Homily

for a video of this homily, click here

December 26, 2021, Feast of the Holy Family

Colossians 3:12-21; Luke 2:41-52

Last week Barb and I decided to take our fifteen-month-old grandson and our two dogs for a walk in the woods.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

For one thing the tires on the stroller were half-flat, and the dogs were jumpy, and then it started to rain, and then it rained harder, and Hank started to cry, and then to cry louder, until finally Barb picked him up and walked home, without a word—just took off—leaving me in the mud with two barking dogs and a stroller I had to drag behind me all the way back.

I was so mad I could barely see straight—not at Hank—he’s a perfect little boy—but at Barb, at my wife—and I shouldn’t have been mad at her.  It wasn’t her fault.  Really, I was mad at myself, that even as a grandfather I can’t seem to control my emotions.

How can any of us ever be as patient and loving as the scriptures suggest Mary and Joseph are?  As faithful?  As kind?  In today’s gospel Mary and Joseph are “anxious,” we’re told, and maybe frantic, and maybe they even raise their voices a little when they find their little boy in the temple.  “Why have you done this to us?”  But I think the traditional interpretation is finally right, that in the end they were patient, they accepted, they listened, even though they didn’t understand—they were holy—and it just doesn’t seem fair that we’re supposed to live up to that standard ourselves.

But I think that’s too easy.  That’s letting ourselves off the hook.

We need ideals.  We need high standards.  We have more than enough examples all around us of slacking off and letting things go and making excuses.  We need models of virtue and love, even if we know we can never live up to them, and in a way that’s the point, that we know what is right and know when we’re wrong and so turn to God for forgiveness and grace.

That’s what the stories of the Holy Family are really about.  Grace.  The immeasurable stores of God’s grace.

Mary was conceived without sin, which is a lot more than could ever be said of us.  But she was conceived without sin, before she was even born, before she could do anything to earn or achieve that grace.  Mary was saved by the love and the mercy of the son she had yet to bring into the world.  In that sense the only difference between her and us is that we are saved after Jesus was born, and because he was, and that we have to keep asking for his grace after we are born, every day.

And also, unlike Mary a few short years later, we don’t say yes when the angel calls us.  We say no.  Again and again.

But that grace is always there, it’s always there, and all families are holy in the sense that they continually give us opportunities to admit our failings and receive this grace.

O Lord, forgive me for my anger and impatience in the woods.  I am a small and sinful man and I need your grace and I need your help.  Please, O Lord, strengthen me to be more like Mary and more like Joseph.

I was talking with my dental hygienist the other day in the pauses as she cleaned my teeth.  She’s a young, Christian mother with two kids, including a boy who is on a basketball team.  The other night, after the opposing team scored and the coach was urging the kids to hustle back down the court, he didn’t.  He just walked back.  And his father was furious when they got home, he was really angry, and the boy ran up to his room and wouldn’t come down to dinner.

So the mother went upstairs to comfort her son, but she also went up to support her husband.  She told her son she was sorry his dad had gotten so mad but that he was right to be upset.  You weren’t doing your best, she told him, you weren’t doing what God wants you to do, and your dad and I have to call on you that.

The next day the dad apologized, too, but he didn’t back down either.  There were consequences.  There were expectations.

Sometimes dads have to be dads, and moms have to be moms, and moms and dads have to support each other, and moms and dads have to set boundaries and establish standards for their kids, even when they get too mad and aren’t perfect and make mistakes.

Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, which I take to mean, be loving.  Put them first. Husbands, love your wives and avoid any bitterness toward them, which I take to mean, be subordinate to them.  Put them first.  Children, obey your parents, because you don’t know everything and you can’t do whatever you want to do—but parents, do not provoke them.  Don’t be too hard on them.  Don’t discourage them.

My hygienist and her husband are struggling to balance their commitment to their church with the sports their kids get involved in, as many parents are, since often practices and tournaments take place on Sundays.  Church has to come first, even if sometimes in the interests of the kids the parents have to make compromises.

But what’s obvious, too, is that God was on the court that night, God was in the game, as he was with me and my barking dogs and that stupid stroller with the flat tires.  He is always with us, and every situation gives us a chance to discern the will of God and to act in Godly ways or try to.

My wife heard this story and passed it on to me.

