Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:14:56 -0400WeeblyFri, 20 Jun 2025 14:12:03 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/june-20th-20257930619
Preached by Sandra Olsen, First Church of Christ, Congregational
In Unionville, CT
June 15, 2025
Genesis 1: 26-31
John 16: 12-15
Sister Claire was quite a character. A member of the sisters of St. Joseph with whom I became acquainted while doing clinical training at a psychiatric hospital, she was a brilliant woman with a sad biography. Her life had been books, and her dream was to teach in a catholic college or university, preferably St. Mary’s College, which was the women’s college to Notre Dame in Indiana. Sister Claire had entered the Order at age 18, after having spent all her life in convent schools, and by the time she was 25 she had earned a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University. She expected her career to blossom, and so did the faculty who had taught her. But her Order had different ideas. Accused of being prideful, Sister Claire was assigned to teach English to junior high school girls. She thought her assignment would be temporary, but it went for years. Frustrated, bored, alienated, and very angry, she began to manifest serious psychological problems by her mid 40's, and suffered a full blown psychosis in her 50's. For five years she was hospitalized in a private psychiatric hospital in New York and then was transferred to a state facility. And there she lived, which was where I met her.
Claire spent most of her day in her room reading the pile of books other nuns would faithfully bring to her, and if you tried to coax out of the room, she would first verbally assault you before resorting to a kick, punch or in my case, a scratch. And so, she was left alone to read her Jane Austen. One day, she quietly came out of her room, and with her finger, motioned me to come in. Sit here, she said, pointing to a chair. Picking up her copy of Mary Gordon's novel, The Company of Women, she said, “This part is about Muriel, a housekeeper for one of the priests. Muriel is a bitter, spiteful, cynical woman, and this is what she says about herself. This is the part I want you to hear. And then she read:
"My death will be a relief to everyone. There is nothing more lonely than to look among live faces for the face of one who will live after oneself and mourn, the face that, after one's death, will be changed by grief, and to find contempt or an undifferentiated kindness. I wait for a face to meet my face; I wait for the singular gaze, the gaze of permanent choosing, the glance of absolute preferment. This I have always waited for and never found, have hungered for and never tasted. I wait here to be looked upon with favor, to be chosen above others, knowing I will die the first beloved of no living soul."
Claire looked up from her book and closed it. "At age 18,” she said, “I became the bride of Christ. Now I would give Christ away, if someone would call me friend."
​
Friend: such a simple one syllable word it is, and yet it is essential to our identity as social and spiritual beings, so central in fact, we can die for want of it; yet in the Bible, the word hardly appears---not at all in the gospel of Matthew, in Mark, once, in Luke, 10 times, and in John only 3, all in the three chapter farewell discourse from Jesus, when he moves from calling his disciples servants to calling them his friends.

Friendship was a very important concept in the ancient world---especially among the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, who thought long and hard about the various kinds of friendship. Christianity, on the other hand, did not expend much effort thinking about friendship. But it did think about relationship, which is, according to Christianity, what the divine identity is all about. And so over time---long after the scriptures were written, the Church developed the doctrine of the Trinity. In Matthew’s great commission, we hear Jesus tell his disciples to go out and baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But that was hardly a developed doctrine. It would take the Church centuries to work out the details with the Councils of the third and fourth centuries claiming that God is three persons, yet one. The Trinity is the distinctive Christian doctrine of God, and yet it is the doctrine that most Christians care very little about.

Put very simply, it means that the very heart and being of God is relationship. It is a dynamic relationship, a giving and a taking, a mutuality of movement among these three persons---Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We use human language to describe this, but, of course, all human language limps; it is inadequate to the divine nature and yet we must say something, or else we are reduced to silence. Now perhaps some prefer the silence. The Buddha, for example, is pictured as a strong, solid figure, sitting silently and passively. Jesus and the Christian God are not like that. They speak. In the beginning was the Word.

Some Christians try to understand the Trinity by breaking down the persons into functions: God, the Father, creates, Jesus Christ, the Son, reveals what it means to be human, showing us how to love God, our neighbors and ourselves. And the Holy Spirit, the gift of empowerment, is constantly working in the creation to bring it to fulfillment. But all persons of the Trinity do similar things. The Father, Son and Spirit all create, teach and empower. Most Christians reduce the second person of the Trinity, the Son, to Jesus Christ. But Jesus was a historical person, who lived on the earth for a limited amount of time in the first century. He did not exist as Jesus until he was born. But the second person of the Trinity is eternal; it is more than the historical manifestation of Jesus. Jesus expresses God when God shows up in what is not God---that is, a human life. But before Jesus existed on earth, there was yet a second person of the Trinity.

So what, you may say. Sounds too abstract. But the important point is that the very nature of God is relationship, and we, made in the image and likeness of God, are made for relationship. Our very humanity depends upon relationship. And this is exactly what Sister Claire lacked. She lacked relationship, and deep down in her soul, she knew what a loss that was.
Now I never found working at that hospital easy. There was so much suffering there, lives completely destroyed by mental illness in times before there were any effective psychotropic drugs. So, one day I blurted out to the nurse how hideous this place was. God is so hidden here, I said, and that is all we have to rely on: a hidden God.” I had not noticed that Sister Claire was standing right there at the nursing station. She said nothing, but she reached out her hand to take mine and put it against her cheek upon which a stream of tears flowed. The two of us said nothing, but after that, things were different. We both shared the same protest against a silence that did not yield an answer. And between the two of us a relationship grew.
We choose relationships, our friends and spouses, for instance. But at other times relationships come to us as gifts, not so much when we seek, but when we are found, found by a God in whose image we are made, a God who calls us to live in relationship and reminds us that this God is relationship and is always with us especially when we do not know or experience the divine presence.]]>Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:07:39 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/june-20th-2025Sat, 15 Feb 2025 22:12:28 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/february-15th-2025February 4, 2025
Dear Friends,
February 1 was the first day of Black History Month, and in Middletown, where I live, there was a special event, marking the history of Black people in our town.  The name of Rapallo Ave, jutting off Main Street in downtown, was changed to Prince Mortimer Ave.  A city ordinance was passed, allowing honorary street names, and so Prince Mortimer became the first such street in Middletown.
 
