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1/17/2018 0 Comments

BIRTH:  A PIECE OF THE DIVINE ~  Rev. Sandra Olsen, 12/17/17

 
You have just seen and heard the familiar story of Jesus’ birth.  Birth:  in so many ways it is an ordinary event.  You and I are here today because someone, somewhere, at some time gave birth.  Birth happens all the time; right now, this very minute, women are giving birth across the globe.  And Mary, mother of Jesus, also gave birth. The Gospel gives us no details; only Matthew and Luke mention the birth in less than one line, but we should not be at all surprised.  Birthing has always been (until very recently) a woman’s experience, and women’s experiences have often been ignored.  And yet in this story, in the ordinary experience of giving birth, God is intimately involved.  And that is what the Christmas story is really all about:  God entering into the most ordinary of human experiences. Yes, God meets us in the ordinary.  We do not have to search in some exotic way to find God.  God comes to us; God meets us, and in fact, God can and does meet us in birth.  
 
I am here today as a minister, because I have given birth----4 times.  When I was pregnant with my first child, about two weeks before she was born, it was a hot, sticky July night in Boston, and I had trouble sleeping, trouble getting comfortable.  Tossing and turning, I finally fell asleep around 4 AM, just a few hours before I needed to arise for my job at MIT, where I worked as an administrative assistant.  It was then I had this dream.  I dreamed that my husband had the baby for me.  He came to me, holding in his arms this beautiful newborn and said, “Look what I have done for you.  I have saved you from giving birth.”  Obviously very proud of his accomplishment, he expected me to show my gratitude.  But I was furious.  What have you done? I demanded.  You have stolen from me a piece of the divine. And then with a start, I awoke, and with relief could feel my still pregnant belly.
 
The dream was disturbing to me, because at that point in my life, I thought of myself as an unbeliever.  Oh, I had been raised in the church, a liberal Presbyterian, but in college I had read the great atheistic thinkers: Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, and looking at the world in all its messiness and evil and pondering it all, I concluded that these great thinkers were right.  God is a projection, a fulfillment of wishes, even an opiate of the people, who promise rewards in heaven while they suffer injustice here on earth. So why this dream, this message that birth is a piece o the divine?  Was my unconscious trying to tell me something?  Was God trying to tell me something I had been ignoring ?   “It’s hormones,” my husband insisted.  He was a PHD student in molecular biology at Tufts Medical School, and biologists were and are the great reductionists.  But I was not so sure this could all be reduced to hormones.    
 
And so when I was giving birth during that period known as transition, (and those of you who have had unmedicated births, know it is the hardest time), when the waves of contractions come rushing on and on and on, and you are ready to call it quits---take me home now, I insisted.  I don’t want to do this any longer; it was then, with Dr. Charles Edes gently commanding, “Relax into the contraction; don’t fight it; work with it, it was then that an image came to my mind’s eye, an image I had seen in an art book of a female Buddha, squatting to give birth with such a completely serene expression on her face.  And I tried very hard to concentrate, to keep that image in my mind’s eye.  In less than a year I returned to church and two years after that I enrolled in seminary.  Hormones?  No, it was far more than that.  I wanted to know something more about this piece of the divine that met me in the experience of giving birth.
 
In seminary I would be transformed by the thinking of Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian of the 20th century, who named God “The Ground of Being.”  Like a great womb, I thought, stretching, straining, taut, yet marvelously elastic, the great Ground of Being releases us into life.  Ultimately, there must be separation, or there can be no life at all, but we are never so separated that we are completely cut off.  And that too is the story of Christmas.  Yes, there is separation and even heartache.  Herod tried to murder the newborn king, whom he saw as a threat to his power, and he murdered other innocent babies, whose mothers must have wondered where God was for them.  Power: it is always a theme, then and now.  Who has the power and who tries to grab it?
 
But in this story the power in this story belongs to a mother and her baby as well as all the characters, who bothered to show up.  Mary gave birth, and God was there and is there, in each birth, in each life, though admittedly sometimes God’s presence does seem hidden.  Yet God does show up in the most ordinary experiences of human life, including birth, and with God the ordinary can become extraordinary. 
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    About Our Pastor:

    I am very happy to be here at the First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT.  I arrived here in July, 2017, and have been warmly received.  This is a wonderful church community.  I have been an ordained minister for over three decades now, and I consider it a great privilege and challenge to be called to serve.  Before coming to Unionville I served churches on Long Island, Middletown, CT and then ten years in New Haven, Center Church on the Green.  My home is in Middletown, where I live with my husband, Donald Oliver, who is a professor of molecular biology at Wesleyan University.  We have four grown children, two boys and two girls and three granddaughters, the youngest born on October 3, 2017!