A woman’s three or four-year-old grandson was standing at a window looking outside.  After a few seconds he reached up and tried to swipe the window.

He tried to swipe the window.  As if it were the screen on his phone.  As if it were too dark and rainy and he wanted to look at something else.

We don’t establish rules and set boundaries to make our children conform to who we are.  We do this to help them conform to who God is.  We do it because there’s a reality beyond that window, a real world we have to face and to see and to deal with, whether we want to or not, and that takes discipline and that takes humility and that takes faith.

Only in God can the souls of our children be healthy and whole and good, and we know that because it’s true for us.  We are all of us always searching for Jesus, as Mary and Joseph search for him today.  Every moment is a window.  This is what we know and what we try to teach our kids:  that there is goodness and beauty and excellence in the world, that Christ is in the world, and that only in Him can we ever be happy and free.  Only in him can we ever be who we were really meant to be.

October 24, 2021

Hebrew 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

Several times recently I’ve been talking with people in their seventies and eighties, and they’ve described this feeling of sadness and futility they sometimes have, this sense that there’s nothing more to look forward to.

And I know that feeling very well.  I’m getting up there, too.  Seventy doesn’t seem that far away anymore!

But for us as Christians this is a serious mistake, not just because we have an afterlife to look forward to, but because in our sadness and anxiety we’re not living in the moment.  We’re stuck in a past we can’t change.  We’re anxious about a future that hasn’t happened yet.

But in the present moment we’re neither young nor old.  We just are.  In the present moment life is what it’s always been.

The mist in the trees.  Our morning coffee.  Our little tasks for the day.

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine died, someone I knew and worked with for many years.  She was very important to me, but our relationship had its ups and downs, and for days after she died I couldn’t shake feelings of guilt and regret.

But regret like that is a temptation, because it traps us in the past, where’s there’s nothing more we can do.  In Christ there’s always more we can do.  The call is always to the present moment, and the future is always opening up before us, and in Christ even death is not the end.

We can console those who remain.  We can reach out to those we’ve kept at a distance.  And we can ask the dead to forgive us, as we can forgive them.

Because the dead are not truly dead.  They live in him, as we all live in him.

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

Today is World Priest Day and we pray in thanksgiving for our priests.  We’re very lucky to have the priests we do.  Very blessed.  We pray in thanksgiving for their energy and their enthusiasm–and most of all for showing us what it really means to be called.  That it’s God who calls us, not we who call God.  A priest isn’t ordained because of his virtue but out of his humanity.  A priest can “deal with us patiently,” Hebrews says, because he, too, is “beset by weakness”–and like even Christ himself, he is not “glorified in himself” but in God and through God.  Just as in our different ways we all are.  We all are.

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

Can you imagine what it be like to really hear those words?  How thrilling that would be?

But we do hear those words.  We hear them every day.

And look at how this works in the literary structure of the Gospel at this point.  How all of this has this context.

It’s not an accident that Mark in his genius as a writer puts the healings of two blind men on either side of the Transfiguration scene and Jesus’s teaching about the crucifixion, that we have to die to ourselves, that we have to be servants of all, that this isn’t about power and glory but about humility and faith.  And the disciples don’t get it.  They see that incredible light and they’re still arguing about who’s on first.  It’s just brilliant the way Mark does this.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but here are the disciples who can see but are blind to who Jesus really is and who they should be, and then, right before and right after, here are these two blind men who are blind but can see, who do know Jesus and know that he can save them if only they humble themselves.

Bartimaeus does call Jesus, and Jesus does answer the call.  But Bartimaeus calls out, in his weakness and his need, and Jesus answers in his compassion and his love, and he comes only to call him in return.

Two blind men, one in chapter 8, on the way up the mountain, the one Jesus heals with spit; and now Bartimaeus, in chapter 10, as they’re coming down the mountain, and Jesus is still trying to teach those egotistical, self-involved disciples that they have to let go.

Us, in other words.

The transfiguration is right in the middle.  The light.  The marvelous light.

This is where we always are, at exactly this same spot.

Before too long I’m going to have to go to this big event—not a Church event but something secular—and the other day I told a friend that I was really dreading it.  I said I knew it was just going to be this big, two-dimensional thing.  That’s the word I used:  two-dimensional.  Because it’s just going to be a secular gathering.  Because it won’t involve any talk about God, any prayer.