No one, except for a few serious history buffs, knew anything about Mortimer, who was kidnapped off the coast of Guinea in the early 1700’s and brought to Middletown.  His enslaver was a man named Philip Mortimer, a wealthy Irishman and rope factory owner.  Prince worked at the rope factory for decades, and he also served officers during the Revolutionary War, including George Washington for whom he ran errands. 
 
Philip Mortimer died in 1794, and his will promised freedom to Prince, whom he said had served him so well.  Sadly, his son in law, George Starr, decided to challenge the will in court, and he won.  I have no idea on what grounds he won, but we can guess that White people were almost always victorious over the petitions of Black people.  And so, tragically, Prince was never freed.  In 1811 George Starr accused Prince of placing arsenic in the chocolate he was serving, and George wasted no time in going to the authorities.  And so, Prince, at the age of 87, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Old Newgate Prison in East Granby, CT, considered at the time to be one of the worst prisons in America.  In 1827 it was closed, and Prince found himself in a new prison in Wethersfield, CT, where he was incarcerated until the year he died, 1834, at the age of 110. 
 
You can visit the Solomon Welles House in Old Wethersfield that was once the state prison, and its cemetery lies nearby.  A majority of the cemetery “residents” are convicts, but there are also two victims of typhoid buried there.  The fear of typhoid was great enough to place their graves among the friendless convicts.  There are no markers noting any of the graves, but the graves do overlook a scene of great beauty, which although doing the dead no good, do offer visitors an uplift. This is Prince Mortimer’s final resting place----small comfort to one whose life was cruelly abused. Whether or not his enslaver behaved kindly or cruelly toward him, nonetheless, slavery is one of the great crimes against humanity, and in our own nation, it required a civil war to defeat it.  Though we cannot remake the past, we can at least give it the dignity of memory.  Black History Month is one way we remember and celebrate the stories and contributions of Black people.  And it is also the way we mourn the injustice and cruelty suffered by people, who did nothing to deserve their fate.
 
I had never heard of Prince Mortimer, and that is undoubtedly true for most of Middletown’s citizens.  He could so easily be forgotten, as most people are when they die, followed later by those who remembered them.  And then the memories are gone.  But Prince Mortimer now has a street in Middletown named after him, and his story can be learned and passed on.  Memory does not change the history that has happened, but it does alter our relationship to the past.  When we know something that once was ignored or denied, the past becomes more real to us and in remembering it, we grant it a kind of dignity.
 
Some years ago, when working as a chaplain in a hospital, I met a German woman, who told me that ten years after her father died, she learned from her aunt, her father’s sister, that he had been a Nazi and had helped to round Jews up for deportation.  “For years,” she told me, “I tried to hate my father. But I never succeeded, because to my brother, sister and me he had been a good father and to my mother he had been a good husband.  My mother had pre-deceased my father, so I never could talk with her about this painful truth, but I did speak with my aunt, who admitted to me that the entire family was really very anti-Jewish.  When I asked my aunt why she told me my father’s story, she said it was one way she could repent for her own anti-Jewish thoughts and feelings.  She never turned anyone in, or so she said, but she admitted to me that she thought she was capable of doing so, if the right circumstances had arisen.  She did not think of herself as better than my father; the opportunities of history just presented themselves so differently to each of them., and for such stark honesty, I was grateful.
 
When I asked the woman if she would have preferred her aunt to keep silent, she said, “Well, at first, I thought so, but in time I realized that somehow the truth was working in me in a way that was positive in the sense that I felt I had been made a part of history that should not be denied.  And it helped me to confront the painful reality that we human beings are terribly complex creatures.  How could my father, whom to me seemed so gentle and kind, be a Nazi, a hater of Jews?  I never heard him utter antisemitic statements, but my aunt did not lie to me.  Of that, I was sure.  And so, though I still loved my father, I loved him with a reality that was deeper and more honest than before.  And it gave me an insight into the love of God, which we find in Jesus Christ.  God never stops loving us, even when we do things that are despicable, completely against God’s commandments.  And it is a great mystery what that love does to us and for us.”  And to that we can say, Amen.
 
Yours in Christ,
Sandra ​]]>Sat, 15 Feb 2025 22:08:53 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/dangerous-wordsPreached by: the Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 2, 2025

Luke 4: 21-30
 
Though we often romanticize the past as the glory days, the truth is the past was not always so glorious. We think, for example, that fake news in politics especially is new, but it has been around for a very long time.  Consider the American election of 1796, when John Adams, a Federalist was running for President against Thomas Jefferson, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party.  Newspapers, in those days, were owned by political parties, and the one owned by the Democratic-Republicans claimed Adams wanted to be king of the United States by trying to marry off one of his sons to a daughter of English King George III, a move said to be blocked by George Washington who intervened just in time to stop it:  Fake news.  Those against Jefferson asserted that if he were elected President “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced,” that the country would be “soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” Also, fake news. Although the words fake news were not used, if someone did not like or approve of what the other candidate said or represented, it was not uncommon for outright lies to be printed.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.
 
In today’s reading from Luke, we are not exactly dealing with fake news, but we are dealing with words that became dangerous, because of how they were heard or interpreted.  The people of Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, were initially delighted with his return.  They marveled at how well he read the scripture from the prophet, Isaiah, because, well, wasn’t he just a hometown boy, the son of Joseph.  Initially, they were impressed.  But notice what quickly happened when Jesus began to preach, that is interpret the words of scripture, which is what preaching is all about.  We should notice the irony that Jesus had returned to his hometown after his sojourn in the wilderness, where he had to face Satan, and the temptations Satan threw at him.  While he conquered Satan, he could not do the same thing with his hometown.  They took immediate offense when he reminded them that a prophet is not without acclaim except in his hometown.
 
And then he reminded them of two stories about foreigners, who were helped by two prophets, Elijah and Elisha.  The first story is about a gentile widow, who is starving, because there is a terrible famine across the land.  And Elijah feeds her, but not the other Israelite widows.  And then there is the story of the Syrian general, Namaan, who is suffering from leprosy, and Elisha, a protégé of Elijah, heals Namaan, but not all the other Jewish lepers in Israel.  Perhaps in our day, such stories about helping foreigners, while leaving the locals to their own troubles, would elicit the outcry, Fake news, but if not heard as fake, at least such stories are understood to be dangerous.  Why else would the townspeople have wanted to push Jesus off a cliff?
 
