What About Mothers?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 8, 2022
Some 40 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I remember this hot July night in Boston, when I had trouble sleeping. I was a month away from delivery, and I just could not get comfortable. Tossing and turning, I watched the hours on the clock tick by, knowing that work in an office with no air conditioning would be made more unbearable with no sleep. At around 5 AM or so, I finally fell asleep, and it was then I had this vivid dream. I dreamed that my husband gave birth for me, and coming to me with this beautiful baby, he was so proud of himself-=--not so much because he had made biological history, but because he thought he had saved me from an awful experience. “Look what I have done for you,” he said to me in my dream. “I have saved you from the agony of giving birth.” But instead of being grateful, I was horrified. Screaming at him, I yelled, “What have you done?” You have stolen from me a piece of the divine.” At that point I suddenly awoke and was grateful indeed to feel my belly still pregnant. Now that dream provoked me, because at that point in my life I did not really believe in God. Oh, I had been raised as a liberal Protestant in the Presbyterian Church, had gone to Sunday School and church my whole life, but in college, I began to think about God very differently, especially after reading thinkers like Freud, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. Almost without realizing it, I no longer believed in the God of my childhood. And yet, here was my unconscious telling me that birth was a piece of the divine.
In my case it is simply a fact that pregnancy and childbirth quite literally sent me to seminary, because the experience pushed me to ponder the big questions: Looking at this beautiful infant who came into the world on an August evening, I suddenly found myself amazed that there is something and not nothing. What is creation, I wondered, and where does it come from? What or who is God. The god of my childhood had died, but surely faith did not have to be a childish business. And so, I went to seminary, because, as I told the Director of Admissions, “I wanted to learn HOW to think about God. But I don’t know if I ever would have gone without the experience of having a baby. Motherhood was the push.Motherhood pushes many people, including women in the bible. Women were expected to be mothers---that was their role--- and if they were not, they suffered the humiliation of barrenness---until God opened their wombs, as the biblical text usually put it. Remember Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who in her old age eventually bore Isaac. And then there was Hannah, who was desperate to have a baby, and finally conceived Samuel, who became the prophet to the king. And Elizabeth, who in her old age gave birth to John the Baptist. Then there is our text from Genesis. Rebekah gave birth to twins, Esau and Jacob. Now Rebecca was a schemer. She favored her younger son, Jacob, over the older one, Esau. Jacob too was a schemer, and the truth is, he was a lot brighter than his hotheaded older brother, who would give up his birthright for a bowl of soup. Rebekah undoubtedly realized where the talent lay, and so it was her idea to deceive Isaac into giving the paternal blessing to his younger son, when it should have gone to Esau.
And then there is our story from Mark, which shows us another mother, desperate for the healing of her daughter. Though Jesus had said he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, this mother would not take NO for an answer. We don’t know what the girl’s problem was, since in Jesus’ day unclean spirits were often blamed for all kinds of conditions, including epilepsy and mental illnesses. It is important to note that this mother was a foreigner, a Phoenician from Syria. Jesus was traveling through the region of Tyre in Phoenicia just north of upper Galilee, which in Jesus’ day was a predominantly Jewish area until you moved outside the city. We know nothing about this woman, whether she had a husband or what her social status was. We know only that she had a sick daughter. Now women were not allowed to accost males---though she did approah Jesus in someone’s house, which is where reputable women should be. She fell at his feet to make her request, a sign of deference. Now in the 5th chapter of Mark Jesus had already healed a foreigner so the foreign identity of the woman would not be enough to explain Jesus’ refusal. But that she a woman, a stranger to Jesus, would take it upon herself to enter a home and make such a bold request---that was beyond what social convention tolerated. And so, Jesus turned her down, calling her in so many words a dog. Well, she could not afford to take offense at the insult Jesus delivered. She was out to accomplish one task and that was the healing of her daughter. She did not care what Jesus called her. And so, she turned the insult around: Even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs, she said, and for her bold and clever persistence--- the only example in Mark, where Jesus is out maneuvered by anyone, male or femaile---Jesus consents to heal her daughter. That mother did what she had to do. And so do many mothers. They do what they have to do on behalf of their children, no matter the cost or the pain they have to bear. Consider Moses’ mother, who hid him in the bullrushes to save him from Pharoah’s decree that male babies be killed. It was Pharoah’s daughter who found the baby and raised Moses in the palace. His mother acted as a nursemaid, but she did not raise him. That was her loss for the sake of his life. She did what she had to do.
Some years ago, when I was working in a church on Long Island, a woman came to see me. She was a woman in her 60’s, not part of my congregation and at the time, which was about 35 years ago. She told me this story about giving birth to a baby girl when she was 15. This was around 1927 or so, when having a baby out of wedlock was scandalous. “I was going to give her up,” she said, “but my mother convinced me to keep the baby. “Your father and I will help you,” she insisted, “and they did. But when my daughter was around 3, something awful happened. My mother’s brother began to abuse my daughter. I caught him, and I was terrified it would only get worse. I was barely 18 at the time, and I had no idea what to do. I mean this was a time no one dared talk about such things. I couldn’t tell my parents; I couldn’t tell anyone, and so I gave my daughter away; I put her up for adoption to save her from my uncle. She was adopted very quickly, but when my parents found out, they disowned me, and for nearly 20 years they did not speak to me. After my uncle died, I told them the truth, and no one ever mentioned it again, but before my father died, he told me he believed me, because my uncle had apparently abused other little girls. “We never admitted it,” he said, “and we never talked about it.”
But this woman’s daughter, then in her mid 40’s, had managed to track her mother down and wanted a meeting. And the poor mother did not know what to do or what to say. What if my daughter does not think the truth is enough to make up for what I did? The truth does not take away my shame, though at the time I did what I I had to do.
I never learned this story’s ending because I never saw that mother again. But I have not forgotten her, because like so many mothers through the march of time, she did something desperate to protect her child. And that desperation continues---in the suburbs, in the cities, and in Ukraine today, when women are sending their children away to protect them. I don’t think you have to be a mother or a daughter to feel the powerful poignancy of that woman’s story, but I do think there is a reason that mothers and motherhood have such a prominent place in the bible. There is something in the role of motherhood that uniquely shows us what God in Jesus Christ is like, when suffering is taken on for the sake of others. Mothers do what they have to do, even when what they do brings pain and even shame upon themselves.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 8, 2022
Some 40 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I remember this hot July night in Boston, when I had trouble sleeping. I was a month away from delivery, and I just could not get comfortable. Tossing and turning, I watched the hours on the clock tick by, knowing that work in an office with no air conditioning would be made more unbearable with no sleep. At around 5 AM or so, I finally fell asleep, and it was then I had this vivid dream. I dreamed that my husband gave birth for me, and coming to me with this beautiful baby, he was so proud of himself-=--not so much because he had made biological history, but because he thought he had saved me from an awful experience. “Look what I have done for you,” he said to me in my dream. “I have saved you from the agony of giving birth.” But instead of being grateful, I was horrified. Screaming at him, I yelled, “What have you done?” You have stolen from me a piece of the divine.” At that point I suddenly awoke and was grateful indeed to feel my belly still pregnant. Now that dream provoked me, because at that point in my life I did not really believe in God. Oh, I had been raised as a liberal Protestant in the Presbyterian Church, had gone to Sunday School and church my whole life, but in college, I began to think about God very differently, especially after reading thinkers like Freud, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. Almost without realizing it, I no longer believed in the God of my childhood. And yet, here was my unconscious telling me that birth was a piece of the divine.
In my case it is simply a fact that pregnancy and childbirth quite literally sent me to seminary, because the experience pushed me to ponder the big questions: Looking at this beautiful infant who came into the world on an August evening, I suddenly found myself amazed that there is something and not nothing. What is creation, I wondered, and where does it come from? What or who is God. The god of my childhood had died, but surely faith did not have to be a childish business. And so, I went to seminary, because, as I told the Director of Admissions, “I wanted to learn HOW to think about God. But I don’t know if I ever would have gone without the experience of having a baby. Motherhood was the push.Motherhood pushes many people, including women in the bible. Women were expected to be mothers---that was their role--- and if they were not, they suffered the humiliation of barrenness---until God opened their wombs, as the biblical text usually put it. Remember Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who in her old age eventually bore Isaac. And then there was Hannah, who was desperate to have a baby, and finally conceived Samuel, who became the prophet to the king. And Elizabeth, who in her old age gave birth to John the Baptist. Then there is our text from Genesis. Rebekah gave birth to twins, Esau and Jacob. Now Rebecca was a schemer. She favored her younger son, Jacob, over the older one, Esau. Jacob too was a schemer, and the truth is, he was a lot brighter than his hotheaded older brother, who would give up his birthright for a bowl of soup. Rebekah undoubtedly realized where the talent lay, and so it was her idea to deceive Isaac into giving the paternal blessing to his younger son, when it should have gone to Esau.
And then there is our story from Mark, which shows us another mother, desperate for the healing of her daughter. Though Jesus had said he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, this mother would not take NO for an answer. We don’t know what the girl’s problem was, since in Jesus’ day unclean spirits were often blamed for all kinds of conditions, including epilepsy and mental illnesses. It is important to note that this mother was a foreigner, a Phoenician from Syria. Jesus was traveling through the region of Tyre in Phoenicia just north of upper Galilee, which in Jesus’ day was a predominantly Jewish area until you moved outside the city. We know nothing about this woman, whether she had a husband or what her social status was. We know only that she had a sick daughter. Now women were not allowed to accost males---though she did approah Jesus in someone’s house, which is where reputable women should be. She fell at his feet to make her request, a sign of deference. Now in the 5th chapter of Mark Jesus had already healed a foreigner so the foreign identity of the woman would not be enough to explain Jesus’ refusal. But that she a woman, a stranger to Jesus, would take it upon herself to enter a home and make such a bold request---that was beyond what social convention tolerated. And so, Jesus turned her down, calling her in so many words a dog. Well, she could not afford to take offense at the insult Jesus delivered. She was out to accomplish one task and that was the healing of her daughter. She did not care what Jesus called her. And so, she turned the insult around: Even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs, she said, and for her bold and clever persistence--- the only example in Mark, where Jesus is out maneuvered by anyone, male or femaile---Jesus consents to heal her daughter. That mother did what she had to do. And so do many mothers. They do what they have to do on behalf of their children, no matter the cost or the pain they have to bear. Consider Moses’ mother, who hid him in the bullrushes to save him from Pharoah’s decree that male babies be killed. It was Pharoah’s daughter who found the baby and raised Moses in the palace. His mother acted as a nursemaid, but she did not raise him. That was her loss for the sake of his life. She did what she had to do.
Some years ago, when I was working in a church on Long Island, a woman came to see me. She was a woman in her 60’s, not part of my congregation and at the time, which was about 35 years ago. She told me this story about giving birth to a baby girl when she was 15. This was around 1927 or so, when having a baby out of wedlock was scandalous. “I was going to give her up,” she said, “but my mother convinced me to keep the baby. “Your father and I will help you,” she insisted, “and they did. But when my daughter was around 3, something awful happened. My mother’s brother began to abuse my daughter. I caught him, and I was terrified it would only get worse. I was barely 18 at the time, and I had no idea what to do. I mean this was a time no one dared talk about such things. I couldn’t tell my parents; I couldn’t tell anyone, and so I gave my daughter away; I put her up for adoption to save her from my uncle. She was adopted very quickly, but when my parents found out, they disowned me, and for nearly 20 years they did not speak to me. After my uncle died, I told them the truth, and no one ever mentioned it again, but before my father died, he told me he believed me, because my uncle had apparently abused other little girls. “We never admitted it,” he said, “and we never talked about it.”
But this woman’s daughter, then in her mid 40’s, had managed to track her mother down and wanted a meeting. And the poor mother did not know what to do or what to say. What if my daughter does not think the truth is enough to make up for what I did? The truth does not take away my shame, though at the time I did what I I had to do.
I never learned this story’s ending because I never saw that mother again. But I have not forgotten her, because like so many mothers through the march of time, she did something desperate to protect her child. And that desperation continues---in the suburbs, in the cities, and in Ukraine today, when women are sending their children away to protect them. I don’t think you have to be a mother or a daughter to feel the powerful poignancy of that woman’s story, but I do think there is a reason that mothers and motherhood have such a prominent place in the bible. There is something in the role of motherhood that uniquely shows us what God in Jesus Christ is like, when suffering is taken on for the sake of others. Mothers do what they have to do, even when what they do brings pain and even shame upon themselves.
NO ONE CAN HINDER GOD
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
May 15, 2022
Acts 11: 1-18
This is a rather strange story from the Book of Acts. Peter was in trouble, because he had been consorting with gentiles, and so when he was in Jerusalem, he was asked (rather sternly, we might assume) for an explanation of his behavior. And so, Peter described the scene: A sheet had come down from heaven with all sorts of animals, reptiles and birds of prey, and Peter said he was commanded, “Kill and eat.” Now this would have been completely against the purity laws of Peter’s Jewish upbringing, and so he told God, “No,” not once but three times. “Nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth,” he insisted to God, and then everything was pulled back up to heaven. Three men came and took him along with some other followers to meet Cornelius, and Cornelius and his household were baptized by Peter, because Peter saw that the same Holy Spirit that had fallen on the followers of Jesus had also fallen on Cornelius’ household. And so Peter asked the people who were questioning, him, “Who was I that I could hinder God?” And not having a good answer to that question, his interlocutors were silenced.
As you heard in the introduction to this reading The Book of Acts is really a continuation of Luke’s Gospel, written, it is believed, by the same person, around the year 80 or so. While Luke tells the story of Jesus Christ, Acts tells the story of the gospel’s emergence into the wider world, which is the gentile world. Now Peter is generally credited with working in the Jewish world, while Paul is the great apostle to the gentiles, and indeed in the Pauline Letters, there is some tension between Peter and Paul concerning the inclusion of the gentiles in the covenant. Peter insisted that the gentiles must first become Jews by being circumcised, but Paul said this was completely unnecessary. Yet here in Acts we see quite clearly that Peter is willing to embrace the gentiles, because he understands this to be God’s intention and work, not his. In so many words he said, “Look, this isn’t my idea; this is what God wants, and we can’t hinder God.”
Of course, we human beings have a long history of hindering God, putting roadblocks in front of the divine intention to love and accept all people. There is a lot of hindrance going on in the world today---look at wars in Ukraine and Syria and Yemen, just for starters, and the mess in Palestine and the 18% poverty rate of children in our country. Is this what we think God desires? And what about World War ll, which killed between 70 and 80 million people 50 to 55 million civilians, non-combatants. Who can hinder God? Oh, we do a pretty good job of trying to do just that. And it is not at all clear how God is responding to our attempts at hindrance. Does God have a strategy, which in our limited and imperfect understanding, we simply cannot see?
When we consider the world of Jesus and now Peter, we do know that the tension between Jews and gentiles was palpable. Jesus probably thought his ministry was solely to the house of Israel. Just a few weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, we had a story about Jesus initially refusing to heal the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman, because she was not part of the ingroup, the house of Israel. And when Jesus’ disciples first began their ministry after Jesus’ resurrection, they most likely thought it was solely to the Jews. But something radical happened. The movement expanded way beyond Israel, drawing in the Greek and Roman world until finally Christianity became a religion of the gentiles, not the Jews. But when Peter went to Cornelius’ home and baptized him and his household after seeing the Holy Spirit falling upon them, it is doubtful Peter understood this as a world wide phenomenon. He was seeing it in terms of the individuals he was encountering. And that is the way most of us see things.
It is very difficult and challenging to look at broad historical movements and discern what God is doing in them and through them. To see the hand of God in the scope of history requires TIME, the ability to look back and reflect. Then we can perhaps discern something of God’s activity, even as we also can see the ways human beings have worked to hinder God. And so, is it any wonder that we often move to individual experiences and stories to see what God is intending and doing---as in the story of Cornelius and his household. And this is how Jesus taught. He told stories about individual people and their struggles to help people see and understand what God is up to in the daily living of lives.
You have heard me mention my former church in New Haven, which boasted a stunningly beautiful hand built Fisk organ and a paid choir, many of them educated at Yale’s School of Music. Sometimes a choir member would give a concert at the church, and it was at such an event, I met this woman, a student at the School of Music as well as a friend of the young woman giving the concert. She was African American and had grown up in Alabama, where her parents were both teachers in an African American high school in a small town. “We were pretty poor,” she told me, “because teachers in schools where black students were taught, were poorly paid, but we were a lot better off than others. My grandmother lived with us, and in her younger years, she had done back breaking farm work. She had the voice of an angel, an operatic quality voice, every bit as talented, I think, as someone like Leontine Price.
My grandmother sang in church; she sang at home. She sang everywhere she could, and I learned so much from her, even as I believe my gift of voice came through her. She could have been a star, but in those days, she had no chance at an education. I used to feel so sorry for her, because of all her lost opportunities. But my grandmother was never resentful, never downtrodden, and as my education has taken off, she is so grateful and joyful for all the opportunities that I have. “You see,” she recently told me, “No one can hinder God. They can put roadblocks in God’s path. They can even slow God’s movement down, but God always works around those roadblocks, God always finds a way to move ahead. And as God moves, God takes us along---even if we sometimes kick and scream as we are being taken.”
I don’t think there is a better summary of today’s bible reading than that grandmother’s words. We rarely have the vision and the wisdom to see the arc of God’s movement in the march of time and history. But we can sometimes see God’s movement in small chunks and slices of life, in our own stories and in the stories of others, whose lives cross our paths. No one can hinder God, she said. God just keeps moving and takes us along, even in spite of ourselves.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
May 15, 2022
Acts 11: 1-18
This is a rather strange story from the Book of Acts. Peter was in trouble, because he had been consorting with gentiles, and so when he was in Jerusalem, he was asked (rather sternly, we might assume) for an explanation of his behavior. And so, Peter described the scene: A sheet had come down from heaven with all sorts of animals, reptiles and birds of prey, and Peter said he was commanded, “Kill and eat.” Now this would have been completely against the purity laws of Peter’s Jewish upbringing, and so he told God, “No,” not once but three times. “Nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth,” he insisted to God, and then everything was pulled back up to heaven. Three men came and took him along with some other followers to meet Cornelius, and Cornelius and his household were baptized by Peter, because Peter saw that the same Holy Spirit that had fallen on the followers of Jesus had also fallen on Cornelius’ household. And so Peter asked the people who were questioning, him, “Who was I that I could hinder God?” And not having a good answer to that question, his interlocutors were silenced.
As you heard in the introduction to this reading The Book of Acts is really a continuation of Luke’s Gospel, written, it is believed, by the same person, around the year 80 or so. While Luke tells the story of Jesus Christ, Acts tells the story of the gospel’s emergence into the wider world, which is the gentile world. Now Peter is generally credited with working in the Jewish world, while Paul is the great apostle to the gentiles, and indeed in the Pauline Letters, there is some tension between Peter and Paul concerning the inclusion of the gentiles in the covenant. Peter insisted that the gentiles must first become Jews by being circumcised, but Paul said this was completely unnecessary. Yet here in Acts we see quite clearly that Peter is willing to embrace the gentiles, because he understands this to be God’s intention and work, not his. In so many words he said, “Look, this isn’t my idea; this is what God wants, and we can’t hinder God.”
Of course, we human beings have a long history of hindering God, putting roadblocks in front of the divine intention to love and accept all people. There is a lot of hindrance going on in the world today---look at wars in Ukraine and Syria and Yemen, just for starters, and the mess in Palestine and the 18% poverty rate of children in our country. Is this what we think God desires? And what about World War ll, which killed between 70 and 80 million people 50 to 55 million civilians, non-combatants. Who can hinder God? Oh, we do a pretty good job of trying to do just that. And it is not at all clear how God is responding to our attempts at hindrance. Does God have a strategy, which in our limited and imperfect understanding, we simply cannot see?
When we consider the world of Jesus and now Peter, we do know that the tension between Jews and gentiles was palpable. Jesus probably thought his ministry was solely to the house of Israel. Just a few weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, we had a story about Jesus initially refusing to heal the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman, because she was not part of the ingroup, the house of Israel. And when Jesus’ disciples first began their ministry after Jesus’ resurrection, they most likely thought it was solely to the Jews. But something radical happened. The movement expanded way beyond Israel, drawing in the Greek and Roman world until finally Christianity became a religion of the gentiles, not the Jews. But when Peter went to Cornelius’ home and baptized him and his household after seeing the Holy Spirit falling upon them, it is doubtful Peter understood this as a world wide phenomenon. He was seeing it in terms of the individuals he was encountering. And that is the way most of us see things.
It is very difficult and challenging to look at broad historical movements and discern what God is doing in them and through them. To see the hand of God in the scope of history requires TIME, the ability to look back and reflect. Then we can perhaps discern something of God’s activity, even as we also can see the ways human beings have worked to hinder God. And so, is it any wonder that we often move to individual experiences and stories to see what God is intending and doing---as in the story of Cornelius and his household. And this is how Jesus taught. He told stories about individual people and their struggles to help people see and understand what God is up to in the daily living of lives.
You have heard me mention my former church in New Haven, which boasted a stunningly beautiful hand built Fisk organ and a paid choir, many of them educated at Yale’s School of Music. Sometimes a choir member would give a concert at the church, and it was at such an event, I met this woman, a student at the School of Music as well as a friend of the young woman giving the concert. She was African American and had grown up in Alabama, where her parents were both teachers in an African American high school in a small town. “We were pretty poor,” she told me, “because teachers in schools where black students were taught, were poorly paid, but we were a lot better off than others. My grandmother lived with us, and in her younger years, she had done back breaking farm work. She had the voice of an angel, an operatic quality voice, every bit as talented, I think, as someone like Leontine Price.
My grandmother sang in church; she sang at home. She sang everywhere she could, and I learned so much from her, even as I believe my gift of voice came through her. She could have been a star, but in those days, she had no chance at an education. I used to feel so sorry for her, because of all her lost opportunities. But my grandmother was never resentful, never downtrodden, and as my education has taken off, she is so grateful and joyful for all the opportunities that I have. “You see,” she recently told me, “No one can hinder God. They can put roadblocks in God’s path. They can even slow God’s movement down, but God always works around those roadblocks, God always finds a way to move ahead. And as God moves, God takes us along---even if we sometimes kick and scream as we are being taken.”
I don’t think there is a better summary of today’s bible reading than that grandmother’s words. We rarely have the vision and the wisdom to see the arc of God’s movement in the march of time and history. But we can sometimes see God’s movement in small chunks and slices of life, in our own stories and in the stories of others, whose lives cross our paths. No one can hinder God, she said. God just keeps moving and takes us along, even in spite of ourselves.
“I’M GOING FISHING” OR GETTING BACK TO NORMAL
Preached by Sandra Olsen
May 2, 2022
John 21: 1-19
I’m going fishing: that is what Peter said, and the others agreed, “We’ll go with you.” On the one hand, it might sound like a rather mundane thing to do after all the horror of an execution and the excitement of a resurrection. Just last week they were all holed up in a room, terrified they might be arrested or worse, and what happened: Jesus showed up and said, “Peace be with you,” while blowing on them the Holy Spirit. After all that they go fishing? But, on the other hand, perhaps that is not such a crazy thing to do after all. Maybe what the disciples wanted more than anything else in the world was to get back to normal. But normal is not what they are about to get.
Remember what Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene, when she first recognized him outside the tomb? She wanted to hold on to him, but he told her, “No. I have not yet ascended to my Father.” There would be no holding on, no going back to once was. It was a new day, a new beginning, which would require change. But change is probably the last thing the disciples would have wanted. Normal, they wanted nothing more than to return to normality, and so should we really be surprised, that they decided to go fishing? They were about 80 miles or so from Jerusalem, on the Sea of Tiberius in their home territory of Galilee. Why wouldn’t they want to put some distance between themselves and Jerusalem, where their beloved leader had been tried and executed? So, home they went, probably hoping that home would return them to their normal lives. I can imagine that deep down they were hoping all this would just go away. Jesus can go to God, if that is what God and he want, but please, just leave us alone. We are too tired and too drained to do anything new.
I am sure that many of us have been reading or hearing about the Ukrainian refugees, and indeed, many of them say, “I just want to go home,” and some women and children have returned to Ukraine to be with their husbands and fathers. Others realize home is no more, but in their hearts and minds home is still there, the place that gives them a grounding and a hope that life can and will return someday to normal---even if not now. Without that hope of normalcy many would find coping almost impossible.
My son, Aaron, who lives in New York City, has a Ukrainian Jewish girlfriend, who immigrated to New York with her grandparents and parents, when she was 5 years old. You might recall that many Jews left Russia in the 80’s, because Jews in Russia and Russian held territories like Ukraine, were not treated well. Polina’s first language was Russian, and she still speaks it with her parents, since she is more fluent in Russian than in Ukrainian. I asked her once what it was like being an immigrant, and she said that because she was so young, she adjusted pretty quickly. She immediately began Kindergarten, and though she could not speak a word of English, she learned. She made friends, who were fascinated by her Russian, though some children accused her of making up sounds, because they could not believe this was a real language.
Her parents and grandparents struggled more, as we might expect, but they tried to make life normal by living in a Russian and a Ukrainian neighborhood in Queens, where they could buy traditional foods and speak Russian. But Polina said it didn’t take her long before she did not want to speak Russian, which at first upset her parents, until they realized that it would be easier for them to learn English, if they spoke it with Polina. They were enrolled in English classes, and though they would speak Russian to people in the neighborhood, they spoke English with Polina, until some years later when her parents felt their English was good enough so they could return to the normality of speaking their native tongue. You know, Polina told me, when your whole life becomes completely new, you need some things that feel like your old life, because that helps you to feel normal. And feeling normal gets you through.
And I think something like that happened to the disciples. For them fishing was the most normal thing in the world; that is what they had done before they met Jesus, and so after all the drama, fishing is what they wanted to return to. And look what happened: they came up empty, but that too, was normal. Some days the fishing was good; other days it was a big disappointment. And then there was Jesus, though they did not recognize him. He told them to put their nets in on the right side, and this time, they came up full, way beyond what was normal, which is a way of saying there will be no going back to what once was. Life would now be new and different.
Peter immediately jumped into the water, after putting his clothes on, which to me seems a bit strange, but that’s Peter, all heart, very little head. He is the one whom Jesus questions, “Do you love me more than these?” And Peter affirms his love for Jesus three times. This is a way of undoing Peter’s three time denial of Jesus in the courtyard after which the cock crowed and Peter wept out of shame. Jesus then commands Peter to feed and tend his sheep, which reminds us that love is more than a feeling. It is an action. Caring for others is the mark of true discipleship.
And then Jesus said something that was not very easy to hear. He told Peter that when he was young, he went and did what we want. It was your way. But now things have changed, and you too have changed. You will go places you would rather avoid, and you will deal with people you would prefer to ignore. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty. You will have enemies, and you will be tested in ways that now you cannot foresee. But this is what it means to be my disciple, and if you love me, you will feed and tend my sheep and deal with people and places you would prefer to avoid.
And this is what Peter did. The man who denied Jesus three times ends up witnessing to the risen Christ with his life. Peter was crucified in Rome upside down, because he did not believe he was worthy to be crucified upright as Jesus was. The year was around 64, during the reign of mad Emperor Nero. John’s gospel was written somewhere between the years 90 and 100, so at least three decades after Peter’s death, and there is much poetic license in John’s gospel. It is not all straight history but it was written, as the gospel attests, that “we might believe,” that we might see the risen Christ in our lives. John’s gospel reminds us that Jesus sometimes shows up in the most ordinary of moments, while fishing and cooking breakfast on the beach, which means that Jesus can do the same for us, showing up in the mundane. The question is: Do we notice
Preached by Sandra Olsen
May 2, 2022
John 21: 1-19
I’m going fishing: that is what Peter said, and the others agreed, “We’ll go with you.” On the one hand, it might sound like a rather mundane thing to do after all the horror of an execution and the excitement of a resurrection. Just last week they were all holed up in a room, terrified they might be arrested or worse, and what happened: Jesus showed up and said, “Peace be with you,” while blowing on them the Holy Spirit. After all that they go fishing? But, on the other hand, perhaps that is not such a crazy thing to do after all. Maybe what the disciples wanted more than anything else in the world was to get back to normal. But normal is not what they are about to get.
Remember what Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene, when she first recognized him outside the tomb? She wanted to hold on to him, but he told her, “No. I have not yet ascended to my Father.” There would be no holding on, no going back to once was. It was a new day, a new beginning, which would require change. But change is probably the last thing the disciples would have wanted. Normal, they wanted nothing more than to return to normality, and so should we really be surprised, that they decided to go fishing? They were about 80 miles or so from Jerusalem, on the Sea of Tiberius in their home territory of Galilee. Why wouldn’t they want to put some distance between themselves and Jerusalem, where their beloved leader had been tried and executed? So, home they went, probably hoping that home would return them to their normal lives. I can imagine that deep down they were hoping all this would just go away. Jesus can go to God, if that is what God and he want, but please, just leave us alone. We are too tired and too drained to do anything new.
I am sure that many of us have been reading or hearing about the Ukrainian refugees, and indeed, many of them say, “I just want to go home,” and some women and children have returned to Ukraine to be with their husbands and fathers. Others realize home is no more, but in their hearts and minds home is still there, the place that gives them a grounding and a hope that life can and will return someday to normal---even if not now. Without that hope of normalcy many would find coping almost impossible.
My son, Aaron, who lives in New York City, has a Ukrainian Jewish girlfriend, who immigrated to New York with her grandparents and parents, when she was 5 years old. You might recall that many Jews left Russia in the 80’s, because Jews in Russia and Russian held territories like Ukraine, were not treated well. Polina’s first language was Russian, and she still speaks it with her parents, since she is more fluent in Russian than in Ukrainian. I asked her once what it was like being an immigrant, and she said that because she was so young, she adjusted pretty quickly. She immediately began Kindergarten, and though she could not speak a word of English, she learned. She made friends, who were fascinated by her Russian, though some children accused her of making up sounds, because they could not believe this was a real language.
Her parents and grandparents struggled more, as we might expect, but they tried to make life normal by living in a Russian and a Ukrainian neighborhood in Queens, where they could buy traditional foods and speak Russian. But Polina said it didn’t take her long before she did not want to speak Russian, which at first upset her parents, until they realized that it would be easier for them to learn English, if they spoke it with Polina. They were enrolled in English classes, and though they would speak Russian to people in the neighborhood, they spoke English with Polina, until some years later when her parents felt their English was good enough so they could return to the normality of speaking their native tongue. You know, Polina told me, when your whole life becomes completely new, you need some things that feel like your old life, because that helps you to feel normal. And feeling normal gets you through.
And I think something like that happened to the disciples. For them fishing was the most normal thing in the world; that is what they had done before they met Jesus, and so after all the drama, fishing is what they wanted to return to. And look what happened: they came up empty, but that too, was normal. Some days the fishing was good; other days it was a big disappointment. And then there was Jesus, though they did not recognize him. He told them to put their nets in on the right side, and this time, they came up full, way beyond what was normal, which is a way of saying there will be no going back to what once was. Life would now be new and different.
Peter immediately jumped into the water, after putting his clothes on, which to me seems a bit strange, but that’s Peter, all heart, very little head. He is the one whom Jesus questions, “Do you love me more than these?” And Peter affirms his love for Jesus three times. This is a way of undoing Peter’s three time denial of Jesus in the courtyard after which the cock crowed and Peter wept out of shame. Jesus then commands Peter to feed and tend his sheep, which reminds us that love is more than a feeling. It is an action. Caring for others is the mark of true discipleship.
And then Jesus said something that was not very easy to hear. He told Peter that when he was young, he went and did what we want. It was your way. But now things have changed, and you too have changed. You will go places you would rather avoid, and you will deal with people you would prefer to ignore. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty. You will have enemies, and you will be tested in ways that now you cannot foresee. But this is what it means to be my disciple, and if you love me, you will feed and tend my sheep and deal with people and places you would prefer to avoid.
And this is what Peter did. The man who denied Jesus three times ends up witnessing to the risen Christ with his life. Peter was crucified in Rome upside down, because he did not believe he was worthy to be crucified upright as Jesus was. The year was around 64, during the reign of mad Emperor Nero. John’s gospel was written somewhere between the years 90 and 100, so at least three decades after Peter’s death, and there is much poetic license in John’s gospel. It is not all straight history but it was written, as the gospel attests, that “we might believe,” that we might see the risen Christ in our lives. John’s gospel reminds us that Jesus sometimes shows up in the most ordinary of moments, while fishing and cooking breakfast on the beach, which means that Jesus can do the same for us, showing up in the mundane. The question is: Do we notice
May 4, 2022
Dear Friends,
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so I thought I would write about five heroic moms in New England’s history. Perhaps the image of mothers in former times is that they were expected to be quiet and submissive to their husbands, or if unmarried to some other male adult, like a father, brother, or uncle. But, as the saying goes, life happens, and women often took upon themselves roles of courage and heroism.
We all know how Ben Franklin left Boston to begin a new life in Philadelphia, but his sister in law, Ann Smith Franklin, also left Boston for a new life. Ann was married to James Franklin, Ben’s brother, but the two brothers did not get along very well. James was jailed in Boston for printing scandalous libel, which translated as criticism of the Puritans. James and Ann took their printing press and moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where they began publishing the Rhode Island Almanack. James died, leaving Ann with five children to support. When her printing business failed to bring in adequate money, she petitioned the General Assembly for a contract, allowing her to print the colony’s laws. She was hired! Not only did she raise alone three of her five children to adulthood, but she also established The Newport Mercury, which was published until her son’s death in 1762. Ann died in 1763 and her obituary described her as a woman of “economy and industry, who supported herself and her family and brought up her children in a genteel manner.”
Prudence Cummings Wright was a mother of five children when her husband marched off to defend Boston after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. With so many men gone to war, Prudence, like many other women, was left alone to cope with raising children and ensuring the family had adequate resources to survive. When she learned that British spies were passing on information through her town of Pepperell, she organized a militia with other women from the town. They dressed in men’s clothing and used farm implements for weapons, since the men had taken the muskets. The women would wait in the night for the spies, and when the horses approached, Prudence confronted them, dragging them off their horses and taking them to the tavern for questioning. One such encounter yielded her brother in law, who remained a committed loyalist to the Crown. The punishment was usually banishment from the colony. At a Town Meeting on March 19, 1777, the town of Pepperell voted to pay Prudence and her band of women for their service.
Mary Patten was a pregnant woman when she faced a crew of mutinous men and then took command of the ship. Mary came from a wealthy Boston family and learned navigation and sailing from her husband, Joshua. In 1856 she (only 19 years old) and her husband were sailing from New York to San Francisco, when Joshua became very ill. Mary navigated the ship while trying to nurse her husband back to health. The crew did not trust Mary’s skill and they tried to mutiny, but Mary was able to convince them that she knew what she was doing. She commanded the ship all the way to San Francisco, where she became an instant celebrity. Sadly, Joshua only lived a few more months and Mary died at the tender age of 24.
Toy Len Goon was born in 1891 in China, Guangdong Province. She did back breaking farm work until the age of 10, when she began to work as a servant for a wealthy merchant family. She married Dogan Goon upon his return to China after he had been working in Portland, Maine. The two of them immigrated to Portland, but in 1917 Dogan was arrested as an illegal resident. To avoid deportation, he agreed to serve in World War l. After the war, Toy Len and her husband worked hard in the laundry business in Portland, which they managed to establish on their own. The couple eventually had eight children, and after Dogan died, leaving Toy with eight children to support from age 3 to 16, she managed the laundry business and made sure her children were all educated. In 1957 the local newspaper reported that her son Carroll was a doctor, Richard, a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert, a lawyer, Josephine, a mother, Arthur, a navy veteran, studying to be an electrical engineer, Doris, a court reporter, and Janet a college student. In 1952 Toy Len was named Maine Mother of the Year.
Margaret Rudkin was a wealthy housewife, who lived in a Tudor mansion with her three sons and husband in Fairfield, CT. But when the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband suffered an accident, she had to find a way to make a living. She began by selling apples and turkeys, but then turned to baking stone whole wheat bread. In August, 1937 she sold her first batch of Pepperidge Farm bread to her local grocery store. Eventually she moved her bakery from her kitchen into her garage and started baking white bread using unbleached flower. A specialty food store in New York ordered 35 loaves, and very soon more stores heard about the bread. Reader’s Digest did a story on her bread, and finally in 1940 Margaret moved her bakery to Norwalk, CT. She sold the bakery to Campbell Soup and became that company’s first female director.
So, as you can see from these short sketches, New England mothers have been accomplishing some pretty amazing feats throughout history. There is a well known saying about necessity being the mother of invention, and in these particular lives, we certainly see what women can do, when faced with challenges. As we celebrate mothers this Sunday and give thanks for the mothers in our lives, let us also remember the creativity and hard work of many mothers, who have gone before us. In so many ways, we stand on the shoulders of their achievements.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so I thought I would write about five heroic moms in New England’s history. Perhaps the image of mothers in former times is that they were expected to be quiet and submissive to their husbands, or if unmarried to some other male adult, like a father, brother, or uncle. But, as the saying goes, life happens, and women often took upon themselves roles of courage and heroism.
We all know how Ben Franklin left Boston to begin a new life in Philadelphia, but his sister in law, Ann Smith Franklin, also left Boston for a new life. Ann was married to James Franklin, Ben’s brother, but the two brothers did not get along very well. James was jailed in Boston for printing scandalous libel, which translated as criticism of the Puritans. James and Ann took their printing press and moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where they began publishing the Rhode Island Almanack. James died, leaving Ann with five children to support. When her printing business failed to bring in adequate money, she petitioned the General Assembly for a contract, allowing her to print the colony’s laws. She was hired! Not only did she raise alone three of her five children to adulthood, but she also established The Newport Mercury, which was published until her son’s death in 1762. Ann died in 1763 and her obituary described her as a woman of “economy and industry, who supported herself and her family and brought up her children in a genteel manner.”
Prudence Cummings Wright was a mother of five children when her husband marched off to defend Boston after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. With so many men gone to war, Prudence, like many other women, was left alone to cope with raising children and ensuring the family had adequate resources to survive. When she learned that British spies were passing on information through her town of Pepperell, she organized a militia with other women from the town. They dressed in men’s clothing and used farm implements for weapons, since the men had taken the muskets. The women would wait in the night for the spies, and when the horses approached, Prudence confronted them, dragging them off their horses and taking them to the tavern for questioning. One such encounter yielded her brother in law, who remained a committed loyalist to the Crown. The punishment was usually banishment from the colony. At a Town Meeting on March 19, 1777, the town of Pepperell voted to pay Prudence and her band of women for their service.
Mary Patten was a pregnant woman when she faced a crew of mutinous men and then took command of the ship. Mary came from a wealthy Boston family and learned navigation and sailing from her husband, Joshua. In 1856 she (only 19 years old) and her husband were sailing from New York to San Francisco, when Joshua became very ill. Mary navigated the ship while trying to nurse her husband back to health. The crew did not trust Mary’s skill and they tried to mutiny, but Mary was able to convince them that she knew what she was doing. She commanded the ship all the way to San Francisco, where she became an instant celebrity. Sadly, Joshua only lived a few more months and Mary died at the tender age of 24.
Toy Len Goon was born in 1891 in China, Guangdong Province. She did back breaking farm work until the age of 10, when she began to work as a servant for a wealthy merchant family. She married Dogan Goon upon his return to China after he had been working in Portland, Maine. The two of them immigrated to Portland, but in 1917 Dogan was arrested as an illegal resident. To avoid deportation, he agreed to serve in World War l. After the war, Toy Len and her husband worked hard in the laundry business in Portland, which they managed to establish on their own. The couple eventually had eight children, and after Dogan died, leaving Toy with eight children to support from age 3 to 16, she managed the laundry business and made sure her children were all educated. In 1957 the local newspaper reported that her son Carroll was a doctor, Richard, a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert, a lawyer, Josephine, a mother, Arthur, a navy veteran, studying to be an electrical engineer, Doris, a court reporter, and Janet a college student. In 1952 Toy Len was named Maine Mother of the Year.
Margaret Rudkin was a wealthy housewife, who lived in a Tudor mansion with her three sons and husband in Fairfield, CT. But when the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband suffered an accident, she had to find a way to make a living. She began by selling apples and turkeys, but then turned to baking stone whole wheat bread. In August, 1937 she sold her first batch of Pepperidge Farm bread to her local grocery store. Eventually she moved her bakery from her kitchen into her garage and started baking white bread using unbleached flower. A specialty food store in New York ordered 35 loaves, and very soon more stores heard about the bread. Reader’s Digest did a story on her bread, and finally in 1940 Margaret moved her bakery to Norwalk, CT. She sold the bakery to Campbell Soup and became that company’s first female director.
So, as you can see from these short sketches, New England mothers have been accomplishing some pretty amazing feats throughout history. There is a well known saying about necessity being the mother of invention, and in these particular lives, we certainly see what women can do, when faced with challenges. As we celebrate mothers this Sunday and give thanks for the mothers in our lives, let us also remember the creativity and hard work of many mothers, who have gone before us. In so many ways, we stand on the shoulders of their achievements.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Faith and Doubt
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen at
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 24, 2022
On April 9, 1945, which was the Sunday after Easter, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was conducting a worship service for a small group of men being held in the concentration camp at Flossenburg, Germany. He had been imprisoned for two years, and just a few days before, he had been transported to this new location. Bonhoeffer read the scriptures and preached a sermon, directly related to the meaning of their imprisonment and the hope that God would use it for a new beginning. Suddenly the door flung open. “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” Everyone, including Bonhoeffer, knew exactly what this meant. Drawing one of his friends aside, he said, “This is the end, but for me, the beginning of new life.”
The only account of his death came from the prison doctor, who said that after the verdict was read, Bonhoeffer kneeled on the floor and prayed fervently. “I was deeply moved by the way this man prayed, so devout and certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution he once again said a short prayer, climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. In the almost 50 years of my service as a doctor, I have never seen anyone approach death so submissive to God.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is certainly one of the 20th century’s heroes of the Christian faith. Having grown up in an aristocratic and highly educated German family, he shocked his parents when he told them he was interested in studying theology. The family, after all, was not at all religious. His father was a famous psychiatrist and professor; his brothers studied law and science, but his parents believed strongly that their children should follow their interests, and so, even though they had strong misgivings about the church, they encouraged their son. He was an outstanding student, wrote two doctoral dissertations, and undoubtedly would have had a brilliant academic career---had the war not come.
Germany had a state church, and so when Hitler came to power, all Lutheran clergy, whose paychecks were signed by the state, were required to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Many, of course, did so willingly, while others signed with great misgivings, and still others would not sign at all. Bonhoeffer not only refused to sign, but he also helped to establish a resistance seminary at which he taught until it was closed by the Gestapo in 1937. Considering the taking of this oath to be an act of heresy, he said there is only one head of the church and that is Jesus Christ. There can be no pledge of absolute loyalty to anyone or anything except Christ. As a committed pacifist, he argued that the duty of the church is to stand with the victims, to work and pray for peace, and to love the neighbor as well as the enemy.
By 1941 Bonhoeffer had joined the anti-Nazi movement through the German military intelligence, which was seeking to overthrow Hitler. At first, he did no more than bring messages back and forth between Germany and England. But finally, all participants in the plot---even those like Bonhoeffer, whose role was not directly violent---were asked to agree that if the opportunity should come, they would be willing to end Hitler’s life. Now this constituted a terrible religious crisis for Bonhoeffer, who did not believe God ever commanded murder or assassination, not even the murder of a murderer. He despised what Hitler represented, but he also believed that Hitler was loved by God just as much as he was. He did not know what he should do, and all his prayers brought him no final answer.
On one cold afternoon in 1943 the conspirators met in a tiny room. All stood in a circle, while a gun was passed around, and if you could accept the gun, you were in the plot. If not, you were out. “There is no shame here,” one of the men said. “There are religious men among us whose conscience may not permit their participation in assassination.” Bonhoeffer stood in the circle and watched as the gun made its way toward him. One man took it; then the next and the next; someone stepped out, and the gun traveled to the next man. Soon it will come to me, Bonhoeffer thought, and still, I do not know what I will do, what I must do, what it is God would have me do. When the gun came to him, he put out his hand and took it. “God,” he prayed, “if this is your will, I need your mercy. If this is not your will, I need your mercy. Every moment of my life, I need your mercy.”
Consider that prayer and what it means for us in the context of our lives today as well as in the context of our Gospel reading. We live in an age, where many people claim that certitude is strength, while ambiguity and uncertainty are dismissed as weakness and confusion. The common assumption is that uncertainty and ambiguity lead to inaction and confusion, and so many people, across our globe, are drawn to religions and politics, which offer certainty, the knowing assurance of God’s will. Consider again Bonhoeffer’s words: “If this is your will, I need your mercy; if this is not your will, I need your mercy. Every moment of my life, I need your mercy.”
It was not the certainty of knowing God’s will, which led Bonhoeffer to act, for he realized that neither he nor any other human being could claim that certainty for his or her own. Rather, it was the conviction of the universal need for mercy, which finally gave him the courage to act, to take upon himself the responsibility for his decision. He picked up the gun, not seeking God’s approval, but acknowledging his need for mercy.
He had been part of the active resistance for four years, having been drawn in by his brother in law, who was a lawyer and took a stand against the Nazis based on his strong commitment to justice. His brother in law, in an attempt to get him to join the resistance, actually showed him pictures of Nazi atrocities. Bonhoeffer was horrified, but he still struggled, because his resistance to the Nazis and the German state was not so much about justice as it was about faithfulness. Faithfulness to Jesus Christ meant that no Christian could claim final loyalty to Hitler. But what form the resistance should take was never completely settled in his mind. He acted and decided without complete assurance that his actions and decisions conformed to God’s will. He lived with doubt, and he never expected faith to remove all doubt.
And this is why Thomas is so important. His story is in the gospel for a reason, reminding us how varied human personalities are and how those varieties bring different perspectives to life’s sundry situations. Thomas was no pushover; he had questions. He wanted to see for himself. That was the kind of person he was. That was how his heart and mind worked. While he did receive the gift of certainty---he saw and was invited to touch--- it is obvious that those who will follow will be unable to receive the same assurance he did. We cannot see and touch. Doubt for many of us will have its place, sometimes humbling us as we are reminded that we do not know as much as we think we know.
Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, defied Rome, declaring, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant.” He also said, “It is neither right nor prudent to go against conscience.” Luther did not believe that conscience was infallible any more than Bonhoeffer thought it was, but they both believed it was a strong guide, as imperfect as it is. God can and does speak through conscience, but we cannot hear and understand infallibly. Bonhoeffer’s conscience was committed to pacifism, and yet he acted against it. But consider the possibility that living with a clean conscience may not be the ultimate religious goal. Bonhoeffer’s life and death remind us that God calls us to act not with certainty but with faith—not faith in the rightness of our actions and the purity of our conscience, but faith in the love and mercy of God. If that is where our faith is placed, we can live with doubt; we can live without absolute certainty. And that is faith.
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen at
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 24, 2022
On April 9, 1945, which was the Sunday after Easter, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was conducting a worship service for a small group of men being held in the concentration camp at Flossenburg, Germany. He had been imprisoned for two years, and just a few days before, he had been transported to this new location. Bonhoeffer read the scriptures and preached a sermon, directly related to the meaning of their imprisonment and the hope that God would use it for a new beginning. Suddenly the door flung open. “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” Everyone, including Bonhoeffer, knew exactly what this meant. Drawing one of his friends aside, he said, “This is the end, but for me, the beginning of new life.”
The only account of his death came from the prison doctor, who said that after the verdict was read, Bonhoeffer kneeled on the floor and prayed fervently. “I was deeply moved by the way this man prayed, so devout and certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution he once again said a short prayer, climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. In the almost 50 years of my service as a doctor, I have never seen anyone approach death so submissive to God.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is certainly one of the 20th century’s heroes of the Christian faith. Having grown up in an aristocratic and highly educated German family, he shocked his parents when he told them he was interested in studying theology. The family, after all, was not at all religious. His father was a famous psychiatrist and professor; his brothers studied law and science, but his parents believed strongly that their children should follow their interests, and so, even though they had strong misgivings about the church, they encouraged their son. He was an outstanding student, wrote two doctoral dissertations, and undoubtedly would have had a brilliant academic career---had the war not come.
Germany had a state church, and so when Hitler came to power, all Lutheran clergy, whose paychecks were signed by the state, were required to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Many, of course, did so willingly, while others signed with great misgivings, and still others would not sign at all. Bonhoeffer not only refused to sign, but he also helped to establish a resistance seminary at which he taught until it was closed by the Gestapo in 1937. Considering the taking of this oath to be an act of heresy, he said there is only one head of the church and that is Jesus Christ. There can be no pledge of absolute loyalty to anyone or anything except Christ. As a committed pacifist, he argued that the duty of the church is to stand with the victims, to work and pray for peace, and to love the neighbor as well as the enemy.
By 1941 Bonhoeffer had joined the anti-Nazi movement through the German military intelligence, which was seeking to overthrow Hitler. At first, he did no more than bring messages back and forth between Germany and England. But finally, all participants in the plot---even those like Bonhoeffer, whose role was not directly violent---were asked to agree that if the opportunity should come, they would be willing to end Hitler’s life. Now this constituted a terrible religious crisis for Bonhoeffer, who did not believe God ever commanded murder or assassination, not even the murder of a murderer. He despised what Hitler represented, but he also believed that Hitler was loved by God just as much as he was. He did not know what he should do, and all his prayers brought him no final answer.
On one cold afternoon in 1943 the conspirators met in a tiny room. All stood in a circle, while a gun was passed around, and if you could accept the gun, you were in the plot. If not, you were out. “There is no shame here,” one of the men said. “There are religious men among us whose conscience may not permit their participation in assassination.” Bonhoeffer stood in the circle and watched as the gun made its way toward him. One man took it; then the next and the next; someone stepped out, and the gun traveled to the next man. Soon it will come to me, Bonhoeffer thought, and still, I do not know what I will do, what I must do, what it is God would have me do. When the gun came to him, he put out his hand and took it. “God,” he prayed, “if this is your will, I need your mercy. If this is not your will, I need your mercy. Every moment of my life, I need your mercy.”
Consider that prayer and what it means for us in the context of our lives today as well as in the context of our Gospel reading. We live in an age, where many people claim that certitude is strength, while ambiguity and uncertainty are dismissed as weakness and confusion. The common assumption is that uncertainty and ambiguity lead to inaction and confusion, and so many people, across our globe, are drawn to religions and politics, which offer certainty, the knowing assurance of God’s will. Consider again Bonhoeffer’s words: “If this is your will, I need your mercy; if this is not your will, I need your mercy. Every moment of my life, I need your mercy.”
It was not the certainty of knowing God’s will, which led Bonhoeffer to act, for he realized that neither he nor any other human being could claim that certainty for his or her own. Rather, it was the conviction of the universal need for mercy, which finally gave him the courage to act, to take upon himself the responsibility for his decision. He picked up the gun, not seeking God’s approval, but acknowledging his need for mercy.
He had been part of the active resistance for four years, having been drawn in by his brother in law, who was a lawyer and took a stand against the Nazis based on his strong commitment to justice. His brother in law, in an attempt to get him to join the resistance, actually showed him pictures of Nazi atrocities. Bonhoeffer was horrified, but he still struggled, because his resistance to the Nazis and the German state was not so much about justice as it was about faithfulness. Faithfulness to Jesus Christ meant that no Christian could claim final loyalty to Hitler. But what form the resistance should take was never completely settled in his mind. He acted and decided without complete assurance that his actions and decisions conformed to God’s will. He lived with doubt, and he never expected faith to remove all doubt.
And this is why Thomas is so important. His story is in the gospel for a reason, reminding us how varied human personalities are and how those varieties bring different perspectives to life’s sundry situations. Thomas was no pushover; he had questions. He wanted to see for himself. That was the kind of person he was. That was how his heart and mind worked. While he did receive the gift of certainty---he saw and was invited to touch--- it is obvious that those who will follow will be unable to receive the same assurance he did. We cannot see and touch. Doubt for many of us will have its place, sometimes humbling us as we are reminded that we do not know as much as we think we know.
Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, defied Rome, declaring, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant.” He also said, “It is neither right nor prudent to go against conscience.” Luther did not believe that conscience was infallible any more than Bonhoeffer thought it was, but they both believed it was a strong guide, as imperfect as it is. God can and does speak through conscience, but we cannot hear and understand infallibly. Bonhoeffer’s conscience was committed to pacifism, and yet he acted against it. But consider the possibility that living with a clean conscience may not be the ultimate religious goal. Bonhoeffer’s life and death remind us that God calls us to act not with certainty but with faith—not faith in the rightness of our actions and the purity of our conscience, but faith in the love and mercy of God. If that is where our faith is placed, we can live with doubt; we can live without absolute certainty. And that is faith.
April 26, 2022
Dear Friends,
About five years ago or so, my husband and I spent a week in Padua, Italy. Padua is famous for the Arena Chapel, which boasts of Giotto’s famous frescoes on the church walls. It is also home to a university, founded in 1222 by students and faculty from Bologna, who wanted a place where thought and ideas could be freely debated. It the 16th and 17th centuries it became a workshop of ideas, where such giants as Copernicus and Galileo taught. Galileo said the earth was NOT the center of the universe, a teaching he was forced to recant by the Church on pain of death, but he realized that eventually truth would win out, which it did. Padua also became a center for medical study, though once again the Church tried to prevent autopsies, though this method was the preferred way people could understand the workings of the human body. Autopsies were performed on tables whose tops could be overturned and the body deposited below as soon as a signal was given that a Church official was about to make an entrance!
I found myself thinking about Padua lately, when I came across an article about the discovery of “other worlds.” We know that our universe is full of other worlds, orbiting their own suns. While men like Galileo and Copernicus assumed this to be the case, now we know, because of what telescopes have allowed us to see. About 30 years ago astronomers began to detect signs of worlds beyond our own solar system, and as the decades have marched on and telescopes have become more sophisticated, the number of other worlds we know about has expanded. Now, according to NASA the current number is 5,005, but still counting! Exoplanets, as they are called, can be much smaller than Mercury or double the size of Jupiter. They can be cold or hot, rocky, or gaseous. There are planets close to our sun, around 4 light years away, and others that are thousands of light years away. And now astronomers confidently claim that our Milky Way has more planets than stars!
But all this knowledge and research has not yielded life on another planet. We human beings so far have not found any company! There have been planets discovered around the size of Earth with conditions that should be right for water, but so far no evidence of life. It is possible, astronomers claim, that another 5000 worlds could be discovered, but that does not mean that life would be there. We may remain all alone.
Astronomers are both delighted and confused by these exoplanets. There is an abundance of Jupiter like planets---giant and incredibly hot, circling their stars in a matter of days. This fact has confused astronomers, who, for the longest time had a theory of planet formation, which could not account for such huge gaseous planets, sidling up to their suns. Theories must eventually give way to truth, which is exactly what Galileo counted on. There are seven planets around a star named TRAPPIST-1 about 40 light years away from our Earth. But their sun is only the size of Jupiter, and a year on the planet that is the farthest out, only lasts 20 days. Three of these planets could possibly have life, and it is hoped that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to detect certain molecules that could suggest life.
But so far scientists are concluding that an Earth-like planet is very rare. No comparable world with a chemically rich atmosphere and temperatures allowing water to stick around rather than boiling way has yet been discovered. Even if 20,000 planets are discovered, there is no guarantee that life will be there. The question is: Is life in the universe common or not? So far the answer seems to be NOT
Our Psalms are filled with praises to a God, who is celebrated as the author of creation. And the Book of Job, which is an argument with God about human suffering, also celebrates the work of a creative God whom human beings can neither control nor understand. And the more we learn about this incredible creation, the more awestruck we can become. As the Psalms sing, “Oh, how majestic are the works of God.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
About five years ago or so, my husband and I spent a week in Padua, Italy. Padua is famous for the Arena Chapel, which boasts of Giotto’s famous frescoes on the church walls. It is also home to a university, founded in 1222 by students and faculty from Bologna, who wanted a place where thought and ideas could be freely debated. It the 16th and 17th centuries it became a workshop of ideas, where such giants as Copernicus and Galileo taught. Galileo said the earth was NOT the center of the universe, a teaching he was forced to recant by the Church on pain of death, but he realized that eventually truth would win out, which it did. Padua also became a center for medical study, though once again the Church tried to prevent autopsies, though this method was the preferred way people could understand the workings of the human body. Autopsies were performed on tables whose tops could be overturned and the body deposited below as soon as a signal was given that a Church official was about to make an entrance!
I found myself thinking about Padua lately, when I came across an article about the discovery of “other worlds.” We know that our universe is full of other worlds, orbiting their own suns. While men like Galileo and Copernicus assumed this to be the case, now we know, because of what telescopes have allowed us to see. About 30 years ago astronomers began to detect signs of worlds beyond our own solar system, and as the decades have marched on and telescopes have become more sophisticated, the number of other worlds we know about has expanded. Now, according to NASA the current number is 5,005, but still counting! Exoplanets, as they are called, can be much smaller than Mercury or double the size of Jupiter. They can be cold or hot, rocky, or gaseous. There are planets close to our sun, around 4 light years away, and others that are thousands of light years away. And now astronomers confidently claim that our Milky Way has more planets than stars!
But all this knowledge and research has not yielded life on another planet. We human beings so far have not found any company! There have been planets discovered around the size of Earth with conditions that should be right for water, but so far no evidence of life. It is possible, astronomers claim, that another 5000 worlds could be discovered, but that does not mean that life would be there. We may remain all alone.
Astronomers are both delighted and confused by these exoplanets. There is an abundance of Jupiter like planets---giant and incredibly hot, circling their stars in a matter of days. This fact has confused astronomers, who, for the longest time had a theory of planet formation, which could not account for such huge gaseous planets, sidling up to their suns. Theories must eventually give way to truth, which is exactly what Galileo counted on. There are seven planets around a star named TRAPPIST-1 about 40 light years away from our Earth. But their sun is only the size of Jupiter, and a year on the planet that is the farthest out, only lasts 20 days. Three of these planets could possibly have life, and it is hoped that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to detect certain molecules that could suggest life.
But so far scientists are concluding that an Earth-like planet is very rare. No comparable world with a chemically rich atmosphere and temperatures allowing water to stick around rather than boiling way has yet been discovered. Even if 20,000 planets are discovered, there is no guarantee that life will be there. The question is: Is life in the universe common or not? So far the answer seems to be NOT
Our Psalms are filled with praises to a God, who is celebrated as the author of creation. And the Book of Job, which is an argument with God about human suffering, also celebrates the work of a creative God whom human beings can neither control nor understand. And the more we learn about this incredible creation, the more awestruck we can become. As the Psalms sing, “Oh, how majestic are the works of God.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
April 19, 2022
Dear Friends,
My reflection letter this week is not my own words. Instead, I am enclosing an opinion piece from the Washington Post by Michael Gerson. I found it very, very moving, and I hope it moves you as well, while challenging you to think and move more deeply into the mystery of faith, which always must confront the issue of evil.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
OPINION PIECE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 18, 2022
BY: MICHAEL GERSON
This is a horrible and sacred story I hesitate to use. But it is being reenacted in our time.
In “Night,” Elie Wiesel describes the execution by hanging of two Jewish men and a boy, conducted before the entire camp at Auschwitz. “The men died quickly,” Wiesel wrote, “but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ a man behind me asked. As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, ‘Where is God now?’ and I heard a voice within me answer, ‘Here he is — he is hanging here on this gallows.”
Think of the last few weeks in Ukraine — the children killed at a train station in Kramatorsk, the streets of Bucha scattered with tortured corpses, the gathered cries of Mariupol. The world seems bound on some hideous wheel, destined to repeat its worst crimes. It wasn’t enough to stain European history with the Holocaust and the gulags. Now, there are new leaders pursuing their cause through human sacrifice.
For many, I suspect, this mass of suffering overshadowed their Passover, Ramadan or Easter celebrations. We consume the media reports of terrible events. We long for unlikely justice. But none of this touches the human need for explanation amid tragedy. Where is God?
The boy on the gallows is not a Christian story. But it has Christian resonance. It is not only that God is on the side of the victim, though he surely is. It is that the founder of this faith was also the victim of a slow execution. And if God was somehow uniquely present in this person, it was God who subjected himself to a full dose of human malice.
The cross measured the depth of the divine descent. The faithless friends. The bloody sweat. The thorny crown. The nails. The beam. The cry of thirst. The call upon a vanished God: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the strangest portion of an unlikely story: The godforsaken Christ. The godforsaken God.
The Christian faith does not set out a philosophy explaining the problem of evil. It responds, instead, with a person. It answers an experience of pain with an experience of pain. It offers the fellowship of suffering. In the process, it gives permission for grief, outrage, even despair. Yet it also raises the prospect of a dramatic reversal. A hope on the far side of anguish. A homecoming on the far side of death. An assurance that the violent will not inherit the earth.
We see the same struggles not only in world historic events but also in the course of nearly every life. In the death of a child from a lingering disease, in a cruel cancer diagnosis, in the self-crucifixion of depression. Every minute is someone’s last minute. Even the bravest and loveliest decay to dust.
There are immoral responses to this tragic state of affairs: to live in smug indifference, or to feed endlessly on our own bitterness. Yet there are also moral reactions. We can live in revolt against a cruel and meaningless world, adopting the existentialists’ hopeless heroism and embracing goodness and justice in a doomed enterprise. Or we can live in the hope that there is a deeper meaning, even if we do not fully comprehend it.
This kind of faith — shared by many faiths — is not an opiate or a self-help manual. It is not a call to look on the bright side. It is certainly not the sanctification of our political predispositions. Rather, it calls the bluff of our deepest beliefs. If we want mercy, we should be merciful. If we demand justice, we must be just. If we hate murder, we should examine our own consuming rage. If we seek deliverance, we should be the source of someone else’s deliverance.
This holds true on the largest matters of state action. Our friends in Ukraine give their lives willingly. Russian forces take lives randomly, show no mercy or remorse, and plan to expand the scope and scale of their murder. There has seldom been a clearer moral case for collective action to deliver a nation-state from evil. Failure would be a source of danger and of shame. A similar moral framework applies on a smaller scale. Humans live in a democracy of vulnerability. We are alike in our susceptibility to pain and loss. We are equal in our capacity for hope and heroism.
This is the message of the cross and the empty tomb. God is on the side of the boy on the gallows and the man on the cross. Even amid horror, some vital purpose is making itself known. Against all my doubts, I choose to believe in a God with scars.
Dear Friends,
My reflection letter this week is not my own words. Instead, I am enclosing an opinion piece from the Washington Post by Michael Gerson. I found it very, very moving, and I hope it moves you as well, while challenging you to think and move more deeply into the mystery of faith, which always must confront the issue of evil.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
OPINION PIECE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 18, 2022
BY: MICHAEL GERSON
This is a horrible and sacred story I hesitate to use. But it is being reenacted in our time.
In “Night,” Elie Wiesel describes the execution by hanging of two Jewish men and a boy, conducted before the entire camp at Auschwitz. “The men died quickly,” Wiesel wrote, “but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ a man behind me asked. As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, ‘Where is God now?’ and I heard a voice within me answer, ‘Here he is — he is hanging here on this gallows.”
Think of the last few weeks in Ukraine — the children killed at a train station in Kramatorsk, the streets of Bucha scattered with tortured corpses, the gathered cries of Mariupol. The world seems bound on some hideous wheel, destined to repeat its worst crimes. It wasn’t enough to stain European history with the Holocaust and the gulags. Now, there are new leaders pursuing their cause through human sacrifice.
For many, I suspect, this mass of suffering overshadowed their Passover, Ramadan or Easter celebrations. We consume the media reports of terrible events. We long for unlikely justice. But none of this touches the human need for explanation amid tragedy. Where is God?
The boy on the gallows is not a Christian story. But it has Christian resonance. It is not only that God is on the side of the victim, though he surely is. It is that the founder of this faith was also the victim of a slow execution. And if God was somehow uniquely present in this person, it was God who subjected himself to a full dose of human malice.
The cross measured the depth of the divine descent. The faithless friends. The bloody sweat. The thorny crown. The nails. The beam. The cry of thirst. The call upon a vanished God: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the strangest portion of an unlikely story: The godforsaken Christ. The godforsaken God.
The Christian faith does not set out a philosophy explaining the problem of evil. It responds, instead, with a person. It answers an experience of pain with an experience of pain. It offers the fellowship of suffering. In the process, it gives permission for grief, outrage, even despair. Yet it also raises the prospect of a dramatic reversal. A hope on the far side of anguish. A homecoming on the far side of death. An assurance that the violent will not inherit the earth.
We see the same struggles not only in world historic events but also in the course of nearly every life. In the death of a child from a lingering disease, in a cruel cancer diagnosis, in the self-crucifixion of depression. Every minute is someone’s last minute. Even the bravest and loveliest decay to dust.
There are immoral responses to this tragic state of affairs: to live in smug indifference, or to feed endlessly on our own bitterness. Yet there are also moral reactions. We can live in revolt against a cruel and meaningless world, adopting the existentialists’ hopeless heroism and embracing goodness and justice in a doomed enterprise. Or we can live in the hope that there is a deeper meaning, even if we do not fully comprehend it.
This kind of faith — shared by many faiths — is not an opiate or a self-help manual. It is not a call to look on the bright side. It is certainly not the sanctification of our political predispositions. Rather, it calls the bluff of our deepest beliefs. If we want mercy, we should be merciful. If we demand justice, we must be just. If we hate murder, we should examine our own consuming rage. If we seek deliverance, we should be the source of someone else’s deliverance.
This holds true on the largest matters of state action. Our friends in Ukraine give their lives willingly. Russian forces take lives randomly, show no mercy or remorse, and plan to expand the scope and scale of their murder. There has seldom been a clearer moral case for collective action to deliver a nation-state from evil. Failure would be a source of danger and of shame. A similar moral framework applies on a smaller scale. Humans live in a democracy of vulnerability. We are alike in our susceptibility to pain and loss. We are equal in our capacity for hope and heroism.
This is the message of the cross and the empty tomb. God is on the side of the boy on the gallows and the man on the cross. Even amid horror, some vital purpose is making itself known. Against all my doubts, I choose to believe in a God with scars.
THE PART ABOUT THE ANGEL?
Preached by Sandra Olsen,
Maundy Thursday, April 14, 2022
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
I always hated it when my beeper went off because it usually signified a crisis. And so, when I heard my beeper on Maundy Thursday of 1990, my heart leapt to my throat. I called a number I did not recognize, which I hoped was a good sign. The message was from a doctor from the high risk pregnancy unit, who wanted to see me IMMEDIATELY. “Look,” he said, I understand that you have been talking to Linda so and so, an Aids patient. She’s dying and she knows it, and I want to do an immediate C section, but she says no go. If I don’t get that baby out now, not only will we lose the mother, but also the baby. Can’t you talk some sense into her?
Sense: a rather strange one to use for someone who had lived the last 10 years of her life as a street walker, and now at 26 years of age, was going to die. What did sense have to do with it? Linda had grown up in an abusive home; at fourteen she ran away from a father who had impregnated her, and then beat her to a bloody pulp for getting pregnant. Her life was a series of wrecks no human being should ever have to endure, let alone recover from. Linda did not recover, and eventually she came down with Aids.
She was not an easy person to be with. I did not like her any more than she liked me. As far as she was concerned, I was next to useless, BUT according to her, not as useless as God. At least, she said to me one day, you show up now and then, which is more than God does.
The ironic thing about Linda was that as much as she denied God, she couldn’t get God out of her life. Sometimes she cursed God; and other days she just lamented that God never helped her. According to Linda not only did God abandon her, but He also abandoned her three kids, all of whom were in foster care. The social worker told me that two of the children suffered from serious neurological damage due to her crack addiction and the oldest child was blind, probably due to fetal alcohol syndrome. I may be guilty, Linda confessed, but my kids didn’t do a thing but be born. Got no use for a God who visits the sins of the parents on the children. Where’s the justice in that? I told her I didn’t think it had anything to do with justice. It is just the way things are. God does not stop the blood from flowing if you slice your hand open with a knife, I said. “So why do you believe in God, if God can’t help?” she wanted to know. Because I’ve got no place else to go, I answered.
One of the nurses told me that Linda liked that answer, though of course she would never have told me that. I guess she preferred God being a place rather than a person. Since practically everyone in her life had used or abused her, and since she spent a good part of her life homeless, place came to mean more to her than person. Well as you can see, Linda was not stupid. She was smart, smart enough to figure out that as a pregnant Aids patient, she was entitled to a lot better care than if she were simply an Aids afflicted street walker. For the first time in a few years, she actually had a place to live, a place she called home. At least I’m not going to die homeless, she told the social worker.
Linda was a lightning rod of controversy. One of her doctors, the one who beeped me, wanted to do immediate surgery on a baby of 32 weeks gestation---40 weeks is full term. Linda was going down hill fast, and the baby was showing serious signs of distress. Another doctor thought that the primary responsibility was to the mother not to the baby. We have to keep her alive as long as we can, he insisted. Her baby is not the primary patient. And so, the two argued, and argued, and as things became even more critical, the two doctors argued even more.
Sometime in mid afternoon on Maundy Thursday, Linda asked to see me. She pulled a Bible out from under the bed sheets. Do you know the part about Jesus, when he prays that he won’t have to die? You mean the Garden of Gethsemane? I said. It’s right before he goes to the cross, I said. She looked up at me and asked, “What about the part with the angel?” The angel? “Yeh, the part when the angel comes and helps Jesus.” In that moment I had no recollection of any angel. Linda handed me a Bible and said, “Could you find the angel part for me?” I heard someone read it on the radio this morning, but I don’t know where it is. You must know. I need the part where the angel helps Jesus.” Desperation was choking her voice. Quickly flipping to the Gethsemane scenes in Matthew and Mark, I confirmed to myself that there was no angel there. And then I turned to Luke. Ah yes, here it is. Read it, she commanded, the part where the angel comes. “Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, Father if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will, but yours be done. Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”
I stopped reading, and the whole world seemed to stop with me. Linda broke the silence: Do you believe that, the part about the angel helping him? Fixing her gaze on me, she did not give me much time to form either my thoughts or my words. I had been educated to be suspicious of angels, those winged creatures, who speak God’s truth and bring God’s help. My education had been a journey into critical biblical scholarship, which tells us that it is probable that the angel was not part of Luke’s original Gospel, since important early manuscripts lack those sentences. Besides, I had been taught to reason, and angels were outside the realm of reason. Nonetheless, I looked Linda straight in the eye, and with no audible or visible hesitation, answered, “Yes, I believe.” “Oh,” she said. “I thought that maybe you were the kind of person who doesn’t believe in angels.”
That was the last time I ever spoke with Linda. That night she consented to undergo an emergency C-section from which she never regained consciousness. She died three days later after delivering a baby girl, who later proved to be free of the Aids virus. I can recall exactly the words the doctor used to communicate that good news. “We always think of the placenta as a bloody sieve,” he said, ”but it turns out in some cases it’s more impervious than we give it credit for.” Impervious, of course, means unable to pass or get through. The placenta does prevent some things, including viruses, from getting through to the baby. But something did get through to Linda and her baby. An angel, an angel that I did not even remember was there, an angel that most of us have a very hard time believing in, an angel that even the early Lucan manuscripts left out, and Matthew and Mark make no mention of. Impervious is a fitting description of the human condition. We are often impervious, impervious to God, impervious to grace, impervious to an angel. How ironic that in the last few hours of this poor battered woman’s life, she opened herself up to something that most of us could miss and dismiss. Who believes in angels, anyway? Perhaps those who are so broken that they have no place to wander except to the cross and from there to the tomb, where they hear the question posed by the angels, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Why indeed?
Preached by Sandra Olsen,
Maundy Thursday, April 14, 2022
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
I always hated it when my beeper went off because it usually signified a crisis. And so, when I heard my beeper on Maundy Thursday of 1990, my heart leapt to my throat. I called a number I did not recognize, which I hoped was a good sign. The message was from a doctor from the high risk pregnancy unit, who wanted to see me IMMEDIATELY. “Look,” he said, I understand that you have been talking to Linda so and so, an Aids patient. She’s dying and she knows it, and I want to do an immediate C section, but she says no go. If I don’t get that baby out now, not only will we lose the mother, but also the baby. Can’t you talk some sense into her?
Sense: a rather strange one to use for someone who had lived the last 10 years of her life as a street walker, and now at 26 years of age, was going to die. What did sense have to do with it? Linda had grown up in an abusive home; at fourteen she ran away from a father who had impregnated her, and then beat her to a bloody pulp for getting pregnant. Her life was a series of wrecks no human being should ever have to endure, let alone recover from. Linda did not recover, and eventually she came down with Aids.
She was not an easy person to be with. I did not like her any more than she liked me. As far as she was concerned, I was next to useless, BUT according to her, not as useless as God. At least, she said to me one day, you show up now and then, which is more than God does.
The ironic thing about Linda was that as much as she denied God, she couldn’t get God out of her life. Sometimes she cursed God; and other days she just lamented that God never helped her. According to Linda not only did God abandon her, but He also abandoned her three kids, all of whom were in foster care. The social worker told me that two of the children suffered from serious neurological damage due to her crack addiction and the oldest child was blind, probably due to fetal alcohol syndrome. I may be guilty, Linda confessed, but my kids didn’t do a thing but be born. Got no use for a God who visits the sins of the parents on the children. Where’s the justice in that? I told her I didn’t think it had anything to do with justice. It is just the way things are. God does not stop the blood from flowing if you slice your hand open with a knife, I said. “So why do you believe in God, if God can’t help?” she wanted to know. Because I’ve got no place else to go, I answered.
One of the nurses told me that Linda liked that answer, though of course she would never have told me that. I guess she preferred God being a place rather than a person. Since practically everyone in her life had used or abused her, and since she spent a good part of her life homeless, place came to mean more to her than person. Well as you can see, Linda was not stupid. She was smart, smart enough to figure out that as a pregnant Aids patient, she was entitled to a lot better care than if she were simply an Aids afflicted street walker. For the first time in a few years, she actually had a place to live, a place she called home. At least I’m not going to die homeless, she told the social worker.
Linda was a lightning rod of controversy. One of her doctors, the one who beeped me, wanted to do immediate surgery on a baby of 32 weeks gestation---40 weeks is full term. Linda was going down hill fast, and the baby was showing serious signs of distress. Another doctor thought that the primary responsibility was to the mother not to the baby. We have to keep her alive as long as we can, he insisted. Her baby is not the primary patient. And so, the two argued, and argued, and as things became even more critical, the two doctors argued even more.
Sometime in mid afternoon on Maundy Thursday, Linda asked to see me. She pulled a Bible out from under the bed sheets. Do you know the part about Jesus, when he prays that he won’t have to die? You mean the Garden of Gethsemane? I said. It’s right before he goes to the cross, I said. She looked up at me and asked, “What about the part with the angel?” The angel? “Yeh, the part when the angel comes and helps Jesus.” In that moment I had no recollection of any angel. Linda handed me a Bible and said, “Could you find the angel part for me?” I heard someone read it on the radio this morning, but I don’t know where it is. You must know. I need the part where the angel helps Jesus.” Desperation was choking her voice. Quickly flipping to the Gethsemane scenes in Matthew and Mark, I confirmed to myself that there was no angel there. And then I turned to Luke. Ah yes, here it is. Read it, she commanded, the part where the angel comes. “Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, Father if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will, but yours be done. Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”
I stopped reading, and the whole world seemed to stop with me. Linda broke the silence: Do you believe that, the part about the angel helping him? Fixing her gaze on me, she did not give me much time to form either my thoughts or my words. I had been educated to be suspicious of angels, those winged creatures, who speak God’s truth and bring God’s help. My education had been a journey into critical biblical scholarship, which tells us that it is probable that the angel was not part of Luke’s original Gospel, since important early manuscripts lack those sentences. Besides, I had been taught to reason, and angels were outside the realm of reason. Nonetheless, I looked Linda straight in the eye, and with no audible or visible hesitation, answered, “Yes, I believe.” “Oh,” she said. “I thought that maybe you were the kind of person who doesn’t believe in angels.”
That was the last time I ever spoke with Linda. That night she consented to undergo an emergency C-section from which she never regained consciousness. She died three days later after delivering a baby girl, who later proved to be free of the Aids virus. I can recall exactly the words the doctor used to communicate that good news. “We always think of the placenta as a bloody sieve,” he said, ”but it turns out in some cases it’s more impervious than we give it credit for.” Impervious, of course, means unable to pass or get through. The placenta does prevent some things, including viruses, from getting through to the baby. But something did get through to Linda and her baby. An angel, an angel that I did not even remember was there, an angel that most of us have a very hard time believing in, an angel that even the early Lucan manuscripts left out, and Matthew and Mark make no mention of. Impervious is a fitting description of the human condition. We are often impervious, impervious to God, impervious to grace, impervious to an angel. How ironic that in the last few hours of this poor battered woman’s life, she opened herself up to something that most of us could miss and dismiss. Who believes in angels, anyway? Perhaps those who are so broken that they have no place to wander except to the cross and from there to the tomb, where they hear the question posed by the angels, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Why indeed?
TURNING POINTS
Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
Preached By: The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
John 20:1-18
Exactly 50 years ago today, on April 17, 1972, a turning point for women happened. That was the first year women were allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon. Eight women ran that year, and Nina Kuscsik was the first woman to finish, but all eight women completed the 26.2 mile course. In 1966 Roberta Gibb had wanted to run, but she could not get an official number, so she hid in the bushes and jumped out when the race began. The following year, Kathrine Switzer registered as K.V. Switzer, and was in the lineup to begin the race, when an official noticed she was a woman. He tried to pull off her bib number and remove her from the race, but Kathrine’s boyfriend pushed the man to the ground and Kathrine ran, finishing the race in four hours 20 minutes. It was indeed a turning point.
Well, that first Easter so long ago in a corner of the world near Jerusalem, was also a turning point---a turning point in history. And like the Boston Marathon it also involved running, at least according to John’s gospel. Mary Magdalene does not figure very much in John’s gospel, and despite what you have heard about her, Mary Magdalene was NOT a prostitute or the woman caught in adultery in John 8. That was something the Church, run by males, I might add, decided in the year 591, but the injustice done to Mary Magdalene is a subject is for another sermon. So here we have Mary on this first Easter morning on her way to the tomb. It was still dark, John’s gospel claims, though Matthew, Mark and Luke all make a point of saying the sun was rising and there was morning light. But for the Gospel of John, dark isn’t about the time of day. It means opposition to God’s promise of new life. It’s being without hope, filled with fear and anxiety. The darkness of John’s gospel can happen when you are sitting in the blaring light of an emergency room, waiting for the doctor to come out and tell you something you cannot bear to hear. And when you finally hear it, the dark becomes even darker.
And that is the kind of darkness Mary Magdalene was in. She was devastated because her beloved friend and teacher was dead. She was alone, which
might lead us to wonder how she thought she was going to gain entrance to the tomb with a stone in front of it. Women were the ones, who washed the dead body and anointed it with oils and spices. Perhaps she planned to meet other women there; we don’t know. But when she saw that the stone had been rolled away, she immediately ran to Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved, often called John, and told them Jesus’ body was gone. The text does not tell us that she entered the tomb and carefully assessed the situation. No, she ran, perhaps in fear and panic, and then Peter and John also ran to the tomb. We have a copy of a famous painting on the cover of the bulletin---Peter and John racing to the tomb.
John outran Peter, but though he looked in, he did not enter. Rather he let Peter be the first to enter. They saw the linen wrappings and the covering for the head, neatly wrapped, lying by itself---most likely an indication that graverobbers had not taken the body, since why would robbers take the time to wrap the linens into a neat pile? And then John and Peter went home. But this time, however, they did not run. They apparently believed something, though we are not sure what it was they believed. Maybe they simply believed what Mary said---the body was gone. No one said anything about Jesus being alive or resurrected.
But Mary did not leave with the disciples. She remained, weeping at the tomb, because she did not know where her beloved Jesus was. She even mistook Jesus for the gardener, and it was only when he called her name, when she felt the intimate connection that she recognized him. She would have held on to him, or clung to him as some translations read, but he would not let her. There would be no holding on, no returning to what once was. After this she went to the disciples and told them that she had seen Jesus. Notice that although there has been a lot of running in the text, when she goes to the disciples the word used is went, not ran.
The Bible is really a lens we use to look at the human condition and God. John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, used to say the bible contains two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of self and knowledge of God. And what we initially see in this story is human beings in a kind of tizzy. We have no acclamation of joy---Jesus is risen--- but rather we see struggle and weeping. The two disciples ran toward the tomb as Mary had run to the disciples’ home, telling them that Jesus’ body had been taken away. There is initially chaos, or maybe it was panic and then deep sadness as Mary gave into her grief. The text mentions Mary’s weeping four times. And isn’t this how life sometimes is? We can panic when we do not understand what is happening or why, as Mary initially did. Fear, in fact, can morph into panic. Sometimes we run away from the panic and at other times we run toward it, because we are trying, like the disciples, to understand what has happened. And we run with our hearts pounding and our stomachs, twisted into knots. And then, like Mary, we may find ourselves weeping because we feel bereft, alone, and helpless.
A week ago or so I came across an article, entitled, Resurrection, and I thought it might offer some new perspectives on the resurrection stories in the Bible. It told the story of black people in the state of Mississippi in the 60’s, as they tried to register to vote. Freedom Riders tried to help with the registration, and three of them, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were cold bloodily murdered in 1964, one of the murderers, a Baptist preacher by the name of Edward Ray Killen, who was finally convicted on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in jail, where he died in 2018.
Well, this one night people were at a church meeting, when suddenly the KKK showed up with cans of gasoline to burn the church to the ground and terrorize the people. And they succeeded. People were in a complete panic, and this one young man, in his early 20’s, remembers running through the darkness. “Panic took hold of me because I knew what could happen if I were caught,” he said. “And I was terrified for my parents. I remember my father yelling, “Run, Allen, run.” And so, I ran. I ran for my life. At first, I ran to help my father, who had been shoved hard to the ground. But he pushed me away, ordering me to run. When I arrived home, I just sat in the dark, too terrified to move. A few hours later my parents arrived. We all were safe, and we cried together, out of fear, out of relief, out of anger. Our church was gone, and we knew there would be no successful voter registration---at least not that year. Two other Black churches were also burned, and I can still remember the pastor’s Easter sermon that year. It began as Easter sermons always did in many black churches: But early Sunday morning he got up with all power in his hands. He repeated that line over and over again, and the congregation joined in: But early Sunday morning he got up with all power in his hands. And we all understood that the power God had given to Jesus would also be given to us. We believed, and when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we felt the power. When my parents and I successfully registered to vote, we did not walk to that place of registration. We ran. And after we had successfully registered, we wept. And the first time we voted, we ran again, and we wept again. We knew that the power Jesus had been given was also given to us.
And there you have it: the resurrection of Jesus Christ should not be reduced to what happened to a tortured and crucified body over 2000 years ago. It isn’t simply about an empty tomb; it is about full life. On this earth. Consider this: the resurrected Jesus never once described his three days in the tomb. He did not talk about his descent into hell, as the Apostle’s Creed confesses. He never once mentioned heaven, or what it felt like to be resurrected. No, his concern was about the work on this earth that required action and commitment. The sick cried out for healing, the orphaned and the widowed needed help as did others, who could not so easily care for themselves. Nations needed to learn the art of peace rather than the folly of war. The resurrection of Jesus points to the promise of new life, the possibility that the old order, where power is asserted to gain more power, is finally overturned and a new order is initiated. Jesus told Mary to tell the other disciples that he would be ascending to his Father; he would be going to God. His work on earth was finished, but there was still work for the followers of Jesus to do, then and now. So, let us try to do it.
Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
Preached By: The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
John 20:1-18
Exactly 50 years ago today, on April 17, 1972, a turning point for women happened. That was the first year women were allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon. Eight women ran that year, and Nina Kuscsik was the first woman to finish, but all eight women completed the 26.2 mile course. In 1966 Roberta Gibb had wanted to run, but she could not get an official number, so she hid in the bushes and jumped out when the race began. The following year, Kathrine Switzer registered as K.V. Switzer, and was in the lineup to begin the race, when an official noticed she was a woman. He tried to pull off her bib number and remove her from the race, but Kathrine’s boyfriend pushed the man to the ground and Kathrine ran, finishing the race in four hours 20 minutes. It was indeed a turning point.
Well, that first Easter so long ago in a corner of the world near Jerusalem, was also a turning point---a turning point in history. And like the Boston Marathon it also involved running, at least according to John’s gospel. Mary Magdalene does not figure very much in John’s gospel, and despite what you have heard about her, Mary Magdalene was NOT a prostitute or the woman caught in adultery in John 8. That was something the Church, run by males, I might add, decided in the year 591, but the injustice done to Mary Magdalene is a subject is for another sermon. So here we have Mary on this first Easter morning on her way to the tomb. It was still dark, John’s gospel claims, though Matthew, Mark and Luke all make a point of saying the sun was rising and there was morning light. But for the Gospel of John, dark isn’t about the time of day. It means opposition to God’s promise of new life. It’s being without hope, filled with fear and anxiety. The darkness of John’s gospel can happen when you are sitting in the blaring light of an emergency room, waiting for the doctor to come out and tell you something you cannot bear to hear. And when you finally hear it, the dark becomes even darker.
And that is the kind of darkness Mary Magdalene was in. She was devastated because her beloved friend and teacher was dead. She was alone, which
might lead us to wonder how she thought she was going to gain entrance to the tomb with a stone in front of it. Women were the ones, who washed the dead body and anointed it with oils and spices. Perhaps she planned to meet other women there; we don’t know. But when she saw that the stone had been rolled away, she immediately ran to Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved, often called John, and told them Jesus’ body was gone. The text does not tell us that she entered the tomb and carefully assessed the situation. No, she ran, perhaps in fear and panic, and then Peter and John also ran to the tomb. We have a copy of a famous painting on the cover of the bulletin---Peter and John racing to the tomb.
John outran Peter, but though he looked in, he did not enter. Rather he let Peter be the first to enter. They saw the linen wrappings and the covering for the head, neatly wrapped, lying by itself---most likely an indication that graverobbers had not taken the body, since why would robbers take the time to wrap the linens into a neat pile? And then John and Peter went home. But this time, however, they did not run. They apparently believed something, though we are not sure what it was they believed. Maybe they simply believed what Mary said---the body was gone. No one said anything about Jesus being alive or resurrected.
But Mary did not leave with the disciples. She remained, weeping at the tomb, because she did not know where her beloved Jesus was. She even mistook Jesus for the gardener, and it was only when he called her name, when she felt the intimate connection that she recognized him. She would have held on to him, or clung to him as some translations read, but he would not let her. There would be no holding on, no returning to what once was. After this she went to the disciples and told them that she had seen Jesus. Notice that although there has been a lot of running in the text, when she goes to the disciples the word used is went, not ran.
The Bible is really a lens we use to look at the human condition and God. John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, used to say the bible contains two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of self and knowledge of God. And what we initially see in this story is human beings in a kind of tizzy. We have no acclamation of joy---Jesus is risen--- but rather we see struggle and weeping. The two disciples ran toward the tomb as Mary had run to the disciples’ home, telling them that Jesus’ body had been taken away. There is initially chaos, or maybe it was panic and then deep sadness as Mary gave into her grief. The text mentions Mary’s weeping four times. And isn’t this how life sometimes is? We can panic when we do not understand what is happening or why, as Mary initially did. Fear, in fact, can morph into panic. Sometimes we run away from the panic and at other times we run toward it, because we are trying, like the disciples, to understand what has happened. And we run with our hearts pounding and our stomachs, twisted into knots. And then, like Mary, we may find ourselves weeping because we feel bereft, alone, and helpless.
A week ago or so I came across an article, entitled, Resurrection, and I thought it might offer some new perspectives on the resurrection stories in the Bible. It told the story of black people in the state of Mississippi in the 60’s, as they tried to register to vote. Freedom Riders tried to help with the registration, and three of them, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were cold bloodily murdered in 1964, one of the murderers, a Baptist preacher by the name of Edward Ray Killen, who was finally convicted on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in jail, where he died in 2018.
Well, this one night people were at a church meeting, when suddenly the KKK showed up with cans of gasoline to burn the church to the ground and terrorize the people. And they succeeded. People were in a complete panic, and this one young man, in his early 20’s, remembers running through the darkness. “Panic took hold of me because I knew what could happen if I were caught,” he said. “And I was terrified for my parents. I remember my father yelling, “Run, Allen, run.” And so, I ran. I ran for my life. At first, I ran to help my father, who had been shoved hard to the ground. But he pushed me away, ordering me to run. When I arrived home, I just sat in the dark, too terrified to move. A few hours later my parents arrived. We all were safe, and we cried together, out of fear, out of relief, out of anger. Our church was gone, and we knew there would be no successful voter registration---at least not that year. Two other Black churches were also burned, and I can still remember the pastor’s Easter sermon that year. It began as Easter sermons always did in many black churches: But early Sunday morning he got up with all power in his hands. He repeated that line over and over again, and the congregation joined in: But early Sunday morning he got up with all power in his hands. And we all understood that the power God had given to Jesus would also be given to us. We believed, and when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we felt the power. When my parents and I successfully registered to vote, we did not walk to that place of registration. We ran. And after we had successfully registered, we wept. And the first time we voted, we ran again, and we wept again. We knew that the power Jesus had been given was also given to us.
And there you have it: the resurrection of Jesus Christ should not be reduced to what happened to a tortured and crucified body over 2000 years ago. It isn’t simply about an empty tomb; it is about full life. On this earth. Consider this: the resurrected Jesus never once described his three days in the tomb. He did not talk about his descent into hell, as the Apostle’s Creed confesses. He never once mentioned heaven, or what it felt like to be resurrected. No, his concern was about the work on this earth that required action and commitment. The sick cried out for healing, the orphaned and the widowed needed help as did others, who could not so easily care for themselves. Nations needed to learn the art of peace rather than the folly of war. The resurrection of Jesus points to the promise of new life, the possibility that the old order, where power is asserted to gain more power, is finally overturned and a new order is initiated. Jesus told Mary to tell the other disciples that he would be ascending to his Father; he would be going to God. His work on earth was finished, but there was still work for the followers of Jesus to do, then and now. So, let us try to do it.
THE IRONY OF IT ALL!
Palm/Passion Sunday
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 10, 2022
Luke 19: 28-40
Mark 15: 1-39
Today is both Palm and Passion Sunday. Our story begins with a parade---the waving of leafy branches, and cries of “Hosanna, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” And it will end with a Roman centurion, an enemy of the Jews, standing at the foot of the cross, confessing, “Truly, this man was God’s Son.” The irony of it all: from a parade to a crucifixion, from a crucifixion to the confession of Jesus as God’s Son by a centurion, who helped put him to death.
There’s irony in Jesus riding from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey, which had never before been ridden. Why a young colt? Well, the Old Testament prophet Zechariah said this was how the Messiah would enter Jerusalem---on a foal of a donkey. And if there was one thing Israel understood about donkeys, it is that they are nothing like mighty war horses. You see Roman soldiers were constantly parading through the streets of Jerusalem, seated on magnificent horses, bred for strength and calm in battle. These rides through the city streets were a constant humiliation and reminder to the Jews that it was Rome, not Israel, who held the power. But no, Israel’s Messiah would not imitate Roman strength. Though the Messiah was expected to lead a mighty battle and be victorious, he would not initiate the charge with a war house, but rather with a donkey! What irony!
So, this Jesus, whom many were hoping was the Messiah, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and was greeted with cheers and shouts. Hosanna, the crowd yelled, and that term is not another word for Hooray. It is a petition meaning, “Save us, we pray.” So, this parade was not like our Memorial Day Parades, but rather more like the march from Selma to Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement, when political change was being demanded and the marchers were facing an enemy, who could violently turn on them in an instant.
But though the people wanted political change, Jesus did not initiate it in the expected way. There would be no battle, as some of his followers wanted or even expected. Some people think that Judas might have been a Zealot in favor of armed rebellion against Rome and was hoping that he could push Jesus into action by betraying him. But, if this is what Judas wanted, this is certainly not what he got.
How ironic that Jesus, whom some desperately wanted to see as a great warrior king, like David, instead showed softness and compassion by weeping over the city of Jerusalem, because it was blind to what really makes for peace. Then, rather than attacking Roman soldiers, he attacked the Temple, throwing out the moneychangers and those selling animals for sacrifice. This really got him into trouble with the Jewish authorities, who wanted him dead. But they could not figure out how to do it, since he had such a strong following among the crowd. And then after expelling the moneychangers, he went about doing what he had always done: teaching. Consider the irony of moving toward his horrible torture and death in Jerusalem, but nonetheless insisting on teaching about the nature of authority, the paying of taxes, and the resurrection of the dead. And when he finally stood before Pilate and was asked, “Are you the King of the Jews,” Jesus simply answered, “You have said so.” That is all he would say to Pilate, and so Pilate, not wishing to get involved in this mess, sent him to Herod.
Remember, Herod was both a king and a Jew, and since Jesus was from Galilee, he was under Herod’s jurisdiction. Now this sending of Jesus to Herod is found ONLY in Luke. And Luke tells us that Herod was curious about Jesus and was glad to have a chance to question him, hoping to learn something. But Jesus would say nothing. How ironic that Jesus, a master of words, whose stories and parables held the rapt attention of crowds, should now become strangely quiet. And so, Herod, along with the chief priests and scribes, mocked and accused Jesus. Herod felt he had no choice but to send Jesus back to Pilate. And then we find another interesting comment, unique to Luke. “That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other. Before this they had been enemies.” How ironic that these two men, whose moral compass was pretty much out of whack, should become friends after their dealings with Jesus. Is it because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or is something else going on here? Does being in the presence of Jesus completely overturn the old order?
Pilate could find nothing in Jesus, worthy of death, but we know the story---how a man of violence, Barabbas, who had murdered Roman soldiers and would probably murder again, was released, while Jesus, who had never done or counseled violence against anyone, including the Roman state, was the one condemned to die. The irony of it all!
A passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, was compelled by the Roman soldiers to carry Jesus’ cross. Consider the name Simon, ironically the same first name as Simon Peter, the disciple, who denied and deserted Jesus, and along with the other disciples was nowhere in sight. Ironically it was a stranger, who was forced to carry the cross for Jesus. Luke says he came from the country, but Cyrene was a small town in Egypt, populated by Jews, who had gone there to escape persecution in Palestine by the Romans. The irony of it all: that Simon should arrive in Palestine from a haven for Jews in Egypt just in time to carry the cross of one who would be executed as the King of the Jews.
No Jew would ever have expected a crucified Messiah. And that is the greatest irony of all. The righteous one, the blessed one, the chosen one of God is also the one who died a cursed death. The Jews believed that death by crucifixion was not only horribly painful, but also shameful, a humiliation, a curse by God. Though we began by reading Luke’s account of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, we will end with the reading of Jesus death from Mark’s gospel. Mark is stark. There are no words of forgiveness, no offering of his spirit to God. Jesus died with a loud cry, following a question, which is also an accusation: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
And after all this---after the pain, the humiliation, the question, and the accusation, the temple curtain is torn from top to bottom, and ironically what has been hidden is revealed. The Temple curtain separated the inner sanctuary, where God was said to reside, from the rest of the temple, and when it was torn, the God hidden in death ironically became God revealed in new life. And the person who recognized this first in both Mark and Luke, the one who saw who Jesus truly was and is was the enemy, a Roman centurion, who had participated in this whole cruel dance of death. The irony of it all!
When I was a chaplain on a neurosurgery unit, I knew this neurosurgeon, who was always arguing about God with his father, a theologian and a seminary President. He told me when he was 15, he and his buddies were going to swim at night across this lake near his home. His parents expressly forbade him to go. But he disobeyed. The swim across the lake was long and hard, but he was a masterful swimmer, so he was the first to complete the feat. But one of his friends could not make it and was drowning, so, though he was exhausted, he swam out and saved him. “I was the only one there, capable of doing it,” he said. “How ironic that my disobedience became the occasion for the saving of my friend. And when my father found out what had happened, he said to me, “You know what my favorite adjective for God is---neither loving, nor merciful, nor powerful. God is ironic, and so is life. Both God and life are full of ironies. We both tonight learned that lesson once again.” And then he said to me, “I hope you never forget it.” And despite all the arguments I continue to have with my father about God, I haven’t forgotten.”
Palm/Passion Sunday
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 10, 2022
Luke 19: 28-40
Mark 15: 1-39
Today is both Palm and Passion Sunday. Our story begins with a parade---the waving of leafy branches, and cries of “Hosanna, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” And it will end with a Roman centurion, an enemy of the Jews, standing at the foot of the cross, confessing, “Truly, this man was God’s Son.” The irony of it all: from a parade to a crucifixion, from a crucifixion to the confession of Jesus as God’s Son by a centurion, who helped put him to death.
There’s irony in Jesus riding from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey, which had never before been ridden. Why a young colt? Well, the Old Testament prophet Zechariah said this was how the Messiah would enter Jerusalem---on a foal of a donkey. And if there was one thing Israel understood about donkeys, it is that they are nothing like mighty war horses. You see Roman soldiers were constantly parading through the streets of Jerusalem, seated on magnificent horses, bred for strength and calm in battle. These rides through the city streets were a constant humiliation and reminder to the Jews that it was Rome, not Israel, who held the power. But no, Israel’s Messiah would not imitate Roman strength. Though the Messiah was expected to lead a mighty battle and be victorious, he would not initiate the charge with a war house, but rather with a donkey! What irony!
So, this Jesus, whom many were hoping was the Messiah, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and was greeted with cheers and shouts. Hosanna, the crowd yelled, and that term is not another word for Hooray. It is a petition meaning, “Save us, we pray.” So, this parade was not like our Memorial Day Parades, but rather more like the march from Selma to Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement, when political change was being demanded and the marchers were facing an enemy, who could violently turn on them in an instant.
But though the people wanted political change, Jesus did not initiate it in the expected way. There would be no battle, as some of his followers wanted or even expected. Some people think that Judas might have been a Zealot in favor of armed rebellion against Rome and was hoping that he could push Jesus into action by betraying him. But, if this is what Judas wanted, this is certainly not what he got.
How ironic that Jesus, whom some desperately wanted to see as a great warrior king, like David, instead showed softness and compassion by weeping over the city of Jerusalem, because it was blind to what really makes for peace. Then, rather than attacking Roman soldiers, he attacked the Temple, throwing out the moneychangers and those selling animals for sacrifice. This really got him into trouble with the Jewish authorities, who wanted him dead. But they could not figure out how to do it, since he had such a strong following among the crowd. And then after expelling the moneychangers, he went about doing what he had always done: teaching. Consider the irony of moving toward his horrible torture and death in Jerusalem, but nonetheless insisting on teaching about the nature of authority, the paying of taxes, and the resurrection of the dead. And when he finally stood before Pilate and was asked, “Are you the King of the Jews,” Jesus simply answered, “You have said so.” That is all he would say to Pilate, and so Pilate, not wishing to get involved in this mess, sent him to Herod.
Remember, Herod was both a king and a Jew, and since Jesus was from Galilee, he was under Herod’s jurisdiction. Now this sending of Jesus to Herod is found ONLY in Luke. And Luke tells us that Herod was curious about Jesus and was glad to have a chance to question him, hoping to learn something. But Jesus would say nothing. How ironic that Jesus, a master of words, whose stories and parables held the rapt attention of crowds, should now become strangely quiet. And so, Herod, along with the chief priests and scribes, mocked and accused Jesus. Herod felt he had no choice but to send Jesus back to Pilate. And then we find another interesting comment, unique to Luke. “That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other. Before this they had been enemies.” How ironic that these two men, whose moral compass was pretty much out of whack, should become friends after their dealings with Jesus. Is it because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or is something else going on here? Does being in the presence of Jesus completely overturn the old order?
Pilate could find nothing in Jesus, worthy of death, but we know the story---how a man of violence, Barabbas, who had murdered Roman soldiers and would probably murder again, was released, while Jesus, who had never done or counseled violence against anyone, including the Roman state, was the one condemned to die. The irony of it all!
A passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, was compelled by the Roman soldiers to carry Jesus’ cross. Consider the name Simon, ironically the same first name as Simon Peter, the disciple, who denied and deserted Jesus, and along with the other disciples was nowhere in sight. Ironically it was a stranger, who was forced to carry the cross for Jesus. Luke says he came from the country, but Cyrene was a small town in Egypt, populated by Jews, who had gone there to escape persecution in Palestine by the Romans. The irony of it all: that Simon should arrive in Palestine from a haven for Jews in Egypt just in time to carry the cross of one who would be executed as the King of the Jews.
No Jew would ever have expected a crucified Messiah. And that is the greatest irony of all. The righteous one, the blessed one, the chosen one of God is also the one who died a cursed death. The Jews believed that death by crucifixion was not only horribly painful, but also shameful, a humiliation, a curse by God. Though we began by reading Luke’s account of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, we will end with the reading of Jesus death from Mark’s gospel. Mark is stark. There are no words of forgiveness, no offering of his spirit to God. Jesus died with a loud cry, following a question, which is also an accusation: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
And after all this---after the pain, the humiliation, the question, and the accusation, the temple curtain is torn from top to bottom, and ironically what has been hidden is revealed. The Temple curtain separated the inner sanctuary, where God was said to reside, from the rest of the temple, and when it was torn, the God hidden in death ironically became God revealed in new life. And the person who recognized this first in both Mark and Luke, the one who saw who Jesus truly was and is was the enemy, a Roman centurion, who had participated in this whole cruel dance of death. The irony of it all!
When I was a chaplain on a neurosurgery unit, I knew this neurosurgeon, who was always arguing about God with his father, a theologian and a seminary President. He told me when he was 15, he and his buddies were going to swim at night across this lake near his home. His parents expressly forbade him to go. But he disobeyed. The swim across the lake was long and hard, but he was a masterful swimmer, so he was the first to complete the feat. But one of his friends could not make it and was drowning, so, though he was exhausted, he swam out and saved him. “I was the only one there, capable of doing it,” he said. “How ironic that my disobedience became the occasion for the saving of my friend. And when my father found out what had happened, he said to me, “You know what my favorite adjective for God is---neither loving, nor merciful, nor powerful. God is ironic, and so is life. Both God and life are full of ironies. We both tonight learned that lesson once again.” And then he said to me, “I hope you never forget it.” And despite all the arguments I continue to have with my father about God, I haven’t forgotten.”
April 6, 2022
Dear Friends,
Most of you have probably read that there is a movement in some communities to ban certain books, mainly in school libraries, but some of the efforts have extended to town libraries. This is not entirely new. I recall when I was in high school, there were parents (though not in my high school) who were outraged about George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Though it was not required reading in my high schools, there were some, where it was. As soon as the book became controversial, many of us went out, purchased the book, and read it. Most of us could not understand what the outrage was all about, and neither could my teachers. The conclusion was that some people simply don’t want to deal with subjects that make them feel uncomfortable, though sometimes discomfort can goad us to change.When my two youngest children were in high school, I complained to the Superintendent that the reading list for the 9th grade honors English class was not challenging enough. She agreed and spoke to the English Department. What I then learned from one of the teachers was that the school had banned the reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, because of its negative portrayal of the Jew. I was shocked. This particular play has one of the most beautiful soliloquies in all of literature, when Portia intones, “The quality of mercy is not strained…”. My husband recalled that when he read the play in high school, one of the main points of discussion was the anti-Semitism expressed toward the Jew, Shylock. So, why could that be discussed in 1968 but not now?Top of FormIn 2021, according to the American Library Association, the attempts to ban books were at their highest level since the Association began keeping track about 20 years ago. We have heard about contentious school board meetings, when parents have insisted that certain books be removed from the school library. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said, “We are seeing organized groups go to school boards and library boards, demanding actual censorship of certain books to conform to their moral or political views.” And most of these books deal with the lives and experiences of people from marginalized communities. The Library Association counted 729 challenges in 2021 to library, school, and university materials as well as research databases and e-book platforms. Each challenge, by the way, can include multiple titles, and the Association claimed that 1,597 books had been challenged, and in some cases removed. These numbers, by the way, are not solid, but are based on voluntary reporting by educators and librarians, so the actual numbers are probably much higher. When Glenn Youngkin of Virginia was running for governor recently, his campaign featured a mother who did not want her son reading, Toni Morrison’s Beloved in his high school English class. Three out of my four children read that book in high school, and for the life of me, I cannot understand what anyone would find objectionable about the book. Furthermore, I am not a big advocate of giving parents so much control over their children’s education. Education is far more than parroting parental values and beliefs. We should want our children to be exposed to ideas that are not like ours. It is a big world out there, and unless we expect and want our children to be carbon copies of us, it is essential that education expand their horizons. Education, at its best, is about helping students to learn how to think critically, and they will not learn to do that, if they are never exposed to ideas outside their parents’ ken. Bottom of FormI have no idea what Jesus would say about book banning. To be sure, Jesus was controversial, and he certainly expressed ideas that challenged the mainline Jewish view. What his parents thought of his ideas and his behavior, I don’t know, but would any of us be surprised if we learned that he was very challenging to raise, and as he grew older, his behavior might have even embarrassed them? Jesus was aware that the world was a vast place, far beyond his own Jewish experience. Anyone conversant with the Psalms would realize that the created order is far more expansive than the place in which one resides. Since God is the author of this vast creation, there is far more to learn and appreciate than what our parents know and think we should know.Just in case you are curious, here is a list of the ten most frequently challenged books.