And my friend called me on it–very gently, and not in so many words–but he sort of implied that maybe the problem was me.  Maybe I’m the one being two-dimensional.

I’m the one who is blind.

Grace is at work everywhere, in everywhere situation.  God loves everyone just as much as he loves all of us at St. Mary’s, and maybe I could plan on going to that event and looking for that grace and listening for that grace.  Because it will be there.  God will be there where anyone talks about him or not.

Maybe, instead of just talking about Christianity, I could, you know, actually try to be a Christian.

I’m glad Jesus is just as patient with me as he is with those clueless disciples.  Again and again he is telling all of us where true greatness lies and true freedom and true joy.  In dying.  In weakness.  In letting go.

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.  He is calling all of us.  He will cure all of us of our blindness if only we ask him to.  If only we first realize we can’t really see.  O Jesus, Son of David, have pity on us!

Click here for a video version of this homily.

September 5, 2021, Ordinary Time

Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

One way to describe how I feel when God is with me is that I feel free.  I feel open.

Ephphatha, Jesus says today, “be opened,” and sometimes we are.

It’s the way we feel when we’re doing something we love and we’re caught up in it and we’re not thinking about anything else.  It’s the way we feel when we’re in a place we love and we can just be ourselves.  It’s the way we feel when we’re with people we love, as if Jesus has touched our ears and touched our tongues and we can really say how we feel without fear of being judged or rejected, and we can really listen, too.

In the opening prayer for mass today we ask that through Christ we may receive the gift of “true freedom.”  True freedom.  That’s how we know:  when we feel free, when we feel this sense of release, of being unbound, we know that Christ is present.

It’s as if the springs have burst forth in the desert.  As if the drought is over and the rain has come.

A few summers ago I was using a listening exercise with a group of deacons and their wives.  It goes like this.  People pair off and one person gets to talk on a certain topic for several minutes while the other person listens.  When the timer goes off, they switch, and the talker becomes the listener and the listener the talker.  When you’re the listener you can only listen.  You can’t say a thing.  When you’re the talker you get to say whatever you want to say—and if you run out of things to say, you both just have to sit there, in silence.

It’s a remarkably freeing exercise.  One deacon wife said that this was the longest her husband had ever listened to her in 45 years of marriage—and she was only half kidding.

Someone is always interrupting us, someone is always trying to fix us, someone is always trying to silence us, and I think that’s why we’re so sealed off to begin with.  If we post something online we’ll be blasted; if we say what we think, we’ll be shunned; if we talk about our fears we’ll be thought of as weak.

Or we won’t be listened to at all.  How many voices in the world go unheard?  How many cries for help go unheeded?

This is how we writing teachers have ruined writing for generations of students.  We’ve made them so afraid of making mistakes they can’t really say what they mean.  No, William Stafford says: “Permit yourself to like what you are doing (if you feel any qualms, then veer towards what feels good—why oppose the only compass you have?)”  Sure, you’ll have to revise, but save that for later.  Just get going.  “When in doubt, lower your standards,” Stafford says, and I think that applies to the spiritual life, too.

We think we have to be pious when we pray and that being pious means being on our best behavior, putting our best foot forward.  But we can tell Jesus anything.  We can wear our shabby clothes.  We can confess our poverty, our smallness.  We can tell Jesus how bored we are.  We can tell Jesus how sad we are, or angry, or discouraged.  We can tell Jesus about our leaky sink and our sick cat and our cranky boss—Jesus loves us, he’s woven himself into every part of our lives, nothing is too small or trivial for him.

Jesus “groans,” when he exorcises the man.  I never noticed that before.  It’s remarkable.

We can groan, too.

Jesus loves us even when we sin and especially then and in fact this is the mystery of sin, that when we confess it there is always rejoicing—if we open up, if we tell the truth.  This is what the sacrament of reconciliation is all about.  God never rejects us.  He shows “no partiality,” as the letter of James says.  He loves us before we sin and he loves us afterwards and so we are free, entirely free—not to keep sinning, but to keep being ourselves.

“One of the essential graces of repentance,” Anthony De Mello says, “is joy.”

It is the authentic, homecoming happiness.  How lovely it is to surrender oneself with one’s inadequacies into the loving arms of God and be accepted.  How much evil I have done and how much I am loved!  How wonderful!