Indeed, words have consequence, and sometimes words become dangerous when people hear what they don’t want to hear.  The hometown people in this story did not want to be reminded that outsiders, gentiles, non-Jews, were helped when their own kind was not.  And why should that be?  Jesus doesn’t attempt here to answer that question, but we do know that Jesus moved outside Jewish circles---not often, but he did go into gentile territory, where he taught and even healed, and Luke is the only gospel which has the story of the Samaritan, who was a good neighbor to a beaten and left for dead Jew, who was ignored by other Jews who walked by him.  So, it seems the locals did not like what Jesus was selling---a God, who does not always behave in the way that favors the locals.  And so, they wanted to get rid of him.  They considered his words dangerous, reminding them of something they did not want to be reminded of that God’s love and mercy extend beyond the locals. 
 
Are any of us really surprised by this?  We shouldn’t be, because it recently happened right before our very own eyes, during a prayer service at the National Cathedral, when the Washington D. C. bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, looked the President of the United States in the eyes and asked him to be merciful as she reminded him that there were many people who were fearful---gays and lesbians, trans-gendered, illegal immigrants, working at jobs, trying to hold their families together.  Their children, she said, are afraid they would come home one day from school and find their parents gone.  And for this---for speaking truth to power---which is usually part of the ordination pledge in most denominations---for this she has been verbally assaulted and even threatened with death by people, who felt she had no right to say such things.  This occurred a few days after the nation celebrated the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr, who definitely was in the habit of preaching truth to power.  In fact, when people complained that his preaching was too political, he said, “When you are silent about injustice and the suffering of others, you are not simply being non-political and non-partisan.  You are being unbiblical, because, whether you like it or not, whether you are comfortable with it or not, the bible is filled with calls for justice and mercy.  And such words can be very dangerous, indeed.
 
 
 ]]>Tue, 26 Oct 2021 16:06:54 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/october-26th-2021​October 20, 2021
Dear Friends,
Chris Hedges is someone worth knowing about. He is smart, committed to the public good and has led quite an interesting life.  He wrote for the New York Times but was asked to leave when he made his objections to the War in Iraq known.  Journalists, have their opinions, of course, but unless they are writing the editorial page, they are not supposed to take sides.  He was a war correspondent for a number of years and from that experience wrote a book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.  I read the book years ago.  He wrote about the addictive nature of covering war---the adrenalin high one gets from being in constant danger.  He wrote of his depression, when he left the war front to return to the normalcy of everyday life and how he could not wait to return to the fire of war.
 
Recently I came across an article about another book he has recently written, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.  Hedges went into East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey to teach a college English course to inmates enrolled in a university program.  The students are carefully selected, and according to Hedges they are very smart and unusual in their love of reading.  Most prisoners, Hedges wrote, are like the general public, meaning they don’t read full length books.  But these guys are serious intellectuals, who have turned their cells into libraries.  Books to them are very precious.  Though they are intellectually gifted, they usually come from backgrounds that did not encourage or allow them to get a good education, and now they are hungry to learn.  When they leave prison, they are not permitted to take with them anything they had while in prison, and for some of the men, leaving their books behind is very traumatic.  They tell Hedges their first goal after finding a place to live is to rebuild their beloved library.
We all can imagine that survival in prison requires a strong defense system, where vulnerability is never shown.  Hedges noticed, as his students began to discuss the literary works they were reading, that barriers were being broken down, and so he had this idea that the men should write a play.  Caged is the name of the play, and it reveals the most intimate aspects of their lives, things they had never shared with anyone.  It was performed at Passage Theatre Company in Trenton and was sold out nearly every night.  There was one performance for family members only, and the audience sobbed through the entire performance.
One of the reasons Hedges’ story grabbed my attention is because Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches, also has a prison program in Cheshire Correctional Facility as well as Niantic Prison for Women.  My husband does not teach in the program, though I told him he would benefit from the experience, but he did not take my advice.  The Wesleyan faculty, who teach in the prisons, have been moved by how intelligent and engaged these students are and how diverse their classes are.  While many come from poor backgrounds, there are others, who grew up middle class and even wealthy, but for whatever reason made very poor decisions.  Prison is boring, the inmates say, and so they look forward to the classes in a way that most Wesleyan students, who have so many other interesting things to pursue, do not.  Assignments in the prison are always completed and always on time.  No excuses are ever offered!
The faculty find that their own stereotypes about prison and prisoners are challenged and often cracked apart.  When they move through the prison gates and go through an extensive security system, they enter a world very different from the one they work in every other day.  On their way to the classroom, they walk past other prisoners, who looked depressed and lacking in any curiosity about the world around them.  And the students in their classes will sometimes talk about other prisoners as “soulless.”  “That’s what can happen here if you are not very careful to guard your soul.  You can easily lose it.”  One of the faculty members told her students in the prison as well as in her Wesleyan class that she thought there were many ways to lose one’s soul.  “We always have to be on guard, to practice growing and expanding our souls every single day of our lives.”   She is right, so we all should ask ourselves:  What have I done recently to grow my soul?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra]]>Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:29:27 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/where-sin-is-grace-abounds-729182 Samuel 11: 1-15
Romans 5: 18- 21
 
Soon after I was ordained, I was invited to guest preach at a church in .Mount Kisco, New York.  After the church service, this woman and I became engaged in a fascinating conversation.  She told me that she had been a nun for over 25 years, but after becoming deeply influenced by the writings of the Jesuit priest and scholar, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, she realized that she must not only leave her convent but also her Roman Catholicism. As part of the departure process, her Order requested she speak to the bishop, and so she agreed. The Bishop was a learned and wise man, somewhat familiar with the thought of Teillard de Chardin, who had died in 1955.  Rome had barred Teilhard from teaching and publishing, accusing him of heretical ideas, and although he continued to write, he was obedient to Rome’s dictates.  It was only after his death, when the ban is automatically lifted, that his work gained public recognition.
Without going into details about his ideas, let it suffice to say that Chardin believed that the whole creation was moving toward complete fulfillment; salvation would encompass everything and everyone, and when the nun told her bishop that she believed this with her whole heart, he wistfully looked at her and said, “If I believed what you believe, I would be the happiest of men.”
Now consider for a moment what the bishop said:  “If I believed what you believe, I would be the happiest of men.”   What belief would have the capacity to make you the happiest of men or women? Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and someone tells you that you can choose one belief to be true.  What would it be?
 