1.Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
2.Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
3.All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
4.Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez
5.The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas6.The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
7.Me and Earl and a Dying Girl
8.The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
9.This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
10. Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Most of you have probably read that there is a movement in some communities to ban certain books, mainly in school libraries, but some of the efforts have extended to town libraries. This is not entirely new. I recall when I was in high school, there were parents (though not in my high school) who were outraged about George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Though it was not required reading in my high schools, there were some, where it was. As soon as the book became controversial, many of us went out, purchased the book, and read it. Most of us could not understand what the outrage was all about, and neither could my teachers. The conclusion was that some people simply don’t want to deal with subjects that make them feel uncomfortable, though sometimes discomfort can goad us to change.When my two youngest children were in high school, I complained to the Superintendent that the reading list for the 9th grade honors English class was not challenging enough. She agreed and spoke to the English Department. What I then learned from one of the teachers was that the school had banned the reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, because of its negative portrayal of the Jew. I was shocked. This particular play has one of the most beautiful soliloquies in all of literature, when Portia intones, “The quality of mercy is not strained…”. My husband recalled that when he read the play in high school, one of the main points of discussion was the anti-Semitism expressed toward the Jew, Shylock. So, why could that be discussed in 1968 but not now?Top of FormIn 2021, according to the American Library Association, the attempts to ban books were at their highest level since the Association began keeping track about 20 years ago. We have heard about contentious school board meetings, when parents have insisted that certain books be removed from the school library. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said, “We are seeing organized groups go to school boards and library boards, demanding actual censorship of certain books to conform to their moral or political views.” And most of these books deal with the lives and experiences of people from marginalized communities. The Library Association counted 729 challenges in 2021 to library, school, and university materials as well as research databases and e-book platforms. Each challenge, by the way, can include multiple titles, and the Association claimed that 1,597 books had been challenged, and in some cases removed. These numbers, by the way, are not solid, but are based on voluntary reporting by educators and librarians, so the actual numbers are probably much higher. When Glenn Youngkin of Virginia was running for governor recently, his campaign featured a mother who did not want her son reading, Toni Morrison’s Beloved in his high school English class. Three out of my four children read that book in high school, and for the life of me, I cannot understand what anyone would find objectionable about the book. Furthermore, I am not a big advocate of giving parents so much control over their children’s education. Education is far more than parroting parental values and beliefs. We should want our children to be exposed to ideas that are not like ours. It is a big world out there, and unless we expect and want our children to be carbon copies of us, it is essential that education expand their horizons. Education, at its best, is about helping students to learn how to think critically, and they will not learn to do that, if they are never exposed to ideas outside their parents’ ken. Bottom of FormI have no idea what Jesus would say about book banning. To be sure, Jesus was controversial, and he certainly expressed ideas that challenged the mainline Jewish view. What his parents thought of his ideas and his behavior, I don’t know, but would any of us be surprised if we learned that he was very challenging to raise, and as he grew older, his behavior might have even embarrassed them? Jesus was aware that the world was a vast place, far beyond his own Jewish experience. Anyone conversant with the Psalms would realize that the created order is far more expansive than the place in which one resides. Since God is the author of this vast creation, there is far more to learn and appreciate than what our parents know and think we should know.Just in case you are curious, here is a list of the ten most frequently challenged books.
1.Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
2.Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
3.All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
4.Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez
5.The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas6.The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
7.Me and Earl and a Dying Girl
8.The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
9.This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
10. Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A Wasteful Act
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
April 3, 2022
John 12: 1-8
Given that Jesus’ life was at grave risk, you might think it wasn’t very smart of him to go to Jerusalem. In the previous chapter, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and the chief priests and Pharisees were very worried that people would be so impressed by his many signs and wonders they would follow Jesus, and the Romans, feeling threatened, would come down hard on the Jewish people, destroying their Temple and their nation---such as the nation was during Roman times. Caiaphas, the high priest told the Jewish leaders it was preferable for Jesus to die than to have the Jewish people destroyed. And so, the text says in chapter 11, “From that day on they planned to put him to death.” Despite the threat, Jesus would go to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, but not before making a stop in Bethany, the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, where he would have a meal with his friends. And it was here that Mary took a pound of very costly perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. Though Judas complained this was a terrible waste, because the perfume could have been sold and the money distributed to the poor, Jesus tells him that Mary has done a beautiful thing. “She has anointed my body for burial,” he said. Indeed, the anointing with oil was commonly done in ancient Israel. Kings were anointed with oil upon their ascension to the throne. Sick people were anointed as a means of healing, and the dead were washed and then anointed with oil as a sign of respect and tender care. So, here we are told that the anointing is because Jesus is moving toward his death in Jerusalem.
The story of Jesus’ anointing is told in all four gospels, but the details are very different. We just heard what Mary did---pouring expensive nard ointment all over Jesus’ feet and then wiping his feet with her hair---quite a sensual scene. In Matthew and Mark it is an unnamed woman who poured some very expensive ointment over Jesus’ head in Bethany at the house of Simon the Leper. In Luke, while Jesus is having supper at the home of a Pharisee named Simon, a woman, who was called a sinner, stood weeping behind Jesus, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with ointment.
Luke’s gospel shows no concern at all about the waste, while John, Mark, and Matthew all register complaint that the sale of the oil could have helped the poor. In John’s gospel, it is Judas, who complains that the oil could have been sold for 300 denarii, which in those days would have been equivalent to a laborer’s yearly salary. Today, we would be talking about $45,000---hardly an insignificant sum. It would make sense to object to the waste, but we are told that it was Judas, who objected, and his objection, the text assures us, was not out of concern for the poor, but because he was keeper of the purse, and he would sometimes steal money for his own purposes. Then we have some words from Jesus, which my father always claimed are the saddest words in the entire bible: the poor you will always have with you. And Jesus added, “but you will not always have me.
Consider the extravagance of that gift. Ask yourself---does it seem wasteful to you? And though Judas’ concern might not truly have been for the poor, nonetheless there is truth to what he says. A thief may not intend the truth, but truth can still come out. Yes, the money could have helped the poor. But the point here is really NOT the poor. Just like Jesus’ life, this expensive perfume is not meant to be saved. It is to be poured out, given, even wasted, or what looks like waste on behalf of something bigger and more important. Yes, the poor could have been helped by the sale of the perfume, but it is also true that a horrific execution was going to take place, followed by a heart wrenching burial, where a body would be prepared in an act of devotion and love.
Be that as it may, I suspect that most of us are far too practical and careful with money to waste a whole year’s salary on expensive perfume to be poured out upon a dead body. I know I am, but sometimes there are these wasteful acts that well, transcend the practical, and perhaps we cannot use the ethics of practicality to judge them.
A few years ago, I was on call for one of my colleagues, who was on vacation. As luck would have it, there was a death, and the family did not want to wait for the minister to return from her month long vacation. Now I did not know the family or any of the details, but I did speak with my colleague, who told me what I needed to know. The woman who died, let’s call her Edith, was the sister of a stalwart church member, Anna. And Edith’s life had been a mess. She had all kinds of psychological struggles, and used illegal drugs as a means of self-medication. The drug habit had taken over her life, and she stole from family members to support it, ending up on the streets for a few years. Anna, however, did take Edith into her home, trying to help her. About a year before Edith died, Anna gave her a beautiful and very expensive emerald and diamond necklace, which had belonged to their mother. Both the mother and Edith shared a May birthday. Well, Edith’s two daughters, who were in their early 30’s were furious at their mother. “This is Grandma’s necklace; one of us should get it,” they objected. “Mom, you know what Edith will do? She will sell it for drugs! How could you be so stupid and callous?! Well, Edith lasted about six months in Anna’s house and before long was out on the streets again. About four months later, she died of an overdose. Edith left no instructions about her death except one: Anna found a note with the necklace, Edith had given a friend for safe keeping. Please bury me with mom’s necklace around my neck. Edith had not sold the necklace for drugs.
When I spoke to Anna about her sister’s service, she was almost hysterical, because her two daughters were furious. “You can’t waste Grandma’s precious necklace that way. She would never have wanted that. She would want one of us to get it. It does not matter who, but you cannot waste this beautiful necklace on Edith, burying it in the ground with her. It's obscene.” And so, since I was doing the funeral, I was caught right in the middle. But in the end, I stood with Anna, who wanted her sister buried with the necklace. “Look,” I said, to the daughters, your mother gave this gift to her sister, and her sister did not sell it for drugs---despite what you thought she would do. She treasured it as the precious gift it is, and she asked for one thing---that this necklace be placed around her neck and buried with her. And this is what we are going to do---wasteful as you two might think it is.” And indeed, that is what we did. Maybe it was wasteful. Maybe people would say expensive and beautiful necklaces are for the living and not for the dead. Yet things are not always just things---they can assume great symbolic meaning as it did in this case. What looked like waste was really a kind of grace. But you needed the eyes to see the grace and the daughters were blind.
We are moving toward Jerusalem, where Jesus will suffer and die. Why? In so many ways, when we look at his death, it looks like a colossal waste. But seen through the eyes of faith, the waste does not tell the whole story, though at the time of Jesus’ death, no one really knew how the whole story would be understood and told. And even today, people are still trying to understand and tell the story.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
April 3, 2022
John 12: 1-8
Given that Jesus’ life was at grave risk, you might think it wasn’t very smart of him to go to Jerusalem. In the previous chapter, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and the chief priests and Pharisees were very worried that people would be so impressed by his many signs and wonders they would follow Jesus, and the Romans, feeling threatened, would come down hard on the Jewish people, destroying their Temple and their nation---such as the nation was during Roman times. Caiaphas, the high priest told the Jewish leaders it was preferable for Jesus to die than to have the Jewish people destroyed. And so, the text says in chapter 11, “From that day on they planned to put him to death.” Despite the threat, Jesus would go to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, but not before making a stop in Bethany, the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, where he would have a meal with his friends. And it was here that Mary took a pound of very costly perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. Though Judas complained this was a terrible waste, because the perfume could have been sold and the money distributed to the poor, Jesus tells him that Mary has done a beautiful thing. “She has anointed my body for burial,” he said. Indeed, the anointing with oil was commonly done in ancient Israel. Kings were anointed with oil upon their ascension to the throne. Sick people were anointed as a means of healing, and the dead were washed and then anointed with oil as a sign of respect and tender care. So, here we are told that the anointing is because Jesus is moving toward his death in Jerusalem.
The story of Jesus’ anointing is told in all four gospels, but the details are very different. We just heard what Mary did---pouring expensive nard ointment all over Jesus’ feet and then wiping his feet with her hair---quite a sensual scene. In Matthew and Mark it is an unnamed woman who poured some very expensive ointment over Jesus’ head in Bethany at the house of Simon the Leper. In Luke, while Jesus is having supper at the home of a Pharisee named Simon, a woman, who was called a sinner, stood weeping behind Jesus, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with ointment.
Luke’s gospel shows no concern at all about the waste, while John, Mark, and Matthew all register complaint that the sale of the oil could have helped the poor. In John’s gospel, it is Judas, who complains that the oil could have been sold for 300 denarii, which in those days would have been equivalent to a laborer’s yearly salary. Today, we would be talking about $45,000---hardly an insignificant sum. It would make sense to object to the waste, but we are told that it was Judas, who objected, and his objection, the text assures us, was not out of concern for the poor, but because he was keeper of the purse, and he would sometimes steal money for his own purposes. Then we have some words from Jesus, which my father always claimed are the saddest words in the entire bible: the poor you will always have with you. And Jesus added, “but you will not always have me.
Consider the extravagance of that gift. Ask yourself---does it seem wasteful to you? And though Judas’ concern might not truly have been for the poor, nonetheless there is truth to what he says. A thief may not intend the truth, but truth can still come out. Yes, the money could have helped the poor. But the point here is really NOT the poor. Just like Jesus’ life, this expensive perfume is not meant to be saved. It is to be poured out, given, even wasted, or what looks like waste on behalf of something bigger and more important. Yes, the poor could have been helped by the sale of the perfume, but it is also true that a horrific execution was going to take place, followed by a heart wrenching burial, where a body would be prepared in an act of devotion and love.
Be that as it may, I suspect that most of us are far too practical and careful with money to waste a whole year’s salary on expensive perfume to be poured out upon a dead body. I know I am, but sometimes there are these wasteful acts that well, transcend the practical, and perhaps we cannot use the ethics of practicality to judge them.
A few years ago, I was on call for one of my colleagues, who was on vacation. As luck would have it, there was a death, and the family did not want to wait for the minister to return from her month long vacation. Now I did not know the family or any of the details, but I did speak with my colleague, who told me what I needed to know. The woman who died, let’s call her Edith, was the sister of a stalwart church member, Anna. And Edith’s life had been a mess. She had all kinds of psychological struggles, and used illegal drugs as a means of self-medication. The drug habit had taken over her life, and she stole from family members to support it, ending up on the streets for a few years. Anna, however, did take Edith into her home, trying to help her. About a year before Edith died, Anna gave her a beautiful and very expensive emerald and diamond necklace, which had belonged to their mother. Both the mother and Edith shared a May birthday. Well, Edith’s two daughters, who were in their early 30’s were furious at their mother. “This is Grandma’s necklace; one of us should get it,” they objected. “Mom, you know what Edith will do? She will sell it for drugs! How could you be so stupid and callous?! Well, Edith lasted about six months in Anna’s house and before long was out on the streets again. About four months later, she died of an overdose. Edith left no instructions about her death except one: Anna found a note with the necklace, Edith had given a friend for safe keeping. Please bury me with mom’s necklace around my neck. Edith had not sold the necklace for drugs.
When I spoke to Anna about her sister’s service, she was almost hysterical, because her two daughters were furious. “You can’t waste Grandma’s precious necklace that way. She would never have wanted that. She would want one of us to get it. It does not matter who, but you cannot waste this beautiful necklace on Edith, burying it in the ground with her. It's obscene.” And so, since I was doing the funeral, I was caught right in the middle. But in the end, I stood with Anna, who wanted her sister buried with the necklace. “Look,” I said, to the daughters, your mother gave this gift to her sister, and her sister did not sell it for drugs---despite what you thought she would do. She treasured it as the precious gift it is, and she asked for one thing---that this necklace be placed around her neck and buried with her. And this is what we are going to do---wasteful as you two might think it is.” And indeed, that is what we did. Maybe it was wasteful. Maybe people would say expensive and beautiful necklaces are for the living and not for the dead. Yet things are not always just things---they can assume great symbolic meaning as it did in this case. What looked like waste was really a kind of grace. But you needed the eyes to see the grace and the daughters were blind.
We are moving toward Jerusalem, where Jesus will suffer and die. Why? In so many ways, when we look at his death, it looks like a colossal waste. But seen through the eyes of faith, the waste does not tell the whole story, though at the time of Jesus’ death, no one really knew how the whole story would be understood and told. And even today, people are still trying to understand and tell the story.
RETURNING HOME
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church, Congregational in Unionville, CT
March 27, 2022, The Fourth Sunday of Lent
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
There are a few parables, which most people know, even if they NEVER have anything to do with church, The Good Samaritan and today’s lesson, The Prodigal Son, both, by the way, unique to Luke’s gospel. You know the story, how the younger son demands his inheritance from his father, so he can go off and have fun. To ask for one’s inheritance in this way is like saying, “I wish you were dead.” But the father gives it to him anyway; the son leaves, living it up for a while, until he runs out of money and friends, and then, when he finds himself eating with the pigs, he decides to go home. And the father lovingly accepts him, throwing a gala, which leaves the older son, who has always remained home, doing the bidding of his father, angry and resentful. But the father reassures his older son that he had to celebrate, because the one who was lost is now found. So, you know the story; I have preached on this before, but today I am going to see the story through the eyes of one of the greatest painters of all time, the Dutch artist, Rembrandt. Now I have previously shown you this painting before, three years ago, which was the last time this reading came up in the lectionary. But today I want to concentrate on the younger son’s homecoming as seen through the gospel imagined and understood by Rembrandt.
There are people, who consider this painting to be the greatest work ever painted. I do not see how it is possible to decide on the greatest painting any more than the greatest piece of music, but certainly it is among the greatest. The Impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh said about it, “You can only paint a painting like this if you have died many deaths.” And indeed, Rembrandt had. His career had been a brilliant success; he became rich and famous, but he lived extravagantly, and when there was an economic downturn in the Dutch Republic and commissions were fewer, his fortune collapsed. He also suffered horrific losses in his life. He lost three children in quick succession. His beloved and young wife, Saskia, died at the age of 29. In grief he took up with his fourth child’s nurse and promised to marry her until he fell in love with a servant in his household. The nurse sued him for breach of promise; he was excommunicated from the Dutch Reformed Church for living with a woman out of wedlock, and then the servant whom he dearly loved, died. Five years later, his beloved son, Titus, also died. Rembrandt could have been a broken man, and in many ways, he was, but it was then, the last few years of his life that he painted this masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
When we look at the painting, we see mercy. The father’s hands, one masculine, the other feminine, are gently placed on his son’s shoulders in a loving touch of merciful acceptance. Like his older son, the father is dressed in red finery. The older son looks on, his hands folded, some say in a gesture of judgment, and though there are two other characters present in the painting, we do not much care about them. We are fixated on the young son, whose clothes are tattered and torn and of course, our eyes travel to the father, ready to forgive all.
Now I want you to consider what it means to return home. The gospel is not primarily about what happened in the past to other people. We are invited to enter into the story and consider our journeys home. It is hard to go home, ---especially after you have been through something hard, perhaps because you messed up, as the younger son did, or maybe you simply chose to walk a different path. It’s hard to return home, when the people at home sit in judgment, because their expectations do not align with yours. I remember a young man I met some years ago, who studied violin at The Eastman School of Music, much to the rage of his parents, both of whom were doctors, along with grandparents on both sides and an older brother and sister. He had broken the family code, and he told me that going home that first Christmas was the hardest journey he ever had to make. “I did not swallow my pride,” he said, because I did not owe that humiliation to anyone. “I went home in love, and though love is not what greeted me, I did what I had to do. I went home, and home is the hardest place to be, when people accuse you of hurting them, rejecting them, and even destroying your own life. It felt like a journey of one million miles. And it is a journey I will have to make over and over again, until my family can see that my life is mine to live.”
Going home is hard enough when you have a pretty good idea what to expect, but what if you have no idea what will greet you. One of my friends at the Y, told me just last week about a neighbor of hers, a Viet Nam vet, who came home to a nation that gave him no victory parade, no honors or thank yous. He was greeted with anger, bitterness, the shrill catcalls demanding to know how many Vietnamese babies he had burned to death with napalm. He spoke about it to my friend, because he found himself thinking about the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, many of whom had no idea where they were going or why. They will know the truth in a way Russian citizens do not and will not know. What will it be like for them, he mused, to return home, and see the official story so different from the one they lived? How will they be met---with unspoken judgment or praise? How will they feel about what they have done? And what will they think they deserve? Going home under such conditions will be incredibly painful.
We know what the prodigal son thought he deserved. He was ready to live in the household as a servant. He recognized that he had sinned against his father and against the moral law as laid down in Judaism. Obedience to the father was the cardinal virtue, and the Old Testament even says that a disobedient son may be killed by his father. In Rembrandt’s imagination, the son knelt at his father’s feet with a shaven head in profound gesture of humility. He would accept the punishment, but as we know, there would be no punishment. Even without knowing the details of the story, the way Rembrandt has painted it, we can see the father’s compassion in his touch, if not exactly on his face. We do not have to know that the father will throw a celebration the likes of which the house had not seen---at least not for a long time. Rembrandt has shown us what mercy looks like, not only from the father of the two sons, but also from the Father-Mother God of us all.
Rembrandt had lost everything. He was destitute, grief stricken, his reputation, though a great one, was not so sought after now. And yet he knew that the final chapter of his life, which was drawing very near, would not be one of blame or condemnation. Though the world seemed to reject him, though his art was not as well sought after as it had once been, though the church deemed him a sinner, outside the boundaries of the sacraments, condemning him for pride and lust, yet Rembrandt knew something that the younger son in the parable would also come to learn and know. He knew that the final words spoken by God are love and mercy. While the younger son was penitent, Rembrandt himself was hardly very penitent for the life he lived. It was, however, his life, and he lived it as he saw fit, hoping and even believing that God could and would read the story of his life with great compassion and understanding. Rembrandt too would go home---home to the God he knew would love and accept him for all he had achieved and for all he had failed. It was the failure, the pain of loss---his many deaths as Van Gogh said--- that finally allowed him to paint his greatest masterpiece.
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church, Congregational in Unionville, CT
March 27, 2022, The Fourth Sunday of Lent
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
There are a few parables, which most people know, even if they NEVER have anything to do with church, The Good Samaritan and today’s lesson, The Prodigal Son, both, by the way, unique to Luke’s gospel. You know the story, how the younger son demands his inheritance from his father, so he can go off and have fun. To ask for one’s inheritance in this way is like saying, “I wish you were dead.” But the father gives it to him anyway; the son leaves, living it up for a while, until he runs out of money and friends, and then, when he finds himself eating with the pigs, he decides to go home. And the father lovingly accepts him, throwing a gala, which leaves the older son, who has always remained home, doing the bidding of his father, angry and resentful. But the father reassures his older son that he had to celebrate, because the one who was lost is now found. So, you know the story; I have preached on this before, but today I am going to see the story through the eyes of one of the greatest painters of all time, the Dutch artist, Rembrandt. Now I have previously shown you this painting before, three years ago, which was the last time this reading came up in the lectionary. But today I want to concentrate on the younger son’s homecoming as seen through the gospel imagined and understood by Rembrandt.
There are people, who consider this painting to be the greatest work ever painted. I do not see how it is possible to decide on the greatest painting any more than the greatest piece of music, but certainly it is among the greatest. The Impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh said about it, “You can only paint a painting like this if you have died many deaths.” And indeed, Rembrandt had. His career had been a brilliant success; he became rich and famous, but he lived extravagantly, and when there was an economic downturn in the Dutch Republic and commissions were fewer, his fortune collapsed. He also suffered horrific losses in his life. He lost three children in quick succession. His beloved and young wife, Saskia, died at the age of 29. In grief he took up with his fourth child’s nurse and promised to marry her until he fell in love with a servant in his household. The nurse sued him for breach of promise; he was excommunicated from the Dutch Reformed Church for living with a woman out of wedlock, and then the servant whom he dearly loved, died. Five years later, his beloved son, Titus, also died. Rembrandt could have been a broken man, and in many ways, he was, but it was then, the last few years of his life that he painted this masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
When we look at the painting, we see mercy. The father’s hands, one masculine, the other feminine, are gently placed on his son’s shoulders in a loving touch of merciful acceptance. Like his older son, the father is dressed in red finery. The older son looks on, his hands folded, some say in a gesture of judgment, and though there are two other characters present in the painting, we do not much care about them. We are fixated on the young son, whose clothes are tattered and torn and of course, our eyes travel to the father, ready to forgive all.
Now I want you to consider what it means to return home. The gospel is not primarily about what happened in the past to other people. We are invited to enter into the story and consider our journeys home. It is hard to go home, ---especially after you have been through something hard, perhaps because you messed up, as the younger son did, or maybe you simply chose to walk a different path. It’s hard to return home, when the people at home sit in judgment, because their expectations do not align with yours. I remember a young man I met some years ago, who studied violin at The Eastman School of Music, much to the rage of his parents, both of whom were doctors, along with grandparents on both sides and an older brother and sister. He had broken the family code, and he told me that going home that first Christmas was the hardest journey he ever had to make. “I did not swallow my pride,” he said, because I did not owe that humiliation to anyone. “I went home in love, and though love is not what greeted me, I did what I had to do. I went home, and home is the hardest place to be, when people accuse you of hurting them, rejecting them, and even destroying your own life. It felt like a journey of one million miles. And it is a journey I will have to make over and over again, until my family can see that my life is mine to live.”
Going home is hard enough when you have a pretty good idea what to expect, but what if you have no idea what will greet you. One of my friends at the Y, told me just last week about a neighbor of hers, a Viet Nam vet, who came home to a nation that gave him no victory parade, no honors or thank yous. He was greeted with anger, bitterness, the shrill catcalls demanding to know how many Vietnamese babies he had burned to death with napalm. He spoke about it to my friend, because he found himself thinking about the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, many of whom had no idea where they were going or why. They will know the truth in a way Russian citizens do not and will not know. What will it be like for them, he mused, to return home, and see the official story so different from the one they lived? How will they be met---with unspoken judgment or praise? How will they feel about what they have done? And what will they think they deserve? Going home under such conditions will be incredibly painful.
We know what the prodigal son thought he deserved. He was ready to live in the household as a servant. He recognized that he had sinned against his father and against the moral law as laid down in Judaism. Obedience to the father was the cardinal virtue, and the Old Testament even says that a disobedient son may be killed by his father. In Rembrandt’s imagination, the son knelt at his father’s feet with a shaven head in profound gesture of humility. He would accept the punishment, but as we know, there would be no punishment. Even without knowing the details of the story, the way Rembrandt has painted it, we can see the father’s compassion in his touch, if not exactly on his face. We do not have to know that the father will throw a celebration the likes of which the house had not seen---at least not for a long time. Rembrandt has shown us what mercy looks like, not only from the father of the two sons, but also from the Father-Mother God of us all.
Rembrandt had lost everything. He was destitute, grief stricken, his reputation, though a great one, was not so sought after now. And yet he knew that the final chapter of his life, which was drawing very near, would not be one of blame or condemnation. Though the world seemed to reject him, though his art was not as well sought after as it had once been, though the church deemed him a sinner, outside the boundaries of the sacraments, condemning him for pride and lust, yet Rembrandt knew something that the younger son in the parable would also come to learn and know. He knew that the final words spoken by God are love and mercy. While the younger son was penitent, Rembrandt himself was hardly very penitent for the life he lived. It was, however, his life, and he lived it as he saw fit, hoping and even believing that God could and would read the story of his life with great compassion and understanding. Rembrandt too would go home---home to the God he knew would love and accept him for all he had achieved and for all he had failed. It was the failure, the pain of loss---his many deaths as Van Gogh said--- that finally allowed him to paint his greatest masterpiece.
March 30, 2022
Dear Friends,
Last week I wrote about Arthur Brooks’ prescription for happiness in later life. This week I want to tell you about something else he recommended people consider: the difference between pleasure and enjoyment. Superficially, we might consider the words to be synonyms, but Professor Brooks asks us to dig more deeply. In Greek mythology Eros and Psyche had a daughter named Hedone, known as pleasure---(think hedonistic) She was only a minor goddess, and there are no great myths or tales attached to her, but still she was considered a goddess., something the Roman philosopher, Cicero, saw as dangerous. The deification of pleasure, he warned, “is vicious and unnatural, “because pleasure can overcome and overpower natural instinct.” Pleasure, in other words, can easily become addictive, and addiction catches us in a whirlwind we may not be able to control.
Consider, on the other hand, enjoyment. While pleasure “happens,” enjoyment is created and cultivated. Pleasure can be addictive, but enjoyment is elective. If we are very hungry, we eat and our appetite is satiated, and indeed, there is a pleasure in that. But the pleasure of eating is not exactly the same as the enjoyment of eating, when, for example, we are gathered with family and friends to partake of a meal. Along with the eating goes conversation and the delight in other people’s company. Eating to satisfy hunger is hardly the same as enjoying a well prepared meal. Even after the meal is finished, we can savor the experience. Savoring is a kind of cultivation. We learn to cultivate good taste, for example. Cicero says that enjoyment gives us a sense of forward movement, because we are often learning from and through our enjoyment.
I am a complete teetotaler; I intensely dislike the taste of alcohol, and so I have never learned to savor a glass of good wine. Five years or so ago, I took a marvelous trip to Italy, parts of Tuscany and Umbria, and as you would imagine we went to some vineyards for wine tasting. There was this one vineyard, run by a very elegant woman, and she was describing the whole process of grape growing and the making of wine. Samples of various wines were passed around and, of course, I did not partake. I simply hate the taste of wine! After a few times of turning the samples down, she asked me what was wrong. “Oh,” I said, “I don’t drink. I don’t like the taste of wine. “ She looked at me, shocked, and said, “My Dear, I feel sorry for you.” What she meant was that I had never learned to cultivate a taste for wine. I could not tell the difference between cheap wine and some fine and expensive wine. For her wine was not primarily about the pleasure of drinking; it was all about the enjoyment of drinking. She had undoubtedly cultivated a taste for fine wine, which I not only completely lacked, but I also had no interest at all in cultivating such a taste.
We can say the same thing about many activities we normally do. Take reading for example. I read newspapers and magazines for the pleasure of leaning what I think I need to know about the world. Sometimes there is a particularly well written article that does more than give me information; it also changes the way I think about a particular issue, and then the pleasure morphs into enjoyment. The reading becomes more than simply acquiring information. It becomes the deep enjoyment of learning. Rarely do I read a book for pleasure. I am very picky about what books I will bother to pick up and read. My time is precious to me, and so I am very careful about my book choice. Reading my books is a deep enjoyment; I feel I am changed by my encounter with the material. I understand the world a little more deeply and I am challenged to see things from a new perspective. All this for me is profoundly enjoyable
Remember the fitness guru, Jack LaLane? Well, I recently read that he disliked working out, but he enjoyed being fit. I would have thought that working out would have at least given him some pleasure, but he claimed NO! He only worked out because of the enjoyment he received from being fit. Not everyone is so disciplined. Many people have a hard time doing things that give them no pleasure at all, even when they can see the enjoyment that lies around the corner.
Arthur Brooks tries to encourage people to consider what it is that brings true happiness and lasting meaning into their lives. And it seems that he believes we can be helped to cultivate a deeper and more meaningful happiness by realizing what is mere pleasure and what is truly enjoyable.
I am not sure what Jesus would say about this. Jesus did not spend much time talking about pleasure, and he did not directly use the language of enjoyment. But the Christian tradition certainly did. It talked about enjoying God not only in this life but in the life beyond, where God can be enjoyed forever.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Last week I wrote about Arthur Brooks’ prescription for happiness in later life. This week I want to tell you about something else he recommended people consider: the difference between pleasure and enjoyment. Superficially, we might consider the words to be synonyms, but Professor Brooks asks us to dig more deeply. In Greek mythology Eros and Psyche had a daughter named Hedone, known as pleasure---(think hedonistic) She was only a minor goddess, and there are no great myths or tales attached to her, but still she was considered a goddess., something the Roman philosopher, Cicero, saw as dangerous. The deification of pleasure, he warned, “is vicious and unnatural, “because pleasure can overcome and overpower natural instinct.” Pleasure, in other words, can easily become addictive, and addiction catches us in a whirlwind we may not be able to control.
Consider, on the other hand, enjoyment. While pleasure “happens,” enjoyment is created and cultivated. Pleasure can be addictive, but enjoyment is elective. If we are very hungry, we eat and our appetite is satiated, and indeed, there is a pleasure in that. But the pleasure of eating is not exactly the same as the enjoyment of eating, when, for example, we are gathered with family and friends to partake of a meal. Along with the eating goes conversation and the delight in other people’s company. Eating to satisfy hunger is hardly the same as enjoying a well prepared meal. Even after the meal is finished, we can savor the experience. Savoring is a kind of cultivation. We learn to cultivate good taste, for example. Cicero says that enjoyment gives us a sense of forward movement, because we are often learning from and through our enjoyment.
I am a complete teetotaler; I intensely dislike the taste of alcohol, and so I have never learned to savor a glass of good wine. Five years or so ago, I took a marvelous trip to Italy, parts of Tuscany and Umbria, and as you would imagine we went to some vineyards for wine tasting. There was this one vineyard, run by a very elegant woman, and she was describing the whole process of grape growing and the making of wine. Samples of various wines were passed around and, of course, I did not partake. I simply hate the taste of wine! After a few times of turning the samples down, she asked me what was wrong. “Oh,” I said, “I don’t drink. I don’t like the taste of wine. “ She looked at me, shocked, and said, “My Dear, I feel sorry for you.” What she meant was that I had never learned to cultivate a taste for wine. I could not tell the difference between cheap wine and some fine and expensive wine. For her wine was not primarily about the pleasure of drinking; it was all about the enjoyment of drinking. She had undoubtedly cultivated a taste for fine wine, which I not only completely lacked, but I also had no interest at all in cultivating such a taste.
We can say the same thing about many activities we normally do. Take reading for example. I read newspapers and magazines for the pleasure of leaning what I think I need to know about the world. Sometimes there is a particularly well written article that does more than give me information; it also changes the way I think about a particular issue, and then the pleasure morphs into enjoyment. The reading becomes more than simply acquiring information. It becomes the deep enjoyment of learning. Rarely do I read a book for pleasure. I am very picky about what books I will bother to pick up and read. My time is precious to me, and so I am very careful about my book choice. Reading my books is a deep enjoyment; I feel I am changed by my encounter with the material. I understand the world a little more deeply and I am challenged to see things from a new perspective. All this for me is profoundly enjoyable
Remember the fitness guru, Jack LaLane? Well, I recently read that he disliked working out, but he enjoyed being fit. I would have thought that working out would have at least given him some pleasure, but he claimed NO! He only worked out because of the enjoyment he received from being fit. Not everyone is so disciplined. Many people have a hard time doing things that give them no pleasure at all, even when they can see the enjoyment that lies around the corner.
Arthur Brooks tries to encourage people to consider what it is that brings true happiness and lasting meaning into their lives. And it seems that he believes we can be helped to cultivate a deeper and more meaningful happiness by realizing what is mere pleasure and what is truly enjoyable.
I am not sure what Jesus would say about this. Jesus did not spend much time talking about pleasure, and he did not directly use the language of enjoyment. But the Christian tradition certainly did. It talked about enjoying God not only in this life but in the life beyond, where God can be enjoyed forever.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
March 23, 2022
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and musician, who also teaches at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as well as the Harvard Business School. He also writes frequently for The Atlantic on the subject of happiness. In fact, he has also taught a very popular course at Harvard on the subject. People, young, old, and in between all want to be happy. In his latest book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, he has come up with five behaviors that are essential for happiness particularly as we age. His work is based on actual research, examining people’s lives, and then trying to figure out what has led to happy or unhappy lives.
The first two behaviors are relatively simple: Do not smoke and do not drink. Concerning drinking he does not mean that it is necessary to avoid all alcohol, (though he does say avoid all smoking). There is nothing wrong with drinking socially now and then, but it can be very dangerous to need a drink. If you need that cocktail every day, even if it is only one, that could be a danger sign. Let the alcohol go as a regular habit, because in the long run, it will not serve your health or your spirit, and it will not really add to your happiness.
Number three: move your body. Exercise regularly. This does not mean that you MUST join a gym or purchase expensive equipment. He actually suggests that walking is the best thing to do and the easiest activity for older people to pursue. Get out every day and walk! You will feel better, and if your body feels better, so will the rest of you.
Number 4: Get your spiritual and/or religious life in order. This does not necessitate joining a church and suddenly finding religion. People can be atheists and agnostics and be content and happy. But all human beings need to be concerned about meaning and what constitutes a well lived life. As we age, we should realize that we will suffer loss. Loved ones will die; we will lose certain capacities as our physical and mental strength lessens. We too will one day die. That is simply the way things are, and it is important to mentally and spiritually prepare for this. How are you going to cope? What kind of beliefs do you have about life/death and the meaning of it all that might help you face and move through the difficult challenges ahead? Freud might have said that denial is one of the great coping mechanisms, but denial about loss and death only lasts so long. Someday the hard truths need to be faced. And it is preferable to think about them when you are not in the midst of crisis.
And finally #5: Nurture relationships. For many people spouses and children are the most important relationships in their lives, but it is very important to have relationships beyond the family. Friendships are often vital to well lived lives because they can introduce new and different perspectives, beyond what families will often allow. Sometimes it is easier to talk about certain subjects with friends rather than family. I know people, who love to talk politics, but cannot do it with family members, and so their friends are the ones with whom they discuss political subjects or test ideas they would not dare bring up in their family. People will often avoid discussing end of life issues with a spouse or children but can do it quite easily with a friend. Friends have even been named as medical proxies rather than a spouse or an adult child, because there can be greater confidence with a friend that the final wishes will be carried out.
Bur friends are not simply for the challenging and difficult decisions and subjects. Friendship adds diversity and delight to our lives, and as one person said to me recently, “I laugh with my friends in a way I do not with my family. There is a freedom in friendship that is different from the freedom we have in families.”
I know exactly what she means. I have two college roommates, who mean the world to me. We have been friends for 50 plus years. They remember me when I was 18, and they share memories with me that NO ONE else on this earth shares. We have laughed together and cried together, and I know that I would not be who I am today without these two very special people. In the last three years we have all lost our mothers, and we all have memories of each other’s mothers. I reminded Ann, for example, how her mother was furious, when a few years after college, she decided to move in with her boyfriend, who became her husband to whom she is still married these many decades later. Her mother completely rejected the idea of co-habitation, and she made Ann’s father talk with the boyfriend. What was THEN so embarrassing and even horrifying, now seems hysterically funny. Jon has told us how the conversation went, and I remember a visit when the three of us (plus Jon) just laughed ourselves practically to death about what was said. Ann and I agreed that we would NEVER in a million years have done anything remotely like that with our children. But times have changed, and mores also change with the times. What was so unacceptable to one generation is no big deal to the next one. We even noted how all our mothers accepted their grandchildren living with their significant others, because times had indeed changed, and even old people can change with the times.
Arthur Brooks believes that the nurturing of relationships is probably the single most important thing we can do as we age. We need those relationships perhaps even more as we grow older. Youth has the time, the energy, and the resilience to meet life’s challenges without a lot of pondering, but as we age, we do ponder what it is all about, and our relationships help us to do just that. The word friend or friendship does not appear very often in the Bible, but when it does, it is something to pay heed to. Jesus had his disciples, whom he finally in John’s gospel referred to as his friends, and though they betrayed and disappointed him, still they remained his friends. And indeed, this is how relationships can work: people---our family and friends---may indeed sometimes let us down, but as we age, we can realize and accept that our love for family and friends does not depend on them being perfect. After all, God’s love for us hardly depends upon our perfection. And if we can love the imperfect, how much more can God!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and musician, who also teaches at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as well as the Harvard Business School. He also writes frequently for The Atlantic on the subject of happiness. In fact, he has also taught a very popular course at Harvard on the subject. People, young, old, and in between all want to be happy. In his latest book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, he has come up with five behaviors that are essential for happiness particularly as we age. His work is based on actual research, examining people’s lives, and then trying to figure out what has led to happy or unhappy lives.
The first two behaviors are relatively simple: Do not smoke and do not drink. Concerning drinking he does not mean that it is necessary to avoid all alcohol, (though he does say avoid all smoking). There is nothing wrong with drinking socially now and then, but it can be very dangerous to need a drink. If you need that cocktail every day, even if it is only one, that could be a danger sign. Let the alcohol go as a regular habit, because in the long run, it will not serve your health or your spirit, and it will not really add to your happiness.
Number three: move your body. Exercise regularly. This does not mean that you MUST join a gym or purchase expensive equipment. He actually suggests that walking is the best thing to do and the easiest activity for older people to pursue. Get out every day and walk! You will feel better, and if your body feels better, so will the rest of you.
Number 4: Get your spiritual and/or religious life in order. This does not necessitate joining a church and suddenly finding religion. People can be atheists and agnostics and be content and happy. But all human beings need to be concerned about meaning and what constitutes a well lived life. As we age, we should realize that we will suffer loss. Loved ones will die; we will lose certain capacities as our physical and mental strength lessens. We too will one day die. That is simply the way things are, and it is important to mentally and spiritually prepare for this. How are you going to cope? What kind of beliefs do you have about life/death and the meaning of it all that might help you face and move through the difficult challenges ahead? Freud might have said that denial is one of the great coping mechanisms, but denial about loss and death only lasts so long. Someday the hard truths need to be faced. And it is preferable to think about them when you are not in the midst of crisis.
And finally #5: Nurture relationships. For many people spouses and children are the most important relationships in their lives, but it is very important to have relationships beyond the family. Friendships are often vital to well lived lives because they can introduce new and different perspectives, beyond what families will often allow. Sometimes it is easier to talk about certain subjects with friends rather than family. I know people, who love to talk politics, but cannot do it with family members, and so their friends are the ones with whom they discuss political subjects or test ideas they would not dare bring up in their family. People will often avoid discussing end of life issues with a spouse or children but can do it quite easily with a friend. Friends have even been named as medical proxies rather than a spouse or an adult child, because there can be greater confidence with a friend that the final wishes will be carried out.
Bur friends are not simply for the challenging and difficult decisions and subjects. Friendship adds diversity and delight to our lives, and as one person said to me recently, “I laugh with my friends in a way I do not with my family. There is a freedom in friendship that is different from the freedom we have in families.”
I know exactly what she means. I have two college roommates, who mean the world to me. We have been friends for 50 plus years. They remember me when I was 18, and they share memories with me that NO ONE else on this earth shares. We have laughed together and cried together, and I know that I would not be who I am today without these two very special people. In the last three years we have all lost our mothers, and we all have memories of each other’s mothers. I reminded Ann, for example, how her mother was furious, when a few years after college, she decided to move in with her boyfriend, who became her husband to whom she is still married these many decades later. Her mother completely rejected the idea of co-habitation, and she made Ann’s father talk with the boyfriend. What was THEN so embarrassing and even horrifying, now seems hysterically funny. Jon has told us how the conversation went, and I remember a visit when the three of us (plus Jon) just laughed ourselves practically to death about what was said. Ann and I agreed that we would NEVER in a million years have done anything remotely like that with our children. But times have changed, and mores also change with the times. What was so unacceptable to one generation is no big deal to the next one. We even noted how all our mothers accepted their grandchildren living with their significant others, because times had indeed changed, and even old people can change with the times.
Arthur Brooks believes that the nurturing of relationships is probably the single most important thing we can do as we age. We need those relationships perhaps even more as we grow older. Youth has the time, the energy, and the resilience to meet life’s challenges without a lot of pondering, but as we age, we do ponder what it is all about, and our relationships help us to do just that. The word friend or friendship does not appear very often in the Bible, but when it does, it is something to pay heed to. Jesus had his disciples, whom he finally in John’s gospel referred to as his friends, and though they betrayed and disappointed him, still they remained his friends. And indeed, this is how relationships can work: people---our family and friends---may indeed sometimes let us down, but as we age, we can realize and accept that our love for family and friends does not depend on them being perfect. After all, God’s love for us hardly depends upon our perfection. And if we can love the imperfect, how much more can God!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
March 23, 2022
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and musician, who also teaches at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as well as the Harvard Business School. He also writes frequently for The Atlantic on the subject of happiness. In fact, he has also taught a very popular course at Harvard on the subject. People, young, old, and in between all want to be happy. In his latest book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, he has come up with five behaviors that are essential for happiness particularly as we age. His work is based on actual research, examining people’s lives, and then trying to figure out what has led to happy or unhappy lives.
The first two behaviors are relatively simple: Do not smoke and do not drink. Concerning drinking he does not mean that it is necessary to avoid all alcohol, (though he does say avoid all smoking). There is nothing wrong with drinking socially now and then, but it can be very dangerous to need a drink. If you need that cocktail every day, even if it is only one, that could be a danger sign. Let the alcohol go as a regular habit, because in the long run, it will not serve your health or your spirit, and it will not really add to your happiness.
Number three: move your body. Exercise regularly. This does not mean that you MUST join a gym or purchase expensive equipment. He actually suggests that walking is the best thing to do and the easiest activity for older people to pursue. Get out every day and walk! You will feel better, and if your body feels better, so will the rest of you.
Number 4: Get your spiritual and/or religious life in order. This does not necessitate joining a church and suddenly finding religion. People can be atheists and agnostics and be content and happy. But all human beings need to be concerned about meaning and what constitutes a well lived life. As we age, we should realize that we will suffer loss. Loved ones will die; we will lose certain capacities as our physical and mental strength lessens. We too will one day die. That is simply the way things are, and it is important to mentally and spiritually prepare for this. How are you going to cope? What kind of beliefs do you have about life/death and the meaning of it all that might help you face and move through the difficult challenges ahead? Freud might have said that denial is one of the great coping mechanisms, but denial about loss and death only lasts so long. Someday the hard truths need to be faced. And it is preferable to think about them when you are not in the midst of crisis.
And finally #5: Nurture relationships. For many people spouses and children are the most important relationships in their lives, but it is very important to have relationships beyond the family. Friendships are often vital to well lived lives because they can introduce new and different perspectives, beyond what families will often allow. Sometimes it is easier to talk about certain subjects with friends rather than family. I know people, who love to talk politics, but cannot do it with family members, and so their friends are the ones with whom they discuss political subjects or test ideas they would not dare bring up in their family. People will often avoid discussing end of life issues with a spouse or children but can do it quite easily with a friend. Friends have even been named as medical proxies rather than a spouse or an adult child, because there can be greater confidence with a friend that the final wishes will be carried out.
Bur friends are not simply for the challenging and difficult decisions and subjects. Friendship adds diversity and delight to our lives, and as one person said to me recently, “I laugh with my friends in a way I do not with my family. There is a freedom in friendship that is different from the freedom we have in families.”
I know exactly what she means. I have two college roommates, who mean the world to me. We have been friends for 50 plus years. They remember me when I was 18, and they share memories with me that NO ONE else on this earth shares. We have laughed together and cried together, and I know that I would not be who I am today without these two very special people. In the last three years we have all lost our mothers, and we all have memories of each other’s mothers. I reminded Ann, for example, how her mother was furious, when a few years after college, she decided to move in with her boyfriend, who became her husband to whom she is still married these many decades later. Her mother completely rejected the idea of co-habitation, and she made Ann’s father talk with the boyfriend. What was THEN so embarrassing and even horrifying, now seems hysterically funny. Jon has told us how the conversation went, and I remember a visit when the three of us (plus Jon) just laughed ourselves practically to death about what was said. Ann and I agreed that we would NEVER in a million years have done anything remotely like that with our children. But times have changed, and mores also change with the times. What was so unacceptable to one generation is no big deal to the next one. We even noted how all our mothers accepted their grandchildren living with their significant others, because times had indeed changed, and even old people can change with the times.
Arthur Brooks believes that the nurturing of relationships is probably the single most important thing we can do as we age. We need those relationships perhaps even more as we grow older. Youth has the time, the energy, and the resilience to meet life’s challenges without a lot of pondering, but as we age, we do ponder what it is all about, and our relationships help us to do just that. The word friend or friendship does not appear very often in the Bible, but when it does, it is something to pay heed to. Jesus had his disciples, whom he finally in John’s gospel referred to as his friends, and though they betrayed and disappointed him, still they remained his friends. And indeed, this is how relationships can work: people---our family and friends---may indeed sometimes let us down, but as we age, we can realize and accept that our love for family and friends does not depend on them being perfect. After all, God’s love for us hardly depends upon our perfection. And if we can love the imperfect, how much more can God!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and musician, who also teaches at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as well as the Harvard Business School. He also writes frequently for The Atlantic on the subject of happiness. In fact, he has also taught a very popular course at Harvard on the subject. People, young, old, and in between all want to be happy. In his latest book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, he has come up with five behaviors that are essential for happiness particularly as we age. His work is based on actual research, examining people’s lives, and then trying to figure out what has led to happy or unhappy lives.
The first two behaviors are relatively simple: Do not smoke and do not drink. Concerning drinking he does not mean that it is necessary to avoid all alcohol, (though he does say avoid all smoking). There is nothing wrong with drinking socially now and then, but it can be very dangerous to need a drink. If you need that cocktail every day, even if it is only one, that could be a danger sign. Let the alcohol go as a regular habit, because in the long run, it will not serve your health or your spirit, and it will not really add to your happiness.
Number three: move your body. Exercise regularly. This does not mean that you MUST join a gym or purchase expensive equipment. He actually suggests that walking is the best thing to do and the easiest activity for older people to pursue. Get out every day and walk! You will feel better, and if your body feels better, so will the rest of you.
Number 4: Get your spiritual and/or religious life in order. This does not necessitate joining a church and suddenly finding religion. People can be atheists and agnostics and be content and happy. But all human beings need to be concerned about meaning and what constitutes a well lived life. As we age, we should realize that we will suffer loss. Loved ones will die; we will lose certain capacities as our physical and mental strength lessens. We too will one day die. That is simply the way things are, and it is important to mentally and spiritually prepare for this. How are you going to cope? What kind of beliefs do you have about life/death and the meaning of it all that might help you face and move through the difficult challenges ahead? Freud might have said that denial is one of the great coping mechanisms, but denial about loss and death only lasts so long. Someday the hard truths need to be faced. And it is preferable to think about them when you are not in the midst of crisis.
And finally #5: Nurture relationships. For many people spouses and children are the most important relationships in their lives, but it is very important to have relationships beyond the family. Friendships are often vital to well lived lives because they can introduce new and different perspectives, beyond what families will often allow. Sometimes it is easier to talk about certain subjects with friends rather than family. I know people, who love to talk politics, but cannot do it with family members, and so their friends are the ones with whom they discuss political subjects or test ideas they would not dare bring up in their family. People will often avoid discussing end of life issues with a spouse or children but can do it quite easily with a friend. Friends have even been named as medical proxies rather than a spouse or an adult child, because there can be greater confidence with a friend that the final wishes will be carried out.
Bur friends are not simply for the challenging and difficult decisions and subjects. Friendship adds diversity and delight to our lives, and as one person said to me recently, “I laugh with my friends in a way I do not with my family. There is a freedom in friendship that is different from the freedom we have in families.”
I know exactly what she means. I have two college roommates, who mean the world to me. We have been friends for 50 plus years. They remember me when I was 18, and they share memories with me that NO ONE else on this earth shares. We have laughed together and cried together, and I know that I would not be who I am today without these two very special people. In the last three years we have all lost our mothers, and we all have memories of each other’s mothers. I reminded Ann, for example, how her mother was furious, when a few years after college, she decided to move in with her boyfriend, who became her husband to whom she is still married these many decades later. Her mother completely rejected the idea of co-habitation, and she made Ann’s father talk with the boyfriend. What was THEN so embarrassing and even horrifying, now seems hysterically funny. Jon has told us how the conversation went, and I remember a visit when the three of us (plus Jon) just laughed ourselves practically to death about what was said. Ann and I agreed that we would NEVER in a million years have done anything remotely like that with our children. But times have changed, and mores also change with the times. What was so unacceptable to one generation is no big deal to the next one. We even noted how all our mothers accepted their grandchildren living with their significant others, because times had indeed changed, and even old people can change with the times.