We talk to God and he listens.  He listens.

There are different kinds of silences, and the silence of God is the silence of listening, of love, of compassion.  He never interrupts us.  He never cuts us off.

I had very close friend at OSU.  We were exactly the same age.  We were both professors, we were both members of the parish, we were both married, and we used to meet at the MU every week for coffee and talk about OSU and St. Mary’s and our wives.  I could tell him anything, I could be myself around him, and he could tell me anything.

And then he got sick and he died, two and half years ago.  I preached at his funeral, here at St. Mary’s.

And then, just last month, this August, two and a half years later, his widow called and asked if I would preside at the burial of his ashes, at the cemetery outside of Philomath, looking out over the fields.

The family had planned to bury the ashes back in the Midwest but that hadn’t worked out.

I’d never had this experience before.  It was as if I had to go through my friends’ funeral all over again, renew my sadness and my grief, and it was very hot that afternoon, stiflingly hot, and I just didn’t want to be there.

But as I began to say the words of final commendation, something started to happen.  I started to feel the way I used to feel, when my friend and I were having coffee at the MU.  I was talking and he was listening.  I was talking and God was listening, and my friend was talking to me, and God was talking to me.  The grave is beneath a great maple tree, and on the plaque above his name it reads:  Devoted Husband, Father, Grandfather, and Teacher.  And underneath his name is this.  He had asked for it to be engraved there:  I love you, I have lived a good life.  Thank you.

I could feel the silence softening.  I looked down the slope of the hill over the dry grass, and I could feel my sadness deepening into something else.

We can tell God everything, and he will listen.  He is always listening.

And God tells us everything, every minute—God tells us everything.

July 18, 2021

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

“Woe to the shepherds who mislead the flock,” says the Lord through Jeremiah.  “You have scattered my sheep and driven them away,” and we know these shepherds ourselves.  They’re all over the internet, all over twitter, and too often we’ve let them mislead and scatter us, too.

God doesn’t want us to be afraid, but these false prophets do.  They feed on it.

God leads us beside the still waters, the psalmist says in Psalm 23, maybe the most beautiful psalm of all.  We know he is present when we feel this peace, when we feel goodness and kindness within us, but the false shepherds want us to doubt this joy and doubt this peace.

There’s a beautiful moment in the baptismal rite when you anoint the baby on the head with the oil of chrism in the same way a king was anointed in the Old Testament, the way King David was anointed.  “You anoint my head with oil,” the psalmist says–some scholars think in the voice of David–and in fact this is what the Hebrew word “messiah” means. It means “the anointed one.”  In Greek that word is translated as “Christ.”

This is the amazing thing about baptism.  In the baptismal rite we are saying, “you, child, you are good, you are made in God’s image. Listen to yourself, trust yourself–listen to God, trust in God.”  The oil of chrism is the oil a priest is anointed with at his ordination, on the palms, and in this sense, through our baptism, we are all priests, we are all prophets and kings, or prophetesses and queens, and through our baptism, too, our families commit themselves and the community commits itself to protecting and nourishing that spirit, that goodness, within us.

So what happens?  All those sad faces we see every day, all those angry faces, all those lost and lonely and suffering people all around us?  They were all once children, too, and they still are, underneath, but they’ve let themselves be led astray.  As we all have.  We all have, all our lives.  It’s always a struggle.  Even the people in AARP magazine are all thin and good looking.  They’re always laughing.  They’re always running marathons or curing cancer and I think, really?  I’m finally retired, I’ve finally walked away from all those false pressures at OSU, as at any workplace, and now there are these new pressures?  I have to be the perfect old person?  The perfect grandfather?  And I fall for it.  I fall for it.

“O Lord, I have let myself be deceived,” Pope Francis prays.  “In a thousand ways I have shunned your love.”  Because of course these false shepherds are inside us, too.  They wouldn’t trigger us if there wasn’t something in us waiting to be triggered.   There are all kinds of voices inside us, and not all of them are from God.  The challenge is to learn how to distinguish our true inner shepherd from our false ones—the challenge is discernment.  And we have to try to surround ourselves with what is good and right and real, with the scriptures, with the Eucharist, with good friends and good food and literature and art and good things on our screens and good things on our phones, and we have to try to get away, too, now and then, come away to “a deserted place” and rest a while, as Jesus says to the disciples today when they’re so busy and beset they don’t even have time to eat.