 For me what Paul wrote in what is now the 20th verse in the 5th chapter of Romans would do it: but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. What if the tense is not simply past, but also present:  where sin increases, grace abounds all the more!  Can we really imagine something like that being true?  Sin increasing, but grace abounding even more!  Consider the sin that greets us everyday in the news---war, poverty, greed, violence.  Consider the sin that reduces human life to rubble---addictions of all kinds, carrying in its wake deep misery and depression.  Consider the sin of human betrayal: adulteries committed, friendships betrayed, children abandoned and abused.  Consider the sin of King David, who not only took another man’s wife, but then had Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, killed.   And yet, Paul claims that where sin increased, grace---that is the presence and working of God---- abounded all the more.  Could this possibly be true?
 
We cannot directly see all this abounding of grace, and so believing it, believing in it, sometimes seems impossible.   Oh we see glimmers; we do see good things happening in the midst of sin---- teens survive a shooting in their Florida high school, because a teacher protected them by throwing himself over their bodies. A teenager, who spent years in shelters and living in a car with her parents, returned to the apartment her family was living in to discover that the family had left her behind. And despite all these terrible disadvantages, she was a straight A student, who gained admission to Harvard, from which she graduated with honors. Sometimes glimmers of grace do happen, even while sin abounds.  But grace overtaking sin?  Grace abounding more than sin?  That is a hard one to believe, isn’t it, because it seems to fly in the face of so much of our experience.
 
Where was the grace, when some years ago, in my former church in Middletown, I refused to give a gas voucher to a man, both my colleague and I had helped many times before to buy gas---until we learned that he was making drug runs to Harford, and so the next time he came in, I refused to help him.  I can still remember how he begged me for that voucher.  Look, he said, sometimes I do sell drugs.  I don’t have a regular paycheck like you.  But I do need the voucher so I can keep warm.  But I can’t use the church’s money to help you sell drugs.  Then don’t use the church’s money, he literally pleaded.  Use your own.  Please help me.”  I did not, and four days later he was found frozen to death in his car, with a cache of cocaine in the front seat.  Oh sin increased all right, his own and mine, but where, where in that situation was the abounding of grace?
 
In my former church in New Haven I remember well this young woman, who came to me devastated over the suicide of her 20 year old brother, who shot himself when his girlfriend dropped him.  She came to me one afternoon with a whole set of pictures of her brother, lying in his coffin.  She wanted to know where God was for her brother. Why would God allow such a terrible thing to happen?  He could not see beyond the pain, she said.  He acted impulsively, like a lot of 20 year olds do.  He did not think of the consequences. Why wasn’t God there for him, she wanted to know?   She came around pretty regularly for months, and then she told me she was pregnant.  She could barely care for herself; I couldn’t imagine how she would care for a baby.  But of course she insisted that she would be a good mother.  And then a year after the baby was born I learned that both she and the father had struggles with depression and drugs.  And two years after that, she took her own life.  Where sin increased, grace, the presence and working of God, abounded all the more? 
 
The stark truth is that the abounding of grace is not what our mortal eyes normally see. Recognizing grace is not a natural process that clearly presents itself to human vision.  And yet, and yet again it is the call of Christian faith to believe, hope and proclaim such a thing, and that is why the church, that is why this community of the faltering faithful is needed.  Where else but the church is grace openly declared? Where else but the church are we regularly reminded that in spite of all the world’s pain, God is yet working to make a new creation. This is what Teilhard de Chardin believed---that nothing and no one shall be lost to God, who can and will make all things well.  The past and the present, said Teilhard, are not nearly so important as the future---the future of God in Jesus Christ.
 
In the midst of great personal turmoil and self-doubt, when Rome ordered Teillhard de Chardin not to publish, when he was forbidden to teach, whenhe was accused of heresy, he wrote these words to a friend:
Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day, say again the words:  this is my Body.  And over every death force which awaits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words:  This is my blood.  More and more I come to see the importance of speaking and believing these words.  Personal success or satisfaction are not worth thinking about or worrying about---whether they come to us or evade us.  The most important thing is action---faithful action in the world and in God.  And the most important action belongs to God, who uses even our most meager and failing action to bring about the new creation.
 
 
Teilhard could have left the priesthood; he could have said good-bye to his beloved Jesuit Order, and he surely would have found many willing publishers for his writings, not to mention an appointment as a professor in a prestigious university.  But that is not what he did.  He said he was who he was, because of his Roman Catholic faith, and the Jesuits had nurtured him along the path of his becoming.  Though loyal to his church, he believed that the most important loyalty was not his or ours, but God’s.  God, he said, is loyal to the church and to us, even when the church and we are not always loyal to God.  And that is indeed Good News.  
]]>Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:27:13 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/on-being-sent-rev-sandra-olsen-71518Mark 6: 1-13
 
One night last week I met with a group of colleagues, two of whom were retired, while three of us were not.  And so the discussion came around to Mark’s gospel, the sending of the disciples out into the world.  One of my colleagues always speaks of the gospel as a pair of glasses, a kind of lens, meaning that when you put it on, you are invited to see life through that lens.  Things can look differently.  So what do we see when we look at life, including our lives, through the particular lens of this story?
 
Now up to this point in Mark’s gospel there have been some questions about Jesus’ identity.  Back in chapter four people wanted to know who this guy is, and in chapter 3 even Jesus’ family thought him crazy. No one was prepared to give Jesus much credit for anything.  He is dismissed as a hometown boy, a tekton, a word, which can be translated as carpenter or even stonemason.  Though Jesus has performed some pretty impressive deeds, and even flabbergasted the crowds, now it is Jesus’ turn to be astonished as he learns that their utter lack of faith is impervious to his ministry.   So what does he do?  He sends his disciples out into the world and gives them at least some of the power he has---the power to cast out demons and heal.  So off they go. 
 