Arthur Brooks believes that the nurturing of relationships is probably the single most important thing we can do as we age. We need those relationships perhaps even more as we grow older. Youth has the time, the energy, and the resilience to meet life’s challenges without a lot of pondering, but as we age, we do ponder what it is all about, and our relationships help us to do just that. The word friend or friendship does not appear very often in the Bible, but when it does, it is something to pay heed to. Jesus had his disciples, whom he finally in John’s gospel referred to as his friends, and though they betrayed and disappointed him, still they remained his friends. And indeed, this is how relationships can work: people---our family and friends---may indeed sometimes let us down, but as we age, we can realize and accept that our love for family and friends does not depend on them being perfect. After all, God’s love for us hardly depends upon our perfection. And if we can love the imperfect, how much more can God!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Job 17
1 Corinthians 1:18-21
Hope in losing the little that I have keeps me quiet and docile,
But when I have no hope,
when I realize I have nothing to lose,
That's when I am the most dangerous.
Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre.
The Hope Question
A while back, I had the opportunity to stroll through a museum whose sole purpose was on the freedom of the press.It was playfully called the “Newseum.” They had exhibits on just about every press-related story you could imagine, on every leap forward, and every boundary crossed … But among the displays, there is one that I will never forget.
After a long day walking, I rounded a corner to find myself amid an installment of Pulitzer- Prize photographs.
It was this dimly lit, round gallery, inviting its guests to walk through a timeline prize– winning photographs, starting in 1942 and ending in the present. A large, embossed quote from Eddie Adams decorated the entrance wall. “if it makes you laugh,”he wrote,”if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture.”
Now anyone who has ever been to a museum, especially a large one, knows that there are some sections you just have to walk through at a brisk pace, skimming the surface and pausing every now and then… But this exhibit was different. This exhibit demanded that I stop and be still in reverence – to pay a kind of homage to the vast spectrum of human joy and suffering.
In some photographs, I saw scenes that radiated with hope and heroism.
One featured a large 18 – wheeler flying off a bridge while ordinary men and women gathered around to pull the desperate driver to safety. It was incredible.
There were Lovers jumping into one another’s arms after what must have been ages apart.
There were Olympians ablaze with glory after performing feats previously considered superhuman…
but each of these photographs had an opposite. The reverse side of those same coins.
● I was not prepared to see Vietnamese children, naked and stumbling from their village, screaming from the Napalm burns on their skin.
● I wasn’t prepared to see Albanian parents desperately passing a frightened child, the
same age as my son, through a barbed wire fence, trying to flee from a war in Kosovo.
● I wasn’t prepared to see the fear on the faces of men and women with guns to their
heads and photographs snapped in the moments before their lies ended.
● As I walked on, my senses of hope and optimism proved far more fragile than I had ever thought they would be.
● They shattered into pieces around me, cutting my feet as I walked.(hope and optimism)
But for all of the photographs I saw that day, there is one that slips, unbidden, into my thoughts most often.
It was a piece called “The Struggling Girl,” even though the child in the photograph was a boy, a young Sudanese boy, no older than three or four. Hunger had eaten him to nothing.
He had collapsed onto the ground.
He was helpless and alone except for a vulture 2 yards behind him, just waiting.
After the photograph was published in the New York Times in 1993, the photographer, a man named Kevin Carter, was criticized for not reaching out and helping this child, for not picking him up and taking him to find food, for not letting him know for a moment that he wasn’t alone…
But Carter would admit that there were strict instructions not to touch the children for fear of disease.
Carter became so overwhelmed by the trauma of the experience, the hopelessness of the
famine and war he had witnessed, that four months after receiving the Pulitzer for that
photograph, he took his own life. I felt hopeless as I looked at that child and read that story.
It was my job, my vocation to imagine hope, to preach hope, to trust hope…
But at that moment, I realized that until we have looked at that kind of hopelessness
square in its eyes, there’s nothing we have said about hope is worth a damn.
Of course, I thought of the story this week.
We are witnessing a televised account of the brutal invasion against Ukraine.
We are learning to wait expectantly and actively for Christ to show up.
My favorite image for help comes from a Brite Divinity School, Emeritus professor of
pastoral care, Dr. Andrew Lester.
He wrote that hope could be best understood in the language of story.
He asserts that each of us is living a story, responding in the present to some kind of perceived narrative trajectory of our past, but it’s not just that.
We don’t often think about the fact that we are also living in response to the perceived narrative trajectory of our future.
In other words, we each have a future story, the next chapter that we anticipate living into.
We have an imagination of what might be coming tomorrow, next week, or next year, and when
this imagined story is good, then we feel hope.
When it is bad… We feel despair.
Of course, as with any story we tell, there is always the question of whether it is true.
Are we really living in the story we thought we were living?
Are we actually as helpless in the face of it as we think we are? Typically, especially doing this
warmongering, this pandemic, is the pastor's job to ask these questions, to help us reimagine
our future in the light of God's story, God‘s redemptive imagination. We draw pictures of the kind
of future God imagines and say in the words of a friend, “ I know it’s dark right now, but just
believe, somehow, that soon there will be light.”
But today… I want to ask a different kind of question, in some ways a question we are more
primed to answer this year than ever before in our lifetime, a question that Sudanese boy will
not let me ignore: Could our idea of hope be empty?
I can think of two kinds of hope. On one hand, there is the conservative kind of hope. It is the hope that if we ask the right way with enough faith in our hearts, God will fix problems, heal diseases, and right wrongs. God will crash in, everything will be alright. The problem is, I have seen too many desperate prayers go unanswered to believe this could be true. On the other hand there is a naïve hope, road – weary activists tend to call “liberal idealism.” This is the kind of hope that claims if we just love one another, if we just are kind, go vote…
Then things will get better, and everything will be alright. The problem here is, I have seen too many liberals (myself included) too paralyzed by the comforts of the system, too segregated from those they claim to serve to make any kind of discernible difference. Sure both of these kinds of hope have merit. There is wisdom to recognizing what is beyond your control and there is wisdom in recognizing the power of love and kindness to bring out the best in people.
Both are important, but when it comes to the full depth of human suffering, in the end both are insufficient.
For me, both shattered in the face of the pain I saw that day in the museum.
Both were exposed to different kinds of escapism, a vain hope everything will be OK,
maintained by a buffer of privilege.
The truth is, many, far too many, we live and die in poverty and pain with no hope to speak of.
For many of us, this year has shown us just how fragile that kind of hope can be.
So, this year, we must ask: could our idea of help be empty?
Maybe. Probably. But here’s the thing…
These cheap hopes do not discount the existence of true hope anymore than cheap
Romance novels discount the existence of true love.
The truth is, real hope, just like real love, has a higher cost.
For that kind of hope, we need to turn to Christ's story.
If they were awarding Pulitzers for photography in the first century and a photographer
had managed to snap a picture of Christ as a child, what do you think they would have
captured?
The iconografters would have us believe; they would have seen a serene and regal child
sitting in the lap of his straight-faced and haloed mother…But honestly, I think we should be suspicious.
● Is this the image of a child born so poor, his birth took place in a stable, alongside
the livestock?
● Is this the image of a child born into a nation shadowed by an imperial
superpower, crucifying any who dared to speak a word of resistance?
● With respect to the iconografters, I think Christ would have looked far more like
those children from Vietnam or Sudan, children born into poverty, pain, and
hopelessness. And yet… The Christ story is, somehow, a story of unparalleled hope.
The Christ story is not one of resignation or depression, but one of a man’s holding
lepers in his arms, preaching relentless Liberation, and marching boldly toward a Roman
cross holding his executioners in his heart.
How? …. Andrew Lester says that when we look into our imagined future stories and see only pain
that we are paralyzed by despair… But in the Christ story, I think we see that this isn’t the
whole picture.
In the Christ story, we see that when we are hopeless and we have the courage to look
despair in the eye, the courage not to look away, then we discover we have, not a
limitation, but a superpower: Desperation.
The story of Christ is a story of one who looked deeply into his hopelessness in
stopping his impending crucifixion and hopelessness of the nation around him, who
looked into a future that ended, unavoidably, in pain and death…Yet, it set him free.
It set him free to do things most never find the courage to do, to love people most think
are too dangerous to love, to work for a future that went beyond his own life. He became,
in the words often attributed to Oscar Romero, the prophet of a future not his own.
Seeing no hope, in his desperation he died to himself and let the God in him run loose in
the world.
This is real hope-Earned hope.
Hope can only be found along the road of honest hopelessness.
If we want real hope, lasting and un-fragile, it can only be found by looking hopelessness in the
eye. By walking through the gallery of human suffering, sitting, and waiting.
It can only come through a recognition that thousands of children will die of hunger and
preventable causes today. It can only come through meaningful contact with the countless children in the United States who will be denied quality education, who will be denied quality employment, sentenced to a life of suspicion and violence for having had the audacity to be born poor.
It can only come from opening your heart to the millions of people in the United States and in
our global community who have died of COVID-19, having faced a decision to either go to a job
that offers no protection or come home to an eviction notice attached to the door.
It can only come from the honest acceptance of the now unstoppable effects of climate change,
calling into question the very survival of our species.
It can only come when we recognize the demeaning and deteriorating and devastating effects
and meaninglessness of war.
It comes when we are “woke” to the unimaginable reality Ukraine is facing today.
How…
Real, lasting hope can never come from easy answers, escape-ism or naive idealism.
Hope comes from a journey into the very heart of hopelessness itself.
It comes from the hopelessness of Christ, who gives birth to despair, who gives birth to
desperation then to the total freedom to do what must be done.
To allow God to live through you, to become the prophet of a future that is not your own-the
future of a new heaven and new earth.
There’s hope through hopelessness, life through a cross; it is foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to all being saved, it is the very power and wisdom of God.
So, people of God on this Sunday of celebration and installation of a pastor as we journey
through the uncertainty of current events, waiting for the light, may we be consistently
dissatisfied with empty hope, with any hope that it’s fragile or threatened by suffering.
I want to leave you with another photograph. a more recent photograph—-
Baby strollers lined up one after another at the train station in Poland. Mothers of Poland left
strollers for Mothers from Ukraine to use as they continued their freedom journey.
May we have the courage to embrace the hopelessness of Christ, looking deeply at that which
we would rather look away from or explain away… So we may find the desperation, the
liberation, the freedom of Christ.
May we live resurrected lives in the service of a kingdom greater than ourselves.
Amen. May It Be So
1 Corinthians 1:18-21
Hope in losing the little that I have keeps me quiet and docile,
But when I have no hope,
when I realize I have nothing to lose,
That's when I am the most dangerous.
Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre.
The Hope Question
A while back, I had the opportunity to stroll through a museum whose sole purpose was on the freedom of the press.It was playfully called the “Newseum.” They had exhibits on just about every press-related story you could imagine, on every leap forward, and every boundary crossed … But among the displays, there is one that I will never forget.
After a long day walking, I rounded a corner to find myself amid an installment of Pulitzer- Prize photographs.
It was this dimly lit, round gallery, inviting its guests to walk through a timeline prize– winning photographs, starting in 1942 and ending in the present. A large, embossed quote from Eddie Adams decorated the entrance wall. “if it makes you laugh,”he wrote,”if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture.”
Now anyone who has ever been to a museum, especially a large one, knows that there are some sections you just have to walk through at a brisk pace, skimming the surface and pausing every now and then… But this exhibit was different. This exhibit demanded that I stop and be still in reverence – to pay a kind of homage to the vast spectrum of human joy and suffering.
In some photographs, I saw scenes that radiated with hope and heroism.
One featured a large 18 – wheeler flying off a bridge while ordinary men and women gathered around to pull the desperate driver to safety. It was incredible.
There were Lovers jumping into one another’s arms after what must have been ages apart.
There were Olympians ablaze with glory after performing feats previously considered superhuman…
but each of these photographs had an opposite. The reverse side of those same coins.
● I was not prepared to see Vietnamese children, naked and stumbling from their village, screaming from the Napalm burns on their skin.
● I wasn’t prepared to see Albanian parents desperately passing a frightened child, the
same age as my son, through a barbed wire fence, trying to flee from a war in Kosovo.
● I wasn’t prepared to see the fear on the faces of men and women with guns to their
heads and photographs snapped in the moments before their lies ended.
● As I walked on, my senses of hope and optimism proved far more fragile than I had ever thought they would be.
● They shattered into pieces around me, cutting my feet as I walked.(hope and optimism)
But for all of the photographs I saw that day, there is one that slips, unbidden, into my thoughts most often.
It was a piece called “The Struggling Girl,” even though the child in the photograph was a boy, a young Sudanese boy, no older than three or four. Hunger had eaten him to nothing.
He had collapsed onto the ground.
He was helpless and alone except for a vulture 2 yards behind him, just waiting.
After the photograph was published in the New York Times in 1993, the photographer, a man named Kevin Carter, was criticized for not reaching out and helping this child, for not picking him up and taking him to find food, for not letting him know for a moment that he wasn’t alone…
But Carter would admit that there were strict instructions not to touch the children for fear of disease.
Carter became so overwhelmed by the trauma of the experience, the hopelessness of the
famine and war he had witnessed, that four months after receiving the Pulitzer for that
photograph, he took his own life. I felt hopeless as I looked at that child and read that story.
It was my job, my vocation to imagine hope, to preach hope, to trust hope…
But at that moment, I realized that until we have looked at that kind of hopelessness
square in its eyes, there’s nothing we have said about hope is worth a damn.
Of course, I thought of the story this week.
We are witnessing a televised account of the brutal invasion against Ukraine.
We are learning to wait expectantly and actively for Christ to show up.
My favorite image for help comes from a Brite Divinity School, Emeritus professor of
pastoral care, Dr. Andrew Lester.
He wrote that hope could be best understood in the language of story.
He asserts that each of us is living a story, responding in the present to some kind of perceived narrative trajectory of our past, but it’s not just that.
We don’t often think about the fact that we are also living in response to the perceived narrative trajectory of our future.
In other words, we each have a future story, the next chapter that we anticipate living into.
We have an imagination of what might be coming tomorrow, next week, or next year, and when
this imagined story is good, then we feel hope.
When it is bad… We feel despair.
Of course, as with any story we tell, there is always the question of whether it is true.
Are we really living in the story we thought we were living?
Are we actually as helpless in the face of it as we think we are? Typically, especially doing this
warmongering, this pandemic, is the pastor's job to ask these questions, to help us reimagine
our future in the light of God's story, God‘s redemptive imagination. We draw pictures of the kind
of future God imagines and say in the words of a friend, “ I know it’s dark right now, but just
believe, somehow, that soon there will be light.”
But today… I want to ask a different kind of question, in some ways a question we are more
primed to answer this year than ever before in our lifetime, a question that Sudanese boy will
not let me ignore: Could our idea of hope be empty?
I can think of two kinds of hope. On one hand, there is the conservative kind of hope. It is the hope that if we ask the right way with enough faith in our hearts, God will fix problems, heal diseases, and right wrongs. God will crash in, everything will be alright. The problem is, I have seen too many desperate prayers go unanswered to believe this could be true. On the other hand there is a naïve hope, road – weary activists tend to call “liberal idealism.” This is the kind of hope that claims if we just love one another, if we just are kind, go vote…
Then things will get better, and everything will be alright. The problem here is, I have seen too many liberals (myself included) too paralyzed by the comforts of the system, too segregated from those they claim to serve to make any kind of discernible difference. Sure both of these kinds of hope have merit. There is wisdom to recognizing what is beyond your control and there is wisdom in recognizing the power of love and kindness to bring out the best in people.
Both are important, but when it comes to the full depth of human suffering, in the end both are insufficient.
For me, both shattered in the face of the pain I saw that day in the museum.
Both were exposed to different kinds of escapism, a vain hope everything will be OK,
maintained by a buffer of privilege.
The truth is, many, far too many, we live and die in poverty and pain with no hope to speak of.
For many of us, this year has shown us just how fragile that kind of hope can be.
So, this year, we must ask: could our idea of help be empty?
Maybe. Probably. But here’s the thing…
These cheap hopes do not discount the existence of true hope anymore than cheap
Romance novels discount the existence of true love.
The truth is, real hope, just like real love, has a higher cost.
For that kind of hope, we need to turn to Christ's story.
If they were awarding Pulitzers for photography in the first century and a photographer
had managed to snap a picture of Christ as a child, what do you think they would have
captured?
The iconografters would have us believe; they would have seen a serene and regal child
sitting in the lap of his straight-faced and haloed mother…But honestly, I think we should be suspicious.
● Is this the image of a child born so poor, his birth took place in a stable, alongside
the livestock?
● Is this the image of a child born into a nation shadowed by an imperial
superpower, crucifying any who dared to speak a word of resistance?
● With respect to the iconografters, I think Christ would have looked far more like
those children from Vietnam or Sudan, children born into poverty, pain, and
hopelessness. And yet… The Christ story is, somehow, a story of unparalleled hope.
The Christ story is not one of resignation or depression, but one of a man’s holding
lepers in his arms, preaching relentless Liberation, and marching boldly toward a Roman
cross holding his executioners in his heart.
How? …. Andrew Lester says that when we look into our imagined future stories and see only pain
that we are paralyzed by despair… But in the Christ story, I think we see that this isn’t the
whole picture.
In the Christ story, we see that when we are hopeless and we have the courage to look
despair in the eye, the courage not to look away, then we discover we have, not a
limitation, but a superpower: Desperation.
The story of Christ is a story of one who looked deeply into his hopelessness in
stopping his impending crucifixion and hopelessness of the nation around him, who
looked into a future that ended, unavoidably, in pain and death…Yet, it set him free.
It set him free to do things most never find the courage to do, to love people most think
are too dangerous to love, to work for a future that went beyond his own life. He became,
in the words often attributed to Oscar Romero, the prophet of a future not his own.
Seeing no hope, in his desperation he died to himself and let the God in him run loose in
the world.
This is real hope-Earned hope.
Hope can only be found along the road of honest hopelessness.
If we want real hope, lasting and un-fragile, it can only be found by looking hopelessness in the
eye. By walking through the gallery of human suffering, sitting, and waiting.
It can only come through a recognition that thousands of children will die of hunger and
preventable causes today. It can only come through meaningful contact with the countless children in the United States who will be denied quality education, who will be denied quality employment, sentenced to a life of suspicion and violence for having had the audacity to be born poor.
It can only come from opening your heart to the millions of people in the United States and in
our global community who have died of COVID-19, having faced a decision to either go to a job
that offers no protection or come home to an eviction notice attached to the door.
It can only come from the honest acceptance of the now unstoppable effects of climate change,
calling into question the very survival of our species.
It can only come when we recognize the demeaning and deteriorating and devastating effects
and meaninglessness of war.
It comes when we are “woke” to the unimaginable reality Ukraine is facing today.
How…
Real, lasting hope can never come from easy answers, escape-ism or naive idealism.
Hope comes from a journey into the very heart of hopelessness itself.
It comes from the hopelessness of Christ, who gives birth to despair, who gives birth to
desperation then to the total freedom to do what must be done.
To allow God to live through you, to become the prophet of a future that is not your own-the
future of a new heaven and new earth.
There’s hope through hopelessness, life through a cross; it is foolishness to those who are
perishing, but to all being saved, it is the very power and wisdom of God.
So, people of God on this Sunday of celebration and installation of a pastor as we journey
through the uncertainty of current events, waiting for the light, may we be consistently
dissatisfied with empty hope, with any hope that it’s fragile or threatened by suffering.
I want to leave you with another photograph. a more recent photograph—-
Baby strollers lined up one after another at the train station in Poland. Mothers of Poland left
strollers for Mothers from Ukraine to use as they continued their freedom journey.
May we have the courage to embrace the hopelessness of Christ, looking deeply at that which
we would rather look away from or explain away… So we may find the desperation, the
liberation, the freedom of Christ.
May we live resurrected lives in the service of a kingdom greater than ourselves.
Amen. May It Be So
March 16, 2022
Dear Friends,
It is certainly true that music has a capacity to touch us in ways we cannot explain. Words can fail, but music rushes in when words have nothing to say. Someone said, Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran minister and theologian, executed for his participation in the plot against Hitler, wrote, “Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in times of care and sorrow will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” I recall when the Deacons were discussing our return to in person worship after a three month absence in 2020, and the suggestion from the Conference was, “No singing out loud,” Cindy Nye remarked, “I cannot imagine church without singing.” And since none of us could either, we have been singing in worship, even during the worst of Covid, while many churches until recently have not permitted voices to sing out loud.
So, should we be surprised that during this horrific war in Ukraine, music has had its important role to play? On a recent day in Kharkiv, when Russian troops were nearing Ukraine’s second largest city and missiles were being fired into the city center, and as some civilians tried to escape the destruction, a young boy sat down at a white piano in a hotel lobby and began to play. Whitney Leaming is a journalist for The Washington Post and in her room a few floors up from the lobby, she heard the music, a work by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan, A Walk to School, composed in 2020. She came down the stairs and filmed the scene. Then she left the hotel to cover the war. The video of the scene has been seen by over 9 million people, but so far no one knows who the boy is and where he is now. His playing brought tears to the eyes of the composers, who never dreamed their music would be for such a time as this. And the people from all over the world, who have watched the scene, have been moved to tears as well as to action---giving money and time to help in whatever way they can the suffering people of Ukraine.
Consider now another musician, Vera Lytovchenko, a classical violinist, who found herself in the basement of her apartment building along with others trying to keep themselves safe from the onslaught of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Vera used to teach in a college as well as teach private students; she also played in an orchestra for concerts, ballets, and operas. Life now is very different from what it had been, and because sadness and depression are a constant temptation, Vera plays in the hope that something of the beautiful music will lift tired and sagging spirits toward a wellspring of hope. She plays all kinds of music, classical as well as folk songs, and sometimes she will sing and encourage others to do the same. When you are stuck with nothing to do, boredom easily sets in and since boredom does not enjoy itself, it can easily give way to other emotions like fear and anger. While such feelings are appropriate in times of war, relief is needed, and what better thing to relieve sadness, boredom, and fear than music?
Maria Von Trapp once said, “Music acts like a magic key to which the most tightly closed heart opens.” I wonder about Putin’s tightly closed heart and all the other tightly closed hearts that could cry over a beautifully played Mozart sonata and yet go about the business of murdering innocent people in concentration camps during the Second World War. Let us hope and pray that tightly closed hearts will indeed open.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
It is certainly true that music has a capacity to touch us in ways we cannot explain. Words can fail, but music rushes in when words have nothing to say. Someone said, Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran minister and theologian, executed for his participation in the plot against Hitler, wrote, “Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in times of care and sorrow will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” I recall when the Deacons were discussing our return to in person worship after a three month absence in 2020, and the suggestion from the Conference was, “No singing out loud,” Cindy Nye remarked, “I cannot imagine church without singing.” And since none of us could either, we have been singing in worship, even during the worst of Covid, while many churches until recently have not permitted voices to sing out loud.
So, should we be surprised that during this horrific war in Ukraine, music has had its important role to play? On a recent day in Kharkiv, when Russian troops were nearing Ukraine’s second largest city and missiles were being fired into the city center, and as some civilians tried to escape the destruction, a young boy sat down at a white piano in a hotel lobby and began to play. Whitney Leaming is a journalist for The Washington Post and in her room a few floors up from the lobby, she heard the music, a work by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan, A Walk to School, composed in 2020. She came down the stairs and filmed the scene. Then she left the hotel to cover the war. The video of the scene has been seen by over 9 million people, but so far no one knows who the boy is and where he is now. His playing brought tears to the eyes of the composers, who never dreamed their music would be for such a time as this. And the people from all over the world, who have watched the scene, have been moved to tears as well as to action---giving money and time to help in whatever way they can the suffering people of Ukraine.
Consider now another musician, Vera Lytovchenko, a classical violinist, who found herself in the basement of her apartment building along with others trying to keep themselves safe from the onslaught of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Vera used to teach in a college as well as teach private students; she also played in an orchestra for concerts, ballets, and operas. Life now is very different from what it had been, and because sadness and depression are a constant temptation, Vera plays in the hope that something of the beautiful music will lift tired and sagging spirits toward a wellspring of hope. She plays all kinds of music, classical as well as folk songs, and sometimes she will sing and encourage others to do the same. When you are stuck with nothing to do, boredom easily sets in and since boredom does not enjoy itself, it can easily give way to other emotions like fear and anger. While such feelings are appropriate in times of war, relief is needed, and what better thing to relieve sadness, boredom, and fear than music?
Maria Von Trapp once said, “Music acts like a magic key to which the most tightly closed heart opens.” I wonder about Putin’s tightly closed heart and all the other tightly closed hearts that could cry over a beautifully played Mozart sonata and yet go about the business of murdering innocent people in concentration camps during the Second World War. Let us hope and pray that tightly closed hearts will indeed open.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
March 8, 2022
Dear Friends,
It is March 8, which is International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is: Break the Bias. The magazine, The Economist, printed a list of 29 countries in order of their “friendliness” to working women, based on gender pay gap, parental leave policies, the cost of childcare, educational attainment, and representation in senior management positions and politics. The top ten countries, most supportive of working women are: Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Belgium, France, New Zealand, Poland, and Canada. Just in case you are wondering, The United States is number 20, followed by Greece, Britain, Ireland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Turkey, and South Korea. Obviously, the wider world as well as our nation have a great deal of work to do to break the bias. We Americans have this tendency to brag about our status as a nation, but when you examine a number of metrics, including health care, where we are number 37, and support and fairness for working women, we can honestly wonder why all the bragging.
International Women’s Day had a long period of birth. It slowly began in the 19th century as agitation for women’s suffrage gained momentum. New Zealand was the first nation to embrace a woman’s right to vote in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913 and The United States in 1920. Switzerland was very slow to catch on: 1971 and Syria finally stepped onboard in 1973. But the march for a day to recognize the contributions of women involved far more than suffrage. On March 8, 1857, hundreds of women in New York City, who worked in the garment industry, gathered to protest what they considered to be inhuman working conditions. On March 8, 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York, carrying bread and roses, bread to signify the need for economic security and roses to symbolize the quest for a greater quality of life. They marched for improved working conditions and shorter work hours, the right to vote, and an end to child labor. The following year, February 28, 1909, was designated to honor striking women, who were once again protesting the harshness of working conditions, especially in the garment industry.
Theresa Serber Malkiel, is a name unknown to most Americans. Born in 1874 in what was then the Russian empire, now part of western Ukraine, her family was middle class and Jewish, and Theresa received a very good education. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was 17, because Jews were mistreated in Russia, but she found that her education did her little good in New York City. As hard as she tried to find decent employment, she ended up working in the garment industry, as so many other immigrant and poor American women did. She was appalled at the 18 hour work days and the fact that women working in the garment industry earned half of what men did.
Theresa became a vibrant advocate for women’s rights and equality. When she married at age 26, an attorney, Leon Malkiel, she was able to leave her job and work on behalf of women’s rights. She wrote a novel about work in the garment industry and published numerous articles, calling for women’s equality, economic freedom, and an end to child labor. Though her husband and she were both socialists, she became discouraged with the Socialist Party, because of the sexism of many of the male leaders. On February 27, 1910, which was designated as The Second National Woman’s Day, there were events all over the nation and talks and poetry readings in Carnegie Hall. Theresa would continue to be a strong voice in the movement that was moving far beyond our nation’s borders. Voices and protests in Europe were also taking place. In 1917 International Women’s Day events snowballed in Russia into a general strike that forced the abdication of Czar Nicholas ll. The strike had begun on March 8, so in many countries that became the official International Women’s Day. China even gives women half a work day on March 8.
Throughout the 20th century, there were many calls to recognize an International Women’s Day, and finally in 1977 The United Nations adopted it as a global holiday, though here in the United States it barely registers at all with most people. The month of March in the United States is designated as Women’s History Month, so libraries and schools try to put materials into the hands of students and patrons. When you walk into my local library during the month of March, you are greeted by a display of books on Women’s History.
A friend at the local YMCA told me she heard a podcast recently about the 7 original women, who were ordained as Episcopal priests in 1977. I knew one of them, Carter Heyward, from whom I took a course at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. when I was in seminary. Those were difficult days, as some people actually refused to take holy communion from the women and others would walk out when they rose to preach. But they endured as did the church and the many other churches which would eventually accept more and more women as clergy. God had and has some pretty hard lessons to teach people, and as always, people resist learning what is God is trying to teach.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
It is March 8, which is International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is: Break the Bias. The magazine, The Economist, printed a list of 29 countries in order of their “friendliness” to working women, based on gender pay gap, parental leave policies, the cost of childcare, educational attainment, and representation in senior management positions and politics. The top ten countries, most supportive of working women are: Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Belgium, France, New Zealand, Poland, and Canada. Just in case you are wondering, The United States is number 20, followed by Greece, Britain, Ireland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Turkey, and South Korea. Obviously, the wider world as well as our nation have a great deal of work to do to break the bias. We Americans have this tendency to brag about our status as a nation, but when you examine a number of metrics, including health care, where we are number 37, and support and fairness for working women, we can honestly wonder why all the bragging.
International Women’s Day had a long period of birth. It slowly began in the 19th century as agitation for women’s suffrage gained momentum. New Zealand was the first nation to embrace a woman’s right to vote in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913 and The United States in 1920. Switzerland was very slow to catch on: 1971 and Syria finally stepped onboard in 1973. But the march for a day to recognize the contributions of women involved far more than suffrage. On March 8, 1857, hundreds of women in New York City, who worked in the garment industry, gathered to protest what they considered to be inhuman working conditions. On March 8, 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York, carrying bread and roses, bread to signify the need for economic security and roses to symbolize the quest for a greater quality of life. They marched for improved working conditions and shorter work hours, the right to vote, and an end to child labor. The following year, February 28, 1909, was designated to honor striking women, who were once again protesting the harshness of working conditions, especially in the garment industry.
Theresa Serber Malkiel, is a name unknown to most Americans. Born in 1874 in what was then the Russian empire, now part of western Ukraine, her family was middle class and Jewish, and Theresa received a very good education. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was 17, because Jews were mistreated in Russia, but she found that her education did her little good in New York City. As hard as she tried to find decent employment, she ended up working in the garment industry, as so many other immigrant and poor American women did. She was appalled at the 18 hour work days and the fact that women working in the garment industry earned half of what men did.
Theresa became a vibrant advocate for women’s rights and equality. When she married at age 26, an attorney, Leon Malkiel, she was able to leave her job and work on behalf of women’s rights. She wrote a novel about work in the garment industry and published numerous articles, calling for women’s equality, economic freedom, and an end to child labor. Though her husband and she were both socialists, she became discouraged with the Socialist Party, because of the sexism of many of the male leaders. On February 27, 1910, which was designated as The Second National Woman’s Day, there were events all over the nation and talks and poetry readings in Carnegie Hall. Theresa would continue to be a strong voice in the movement that was moving far beyond our nation’s borders. Voices and protests in Europe were also taking place. In 1917 International Women’s Day events snowballed in Russia into a general strike that forced the abdication of Czar Nicholas ll. The strike had begun on March 8, so in many countries that became the official International Women’s Day. China even gives women half a work day on March 8.
Throughout the 20th century, there were many calls to recognize an International Women’s Day, and finally in 1977 The United Nations adopted it as a global holiday, though here in the United States it barely registers at all with most people. The month of March in the United States is designated as Women’s History Month, so libraries and schools try to put materials into the hands of students and patrons. When you walk into my local library during the month of March, you are greeted by a display of books on Women’s History.
A friend at the local YMCA told me she heard a podcast recently about the 7 original women, who were ordained as Episcopal priests in 1977. I knew one of them, Carter Heyward, from whom I took a course at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. when I was in seminary. Those were difficult days, as some people actually refused to take holy communion from the women and others would walk out when they rose to preach. But they endured as did the church and the many other churches which would eventually accept more and more women as clergy. God had and has some pretty hard lessons to teach people, and as always, people resist learning what is God is trying to teach.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST
Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022
In 1914 or perhaps 1915---no one knows the date for sure---Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter of Polish descent, took a 35 inch square canvass and painted it white around the edges and in the middle black. Here it is, a copy, called The Black Square. Art critics, if you want to take them seriously called it “the most famous, most enigmatic, and most frightening painting known to man.” Well, critics are known to exaggerate. Another critic claimed this painting crossed the line “between old art and new art, between a man and his shadow, between a rose and a casket, between life and death, between God and the devil.
Now, if you are anything like me you might have some trouble with what passes for new art. For one thing it has no concern for beauty, and why repetition of images of Marilyn Monroe or Campbells Soup a la Andy Warhol or a black square surrounded by white should be considered art confounds me and probably confounds most of you as well. I will tell you that some years ago, I took a course in modern/postmodern art history at Wesleyan, taught by a professor whose field of expertise was Renaissance Art. In fact, he was one of the experts called in when the Sistine Chapel ceiling was cleaned. So, he certainly knew about beautiful art and its capacity to inspire and even heal. Yet even after taking the course, I remain confounded. But whether or not we like the Black Square as art, it did make a major impact on the art world and by extension the world at large, because its theme was death.
Now in 1914/15 the First World War was going on, and we all know what a horrible decimation of life it was---young men were pulverized in the trenches. And perhaps that is why the Black Square made its appearance---it was an expression of the absurd cruelty that was being played out in Europe, though in 1915 it was not yet fully realized how horrific the war would be. And some would say this Black Square announced the coming horror. The unconscious, in other words, already knew what the conscious mind did not yet recognize.
Here we are on Ash Wednesday, 2022, when another war is going on, threatening to undo democracy in the Ukraine as well as kill many of its citizens. And in the midst of this, we are once again reminded of our mortality: “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Ash Wednesday is clearly the announcement of our mortality, something we all know, but tend to ignore or even deny. After all, we live in an age, when death is kept at a relative distance. People usually die in hospitals or nursing homes, and though hospice has made death at home more common than it was just a few decades ago, still death is not the intimate it was for our ancestors. And all the talk about death being “natural” hardly makes it our friend. If death becomes a friend, it is only because the suffering is so great and has made of life a pathetic shadow of what it once was. At such stages, yes, death is a friend, but otherwise it is an enemy---because it removes us from everything and everyone we know and love. Of course, we rationally know that without death there can be no renewal of life. All forms of life must die to make room for the new. I am reminded of a letter an eight year old boy wrote to God: Dear God, my mother told me that you invented death to make room for all the new people being born. Why don’t you keep the people you already have instead of always making new ones? Out of the mouths of babes.
Why then do we have this day, when we are called to remember and ponder our mortality? Let me begin my answer by telling you about a social psychology course I took when I was a sophomore at the U. of Chicago. The reading list included a number of famous psychologists, including Abraham Maslow, who believed that the human project is to actualize our gifts and potentials that we might not only live a happy life, but also a helpful life for the world. And Maslow said something else that made a big impression on me: ”If we did not die, we would be unable to love.” He gave as an example the stories of the Greek and Roman myths. He noted that when the immortal gods and goddess had love affairs among themselves, their affairs were boring, because time did not figure in; there was no consequence to any of their acts or decisions, since they had an infinite amount of time to do and redo. But, Maslow noted, when a god or goddess fell in love with a mortal, ah, then things began to become interesting, because time mattered; time had entered into the story, and there were consequences for the human life. There was not enough time to redo and remake, so the decisions made actually bore fruit, for good or evil. Time mattered and it matters still.
Now at 19, what did I know of death? It was something that happened to the very old, or to the unfortunate young sent to die in a hell hole called Viet Nam, or a terrible tragedy in my own family, taking the life of a two year old brother from leukemia, a year before I was born. That was all I knew of death, and though I did not then understand what Maslow meant---how could I; I was simply too young--- still, what he said made me think and all these many decades later, I still recall his words. And because I am so much older now, I do understand. I understand that time matters, and the choices and decisions we make in time also matter, because we will not have an infinite amount of time to do and redo.
Of course, this does not mean we should crucify ourselves for our foolishness and mistakes, but it does mean we should take stock of our choices, our values, what it is we care about and love. We should ask ourselves how do our actions, how does the way we spend our time instantiate what it is we truly believe and love?
The reading from the Prophet Isaiah was written during a very tough time. The Jews had returned from Babylon, where they had been exiled for a little over 50 years, and now they were back in Jerusalem. So much had been destroyed by the Babylonians and much of it remained destroyed. During the years of exile, little was rebuilt, because the educated and the skilled had been carried off into captivity. So, they returned home to a mess, and they were disconsolate, without hope. And what did the prophet tell them? He reminded them (as Jesus also did in our gospel reading from Matthew) that they should not pursue piety for the sake of looking good to God or themselves, but rather they should consider what it is God would have them do: give food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, clothing to the naked. Then, the prophet said, “your light shall break forth like the dawn and your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt and you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach.”
In other words, it matters what we do in this brief span we call life. God knows there are many breaches that cry out for repairing. What we do matters NOT because hell will greet us if we fail to do our part; it matters because our lives are limited, mortal, and we do not have an infinite amount of time to do what we are called to do. No one wants to come to the end of his or her life and conclude, “I have wasted my time; I have not lived my life well. Or worse yet, I have not loved the good; I have embraced evil.” To come to that end is ugly, a tragedy, a fall, a missing of the mark, which is what sin is. No wonder last week the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN said to his Russian counterpart: “For war criminals there is no purgatory; it is straight to hell.” While we do not have to believe in a literal hell, there is yet something called the judgment of God, which means there is finally no hiding from the truth of one’s life and the decisions one has made. God compels an accounting, an acknowledgement of what one had done with this precious gift of life. To face the bankruptcy of a life is indeed a hell, and the only exit from that is God’s mercy.
When I worked as a chaplain at Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island, a 600 bed teaching hospital that also served the poor, Ash Wednesday was always a big day. While ashes were brought to patients, who so desired, the hospital staff would line up outside the chaplain’s office for their ashes. My supervisor knew many of these people, most of whom, he said, were not in the least religious, but here they were, insisting on being reminded of their mortality. One of the surgeons, who was Jewish, always came for ashes. He was raised Roman Catholic, and when he married his Jewish wife, he converted to Judaism. But he always honored Ash Wednesday. “I do want to remember my mortality,” he said. “Remembering helps me to not only be a better surgeon, but it also helps me to WANT to be a better human being.” amen
Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022
In 1914 or perhaps 1915---no one knows the date for sure---Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter of Polish descent, took a 35 inch square canvass and painted it white around the edges and in the middle black. Here it is, a copy, called The Black Square. Art critics, if you want to take them seriously called it “the most famous, most enigmatic, and most frightening painting known to man.” Well, critics are known to exaggerate. Another critic claimed this painting crossed the line “between old art and new art, between a man and his shadow, between a rose and a casket, between life and death, between God and the devil.
Now, if you are anything like me you might have some trouble with what passes for new art. For one thing it has no concern for beauty, and why repetition of images of Marilyn Monroe or Campbells Soup a la Andy Warhol or a black square surrounded by white should be considered art confounds me and probably confounds most of you as well. I will tell you that some years ago, I took a course in modern/postmodern art history at Wesleyan, taught by a professor whose field of expertise was Renaissance Art. In fact, he was one of the experts called in when the Sistine Chapel ceiling was cleaned. So, he certainly knew about beautiful art and its capacity to inspire and even heal. Yet even after taking the course, I remain confounded. But whether or not we like the Black Square as art, it did make a major impact on the art world and by extension the world at large, because its theme was death.
Now in 1914/15 the First World War was going on, and we all know what a horrible decimation of life it was---young men were pulverized in the trenches. And perhaps that is why the Black Square made its appearance---it was an expression of the absurd cruelty that was being played out in Europe, though in 1915 it was not yet fully realized how horrific the war would be. And some would say this Black Square announced the coming horror. The unconscious, in other words, already knew what the conscious mind did not yet recognize.
Here we are on Ash Wednesday, 2022, when another war is going on, threatening to undo democracy in the Ukraine as well as kill many of its citizens. And in the midst of this, we are once again reminded of our mortality: “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Ash Wednesday is clearly the announcement of our mortality, something we all know, but tend to ignore or even deny. After all, we live in an age, when death is kept at a relative distance. People usually die in hospitals or nursing homes, and though hospice has made death at home more common than it was just a few decades ago, still death is not the intimate it was for our ancestors. And all the talk about death being “natural” hardly makes it our friend. If death becomes a friend, it is only because the suffering is so great and has made of life a pathetic shadow of what it once was. At such stages, yes, death is a friend, but otherwise it is an enemy---because it removes us from everything and everyone we know and love. Of course, we rationally know that without death there can be no renewal of life. All forms of life must die to make room for the new. I am reminded of a letter an eight year old boy wrote to God: Dear God, my mother told me that you invented death to make room for all the new people being born. Why don’t you keep the people you already have instead of always making new ones? Out of the mouths of babes.
Why then do we have this day, when we are called to remember and ponder our mortality? Let me begin my answer by telling you about a social psychology course I took when I was a sophomore at the U. of Chicago. The reading list included a number of famous psychologists, including Abraham Maslow, who believed that the human project is to actualize our gifts and potentials that we might not only live a happy life, but also a helpful life for the world. And Maslow said something else that made a big impression on me: ”If we did not die, we would be unable to love.” He gave as an example the stories of the Greek and Roman myths. He noted that when the immortal gods and goddess had love affairs among themselves, their affairs were boring, because time did not figure in; there was no consequence to any of their acts or decisions, since they had an infinite amount of time to do and redo. But, Maslow noted, when a god or goddess fell in love with a mortal, ah, then things began to become interesting, because time mattered; time had entered into the story, and there were consequences for the human life. There was not enough time to redo and remake, so the decisions made actually bore fruit, for good or evil. Time mattered and it matters still.
Now at 19, what did I know of death? It was something that happened to the very old, or to the unfortunate young sent to die in a hell hole called Viet Nam, or a terrible tragedy in my own family, taking the life of a two year old brother from leukemia, a year before I was born. That was all I knew of death, and though I did not then understand what Maslow meant---how could I; I was simply too young--- still, what he said made me think and all these many decades later, I still recall his words. And because I am so much older now, I do understand. I understand that time matters, and the choices and decisions we make in time also matter, because we will not have an infinite amount of time to do and redo.
Of course, this does not mean we should crucify ourselves for our foolishness and mistakes, but it does mean we should take stock of our choices, our values, what it is we care about and love. We should ask ourselves how do our actions, how does the way we spend our time instantiate what it is we truly believe and love?
The reading from the Prophet Isaiah was written during a very tough time. The Jews had returned from Babylon, where they had been exiled for a little over 50 years, and now they were back in Jerusalem. So much had been destroyed by the Babylonians and much of it remained destroyed. During the years of exile, little was rebuilt, because the educated and the skilled had been carried off into captivity. So, they returned home to a mess, and they were disconsolate, without hope. And what did the prophet tell them? He reminded them (as Jesus also did in our gospel reading from Matthew) that they should not pursue piety for the sake of looking good to God or themselves, but rather they should consider what it is God would have them do: give food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, clothing to the naked. Then, the prophet said, “your light shall break forth like the dawn and your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt and you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach.”
In other words, it matters what we do in this brief span we call life. God knows there are many breaches that cry out for repairing. What we do matters NOT because hell will greet us if we fail to do our part; it matters because our lives are limited, mortal, and we do not have an infinite amount of time to do what we are called to do. No one wants to come to the end of his or her life and conclude, “I have wasted my time; I have not lived my life well. Or worse yet, I have not loved the good; I have embraced evil.” To come to that end is ugly, a tragedy, a fall, a missing of the mark, which is what sin is. No wonder last week the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN said to his Russian counterpart: “For war criminals there is no purgatory; it is straight to hell.” While we do not have to believe in a literal hell, there is yet something called the judgment of God, which means there is finally no hiding from the truth of one’s life and the decisions one has made. God compels an accounting, an acknowledgement of what one had done with this precious gift of life. To face the bankruptcy of a life is indeed a hell, and the only exit from that is God’s mercy.
When I worked as a chaplain at Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island, a 600 bed teaching hospital that also served the poor, Ash Wednesday was always a big day. While ashes were brought to patients, who so desired, the hospital staff would line up outside the chaplain’s office for their ashes. My supervisor knew many of these people, most of whom, he said, were not in the least religious, but here they were, insisting on being reminded of their mortality. One of the surgeons, who was Jewish, always came for ashes. He was raised Roman Catholic, and when he married his Jewish wife, he converted to Judaism. But he always honored Ash Wednesday. “I do want to remember my mortality,” he said. “Remembering helps me to not only be a better surgeon, but it also helps me to WANT to be a better human being.” amen
On Being Tempted
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational
In Unionville, CT
March 6, 2022
Luke 4: 1-13
On the first Sunday of Lent the gospel lectionary reading almost always concerns Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness: Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story. John doesn’t because his Gospel gives us the resurrected Christ from its very beginning, so Jesus’ full humanity does not shine through in the same way as it does in the synoptic gospels. Though Mark has a temptation scene, it is very short, only two sentences. It is only Matthew and Luke, which give us details.
Luke tells us that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit, and it was the Spirit who led him into the wilderness for 40 days, where he was tempted by the devil. While Mark used the term driven by the spirit, both Matthew and Luke use the gentler term, led. But whether led or driven, it was not Jesus’ idea to go into the wilderness and face temptation. It was the Spirit’s idea, which suggests that there is something spiritually necessary about facing and conquering temptation. Without it, Jesus could not be or fully become the Christ.
The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, said that the worst temptation of all is to have no temptations, which means, I think, that if we are never tempted by anything, we may be living our lives on such a comfortable level, where we allow no challenges to ever disturb us. And perhaps Luther would say, we have then given into the temptation of living a life of spiritual malaise without ever realizing what it is we have done.
Some years ago, I met woman, who was taking courses at the Catholic seminary, where I received my doctorate. She told me she realized her life had been too settled and comfortable. Two years before, the lid blew off, when she learned that her best friend was having an affair with one of the priests in her parish. “Here I was,” she said, “with three kids, a solid marriage, a regular church goer, so comfortable and blessed. But when I learned this truth from my friend, I could not handle it. I shut her out and down, and I threatened to make it all public. I was furious; she was married with three kids, and the priest, well I told him off too and threatened him with exposure and shame. And then I stopped. I realized I did not understand what was driving my anger and this sudden feeling of vulnerability. I knew I was facing a big temptation, but I did not know why. It finally dawned on me that I had allowed myself to become so secure and comfortable that I was unable to handle things outside my small world. Life is very complicated and recognizing the complexity has left me feeling very vulnerable.”
And that is precisely when temptation often comes: when we are vulnerable. Jesus was vulnerable, famished, the text tells us, and that is when the devil came to him. Every week we pray the Lord’s Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, and here the Holy Spirit led him not directly into temptation, but to the place where temptation occurred. Notice that all three of Jesus’ temptations concern power. How will he use his power? Will he use it for his own benefit, or for the benefit of others? Consider his hunger. We are not talking about excess food here. He is famished; he needs to eat, and satisfying hunger is a good thing. But Jesus here recognizes the true nature of the temptation he is facing. A serious spiritual temptation always involves some good. The woman who threatened to expose her friend and the priest had some good on her side. The affair was morally troubling to say the least. But was her motivation in exposing it because of her love and service to the good, or was something else going on? Motivation does matter, and it certainly mattered in this first temptation.
Though food is a necessity for life, Jesus here recognized that his ministry would be about more than satisfying people’s physical needs, as important as those needs are. The number 40 is important here as code language, pointing to Jesus’ connections to his Jewish roots. The Jews wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, and they too were hungry, whining and complaining to Moses until God fed them with mana. They too would have to learn that they would not live by bread alone.
There is something else here and it involves Jesus’ temptation to deny his full humanity. If he had given in, turning stones into bread, he would have been denying the limitations in which all human beings must live. Jesus made the choice to endure the human limitation of hunger, and later he would endure the limitations of suffering and death.
In the second temptation Jesus is taken to a high place, where the kingdoms of the world are displayed, and the promise is made that they could all be his, if only he will worship Satan. But Satan is a lair, because as scripture proclaims, the earth and all within it belong to God, not to Satan. So, Satan has no real authority to grant Jesus dominion over all the earth. Secondly, Satan is a creature, and the worship of any creature or object is idolatry. And Jesus quotes scripture to the devil. “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” (DT 6:3)
And then comes the final temptation, which took place in Jerusalem on the pinnacle of the Temple, a place that some Jews believed the Messiah would finally appear. Satan commanded him to throw himself down, for surely God’s angels will bear him up. But Jesus would not test God; he would not question God’s care for him, and after successfully meeting this third temptation, the text tells us that the devil departed. But it adds something that neither Mark nor Matthew included. Satan departed until an opportune time. In other words, Satan would be back, showing up at another moment of deep vulnerability, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus begged for the cup to pass, yet not his will, but God’s will.
It was only when Jesus had faced and conquered his temptations that he was ready to begin his ministry. He would first return to his hometown of Nazareth, where he would be rejected and almost killed by being pushed off a cliff. But the text tells us that he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. After facing Satan, facing the rejection of the crowd was easy.
Jesus had much to learn and learn he did. He was on a journey that would teach him there is more to wish for than feeding a hungry world, or even ruling it, or staging a miracle by jumping off the top of the Jerusalem Temple without going splat on the ground. He came into the world not to do magic, but to reveal God’s grace that hearts and minds would be transformed, that we, his followers, would learn how to struggle rightly and mightily against temptation. So, consider what tempts you, and then ponder Martin Luther’s words: The worst temptation of all is to have no temptation.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational
In Unionville, CT
March 6, 2022
Luke 4: 1-13
On the first Sunday of Lent the gospel lectionary reading almost always concerns Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness: Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story. John doesn’t because his Gospel gives us the resurrected Christ from its very beginning, so Jesus’ full humanity does not shine through in the same way as it does in the synoptic gospels. Though Mark has a temptation scene, it is very short, only two sentences. It is only Matthew and Luke, which give us details.
Luke tells us that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit, and it was the Spirit who led him into the wilderness for 40 days, where he was tempted by the devil. While Mark used the term driven by the spirit, both Matthew and Luke use the gentler term, led. But whether led or driven, it was not Jesus’ idea to go into the wilderness and face temptation. It was the Spirit’s idea, which suggests that there is something spiritually necessary about facing and conquering temptation. Without it, Jesus could not be or fully become the Christ.
The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, said that the worst temptation of all is to have no temptations, which means, I think, that if we are never tempted by anything, we may be living our lives on such a comfortable level, where we allow no challenges to ever disturb us. And perhaps Luther would say, we have then given into the temptation of living a life of spiritual malaise without ever realizing what it is we have done.
Some years ago, I met woman, who was taking courses at the Catholic seminary, where I received my doctorate. She told me she realized her life had been too settled and comfortable. Two years before, the lid blew off, when she learned that her best friend was having an affair with one of the priests in her parish. “Here I was,” she said, “with three kids, a solid marriage, a regular church goer, so comfortable and blessed. But when I learned this truth from my friend, I could not handle it. I shut her out and down, and I threatened to make it all public. I was furious; she was married with three kids, and the priest, well I told him off too and threatened him with exposure and shame. And then I stopped. I realized I did not understand what was driving my anger and this sudden feeling of vulnerability. I knew I was facing a big temptation, but I did not know why. It finally dawned on me that I had allowed myself to become so secure and comfortable that I was unable to handle things outside my small world. Life is very complicated and recognizing the complexity has left me feeling very vulnerable.”
And that is precisely when temptation often comes: when we are vulnerable. Jesus was vulnerable, famished, the text tells us, and that is when the devil came to him. Every week we pray the Lord’s Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, and here the Holy Spirit led him not directly into temptation, but to the place where temptation occurred. Notice that all three of Jesus’ temptations concern power. How will he use his power? Will he use it for his own benefit, or for the benefit of others? Consider his hunger. We are not talking about excess food here. He is famished; he needs to eat, and satisfying hunger is a good thing. But Jesus here recognizes the true nature of the temptation he is facing. A serious spiritual temptation always involves some good. The woman who threatened to expose her friend and the priest had some good on her side. The affair was morally troubling to say the least. But was her motivation in exposing it because of her love and service to the good, or was something else going on? Motivation does matter, and it certainly mattered in this first temptation.
Though food is a necessity for life, Jesus here recognized that his ministry would be about more than satisfying people’s physical needs, as important as those needs are. The number 40 is important here as code language, pointing to Jesus’ connections to his Jewish roots. The Jews wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, and they too were hungry, whining and complaining to Moses until God fed them with mana. They too would have to learn that they would not live by bread alone.