It’s wonderful that the pandemic seems to be easing, at least for now, at least in this country, but I hope that we don’t just add back in all the stresses and pressures and false ambitions and empty busyness the pandemic forced us to give up.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the psalmist says.  There’s nothing here about weight loss.  There’s nothing here about making a lot of money or impressing people.

“Live in the present,” Pope Francis said in his homily on Pentecost this year.  The Spirit, he says, “affirms the primacy of today against the temptation to let ourselves be paralyzed by rancor or memories of the past or by uncertainty or fear about the feature.”  The Spirit “reminds us of the grace of the present moment.  There is no better time for us.”  We don’t need anything else.  We don’t need all the stuff we buy and all the trouble we borrow.  And all the things we worry about?  Even theological issues, however important, even issues of social justice and action in the world for the poor and the oppressed–and these are crucial, these are essential–all these things however real and necessary are not the most important things and can even be temptations, away from the grace of the present moment and into abstractions.  Ideas can be false prophets.  Causes can be false shepherds.  Unless our engagement with these larger issues proceeds from the peace of the still waters, from the cup that overflows, they are dangerous.  They work against the Spirit.

“If we listen to the Spirit, we will not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left,” Pope Francis says.  “When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit.”

Or as Ephesians puts it today, “brothers and sisters, in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near.”  The author is talking here about Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians and how they’ve been battling each other, though he could be talking about warring factions in any time.  In ours.  “Christ came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” Ephesians says, “for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

I think of another moment in the baptismal rite, when one of the godparents lights a candle from the Easter Candle.   This light, we say to the parents, is “entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly,” because that light is Christ.  That light is the goodness burning in that child, and it’s such a touching thing, to see the godmother or the godfather walking back, cupping a hand to protect that little flame.  It’s so easily snuffed out.

This why we need the deserted places.  This is why I do.  This why I need community.  This is why I need to try to pray and pray, to try to keep myself as best I can in alignment with the force of Christ within me.  Only then, though I walk in the dark valley, will I fear no evil.

Only when we dwell in the house of the Lord.  Only when our cup first overflows.

O Lord, I have let myself be deceived;

            in a thousand ways I have shunned your love,

            yet here I am once more,

            to renew my covenant with you.

            I need you.  Save me once again, Lord,

           take me once more

          into your redeeming embrace.

Divine Mercy Sunday

1 John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31

I have never seen Jesus the way Thomas does in the Gospel today and the way the other disciples do.  But he has come through my walls.  He has stood in my midst.   I have felt a peace.  A breath.

I have never seen Jesus the way St. Faustina did in her beautiful vision, love raying out from his heart like light.  But I have felt that light within me.  I have felt my own heart swell.

I think this is the way it is for most of us.  All praise for all the visions and appearances down through the ages.  They are great gifts.  But I think that for most of us our experience of Christ is much subtler, much more diffuse, and nothing is more important than realizing this and accepting this, because otherwise we’ll think this is all made up, it’s not true, at least for us.  We’ll think that God isn’t here when he’s everywhere—he’s not obvious but he’s everywhere—and blessed are we when we finally know this and feel this.

It’s deep in our tradition, this sense of the presence of Jesus.  In the twelfth century St. Bernard wrote that in his own experience of Jesus in prayer, there was, as he put it,

nothing sensational.  I don’t see anything, I don’t hear voices.  I suddenly feel a warmth and glow in my heart and I know that the bridegroom is there.

A warmth.  A glow.  In the sixteenth century St. Ignatius describes a moment when he “seemed to see something white, from which rays were coming”—a vision a little like Faustina’s, in fact, but much less clearly defined.  It’s a “something” he sees.  It’s vaguely, if brightly, white, and even this is more specific than Ignatius usually is.  For him the experience of Jesus is much more a matter of feeling and intuition, he can never pin it down or put it into words, and like William Barry, a modern Jesuit thinker, I find this very consoling.  Very freeing.  “I have no idea how to describe the Jesus I contemplate,” Barry says, “yet I, too, believe that I have encountered him and gained some interior knowledge of him.”

Images like this keep coming up again and again, of a light, a fragrance, a stream.   A sense.