Now on some level it is pretty extraordinary that these disciples are sent out, because in so many ways they are a pretty pathetic lot.  Of all the gospel writers Mark is the hardest on the disciples.   He shows them utterly lacking in all knowledge and understanding.  Jesus is always explaining things to them, and still they don’t get it.  And yet they are his  disciples, chosen by him to do the work that needs doing.  And the fact that these disciples are so unimpressive, so extraordinarily ordinary is exactly the fact, which grabbled my colleagues’ attention, directing the course of our conversation and in the end giving us all some hope.  And perhaps we too can find that hope, because let’s be honest, in so many ways we too lack understanding and knowledge.  We too are not necessarily the greatest examples of faithful discipleship.  But here we are, trying in our own ways to be faithful, and we too are sent out---though often we fail to notice that sending out, because we don’t often use the gospel as a lens through which to look at our lives.
 
But when one of my colleagues looked at his life through the lens of this particular story, he recalled an incident from his life when he was 10. I was suddenly called out of Mrs. Dodson’s class, he told us, to go down to the principal’s office.  I could not imagine what I had done; I tried to think of things. Oh yes, I had witnessed a fight in the schoolyard, but I was not a part of it. I hadn’t been late to school; my homework was done.  Why was I being called down to old Mr. Nelson’s office?  Of course, he was not really old, but when you are 10, 40 years olds seems ancient.  So when Mr. Nelson looked at me over the rim of his glasses and said my name out loud, James Wilson, I just stood there, terrified in the very pithy of my soul.  Very brusquely he said, “Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you, because I will say it only once.  Go out of the school and walk down Maple Street until you get to Oak Street; take a left and walk three more blocks until you come to 17 Raymond Road.  That’s where Peter Hanson lives.  Tell his mother that if Peter is not in school by noon, I will report her for truancy.
 
Well, first of all, my colleague continued, I did not know what truancy was, and secondly Peter Hanson was the toughest kid in our school.  He was mean, and one time he punched me in the stomach for no reason at all.  So why was I being sent to his house?
 
It didn’t take me long to get there. The blocks weren’t long, but the last four of them were run down, a neighborhood I had never been in before; had never really seen before.  When I arrived, I saw this guy getting into a blue Chevrolet. Are you Mr. Hanson? I asked.  He just laughed at me and said, “Like hell I am,” and got into his car and slammed the door shut and drove off in a hurry.  Almost immediately I remembered what everyone used to say. The reason Peter was so mean was because he had no father.  This was, after all, 1952, and in those days single parenthood was not so common.  So, I got up my courage, knocked on the door, which was hanging off its hinges, and who should answer but Peter.  He was as startled as I was, and his eyes became as big as saucers, but he did not speak a word.  He just stared until his mother came to the door, wearing a dirty blue bathrobe and smoking a cigarette. What do you want, she asked.
 
Well, the principal sent me to get Peter.  You see, it is kind of a special day in school, and we all feel that it is just not right without Peter.  I mean we are doing some pretty interesting stuff today, and Peter could help us. It’s just not the same without him.  And then came a pause, before I said, At least I think this is what the principal said. 
 
Well, Peter, his mother asked, do you want to go to school?  And Peter nodded his assent.  So there it was:  Peter and I walking to school together.  We had never had a conversation before, and now was not the time to start, so we just walked along in silence, and when we arrived at school Peter let me lead him to the principal’s office, and as he turned to go in, he gave me this look---a kind of half sad, half relieved, mixed with some embarrassment look, and that was that. 
 
When I arrived home from school that day, I told my mother what I had done.  That is outrageous, my mother objected.  What is wrong with Mr. Nelson, sending a child to that neighborhood to do his job?  He ought to have his had examined.  Why, I have a good mind to go to your school and give him a piece of my mind. But this was 1952, and parents back then did not tangle with school principals, so my mother never went.
 
But you know something, my colleague told us.  Even back then, I knew my mother was wrong.  I knew even then that something important happened that day, and now when I look back at that experience, I see it was one of the most important things that happened to me in my entire elementary school years.  When I look at it through the lens of the gospel, I know I was sent.  And my world got a little bigger that day.  And in some respects so did Peter Hanson’s.  I think he actually believed what I said:  that we wanted him to be there, that he could help us with the things we were doing. We were making salt maps, and he did a brilliant job of painting one. His was the most striking of all the maps, and the teacher told him so, and he was proud, and you know something, so was I.
 
You see gospel moments do not always have to be huge drama with God playing the major role.  Sometimes God is in the background, hanging out on the sidelines, whispering hints and suggestions that we might hear or choose to ignore.  One of my other colleagues told us he had just finished reading a book, Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer.  The message was basically that we are called to listen to our inner voice, listen to our life, calling us to be who we are born to be.  It is not something from without, Palmer insisted; it comes from within.  But you know something, all of us gathered around the table that evening thought Parker Palmer was wrong.  It is not all about what is within; there is also something without, something pushing and pulling us out of ourselves.   There are times in life we are summoned and called by something beyond ourselves.
 
My colleague said that if there had been a call for volunteers to go to Peter Hanson’s house to deliver a message from the principal, he NEVER would have gone, never would have volunteered.  Why he was called; why the principal chose him that fateful day, he never will know.  But it was a big moment in his life, and he sees that moment differently; he sometimes sees his life differently because every now and then he puts on the gospel, like a pair of glasses, and sees what he has not seen before. And so the same is true for all of us.  We too are invited to put the gospel on and see even a moment through that lens.  And we just might be surprised at what we see. 
 