There is something else here and it involves Jesus’ temptation to deny his full humanity. If he had given in, turning stones into bread, he would have been denying the limitations in which all human beings must live. Jesus made the choice to endure the human limitation of hunger, and later he would endure the limitations of suffering and death.
In the second temptation Jesus is taken to a high place, where the kingdoms of the world are displayed, and the promise is made that they could all be his, if only he will worship Satan. But Satan is a lair, because as scripture proclaims, the earth and all within it belong to God, not to Satan. So, Satan has no real authority to grant Jesus dominion over all the earth. Secondly, Satan is a creature, and the worship of any creature or object is idolatry. And Jesus quotes scripture to the devil. “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” (DT 6:3)
And then comes the final temptation, which took place in Jerusalem on the pinnacle of the Temple, a place that some Jews believed the Messiah would finally appear. Satan commanded him to throw himself down, for surely God’s angels will bear him up. But Jesus would not test God; he would not question God’s care for him, and after successfully meeting this third temptation, the text tells us that the devil departed. But it adds something that neither Mark nor Matthew included. Satan departed until an opportune time. In other words, Satan would be back, showing up at another moment of deep vulnerability, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus begged for the cup to pass, yet not his will, but God’s will.
It was only when Jesus had faced and conquered his temptations that he was ready to begin his ministry. He would first return to his hometown of Nazareth, where he would be rejected and almost killed by being pushed off a cliff. But the text tells us that he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. After facing Satan, facing the rejection of the crowd was easy.
Jesus had much to learn and learn he did. He was on a journey that would teach him there is more to wish for than feeding a hungry world, or even ruling it, or staging a miracle by jumping off the top of the Jerusalem Temple without going splat on the ground. He came into the world not to do magic, but to reveal God’s grace that hearts and minds would be transformed, that we, his followers, would learn how to struggle rightly and mightily against temptation. So, consider what tempts you, and then ponder Martin Luther’s words: The worst temptation of all is to have no temptation.
Sometimes Silence is the Best Answer
Transfiguration Sunday
Preached by Sandra Olsen
February 27, 2022
Exodus 34: 29-35
Luke 9: 28-36
I have a small sign, sitting on a bookshelf, in my office: “Sometimes Silence is the Best Answer.” And there’s a saying from Abraham Lincoln, which we all should take to heart: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Yet the sad truth is, we are not very good at tolerating silence. It’s unnerving, and people are uncomfortable with it. Remember high school, when a teacher asked a question, and silence ensured, it didn’t take long before the coughing would begin, or the moving around of chairs. And then there is the silence after someone has the nerve to say something usually not said out loud. My sister attended a grief group for a short while after her husband’s unexpected death, but after the third time she ceased going, when a woman, who lost a three year old to a choking accident confessed she hated God. There was this awful silence after the woman spoke, my sister said. Some people were obviously angry that she dared to say such a thing, while others looked sad or embarrassed. No one said a word, and finally some people just got up and left. The leader made us sit in complete silence, and it was awful! When I asked her what was so awful about the silence, she could not say. She just had this feeling that SOMETHING needed to be said. But what, I asked? She had no idea, and so I said, “Perhaps silence was the best answer.”
After all, we do face situations in life which are beyond words, and we would probably be much better off if we could simply sit with the silence. And from my perspective, this was one of Peter’s big problems. He could never let the situation be. He always had to jump in--- with an action or words. He is definitely not my favorite disciple--- all heart and no head. Consider Peter’s impulsive behaviors. He was the guy who with no thought at all jumped out of the boat, when he saw Jesus walking on the water. But as soon as he realized what he had done, he was terrified and began to sink. Peter was the one who replied to Jesus’ question, Who do you say I am? You are the Christ, the chosen one of God, he answered. And then when Jesus began to predict his suffering and death, Peter immediately objected, “Oh no, Lord, this must never happen to you” after which Jesus told him, “Get behind me, Satan. You speak of human things, not godly things.” And at the Last Supper, when Jesus told the gathered disciples that one of them would betray him, Peter was the first to say, “Even if all others betray you, I will not. I will go with you to prison and to death.” And yet what did Peter do? He denied Jesus not once, but three times.
Impulsive Peter, all feeling, but very little thought, and so it should surprise none of us that he rushed in to fill this mystical experience with words as well as action. Let’s do something, build something, dwelling places for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. And isn’t this so typically human? Even when, especially when, we don’t understand what is going on, or what is being asked of us, we rush in with some plan, though it may make very little sense. We want to do something, anything, to fill the void of our ignorance and misunderstanding. At least if they could build three dwelling places, there would be a modicum of control. They would have it staked out, fenced it in, and when confusion and chaos threaten, this is exactly what we humans tend to do. So, who can really blame Peter? He was simply trying to get a handle on what was going on, giving it structure, form and discipline. But what was going on was not something neither Peter nor anyone else could really grasp. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration is humbling because it reminds us that as much as we live in a world of sense perception and ideas, that is, a world where our bodies and our minds give us all kinds of information, that same world is also one of deep mystery. And mystery is not something, which can be explained. Who can explain Jesus’ clothes, glowing with a brilliant whiteness, while he cavorts with Elijah and Moses, people, by the way, who were said not to have died, but were somehow taken up into God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom you have heard me mention before, was a brilliant theologian and Lutheran pastor, who, though a pacifist, nonetheless entered into the plot against Hitler. He was finally arrested and executed in April, 1945, a few weeks before the camp was liberated. For two years he was imprisoned, and during that time, he wrote, and many of his letters and thoughts have been gathered into a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. Something that bothered Bonhoeffer greatly was this tendency people have to use God to fill in the gaps of human understanding and knowledge. But what happens, Bonhoeffer asked, when people learn and understand more and more about the world. God then gets pushed back and out. But faith and religion are not gap fillers. God is not the explanation. God is the depth of the mystery that defies all explanations. God is about depth, and the deeper we go, the more the mystery grows.
If people think that God is an explanation, when knowledge grows and expands, they will feel God is somehow directly threatened. And indeed, in the history of our world, this has happened many times. The Church was unnerved when Galileo showed that the earth was not the center of the universe. They made him recant on the threat of death. And when Darwin and his theory of evolution made its appearance and then biblical criticism came along, showing that words of scripture don’t emerge directly from the mouth of God, some people and denominations went apoplectic. If God is a gap-filler, then knowledge can easily become a threat, which is exactly what happened. Southern Baptists and southern Presbyterians distinguished themselves from their northern counterparts precisely over the issue of knowledge. They feared that some forms of knowledge would finally displace God---but this only happens if you allow your God to be too small.
Some years ago, when I worked on a neurosurgery unit, there was this brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr. Davidson, whose father was a theologian and retired president of a seminary. Father and son fought over God, because the son was not much of a believer, which pained his father greatly. Davidson’s concentration was legendary. He saved a 17 year old’s brain even when the anesthesiologist told him he was running of time. “This kid’s brain is not turning to mush under my watch,” he insisted. And it didn’t. The more he studied the brain, the more awestruck he became. For him operating was a kind of religious experience, drawing him more deeply into mystery.
And I think this mystery is exactly what the story of Jesus’ transfiguration is all about. It points us toward something beyond our ability to explain. Oh, there is a lot of symbolism in the story we can explain. Jesus goes up the mountain, and mountains in the bible are always code language that something BIG is about to happen. Jesus took with him three disciples, and the number three is also significant: for Christians, God is three in one; Jesus died at 3 PM and rose from the dead on the third day. Jesus together with Moses and Elijah make a company of three. Moses connects Jesus to the old law, and Elijah connects Jesus to the prophets, and Jesus represents the new law.
But there is something else worthy of note. While both Matthew and Mark also tell the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, it is only Luke that says Jesus took the three disciples up the mountain to pray. It was while Jesus was praying that his face and clothes became a dazzling white, and being overcome by this awesome sight, Peter insisted on making three shelters or booths. But notice as soon as Peter said this, a cloud came, and a voice spoke. “This is my Son, my chosen, Listen to him.” And after that voice spoke, no one said a thing. They were silent, even Peter, who realized he did not know what he was saying.
I remember when Dr. Davidson heard about a former patient of his, a young woman who was killed in a car accident. Five years before, the surgery he performed had saved her from another car accident, when a drunk driver hit her head on. When he learned of her death from another drunk driver, he was inconsolable, collapsing on the floor as he sobbed over and over again, “Why, oh, why?” A few days later, I saw him on the hospital floor, and though I tried to avoid him, he found me later. He asked me what I thought. I quoted something Ralph Waldo Emerson said, when he lost his young son, “The wisest among us know nothing.” “Yes,” the Doctor agreed, absolutely nothing, which is why sometimes silence is the best answer.
Transfiguration Sunday
Preached by Sandra Olsen
February 27, 2022
Exodus 34: 29-35
Luke 9: 28-36
I have a small sign, sitting on a bookshelf, in my office: “Sometimes Silence is the Best Answer.” And there’s a saying from Abraham Lincoln, which we all should take to heart: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Yet the sad truth is, we are not very good at tolerating silence. It’s unnerving, and people are uncomfortable with it. Remember high school, when a teacher asked a question, and silence ensured, it didn’t take long before the coughing would begin, or the moving around of chairs. And then there is the silence after someone has the nerve to say something usually not said out loud. My sister attended a grief group for a short while after her husband’s unexpected death, but after the third time she ceased going, when a woman, who lost a three year old to a choking accident confessed she hated God. There was this awful silence after the woman spoke, my sister said. Some people were obviously angry that she dared to say such a thing, while others looked sad or embarrassed. No one said a word, and finally some people just got up and left. The leader made us sit in complete silence, and it was awful! When I asked her what was so awful about the silence, she could not say. She just had this feeling that SOMETHING needed to be said. But what, I asked? She had no idea, and so I said, “Perhaps silence was the best answer.”
After all, we do face situations in life which are beyond words, and we would probably be much better off if we could simply sit with the silence. And from my perspective, this was one of Peter’s big problems. He could never let the situation be. He always had to jump in--- with an action or words. He is definitely not my favorite disciple--- all heart and no head. Consider Peter’s impulsive behaviors. He was the guy who with no thought at all jumped out of the boat, when he saw Jesus walking on the water. But as soon as he realized what he had done, he was terrified and began to sink. Peter was the one who replied to Jesus’ question, Who do you say I am? You are the Christ, the chosen one of God, he answered. And then when Jesus began to predict his suffering and death, Peter immediately objected, “Oh no, Lord, this must never happen to you” after which Jesus told him, “Get behind me, Satan. You speak of human things, not godly things.” And at the Last Supper, when Jesus told the gathered disciples that one of them would betray him, Peter was the first to say, “Even if all others betray you, I will not. I will go with you to prison and to death.” And yet what did Peter do? He denied Jesus not once, but three times.
Impulsive Peter, all feeling, but very little thought, and so it should surprise none of us that he rushed in to fill this mystical experience with words as well as action. Let’s do something, build something, dwelling places for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. And isn’t this so typically human? Even when, especially when, we don’t understand what is going on, or what is being asked of us, we rush in with some plan, though it may make very little sense. We want to do something, anything, to fill the void of our ignorance and misunderstanding. At least if they could build three dwelling places, there would be a modicum of control. They would have it staked out, fenced it in, and when confusion and chaos threaten, this is exactly what we humans tend to do. So, who can really blame Peter? He was simply trying to get a handle on what was going on, giving it structure, form and discipline. But what was going on was not something neither Peter nor anyone else could really grasp. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration is humbling because it reminds us that as much as we live in a world of sense perception and ideas, that is, a world where our bodies and our minds give us all kinds of information, that same world is also one of deep mystery. And mystery is not something, which can be explained. Who can explain Jesus’ clothes, glowing with a brilliant whiteness, while he cavorts with Elijah and Moses, people, by the way, who were said not to have died, but were somehow taken up into God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom you have heard me mention before, was a brilliant theologian and Lutheran pastor, who, though a pacifist, nonetheless entered into the plot against Hitler. He was finally arrested and executed in April, 1945, a few weeks before the camp was liberated. For two years he was imprisoned, and during that time, he wrote, and many of his letters and thoughts have been gathered into a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. Something that bothered Bonhoeffer greatly was this tendency people have to use God to fill in the gaps of human understanding and knowledge. But what happens, Bonhoeffer asked, when people learn and understand more and more about the world. God then gets pushed back and out. But faith and religion are not gap fillers. God is not the explanation. God is the depth of the mystery that defies all explanations. God is about depth, and the deeper we go, the more the mystery grows.
If people think that God is an explanation, when knowledge grows and expands, they will feel God is somehow directly threatened. And indeed, in the history of our world, this has happened many times. The Church was unnerved when Galileo showed that the earth was not the center of the universe. They made him recant on the threat of death. And when Darwin and his theory of evolution made its appearance and then biblical criticism came along, showing that words of scripture don’t emerge directly from the mouth of God, some people and denominations went apoplectic. If God is a gap-filler, then knowledge can easily become a threat, which is exactly what happened. Southern Baptists and southern Presbyterians distinguished themselves from their northern counterparts precisely over the issue of knowledge. They feared that some forms of knowledge would finally displace God---but this only happens if you allow your God to be too small.
Some years ago, when I worked on a neurosurgery unit, there was this brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr. Davidson, whose father was a theologian and retired president of a seminary. Father and son fought over God, because the son was not much of a believer, which pained his father greatly. Davidson’s concentration was legendary. He saved a 17 year old’s brain even when the anesthesiologist told him he was running of time. “This kid’s brain is not turning to mush under my watch,” he insisted. And it didn’t. The more he studied the brain, the more awestruck he became. For him operating was a kind of religious experience, drawing him more deeply into mystery.
And I think this mystery is exactly what the story of Jesus’ transfiguration is all about. It points us toward something beyond our ability to explain. Oh, there is a lot of symbolism in the story we can explain. Jesus goes up the mountain, and mountains in the bible are always code language that something BIG is about to happen. Jesus took with him three disciples, and the number three is also significant: for Christians, God is three in one; Jesus died at 3 PM and rose from the dead on the third day. Jesus together with Moses and Elijah make a company of three. Moses connects Jesus to the old law, and Elijah connects Jesus to the prophets, and Jesus represents the new law.
But there is something else worthy of note. While both Matthew and Mark also tell the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, it is only Luke that says Jesus took the three disciples up the mountain to pray. It was while Jesus was praying that his face and clothes became a dazzling white, and being overcome by this awesome sight, Peter insisted on making three shelters or booths. But notice as soon as Peter said this, a cloud came, and a voice spoke. “This is my Son, my chosen, Listen to him.” And after that voice spoke, no one said a thing. They were silent, even Peter, who realized he did not know what he was saying.
I remember when Dr. Davidson heard about a former patient of his, a young woman who was killed in a car accident. Five years before, the surgery he performed had saved her from another car accident, when a drunk driver hit her head on. When he learned of her death from another drunk driver, he was inconsolable, collapsing on the floor as he sobbed over and over again, “Why, oh, why?” A few days later, I saw him on the hospital floor, and though I tried to avoid him, he found me later. He asked me what I thought. I quoted something Ralph Waldo Emerson said, when he lost his young son, “The wisest among us know nothing.” “Yes,” the Doctor agreed, absolutely nothing, which is why sometimes silence is the best answer.
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March 1, 2022
Dear Friends, My reflection letter this week consists of Psalm 31, which the chief rabbi in the Ukraine invited Christians to join Jews in praying this week. I am also including a prayer for Ukraine under invasion by Maren Tirabassi. PSALM 31 In you, O Lord, I seek refuge; do not let me ever be put to shame; in your righteousness deliver me. 2 Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily. Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me. 3 You are indeed my rock and my fortress; for your name’s sake lead me and guide me, 4 take me out of the net that is hidden for me, for you are my refuge. 5 Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God. 6 You hate[a] those who pay regard to worthless idols, but I trust in the Lord. 7 I will exult and rejoice in your steadfast love, because you have seen my affliction; you have taken heed of my adversities, 8 and have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy; you have set my feet in a broad place. 9 Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. 10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery,[b] and my bones waste away. 11 I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror[c] to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. 12 I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel. 13 For I hear the whispering of many-- terror all around!-- as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life. 14 But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.” 15 My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. 16 Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love. 17 Do not let me be put to shame, O Lord, for I call on you; let the wicked be put to shame; let them go dumbfounded to Sheol. 18 Let the lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous with pride and contempt. 19 O how abundant is your goodness that you have laid up for those who fear you, and accomplished for those who take refuge in you, in the sight of everyone! 20 In the shelter of your presence you hide them from human plots; you hold them safe under your shelter from contentious tongues. 21 Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was beset as a city under siege. 22 I had said in my alarm, “I am driven far[d] from your sight.” But you heard my supplications when I cried out to you for help. 23 Love the Lord, all you his saints. The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily. 24 Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord. Prayer for Ukraine under invasion by Maren Tirabassi God of plowshares, pruning hooks and peace-making, Translate such old archaic words into hope today in Ukraine That your promises to shatter swords, spears and shields, may mean now An end to missile strikes and long range artillery, the silencing of Kyiv’s air raid sirens. We pray for those who flee the capital and those who shelter in place and in fer in Kharkiv to the east. We pray for troops already exhausted from their long watching. We Pray for NATO land and air force, knowing that means people, and we pray for Germany and Poland as they open border to fleeing refugees. God, we have studied war for so long, let it be no more, no more. Teach us a new peacemaking, guiding the leaders of nations, and holding gently in your heart the many who live and die because of their decisions, for we pray in the name of Jesus who wept for our great needing of things that make for peace. Amen February 22, 2022
Dear Friends, Because so much of the international news lately has been focused on The Ukraine, I imagine that most of you missed a very important trial that took place in Germany. Last month a German court found a former high ranking Syrian official, Anwar Raslan, guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to life in prison. His crimes against humanity included murder, rape, and torture. Dr. Alaa Mousa, accused of torturing over a dozen dissidents and murdering at least one of them in prison, is soon to go on trial. Such trials are monumental occurrences, because it means that people who suffer atrocities in armed conflict, whether in Syria or beyond, can have hope that justice will one day be served. The process is long and challenging, because crimes are usually prosecuted by a country where the crime is committed, which means that prosecuting war crimes is very difficult, because the country, who is the site of the crime, rarely is looking to do justice. Who expects, for example, the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad to police its own crimes? So, Germany stepped up by using something called “the principle of universal jurisdiction.” Any court in any country can have jurisdiction in a case or cases where the crime is deemed so heinous that to ignore it would be a gross act of injustice. But the prosecution of such crimes requires the willingness of courts and prosecutors to get involved and the courage of witnesses to come forth. And such willingness is exactly what happened in Germany. Unlike many other European countries, Germany has a war crimes unit, which opened investigations in 2013 into torture committed by Syrians during its civil war. Germany had procured the “Caesar Files,” a trove of 28,000 photos, documenting crimes at Syria’s state run detention centers, which were smuggled out of Syria. These files can be used in the prosecution of other war crimes. Germany has issued an arrest warrant against a Syrian official, who is not residing in Germany and has been joined by courts in France and Spain, which have also issued warrants. The message is clear: the warrants shrink the world of the accused and help to ostracize him or her, even if the accused resides in a place that does not extradite. The issuing of warrants destabilizes the accused persons, who for too long have felt they are way beyond the arm of justice. The guilty verdict leveled against Anwar Raslan is the first conviction of a high ranking official whose regime is still in power. It took a tremendous amount of international cooperation and the willingness of victims to come forward to tell their stories. More convictions will probably come, but how likely it is that Assad will ever face war crime charges? Perhaps the chances are slim, but then someone pointed out that the Serbian, Slobodan Milosevic, never thought he would stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague for the crimes he committed in the former country of Yugoslavia. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes, so the arm of justice can have a very long reach. Justice is never perfectly rendered, and we would do well to recall the words and work of Reinhold Niebuhr, a clergyman, who supported labor rights in the auto industry in Detroit, where he served as a pastor before coming to Union Seminary in New York City, where he taught social ethics. While recognizing the imperfect nature of justice, he said that in an unjust word, justice is the incarnation of the love Jesus commanded us to have for others, including the enemy. Yours in Christ, Sandra THE STORY OF HENRY OSSAWA TANNER
Moving Beyond Comfort Preached by: Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT February 20, 2022 Luke 6: 27-38 We all know these words of Jesus, loving the enemy, praying for him or her, doing good to those who hurt and revile you, and showing mercy to the unmerciful. We know these words from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount as well as here in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Most of us can think of particular people in our lives, who have actively done us wrong---perhaps lied about us or betrayed us. Betrayal by a spouse, friend or another intimate is among the most painful of experiences as Jesus well knew. He was betrayed, denied, and abandoned by his disciples, and he even felt abandoned by God. And yet despite the hurts and betrayals, we are called to love the one or ones who have hurt us. February is Black History Month, when we are asked to consciously learn, remember, and celebrate the contributions of black persons to our nation and the world. And yet we know that these are the people whom our nation enslaved and oppressed. Consider the challenge of loving the ones who have denied and would deny your full humanity. And consider also how hard it is, almost impossible, perhaps to love the other when you might have very little self-regard, because you have taken on the identity your enemy has assigned you. That is sometimes part of the tragedy of enslaved and brutalized people---they do not know how to love themselves. Healthy self love can help to make the love of others, including the enemy, possible. Today I want to tell the story of a black artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner whose development of his artistic talent was his way of loving himself as well as others. On October 29, 1996 President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton held a reception in the East Room of the White House to unveil a landscape painting by Tanner, Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City. It was the first painting by an African American artist to hang in the East Room along with other paintings by such notables as Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent, to name a few. A magnificent painting, depicting “the diminishing light of an afternoon sky casting shadows over a windswept, grass-tufted shoreline” with the white sails of two boats barely visible in the distance, Sand Dunes gives no hint at all of the artist’s race. And this was one Tanner’s struggles: to become the artist he believed God was calling him to become without his art being defined by his race. He was proud of his racial heritage, and yet he suffered terrible insult and injustice as a black man. An artistic career for a person of color, born in 1859, one year before the onset of the Civil War---why it was unheard of! Despair, anger, and resentment were real struggles for him, threatening his art and his spirit, and yet he worked tirelessly to overcome them. As a very young child, he remembered the attic of his family home in Frederick, Maryland, from where he saw the rebel camps of the Confederacy and heard the rumblings of war. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, had been born into a family of free people, and was able to pursue an education, eventually becoming a bishop in the African Episcopal Church, a denomination with a passionate commitment to justice and racial equality. His mother, Sarah Elizabeth Miller, was born into slavery in Virginia, but her mother managed to escape with her children to freedom in Pennsylvania with the help of Quaker abolitionists and the Underground Railway. Sarah would pursue an education at Avery College, where she met and later married Henry’s father. Bishop Tanner hoped his son would pursue the ministry, and though Henry seriously considered this, he felt an undeniable call to paint. Fortunate that his parents supported him in this endeavor, he was also fortunate to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the first black person to be admitted. But Henry Tanner would not remain in America, because he believed he could not fight prejudice and paint at the same time, so most of his adult life was spent in France, in Paris and Normandy. He married a white woman, Jessie Macauley Olssen, in 1899, and found that an inter-racial marriage was accepted more easily and gracefully in France than in the United Sates. Tanner’s life was filled with tension---especially tension between his art and his racial identity. On the one hand, he had a passionate desire—he would say call---to paint, but on the other hand, his race made that a major challenge. He never denied his racial heritage. The blood that ran through his veins, he proudly said, was black, white, and Native American. His racial identity was even embedded in his middle name, Ossawa, which had been given to him by his father as a veiled reference to Osawatomie, Kansas, where the abolitionist, John Brown, had successfully and violently routed proslavery forces. And yet Tanner would chafe when people made his race the issue rather than his art. His art was his passion, and eventually he found his style, moving from illustration to landscape paintings, such as Sand Dunes at sunset. The Pennsylvania Academy would help him with realism, and then Paris would educate him in genre painting, such as we see in the Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor. In these two paintings Tanner was addressing the real life experience of black people. Banjo playing was not to be dismissed as a trivial skill, as if someone could simply pick one up and play. No, it requires both instruction and patience, which is what we see in the older man teaching the youth. And in The Thankful Poor Tanner wanted to convey the deep piety, faith and dignity that sustained poor people of color in America. Eventually religious paintings became the lens through which Tanner would share his vision of life and his reverence for life. A deeply religious man, Tanner said, “I paint the things I see and believe.” Nearly all his paintings, but especially his religious ones, use light to communicate. The light may emanate from a lantern or fire or the sun or moon or from God, or from the spirit within all human beings, and this light for Tanner was always a source of goodness, never wrathful or destructive. The light he painted did not always promise clarity or understanding, because Tanner believed we live within deep mystery, which can be pondered, but never fully understood. Yet the light always communicates acceptance and protection. For Tanner light is God’s love. And when we look at the painted light in the copies of paintings I have included in the bulletin, we can grasp some sense of this acceptance and protection---even if neither the biblical character nor we can fully understand. Consider the light in the annunciation---the moment at which Mary realizes she is chosen as the mother of the Messiah. Gabriel is painted as this brilliant shaft of light coming from God. Though Mary ponders its meaning, it is beyond mental grasp, just as it is beyond the mental grasp of the Pharisee, Nicodemus, who, according to John’s Gospel, came to Jesus in the night, because he wanted to understand how it is that a person can be born again. Notice that Tanner did not paint the scene in the dead of darkness, but in the gloaming, as night was coming on. There is still light, but it is not the light of full understanding. How can one explain the light that envelopes Lazarus as Jesus raised him from the dead, or the light cast upon the faces of the disciples and Jesus as they share bread and wine together around the table---and then and only then do the disciples recognize the risen Christ. Look at the light cast upon Daniel---not fully, because Daniel’s face is in the shadows, yet the light is not only for Daniel; it also shines on the lion’s head, who is nearest to Daniel as well as a lion that is walking away. Light, for Tanner, is God’s love and protection, always available, always present, but God’s light never guarantees ease. Faith for Tanner was a life long journey, a project of coming to know self and to know God. God always reveals, Tanner said, but not always fully. The light shines, yet, as Tanner acknowledged, we don’t always see. He knew that he did not always see and understand, just as he knew that the light can hurt our eyes with its brightness. Consider the Annunciation again---how Mary’s eyes are looking at the light, obliquely, not directly. At least she is trying to see, trying to understand, while so often we have to admit our response is to turn away, shut our eyes against that which is hurtful and uncomfortable. Tanner’s life was far from comfortable, but he did not think that God called him to be comfortable. In moving beyond comfort, he discovered his art, which also helped him to grow a larger heart for humanity---his own as well as others. February 17, 2022
Dear Friends, When we hear or read the word Rwanda, what immediately comes to mind for most of us is the horrible 1994 genocide, which left over 1 million people dead. Bill Clinton has said that his non-interference in the genocide was perhaps the biggest regret of his Presidency. In fact, as the war in the former country of Yugoslavia arrived, he finally decided to bomb and send in United States peacekeeping forces precisely because of what happened in Rwanda. He did not want to see another massacre repeated. Fast forward to the year 2004, when a woman named Odile Gakire Katese, founded Rwanda’s first all female percussion group, named Ingoma Nshya. It is a drumming group, where the woman pound on these huge heavy drums, which long have been the sole preserve of men. Women from both the Hutu and the Tutsi tribes come together in a spirit of sisterhood and reconciliation to work out their pain and their differences. Initially the women who joined all had lost loved ones in the genocide, but as decades have passed, the losses suffered are not always direct ones. Memory is powerful, reaching far beyond the immediate time when the event happened, and everyone in Rwanda carries a form of the genocide’s pain. One woman, who lost her husband and children in the genocide, said she thought she never could be happy again. But drumming has not only brought happiness, it has also healed some of the deep loneliness she suffered. She has traveled around Rwanda with the group and recently returned from a trip to Senegal. Since so many men were murdered during the genocide, women had to step up to rebuild the country, and for the first time women assumed positions of leadership. One woman said, “Ingome Nshya shows the power that women actually have.” People who have been part of the group for years say that it shows how differences can be worked out in other ways besides fighting with words or with machetes. The drumming is nothing if not intense, and it embraces a choreography of songs, dances, jumps and shouts. The memories and the pain are not magically healed, but people have found that the drumming and the listening to the drumming have helped them to cope with what is so devastatingly hurtful. It seems that the drumming is a way of integrating the pain, and integration is a form of healing. When trauma occurs, the temptation is, of course, to push it all away, to try to kill the memory, but often that does not work. The memory and the pain of it still intrude, sometimes in flashbacks or in depression and even suicide. One woman, who lost her entire family---husband, children, aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins, said she thought she would die of the pain. She could not imagine living with the loss. But now she drums and drums and drums. She can’t explain why it works or how it works. She only knows that somehow drumming has brought her to a peace she never would have imagined was possible. There is much in life we cannot explain. We know that people are different, and what works for some is not effective with others. I am not sure what psychologists or psychiatrists would say about this, whether or not, they would consider this “real healing.” But life in Rwanda has gone on, and people who once were murdering each other, are now living side by side in peace, just as they did before the massacre began. When I visited the former country of Yugoslavia this past fall, I witnessed a similar dynamic. How was it that neighbors became enemies with ethnic divisions destroying what had seemed to be harmonious relationships? My Polish friend has told me about the friendships his Nana had with Jewish women before The Nazis invaded in 1939. Then everything changed. The deep anti-Semitism that had apparently laid dormant asserted its terrible power. We can wonder if the harmony and friendships in all these varied situations were only surface and shallow, if they could be so quickly and horrendously destroyed. And we can also wonder how a bunch of huge drums and drumsticks could bring healing and hope to not only the women who play the drums but also to the people who see and listen to them. Perhaps we do not need to understand why it works. We cannot explain everything, but we can be relieved that there are instances when healing and forgiveness have their say, even when we cannot so easily explain how or why. Yours in Christ, Sandra BLESSINGS AND WOES
Preached by: The Rev. Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT February 13, 2022 Luke 6: 17-26 Oscar Wilde once said, “In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting it.” But, of course, Wilde’s statement depends on what it is you actually want and finally get. What if your desire is simply to have enough money to pay your bills and have a decent place to live---like this single mom with two kids, who lives in Queens and works for a grocery store that doesn’t give her enough hours. The store staffs itself with part time workers, and then constantly changes their schedules, which is very difficult for people who need day care and have another part time job. I just read a few days ago how companies still prefer, even in these days of labor shortages, to hire part time workers, especially in areas like hospitality and retail, because they don’t want to pay benefits, and so they give hiring bonuses instead. And so, would it really be a tragedy, if this mother actually were hired full time, so she would not be constantly worrying about rent, food and day care? On the other hand, what if what you want is life destroying. I remember this poor, homeless, drug addicted woman, who was so broken she could not desire anything good for her life. I was so exasperated with her that I poured out my frustration by practically yelling this question: Is there NOTHING good you want out of life? “Yea,” she said, “I’d like a free cache of crack.” She wasn’t kidding. She finally got enough that it killed her. So much for getting what you want. For most of us, however, life is not lived on such extremes, and we probably feel that our wants are fairly reasonable ones, given what the norms in our society are. But in Jesus’ day life was lived on the extremes. There were the rich and the poor with hardly anyone in between. Now Judaism did not disdain wealth, but it did have rules about how a faithful Jew was to expend his or her wealth. The widow and the orphan were to be cared for and there were also strict rules of hospitality which meant that feeding a hungry person was an obligation. But it is also true that Jesus was especially hard on the rich and the privileged; he strongly identified with Israel’s prophets, like Jeremiah, who spoke God’s word of judgment against those who ignored the needs of the poor and amassed wealth unjustly. Our gospel reading this morning, Luke’s sermon on the plain, can be distinguished from Matthew’s sermon on the Mount, which is longer, its language more beautiful and more spiritualized. While Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Luke proclaims, “Blessed are you, who are poor.” Matthew reads, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” while Luke declares, “Blessed are you, who are hungry now. And though Matthew has no curses or woes, Luke’s Jesus pronounces judgment on those who have: But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. The Greek word translated as consolation is a commercial term, meaning having received your due, paid in full. No more, in other words, is coming to you. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. These are pretty tough words, directed against the comfortable and the privileged. If Luke’s words leave us feeling a bit uncomfortable, is that really such a bad thing? Individuals as well as society could stand to take a hard look at its priorities. Being attentive to the least of these is exactly what Jesus commanded his followers to do, and many of these least are children, who bear no responsibility for creating the conditions in which they live. When one of our nation’s senators from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, recently said “It is not society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children,” does he mean that we should let the children be hungry if their parents cannot or do not feed them, or permit them be cold, if their parents cannot pay the heating bills? Does he think it should not matter to our county that 100,000 children in New York City’s public schools are officially homeless, living in shelters or in some other temporary residence? Do we really think Jesus would say, “None of this is our concern or our responsibility?” Of course, we also know that not all God’s blessings and woes come down to money. Jesus was certainly concerned with more than financial and physical rewards. In today’s lesson it is worth noting that the people who traveled to hear Jesus preach on the plain came from all over, Judea, Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, the latter Gentile territory. All these people came to hear his words and to experience the healings he offered. And the offer was to a vast variety of people. Luke’s gospel has a very wide reach, beyond the house of Israel. The writer of this gospel wanted to push people beyond themselves and their home territory, to help them realize that God’s love and mercy as expressed in Jesus Christ, embraces a wide world of contrast and difference, including people who were not like them. We can imagine there were Jews who felt very uncomfortable when the Samaritans showed up in the crowd, wanting to be healed by Jesus. He is one of us, they probably thought. What does he have to do with them? And when Jesus actually healed some of those “unclean” gentiles from Tyre and Sidon, there must have been those who took offense at his actions. His blessings are for us, not for them! It is the same old story, time and time again, repeated across the pages of history, including our own time and place---us vs. them, the ingroup vs. the outgroup. But there is something else about blessings and woes. Sometimes what looks like a blessing turns out to be a woe---like some people who win the lottery only to have it destroy their lives. And then there are the woes that can become a blessing. Now we need to be very careful with this, so we don’t end up saying that God intends people to suffer so good can emerge, or so a reward can come in the afterlife. But, as Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, and certainly knew about suffering once said, “While it is true the world is filled with suffering, it is also true it is full of the overcoming of it.” Some years ago, when I worked in this large medical center on Long Island, there was this man, who used to come a couple of times each week and play the violin. He was a classical violinist. One of the surgeons, who also played the violin, said, “He plays like an angel.” He played on the wards, but he also was permitted to go down into the surgical units, where he played for people going into and exiting surgery. Since so many of these persons were heavily sedated, he began to wonder if this really was helpful. What he didn’t figure on was his influence on the surgeons. When he didn’t show up for a few weeks, some surgeons wanted to know where he was. My God, one surgeon told me, I lost a 10 year old on the operating table last month, and when I heard our musician play Mozart, it gave me the strength to tell the parents their son was gone. I don’t know how I would have faced it without the music lifting me up, reminding me that despite the world’s sufferings, beauty has the power to transform.” Well, when the musician returned and the surgeons poured out their gratitude, he told them his story, how he had been at Columbia Medical School and suffered a car accident that left his blind. He did not think he could continue his medical studies, but what he did was return to music, which he had always loved and studied, but he didn’t think he would ever be able to earn a living as a musician. After his accident he went to Vienna to study, and he returned to find a place not only in the music world but also in the world of a hospital. His blindness, he said, was still a great agony to bear, certainly a woe, and not something God would have ever intended for him, but he told the surgeons that with God’s grace and the help and support of others he was able to turn it into a blessing for himself and for others. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but it was what he felt called to do. February 10, 2022
Dear Friends, Henry Ford once said, “One of the great discoveries a person makes is when she discovers that she achieved the thing she was afraid she could not do.” And Eleanor Roosevelt told us that each day we should try one thing we are afraid of doing. Fear is powerful. It can keep us from living our lives, but it can also help to motivate us to action. Fear can be crippling, but it can also be life giving. Sometimes people do not act, because they are afraid, but at other times they act precisely because of their fear. Fear is a complicated emotion, and though most of us do not like to be afraid, can you imagine what life would be like, if we never knew fear? There is, in fact, a Hans Christian Anderson story about a man, who could not experience fear, and so he goes through a great deal of trouble to learn how to be afraid. The point of the story is that a human life without fear is a very limited life, indeed. We also know that Jesus spent a great deal of his time and ministry telling people, “Do not be afraid; do not be anxious.” He realized that people live so much of their lives, captive to fear and anxiety, which prevents them from living full and abundant lives. My husband had a brilliant student at Wesleyan, who graduated 22 years ago, but the poor man has spent his life, terrified to go out of the home he inherited when his mother died of cancer 20 years ago. Not only does he struggle with agoraphobia, but he also is terrified that because he has the same cancer prone gene his mother had, he will suffer the same hideous death. My husband said his brilliance would have led him to make so many contributions to medicine and science, but his neurosis has kept him imprisoned in a house of fear. With those thoughts in mind, consider an article I recently read in the New York Times about the winter Olympians. What unites all the competitors, no matter the sport, is fear. They all are afraid. They have all suffered injuries because they have pushed the limits of what is possible for the human body to do, and some have suffered grievous injuries. Alice Merriweather was supposed to be competing in the Olympics this winter, but last September in the Swiss Alps she suffered an injury that will keep her off skies for two years. She claims her greatest fear has never been about the pain of an injury. Her fear is about lost opportunity, the heartbreak of working so hard for something that finally goes on without her. She now must cope with the fear of uncertainty because she cannot know how her body will heal. Will she ever be able to ski as she once did? She is determined to come back, and she says that the joy which comes from going tremendously fast and achieving a beautiful turn is worth the fear. In fact, she claims it outdistances the fear by a ratio of 10 to 1! With each Olympic cycle the pressure grows to be faster, higher, scarier. Olympic snowboarders, skiers, bobsled, and luge racers have died, and in 2010 in the training session at the Vancouver Olympics, a luge racer was killed. That young man’s death traumatized everyone who went down the same run where he was killed. But nowhere is the pressure more apparent than in the aerials, where the skier goes down a four meter jump, hurls himself into the air, twisting and turning in somersaults. The number of flips that can be done has been capped at three, and even these thrill seekers and fear junkies are relieved that limits have been set. Some admit they are in love with fear and the incredible adrenalin rush that inevitably comes, while others acknowledge that fear creates a bond among all those who compete. They respect one another, because they know the fear that drives them forward to push themselves against the limits. But the Olympics are extreme situations, outside the boundaries of what most of us will ever face. Yet fear is no stranger; we all know fear. I remember when I worked as a chaplain on a neurosurgery unit, where people faced (to my way of thinking) the most terrifying surgery, when someone would drill into the skull and then cut deeply into the brain tissue to remove a tumor. Though people were very afraid, they would, nonetheless, undergo the surgery, because they felt they had no choice. It was either submission to the surgery or death. I was very impressed with their courage, so much so that one summer day, while at an amusement park with friends, I decided to go on this super rollercoaster that went upside down. I did not want to go. I hate such rides and I was utterly terrified. But I told myself how every day I saw people undergo brain surgery, which was more terrifying than this, so I made myself get on. From the moment I was belted in, I regretted my decision, and I immediately began to scream as we ascended the first steep incline. It was a horrible experience, and I was terrified the entire time. I am not sure what insights I gained, but I do think there is a world of difference between facing something that you feel you must (as in surgery and war) and making an active decision to do something you do not have to do, but perhaps feel compelled to do---like extreme sports or riding on a rollercoaster. When Jesus talked about fear and anxiety, he was not considering daredevil actions. He was speaking to people who often were threatened with taxes they could not pay, food they could not afford, and sickness that left them unable to work. They lived under Roman rule, which they often experienced as capricious and arbitrary. Rules and laws changed without any input from them. Insecurity was a constant threat. They had very little control over outward circumstances, and so Jesus’ advice was to trust God. Trusting God did not solve their problems. People were still hungry and poor, but trusting God somehow made life look differently to them. Problems still assailed them, but they were assured they were not alone or abandoned, that there was something far larger than self that loved them. And for those who can believe that, the unbearable becomes possible to bear. I once heard a Holocaust survivor say that there came a certain point in his imprisonment, when he realized God was not going to save him or the others from the horrors of the camp. And when that realization came, he said his fear greatly lessened. Each day he would repeat this Jewish prayer. “Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, The Lord alone, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being and with all your might.” While he did not expect the prayer to save him, it was still important for him to pray it. And when he did, fear was no longer the great enemy it once had been. Yours in Christ, Sandra NO MORE WINE
Preached by: Sandra Olsen January 30, 2022 John 2: 1-11 They have no wine, and initially the statement sounds nothing more than an embarrassing problem for the wedding host. We might be tempted to think, “Well, no wonder Jesus tells his mother this is no concern of hers or his. Why should he help people get drunk?’ But something deeper is going on here, and it relates to the very nature of Jewish life. There are two primary elements in this story---water and wine, both essential ingredients in the living of everyday life as well as the celebration of religious rituals. First, consider water. Water is the stuff of life. Life on this planet began in water; our lives begin in the watery womb of our mother’s bodies. Ancient Israel was a very dry place, so water was precious, necessary for the growing of crops and the caring of animals, for bathing and food preparation. Water was essential for the ritual washing of hands before meals and other acts of ritual bathing, both in the home and in the Temple. Women were the ones who fetched water at community wells or at the rivers and lakes. Though the Jews did not drink water, because it was unsafe, unless boiled, they certainly recognized the preciousness of water And wine: it was what people drank on a regular basis, and it was also used in religious rituals along with water. And, of course, both water and wine were offered to guests. They were marks of hospitality, and the obligation of hospitality was at the center of Jewish life. You offered your guests wine to drink and water to wash their hands and feet So, to be out of wine was to be out of one of the essentials of life. It was to be bereft of what one needed to live fully. In other words, you only have part of what you need. It’s like a painter who has all the tools to paint, including talent, but lacks the paint, or a sculptor who has no clay. Now the writer of this gospel wants to communicate the emptiness of Jewish religious life. John’s gospel was written around the year 100, about 30 years after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans. And when the Temple was destroyed, Judaism went through a crisis. First of all, the priestly class came to an end, since there was no Temple where religious ritual could be practiced. “We’re done for, finished, empty”---they could not imagine Judaism without a Temple. But the Pharisees could. So, the Temple is gone, they said, but we still have God’s Word. We still have the Law, and so they moved from the Temple to the synagogues. The synagogues were like house churches, where people read and studied scripture. There were synagogues in Jesus’ time, but they did not become CENTRAL to Jewish religious life until after the Temple was destroyed. The Pharisees saved Judaism by recreating it. But John’s gospel has no interest at all in giving the Pharisees any credit for anything. Its intent is to show the emptiness of Judaism---it’s out of wine. Right after Jesus turned the water into wine, he goes to Jerusalem, where he throws the moneychangers out of the Temple courtyard, declaring they have made God’s house into a den of robbers. The moneychangers, however, were essential, because Jews came to the Temple from all over the Roman empire, and they had to change their money into Jewish money, which was the only money acceptable in the Temple. No coin with Caesar’s image was permitted. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus expelled the moneychangers at the end of his earthly ministry, right before his arrest, so his behavior in the Temple was the primary reason the religious leadership wanted Jesus gone. But in John, the story is at the gospel’s beginning, because the writer wants to show that from the beginning Temple religious life is empty. “They are out of wine,” out of what they need, and so they cannot do and be what they are called to do and be. Out of wine, running on empty: Don’t most of us know what that means? Don’t we all have periods in our lives when we feel we are running on empty? Sometimes it’s a marriage that is empty. Let’s face it: you can only work so long and try so hard to fill up what is empty. And when it comes to relationships, it requires other people to help fill the emptiness. Sometimes we run empty on our jobs, when we just can’t do what we need to do anymore. I just heard the other day about one of my former parishioners in Middletown, who was a high school Spanish teacher. And after a year on zoom, when she finally went back to the classroom last April, she discovered she could not do it anymore. Her students in Spanish 2 had learned nothing in Spanish 1, and her students in Spanish 3 had learned nothing the previous year in Spanish 2. She had been told that as long as they showed up on Zoom, even if they did no work all, she had to pass them, which she did, but in the next year, at the next level, they knew nothing. And so, last June she told the school she would not be back. She needs to work; she needs a job, but she can no longer teach in school, because she is running on empty---no more wine. And so, she is spending this year, trying to figure out the next step. And sometimes running on empty happens in the religious life, as it did to the Jewish Temple leadership when the Temple was destroyed. Sometimes people face a crisis, and suddenly ealize they have no spiritual resources to see them through. When Ralph Waldo Emerson, an ordained Unitarian minister, lost his young son, he said, “The wisest among us know nothing.” He was shocked how little his religion was of help to him. And so, he left his pulpit and his denomination and orthodox Christianity, but he did go on and become one of the greatest theological geniuses in our nation---just as the Pharisees went on and recreated Judaism and Jesus too did something new. He turned the water into wine, a way of showing we do not need to remain empty. But notice that the story begins with his not knowing that this was the time, the right time for him to act. He initially resisted, telling his mother, “My hour has not yet come.” And Mary did not argue with him; she only told the servants to do whatever he asked. Perhaps that expressed confidence in Jesus, helped him to recognize that his time had come. The empty jars were filled with water, turned to wine. But who knew? Certainly not everyone. The host did not know; neither the steward nor the guests---only Jesus, his mother, and the servants, the least of these, who filled the stone jars with water, knew from where the wine came. And that is exactly how it often is in life: new life comes, but who sees and who knows? February 2, 2022
January 20th has come and gone, but most people have no idea that the day was an anniversary of something world shattering. On January 20, 1942, fifteen high ranking Nazis met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin to plan the extermination of the Jews. The meeting took all of 90 minutes, but the plan it laid out was extremely efficient and well organized. If you do not know what the subject of the meeting was, the notes taken that day read like most of the bureaucratic plans that emerge from such meetings. The word, murder, was never used, but rather words like evacuation, reduction, treatment are the preferred language. The tasks of this vast and evil undertaking are divided among the various governmental departments. An interesting fact is that no military leaders were present. The plan was to go after 11 million Jews, but they only managed to murder 6 million. The villa, where the plan was made, is stunningly lovely: three stories high, situated on a lake, set back from the road. Boasting beautiful, expansive gardens, a magnificent front portico and four statues of chubby cherubs, dancing on the roof, the villa offers no hint of the machinations on the minds of those 15 participants. The host of the meeting was Reinhold Heydrich, chief of security service in the SS, and the men he invited to partake of the plan were senior civil servants and party officials, most of them in their 30”s, nine of them with law degrees and over half with PhD’s---perhaps the most well educated group of murderers ever gathered. Though we prefer to think that education issues in goodness, what happened in Nazi Germany should clearly reveal that goodness is not a guaranteed result of an educated mind. It is profoundly humbling and disturbing to recognize this bitter truth. By the time these men met in 1942 mass deportation had already begun as well as the murder of Jews in the East---in Russia as well as the Baltic states. But it was at the Wannsee villa that the grand design of efficient murder was laid out. The current President of Germany, when reading the notes of the gathering, said that the language was so familiar. “It reads like so many reports that are issued today,” he said. But his blood congeals, when he considers what it is these 15 men were planning and discussing. So, what happened to these fifteen men, all of whom took direct part in the Holocaust? By 1945 six of them were dead. Only two stood trial for murder and war crimes: Adolph Eichmann was executed in Israel after being apprehended in Argentina, where he had lived for years. Wilhelm Stuckart, who coauthored the Nuremberg Laws, served some years in prison, but was released in 1949. Three others were tried for unrelated offenses and given mild sentences and four were NEVER charged with any crime at all. Gerhard Klopfer, a senior official in Hitler’s chancellery, worked as a lawyer for years after the war. When he died in 1987 his family published a death notice, celebrating his accomplishments and claiming his was “a fulfilled life that was to the benefit of all who came under his sphere of influence.” It may be that the man did some good work as a lawyer after the war, but even that goodness cannot erase the evil he helped to commit. I have no idea what went on in his mind, and his spirit---whether or not he felt any remorse or ever acknowledged his guilt. Only God can know such things. But it should astound and profoundly disturb us that so much was finally ignored and dismissed. The planners of the murders---some of them at least---were never held accountable! Perhaps it was simply too painful for the nation to prosecute crimes that would suggest some form of collective guilt. So many Germans claimed ignorance: “I did not know; I did not commit the crimes.” And yet on a daily schedule the average German citizen witnessed Jews being expelled from their homes and taken away to “who knows where,” which was the common response. People do not want to admit collective guilt; they do not want to examine the many ways in which a society helps to grow the prejudice and hatred that, if unchecked and unacknowledged, can lead to the horror that became the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust is not history’s only shame. Again and again, we see people turning away from facing the truth of their history. We see it in our own nation, where people to not want to face the ugly story of racism and slavery. And now we see certain states and boards of education removing books from school library shelves that tell stories and discuss topics some people think are too upsetting to be read and taught in school. But sometimes truth is upsetting! We are called to be faithful, not comfortable. Jesus told us to know the truth, because the truth will make us free--- free FROM fear and free from hate and free TO learn, free to grow and change, free to love God and the other, who is also God’s beloved. Yours in Christ, Sandra January 26, 2022
Dear Friends In a world were divisions on all sorts of things define reality, it is uplifting to realize that the James Webb Space Telescope is not causing division. All the world is excited by this wonderful invention, many, many times more powerful than the famous Hubble Telescope. Weighing in at 7.2 tons and costing $10 billion, the James Webb is the brainchild of NASA and the European and Canadian Space Agencies. It was conceived in the 90’s with a lowball budget of $500 million, and astronomers had to fight off threats to cut the project off, since cost overruns were almost a daily occurrence. But finally, decades later, it was finished, lifting off from French Guiana on December 25. After a journey of one million miles, it landed a few days ago, unfolding a kite shaped sunshade the size of a tennis court, which will allow it to operate at minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to see infrared wavelengths. It boasts a set of eighteen hexagonal, gold coated mirrors, built of beryllium to withstand extreme temperatures. While its predecessor, Hubble, orbits the earth, the James Webb will orbit the sun at Lagrange Point 2, one of five places in the solar system where the gravitational pull of the sun and earth balances the orbital motion of a satellite. Hubble reads primarily visible light, which limits how far it can see and is 340 miles from the earth. William Shatner went up 66 miles on his space ride, so wrap your head around one million miles! At these distances the wavelengths of light grow so long they leave the visible spectrum and become infrared. What scientists hope is that the telescope will be able to “see” into the far distant past in order to examine the formation of early galaxies and stars, the nature of dark energy and whether there are other life forms out there. Its mirrors will focus in movements smaller than the width of a human hair! Other instruments on the telescope will allow it to gaze through intergalactic dust clouds and analyze planets and stars in faraway solar systems. Because the telescope is at such a great distance from earth, there can be no space repair mission as happened with Hubble. Risk averse engineers at NASA had to test and retest every single component, trying to make allowances for every possible problem. But, of course, it is the unexpected that gets us every time! What the James Webb will reveal will most likely be shocking, at least according to astronomers. Hubble, for example, showed us dark energy, which drives the cosmos to expand. Using information from dying stars, James Webb may help astronomers to pin down the rate of the universe’s expansion and whether the influence of dark energy has changed throughout the epochs of the universe’s history. There is also the hope that we will learn much more about black holes, which can weigh millions and even billions of times more than the sun’s mass. These massive black holes have been spotted, lurking in the centers of many different galaxies, but while scientists have different theories about how they came to be, as of yet, there is no corroborating evidence. Some think that in the great expanse of past time massive clouds of hydrogen and helium collapsed under their own weight into super dense black holes, which could be the anchors around which galaxies form. Each time a revolutionary invention has allowed humans to peer into space, amazing new discoveries have been made. Hubble revealed that there are galaxies larger than astronomers ever thought possible, that stars formed in the early creation were far larger and more luminous than they are now. James Webb will almost certainly reveal more shocking truths about the amazing universe. Scientists, for example, wonder if the earth was formed in the presence of water, or if the water came to earth from asteroids or comets that crashed to earth. James Webb will help them to answer that question. When I consider the marvels of this new telescope, I am reminded of some words from the brilliant and imaginative Albert Einstein, who said, “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” But God is also in the details, as the medieval theologians taught. Yours in Christ, Sandra Words of Power