I used to think that it was easier to understand God from the perspective of the Holy Spirit than from the perspective of the Son, but I was wrong.  Because the Spirit is the Son.  The Father and the Son and the Spirit are one, and they are always coming into our lives and taking us up into theirs.   It’s the Spirit that “testifies,” the Letter of John tells us today, and “the Spirit is Truth.”

I have never felt the wounds of Jesus.  I have never touched the holes in his hands.  But I have felt my own wounds.  I have felt the wounds of others, and we have to feel them.   Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus says, because unless we acknowledge our grief, it consumes us.  Blessed are those who weep, because there is reason to weep and to deny that is to reduce the faith to something childish and false.

Recently I wrote a friend that all would be well.  She’s been struggling with health problems and problems at her job.  I knew that sounded too pious in a way, but I believe it, and when she wrote back she said something really profound, really insightful, and when I asked her she said I could share it.

“All will be well,” she wrote,

but I think that statement hinges on what we place within the word ‘all.’  If by ‘all’ we mean that our relationship to Christ cannot be broken by anything outside of us in and of itself—anything!—then yes, all shall be well.

And then she goes on,

‘All’ doesn’t mean that the pain caused by our sins and faults isn’t real.  It doesn’t negate the pain and upheaval brought to us by the decisions of others.  ‘All’ also does not mean that the events of this life will turn out in a way that is okay for us.

Our work is to hold the light and hold the darkness and not reduce the one to the other—or not to hold them ourselves, because we can’t, but to trust God to hold them, to make sense of them, to reconcile them, because in him all things hold together.  How, we don’t know.  That’s the mystery.  That’s what we must surrender to.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t exist.  It’s that he is always and everywhere present in a way we never expected.  He is far more pervasive.  He is woven into the fabric of our lives, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a “steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the center of everything that is,” and this comes close to it for me, too, when I look back on a day or a week and realize that God was always there, just beneath the surface, all around me.  In me.

This is the Divine Mercy: “a steady swell of loving presence.”

This is the Divine Mercy, and we feel it in our chest and behind our eyes, like the beginning of tears.

I sensed it between the lines of my friend’s email.  Underneath every word.

Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall. 

We may hear these words in a few minutes.  They’re from the second Eucharistic Prayer, at just the moment of the consecration.

The Eucharist is unique, it’s the source and summit, and yet somehow at the same time it’s like the morning dew.

I can’t explain it.  I can’t put it into words.

The dewfall.  Ordinary.  Beautiful.  On every blade of grass.

Arias

September 6, 2020

Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

Not long ago I got an email from an old high school friend I’d not heard from in years.  He was in a dark place, he said, and he wanted some spiritual advice.  And I was stunned.  We were on the debate team together—he was a year ahead of me—and I’d never known anyone so brilliant, with such verbal facility and intellectual quickness, and I still haven’t.  It was like listening to Pavarotti sing.  He was a virtuoso.

And he wanted my advice?

What I was being asked to do was not to confront my friend in his wickedness, as Ezekiel is asked to confront the nation of Israel, but to speak to him of my faith, to try to say what I believe is true—and that’s hard enough, especially with someone you’ve always looked up to, someone so smart and justifiably skeptical about churches.  I was afraid he’d think I was being naïve or preachy—he’d think, “oh, that’s just something Christians always say.”  Or, “he’s just one of those Christians.”

But I am just one of those Christians, at least on my good days, through grace.  The only wisdom I have is from the scriptures, is from Christ, and though I had to approach this indirectly, had to avoid the kind of churchy language I knew would turn him off, I had to try to share what I believe as best I could.

I had to try to say:  be not afraid.  The Lord is with you.

Not in ways we can prove.  Not in ways we always notice.  “If today you hear his voice, harden not your heart,” the psalmist says, because this is how God speaks, quietly and day to day.  In the roses on the deck.  In a passage in a book.  “Wherever two or three are gathered together” he is present, Jesus tells us, even over the internet, even in an email from a friend—but always, and quietly, and tenderly, in ordinary things.

“The Church has left the building,” a parishioner wrote in another email, when I asked how he was doing in the pandemic—“the Church has left the building, and we are being called to love the people he puts in front of us.”  I think that’s a wonderful statement.  I think that’s a theologically profound statement.  The Church has left the building—and love, love, another one of those words that Christians always use.  But that’s because it’s the right word, the true word, however soft or fuzzy or irrelevant it might seem in our violent and anxious times.

