teaching Archives - Deacon Chris Anderson

The Fist Bump

Ordinary Time – Luke 11:5-13

“Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.” This was the biblical verse I was given when I was 14, when I was confirmed a Missouri Synod Lutheran in Spokane.

And in a way it’s problematic for me now because it doesn’t at first seem to account for what I think is a major fact of the spiritual life, and that’s desolation. We seek and don’t seem to find anything sometimes, for days and weeks and months. We knock and the door stays closed, or seems to. All we have is emptiness or blankness or loneliness, or we’re bored, or the usual gossip and bureaucracy keeps going on inside us and we just don’t want to keep knowing that.

October 8, 2015

Homily

Being A Camera

Ordinary Time – Luke 8:1-3

Classes have started again, and last week as I was getting my syllabus ready I was feeling ambivalent about going back into the classroom. This is my thirtieth year at Oregon State, and I taught for four years before that in North Carolina, so that’s thirty four years as a professor, and before that I was a teaching assistant at the University of Washington for five years: 39 years.

I’m so blessed to do something I love for a living, and to have this job–what a wonderful life–but I have to admit I was wondering how I was going to feel when I had to put on my school clothes and walk into Moreland and hand out my syllabus again.

September 18, 2015