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT January 23, 2022 Nehemiah 8: 1-3; 5-6; 8-10 Luke 4: 14-21 My oldest daughter, Alethea, whose name, by the way, means Truth in Greek, remembers being around four years old and hearing her father and me discuss something, using many words she did not know. She remembers listening very intently and thinking to yourself, “One day I will know all those words and then I will understand everything!” She brought this memory up recently when telling us about her experiences teaching high school history. She teaches outside of Boston in a very good suburban school system, but she complained that education these days is not about words. Students pay attention to images, not words, she said. As a teacher I am told I am not supposed to talk very much; lectures are out, and though I can ask questions, discussions are not good either, I am told, because not everyone participates. She was talking to her class about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and specifically these words: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. Her question to the class was: If you knew nothing else about Lincoln except that he spoke these words, what can you say about him and his priorities as President. Some kids did talk, but that was not good enough, because, as the chair of the history department told her, who was observing the class, some students just sat there and didn’t say a word. “Maybe they were listening,” she countered. “You know people can learn something by listening.” He looked at her as if she had just said the most shocking thing. Words: They matter, and they matter profoundly. Consider our two lessons from this morning. First of all, we have from the Old Testament a story about some of the Jewish people, who after a 50 exile in Babylon, have returned to Jerusalem. They were rebuilding the city walls, and while working on the project, a scroll was discovered, a piece of scripture, lost and forgotten during the years of exile. All the people were gathered, and Ezra, the scribe, read some words that moved them deeply. On that day, in their hearing, they felt and believed that scripture had been fulfilled. Fast forward 500 years to another location, the town of Nazareth, a simple, lackluster place. Now at this point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus, after being baptized by John and driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit, where he successfully resisted Satan’s temptations, returned to his hometown of Nazareth. And there he went to the synagogue, where he read from the prophet Isaiah, beginning with the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” In Jesus’ day it was common practice to stand while reading the scripture and then sit down for the explication of the text. And this is exactly what Jesus did. He sat down, and the reason the text tells us that the eyes of the congregation were upon him was because they were expecting him to preach. But his sermon was very short, one line, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” It certainly was not what people were expecting to hear. The Jews, who 500 years before, had heard Ezra read God’s law in the rubble of a devastated city must have wondered what God was about to do. And surely the people sitting before Jesus must have pondered the same question. How was scripture fulfilled? What would happen next? Well, what happened was the ministry of Jesus. He went around healing and teaching. He taught by doing and by telling. He used words to tell stories about ordinary life, which engaged peoples’ imaginations. They could see themselves in these stories, imagine themselves as the characters. When Jesus spoke, people listened because his words had power, transformative power, pointing to God. The Apostle Paul said that faith comes by way of hearing. We must hear the Word, learn the stories so that we can see and understand what the Christian life looks like. Just last week our nation celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a man, who certainly knew the power of words. He knew that words could move people. I remember reading a biography of Lyndon Johnson, who during some of the most challenging days of Civil Rights called Governor George Wallace and told him to get his behind to Washington ASAP. Now Johnson was hardly known for eloquence, but he certainly had a way with words. Sitting Wallace down, directly opposite him, his gaze, boring into Wallace’s eyes, he said, “George in another twenty years or less, you and I are going to be six feet under, and what do you want your legacy to be: George Wallace: he hated? Wallace later said he had to get out of there as fast as he could. Why, before long, he would have had even me believing in Civil Rights. His words were getting to me. Yes, sometimes words do get to people. There was this little French Protestant town, Le Chambon, in southern France, which during the Second World War hid and saved 5000 Jews from Nazi brutality. Andre Trocme, was the minister, and he had always made clear that the Gospel mandates loving both the neighbor and the enemy. And so, the villagers not only protected the Jews, but they also did not harm one Nazi soldier. Buses of German soldiers would suddenly invade the town with the expectation that the buses would leave, filled with French Jews, but no Jew was ever found or surrendered. The citizens of Le Chambon did not consider themselves particularly courageous or heroic. Without exception they simply believed they were doing what Jesus would have them do. “They can close down our church,” Trocme said, “but they cannot close down our faith in Jesus Christ and our duty to him.” When a high church official from Paris once pleaded with the pastor to cease all activity on behalf of the Jews, because it would hurt French Protestantism in France, Trocme replied, “I would rather see every Protestant church burned to the ground in France than to see us turn our backs on one Jewish man, woman or child.” And in 1942 as Jews in Paris were being deported, Rev. Trocme mounted his pulpit and thundered, “The Christian Church should drop to its knees and beg pardon of God for its cowardice and lack of faith.” Powerful, faithful words. Rev. Trocme believed and taught what Paul had said in Romans, “Faith comes though hearing.” (Romans 10:17). His congregation heard; they heard the preached word week after week, and though they lived what appeared to be a life of spiritual simplicity, when the big moment came, they acted. They protected the Jews without a lot of soul searching and spiritual agony. They understood how scripture was indeed being fulfilled as they defended those who could not defend themselves. We would do well to wonder and ponder, if a society, which fails to pay close attention to words and whether they are true or false, will have enough Christians capable of hearing not only what the Gospel says but also what it demands. January 21, 2022
Dear Friends, It has been a while since I have written a reflection letter, but recently I came across something that I found engaging. Apparently, a joint study by the London School of Economics and the University of Wisconsin found that references to nature in novels, songs, and films began to decline in the 1950’s and as only accelerated since then. The study looked at key words such as animals, snow, soil, storm, sky, sun, moon, and seasons and noticed a key decline in their usage. What changed over this time frame was the expansion of technology: television in the 50’s and 60’s, video in the 70’s and then computers, smartphones and the internet after that. In the year 2018 the Nielson study found that the average American adult spend 9.5 hours a day looking at some kind of screen. And teenagers spend even more time. The result of all this is that people are spending more and more time indoors and less time in the natural world. How many of us adults have commented that children no longer play outdoors? When I was growing up, we were always outdoors, even in the cold. I played for hours in the snow, and in the warmer weather, we kids changed into our play clothes after returning from school and outside we went. Summer vacation time meant that we were out the door after breakfast, returning home for lunch and then out again until dinner. We roomed the neighborhood in groups, playing all kinds of games, riding our bikes, and even wandering in the nearby woods. My mother certainly did not know where we were every minute of the day, and she did not worry about it either. We were told never to go with strangers, but that is about as far as the anxiety went. Both children and adults are now suffering from a “nature deficit disorder. “It is simply a fact that mental health is helped by nature---that walks in the woods, or time spent by water offer a kind of healing touch. There is a reason city residents flock to parks. Trees, grass, flowers all help people to be mentally and spiritually healthy. Nature is not magic, and it certainly will not solve or remove all our problems, but we do need nature’s touch. It is simply part of what our humanity requires. After all, are we not part of nature? In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great Transcendentalist thinker, (whom one of my professors claimed was one of the two theological geniuses the United States produced---the first was Jonathan Edwards) wrote an essay On Nature, which he revised in 1844. Emerson had been a Unitarian minister in Boston, but he was too intellectually daring to remain in the pulpit, so he resigned his ministry and moved to Concord, where he developed his own theology and became a renowned leader of the Transcendentalist Movement. Nature for the Transcendentalists was both a physical and a spiritual reality. "In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." In his 1844 essay, he wrote: “There are days which occur in this climate at almost any season of the year, when the world reaches its perfection when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring. . . . Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom.” Our world in 1844 was a very different place, and we can only imagine what Emerson would say about our situation today. Surely, he would be appalled at the havoc we have wrecked on our planet, and he would undoubtedly issue a clarion call for us to exit “our close and crowded houses” to see what majesty nature has to offer. While driving home the other night, I came face to face with the full moon, known as the Wolf Moon, the first full moon of the new year. It was gorgeous, inspiring a feeling of unmitigated awe. Emerson, ever the optimist, believed that seeing could actually lead to understanding and understanding could lead to wisdom. And so he ended "Nature" with these words: "Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. Let us hope he was right. Yours in Christ, Sandra THE STORY OF THE OTHER WISE MAN
A Retelling of the Original Story by Henry Van Dyke Epiphany Sunday, January 2, 2021 When Caesar Augustus sat on Rome’s throne and King Herod reigned in Jerusalem, there was a man named Artaban, who resided in a mountainous city in Persia. Artaban was a nobleman, and his richly designed clothes, including the massive gold collar around his neck and the winged circles of gold, emblazoned across his chest, marked him as a follower of Zoroaster. Artaban was among the wise men, who studied the stars and the movement of the planets, because they believed that the heavens revealed the thoughts of the eternal and could be directly applied to life on earth. On this particular night Artaban had invited other magi to his house to remind them of an ancient prediction: There shall come a star out of Jacob and a scepter shall arise out of Israel. A new star has risen, he said, and for one night its brightness was beyond compare. Now it is gone, but tonight Jupiter and Saturn will meet, Artaban said, and if the star appears again, I will leave my home and join my three companions: Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, and we shall journey together to find the newborn king. They will only wait 10 days for me, so my ride will be long and hard. I have sold my possessions and have purchased these three jewels to give the king: a sapphire, a ruby, and a pearl. Will any of you join me? “I have just married,” said one. “The tribes of Israel are scattered like lost sheep.” “Nothing of any worth will rise from them,” said another. But then the oldest among the Magi stepped forward. “Perhaps this will only be an empty search, but those who would find wonderful things must often travel alone. I am too old to accompany you, Artaban, but my heart goes with you.” That very night Jupiter and Saturn conjoined, pulsating with pure, white light. And then the star once again appeared, so Artaban mounted his swiftest horse, Vasda, and began his journey. Days flew by as Artaban and Vasda raced toward their destination, and as the early evening of the 10th day brought its darkness, Artaban approached the city of Babylon, a three hour journey from the Temple of the Seven Spheres, where Artaban would meet his comrades. Approaching a grove of date nut trees, Vasda slackened her pace. Without halting, she moved ahead slowly, tentatively, expecting, it seemed, to come upon something troubling. And there it was---in the road lay a man, a Hebrew, whose pallid skin and dry mouth marked him as a man who had apparently died from a fever. Artaban was about to pass on, saying a silent prayer, when suddenly he heard moaning. The man was alive, and in a flash with no thought but only feeling, Artaban could feel resentment rising. “If I stop to help him, surely I will miss my comrades. It is they, not I, who have the provisions for the journey, and if I miss them, I will have to return to Babylon to buy the necessary supplies. But if I do not help, the man will die.” So Artaban dismounted, and for the next five hours nursed the man back to health. The magi, you see, not only studied the stars, they also were healers of the body. Who are you?, the Hebrew wanted to know, and when Artaban identified himself and his mission, the man said, “May the God of Abraham bless and prosper the journey of the merciful and bring him to his desired haven. I have nothing to give you in return for your healing arts, but I can tell you that our prophets say the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. May God guide you there.” Artaban raced through the night, but when he arrived at the Temple, his comrades were gone, having left a note: We have waited past midnight and can delay no longer. We go to find the King; follow us across the desert. How can I go? Artaban sighed. I have no supplies and so must return to Babylon and with my sapphire buy what I need. And this is what Artaban did. I may never be able to overtake my friends, he sadly said, all because I tarried to show mercy. Soon Artaban was traveling across the desert, arriving in Bethlehem three days after his comrades had seen Mary, Joseph, and the baby. The streets were deserted, and a strange foreboding hung in the air. Knocking on a door, he was greeted by a young woman with a baby, who explained to him that yes, three other men, dressed like him, had been here, and yes, they did visit a couple who just had a baby. But the visitors left, as did the couple and the infant, on their way, she thought, to Egypt. She also explained to Artaban that there was a rumor that the Romans were about to make a tax raid on the village, and so all the men had moved the cattle into the hills to preserve their herds. Since hospitality was a Jewish virtue, the woman prepared for Artaban a humble meal and invited him to rest for a while, which Artaban did, until suddenly he heard shouts and the terrified warning of screaming women, “Herod’s soldiers are murdering our babies.” The sound of doors being smashed and blood curdling cries were too much for the young mother, who crouched in the corner in total terror, while the door to her home was almost demolished by the force of a determined and brutal kick. Slowly and calmly Artaban opened the door to face a solder holding a bloody spear. “I am alone in this home and willing to give the man who leaves me in peace this sparkling ruby,” and removing the ruby from his pocket, he held it up for the soldier to see. Greedily the soldier’s eyes stared at the shimmering gem, and grabbing it, he said to his comrades, “There are no children here; let us be gone.” O God of truth, Artaban prayed, I spent for man what was intended for God. Shall I ever be worthy to see the king? Artaban asked.” But the voice of the grateful young mother said, “Because you have saved the life of my child, may the God of Israel bless you and keep you always.” The years came and went. Time moved on, and Artaban’s search seemed to have no end. People reported seeing Artaban in Egypt, in Alexandria, in New Babylon. Once he was seen taking counsel from a venerable old Jewish rabbi, who read to him the words from Isaiah about a suffering servant who would be despised and rejected and acquainted with grief. If you would seek the king, the old rabbi said, you would do well to look among the poor, the lowly, the sorrowful and the oppressed.” And so Artaban did. He visited those in prison; he helped to distribute food to the hungry and clothes to the naked, and though he found many to help, he found no one to worship. Three decades had come and gone. Worn, weary and ready to die, for one last time, Artaban came to Jerusalem. The air was thick with foreboding, a kind of macabre excitement surrounded the city. Have you not heard, someone asked him, about the Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth, a healer and prophet, whom some call King of the Jews? He is about to be executed. Why not join us for the sport! Is it possible that this is where all my searching will end---at the death of an innocent man? As Artaban made his way toward Golgotha, he suddenly heard the sound of a young woman’s scream. “Help me,” she pleaded, as she broke away from the men who were dragging her way, to sell her as a slave to pay debts that her now dead father could not pay. “Please Sir,” she pleaded, “if there be a drop of compassion in your heart, save me from this fate that for me is worse than death.” Artaban trembled; it was the old conflict he had met in a palm grove near Babylon and in a young mother’s house in Bethlehem, the conflict between the expectation of faith and the impulse of love. Was this his greatest opportunity or his last temptation? Placing his hands in his pocket to feel the pearl before pulling out its glistening whiteness, he knew only one thing. It was inevitable that he give the pearl away. “This is your ransom, my child,” he said, “the last of my treasures, which I have saved all these years for the king. Take it; it is yours.” As he handed the pearl to her, the sky turned menacingly dark and shuddering tremors ran through the earth. The walls of the house next to where they stood began to rock and loosened stones crashed to the ground. Artaban and the young girl tried to crouch down for safety. But what had Artaban to fear now? His quest was over, and it had failed, but it was not anger or sadness, not even resignation he felt, but rather peace, the peace that passes all human understanding. Suddenly, Artaban felt a sharp pain on his head as a tile from the roof fell upon him, cutting deeply into his skull. He fell to the ground, and the young girl bent down to wipe the blood from his head. Not so, my Lord, she heard Artaban say. For when did I see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink, or when were you in prison that I visited you? And the girl heard the voice answer: As much as you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me. A calm radiance of wonder and joy spread across Artaban’s face. One long last breath of relief exhaled from his lips. His journey was ended; his treasures were accepted. The Other Wise Man had at last found the King. Yours in Christ, Sandra CHRISTMAS EVE AT MCDONALD’S
Preached by: Sandra Olsen Not many people spend Christmas Eve at McDonald’s. Perhaps some parents run there to procure a Happy Meal for a child, who is insisting it is the only thing he or she will eat, while everyone else is gorging on a Christmas Eve feast. And then there may be some who find their way to the Golden Arches just because it is quick way to get something to eat while on their way to someplace else. On Christmas Eve, 2014, I spent 2.5 hours at the McDonald’s on Route 80 in New Haven. I had led a 4:00 PM. Christmas Eve service at Center Church on the Green, where I was serving as minister, and then at 10 PM I had another service with three other churches, so I had no desire to drive the 26 miles back home to Middletown, only to return later. I went to McDonald’s with two of my parishioners, who were also waiting for the later service. Rachel had been homeless for three years, but now had a place to stay. She was not able to eat solid food, because of some medical treatments, and so the thick milkshakes were what she craved. Donna, my other parishioner, was in a nursing home, afflicted with Huntington’s, a degenerative nerve disease, so she was grateful to be out for the evening, and besides, she loved McDonald’s---fish sandwich, fries, sweet tea, and chocolate chip cookies. So, we alighted from the car and walked in. There was the familiar manager; he knew us all because we went there on Thursdays after helping out at the Soup Kitchen. What are you doing here on Christmas Eve, he wanted to know? Oh, we’re just making time, waiting for a later service, I said. Suddenly, the man who was sitting down at one of the tables, got up. Excuse me, he said, I just finished my coke and a small fries, but I am still awfully hungry. Would you be willing to buy me something? Sure, I said. What do you want? A Big Mac, large fries, and a large coke. I fed him lunch, the manager whispered, but he is homeless and often hungry. Kyle was his name, and he asked if he could sit with us. It’s almost Christmas, he said, and I really don’t want to eat alone. I eat alone most days, but Christmas should be different. I’m homeless, he said, but tonight and tomorrow my buddy is letting me stay at his place. He is not supposed to; it’s against the rules, but who is going to check on Christmas? And then Kyle sat down at our table without us ever giving permission. Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m homeless, he asked? I don’t think it is our business, Rachel responded. When you feed someone, you automatically make a connection. It is a given, and so it is your business, even if you don’t want it to be. And then he told us his sad story. He could not get his life together these past five years, because he had fallen asleep at the wheel while driving his wife and three little kids across Montana one Christmas Eve, on the way to his wife’s parents’ home. All were killed, except him. I had a pretty serious neck and head injury, he said, but I recovered from that, but I can’t recover from the pain of losing my family. I couldn’t get my life together after the accident. Everything fell apart, and you know something, most of my friends and even my family—sister, brothers and parents kind of pulled away---not knowing how to deal with my rage and self-hatred. So, here I am, a man with a degree from Tufts and MIT, and homeless. It’s Christmas Eve, when we celebrate the birth of Christ, and I wonder what it is Christ has to say to me. People tell me I’m forgiven; falling asleep is no crime, but it is not really forgiveness I’m after. It’s peace. I want the peace the angels sing about. I need that peace, and I have not felt a hint of it, since I woke up in the hospital and learned that my wife and three kids were dead. Lord, give me peace. I pray for it all the time, and yet it does not come. Lord, I need peace. Please, give me peace. He uttered his prayer for peace rather loudly, and another man around 30 or so, who had just come in, looked at him and at us and said, “We all want peace. I want it too. But it doesn’t come so easily. Maybe we are not supposed to have peace on this earth. I mean those angels you mentioned; they were heavenly creatures. What did they really understand about peace on earth? They weren’t living here in families. They were looking down from afar, from way up there. So, what did they really know, anyway?” “So you must have a story too, Kyle said to him. I mean here you are on Christmas Eve in a McDonald’s in New Haven, CT. No one should be at McDonald’s on Christmas Eve. Everyone has a story, the young man said. But why should I tell you mine? “Oh, you don’t have to,” said Kyle. But all of us have kind of been thrown together on Christmas Eve, and so, if you want to share, we’ll listen, but no one is going to force you. I don’t know these three people’s stories, why they’re here. Maybe they don’t want to share either. Donna, who was always very quiet, suddenly spoke up: We’re from Center Church in New Haven, waiting for a 10 PM service, and this is our minister. Minister: Kyle eyed me with deep suspicion while the young man just stared at me with a measure of anger on his face. Let me tell you, he said, about my minister. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and every Sunday we went to the Baptist Church, but when I came out to my family, the minister came over to our house and told me, “Son, I am praying for you. You don’t need to follow the path of sin. You’re a good boy, and I know God will lead you on the straight and narrow. And of course, I knew exactly what he meant by straight. That was 7 years ago; I have not spoken to my parents or anyone in my family since then. And I certainly have not spoken to any minister. So, Rev, what do you have to say? I don’t think Jesus either demands or expects our paths to be straight. We all have our roads to walk, and God goes with us, blessing us along the way, but sometimes it’s very hard to hear and find the blessing, especially when others are shouting in our ears. I hope you can hear it and find it. So, do I the man said, as he left McDonald’s with his dinner in a bag. Kyle got up and looked outside. Hey, he is driving a pretty fancy Volvo. He may be hurting, but at least he isn’t poor. I wonder why he chose to get food here at McDonald’s. Maybe, I said, he feels this is the kind of place where people are not going to judge him. I guess so, Kyle said. People who chose to eat at McDonald’s on Christmas Eve don’t have a right to judge anyone. I don’t know when the other man came in. I had not noticed him enter, but there he was, suited up, very nicely, sitting at a table about four feet from ours. Hey, Kyle said. You don’t have to sit alone. Come, and join us. It is Christmas Eve, and no one should be sitting at a table alone. The shepherds were not alone; the angels were not alone; Mary and Joseph and the baby were not alone. This is not a night for aloneness. The man smiled but didn’t say a word. Kyle knew enough to respect his privacy and his silence, but suddenly the man got up and went outside and came back in with a violin. He then began to play the most hauntingly beautiful medley of Christmas carols, followed by some music I recognized from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Oh, my God, I said, that was stunningly beautiful. Where did you learn to play like that? At the Eastman School of Music, he said. But that was not what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go to Columbia Medical School, like my mother and father did. Oh, I got in, all right, but I also got into Eastman. You know, my parents did not even know I applied. I studied music in college along with the requisite courses for medical school, but they thought music was my avocation. No one can make a living doing music, or at least not the kind of living my parents make. I’m no Joshua Bell, but I am a good player. I play in a local symphony on the Cape, and I teach music in a private school. I make a decent living, but not decent enough, at least according to my family. I’m on my way to New York to spend Christmas with my family, and I just hope and pray I won’t have to listen to their complaints against me for turning down the profession they had chosen for me. I just came from playing at a couple of nursing homes and then I went to two homeless shelters. People need beauty in their lives. You know something? I believe that people can actually die for lack of beauty. Well, I said, the great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, agrees with you. He once said, “Beauty will save the world.” “I believe that,” the man said. I just wish my parents did. Perhaps they do, I answered. They’re just too busy hanging on to a dream that is theirs, not yours, and they’re clinging so hard to it that they can’t imagine there is anything else to hold on to and touch. The young man, whose name I never learned, held his violin close as he stroked it with great care. Thanks, he said. I had better go, if I want to get to New York at a reasonable hour. And then he left. Christmas Eve, 2014---a gathering of well, we were a motley crew. And even today, seven years later, I wonder how it was that the six of us were thrown together for a time on a night when most people do not end up at a McDonald’s. And as we left, Rachel said to me, “You know all of us are afflicted in one way or another. We all carry burdens, and it is vitally important to know how to carry them. Some manage the carrying better than others.” Christmas Eve, 2021. We are not at McDonald’s but here we are in Unionville, CT. And we too have our burdens and some of them are undoubtedly very hard to carry. Some of them we would love to put down and run away from. So what does the Christmas story say to you? The story is not simply about THEN; it is also about NOW and whether or not we recognize that the one who was born into the poor and humble conditions of a stable in Bethlehem is also the one who continues to stoop down to meet human beings in the messiest conditions of life? And that messiness is the story of Christmas. All over the world, the story of Jesus’ birth is being read and told over and over again. Tonight, he is born---born into the messiness of human life, with all its joys, sorrows, blunders, and victories. But is he born in you, and do you see the way he comes into your life and helps you to recognize not only the burdens you carry but also the blessings you have---the hope, the peace, the joy, and the love of Christmas? Yours in Christ, Sandra THE SHEPHERDS AT THE MANGER December 19, 2021 First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT Shepherd 1( Susan) Many of you probably have a particular image of the Christmas scene, made popular by Luke’s gospel. Of course, Luke’s gospel was written nearly 100 years after the events, so it is no eyewitness report. He has a story to tell with a particular perspective. And it begins with Mary and Joseph, making a trip to Bethlehem for a census, because Bethlehem was Joseph’s hometown with a population of about 300. Luke wanted to show that Jesus’ parents were obedient to the law as laid down by Rome as well as to the religious law. They would later go to the Temple and make the appropriate sacrifices. In other words, they were not out to make trouble. And so, according to Luke, Bethlehem was the place where Jesus was born. Matthew had Jesus born in Nazareth, but Luke wanted to make the point that Jesus shared the same birthplace as the shepherd king, David. Shepherd 2 (John) And so we arrive at our story, the shepherds’ story. We were out in the fields that night, star gazing. All of us were there, staring at the heavens with stars glowing in the darkness---no light pollution in those days. Though it was very cold, it was a beautiful night. We all remember how the sky looked that night, and I recall just staring at the night sky. Shepherd 3 (Julie) Now before we go on, there is something you should understand about shepherds. We were considered among the lowly, people of low status. You see, being a shepherd meant that we had to deal with ewes giving birth, and because birth issues in blood, and blood was considered a contaminant to be avoided at all costs, shepherding was understood to be a ritually unclean profession. Shepherd 1 (Susan): And yet, consider the irony. Israel’s greatest king, David, was a shepherd, and there are places in the scriptures where God is presented as a shepherd. Go no further than the 23rd Psalm, whose first line reads: The Lord is my shepherd. And, of course, Jesus is presented as the Good Shepherd, the one who will leave the 99 to go after the one lost lamb and tenderly carry it back to safety. So, although we shepherds were considered lowly, David, Jesus and even God would stoop so low to become shepherds. Shepherd 2 (John) But there is something else you should understand about shepherds and status. Though lowly, there was a pecking order with some shepherds being of higher status than others. You see, the Jerusalem Temple required unblemished lambs for sacrifice, and these lambs were to be perfect physical specimens. It was the job of specifically trained shepherds to search out those perfect lambs and keep them from getting hurt. So, some of us, who were out in the fields that night, were higher status shepherds. And because the terrain was rocky and sheep could get hurt, one of the things we did was wrap these unblemished lambs in bands of cloth. So, when Luke tells you that Mary wrapped Jesus in bands of cloth, you are supposed to make a connection with the unblemished lambs, who would be offered as a sacrifice in the Temple. Jesus is the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Shepherd 3 (Julie) So, there we were, out in the fields, star gazing at the beautiful night sky. And then suddenly, with no warning at all, an angel of the Lord appeared, and the glory of the Lord was so bright our eyes could not bear the sight. We were terrified. But the angel told us, “Do not fear, for today in the city of David a savior has been born, and you will find him wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger.” And then something even more extraordinary happened: a multitude of angels appeared, singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people whom God favors.” I want you to understand how extraordinary it is that a multitude of angels appeared, because when angels appear to human beings, it is a solo appearance, just one angel. There is only one other example in the Bible, where a multitude of angels appears, and that is in the Old Testament, when Jacob has a dream in Bethel, and in his dream, he sees a staircase ascending to heaven with angels moving up and down the staircase steps. Shepherd 1 (Susan) Now that multitude of angels signing praises to God follow a particular pattern, well known in the days of the Roman Empire, when official announcements were made, and then words of praise and honor were offered to Caesar. You see, the people hearing Luke’s gospel would have known that in the year 29, around the time Jesus began to preach, about 60 years or so before Luke wrote his gospel, Caesar Augustus had ended the civil war that had plagued Rome for almost 100 years. The doors of the Shrine of Janus in the Forum were opened during war, but now they were closed. And these days of peace were known as Pax Romana, a great achievement, to be sure. An altar was built to Augustus in praise of the peace he had brought. But now, according to Luke, a new and different kind of peace was coming into the world, and it would transcend the Pax Romana. The multitude of angels declared to us shepherds, “peace to those whom God favors.” And because the angels appeared to us lowly shepherds, we certainly got the idea that God favors the humble and the lowly ones, which is what we were, although some of us might try to boast that our status was a bit higher than the others. The point is that the announcement of this extraordinary birth came first to us, not to the high and mighty, but to the humble and lowly. Shepherd 2 (John) Now there is something else you should know about, though it does not appear in the story. There is a place called Migdal Eder, known as the Tower of the Flock, located somewhere on the road between Bethel and Jerusalem, very near to Bethlehem. We all knew about the Tower, though only those shepherds, who were trained to care for the unblemished lambs, were allowed to go in. And because I was one of those trained shepherds, I had been there many times. I used to climb the stairs of the tower and watch the flocks, and since I could see for quite a distance, I could tell if there were any dangerous animals, moving toward the sheep. And sometimes I would bring into the Tower an ewe, who was about to give birth. Remember, how I mentioned Jacob’s dream? Well, his beloved wife, Rachel, was said to have given birth to Benjamin in this tower, and then sadly she died. Jacob then moved his flocks beyond the tower. I guess he was so saddened by Rachel’s death, he didn’t want to be too near that Tower. Who can blame him? Anyway, years later, we shepherds heard a rumor that Jesus was born in the Tower. But no, I was there in the Tower, the night Jesus was born. I was probably the first one to see the angel of the Lord, but to see Jesus, we had to travel to Bethlehem, which was not far down the road. Shepherd 3 (Julie) And so we made the short trip to see the baby. You know some journeys take a lifetime, but this journey to the baby was quick. We found him and his parents, just as the angel said we would. I was the one who began explaining to Mary about how the angel made an announcement, followed by a host of angels, singing praises to God, and wishing peace to those whom God favors. And you know what I remember best? It was how Mary looked very pensively at all of us. You could tell she was thinking hard. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I guess she was one of these people, who ponder things deeply without saying very much. But back then, I doubt anyone would have paid her words much mind anyway. After all, she was a woman, and women were not expected to speak. But she pondered, and it would have been worth a lifetime of journeys to learn what her ponderings were all about. Shepherd 1 (Susan) So, there you have it: the Christmas story told from the perspective of us lowly shepherds. But that was then and now is now. So, what does it mean today? What does it mean to say that God makes God’s appearance among those of low status, people whom the world would ignore or reject? Some years ago, we received some news in the Heavenly Court about this Canadian sculptor, Timothy Schmalz, a devout Roman Catholic, who made a life size bronze statue of Jesus as a homeless man lying on a bench. You cannot see his face, and you only recognize him as Jesus because of the nail imprints in his feet. It caused quite a stir and when it first appeared at Regis College of the University of Toronto, someone called the police, because she thought it was a real homeless man. Well, when word got around about the statue, some people took great offense, saying it was an insult to Jesus. But you know who really loved the statue, Pope Francis, and he invited Timothy Schmalz to the Vatican, where another statue now sits. In fact, there are a number of these statues around the world, placed on various church properties. One clergyman said he saw a homeless man sitting by the statue with his hand gently placed on Jesus as he prayed. Shepherd 2 (John) So we lowly shepherds get it. But do you? Do you understand that God’s criteria about whom or what is worthy is not the same as your criteria? What might impress you is not what impresses God. God is apparently in the habit of coming to those who will receive, those humble enough to accept the gift of God’s presence and believe what they heard and saw. Shepherd 3 (Julie) This was all such a very long time ago, but we still remember it as if it happened yesterday. We remember how the light shone around the angelic host, and we remember the baby, wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in the manger. He was supposed to be a king like the mighty King David, but he lived his humble life more like a shepherd. He too lacked status, and he ministered to those who also had no status, the mentally and emotionally brutalized, the physically sick, like the lepers and the despised, like the tax collectors. He showed us what and whom we are supposed to care about, what we are supposed to be impressed by, but we still have a hard time learning the lessons he taught, and though for us it was a very short journey to Bethlehem that night, for most people the journey to the manger takes a very long time. What Should We Do?
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen First Church in Unionville, CT December 12, 2021 Luke 3: 7-18 John the Baptist was certainly not an easy person to be around. He was harsh and tough and did not care in the least if his words made you feel badly about yourself. In fact, that is what he was trying to do---make you feel your sinfulness and repent of it. He was definitely from the tough love school, apparently believing gentleness and empathy would not move people to change. And change is what John was after. It is no small question to contemplate how it is that people change. What really encourages people to move ahead and leave behind some of their self-destructive behaviors? Family therapists, for example, will examine the dynamics of a family situation to discover which person has not only the greatest ability to change but also wields enough power to push change. Well, John the Baptist seems to be one of these people, who believed that if you yelled at people long and hard enough and made them uncomfortable with their current behavior, they would change. A few weeks ago, when I was visiting the Johansons, Rod told me how when he was new at Farmington High, the principal told him not to stand around with his hands in his pockets, because it made him look as if he were up to no good. Well, later in the day, there was Rod with his hands in his pockets once again. And the principal came up to him and grabbed him by his collar, hoisted him up and placed him in one of the trash containers. I told Rod I thought that was horrible. Putting him in the trash can was like saying, “You’re a piece of trash!” ‘Horrible or not,” Rod said, it was effective. I never put my hands in my pockets again, at least not at school.” Well, we don’t really know how effective John the Baptist was at getting people to repent. He called them names, a brood of vipers and told them to prepare for the coming fire. God, he said, was getting ready to chop down the trees, which do not bear good fruit, that is, deeds, worthy of repentance. And though we can imagine that the high and mighty scoffed at the mere suggestion, still the crowds were worried enough to ask: What then shall we do? And he told them, “If you have two coats, give a coat to someone who has none, and if you have food, do likewise. The despised and ritually impure tax collectors also asked John: What should we do? And John told them to collect no more than the prescribed amount. You see, tax collectors were known for collecting excess amounts and then keeping the excess for themselves. That is how some managed to make a very lucrative living. Soldiers too asked: And what should we do? John said, “Don’t extort money from anyone through threats and false accusations and be satisfied with your wages.” So, John gave very specific ethical instructions. He told them exactly what they needed to do. And sometimes that can be such a relief, since many are the occasions we simply don’t know what to do. There are times we face issues that are downright ambiguous or confusing, or perhaps situations over which we have no real power, when we face the hard conclusion there is nothing we can do. Some weeks ago, when I was in Sarajevo, a beautiful city, set against a stunning range of mountains and the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics, I told you before how I visited the War Museum there. Sarajevo was mercilessly shelled between 91 and 95, but the museum concentrated on the massacre of 8000 Bosnian and Croatian Muslims by the Serbians. It was not an easy place to visit, and when I exited the museum, I was quite shaken. I struck up a conversation with one of the young women, who worked there, and I told her I was a Protestant clergywoman from the United States, and how moved I was by the exhibition. The young woman then told me about a man in his 30’s, who for a few months came daily to visit the museum, always leaving very upset. Finally, she got up the nerve to ask him about his interest. At first, he was very hesitant to speak, but then he said, “I am the son of a Serbian officer, and when I was a child, I lived in a house by father took over from a Bosnian Muslim family. I didn’t know it, of course; I was just a small child at the time, but recently I learned the truth. And the truth only became more awful when I learned that my father participated in the massacre at Srebrenica (Sray Breh Neet suh). I did not want to believe it, but I know now it is true. What can I do? What must I do? And so, I have begun by coming here and seeing for myself the horror. I will never have anything to do with him again---with none of my family, because they can live with something that is unlivable. As quickly as he came, he stopped coming, the woman told me. I thought that he was too ashamed to face me again. But some months ago, he came back and told me he was volunteering with some of the original refugees---women and their children, He helps them find information about their murdered loved ones. They realize he is Serbian, but he does not tell them the role his father played in their lives. He simply does what he can. I feel so sorry for him, she told me, because he is obviously tortured, and so I spoke with my priest about him, and he told me he believed this young man is doing penance on behalf of his father. And I asked my priest. But is that possible? How can one repent on behalf of another, especially if the one who has committed the wrong, feels no real remorse or sorrow? The young man feels the sorrow of the crime, but what about the father? What if he feels no guilt? What does God do with that? And then she asked me what I thought. I told her that though none of us can know such things with any certainty, I do believe in the power of prayer and in the power of good deeds. There are human beings who work and pray on behalf of not only the innocent but also the guilty, like this young man, who carries the burden of his father’s deeds, and though he bears no direct guilt, he feels the wrong that has been done. And we should be grateful there are such people in the world because their lives become a kind of prayer to God, expressing the conviction that we are all in this together, and no deed committed by another human being is so far away from us that we can ever afford to walk away and feel free from its deadly power. I have been thinking about this in relation to the young shooter in Michigan, a 15 year old boy, Ethan, who killed four students in his high school. He had made a drawing showing a person shot with blood flowing all over the place and words scribbled on the bottom of the page: The thoughts won’t stop coming. Help me. And where at this point is help going to come---from a nation so in love with guns it will do nothing to protect even its children in school? Dare we hope help will come from the God who can accept the deeds, prayers and penance of the innocent on behalf of the guilty, and then with the aid of people like John the Baptist move the nation to active repentance and change? This is the third Sunday of Advent, when we are faced with the twin themes of repentance and joy. And how those two themes work together is one of the great mysteries of the Advent season, the season of waiting and hoping., when we wait and hope for joy as well as for forgiveness. OUT IN THE WILDERNESS
Preached by: Sandra Olsen December 5, 2021 Luke 3: 1-6 Whatever we want to say about John the Baptist, we have to acknowledge that he was an outlier. He was not part of the religious order or establishment, though his father, Zechariah, had been a priest, and his mother Elizabeth, was Mary’s cousin. Elizabeth had trouble conceiving John, and when Mary went to see her after she learned she was to bear the savior of the world, John leaped in Elizabeth’s womb—a sign that he recognized whom Mary was carrying. But John did not follow his father’s footsteps into the priesthood, but instead lived out in the wilderness before he began his ministry of baptism. Living in the wilderness was dangerous not only because of wild animals and beasts, but because wilderness was understood to be a place where dangerous things can happen, a place where God or Satan can make a claim on lives. And one never knows beforehand whom one is going to meet there---God or Satan. Jews remembered the forty year journey through the wilderness, led by Moses, who had to put up with a lot of whining and complaining. Jesus, immediately after his baptism, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he first met, not God, but Satan, who tempted him for forty days and nights. Wilderness is code language; it means pay attention, because something big is on the horizon. So, here we have this screwball of a character, John, who comes to the Jordan River from the wilderness. I suspect that most of us would want very little to do with John, because he seems a bit crazy. But sometimes these are the people to whom the word of God comes, perhaps because they are open to it in a way most of us are not. We are more likely to be defensive and suspicious, asking ourselves (not inappropriately, I might add) how it is we really know this is from God and not from our imagination or even a product of mental illness. We wonder about such things, but apparently John did not. So, John came in from the wilderness to the River Jordan, where he began to baptize people, offering them a cleansing from sin. Now the people who came to John for baptism were a varied lot. Verse 10 simply refers to them as crowds, so it is probably safe to conclude that they were a mixture of all different kinds of people, curious and perhaps spiritually hungry enough to take a chance on someone who was different. Some probably did not trust the Temple elite with all their rules and regulations about ritual purity and temple taxes. And then there might have been those who were members of groups like the Essenes, who preached and practiced radical separation from society in preparation for the coming of God’s Kingdom. Perhaps even some Pharisees came, since they were open to new ideas. It was the Pharisees, after all, who introduced the idea of the oral interpretation of the law and the resurrection of the body. There were many different spiritual options out there, and so some people might have come to see what it was John had to offer. And what John was offering was a baptism of repentance. He offered tough words, telling people to turn their lives around. Get out of your hole of self-obsession and turn toward God. John’s message, however, was not completely new, because some of his words he spoke came from the prophet Isaiah, who lived during another wilderness time, when in 587 BC, the Jewish elite were led into captivity to Babylon. It wasn’t that they were slaves in Babylon; it was just that Babylon was not home. They thought they could not be God’s people in this strange land, and in the midst of this wilderness, Isaiah spoke words of comfort and hope, which John borrowed: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight. Every valley shall be lifted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” The wilderness of Babylon was the past, but in John’s time the wilderness still was very real for the Jews. They were no longer an independent nation. Rome had its boots on their neck. Oh, the people had something to be grateful for. After all, Caesar Augustus had established the peace of Rome, and that was no small achievement, but still there was a yearning for more than Rome could deliver. And so, notice how Luke names the concrete situation in which the Jews found themselves. This is the time, the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and King Herod was the ruler of Galilee. In other words, in this specific time and place, God acts, and God will act. The Jews were a people of history, and their God acted in history. God was not some distant, ethereal spirit, who had nothing to do with time and place. The Jews understood that God meets people in the midst of real concerns and troubles, including political and economic issues. Their God was a God who entered into the political fray, taking sides even, and just as God had met the people in the wilderness of Babylon, so the people of John’s day hoped that God would meet them in their wilderness, in the land of Judea during the reign of Tiberius. And, of course, we hope that we will be met in our wildernesses as well. We all have them. You can be in a wilderness after the one whom you thought was the love of your life, dumped you. Mainline churches are living through a kind of wilderness, when each year numbers drop, and young people simply do not show up. And then there are political wildernesses, when things alter in radical ways, and what was once considered a right is suddenly threatened by people who live in privilege and have very little imagination for what it is like to be out in the wilderness. I just returned from a part of the world, which lived through war in the 90’s for four long years, when cities like Sarajevo and Dubrovnik were shelled so badly and there was no electricity or running water for four years. One Croatian family with whom four of us had dinner were chased out of their home for eight years. They lived in this little village close to the border of Serbia, and they were the first people to have a pre-fab home. The townspeople were fascinated to see the house go up in five days, and when the war began in 91, their Serbian next door neighbor told them to leave. “I want your house and I will get it.” And there was enough instability that they decided it would be best to leave, and so for eight years, they lived in their own kind of wilderness. And though they eventually returned to their home, it was to a different country, no longer one Yugoslavia, but now six. The Jews used to call the highway leading through the wilderness to new life, the King’s Highway. They wondered where and how it could be found. But perhaps the lesson of Advent is that there are some situations where we are not the ones who do the finding, but rather we are the ones who are found by a gracious God who finally shows up in a manger no one was even looking for until they were told where to go. December 5, 2021
Dear Friends, The following poem was copyrighted in 1996 by Harvey Ehrlich. It is free to distribute, without changes, as long as this notice remains intact. All follow-ups, requests, comments, questions, distribution rights, etc. should be made to: mduhan@husc.harvard.edu. Enjoy and give yourself permission to smile and laugh! Politically Correct Santa 'Twas the night before Christmas and Santa's a wreck ... How to live in a world that's politically correct? His workers no longer would answer to "Elves," "Vertically Challenged" they were calling themselves. And labor conditions at the North Pole Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul. Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety, Released to the wilds by the Humane Society. And equal employment had made it quite clear That Santa had better not use just reindeer. So Dancer and Donner, Comet and Cupid, Were replaced with four pigs, and you know that looks stupid! The runners had been removed from his sleigh; The ruts were termed dangerous by the EPA. And people had started to call for the cops When they heard sled noises on their rooftops. Second-hand smoke from his pipe Had his workers quite frightened. His fur-trimmed red suit Was called "unenlightened." And to show you the strangeness of life's ebbs and flows, Rudolph was suing over unauthorized use of his nose And had gone on Geraldo, in front of the nation, Demanding millions in overdue compensation. So, half of the reindeer were gone; and his wife, Who suddenly said she'd had enough of this life, Joined a self-help group, packed and left in a whiz, Demanding from now on her title was Ms. And as for the fits, why, he'd ne'er had a notion That making a choice could cause such a commotion. Nothing of leather, nothing of fur, Which meant nothing for him. And nothing for herNothing that might be construed to pollute. Nothing to aim. Nothing to shoot. Nothing that clamored or made lots of noise. Nothing for just girls. Or just for the boys. Nothing that claimed to be gender specific. Nothing that's warlike or nonpacific. No candy or sweets ... they were bad for the tooth. Nothing that seemed to embellish a truth. And fairy tales, while not yet forbidden, Were like Ken and Barbie, better off hidden. For they raised the hackles of those psychological Who claimed the only good gift was one ecological. No baseball, no football ... someone could get hurt; Besides, playing sports exposed kids to dirt. Dolls were said to be sexist, and should be passe; And Nintendo would rot your entire brain away. So Santa just stood there, disheveled, perplexed; He could not figure out what to do next. He tried to be merry, tried to be gay, But you've got to be careful with that word today. His sack was quite empty, limp to the ground; Nothing fully acceptable was to be found. Something special was needed, a gift that he might Give to all without angering the left or the right. A gift that would satisfy, with no indecision. Each group of people, every religion; Every ethnicity, every hue, Everyone, everywhere. ... even you. So here is that gift, its price beyond worth ... "May you and your loved ones enjoy Peace on Earth." STAND UP AND RAISE YOUR HEADS
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT November 28, 2021 Jeremiah 33:14-16 Luke 21: 25-36 Many of us, I suspect, are somewhat puzzled by the lectionary’s choice for today’s gospel reading from Luke. On this first Sunday of Advent, we are beginning to look forward to the loveliness of the season---the decorations, the music, the celebrations with family and friends in spite of Covid. So, who really wants to hear about “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars and on earth distress among the nations, confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves?” After living through some storms this past fall, which killed more people in New Jersey and New York than a hurricane did in Louisiana, we really don’t want to think right now about all the distress on earth. Between floods and the fires on the west coast and the ravages of Covid 19, we have had quite enough of nature’s disturbances, and we would just as soon settle into a comfortable waiting for Christmas. But no, this is not what we get---at least from the Gospel of Luke. Instead, we have this dramatic text all about the Apocalypse, a Greek word, which means a revelation or an uncovering. It claims that God’s work in the world is about to be revealed, and the Son of Man, as the Chosen One of God, would begin to usher in the new creation. And so, since these New Testament days, people have been trying to second guess when this dramatic revelation and change will come to pass. When the year 1000 made its appearance in the western world, just as in the year 2000, many people were preparing for a radical change. Some even predicted that the end was coming as recently as 2012, when a man named Lawrence Joseph predicted that on December 21 of that year, the sun would line up with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in 26,000 years. And so, Joseph thought that the energy streaming to the earth from the center of the Milky Way would be disrupted on December 21 at 11:11 P.M. and the end of normal time and history would come. And that would be the Apocalypse! Well, I don’t recall what specifically happened on that day, but surely the end did not arrive. There is no doubt that Jesus talked about the end, and most New Testament scholars attest that the historical Jesus did think he was living in the final days of earthly history. He might well have believed that God was about to directly intervene in history to bring about a radical ending of the old creation and the beginning of the birth pangs of the new creation. But exactly when God would do this, even Jesus did not know. The point of all such talk about the end of the old and the beginning of the new is neither to encourage predictions nor to frighten people into faith, but rather to insist that the dramatic ending known as the apocalypse is really far more about salvation than destruction. Listen again to Jesus’ words as we find them in Luke: People will faint from fear and foreboding, then they will see the Son of Man coming on clouds of glory. Now when these things happen, stand up and raise your heads, for your redemption is drawing near. Our tradition is not one of biblical fundamentalism; we do not have to believe that everything in the bible is literally true. This is one of the defining differences between mainliners and the more biblically conservative churches. Where they see literal truth and actual historical images, we see symbolism and metaphorical language, challenging us to use our minds and imaginations so we can hear and understand the meaning and truth that is being communicated. Think about it: when fear strikes and dangerous things from the sky appear, we tell people to duck and take cover. But here Jesus says, “Stand up and raise your heads, for your redemption is coming.” Note well: this is a command, not a pleading, tentative request: Please get up; you have nothing to fear. No, this Jesus is accustomed to giving commands and orders. We have heard such commands before: Get up and walk; Go, your faith has made you well. Forgive, as you have been forgiven. Powerful, commanding words, and now the command comes again. Stand up and raise your heads; your redemption is coming. Perhaps Jesus expected the time of this redemption to be nearer than it has turned out to be. Many people have waited for the wrong time but getting the time wrong is not the same thing as getting the hope wrong. This is the first Sunday of Advent, and we have lit the Candle of Hope. Words from the poet, T.S. Eliot, should haunt us all during this Advent season: “I said to my soul be still and wait without hope, for hope could be hope for the wrong thing.” None of us wants to be fools, waiting and hoping for the wrong thing, for the coming of God’s realm, for the establishment of peace and justice and goodwill---on earth as it is in heaven. We can be wrong about the time, but to be wrong about the hope is a very serious matter, indeed. Now I have just returned from a trip to some of the Balkan countries, where I visited Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Slovenia. And though the trip was absolutely wonderful, there were parts that were especially hard—like visiting the war museum in Sarajevo and seeing footage of the massacre of 8000 Bosnian and Croatian Muslims. I could not tear myself away from the video, where women were testifying (with English subtitles) about the murder of their male loved ones. Mothers, whose 10 and 12 year old sons, were ripped away from them, were speaking of a horror that words simply limp to describe. But what struck me was how essential hope was and continues to be for these women. Now this war was between 91 and 95, and yet DNA identification is still going on. There is yet a need for people to know definitively that their loved ones are truly dead. So, the mass graves are unearthed; articles of clothing and personal objects are found along with bones. And when people are notified that definite identification has been made, when they clutch a ragged piece of clothing or even a teddy bear that belonged to a beloved grandson, they revisit the grief all over again, surrendering the hope of ever seeing their loved ones again on this earth. And then some embrace another hope---that death was quick and merciful. The victims were all shot. And so, one mother said, “I hope my little boy died quickly, that he did not suffer long, that his terror was over in an instant.” And finally there were women, who having lost so much hope, now embrace the hope that this horror will not be repeated again. “My son, my husband, my father, my brother, no, they are never coming back, but I choose to live with the hope that their deaths will be a witness to peace, that the world will know what happened here and will refuse to forget. Let the hatred stop now, and let it begin with my refusal to hate.” It is as if she were repeating Jesus’ words: Stand up and raise your heads, for your redemption is coming. She is not Christian, but a devout Muslim, and hope, hope for the coming realm of peace and justice spills beyond the tight boundaries of religion and politics and ideology we human beings are in the habit of drawing. Hope is what are called to do in this season of Advent, a time of waiting in the darkness for the coming of the light. All time is immediate to judgment, immediate to completion. The night is far spent, but the dawn is at hand. Stand up and raise your head, for your redemption is coming. November 4, 2021
Dear Friends There has been a great deal of talk lately about social media and how it impacts our society. With the publication of The Facebook Papers, we have been hearing a great deal about the negative effects. So, it is with great interest that I came across an article about some research done by a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, Christopher Bail. Like all of us, Professor Bail had read the many defenses of social media, claiming that by connecting people to ideas and worlds outside their usual comfort zones, greater understanding and tolerance would grow. So, he decided to test that claim. He gathered together 1200 Twitter users, who were identified as either Republican or Democrat, and he got them to agree to follow a particular Twitter access for a month for which they were paid $11/hour. The Republicans were fed messages that Democrats commonly read, and the Democrats were fed Republican ones. He wanted to sew what would happen if people were forced to engage with ideas they did not usually follow. Would their views be moderated? But what he discovered was rather upsetting. Republicans in particular became more conservative and Democrats a bit more liberal. Rather than moderating viewpoints, the exact opposite happened. Both sides expressed more negative views of the other side than they had before. Neither side became more tolerant. Bail concluded that too much exposure to the ideas of those who do not “think like us” grows resentment and even hatred. He concluded that social media actually blocks conversation rather than encourages it. In the normal run of life, before the days of social media, people would sometimes have conversations with those who were on the other side, but these conversations were usually not that intense and not that often. In face to face encounters, people have a tendency to control their reactions in the interest of social harmony. They may feel themselves becoming angry at another viewpoint, but they tend to assert self-control rather than find themselves in an ugly fight. And because these exchanges can be upsetting, people do not engage in them all that frequently. Social media, however, has no built in mechanism for self-control. People can and do write all kinds of outrageous things on Facebook or elsewhere that they never would have had the nerve to say in a face to face exchange. Social media, in fact, allows people to learn much more about the ideas of the other than the usual face to face encounters This certainly rings true to my experience growing up. My father, a socialist, turned New Deal Democrat, passionately argued with my mother’s Republican family. The two sides would quite literally yell at each other, and though my mother would try to control the emotion, she was rarely successful. However, personal insults were simply not permitted or tolerated. They attacked each other’s ideas, but rarely the person who held them. And these arguments were not something that went on all the time. I think people understood that to engage in them too frequently would actually weaken relationships. And I certainly do not think each side wanted to know fully what the other person was thinking. In fact, Professor Bail said that one of the dangers with social media is that it permits us to know much more about the other person and his or her ideas than is actually healthy and helpful to know. It can be very helpful to know less not more about people and their opinions. Of course, this phenomenon concerns far more than politics. It concerns all areas of life. Bullying, for example, has always been a problem, especially for youngsters and teenagers, but cyber bullying is much worse. Again, people will often write things online that they would never say to a person’s face. In school bullying is very painful, but cyber bullying is even more so. Maybe we do not understand why it is that youngsters will constantly read what others are saying about them online, but this is what they do. They seem incapable of ignoring their phone or computer. The church is an institution that is built on relationships. We are drawn together as followers of Jesus Christ, but we also realize that we have a plurality of opinions on what it means to follow Jesus. We have different ideas about God, sin, salvation, and the authority of scripture, and we rarely make our views known. Most of us are content to worship together without demanding a uniformity of belief. Perhaps some of us do not really care what the other believes as long as we can come together and be in community, enjoying each other’s company and worshipping together. Would that be more difficult to do if we learned that someone believed something about God that we find completely distasteful? No wonder Professor Bail said that it is often helpful to know less rather than more about people and their beliefs. We live in a very complex world and the media blitz makes it more complicated than the world in which our parents lived. But there is no turning back the clock, and we must live in the world in which we find ourselves. And we always need to remember that God loves the world and calls us to do the same. This does not mean we must love everything about the world, but it does mean that the world should engage us in a caring and compassionate way. Yours in Christ, Sandra Unbind Him and Let Him Go
Preached by Sandra Olsen at The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT October 31, 2021 John 11:32-44 Romans 7: 15-25 This is Reformation Sunday as well as the Sunday nearest All Saints Day, which is tomorrow, so we are hearing the gospel text assigned not for today, but the one for tomorrow: the raising of Lazarus. So, let me begin with a question: what is this text about? Anyone, just speak out. So, yes, it is the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead. But it is not a resurrection, which is understood as a raising into new life. Lazarus was raised into his old life, meaning that he will have to undergo death again. So, this is really a story of resuscitation not of resurrection. Now we do not know if this story is truly historical. It is only in John’s gospel, and according to biblical scholars, John’s gospel shows us a Jesus whose language is not that of a first century Jew. He speaks all throughout the gospel as the resurrected Christ, not as the historical Jesus. But we do not need to be concerned if this story of Lazarus is historical, because whether or not it actually happened, it is true, nonetheless. Its truth is deeply existential, meaning that it shows us something profoundly true about the human condition. And it says the truth in six words: “Unbind him and let him go!” We all know what that means, because we all have had times in our lives when we have been bound, tied up, stuck, unable to move and to grow. Sometimes it comes from a painful past---a trauma, perhaps the death of a parent at a young age, or a divorce we did not want, or a deep betrayal by a trusted friend. It can be a depression that cuts so deeply into our lives that we are left with a limp in actuality or symbolically. We become fearful and withdrawn, crippled, afraid to move. We are all bound up, tied down, and we don’t know how to make ourselves live fully again. I remember some years ago when my husband had this very talented student he was advising. She was a molecular biology and biochemistry major, heading for medical school. My husband thought this was what she wanted, but as he was preparing to write her letter of recommendation, the young woman came into his office and broke down in tears. “Professor Oliver, I don’t want to go to medical school,” she protested. “I don’t want to be a doctor. This is my parents’ dream, but it is not mine.” Both parents were doctors, her father a heart surgeon and her mother a neurosurgeon. Both sets of grandparents were also doctors, and her older brother was a physician, and her older sister was in medical school. According to the family this was the sole licit path in life to take. But what made this young woman’s soul sing was music. She played the violin and the piano. “I want to teach music,” she insisted. “I want to help youngsters fall in love with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2---the way my music teachers helped me to love the beauty and transformative power of music. This is what makes my soul sing, Professor Oliver---not science, not medicine. So, what am I going to do?” Do what makes her soul sing, both my husband and her music professor advised, and when the father called up in a rage what both professors told him in so many words: “Unbind her and let her go!” Sometimes, though, we are bound more by our own internal standards than we are by the outward pressures. This was true of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. Luther had been caught in a terrible thunderstorm with lightning crashing all about him, and he yelled out in fear, “Saint Ann, save me, and I shall become a monk.” Well, Luther was saved, and he followed his promise, much to his father’s chagrin, who wanted him to become a lawyer. Now Luther was a fastidious monk, imposing so many rules on himself that he was completely miserable and literally sick from the rigors of his regimen. He fasted; he prayed on his knees in his cold, dank cell for hours. He whipped his naked body with cords of rope until he bled, all he thought, to show his devotion to God. His spiritual advisor, a wise and compassionate man by the name of Staupitz, tried to dissuade him from this self-destructive path. “Martin,” he said, “God does not demand such cruelties from you. God is not angry at you, but you are angry at God.” And Luther had to admit that Staupitz was correct. He was angry with God, so angry that he admitted he did not love God, but rather hated God. He fervently believed that God had doomed him to hell, and he was powerless to change his course. And then came his great insight. From the book of Romans, he embraced the idea that it is not our deeds, which save us; it is faith, faith in the goodness, love, and mercy of God. And suddenly Luther was unbound. He began to believe and preach differently. “Believe,” he said, “that God’s love and mercy are for you, meant for you, given to you as a gift from a good and gracious God.” God had found Luther, had unbound him, and let him go into his new freedom. Luther wrote movingly of the bondage of the will, that we can know what the right thing to do is, but our wills are in bondage to a lesser and meaner desire. And we all know what that is like; we all have had experiences when we know what the right thing to do is, but we do not do it---just as Paul had written in the Book of Romans. When I was 19, a sophomore at the U. of Chicago, I was tutoring two young black kids, 7 and 9. Their mother worked in the kitchen at my dormitory. But when the winter months came, she told me her kids could no longer come to the university for tutoring, because they lacked warm winter coats. I found two very warm and heavy coats at Sears for a total of $55, which was a great deal of money back then. But I was saving for a beautiful pair of leather boots at Marshall Fields’ Department Store that cost $65. Oh, I already had a pair of boots, but I wanted what I wanted, these beautiful brown leather boats with laces running up the side of them. I knew what the right thing to do was, but I did not do it, because my will was in bondage to another desire. And so, I bought the boots while two little kids went without warm coats. I would feel badly about it but feeling badly is not the same thing as doing the right thing. I needed someone to unbind me and let me go. And someone would, though that is another story. And so do we all; we all need at times to be unbound and let go. Sometimes the tragedy is that we do not even recognize our bondage. Perhaps some of you, like me, have been following the Facebook Papers, which show an organization so bound to power and wealth that it will do almost anything to protect that status. It does not matter if political discord and extremism are spread across the globe, or hate speech is pushed, or dangerous events like January 6 are organized through lies and manipulation. It does not matter if drug cartels expand their reach or girls are sold into sexual slavery. Power and wealth can be as addicting as alcohol and drugs, and the end is as ugly---death, not necessarily of the body but of the soul. The soul becomes shriveled and shrunken, because too many addicting bad choices have been made and then freedom is gone, destroyed by loving wealth and power more than truth. No wonder Jesus taught, Know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Freedom cannot live without truth. In this story of Lazarus, the bands of cloth that were tightly wound around his body were removed. That was the way burials were done. He was unbound and let go, and he entered into his old life again, a good life with family and friends. Oh, he still had problems and challenges to face, including death, which he would have to go through again. But the truth is we do go through any number of mini-deaths. We are bound and unbound many times in our lives, and each time we are unbound, it is a kind of death and rebirth, where though we are still in our old life, yet there is something new and liberating about the unbound state. Being unbound is rarely comfortable. The truth is we often prefer the old bondage to the new state of freedom we are offered, so it is no wonder that Lazarus was given no choice. The command came from Jesus, directed to others: “Unbind him and let him go!” October 26, 2021