I notice that Jesus says “every fact should be established”; we shouldn’t just fly off our various handles before we even know what’s actually true.  We should be rational, he’s saying.  We should wait and consider the evidence.

But even more than that, we should treat our neighbors as ourselves, with respect, as St. Paul says today, even when we confront them with what we think is true or know is false—not call them names, not tweet insults or post further lies. Not shoot them.  This person we believe is wrong is loved by God, is no more sinful than we are, however wrong or misguided he or she might be.

In fact I don’t think these passages are really about what we say.  I think they’re about what we don’t say.  I think they’re about listening.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but last winter, before the pandemic, I was talking with a friend who was having a serious crisis of faith.  He was really struggling, and we talked and talked, and I said things, and then more things, until I ran out of things to say.  And for a moment I just sat there.  I just stayed, in silence.  It wasn’t a strategy—I didn’t know what else to do—but it was the turning the point.   Gradually I began to feel something changing in the air of the room.  Everything grew still.  And then out of that silence something beautiful and gentle started happening, my friend started saying what was really in his heart, honestly and without filtering or performing, and I could feel the Spirit rising up, I could hear the voice of the Spirit, and there was nothing more I needed to say.  It wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about him.

In a way it was very difficult, just to stay there.  Just to not turn away.  It was a kind of confrontation.  It wasn’t a saying of the truth, it was a waiting for the truth, but a hard waiting—and then it came.  It was there, deeper than words, deeper than tears.

A sequence of cartoons:  a woman is being burned at the stake and another woman says to her, “maybe you should take up yoga.”   A woman is drowning and another woman looks down from a dock and says, “focus on the positive in this situation.”  A woman is falling off a cliff and a man who is standing on the edge calls after her: “You need to speak goodness into existence.”

Maybe.  Maybe what I’m suggesting is naïve.  Is too fuzzy and intangible.

Jesus died for the truth—he died for who he was.

But there’s also this, this wonderful video I also saw the other day, on YouTube.  We’re in a busy shopping mall in Leeds, England, very crowded—this was before the virus—and an ordinary-looking man walks out of the crowd into the center of the atrium.  He’s middle-aged, wearing a leather jacket, hands in his pockets.  And he starts to sing.  He opens his mouth and starts to sing, loudly and clearly.  At first you think he’s crazy, he’s some kind of crank, but then you realize, wait a minute.  His voice is beautiful, it’s powerful—he’s singing a famous aria—he’s singing Nessun Dorma, from Puccini—this guy’s a tenor.  This ordinary man who has emerged from the crowd is a tenor, and he’s a great tenor, and his voice is building and rising, and people are stopping and looking, the expressions on their faces are changing, people who would never be caught dead at an opera, who don’t have any idea what opera is, they’re stopped in their tracks.  One little girl turns around and looks up at her mother, an expression of amazement on her face.  O look at the stars, he sings, that tremble of love and hope, and his voice builds and builds, it rises to its climax, and he hits that final, high note, and he holds it, holds it until it’s ringing in the air of that crowded mall, and something transcendent has happened, something wonderful has risen up out of that ordinary gray day, something excellent and pure, and everyone knows it, they can feel it, and they burst into applause.  They clap and clap.

And the tenor smiles, and looks around, then puts his hands in his pockets and walks back into the crowd.  He disappears.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

July 5, 2020

Matthew 11:25-30

We’re all feeling burdened right now.  We’re all feeling the weight of the world—of the pandemic and of the economic crisis and of the racism that’s been exposed once again, in our country and in our lives, this deep American sin.

And as Christians we have a duty to act—we have to act.  But how, exactly?  What are we supposed to do?  It feels so overwhelming.  So impossible.

And today, in the Gospel, Jesus says: “my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

All our problems?  They’re easy.  All our burdens?  They’re light.

I don’t mean how easy it is to wear a mask or maintain social distance, as both the governor and the archbishop have asked us to do—how really absurd it is to resist this and complain about this when we think about the real sacrifices, the truly heroic sacrifices that people have made in wars and famines and earthquakes and fires, and are still making, now, in the pandemic.

I mean that for us as Christians even real suffering and real loss are bearable, are easy, in some deep and fundamental sense, however hard they obviously are in other ways.