]]>Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:22:37 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/decent-killers-rev-sandra-olsen-7818 
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Matthew 5: 1-10 
 
If you have learned anything about me at all this past year, you realize that I am a person who pays attention to stories, which I try to see through the lense of the gospel. Well, in my first semester in semianry in the course Philosophical Theology, my professor, Leroy Rouner, told this story to the class about one of his seminary professors, who was barely 20 years old, when he landed in France for the Normandy invasion in June, 1944.  He and three other young men were scouting around a small French village when through no design or intention of their own, a young German soldier fell into their hands.  They didn’t know what to do with him, since keeping him as a prisoner was impossible.  They considered letting him go, because well, he was no more than a kid, about 16 or 17 years old.  But what if he pulled down the wrath of other Germans upon their comrades, who had just parachuted into German held territory?  And so, sadly and reluctantly, they decided they had no recourse but to shoot him.  Four young men, who had grown up going to church and who could tell you something about Jesus’  Sermon on the Mount made a decision they did not want to make.  They picked some blades of grass, and the one who got the shortest blade was assigned the horrific task. They decided to shoot him in the back with no warning, so he would not be afraid, and this 20 year old recruit got the job.  He carried it out against his conscience, believing he was acting against what Jesus would have him do, and eventually after the war and college, he found his way into seminary and into the field of ethics, becoming a professor at Union theological Seminary in New York.  He had done something he knew to be wrong, but under the circumstances of brutal war, he did not know what else could be done. 
 
Many of you are famiiar with the Sermon on the Mount, which, in Matthew  begin with the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they inherit the earth, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy, and so on.  We know them as the heart of Jesus’ teaching, just as these four young men also knew them. But they also knew (as we do too) that  they did not live in a black and white world, where absolute good stands on one side and absolute evil on another.  And so they did what they did not want to do, because they did not see any alternative.  Choosing life, as the reading in Deuteronomy dictates, is not without its ambiguity. 
 
At Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches, there was a professor of ethics, Philip Hallie, who during World War II, was a young soldier in the infantry.  Hallie witnessed and participated in the horror of war, and after the war’s conclusion he found himself haunted by the depth of evil and cruelty that people did and do to one another.  He became a student of the Holocaust, cataloguing horror after horror, and contemplating the darkness that lies within the human heart and psyche.  He said that after decades of studying evil, he was descending into a pit of depression and hopelessness ---until one day, reading some Holocaust literature in his office, he suddenly noticed that he could no longer read, because his eyes were blinded by tears.  He stopped, wiped his eyes, and saw that the pages before him were drenched and the paper crinkled. 
 
Why am I crying? he asked himself.  And then he read the page again, the story of a French Huguenot village, Le Chambon, whose 3000 citizens, took Jesus’ commands seriously and literally.  They believed what Jesus said about love---love the neighbor and the enemy.  Show mercy to the neighbor and the enemy.  Resisting the Nazis and the puppet Vichy government, they hid and helped to escape nearly 6000 Jewish children.  Led by their pastor, Andre Trocme, his wife Magda, and his associate pastor, Edward Theis, this village is an admirable example of pure faith.   They saved Jews, and they did it without harming or killing any Germans or their French collaborators.  They were pacifists, who believed it was unChristian to save lives by destroying others.  And it was this story, which made Philip Hallie cry. Hallie had become so immersed in studying evil that he had forgotten how to cry, but when he came across something good, he wept. And so he began a new study, the study of Le Chambon,  whose story is told in his book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. 
 
But there is more to this story than the pure goodness and faith of these French Protestants.  How was it then that this little village managed to do what it did right under the nose of the Germans? You see it was known that Le Chambon was hiding Jews, and with the record of Nazi terror, why was this village not utterly destroyed?  And the answer has to do with the very thing that Le Chambon would not do---compromise.
 
In the last week of August, 1944, Hitler’s Third Reich was about finished in France, and trials of Germans and French collaborators were already beginning.  On August 23, a German officer, Major Julius Schmahling, who had for the past two years been in command of the German troops in the region, which included the village of Le Chambon, was now facing an inquiry about whether or not he should stand trial as a war criminal.  As he walked up the aisle toward the presiding officer of the hearing, who had been one of the leaders of the French Resistance, something strange began to happen.  People, including members of the French Resistance, rose to their feet. As the inquiry began, a Resistance leader spoke on Schmahling’s behalf, saying that he had fought his bad war well; he fought with dignity and with justice, and he refused to harm the village of Le Chambon, because though he knew they were hiding Jews, they were not killing or hurting German soldiers. 
 
Schmahling had been an officer in the First World War, and after that war, he became a teacher.  He despised the Nazis, though he was finally forced to join the Nazi Party to keep his teaching job. In 1942 he was called up to military service, and given command of the Haute Loire region in France.  He was told to go after the French Resistance, and he was also commanded to do something about the village of Le Chambon.  While Schmahling did fight the Resistance, he did nothing about Le Chambon.
 
When the Major died in 1973, his son found a letter in his father’s wallet, a letter written in 1966 by the mayor of the French region, where Schmahling had served.  The letter thanked the Major for “rendering the conditions of war as supportable as they could be within the limits of the freedom you were granted.  We remember you with affection and gratitude during an epoch when it was not easy to be a good German among good Frenchmen.” 
 
Understand that Schmahling was not a lowly soldier; he was the commander of the region, and it was his job to control the French while Germany went about its business of trying to win the war.  He was serving a nation, which was murdering millions and millions of people, and Berlin put him in command, because they thought he would keep the region quiet.  And Berlin was right.  Schmahling did his job well; there were few attacks on German soldiers under his administration.  If evil is about the twisting and systematic abuse of human life, then there is no doubt that the Nazi government Schmahling served was evil, and in serving it, he was part of that evil.  But if goodness has something to do with the prevention of cruelty and murder, then there is no doubt that Schmahling did good.  It was not the goodness of the people of Le Chambon, who under no circumstances would commit violence against their enemies.  It was not the goodness enshrined in the Beatitudes of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Julius Schmahling had no interest in religion or in Jesus, but he did have his ethical standards.  He lived in a world he did not make, but choose to accept, a world where compromises are made that some can survive, who under different conditions, would be murdered. 
 