Dear Friends, Silence has an important role to play in life. Teachers sometimes must insist on silence in a classroom, so concentrated thought can flourish. We ask for silence during the prelude so we may prepare for worship in a calm way. Even music uses silence, pauses between measures and movements that can allow the listener to truly hear what the music is trying to communicate. So, it is with great interest that I read in the New York Times that in the months between January and September of this year, there have been 17, 733 more complaints about noise in New York City than in all of 2019 and 2020 combined. Now New York is a pretty noisy place, but it is also true that when the pandemic struck in 2020, life quieted down on the streets. First of all, there were many fewer cars and buses on the roads, fewer people as well, as more and more of them worked at home. And because tourism was way down, the noisy helicopter rides over the city were few and far between. The simple truth is that the pandemic ushered in quiet and silence that New Yorkers had not been accustomed to, but now seem to crave. And so, the expansion of complaints against noise. One woman, who called to complain about the loud noise of helicopters said that the pandemic had caused her to rethink her relationship to noise. “Before the pandemic,” she said, “I had come to accept that the city is a noisy place, but now I am wondering if we really should be so tolerant of all this noise. A lot of my friends have noticed that they feel calmer and more centered, less distracted by all the noise going on around them. And now that things are picking up again, we feel more nervous and on edge. Is this really the way life should be lived?” That is the question. What does it really do to us to be constantly inundated by noise? When my daughter, Caitlin, lived in Thailand, she did a number of silent retreats for a week each time. I recently asked her what she got out of it, and she claimed that it put her in touch with the deep parts of her unconscious of which most of the time she was unaware. “I felt as if I knew myself better at the end of the retreat than I did before.” She recently spoke with someone from Nepal, who is at Wesleyan as a temporary scholar. He commented to her that Middletown is an incredibly noisy place, and that he has to remove himself from the environment for two hours a day in order to be deeply quiet. When Caitlin told me that she too thought Middletown was incredibly noisy, I looked at her in shock. “Really? I don’t find it noisy at all.” “Well Mom,” she said, “you just live in your head most of the time, so I am not surprised you don’t hear all the noise.” I told her I have an excellent capacity to block unpleasant things out---including noise. I have always been aware that there is a difference between urban and country dwellers. My brother in law lives in Massachusetts on an apple orchard, and whenever he is FORCED to go to Boston, he complains that all the noise and constant commotion give him a headache and a feeling of dizziness. “I just could never live in the city,” he claims. On the other hand, my son and his girlfriend, who live in Manhattan, took a trip out West this past summer to Lake Tahoe and parts of northern California. They had a great time, but they were so happy to return to the pulse of city life. His girlfriend came to this country at age 5 from the Ukraine, and her whole life has been spent in New York. “I would never leave New York, she says. “It is so alive. I can’t imagine the quiet and calm of rural life as a steady diet.” And she absolutely hates the suburbs as the dullest places on earth. “They are nothing but houses that people live in behind shut doors,” she asserts. I do think it is important for us to reflect on our relationship to noise and quiet. Some people, it is true, struggle to be quiet. They find silence deafening and have no desire to practice the quiet and calm of a silent retreat. But what does it mean that some people cannot bear to be alone with the quiet of their own breathing and thinking and feeling? Are they afraid of what the inner torrent or the calm that later comes might say to them? I have included 15 quotes on silence for you to read and ponder. Whether or not you do it silently is your own choice. 1. “Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.” – Plutarch 2. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” – Martin Luther King Jr. 3. “Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.” – Josh Billings 4. “True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” – William Penn 5. “He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” – Elbert Hubbard 6. “Work hard in silence, let your success make the noise.” – Frank Ocean 7. “Through the portals of silence, the healing sun of wisdom and peace will shine upon you.” – Paramahansa Yogananda 8. “We need to find God, and God cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls.” – Mother Teresa 9. “Sticks and stones are hard on bones aimed with angry art. Words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.” – Phyllis Mcginley 10. “Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.” – Deepak Chopra 11. “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” – Abraham Lincoln 12. “I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.” – Publilius Syrus 13. “Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than the silence.” – Spanish Proverb 14. “Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.” – Charles Caleb Colton 15. “Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Words come out of the void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.” – Wayne Dyer Yours in Christ, Sandra When There is No Explanation
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT October 23, 2021 Job 42: 1-6; 10-17 Mark 10: 46-52 For a few years, while serving a church in Middletown, I did manage to pressure my husband into going to church as an example to the children, who were then attending Sunday School. My husband is not a believer. He used to describe himself as an atheist, but age has mellowed him. “I don’t know enough to say there is no God, he says, so I guess I’m an agnostic.” My husband’s attendance at church lasted for about four years. One Sunday, my colleague said in a sermon that what we are all looking for is acceptance and love by something much bigger than ourselves. When I arrived home later that day, there was Donald, sitting pensively in a chair. I assumed he was pondering some scientific problem, since he is a professor of molecular biology. But he looked up at me and said, “I am not looking for a celestial embrace from God; I am not looking for God’s love and acceptance. What I want from God, if there is a God, is an explanation, and it had better be a good one!” After that Sunday my husband refused to go to church. “Not only does the church not have my heart,” he said,” it also doesn’t have my head!” A good explanation! Certainly, that is what a lot of people want, including Job. Now Job is one of those biblical books that many people know about, though few have bothered to read through the whole text. It is not an easy book to read, and many people, when they try to do so, complain that it just goes on and on and on with these long winded monologues by Job’s three friends, who are trying to offer him an explanation for his suffering. Though the three friends offer some subtle difference of opinion, the essential arguments came down to either Job’s guilt--- You must have done something wrong---or education---God chastises those whom God loves that they might learn. Well, if I have done wrong, Job says, I want to know what it is. But no one, including God, says anything. And as for learning, what does Job need to learn through his misery, which has left him not only childless and penniless but also afflicted in body, covered with terrible festering sores? But again, no explanation is forth coming. His friends told him it was arrogance to even ask. It is not for mere mortals to know. And indeed, John Calvin, the most theologically brilliant of the Protestant reformers whose thinking most directly impacted our reformed tradition, said the same thing: “For of those things which it is neither given nor lawful to know, ignorance is learned; the craving to know a kind of madness.” “The craving to know a kind of madness.” Is that really true? The craving to know drives human beings on to new frontiers of knowledge and understanding. We have been blessed with a certain kind of intelligence, and intelligence by necessity leads to questions. And for some the passion to discover is the deepest passion of their life. How do we really know where the line is---if there is a line---beyond which our intelligence should not dare go? Besides, when it comes to this question of suffering, a question which remains unanswered, so many people are prevented from believing in God, because they cannot even begin to fathom why a good and gracious God would permit such suffering, especially of the innocent. Surveys do indicate that the single most common reason offered by unbelievers for their unbelief is the presence in the world of evil and suffering. A few weeks ago, when waiting to visit a friend at CVH, I had a brief conversation with a middle age man, who was waiting to visit his 25 year old schizophrenic son. When he learned I was a minister, he told me he had not been to church since the age of 15, when his minister failed to give him any theological account of the meaning of the death camps in World War II. “Where was God in all that?” he demanded to know, and his minister did not know what to say. I told him that while I was deeply sympathetic to his question, I was also sympathetic to the minister: What can anyone really say? I asked him. Would any explanation have satisfied you? Should we human beings be satisfied by any explanation of such a horror? I answered my own question by telling him,”I don’t think so.” The only answer to that horror is our total outrage and protest against it. Of course, we wonder why. We cannot help but wonder. We wonder what God was doing through all that, and even if we do not hold God responsible for the commission of evil, we still question why it is that God should allow the innocent to suffer. Again, to quote John Calvin, who believed that suffering was both a judgment and an instruction. “We are so bedazzled by the things of this world---riches, power and honor---that we are seduced away from God, and toward the belief that our happiness lies here on this earth. Therefore, that we may not promise ourselves a deep and secure joy on this earth, God permits us to be troubled and plagued with all kinds of terrible pains and injuries.” But honestly, how satisfying is such an explanation? It is one thing to come up with an explanation when you are sitting around a table discussing a theological question, or writing a paper to satisfy the requirements of a course at Yale Divinity School, or even preaching a sermon. But when you walk into a hospital room where a 27 year old is dying of cancer, or into an emergency room where parents are waiting to hear from a doctor, who is going to have to tell them that she has just pronounced their 16 year old dead after a car accident, good explanations don’t much matter. They can never be good enough to satisfy human pain. And you know something, they shouldn’t be! In life, where pain and suffering are concerned, it seems that presence matters more than explanations. Caring matters; showing up matters, and at least this is what Job’s friends did. They showed up. The text tells us, When they saw Job from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with Job on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. They probably should have maintained their silence, for as the writer G.K. Chesterton once said: “There is one thing worse than giving no answer, and that is to give an answer that is wrong.” And perhaps that is one of the points of Job’s story. His friends tried to offer good explanations, but there were none, and even God did not try to give one, just as Jesus offered Bartimaeus no explanation for his blindness. The question of suffering remains unanswered, even though we will and must continue to ask why, because WHY is in our DNA. And yet in the end what counted for God was not an explanation, but presence---the presence of friends and finally the presence of God. And because Job’s friends showed up, even though their words were false and at times hurtful, God was willing to accept their sacrifice, and Job was willing to pray for them, and God was willing to accept Job’s prayer. OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT October 17, 2021 Job 38: 1-7; 34-41 Mark 10: 35-45 It begins with the question Why? It is not only Job’s question; it is everyone’s question. Children incessantly ask why, especially around the age of 3. And as soon as you gave them one answer another why immediately follows. It is the most human of questions, and as far as we know, it seems that no other creature asks why or ponders why. The question circles the globe millions of times a day---in every country and city of the world. Walk into a hospital at any time of the day or night, and you will hear even the walls whisper the word, Why. Well, this why is precisely what Job is after in this story/poem. He wants a good explanation, and who can blame him? In the first chapter we learn that Job is a good and upright man, and the only reason he is suffering is because of a bet between Satan, the challenger, whose job it is to unsettle things, and God, who is completely confident that Job will remain faithful to him---even if Job should lose everything---family, wealth and finally health. So, Job has been suffering because of a bet, and then his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come and sit with him for seven days and seven nights without saying a word, because as the text says, “they saw that his suffering was very great.” Job’s friends were silent until the silence was finally broken by Job. “Let the day perish in which I was born,” he laments. “Let that day be darkness. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.” What follows then is a long exchange between Job and his friends, back and forth, back and forth. Like Job, they too were struggling mightily to understand what has happened to Job and why, and their solution was to tell Job to look within. Be honest with yourself; you must have done something to deserve this punishment. God is good and God is just, and so if you are suffering, there must be a reason. But Job won’t go there; he insists on his innocence. Job wants God to make an appearance. Make yourself known to me, Job insists. If God would do that, Job says he would lay his case before the Almighty. He would reason with God, and God would surely acquit him. But the problem is---and this is a universal problem that so many other voices have articulated in agonized protest: I cannot find God. “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him. I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.” God is nowhere to be found. Until we arrive at chapter 38, where God is not found by Job, but rather Job is found by God. Out of the whirlwind God appears. Now consider this image of the whirlwind, a swirling movement of air, constantly in motion, blowing everything around and everything apart. Whirlwinds are something human beings cannot control, and it is out of the whirlwind that God appears. The technical name for God’s appearance is a theophany. There are other theophanies in the Old Testament. God speaks to Moses in a burning bush that is not consumed. And the prophet Elijah meets God not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but rather in the sound of sheer silence. But silence is not what Job received from God. God rages and God accuses: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you, when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you know.” For four chapters, God rants and raves against Job, slamming Job time and time again with the powerful images of a marvelous creation beyond anything Job could ever imagine let alone do---the earth, the sea, the heavens. Where were you Job, when I was fashioning all this bountiful beauty and majestic marvel? You were nothing; you were not here. Now on one level, God’s response sounds completely unfair, because Job never once arrogated to himself divine powers or divine knowledge. Job knows he is not God; he acknowledges the great distance between God and him. All he is asking for is an explanation, a reason for his terrible suffering, which came upon him like a great whirlwind, destroying and devouring everything in its path. Job is not pretending to be God; he has not claimed that he sees and understands as God. He can only see and understand as a human being, and for this he cannot and should not be blamed. He sees and understands as only a human being can. What is fascinating about God’s speech to Job is that in none of the four chapters does God ever describe a place for human beings. It is as if God has made a creation without any human beings at all. Yes, this creation is mighty and marvelous in all its majestic diversity and haunting beauty---from the brilliant stars that shine above to the deep darkness of the ocean, hiding strange creatures no human eye has ever seen. If the point is that from God’s view the human being is such a tiny speck in the creation that God should take no mind or notice of such a creature, well, so be it. But this is not how Job’s story begins. God cares enough about the human creature, in this case Job, that in a contest or debate with The Satan, God is willing to place his bets on Job as the upright and pious man. God will take the challenger on, because God knows there is something so unique about the human creature that no other creature can be used in the bet with The Satan. Other parts of the creation may indeed be more beautiful, powerful, and majestic, but God cannot point to any other creature and say how good and upright and pious it is. If God wants a creature who worships, one who stands before the Divine in awe and wonder, God is also going to get a creature who asks questions, and wonders why, and yes, sometimes even accuses God of not keeping faith with the covenant. After all, even Jesus screamed out an accusation from the cross: Why, oh, why have you abandoned me? On February 25, 1649 in the village of Shamgorod in the Ukraine God was put on trial after a pogrom left a number of Jews dead, murdered by Christians. The verdict: guilty. Fast forward nearly 300 years to a concentration camp named Auschwitz in Poland. Ellie Wiesel, a Jewish boy of 14, who would lose his parents and a sister to Nazi violence, yet would go on to become a writer and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, witnessed a similar trial of God. There were plenty of people, willing to play the prosecutor, but no one wanted to defend God. And once again, the verdict came down: Guilty as charged, guilty of failure to defend the Jewish people. At the end of the trial, after the guilty verdict was reached, Wiesel noted to his surprise that most of the people who were convinced of God’s guilt, nonetheless prayed to that guilty God. One man said, “Our prayer shawls have been stolen, our Torahs desecrated, but still we remember the words: “The Lord God is one; blessed be the name of the Lord.” And those words were on his lips as he walked toward the gas chamber. No other creature has ever done such a thing. No wonder God placed his bet on Job. No wonder it was the human condition into which God chose to enter that God might be fully known---known not in power and might as he appeared in the theophany to Job, but known in suffering, known in servant love, as he was made known in the story of the Christ. As Christ taught, “Whoever would be great among you must be servant of all.” October 12, 2021
Dear Friends, The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to two journalists, Maria Ressa from the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov from Russia. We are accustomed to prizes being awarded to politicians, like Jimmy Carter in 2002, who negotiated numerous peaceful settlements across the globe, or to activists, like Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, who in 2018 were awarded the prize for their work against the use of sexual violence in war and armed conflict. Then there are the organizations, like the World Food Program or the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons or the European Union, all of which received the prize for work done on behalf of building a peaceful world. But the last time the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a journalist was in 1935, when a German by the name of Carl von Ossietzky won the prize for his revelation of Germany’s rearmament program. Maria Ressa co-founded the Philippines most prominent independent news outlet, Rappler. Begun in 2011, it was a Facebook page before becoming independent. Rappler has been uncompromising in its pursuit of truth, daring to make public the corruption of the current President Duterte and his regime. Her opponents have called for her rape and beheading, but she still speaks and writes the truth. She is very critical of Facebook, which, she says, provides 97% of the news that the citizens of Philippines read and is responsible for spreading copious amounts of disinformation. Ressa asked Mark Zuckerberg to come to the Philippines and see the result of the lies that are readily accepted, as truth, and Zuckerberg’s response to the invitation was, “Where do the remaining 3% get their news?” Dmitry Muratov founded the independent newspaper, Novaja Gazeta, in 1993, which has been an implacable enemy of Putin and his lies. The paper has printed stories of police violence, corruption, and unlawful arrests. Six of its journalists have been murdered and Dmitry’s life has been threatened more times than he can count. But still, he presses on. In granting the award, the Nobel Prize Committee reflected on the critical importance of truth telling. “There must be free expression,” it said. “There must be freedom of information, or there can be no true democracy.” But free expression that uses distortion and lies is not the kind of expression that builds strong communities. It does not build a society of committed persons, working for the common good. In fact, the lies and distortion tear apart societies, pitting citizens against one another. Some people think that granting Ressa the prize was a direct attack against Facebook for its refusal to be guardians of the truth. We all realize that truth can seem ambiguous, since human interpretation honestly looks at reality from many different angles and perspectives. When we look at the world, we do not all see the same thing, and that is to be expected and accepted. But it is also true that we live in a world where lies are spread quickly and efficiently with no accountability at all. People will read something on Facebook and accept it as fact, simply because it is there. The most outlandish things are believed without any degree of proof. Some believe the Covid vaccines will inject computer chips into the body, so the government can track its citizens. Others deny climate change, refusing to believe scientists, who have spent their lives studying the evidence. It really makes me wonder what kind of education such people received. Did not they learn that evidence needs to be offered to defend their positions? Jesus spent a great deal of time talking about the truth that sets us free. Though the truth of which Jesus spoke was spiritual, it is also true that Jesus would not have understood truth as something which is piecemeal. Loving the truth means loving the truth not only in the spiritual life but also in the day to day living of ordinary life. If we seek the truth spiritually, we should also seek it in all other dimensions of life as well. Jesus calls us to love and serve the truth, and though there will always be differences of opinion about what the truth is, we should all care deeply about discerning what is a lie and who the liars are. Liars simply do not make a mistake in judgment or have a difference in opinion. On the contrary, they intend to lie, to obfuscate, to distort. The Nobel Peace Prize this year was granted to two persons, who not only could tell the difference between truth and lies, but also thought it critical for the health and safety of their respective societies to help others to recognize the difference between truth and lies. Peace is NEVER advanced by lies but only becomes possible when truth is loved and valued as much as peace. Yours in Christ, Sandra The Fuss Over Marriage and Divorce
Preached by Sandra Olsen October 10, 2021 Mark 10: 1-12 A few of you might remember some years ago, when the Jesus Seminar met, and scholars voted on whether they thought particular gospel words of Jesus were actually uttered by the historical Jesus or were more likely to have been a product of the community out of which a particular gospel arose, decades after the historical Jesus actually lived. My understanding is that most scholars of the New Testament believe that Jesus actually uttered these words about marriage and divorce. The context for this discussion between Jesus and the Pharisees came as Jesus was moving into the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, which was under Herod’s rule. Herod was the one who had John the Baptist beheaded, because John had criticized his marriage to his sister in law, Herodias, who had been married to and then divorced John’s brother. Herodias was furious with John, and she was the one who had instigated his beheading. So, the writer of this gospel immediately wants to remind of a controversy concerning divorce. Now in Jesus’ day there were two major rabbinic thinkers, Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel. The former was pretty strict about divorce, insisting that there were few legitimate reasons for it---infidelity and sterility, the latter always blamed on the woman. Rabbi Hillel, on the other hand, gave men (but not women) a great deal of latitude to divorce their wives, including burnt meals! However, in Jesus’ time Rome ruled, and Rome did grant women legal rights, including the right to divorce their husbands. So, this liberalization of women’s rights might have impacted Jewish culture, because in verse 12, notice that Jesus seems to assume women can also divorce their husbands, since he says both men and women who divorce and then remarry are guilty of adultery. Divorce in Jesus’ day usually spelled disaster for women, because of their economic dependence. If a husband divorced his wife, he was supposed to return the dowry, but if it was spent, it was difficult to force repayment. Furthermore, the children belonged to the husband, so in a case of divorce the children always remained with the father. The only real alternative a divorced woman had (unless she immediately remarried) was to return to her family of origin—to her father, brothers or some other male relative. If there were no male relatives, she was left in dire need. So biblical scholars tend to interpret Jesus’ harsh stand against divorce as a defense of women, so as not to leave them vulnerable. That was then, but what about now? So much has radically changed over the past 50/60 years. When I was a child, between kindergarten and the 8th grade, I knew only one divorced person. She was the one who lived in an apartment rather than a house, and when I asked her why, she told me that her mother, who was a nurse, could not get a mortgage. I had no idea what a mortgage was, and when my mother explained, she told me women could not get their own mortgages. At age 8, I was outraged by this, but my mother accepted it as the norm. Not only can women get mortgages today, but women also initiate many of the divorces, and though I have no national statistics on this, a divorce lawyer I know claims that in his experience more women initiate the divorce than men. When I asked him why, he told me rather bluntly that he thought men “get more benefits out of marriage than women do.” “Women are no longer willing to endure the same degree of unhappiness their mothers and grandmothers once did,” he said. I recall in one of my former churches that this woman with whom I had become quite close told me after I had been at the church for over 10 years how profoundly unhappy she had been in her marriage. “You’ve been here long enough for me to trust you,” she said. And then she told me that one of the saddest days in her life was when we stood up in church and clapped, after her husband announced that they had been married for 70 years. “I was not going to say a word about our anniversary,” she cried, “because I am ashamed of my marriage. It was a terrible sham, full of misery---his extramarital affairs, physical and verbal abuse,” but, she admitted, there were also delights and comforts--- two children whom both parents loved, his very successful career, which gave the family a comfortable life with a lovely summer home on the shore, and time and money for the wife to pursue her painting. “But when I look back on it all”, she said, “I recognize now how profoundly unhappy I was. I never, ever really asked myself the question of my happiness. It just wasn’t something I had been raised to consider.” And indeed, this is one of the major cultural shifts. Psychologists and marriage counselors tell us that people are now asking themselves, “Am I happy? Is this marriage helping me to be happy?” Now before we dismiss the question as another example of excessive self-concern, we should remember that the question of happiness—what it is and how to achieve it--- has engaged great minds throughout the history of the world. We can look at happiness in a superficial manner, as a kind of feel good attitude toward life that one pursues even at the expense of others, but it is also true that it means far more than this. When people say, I want to be happy, it means they are looking for deep fulfillment and meaning. They want to know that their lives matter, count for something. And I think this is one of the reasons marriage has become so hard, because the level of expectation is so high. People look to their marriage and their families for more meaning, perhaps, than is reasonable to expect. And so, disappointment sets in. And how we learn to deal with disappointment is key. I wonder if as a culture we have become too intolerant of disappointment, impatient with waiting it out. Let’s face it: sometimes it is wisdom to stay the course, to get through the very hard times, because on the other side there is the possibility of something worth saving and having. As George Eliot so beautifully wrote in her novel, Adam Bede: What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting. Yet as beautiful as that vision is, there is also no denying that there are times when the wise course is to end it, because the marriage is quite literally sucking the life out of people. If nature abhors a vacuum, depression can rush in to fill it, or bitterness can invade the broken and disappointed heart. This is not what God intends. God does not demand our misery. Sometimes, however, it is not misery, which is the problem, but rather emptiness. Nothing is there. And people have a very hard time believing and hoping that there can be something on the other side of emptiness. Sometimes people simply lack the energy to work to fill up what feels so empty. The gospel is not an invention for ideal times; it is for life as it is actually lived with all its problems and failures. Happiness is not an entitlement, but it is a possibility, and even in failure and disappointment, God invites us to abundant life. God doesn’t give us an exact road map to follow in life or in marriage. We chart our way toward the future with faith and hope, even as we sometimes stumble and fall along the way. Statistics can tell us that second marriages are more likely to fail than first ones and third marriages more likely to fail than second ones. But statistics can never tell the whole story of individual lives because it is also true that people can and do rise from their disappointments and failures. People can and do learn from their past and with God’s grace a new beginning is born. Our Protestant tradition does not stand in the way of divorce and remarriage, for which most of us are grateful. We recognize reality---that life is messy and complicated, and because God calls us to live in hope, we do hope that a new beginning is always possible. September 28, 2021
Dear Friends, Lately we have been inundated about our beleaguered earth: wildfires in California, flooding in New York and New Jersey, hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas. No doubt about it: climate change is here and a threat to our beautiful planet. We all should be concerned and support programs and legislation that try to address the crisis. But I was reminded the other day, as I read about the latest discovery of a massive comet, that the EARTH is not the center of the universe. Back in the days of Galileo, the Church tried to insist that he cease teaching the SUN was the center and not the earth. Galileo finally recanted in 1633, because death by burning was brutal, and he reasoned his death would do nothing to advance the march of truth. He spent eight years under house arrest before dying in 1642. It took the Church until 1992 to admit that Galileo had been wrongly condemned. Remembering that the earth is not the center helps us to gain some perspective on the truth that we are simply one small part of a vast universe about which new information is being learned every day. The newly discovered comet, named Bernardinelli-Berstein, after a graduate student and his professor, is the largest known comet, about one thousand times more massive than any other known comet, measuring between 60 and 124 miles across. Astronomers say the comet will make its closest approach to the sun in the year 2031. The comet is from the edge or the outskirts of our solar system, and it has been making its way toward our sun for many millions of years. Not only is it the most massive comet we know of, but it is also the most distant (from our sun) that we have ever discovered---at least so far. It took more than six years of data collection to discover the comet. The Dark Energy Camera, located on a telescope in Chile, has been collecting data, which is fed into The Dark Energy Survey, studied by more than 400 scientists involving seven countries and 25 institutions. The camera is mapping 300 million galaxies as well as comets and other icy celestial bodies that live on the very edge of our solar system. Comets are icy objects, thrown out of the solar system when the planets formed and then migrated to their current location. As a comet approaches the sun, its ice begins to evaporate, creating the two tails, recognized by many people as the main feature of comets. These tails can be hundreds or even millions of miles long. Comets are composed of a nucleus at the center and gaseous clouds, forming around the nucleus as the ice melts and evaporates. This comet’s journey probably began over 3.7 trillion miles away from the sun and is now about 1.8 billion miles away. It is believed that the comet emerged from the Oort Cloud of objects, an isolated group of icy objects at the very edge of our universe. Though this is where scientists believe comets originate, they have never actually observed an object within the Oort Cloud. Though spacecrafts like Voyager 1 and 2 and New Horizons will eventually reach the Oort Cloud, by the time they arrive, their power sources will have been dead for centuries! So, what are we to make of the vastness of this incredible creation? It fills us with awe and perhaps even a bit of dread as we try to imagine space and time that are almost beyond our imaginations. The Bible extols God as the mysterious creator of everything that is, and what is, is far more than we currently know. When we contemplate the vastness, we can feel as tiny fragments in one galaxy among millions and millions, perhaps even billions of others. We know so little, and we understand even less than we know. We should be humbled by that piece of knowledge, and our humility should make us more committed to saving our tiny fragment of our galaxy. Yours in Christ, Sandra Money Matters
The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT October 3, 2021 Mark 10: 17-22 When I was a college senior, I took an anthropology course with a famous anthropologist, Sol Tax. He had spent years doing original field work in Native American culture as well as some island cultures in the Pacific. When I took his course, he was already in his mid 70’s, and he struck me at the time as a wise old man, someone who had lived in many different places across the face of the earth and had spent a great deal of time observing and thinking about the human condition. Though I do not remember much from the course, I do recall him telling our class that there are some societies, where status is not measured by how much you can accrue but rather by how much you give away. If something precious comes to you, the expectation is that you give it away. He told us that the home of a wealthy person in such a society does not look so different from the home of a poor person, yet the status is different all because of what was given away. Now that is almost impossible for us to fathom, because we live in a culture that is the exact opposite. And I am not only speaking of American culture. The philosopher, Jacob Needleman, wrote in his book, Money and the Meaning of Life, “We do not create the art of the Renaissance or the medieval world; we do not worship the state as did ancient Rome. We do not build as did the Egyptians. But none of them has created the immense global mechanism of finance whose penetration into every aspect of human life has been the chief feature of our contemporary culture. In other times and places, not everyone has wanted money above all else. People have desired salvation, beauty, power, strength, pleasure, explanations, food, adventure, conquest, comfort. But here and now money---and not necessarily the things that money can buy--- is what everyone wants. The outward expenditure of mankind’s energy now takes place in and through money.” Long after we are gone, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years from now, when the history of our time is written, money, that is, finance, will be the major character and theme. And that theme has now seeped into the East---into Japan, China, Southeast Asia. The West rules in its concentration on money. So, what does Jesus say about money? Certainly, in Jesus’ day there were wealthy persons, like the rich young man in our story, but most people were very poor and most likely did not aspire to be rich, because they could not imagine such possibility. In Jesus’ day there was trade, which made some people rich, and agriculture also played an important role. So, some wealthy people had a lot of land with sheep and goats, and perhaps barns filled with grain. Others might have traded in spices and cloth, but because barter was the common means of exchange, wealthy people did not accrue money as people do today. Besides, wealth was often seen to be very precarious, since it could easily be stolen or destroyed without the benefit of modern day insurance and other legal protections. Wealth, according to Jesus, was not something to be desired; it was something to be used. He certainly lived off the generosity of some wealthy people and spent a considerable amount of time talking about money and what it can and cannot buy. 27 of Jesus’ 43 parables are concerned with money and possessions, and one out of ten verses in the gospels deals with money. The Bible, as a whole, includes 500 verses on prayer, fewer than 500 on faith, but over 2000 on money. So, it is a subject that concerns the spiritual life. Why? Because money shows where the heart is, revealing what matters to people, where their values truly lie. Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, who just spent a bundle on going up into space, is worth about $200 billion, and he’s giving away half to conservation and climate concerns. His ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, is worth about $58 billion, and has given away over 8 billion to a variety of causes, including the arts, education and organizations working to overcome racism. And she promises to keep giving. As admirable as such generosity is, these gifts are given out of tremendous excess, which should lead us to ponder some words from Mother Theresa: “I hope that what you give comes not from your surplus but is the fruit of a sacrifice made for the love of God. You must give what costs you.” Give what costs you: This is exactly what Jesus was asking the rich man to do, but he could not do what Jesus asked because he had much wealth, and the cost for him was simply too high. I have often been struck by the reality that people who have very little often have an easier time letting it go. When I worked in New Haven, I had a great deal of contact with the poor. In the midst of a terrible winter freeze, when temperatures dropped to zero, I saw a homeless man give away his mittens to another, who had none. “I have pockets in my coat,” he said, “but your coat doesn’t have any.” I saw another homeless person find a $20 bill on the ground outside the soup kitchen and offer half of it to his friend. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this,” he said. “It just fell into my hands, and I think God wouldn’t want me to keep it all.” And then there was a woman I met in the hospital, who had no money to speak of, but when a homeless woman turned up in the hospital, dying of terminal cancer, Elsie paid to put her in an apartment for the rest of her life, which was about 6 months. The social worker tried to dissuade Elise, who had barely enough to pay her own bills. But, Elsie insisted, “A dying person should have a home. She needs a home, and I can help her.” These gifts were given at a cost. They came out of poverty, and yet were given, it seemed to me, without much struggle---unlike the rich man, who wanted to find eternal life, but could not do what Jesus commanded. It was simply too hard. And so, he went away with a heavy heart, a heart burdened by his wealth. How hard is it to give to the church? What does it really cost you? That is a question each of us can only answer for ourselves. When we give to the church, we are giving to an institution which has a particular and unique call---to love and serve God, who shows us time and time again that justice, truth, mercy, generosity, and forgiveness matter. They matter to God, and so they should matter to us. The church is a human institution, populated by imperfect people, like you and me. But our imperfections and the church’s imperfections are no excuses for failing to give, just as they are no excuses for failing to try to be what God calls us to be as the church—Christ’s body, heart, and mind in a world sorely in need of redemption. God calls us to proclaim and live the Good News---that the love and mercy of God in Jesus Christ stand forever over all. And because that truth matters, the church, which proclaims it, also matters, just as the money, which you give to support the church, also matters. Making Life Count for Something
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT September 26, 2021 Mark 9: 38-50 A friend of mine, who although not ordained, does some preaching in and outside of church, was asked to do some services at a nursing home, and so Mark asked the residents, who bothered to come to the services, what they were interested in hearing in sermons. “Well,” they said, “we don’t want to hear much about sin. We know there is a lot of it in the world, but we are too old to do much serious sinning anymore. What we really want to hear is that our lives counted for something---that it mattered we lived.” So, what makes our lives count for something? Most of us recognize that a completely self-centered life is simply not enough. And so, we see how common it is for people to find meaning by being part of some larger group or identity. The identification can be national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social or a mixture of some or all of them. These identifications not only give people a sense that their lives count for something, but they also are a way of helping people distinguish themselves from others. For example, as Israel developed its identity as God’s chosen people, they also had a very strong sense that they were different from others and at times even better. And in today’s lesson this is what we see, disciples, who as followers of Jesus, are deeply troubled because someone is casting out a demon in the name of Jesus---though he was not a follower. And we can also imagine they expected Jesus to be on their side---to tell them, why yes, this man has no right to use my name, when he is not part of our inner group. But this is not what Jesus said or did. He greatly widened the circle by saying, “The one who is not against us is with us.” In so many words Jesus told them, “Get over yourselves. You are neither the center nor the fullness of the story. Others, whom you refuse to recognize, are also included.” Now it is important to understand that scripture often tells us something very significant about the time in which it was written, so this text is not simply about what Jesus taught to his disciples. It is also about what was going on in and around the year 70, which is when Mark’s gospel was most likely written. And at that time, there was great concern about the people not only coming into the new faith, but also those who were on the outside, perhaps looking in, not fully believers, but maybe admirers of Jesus, or at least admirers of the stories they were hearing about Jesus. And so, there was concern about how the followers of Jesus were supposed to respond to others, who were not yet fully in. Should they be like the disciples, rejecting the outsiders, or would it be wise to be more temperate, to see them as Jesus did? If they are not against us, in some way they are with us. And then immediately the conversation moves to sin. Though Jesus is here seen talking to his disciples, what is being said is directly applicable to the end of the first century with people on the outside looking in, not quite sure what to make of the new faith. And when Jesus talks about physical parts, like the hand, foot, and eye as causes for sin that should be cut off, this is directly related to some of the other sects, which were beginning to flourish during this time. You see, some groups (like the Gnostics) made the body into the big problem, the locus of sin. But this is neither what Jesus taught not what the Christian church would come to believe and preach. The physical world is God created and therefore good. In his lifetime Jesus had taught that sin comes from within, from a heart and head wrongly oriented. The foot or the eye or hand alone can have no guilt---so Jesus is really being absurd here, engaging in hyperbole to make the point that the body is not the problem. Though the translation puts the world hell on Jesus’ lips, the word he actually used was Gehenna, a place in the Hinnom Valley, south of Jerusalem. This was a place where the Jews believed pagans had sacrificed children to Baal. In Jesus’ time it was a trash heap, where things were discarded and burned, including the bodies of criminals. Gehenna was nothing like the common Christian understanding of hell, which comes from the 13th century Italian writer, Dante, whose Divine Comedy gives us hell as a place of terrible punishment and torture. Jesus is never shown actually condemning people to hell. On the contrary, it is his job to move people out of hell, out of the trash heap, where life is not properly valued as the gift from God that it is. To be in hell is to be in a place where your desires and priorities are misshapen and distorted in the sense that to follow such desires will only bring you to dead and miserable ends. To be in hell is to be misery because you love and serve the wrong ends. So, the scripture is telling us to get our priorities straight and care about the right things, things that bring full and abundant life not only for us but also for others. This hardly means perfection, but the test is: Are we moving in the right direction, because no one wants to get to the end of life and say, “I’ve missed the point. I failed to get it. My life was a catalogue of trivial pursuits, a pile of trash.” This is hell, what Jesus called Gehenna. Most people want their lives to have counted for something. This is what the old people in that nursing home told my friend they wanted to hear---that their lives mattered, counted for something. The Rev. Phillips Brooks’ life did seem to count for something. A beloved Episcopal priest, who served in Boston’s Trinity Church as rector for many years, he was a graduate of Harvard, and would often return there to preach and lecture, where he was also beloved. Soon after he died, his parishioners hired the illustrious sculpturer, Augustus St. Gaudens to sculpt a statute of their beloved priest. If you want to see St. Gaudens’ work today, go to Lincoln Park in Chicago, and see his statue of Lincoln; or NYC's Central Park where his statue of General Sherman is, or in Boston Commons, his Shaw Memorial. So, Saint Gaudens came to Trinity Church in hopes of getting to know the man who had so faithfully served there. But the beautiful architecture of the church did not help him, nor did Brooks' old office. He spoke with Brooks' parishioners and his friends, and then he went to the Harvard Community that loved Brooks so much, but he still couldn't get a handle on who this preacher was and what made him so special. He then spent weeks reading Brooks' sermons and lectures, but these didn't help him either. In desperation, St. Gaudens returned to Trinity Church one last time. The church was empty, save for one elderly woman, bent with care, bent in prayer. When she had finished her praying, St. Gaudens went over to her and struck up a conversation. He confessed to her his frustration at not being able to grasp who this man was he was supposed to sculpt. The woman turned to him and spoke these words: "Sir, if you would know our preacher, you must first know his Master. You must know whom he spent this life loving and serving. " St. Gaudens returned to his room and wrote in his diary days later: "I read the Gospels for the first time, and I realized I had never met this man named Jesus until now.” It was only then that Saint Gaudens was able to sculpt Brooks with Jesus, resting on a granite base, standing in a domed marble niche. It was placed in the church in 1893. No one wants to feel or believe that his or her life is or was trivial, discarded on a trash heap. So, we should take stock now and then, and consider what it is we are pursuing, whom and what it is we are loving and serving. But we can take great consolation in this----even if the worse happens, and someone’s life does end up on a trash heap, the final word is never spoken by human beings, but by a merciful God, who can repair and save what is beyond our capacity to do. THE GOD WE DID NOT EXPECT (OR EVEN WANT)
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT September 19, 2021 James 3: 13-18 Mark 9: 30-37 Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the great rabbis of the 20th century. Known for his sharp mind and big heart, he had many friends among the Christian community with whom he eagerly entered into dialogue. One time the subject under discussion was the question: Does God suffer, and so Heschel began, as he often did, by telling a story. At the end of the Second World War, a Jewish diplomat was about to board a train, when a young and obviously poor Jewish man entered behind him. Because the diplomat had a whole compartment to himself, and because both men were headed to Israel, the diplomat invited the young man to share his compartment. Pulling out his prayer shawl, the diplomat prayed, and throughout the day, at designated times, he repeated his actions, while the young man looked on very sadly and uncomfortably. Finally, at the end of the day, the young man said, “I’m never going to pray again, because of what happened to us at Auschwitz”. But at the end of the second day, suddenly he pulled out his prayer shawl and joined the diplomat in evening prayers. “Why did you change your mind,” the diplomat asked? I felt sorry for God, he said. Look at mess we have made of the world. And look with whom God has to work.” And then Heschel added: Faith truly begins when we can feel sorry for God. I first heard that story when I was in seminary, and I must admit that I had never before considered the question of God suffering. After all, we are more accustomed to the idea that God should feel sorry for us and help us in our distress. God, we tend to think, has all the power, and we, in contrast, have very little. In the same seminar I first heard Heschel’s story, I also read Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A Lutheran pastor and brilliant theologian, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for two years before he was hanged for his participation in a plot against Hitler’s life, and during those years he wrote copious letters to family and friends, collected in the book now called, Letters and Papers from Prison. Blown away by what I read 40 years ago, I still am haunted and challenged by Bonhoeffer’s life and his words, especially the following ones: And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world as if there were no God. And this is just what we do recognize before God. God compels us to recognize it. God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the only way in which God is with us and helps us. Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Human religiosity makes people look in their distress to the power of God in the world. But the Bible directs us to God's powerlessness and helplessness; only the suffering God can help. A false conception of God is being done away with as we are opened to seeing the God who wins power and space in the world by weakness. Only a suffering God can help? What can that possibly mean? Last week’s gospel lesson from Mark, when Jesus asked, “Who do people say I am,” showed Jesus predicting his death, and Peter understandably objected. And now this morning’s lesson gives us Jesus’ second prediction of his death, and though we hear no open verbal protest from the disciples, we are told they don’t get it. And who can blame them? A suffering Messiah is not what the Jews wanted or expected. Their model was a strong monarch like David, a military leader, who would defeat Israel’s enemies with the sword. Each time a contender for the Messianic throne was executed by the Romans, the Jews had to cope with their disappointment that this one was not the Messiah after all. And then along came Jesus, insisting that he must suffer and die, because God is revealed most perfectly in the cross. This is Christianity’s fundamental claim. Many Christians these days tend to think that Christianity can best be summarized by the golden rule or doing the good works that show wisdom and understanding as the Letter of James attests. Of course, these are marks of the Christian life, but these are also things we share with other religions as well as with secularity. It is not necessary to be a Christian to be good and to do good. The uniqueness of Christianity is manifested in the cross. What is truly god-like about God is self-giving, suffering love. In the early centuries of Christianity, some very definite ideas of perfection were laid down. God, for example, was defined as unchanging, because change would imply a lack in God. And certainly, these thinkers insisted, God could not suffer, because suffering too implies a lack as well as change. But Christian theology also affirmed Jesus Christ as the fullness of God, that is, showing us what God is like when God is expressed in a human life. And certainly Jesus grew; Jesus suffered; Jesus changed. How could God be involved in all this flow and flux? And so, there were all kinds of discussions about God suffering in God's human nature, but not in the divine nature, solutions, which were not very compelling. Perhaps to many of you this sounds like a lot of theological nit-picking, but the central question was and is about how God is present to us. Where is God now? That is the question the sufferer pleads in his or her distress. It is a cry seeking a presence in the midst of what is experienced as an absence. Where is God in the midst of the suffering at our southern border? Where is God in the midst of the sexual abuse of children? Where is God in the midst of a battle with cancer? God is right there, sharing and undergoing the suffering. The God to whom Jesus points in Mark’s Gospel is a suffering God. But why would anyone believe in a suffering God when the need is for release from suffering? The human desire is for escape, not participation. Besides, we all know that much human suffering is degrading. Someone once said to me, "The worst thing about having this brain tumor is not that it is going to kill me, but that it is first going to destroy me." And the same is true of so many other forms of suffering. It destroys by first degrading. What does God say to that? God answers in the cross: "What I take belongs to me in a different way from what I can only bear." When Jesus chose the cross, he was certainly subjected to terrible suffering, but not subjected in the sense of being a total victim. He chose to go the way of the cross, not because God demanded it, but because human beings demanded his death. Jesus died for our sins not to satisfy God’s demands for a perfect sacrificial victim, but to satisfy the human lust for blood. We humans say No to God, and in the cross God says No to our No. “Do what you will; reject the love I offer; do to me the worst you can do, and I will still love you. That is God’s answer. In Jesus Christ God freely takes on suffering. And God's freedom to take on suffering is also God's radical protest against suffering, which is why Bonhoeffer said that only a suffering God can help. Only a suffering God can save. God hears our protest, “This must not be,” and joins in the protest by promising that finally all shall be made well. But all is not well now, and so we wait and hope and work for that future. And while waiting, hoping, and working, we sometimes do feel sorry for God. Some years ago, when I was a chaplain, I was called to the emergency room, where a young woman was in the throes of a miscarriage. She was inconsolable, and also homeless and unemployed with a history of abuse, and somehow she thought that her baby would save her life, give her a reason to live and to hope. For three hours I sat with her, listening to her sobs as she poured out her sorrow and rage at the abuse she had suffered as a child and the abuse she still suffered as a young woman. What could I say? I had nothing to give except my presence, and that seemed pathetic enough, so as the third hour approached, I found myself silently praying, “Oh God, I feel so sorry for you, because it this god-forsaken place, I’m all you’ve got, and I’m very little help.” Sorry for God, because God suffers with us, for us and from us. This is not the God we expect and not even the one we want, but it is the God we get, and it is the God who loves us. And love is the Good News because it is love which finally heals and saves. September 16, 2021
Dear Friends, In the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 there were many engaging articles to read. One of my favorites was in The Atlantic about a family, who lost a young son in the Twin Towers, and how these past twenty years they have coped. The mother spent time, obsessing over the fact that her son’s fiancée would not give up a journal written by her son a few weeks before he died, a journal, by the way, the father had given to her. The mother was furious her husband had given the woman the journal and tried to convince the young woman to loan it to her, insisting that she would give it right back. The father, on the other hand, spent his time investigating all these conspiracy theories, which his wife would no longer even listen to. And the younger son simply stopped telling anyone he lost his brother in 9/11. (By the way, after 20 years the woman gave the mother the journal.) Yet what grabbed my attention the most was not a story at all, but rather a single comment I read about a man who had escaped one of the towers, when a few minutes later, it suddenly collapsed. He had run into a store, where he was shaking and crying, when a fireman gave him a hug and said, “You’re in shock.” The man looked at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I have never been more awake and aware in my entire life. I hope this feeling never goes away.” I think many of us can understand what this man meant. When one has a close call with death, it is hardly unusual to feel more alive, more attuned to what is going on around one, more aware of what life’s truly important priorities are. I have seen it in people who have escaped the ravages of a life-threatening illness, who then promised they would live their lives differently. They often feel they have been given a second chance, and they are not going to waste it. I have seen people end marriages they recognized as toxic, and I have seen people recommit to marriages that seemed beyond repair. People have left high paying jobs, because they suddenly realized that money is not nearly so important as they used to believe. I have heard of people doing something daring---like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, they highest mountain in Africa, something they never would have tried before their reprieve from death. And then I remember reading a story about a man, who thought he was going to die, when his plane was about to go down on the Hudson River. We all recall the incredible landing, how not one person was lost and how Captain Sully became the nation’s hero. This man said he realized how shallow his life had been, and he promised he was going to change. I wonder if he really did. Promises are easy to make yet hard to keep. One of my favorite true stories concerns the brilliant Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, surely one of the world greatest writers, famous for such novels as Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky was a gambler, a womanizer, and a political rebel, which eventually led to his arrest and condemnation to death before a firing squad. There, he was with a bunch of other people, waiting to be executed. He saw groups of men lined up against a wall and shot. Group by group went before him, and he realized in only a few minutes, his turn would come. Then as he was about to be lined up, a man on a horse arrived, with a decree from the Czar granting amnesty. Dostoevsky had come so close to death, and the result was that his writing took off as his creative juices flowed beyond anything he had before accomplished. He still gambled and drank and womanized, but he now wrote, and he wrote brilliantly. Sometimes the closeness of death does lead people to make radical changes in their lives. Change is never easy, something we see not only in those who struggle with addictions of all types, but we also see it in the most ordinary of life’s circumstances. My father and I would enter into fierce arguments, from the time I could put words together, and so it would go, even when we agreed on the issues. In my mid 40’s, I decided I was going to stop arguing with him. Did I succeed? No, not really. My husband finally pointed out to me that I would continue to fail, because, as he said, “You and your father just live to argue.” I had to admit he was more right than wrong. And so, I accepted that reality. It only changed in the last year of my father’s life, when he was simply slowing down, and did not have the energy to argue. He did not seem ill, but I should have figured something was not right, because there was hardly anything my father loved more than a good argument. At the end of my first year in seminary I did a unit of clinical training at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where one of my assignments was the heart unit. And the head cardiologist talked with us aspiring clergy about heart disease as well as his new and eager young residents. “I get the best and the brightest here,” he said. “All these eager young doctors are going to change the behavior of many of these patients, who eat too much, smoke too much and don’t exercise enough. They are going to save their patients from their fates. And I am going to tell you aspiring clergy when I tell my young residents: Be prepared for the hard truth. Most people would rather die than change.” I am sure as Jesus wandered around, ministering to a variety of people, he ran into many people who had very little interest in changing. We have all these wonderful stories, where people SEEM to change, but I cannot help wondering, how permanent these changes really were. When Jesus told the woman caught in adultery, “No one has condemned you, and neither do I. Go, now and sin no more,” I wonder if she did avoid sinning, at least in that particular way. And what about the prodigal son, who was such a wastrel? Did he truly reform after his father welcomed him home and threw a big party for him? And what about the older brother, so resentful of his father’s generosity toward his younger sibling? Did he remain resentful, or did he turn around and change? We do not know, but we can wonder. And we can also hope that change truly is possible, even if never easy. I would wager that Jesus did a great deal of hoping, and I would guess that God does the same. Yours in Christ, Sandra September 8, 2021
Dear Friends, Have any of you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? It happened in late August,1921 in southern West Virginia, when thousands of coal miners, exercising their right to bear arms as well as to protest, marched against not only their oppressive working conditions but also against the open assassination of union sympathizers. It was the largest armed labor uprising in American history. This army of miners was met by another army of civilians, who volunteered to fight with the county sheriff, who happened to be on the payroll of coal companies. Anger at the severe and dangerous working conditions had been building for years, but when union sympathizers were assassinated in broad daylight, anger transmuted into rage, and so the miners marched and fought. The number of deaths is believed to have been around 16, and before that number could grow, the United States Army was called in to quell the fight. It was then that many of the miners gave up. They had fought in the Army of the First World War, and they had no interest in fighting against the Army in which they had served. There is a roadside marker on the stretch of highway leading into the hills that bears the words, Battle of Blair Mountain, but that is all the reminder there is, except perhaps for some stray shell casings. The people who made up the army of miners were a varied group: black, white, recent immigrants and those with long and proud histories in the area. But they all had one thing in common: They did dangerous work for very little pay, and they were literally guarded by hired guns, men who stood over the miners with rifles. As for their pay, they were paid in company money, which meant they could only buy at the company store and pay for their housing with company money. They also had to pay for their own tools, and if they were hurt on the job, any medical care given was deducted from their “wages.” No wonder they protested. And yet almost no one has ever heard of this protest. It is not in the American history books, where labor rights and disputes are discussed. Why? Because the story was suppressed by the power of the coal companies, who did not want it told as part of American history. Today it is being talked about more, but it tends to be a local story, not one that makes it into a larger discussion about labor rights and protests. People in West Virginia would rather talk about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which plays a lot better with most tourists. Labor rights and feuds are much more unsettling. In 2015 a small and dedicated group of local residents, activists and retried union people helped to put together and open The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Privately funded, its home is in a union owned building in Matewan. On the Battle’s centennial the Museum staged re-enactments of the march and battle and gave talks about the issues involved. None of this was state sponsored, so it was a big surprise when the state’s governor, Jim Justice, showed up. He is a billionaire owner of coal companies, so he shocked people even more when he issued a proclamation, acknowledging the significance of the battle as a “fight for fair working conditions.” The Mine era wars between workers and those who owned the mines were bloody---at least 100 deaths in shootouts. Some of the mine workers, who were most committed to labor rights, were ostracized and had difficulty finding any kind of work. But it was the coal industry and their supporters in the state government that made sure no mention of the mine wars became part of recorded history. State officials even demanded that any mention of the Blair Mountain incident be stripped from the public record! There is much discussion these days about history and how and what is taught in our public schools. But surely we should realize that is left out can be just as important as what is included. There is greatness and there is shame in any history, and both need to be recognized. Christianity too has its share of shameful stories. Consider the vicious execution of so called heretics—people whose only crime was disagreement with the orthodox position. Roman Catholics had their Inquisition, but we Protestants also executed people. Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva because he refused to accept the doctrine of the Trinity. God, he insisted, is one, not three. Jesus taught that we are called to love the truth and serve the truth, for the truth does make us free. And though there will always be disagreements about what the truth is, if the love of truth rather than the love of power, is the guide, surely the journey will take us to more solid ground. Yours in Christ, Sandra |
August 29, 2021
Dear Friends,
Bertrand Russell was one of the great minds of the 20th century. Born in 1872, he died in 1970 after earning a renowned reputation as a logician, social philosopher, and anti-war activist. Though sometimes his writings are abstruse, written for the professional academic community, he also wrote for common readers, believing them capable of understanding his positions and arguments. In 1950 he was granted the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his varied and significant writings, in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”
Nobel Prize acceptance speeches run the gamut of topics, and Russell chose to speak on the central role that desire plays in human life. He said, “All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interest of duty and moral principle.” Russell did not disagree that duty plays a role, but his claim was that duty is only effective if there is a desire to follow the dictates of duty. Without that desire, duty has no hold on human beings.