Almost exactly five years ago, on June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, took out his gun, and shot and killed nine black parishioners who had been praying and studying the Bible, including the pastor.

A few months later the new pastor, the Reverend Norvel Goff, climbed into the pulpit and preached about joy.

“I’m a little weary and worn,” he said, but “with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”  With God there is joy, there is always joy—not just happiness.  There is no happiness in moments like this.  But happiness is finally trivial, happiness is finally fleeting.  Joy is deep and joy is enduring.  “Even in the midst of trials and tribulations,” Goff proclaimed, “we still have joy.”

We have joy because we have God.  We have joy because we believe in a love and a power greater than all our violence and all our hate.

This weekend we celebrate American independence and the great spirit of independence that has defined our country.  But as Christians we celebrate independence every day—our freedom from fear, our freedom from the false demands of the world, our freedom from all that makes us question our worth as human beings.

Or really, what we celebrate is our dependence, what we celebrate is our need:  our need for God, our need for grace.  Our yoke is easy and our burden is light because we don’t bear it alone.  Christ bears it for us and with us.  Christ gives us rest, Christ lightens our load, and so strengthened and so restored we can go out in his name and face what we must face, and not just that, not just endure, but work in the ways we’ve been given to work to ease the burden of others.

As Abbot Jeremy puts it in his latest newsletter and video, our best and first response to all that’s happening now should be “silence”—not the silence of indifference or inaction, but the silence of prayer, first and always—”prayer as the place,” Abbot Jeremy says, “where we let the work of God radiate outward into the world.”

This whole series of the Abbot’s newsletters is wonderful, I think.  You can find it on the Mount Angel Abbey website, and it’s life-giving.  Indispensable.  I can’t recommend it enough.

The meekness of Christ is a radical meekness.  The humility of Christ is a radical humility.  They might seem to have been defeated, these Christian virtues, by stupidity and ignorance and brutishness.  We might seem to be have been deluded, if we try to follow our Lord’s example.  God who is love is always being put to death.  But we know that his death is never the end.  We know that through his dying an even greater love is being released into the world.  It’s filling the world.  It’s the force that created the world, before time began, and it’s only when we let it come into us and let it flow through us that we can make the difference we are each called to make until the Lord comes again in his glory.

The burdens of poverty and injustice are too great to bear, and we are called to change that.  They’re crushing, they’re soul-numbing, and we are called to lighten the load and restore what is fair.  Christ gives us rest so that we can take his yoke upon us.

But first he gives us rest.  First he gives us strength.

It’s all grace.  Without him, we are nothing.

Last weekend Barb and I met our daughter and son-in-law at the Oregon Gardens, outside of Salem.  We’ve not seen them in person for a long time, and it was so good to walk with them through the roses and the Day Lilies and all the summer flowers.

Our son-in-law is Chinese-Indonesian-American–his parents immigrated from Jakarta when he was a little boy–and he’s grown up in Oregon with different skin and different eyes.  I love and respect him, and he’s Catholic, too, a deep and thoughtful Catholic, and so we have our faith to share.

But I don’t know what it’s like to be the only person of color in a room.  I don’t know what it’s like to be stopped by the police when you don’t look like everyone else.  I can only imagine, and I can only ask questions and listen.

And so we talked, and we listened, and we ate lunch together—we each brought our own.

We kept six feet apart, and we had our masks if we needed them.  It was the very least we could do—it’s what we had to do—and we did it not for ourselves, but for each other.

But we weren’t really at a distance.  We weren’t really far apart.  For a moment we were carrying the burden together, the four of us.  For a moment, together, we could feel the presence of Christ.  We were free.

As Archbishop Sample said last week in The Sentinel, there are vast structural changes that need to be made, there are systemic problems requiring systemic solutions, and as Christians we need to work to find them.  “It’s undeniable,” the archbishop says, “that there are still injustices that sicken segments of our society.”

But it’s to moments like this that all the changes lead and it’s for moments like this that we try to make them.  We work so that everyone has the capacity and the security and the opportunity to visit their families, or to eat a quiet lunch, or to walk in a garden on a morning in June.

And it’s from these moments that all our actions should proceed.  It’s where they should all begin.  Because this is where God is.  This is where he can be found:  when we are at peace.  When through him and with him we are free—when we are all free.