”  This is what a true veteran knows, in his or her discipline and dedication and self-sacrifice:  forgiveness. Compassion.

“To enter into the mystery,” Pope Francis says, “we need humility, the lowliness to abase ourselves, to come down from the pedestal of our “I” which is so proud, of our presumption; the humility not to take ourselves so seriously, recognizing who we really are:  creatures with strengths and weaknesses, sinners in need of forgiveness.  To enter into the mystery we need the lowliness that is powerlessness, the renunciation of our idols.”

This is what true veterans know, humility, self-sacrifice, and for this we honor them and we praise them, and we ask for the grace to be like them ourselves in our own battles, however big or small.

October 31, 2018

Luke 13:22-30

Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you,

will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.

There are passages in the gospels that comfort and reassure us, and passages that don’t, that scare us, that frighten us.  And though I take it as a rule that God is a God of infinite mercy and kindness and love, and He is, and that any of us who choose him will be saved, however sinful we are, if only we admit our sins and ask for his grace—and that’s the Church’s teaching, too, that we can all be saved—still, I don’t think it’s bad for us to be shaken up sometimes, as we should be by this passage, to be reminded that these are life and death issues and that we have choices to make and that not everything is OK.

It’s not bad to be scared sometimes, especially on Halloween.

I think of one of my favorite passages from the letters of Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic writer.  A younger writer has written her about all her doubts, all her struggles with faith, and these are the first two paragraphs of O’Connor’s reply:

          I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.  I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened.  A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. 

        What people don’t realize is how much religion costs.  They think faith is a big electric blanket, but of course it’s the cross.  It is much harder to believe than not to believe.  If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this:  keep an open mind.  Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

As someone who talks a lot with young people about faith and about doubt, I really love this passage.  O’Connor is saying that the struggle to believe is a part of the process, always, and that it’s really a kind of suffering in itself, a kind of intellectual suffering.  My students just don’t think that way.  Most of us don’t.  We think that if it’s tough to believe, if we struggle, there must be something wrong. We think that if something isn’t obvious or easy, it’s not for us.  But with faith, it’s exactly the opposite.  Eventually we get to the peace and the joy of the gospels, of Jesus, but we have to struggle first:  with our own sinfulness, with our false assumptions, with the vastness of a God who is beyond our comprehension, who won’t give us easy answers—who isthe answer.  “There’s no coming to consciousness without pain,” Carl Jung says.

We just have to accept that:  that there’s suffering in the world; that we can’t understand why.  That’s the call:  to complexity, and then to surrender.  Only then do we get light enough and thin enough and free enough to walk through the narrow gate—without all those bulky preconceptions, without that big, heavy blanket.

And that’s the choice, there it is, and it’s a choice that many, many people are not making and that we don’t always make ourselves day to day.  “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, rather than face their own souls,” Jung also says.  We eat.  We spend hours on our phone.  We drink too much.  We get lost on Facebook, reading things that only distract us, posting things that only hurt us, and others.  We buy things.  We turn to sex.  We work harder and harder.  Anything, rather than just sit in that chair in the morning and pray, or try to pray, or admit that we can’t.  That we need grace.  That we need God.

To get through the narrow gate, ironically, we have to “keep an open mind,” as O’Connor says.

That’s the cost.  Keeping an open mind.  Accepting the lack of certainty.  And trusting the rest to God.