Most of us are probably more like Julius Schmahling than we are the people of Le Chambon.  So what is the lesson here?  Is it that that even in a world of lions and lambs, the world still has need of the purists, like the people of Le Chambon, as well as those, like Major Schmahling and those four young soldiers in Normandy, who were wiling to compromise that some measure of goodness might have a chance of surviving in a world where evil also flourishes.   There are lines we draw in the sand, and though we do not always know beforehand where we will draw the line, still a time may come when a decision must be made.  And then we decide how and to what degree we are serving Christ and choosing life over death? 
]]>Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:14:41 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/why-the-church-rev-sandra-olsen-7118Micah 6: 6-16
1 Corinthians 12: 27-13: 13
  
From the looks of it, The Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Arizona was a great success.   Construction was everywhere on the church’s 187 acre campus, and there were 12,000 names on the membership roles.  There were professional musicians, who delivered what people called “upbeat music”, square dancing classes, weekly group trips to favorite restaurants and game playing nights.  But the Rev. Walter Kallestad was having difficulty sleeping. While discipleship calls Christians to take up their crosses and care for the most vulnerable, Kallestad reached the disturbing conclusion that his congregation was not interested in engaging with God, but were looking for relief, entertainment and inspiration.  While the church, he thought, had become a formidable institution, it was not following Christ, and so one Sunday morning he
stood before his congregation and confessed that under his leadership the church had become a dispenser of goods and services.  And so, he said, things would have to change.  And change they did.  The professional musicians were suddenly gone, because, he said, they had no real interest in the faith.  No more group trips to restaurants or game nights or any of the other frills.  One out of every three members and half the staff immediately left the church in protest.  Soon others would follow, when they recognized the minister meant what he said. “Faith is costly; if you’re a spectator and a consumer here,” he said, “then you are living a lie and you are ignoring what Christ commands you to do.”  The church has still not recovered even one quarter of its former membership, but at least some people learned that faith is not a commodity and that the church is not primarily about making its members feel comfortable or satisfied.
 
Because we live in a consumerist society, people have learned to approach everything as consumers---including religion and education. But unlike commercial enterprises, the church does not exist to satisfy the wants of customers.  In fact, its call is to transform what their so called “customers” want; in other words, diminishing selfish and primitive desires and moving its members to desire what is truly good and worthy of human desire.   The church’s business is character formation or transformation on the deepest levels---to become conformed to the image of God in Jesus Christ.  
 
In former times the business of the church was understood to be about “saving souls.”  Though many of us do not embrace the old images of keeping souls out of a devouring pit of fire, we certainly should believe that the church is still in the business of salvation.  And at least part of what that word means is to be constantly in the process of being saved; that is, having our desires transformed, learning, in other words, to desire what God in Jesus Christ would have us desire. 
 
For what we desire says a great deal about our character, about the kind of people we are and want to become.  When my husband began his career as a professor in a medical school 30 years ago, the most competitive residency was orthopedics, but now it is dermatology. And do you know why, because it’s a lucrative specialty with defined hours. Money, ease and comfort are what many desire.  Professors at universities and colleges sometimes lament what they see as the brain drain to Wall Street. While decades ago, the so called best and brightest went into medicine, scientific research, law and teaching, now many head off to Wall Street, where some figure out how to do all kinds of complicated financial manipulations that escape the attention of the less clever. One of my husband’s colleagues, who formerly worked on Wall Street, before going into molecular biology, told him, “It is scary how smart some of these people are.  But they too often use their intelligence for the wrong things.”
 
Who or what helps us to use our intelligence for the right things?  The public schools have all but given up on character formation and the church is not far behind.  If the church makes its priorities what the culture deems worthy, what are we?  Who are we?  Why do we need to exist?  The temptation is to surrender the distinct religious identity by merging into the larger cultural identity.  Micah told his people that they had become a vassal state of the Assyrian Empire, because they had pursued the wrong desires.  You have been greedy, he said.  You have cheated the poor by using scales that do not properly weigh the grain.  Your wealth rests on violence.  Lies and deceit dominate the public square. You know, Micah said, what your call is:  do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. 
 
And Paul told the Christians of Corinth that their differing gifts should be used in an excellent way.  Let love be your guide.  These well known verses on love, too often, in my opinion, read at weddings, are not about romantic love. The love here is agape, which can be translated as charity.  This is care and concern for the other, including the enemy.  This love is not about liking or approval, but it is about deep caring, desiring for the other true fullness of life.  Paul wrote these words in the context of church. This is his vision of what the church should be and become: a community whose members have had their desires transformed and changed. When your desire is changed, your view of yourself and the other and the world changes.  You do not see as the culture sees. 
 
Do you think, for example, that St. Francis or Mother Theresa saw the leper or criminal or the drug addict or the illegal migrant as less than they, lacking the image and likeness of God?  Would they have poured contempt upon these people, because they fail to do what our common morality dictates? No, because their vision had been transformed by the gospel, and so they saw differently, dimly to be sure, because no human being can see the fullness.  No institution, church or state, can make the new creation.  Only God can do that, but in the meantime the church is called to be witness to God’s new creation.  How? By doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God.  And though we cannot do that perfectly, we can open our eyes and recognize when justice is NOT done, when mercy is denied and when arrogance rules the day.  And then we raise our voices and our prayers in the hope that God’s will indeed one day overcome the world’s will and make all life new.   
]]>Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:10:09 GMThttps://www.firstchurchunionville.org/pastors-page/in-a-boat-out-in-a-storm-rev-sandra-olsen-62418 
Job 38: 1-11
Mark 4: 35-41
 
Last Wednesday some of us gathered to watch the move, The Painted Veil.  It is a story of love and betrayal, forgiveness and redemption. In one scene between the Mother Superior of an orphanage and the wife of a doctor, who is battling a cholera epidemic China, the nun says to the woman, “When I was 17 years old, I fell madly, passionately in love with God.  But over the years, God has disappointed me, and now God and I are like an old married couple.  We don’t talk much any more, but God knows I will never leave him. 
 
Disappointed with God: It is not a subject usually brought up in church. After all, as Christians we are called to love God with the fullness of our hearts, minds and souls, and to admit disappointment appears to be a faithless act.  And yet, over more than three decades of ministry, I have heard many, many people express keen disappointment with God.  A baby is stillborn; a 12 year old loses her sight; children at the southern border are ripped from the arms of their parents and placed in detention centers.  God, where are you?  We are in a terrible storm.  Don’t you care? Imagine those disciples, out in a boat in a storm, fearful that they might drown.  Their fear is not unreasonable, and so they cried out to Jesus, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  Or to put the question in another way, “God, where are you in the midst of life’s storms?”  
 