    Before moving to Middletown in 1991, I lived in Stony Brook, Long Island for nine years, where I served a small church part time and also worked as a chaplain in various medical settings. My experiences as a chaplain made a very profound impact on me and changed me as a minister.  I saw people break under the weight of their burdens, so I don’t believe it is ever helpful to tell suffering people that God never gives burdens that cannot be borne.  God does not send burdens; life just is; life just happens.

    My growing up years were spent mainly in (suburban) Buffalo, NY, though I also lived in Jacksonville for three years during the turbulent civil rights years in the 1960’s.  The experience of being a “Yankee” in the midst of entrenched resistance to civil rights certainly made a deep impression on my young mind and spirit.  I was sometimes viewed as an “enemy,” an outsider, who was trying to impose a whole new set of rules on a culture not interested in changing.  I did not understand why I was being personally blamed for this, but the experience was character building.


    ​I grew up as a pretty liberal Presbyterian, and my childhood memories of church and Sunday school are positive ones.  I was taught that God is love and God’s love is for everyone, including people of other religions or no religion at all.  God’s love was big enough to hold everyone, I was assured, so it was quite a shock to see many “good” members of our Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, Florida, totally opposed to integration and the passage of Civil Rights legislation.  When I asked my parents why, their response was, “Change is painful.  None of us likes to change.”

    I went off to the University of Chicago in the late 60’s, and like many students of my generation, I was swept up in the protest against the Viet Nam War as well as the civil rights campaign and the women’s movement.  The assassination of Martin Luther King erupted in flaming riots as National Guard troops descended on our campus.  The summer of 1968 brought the Democrats to Chicago for their convention with more protest and riots.  Church and God seemed both remote and irrelevant, and I recognized with a pang of regret that I no longer believed in God.

    After graduation from college I earned a Master’s Degree in teaching, but after teaching for three years I decided it was not my call.  Eventually I found my way into Boston University’s School of Theology.  I went not because I was deeply spiritual, but rather because I was curious.  I had found my way back to church, but it was the Unitarian-Universalist tradition, where all your answers are questioned, including belief in God.  Somewhere in college my belief in God had died, and I wanted to know if or how it was possible to THINK about God.  I wanted to know if it were possible to maintain intellectual rigor and honesty, while also embracing faith.  Where else to go but to a school of theology?    I was not disappointed.  I loved my studies and the questions theology asks and the answers it struggles to offer.  I was inspired by the theology of Paul Tillich and the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazis and paid with his life.  I loved the never ending quest to know and understand, and the deep need and yearning to relate that knowledge and understanding to faith and the actual conditions of life.
    ​
    After graduation from Boston University, I was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist Association, though I was already beginning to consider returning to my Christian heritage.  I moved with my family to Long Island in 1983 and served a church (part time) as well as worked in various hospital settings.  I also pursued a Doctor of Ministry Degree at the Roman Catholic Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York.  The sole Protestant in the program, I was challenged and stretched by not only my colleagues and professors, but also through my exposure to Catholic thinkers such as Karl Rahner, Walter Kasper and Bernard Lonergan. 

    While working as a chaplain in the midst of great suffering on a burn unit, a neo-natal intensive care unit, a neurosurgery unit and a state mental hospital, where the deepest questions about life, death, and hope are not theoretical but actual, I finally decided to transfer my ministerial standing into the United Church of Christ.  In the context of so much suffering, the God who suffers and yet also loves and forgives was the God who captured both my heart and mind, the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. 


    We human beings are all on a journey, and the paths before us are many and diverse.  The Christian path has been the one I have chosen to walk, and I have found it leading to full and abundant life.  But I also realize there are other paths, asking different questions, offering different answers.  We need such diversity to challenge and enrich us and also remind us, “Not all who wander are lost" (Tolkien).  The great physicist, Albert Einstein once said, “Our situation on this earth seems strange.  Every one of us appears here involuntarily without knowing exactly why.  To me it is enough to wonder at the secrets.”

    I hope you will pay us a visit at First Church in Unionville.  Come, and wonder with us.  With all of life’s struggles, hurts and sorrows, it is still a beautiful world.  Come and give thanks to God with us.

    ​Yours in Christ, Sandra Olsen

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