 We all know life is full of storms, and there are storms severe enough to push some people to unbelief. But the disciples were not tempted by unbelief; they were tempted by fear to doubt the power of God, the power they had witnessed in Jesus.  And so they were mightily disappointed, just as Job was also mightily disappointed.  Poor Job, battered and bruised by a series of calamities, because he was made a pawn in a bet between the Adversary and God.  God had permitted the Adversary to afflict Job to see what Job would do, if he would maintain his faithfulness. And so Job lost his wealth, his children and finally his health.   And he wanted an answer to a very human question: WHY?  Have I not been faithful?  Have I not been just?  Answer me, God. And finally God spoke out of the whirlwind, and what we heard today was the first part of God’s response.  God basically told Job that he was so small and puny in understanding that he could not possibly comprehend the fullness of God’s power.  Since God is beyond everything that he, a mere human, can know or understand, how dare he question God?
 
But Job always knew that his understanding was limited, just as we all know that.  But can we be blamed for being mere human beings, for having limited understanding?  We have no alternative but to see, speak and understand as humans, and so the questions we put forth must be human questions, spoken from our limited human perspective. That is the very best that we can do, and unless God wants to tell us that our humanity is completely trivial, we do have a right to question and to ponder from our limited human point of view.  Job and the disciples were not asking to understand as God understands.  They were asking for help as human beings.
 
And this is what the early church was asking for as well.  It is not at all unlikely that the community out of which the Gospel of Mark emerged had its own beef with God, because the sovereign ruler of the universe was not taking corrective action against the church’s enemies.  The Emperor Nero had been dipping Christians in oil and setting them on fire, so imagine the challenge of converting people to Christ with that threat hanging over their heads.  Was not God supposed to care for and protect God’s people?  If the church truly is Christ’s body in the world, why is it so hard to build up that body?  Why all this persecution and failure?  Those are some of the questions on the minds of the early Christians. They were having a very hard time, and they saw their church in the middle of a great storm, buffeted and bashed by strong winds and heavy rains.  Why doesn’t God do something?  Does God even care?  These are the questions the writer of Mark’s gospel was dealing with, and so it was essential that the story he told be filled with hope for a people in a boat out in a storm.
 
Notice how skillfully Mark weaves his story.  Right before this, Jesus had been teaching in parables, and exhausted, he said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.”  In other words, let’s get out of here; let’s leave the crowds behind.  And so they did.  They pushed off, and there they were on the Sea of Galilee.  Now I have been to Israel and I have seen the Sea of Galilee, and let me tell you, it can get mighty rough. Storms blow in very rapidly.  On the east shore the mountains rise up to about 2000 feet, and when the wind blows through the ravines the danger to boats out on the water is fierce.  So we can imagine that the disciples had a very good reason to be afraid---just as the early Christians had good reason to be afraid.  And where is Jesus in the story? Why, he is asleep in the boat; the text even gives us the extra detail that he is asleep in the stern, on a cushion.  He is in the back of the boat, not the front.  He is behind his disciples, not ahead of them. 
 
And what do these disciples do?  Terrified for their lives, they awaken him with this accusation, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  Notice to whom or what Jesus first speaks.  Mark tells us he first rebuked the wind, and this term rebuke, a term of great power, was the same verb Mark used to describe Jesus’ control over the demons.  Earlier in the gospel Jesus had rebuked the demons, telling them to come out of the possessed man.   Next he speaks to the sea, but in a gentler voice. “Peace! Be still.”  Only then did Jesus address his disciples, asking them “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?”  And the text tells us that the disciples were filled not yet with faith but with great awe, and they wondered who this man is that even the wind and the sea obey him.
 
Now up to this point Mark has been giving us a Jesus, who has been mainly a teacher, preaching and teaching in parables.  But now through the end of chapter five, we are going to see a Jesus performing miracles, and this stilling of the storm is a reminder of what God did to the Israelites in Egypt, parting for them the Red Sea so they could escape. So the message to the early church was:  just as God saved the Israelites then, so will God save the church now from the fearsome power of Rome.
 
But how will God accomplish that?  Through the power miracles? No, that is not how it works in Mark’s gospel.  People may be awed by miracles, but awe is not faith. In fact, miracles represent diminishing returns in Mark.  In chapter 6, for example, 5000 people are fed, but in chapter 8 the number drops to 4000, and in that same chapter Jesus has to try twice to heal a blind man.  When we arrive at chapter 11, Jesus does not seem to have much power left, and when the fig tree does not give him any fruit, he curses it.  His power seems to be spent, and he cannot even prevent his own death.   What kind of a Messiah is this, anyway?  With what kind of God are we dealing?  If the expectation is raw power, God’s complete restoration in this life of what has been so grievously lost, the gospel shows us that such expectations may be the wrong ones to have. God is not magic; God is love, and love works differently from magic.  Love does not make all the pain go away; it cannot restore everything that has been lost.  But love allows us to see life differently. 
 
Some years ago, I met a 30 year old man in a nursing after a car accident left him severely brain damaged.  His father visited him regularly, but after a while the father painfully admitted that he had stopped loving his son.  The truth is, the father confessed, his son no longer seemed like his son.  He could not talk or respond, and he did not realize anyone’s identity.  Well, one day, when the father entered the room, another man from his Presbyterian church was there, visiting his son, talking to him, reading scripture and praying as if the young man could understand what was being said. What’s wrong with this guy, the father pondered?  Doesn’t he know that my son can understand nothing that his brain is damaged and he will never be well? He was about to say something, but suddenly it dawned on him that this man was looking at this son through the eyes of faith. His words were not wasted, because even if the young man could not understand them, God heard them and accepted them as an act of faith and love. “That man’s faith,” the father said, “helped to rebirth my love for my son.” 
 
There are many storms in life, and the waves bash against us, threatening to overwhelm our little boat.  Sure, we are afraid, wondering what the outcome will be.  There is no promise that there will be no more storms. The only promise given is that God is love, and love does work in mysterious ways as it helps us to see what we did not see or understand before.  
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