“The human being, Russell claimed, “differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise.” So, what are these infinite desires, according to Russell?
The first one is acquisitiveness, the wish to possess as much as possible of goods or the title to goods. Russell sees this desire originating in fear---the fear that there will not be enough. That makes perfect sense when we consider our ancestors and their struggle for survival, but in a capitalistic system, the struggle for more and more is yet very pronounced, way beyond the satisfaction of basic needs. And it is even most pronounced Russell points out, in the very rich and powerful.
The second desire, which, he claims, is even more powerful than acquisitiveness is rivalry. He told a story about the Kaiser of Germany being shown the Royal Navy, and though the English thought this would impress the Kaiser that the English were not to be toyed with, the Kaiser decided he must build a navy even more grand than the Royal one! As a species, we would be far better off, Russell thought, if acquisitiveness were more powerful than rivalry, but alas, it is not. A great many people and nations will choose to ruin themselves if they can also ruin their competitors. Consider war and its ugly consequences.
From rivalry we move to vanity. “Look at me” is one of the fundamental motivators in human life. We see it in children, when quite literally they beg to be looked at, but it hardly stops at childhood. Russell believed that we even project this vanity onto God, when we proclaim that God desires our adulation and praise. I am reminded of one of my friends, who years ago told me that when she was seven years old and learning the Baltimore Catechism, she objected to the idea that God wants our praise. Well, she concluded, God must be very conceited! For that impertinence she had to stay after school for three days. She said she never did understand why she was punished, since she was confident that she was correct in her view of God, who seemed to her very vain, indeed.
Finally, Russell moves to the love of power, which he understands to be the most destructive of human desires. “Power, like vanity, is insatiable,” he said in his address. “Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.” Russell went on to say that “the love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power.” This explains why we do not necessarily notice this drive in people as they begin their terms of service, but as they exercise their power, they can become more and more infatuated with it.
Again, we need to be reminded that Russell did not mean that people NEVER put limits on their love of power. It is obvious they do, but Russell would remind us again and again this is because they have a desire to limit themselves and without that desire, no appeal to fairness or goodness will be effective.
We should all remember the story of our first President, George Washington, who could have been named King of the new nation, if he had so desired. But Washington said, “I did not fight George the Third of England to become George the First of the United States.” And when after two terms as President, King George the Third heard that George Washington was surrendering his power, he said. “He is the greatest man in all of human history.”
Christian ethics have often been termed “the great reversal,” because so much of normal human behavior and desire are completely turned upside down. Jesus said, “The one who would be great in God’s kingdom must be servant of all.” And even the most cursory glance at Jesus’ life shows us someone who renounced power in the service of love. That he died a horrible and humiliating death as a criminal only corroborates that the love of power as it is normally understood is not what he desired.
We would all do well to ponder desire and what it is we truly do desire and why. The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, would remind us that so much of what we do is habitual, and so, it is important to cultivate good habits---including the habit of desiring what is life giving and affirming.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Bertrand Russell was one of the great minds of the 20th century. Born in 1872, he died in 1970 after earning a renowned reputation as a logician, social philosopher, and anti-war activist. Though sometimes his writings are abstruse, written for the professional academic community, he also wrote for common readers, believing them capable of understanding his positions and arguments. In 1950 he was granted the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his varied and significant writings, in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”
Nobel Prize acceptance speeches run the gamut of topics, and Russell chose to speak on the central role that desire plays in human life. He said, “All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interest of duty and moral principle.” Russell did not disagree that duty plays a role, but his claim was that duty is only effective if there is a desire to follow the dictates of duty. Without that desire, duty has no hold on human beings.
“The human being, Russell claimed, “differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise.” So, what are these infinite desires, according to Russell?
The first one is acquisitiveness, the wish to possess as much as possible of goods or the title to goods. Russell sees this desire originating in fear---the fear that there will not be enough. That makes perfect sense when we consider our ancestors and their struggle for survival, but in a capitalistic system, the struggle for more and more is yet very pronounced, way beyond the satisfaction of basic needs. And it is even most pronounced Russell points out, in the very rich and powerful.
The second desire, which, he claims, is even more powerful than acquisitiveness is rivalry. He told a story about the Kaiser of Germany being shown the Royal Navy, and though the English thought this would impress the Kaiser that the English were not to be toyed with, the Kaiser decided he must build a navy even more grand than the Royal one! As a species, we would be far better off, Russell thought, if acquisitiveness were more powerful than rivalry, but alas, it is not. A great many people and nations will choose to ruin themselves if they can also ruin their competitors. Consider war and its ugly consequences.
From rivalry we move to vanity. “Look at me” is one of the fundamental motivators in human life. We see it in children, when quite literally they beg to be looked at, but it hardly stops at childhood. Russell believed that we even project this vanity onto God, when we proclaim that God desires our adulation and praise. I am reminded of one of my friends, who years ago told me that when she was seven years old and learning the Baltimore Catechism, she objected to the idea that God wants our praise. Well, she concluded, God must be very conceited! For that impertinence she had to stay after school for three days. She said she never did understand why she was punished, since she was confident that she was correct in her view of God, who seemed to her very vain, indeed.
Finally, Russell moves to the love of power, which he understands to be the most destructive of human desires. “Power, like vanity, is insatiable,” he said in his address. “Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.” Russell went on to say that “the love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power.” This explains why we do not necessarily notice this drive in people as they begin their terms of service, but as they exercise their power, they can become more and more infatuated with it.
Again, we need to be reminded that Russell did not mean that people NEVER put limits on their love of power. It is obvious they do, but Russell would remind us again and again this is because they have a desire to limit themselves and without that desire, no appeal to fairness or goodness will be effective.
We should all remember the story of our first President, George Washington, who could have been named King of the new nation, if he had so desired. But Washington said, “I did not fight George the Third of England to become George the First of the United States.” And when after two terms as President, King George the Third heard that George Washington was surrendering his power, he said. “He is the greatest man in all of human history.”
Christian ethics have often been termed “the great reversal,” because so much of normal human behavior and desire are completely turned upside down. Jesus said, “The one who would be great in God’s kingdom must be servant of all.” And even the most cursory glance at Jesus’ life shows us someone who renounced power in the service of love. That he died a horrible and humiliating death as a criminal only corroborates that the love of power as it is normally understood is not what he desired.
We would all do well to ponder desire and what it is we truly do desire and why. The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, would remind us that so much of what we do is habitual, and so, it is important to cultivate good habits---including the habit of desiring what is life giving and affirming.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
August 15, 2021
Dear Friends,
I don’t know if any of you is familiar with the book, The Little Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The book was published in 1943 during the Second World War, and indeed, Saint-Exupery was a pilot during the war, though his love of aviation began long before the war. He died in 1944 in a crash, most likely resulting from enemy fire.
Saint-Exupery wrote a number of books, but his most beloved is The Little Prince. Though usually considered a children’s book, there is much wisdom in it worthy of adult attention. Early in the book, the main character, who is simply called, The Little Prince, complains that adults do not know how to ask good and important questions. They concentrate too much on numbers, he claims. When you make a new friend, for example, and you tell your parents or other adults that you have this wonderful new friend, they ask questions like, “How old is he? How many brothers and sisters does he have? How much does he weigh? What do his parents do for a living, which is really a question about how much money they make. They fail to ask the really important questions like, What does his voice sound like? What does he like to do? Does he like butterflies? What games does he like to play?
I immediately thought of this book when the other day I came across a short article about what kinds of questions are worth asking, when you meet people, let’s say at a party or perhaps some other kind of gathering. Avoid questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and “Where do you live?” The Little Prince would certainly agree that such questions are BORING, and do not really spark interesting conversation. And so here is the list of five questions that should stimulate conversation.
1. What’s your story? That is an open ended questions that invites the person to consider what he or she might like to share. The person might ask you what you mean by this. What kind of story are you looking for, and then you can give it right back. Well, what would you like to tell me about your life?
2. What makes you smile when you get up in the morning? We can all think about many things that make us upset or sad or anxious. All you have to do is turn on the news, and in less than five minutes, you can find your blood pressure rising. So, instead of concentrating on the negative, ask someone what makes he or she smile upon rising in the morning.
3. What is the one book that has influenced you the most? This is a very direct question that should encourage some thought, and the conversation that ensues could be very engaging. If you have read the book yourself, you might have some follow up questions, but if not, asking the person how and why the book had such a profound influence could spark conversation.
4. What absolutely excites you now? This is a question that really gets at someone’s passion. What does he or she really care about? People do all kinds of jobs to make a living, but making a living is not necessarily the same thing that making a life.
5. What is the most important thing I should know about you? I find this a great question, because I could imagine answering it differently, depending upon the circumstances. If I were at a political meeting, my answer might differ from one, I might give at a theology seminar or certainly a job interview. And if at a party, where I have no idea what interests are drawing people together, I might come up with something completely different from the other contexts.
At any rate, I wonder what the Little Prince would think about these questions. I have a hunch he would approve. Read the book; it’s a bit over 50 pages with illustrations. You won’t regret reading it, and it will help you appreciate even more the five questions above.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I don’t know if any of you is familiar with the book, The Little Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The book was published in 1943 during the Second World War, and indeed, Saint-Exupery was a pilot during the war, though his love of aviation began long before the war. He died in 1944 in a crash, most likely resulting from enemy fire.
Saint-Exupery wrote a number of books, but his most beloved is The Little Prince. Though usually considered a children’s book, there is much wisdom in it worthy of adult attention. Early in the book, the main character, who is simply called, The Little Prince, complains that adults do not know how to ask good and important questions. They concentrate too much on numbers, he claims. When you make a new friend, for example, and you tell your parents or other adults that you have this wonderful new friend, they ask questions like, “How old is he? How many brothers and sisters does he have? How much does he weigh? What do his parents do for a living, which is really a question about how much money they make. They fail to ask the really important questions like, What does his voice sound like? What does he like to do? Does he like butterflies? What games does he like to play?
I immediately thought of this book when the other day I came across a short article about what kinds of questions are worth asking, when you meet people, let’s say at a party or perhaps some other kind of gathering. Avoid questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and “Where do you live?” The Little Prince would certainly agree that such questions are BORING, and do not really spark interesting conversation. And so here is the list of five questions that should stimulate conversation.
1. What’s your story? That is an open ended questions that invites the person to consider what he or she might like to share. The person might ask you what you mean by this. What kind of story are you looking for, and then you can give it right back. Well, what would you like to tell me about your life?
2. What makes you smile when you get up in the morning? We can all think about many things that make us upset or sad or anxious. All you have to do is turn on the news, and in less than five minutes, you can find your blood pressure rising. So, instead of concentrating on the negative, ask someone what makes he or she smile upon rising in the morning.
3. What is the one book that has influenced you the most? This is a very direct question that should encourage some thought, and the conversation that ensues could be very engaging. If you have read the book yourself, you might have some follow up questions, but if not, asking the person how and why the book had such a profound influence could spark conversation.
4. What absolutely excites you now? This is a question that really gets at someone’s passion. What does he or she really care about? People do all kinds of jobs to make a living, but making a living is not necessarily the same thing that making a life.
5. What is the most important thing I should know about you? I find this a great question, because I could imagine answering it differently, depending upon the circumstances. If I were at a political meeting, my answer might differ from one, I might give at a theology seminar or certainly a job interview. And if at a party, where I have no idea what interests are drawing people together, I might come up with something completely different from the other contexts.
At any rate, I wonder what the Little Prince would think about these questions. I have a hunch he would approve. Read the book; it’s a bit over 50 pages with illustrations. You won’t regret reading it, and it will help you appreciate even more the five questions above.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
BETRAYED & BROKEN HEARTS By Sandra L. Olsen 8/1/2021
2 Samuel 18: 5-9’ 15. 31-33
Ephesians 4: 25-5:2
When I was a child in Sunday school, we spent considerable time learning the stories of David. As children we were impressed with this shepherd boy, who slew with his slingshot the giant Goliath. We also learned about
David’s extraordinary friendship with Jonathan, Saul’s son. Saul, you might recall, became jealous of David’s success as a warrior, and so Saul conspired to kill David, but Jonathan intervened to save David’s life. We also knew the story of Bathsheba and David, but the concentration in Sunday school was not on the sex scandal, but rather on David’s manipulation of the circumstances that led to Uriah’s death. And so, even to children, it is obvious that David was far from a perfect man or perfect king, and yet early on in the David narratives we hear from Samuel, who had anointed him king, that God had sought David out as “one who was after God’s own heart.”
But being after God’s own heart does not guarantee that one’s life will go smoothly. David’s surely did not. David had many wives and concubines, which resulted in numerous children. When one of David’s sons, Amnon, raped his half sister, Tamar, David, who greatly loved Amnon, said and did nothing. And then when another son, Absalom, in revenge for the rape of his sister, killed Amnon, his half brother, the heart broken David managed to banish Absalom from his kingdom for only a short while, until Joab, one of David’s commanders, helped to bring Absalom back to Jerusalem where he was reconciled with his father. But the reconciliation was short lived, because in no time at all, Absalom would seek to usurp the throne from his father. And since love often is blind, David did not see Absalom’s evil intention. And so, we arrive at our lesson from Samuel for today.
We learn that Absalom has raised an army against his father, and yet the father cannot help but love his son. This is the human condition. Remember Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? He too was loved by his father. And so, we should not be surprised that David told his commanders, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, Absalom.” But the king’s words were ignored. Convinced that Absalom would continue to cause disruptions in the kingdom, Joab first struck Absalom with three spears, and then ten men surrounded him and finished him off.
The text tells us that 20,000 men died in the battle, but David showed no concern for the number of casualties. He had only one question in his mind and heart: Is it well with the young man, Absalom? He asked it first of Ahimaaz, who was an Israelite soldier, and when David received no definite answer, he asked the same question of a nameless Cushite—an outsider, someone from another tribe. It seems that no Israelite wanted to tell the king that his son was dead, and so the task fell to the Cushite, who could have been the recipient of David’s rage.
But it is not rage we get. It is heart broken grief: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” Every parent can feel David’s agony, because it is the fear that every parent must live with---that their child might pre-decease them. It matters not if the child is 4 or 40. That modern medicine has helped to make this a relatively uncommon experience for most of us, does not mean that the fear has been removed.
The loss of a son or daughter is a theme literature has readily embraced throughout the centuries, precisely because it is a story, which goes to the very depths of human life. Consider Shakespeare’s King Lear, who lost his daughter, Cordelia, or Homer’s The Iliad, when King Priam of Troy, lost his son, the valiant warrior, Hector, to the mighty Greek fighter, Achilles. Priam then went to Achilles in the dead of night to ask for the body of his dead son. You would have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved by these stories of terrible heartbreak.
But David had double heartbreak. Not only was his son killed, but also his son betrayed him. And so, we have here two of the most poignant themes in human life: broken hearts and betrayed hearts. Bad enough that the son is dead, but the agony is compounded by the painful truth that the son betrayed his father. And yet what else can a father do but love his son: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!”
The David stories grab our attention, because they show us what we as human beings are like. We love, and yet we betray. And are betrayed. And we can also continue to love those who have betrayed us. So yes, these stories show us who we are, but they also show us who God is. It means something that David is described as “one after God’s own heart”. It means that David helps us to see what is in God’s heart. In David’s anguished cry over his dead son, we also hear God’s anguished cry over his dead son, a son murdered and betrayed by God’s own people, people whom God yet continues to love, even when they are the betrayers.
The suffering of David mirrors in some mysterious way the suffering of God. Though David was a mighty warrior and united the northern and southern kingdoms into a regional power with which other nations had to reckon, it is not his success as a warrior that offers us the deepest insight into God. We often call God mighty and powerful, but God’s might and power are not fully grasped in God’s absolute control, but rather in God’s absolute love, a love that remains love even when it betrayed and rejected. Human beings can and do destroy human love. But God’s love for us does not disappear. There is nothing we can do to destroy God’s love for us. No matter what we do, no matter who we are, God loves us. And that is the reason God suffers.
Some years ago, I audited a course at Yale Divinity School, taught by Marilyn Adams and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It was a philosophical theology course on the question of God’s suffering. Does God really suffer? Many theologians throughout Christian history, including Thomas Aquinas, have taught that God does not suffer and cannot suffer, because God is completely self-sufficient and lacks nothing.
Suffering implies incompletion, a lack, a longing for what is not yet. Now Wolterstorff lost a son in a mountain climbing accident some years ago, and in response to his horrific loss, he wrote a book, Lament for a Son in which he wrote:
God is love. That is why God suffers. To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that God gave up God’s only son to suffering. The one who does not see God suffering does not see God’s love. God is suffering love. So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.
David’s plaintive cry over his dead son pierces our ears and jolts us into remembering another one of David’s descendants----Jesus, who was nothing like Absalom. You see, Absalom was beautiful with a stunning thick mane of hair that was the envy of everyone. People could not help but be attracted to this beautiful and charismatic man. And Jesus? Using the book of Isaiah to help us interpret Jesus Christ, we are reminded that “he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.” No, Jesus was not like Absalom, and yet his God whom Jesus called Father, would also grieve over the son, who was surely after God’s own heart.
2 Samuel 18: 5-9’ 15. 31-33
Ephesians 4: 25-5:2
When I was a child in Sunday school, we spent considerable time learning the stories of David. As children we were impressed with this shepherd boy, who slew with his slingshot the giant Goliath. We also learned about
David’s extraordinary friendship with Jonathan, Saul’s son. Saul, you might recall, became jealous of David’s success as a warrior, and so Saul conspired to kill David, but Jonathan intervened to save David’s life. We also knew the story of Bathsheba and David, but the concentration in Sunday school was not on the sex scandal, but rather on David’s manipulation of the circumstances that led to Uriah’s death. And so, even to children, it is obvious that David was far from a perfect man or perfect king, and yet early on in the David narratives we hear from Samuel, who had anointed him king, that God had sought David out as “one who was after God’s own heart.”
But being after God’s own heart does not guarantee that one’s life will go smoothly. David’s surely did not. David had many wives and concubines, which resulted in numerous children. When one of David’s sons, Amnon, raped his half sister, Tamar, David, who greatly loved Amnon, said and did nothing. And then when another son, Absalom, in revenge for the rape of his sister, killed Amnon, his half brother, the heart broken David managed to banish Absalom from his kingdom for only a short while, until Joab, one of David’s commanders, helped to bring Absalom back to Jerusalem where he was reconciled with his father. But the reconciliation was short lived, because in no time at all, Absalom would seek to usurp the throne from his father. And since love often is blind, David did not see Absalom’s evil intention. And so, we arrive at our lesson from Samuel for today.
We learn that Absalom has raised an army against his father, and yet the father cannot help but love his son. This is the human condition. Remember Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? He too was loved by his father. And so, we should not be surprised that David told his commanders, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, Absalom.” But the king’s words were ignored. Convinced that Absalom would continue to cause disruptions in the kingdom, Joab first struck Absalom with three spears, and then ten men surrounded him and finished him off.
The text tells us that 20,000 men died in the battle, but David showed no concern for the number of casualties. He had only one question in his mind and heart: Is it well with the young man, Absalom? He asked it first of Ahimaaz, who was an Israelite soldier, and when David received no definite answer, he asked the same question of a nameless Cushite—an outsider, someone from another tribe. It seems that no Israelite wanted to tell the king that his son was dead, and so the task fell to the Cushite, who could have been the recipient of David’s rage.
But it is not rage we get. It is heart broken grief: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” Every parent can feel David’s agony, because it is the fear that every parent must live with---that their child might pre-decease them. It matters not if the child is 4 or 40. That modern medicine has helped to make this a relatively uncommon experience for most of us, does not mean that the fear has been removed.
The loss of a son or daughter is a theme literature has readily embraced throughout the centuries, precisely because it is a story, which goes to the very depths of human life. Consider Shakespeare’s King Lear, who lost his daughter, Cordelia, or Homer’s The Iliad, when King Priam of Troy, lost his son, the valiant warrior, Hector, to the mighty Greek fighter, Achilles. Priam then went to Achilles in the dead of night to ask for the body of his dead son. You would have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved by these stories of terrible heartbreak.
But David had double heartbreak. Not only was his son killed, but also his son betrayed him. And so, we have here two of the most poignant themes in human life: broken hearts and betrayed hearts. Bad enough that the son is dead, but the agony is compounded by the painful truth that the son betrayed his father. And yet what else can a father do but love his son: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!”
The David stories grab our attention, because they show us what we as human beings are like. We love, and yet we betray. And are betrayed. And we can also continue to love those who have betrayed us. So yes, these stories show us who we are, but they also show us who God is. It means something that David is described as “one after God’s own heart”. It means that David helps us to see what is in God’s heart. In David’s anguished cry over his dead son, we also hear God’s anguished cry over his dead son, a son murdered and betrayed by God’s own people, people whom God yet continues to love, even when they are the betrayers.
The suffering of David mirrors in some mysterious way the suffering of God. Though David was a mighty warrior and united the northern and southern kingdoms into a regional power with which other nations had to reckon, it is not his success as a warrior that offers us the deepest insight into God. We often call God mighty and powerful, but God’s might and power are not fully grasped in God’s absolute control, but rather in God’s absolute love, a love that remains love even when it betrayed and rejected. Human beings can and do destroy human love. But God’s love for us does not disappear. There is nothing we can do to destroy God’s love for us. No matter what we do, no matter who we are, God loves us. And that is the reason God suffers.
Some years ago, I audited a course at Yale Divinity School, taught by Marilyn Adams and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It was a philosophical theology course on the question of God’s suffering. Does God really suffer? Many theologians throughout Christian history, including Thomas Aquinas, have taught that God does not suffer and cannot suffer, because God is completely self-sufficient and lacks nothing.
Suffering implies incompletion, a lack, a longing for what is not yet. Now Wolterstorff lost a son in a mountain climbing accident some years ago, and in response to his horrific loss, he wrote a book, Lament for a Son in which he wrote:
God is love. That is why God suffers. To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that God gave up God’s only son to suffering. The one who does not see God suffering does not see God’s love. God is suffering love. So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.
David’s plaintive cry over his dead son pierces our ears and jolts us into remembering another one of David’s descendants----Jesus, who was nothing like Absalom. You see, Absalom was beautiful with a stunning thick mane of hair that was the envy of everyone. People could not help but be attracted to this beautiful and charismatic man. And Jesus? Using the book of Isaiah to help us interpret Jesus Christ, we are reminded that “he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.” No, Jesus was not like Absalom, and yet his God whom Jesus called Father, would also grieve over the son, who was surely after God’s own heart.
BETRAYED & BROKEN HEARTS By Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/8/2021
2 Samuel 18: 5-9’ 15. 31-33
Ephesians 4: 25-5:2
When I was a child in Sunday school, we spent considerable time learning the stories of David. As children we were impressed with this shepherd boy, who slew with his slingshot the giant Goliath. We also learned about
David’s extraordinary friendship with Jonathan, Saul’s son. Saul, you might recall, became jealous of David’s success as a warrior, and so Saul conspired to kill David, but Jonathan intervened to save David’s life. We also knew the story of Bathsheba and David, but the concentration in Sunday school was not on the sex scandal, but rather on David’s manipulation of the circumstances that led to Uriah’s death. And so, even to children, it is obvious that David was far from a perfect man or perfect king, and yet early on in the David narratives we hear from Samuel, who had anointed him king, that God had sought David out as “one who was after God’s own heart.”
But being after God’s own heart does not guarantee that one’s life will go smoothly. David’s surely did not. David had many wives and concubines, which resulted in numerous children. When one of David’s sons, Amnon, raped his half sister, Tamar, David, who greatly loved Amnon, said and did nothing. And then when another son, Absalom, in revenge for the rape of his sister, killed Amnon, his half brother, the heart broken David managed to banish Absalom from his kingdom for only a short while, until Joab, one of David’s commanders, helped to bring Absalom back to Jerusalem where he was reconciled with his father. But the reconciliation was short lived, because in no time at all, Absalom would seek to usurp the throne from his father. And since love often is blind, David did not see Absalom’s evil intention. And so, we arrive at our lesson from Samuel for today.
We learn that Absalom has raised an army against his father, and yet the father cannot help but love his son. This is the human condition. Remember Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? He too was loved by his father. And so, we should not be surprised that David told his commanders, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, Absalom.” But the king’s words were ignored. Convinced that Absalom would continue to cause disruptions in the kingdom, Joab first struck Absalom with three spears, and then ten men surrounded him and finished him off.
The text tells us that 20,000 men died in the battle, but David showed no concern for the number of casualties. He had only one question in his mind and heart: Is it well with the young man, Absalom? He asked it first of Ahimaaz, who was an Israelite soldier, and when David received no definite answer, he asked the same question of a nameless Cushite—an outsider, someone from another tribe. It seems that no Israelite wanted to tell the king that his son was dead, and so the task fell to the Cushite, who could have been the recipient of David’s rage.
But it is not rage we get. It is heart broken grief: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” Every parent can feel David’s agony, because it is the fear that every parent must live with---that their child might pre-decease them. It matters not if the child is 4 or 40. That modern medicine has helped to make this a relatively uncommon experience for most of us, does not mean that the fear has been removed.
The loss of a son or daughter is a theme literature has readily embraced throughout the centuries, precisely because it is a story, which goes to the very depths of human life. Consider Shakespeare’s King Lear, who lost his daughter, Cordelia, or Homer’s The Iliad, when King Priam of Troy, lost his son, the valiant warrior, Hector, to the mighty Greek fighter, Achilles. Priam then went to Achilles in the dead of night to ask for the body of his dead son. You would have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved by these stories of terrible heartbreak.
But David had double heartbreak. Not only was his son killed, but also his son betrayed him. And so, we have here two of the most poignant themes in human life: broken hearts and betrayed hearts. Bad enough that the son is dead, but the agony is compounded by the painful truth that the son betrayed his father. And yet what else can a father do but love his son: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!”
The David stories grab our attention, because they show us what we as human beings are like. We love, and yet we betray. And are betrayed. And we can also continue to love those who have betrayed us. So yes, these stories show us who we are, but they also show us who God is. It means something that David is described as “one after God’s own heart”. It means that David helps us to see what is in God’s heart. In David’s anguished cry over his dead son, we also hear God’s anguished cry over his dead son, a son murdered and betrayed by God’s own people, people whom God yet continues to love, even when they are the betrayers.
The suffering of David mirrors in some mysterious way the suffering of God. Though David was a mighty warrior and united the northern and southern kingdoms into a regional power with which other nations had to reckon, it is not his success as a warrior that offers us the deepest insight into God. We often call God mighty and powerful, but God’s might and power are not fully grasped in God’s absolute control, but rather in God’s absolute love, a love that remains love even when it betrayed and rejected. Human beings can and do destroy human love. But God’s love for us does not disappear. There is nothing we can do to destroy God’s love for us. No matter what we do, no matter who we are, God loves us. And that is the reason God suffers.
Some years ago, I audited a course at Yale Divinity School, taught by Marilyn Adams and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It was a philosophical theology course on the question of God’s suffering. Does God really suffer? Many theologians throughout Christian history, including Thomas Aquinas, have taught that God does not suffer and cannot suffer, because God is completely self-sufficient and lacks nothing.
Suffering implies incompletion, a lack, a longing for what is not yet. Now Wolterstorff lost a son in a mountain climbing accident some years ago, and in response to his horrific loss, he wrote a book, Lament for a Son in which he wrote:
God is love. That is why God suffers. To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that God gave up God’s only son to suffering. The one who does not see God suffering does not see God’s love. God is suffering love. So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.
David’s plaintive cry over his dead son pierces our ears and jolts us into remembering another one of David’s descendants----Jesus, who was nothing like Absalom. You see, Absalom was beautiful with a stunning thick mane of hair that was the envy of everyone. People could not help but be attracted to this beautiful and charismatic man. And Jesus? Using the book of Isaiah to help us interpret Jesus Christ, we are reminded that “he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.” No, Jesus was not like Absalom, and yet his God whom Jesus called Father, would also grieve over the son, who was surely after God’s own heart.
2 Samuel 18: 5-9’ 15. 31-33
Ephesians 4: 25-5:2
When I was a child in Sunday school, we spent considerable time learning the stories of David. As children we were impressed with this shepherd boy, who slew with his slingshot the giant Goliath. We also learned about
David’s extraordinary friendship with Jonathan, Saul’s son. Saul, you might recall, became jealous of David’s success as a warrior, and so Saul conspired to kill David, but Jonathan intervened to save David’s life. We also knew the story of Bathsheba and David, but the concentration in Sunday school was not on the sex scandal, but rather on David’s manipulation of the circumstances that led to Uriah’s death. And so, even to children, it is obvious that David was far from a perfect man or perfect king, and yet early on in the David narratives we hear from Samuel, who had anointed him king, that God had sought David out as “one who was after God’s own heart.”
But being after God’s own heart does not guarantee that one’s life will go smoothly. David’s surely did not. David had many wives and concubines, which resulted in numerous children. When one of David’s sons, Amnon, raped his half sister, Tamar, David, who greatly loved Amnon, said and did nothing. And then when another son, Absalom, in revenge for the rape of his sister, killed Amnon, his half brother, the heart broken David managed to banish Absalom from his kingdom for only a short while, until Joab, one of David’s commanders, helped to bring Absalom back to Jerusalem where he was reconciled with his father. But the reconciliation was short lived, because in no time at all, Absalom would seek to usurp the throne from his father. And since love often is blind, David did not see Absalom’s evil intention. And so, we arrive at our lesson from Samuel for today.
We learn that Absalom has raised an army against his father, and yet the father cannot help but love his son. This is the human condition. Remember Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? He too was loved by his father. And so, we should not be surprised that David told his commanders, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, Absalom.” But the king’s words were ignored. Convinced that Absalom would continue to cause disruptions in the kingdom, Joab first struck Absalom with three spears, and then ten men surrounded him and finished him off.
The text tells us that 20,000 men died in the battle, but David showed no concern for the number of casualties. He had only one question in his mind and heart: Is it well with the young man, Absalom? He asked it first of Ahimaaz, who was an Israelite soldier, and when David received no definite answer, he asked the same question of a nameless Cushite—an outsider, someone from another tribe. It seems that no Israelite wanted to tell the king that his son was dead, and so the task fell to the Cushite, who could have been the recipient of David’s rage.
But it is not rage we get. It is heart broken grief: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” Every parent can feel David’s agony, because it is the fear that every parent must live with---that their child might pre-decease them. It matters not if the child is 4 or 40. That modern medicine has helped to make this a relatively uncommon experience for most of us, does not mean that the fear has been removed.
The loss of a son or daughter is a theme literature has readily embraced throughout the centuries, precisely because it is a story, which goes to the very depths of human life. Consider Shakespeare’s King Lear, who lost his daughter, Cordelia, or Homer’s The Iliad, when King Priam of Troy, lost his son, the valiant warrior, Hector, to the mighty Greek fighter, Achilles. Priam then went to Achilles in the dead of night to ask for the body of his dead son. You would have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved by these stories of terrible heartbreak.
But David had double heartbreak. Not only was his son killed, but also his son betrayed him. And so, we have here two of the most poignant themes in human life: broken hearts and betrayed hearts. Bad enough that the son is dead, but the agony is compounded by the painful truth that the son betrayed his father. And yet what else can a father do but love his son: O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom. Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!”
The David stories grab our attention, because they show us what we as human beings are like. We love, and yet we betray. And are betrayed. And we can also continue to love those who have betrayed us. So yes, these stories show us who we are, but they also show us who God is. It means something that David is described as “one after God’s own heart”. It means that David helps us to see what is in God’s heart. In David’s anguished cry over his dead son, we also hear God’s anguished cry over his dead son, a son murdered and betrayed by God’s own people, people whom God yet continues to love, even when they are the betrayers.
The suffering of David mirrors in some mysterious way the suffering of God. Though David was a mighty warrior and united the northern and southern kingdoms into a regional power with which other nations had to reckon, it is not his success as a warrior that offers us the deepest insight into God. We often call God mighty and powerful, but God’s might and power are not fully grasped in God’s absolute control, but rather in God’s absolute love, a love that remains love even when it betrayed and rejected. Human beings can and do destroy human love. But God’s love for us does not disappear. There is nothing we can do to destroy God’s love for us. No matter what we do, no matter who we are, God loves us. And that is the reason God suffers.
Some years ago, I audited a course at Yale Divinity School, taught by Marilyn Adams and Nicholas Wolterstorff. It was a philosophical theology course on the question of God’s suffering. Does God really suffer? Many theologians throughout Christian history, including Thomas Aquinas, have taught that God does not suffer and cannot suffer, because God is completely self-sufficient and lacks nothing.
Suffering implies incompletion, a lack, a longing for what is not yet. Now Wolterstorff lost a son in a mountain climbing accident some years ago, and in response to his horrific loss, he wrote a book, Lament for a Son in which he wrote:
God is love. That is why God suffers. To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that God gave up God’s only son to suffering. The one who does not see God suffering does not see God’s love. God is suffering love. So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.
David’s plaintive cry over his dead son pierces our ears and jolts us into remembering another one of David’s descendants----Jesus, who was nothing like Absalom. You see, Absalom was beautiful with a stunning thick mane of hair that was the envy of everyone. People could not help but be attracted to this beautiful and charismatic man. And Jesus? Using the book of Isaiah to help us interpret Jesus Christ, we are reminded that “he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.” No, Jesus was not like Absalom, and yet his God whom Jesus called Father, would also grieve over the son, who was surely after God’s own heart.
August 5, 2021
Dear Friends,
We hear a great deal these days about critical race theory and the structural racism that has been a major part of our nation’s history. There is no denying the fact that black persons were brought here as slaves, and even after the Civil War, which was supposed to guarantee their freedom, racist laws prevented them from the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It was not until 1954 that the United States Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional. And still deep, structural problems persisted in education and voting rights---and still do. When I consider my own youth in various suburbs, it embarrasses me to admit that from kindergarten through high school, I did not have one person of color in any of my schools or neighborhoods!
So, it was with surprise and delight that I recently came across a review about a book, A Stronger Kingship, by historian Anna-Lisa Cox. The book tells the story of a small town, Covert, in Michigan, where black and white people lived together as neighbors, farming together, and doing what needed to be done to make their little community a decent place to live. According to Ms. Cox, black and white men (not women) voted together, and black men actually ran for office and won! But to me the most shocking thing was what happened in the schools.
In Michigan in the year 1866 it was illegal to educate black and white children together, so when black settlers, after the Civil War, began showing up in Covert and buying land with a schoolhouse on it, the town had to make a decision. And the town decided to educate the children together.
The town was required each year to submit a report to the state capital, listing all the students they were teaching, and though race was supposed to be included, Covert’s School Board simply omitted it. The town had a secret, and this secret would protect ALL their students.
According to this book, black and white people lived side by side, socializing and worshipping together. There were even a handful of intermarriages, something almost unheard of in the 19th, let alone the 20th century, before 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned miscegenation laws, which had outlawed marriage between white and black persons. The town, by the way, was not founded by abolitionists, and it was not intended to be a utopia, and yet it rejected all the Jim Crow laws, the lynchings and court sanctioned segregation that became the nation’s common history.
How was this possible and why was it that Covert, Michigan happened? Ms. Cox apparently does not answer the question directly, but writes, “Our puzzlement over Covert reveals a hidden assumption that racism is the norm, that unfairness and injustice are the natural partners that the nation falls into if given half a chance.” That is an understandable conclusion “given the horrific and sorrow filled history of race relations in this country.” But Covert reminds us “that the terrible history was a choice, not a given.” Ponder those words: a choice, not a given. And if a choice, that means we can make changes.
I am no historian, and I have not read the book, but the story intrigues me. I have no idea whether or not religion or faith played any role in how this town chose to live its life, but that is certainly an interesting question to pursue. Yes, Covert citizens made a choice, but what was it that helped them to make the right choice, the choice for goodness and fairness and justice? That is the question I am most interested in seeing answered. Perhaps I will simply have to read the book.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
We hear a great deal these days about critical race theory and the structural racism that has been a major part of our nation’s history. There is no denying the fact that black persons were brought here as slaves, and even after the Civil War, which was supposed to guarantee their freedom, racist laws prevented them from the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It was not until 1954 that the United States Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional. And still deep, structural problems persisted in education and voting rights---and still do. When I consider my own youth in various suburbs, it embarrasses me to admit that from kindergarten through high school, I did not have one person of color in any of my schools or neighborhoods!
So, it was with surprise and delight that I recently came across a review about a book, A Stronger Kingship, by historian Anna-Lisa Cox. The book tells the story of a small town, Covert, in Michigan, where black and white people lived together as neighbors, farming together, and doing what needed to be done to make their little community a decent place to live. According to Ms. Cox, black and white men (not women) voted together, and black men actually ran for office and won! But to me the most shocking thing was what happened in the schools.
In Michigan in the year 1866 it was illegal to educate black and white children together, so when black settlers, after the Civil War, began showing up in Covert and buying land with a schoolhouse on it, the town had to make a decision. And the town decided to educate the children together.
The town was required each year to submit a report to the state capital, listing all the students they were teaching, and though race was supposed to be included, Covert’s School Board simply omitted it. The town had a secret, and this secret would protect ALL their students.
According to this book, black and white people lived side by side, socializing and worshipping together. There were even a handful of intermarriages, something almost unheard of in the 19th, let alone the 20th century, before 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned miscegenation laws, which had outlawed marriage between white and black persons. The town, by the way, was not founded by abolitionists, and it was not intended to be a utopia, and yet it rejected all the Jim Crow laws, the lynchings and court sanctioned segregation that became the nation’s common history.
How was this possible and why was it that Covert, Michigan happened? Ms. Cox apparently does not answer the question directly, but writes, “Our puzzlement over Covert reveals a hidden assumption that racism is the norm, that unfairness and injustice are the natural partners that the nation falls into if given half a chance.” That is an understandable conclusion “given the horrific and sorrow filled history of race relations in this country.” But Covert reminds us “that the terrible history was a choice, not a given.” Ponder those words: a choice, not a given. And if a choice, that means we can make changes.
I am no historian, and I have not read the book, but the story intrigues me. I have no idea whether or not religion or faith played any role in how this town chose to live its life, but that is certainly an interesting question to pursue. Yes, Covert citizens made a choice, but what was it that helped them to make the right choice, the choice for goodness and fairness and justice? That is the question I am most interested in seeing answered. Perhaps I will simply have to read the book.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
No One is Good But God by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/1/2021
Mark 10: 17-22
2 Samuel 11: 1-17
Consider how this story of David’s lust begins: In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him. So, kings go out to battle in the springtime, but this is not what David did. He remained home, in his palace, where he rose from his couch one late afternoon and walked about. We can almost imagine his boredom. No longer in the flush of youth, David is most likely middle aged. The lust for battle has perhaps passed; he will leave that to his younger officers. But his lust for beautiful flesh has not diminished, and so when spies Bathsheba, bathing, he decides he must have her. Now our text says he sent messengers to get her, which really is an abduction. How could she possibly refuse to go with them
The incomparable Dutch artist, Rembrandt, paints the scene with a different twist. He imagines Bathsheba reading a letter, commanding her to come to the king. And he paints on her face a look of pensive sadness as she ponders her fate. What else can she do but go? There is no choice at all. It is rape, though I suppose some would try to argue that Bathsheba had some limited agency in this sordid affair. What would David have done, if she had refused to come to his chamber? We do not fully know, though we have our deep suspicions that powerful men like David do not react well when their power is thwarted. The Hebrew uses some rather violent language, saying that David took her, though most English translations read euphemistically he lay with her. And, of course, things become messy, when she becomes pregnant, and David tries to hide the fact of his ignominy by trying to entice Uriah, her husband, to return home and sleep with his wife, which he refuses to do. Uriah is a warrior, a man of honor, and he will not desert his men and do something he considers to be shameful. So, David conspires to have him killed by telling Joab to make sure the men withdraw at the right time, leaving Uriah vulnerable and finally dead.
So, there we have it, a story which is far older than David, yet a story we are all too familiar with today. We hear it time and time again----powerful men abusing their power to sexually have their way with women. Sometimes women claim rape, and at other times they claim their consent came from fear of what would happen if they refused---not unlike Bathsheba. The repetitive details would be almost boring, if we did not know they involve real people with real sufferings. The list of names is long, but hardly exhaustive, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy and Donald Trump whose behaviors with women certainly crossed lines---perhaps even criminal lines. I recall a few years back, listening to a grandmother, being interviewed about her affair with President Kennedy. She had been a young intern in the White House, and she claimed the President seduced her. She never said a word until she was named in a book, and then she came forward, talking about a bath with the President playing with toy boats in the bathtub during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she reported him saying, “I would prefer my children to be Red rather than dead! I was at the Y at the time, watching the television along with the two other women around my age, and we were all were shocked she would make such things public. I mean she was a grandmother, for goodness sakes! What would her grandchildren think? We all agreed: we would keep our mouths shut!
Of course, historically that is what women have done. They have kept quiet, because they saw no advantage in talking. When there is a disequilibrium of power, as there is between a President and in intern or a king and the wife of one of the king’s soldiers, it is all too easy to dismiss the voice of the less powerful one. We have no idea what Bathsheba said other than the text telling us that she told David she was pregnant. She remains voiceless, and that is a major problem. Her side of the story is never told. We see it solely from David’s angle, from the position of a man of power, considered to be a great man.
And despite his major moral failure, greatness did shine. He accomplished great things in battle as well as in politics. He held together both the northern and the southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah, hardly an easy thing to do with diversity threatening to unravel the alliances he also made with other countries. Did these successes justify his treatment of Bathsheba? Of course not, but perhaps we would be wise to consider a truth we often deny: character is rarely consistent. Oh, we expect it to be, and we look for it, and should we discover that the strong and great really do evidence flaws and weaknesses, we are shocked, as many of us were about Martin Luther King’s infidelities. But should we really be so surprised? People are strong and weak in different places and being broken in one place does not mean broken in all places. Now it is true that if there are too many broken places, the character structure is in danger of breaking down, but most human beings are a mixture of both strength and weakness. And the same is true of the so called great men and women. That is simply the way it is. Remember, even Jesus wanted to know why people were calling him good. “No one is good except God,” he insisted.
We would do well to pay greater heed to the Christian doctrine of the human being---the idea that sin lurks in all of us. We are all fallen creatures, which is why Christianity points out that the greatest of saints are also the greatest of sinners, meaning that bold people often are guilty of bold sin. Consider the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who spent his early years in the monastery confessing trivial sins---until the Reformation helped him realize that he might be guilty of spiritual pride---believing that he alone understood God’s Word. The most bedeviling question put to him by the Roman authorities, the one that disquieted his soul was: “Why is it, Martin, that you think you are right, that you alone understand, when for more than one thousand years the church has been teaching what you now reject?” Luther had no answer to that question. Was it God’s truth that was grasping his heart and mind, or was it spiritual pride? He could never be sure, and I suspect it was probably a mixture of both----but without the sin of spiritual pride, would not have been able to do what he did---defy the Roman Church and offer a new way of understanding faith?
Luther was far from perfect; he was partly responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of peasants in the Peasant uprising against the aristocracy. And in later life he penned such filth against the Jews that we can only cringe in horror even as we condemn his words. But do those sins undo his achievements and overturn the brilliance of his insights? If they do, the fault lies with us, not with Luther. It is not perfection we should expect from human beings. It is not even an unblemished goodness, for as Jesus insists, “Only God is good.”
When Larry King interviewed Bill Clinton after he was no longer President, he asked him why he did what he did with Monica Lewinsky. Why would you risk your Presidency? And I give Clinton credit for answering honestly, “For the worst of all reasons,” he said, “because I could.” And King David, like so many others, wrote the same script. They did what they did because they could---and they continue to do it today, because they still think they can get away with it. Without a doubt, such behavior was and is immoral, but again, consider David. He is still in the pages of biblical history, remembered as Israel’s greatest king, the one who ruled over a United Kingdom, the one from whose line Jesus would come. We look at David and so many others, clearly seeing that character is inconsistent. That is the way it is, the way human beings are, which is why, with no ambiguity intended, Jesus told us: “No one is good but God.”
Mark 10: 17-22
2 Samuel 11: 1-17
Consider how this story of David’s lust begins: In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him. So, kings go out to battle in the springtime, but this is not what David did. He remained home, in his palace, where he rose from his couch one late afternoon and walked about. We can almost imagine his boredom. No longer in the flush of youth, David is most likely middle aged. The lust for battle has perhaps passed; he will leave that to his younger officers. But his lust for beautiful flesh has not diminished, and so when spies Bathsheba, bathing, he decides he must have her. Now our text says he sent messengers to get her, which really is an abduction. How could she possibly refuse to go with them
The incomparable Dutch artist, Rembrandt, paints the scene with a different twist. He imagines Bathsheba reading a letter, commanding her to come to the king. And he paints on her face a look of pensive sadness as she ponders her fate. What else can she do but go? There is no choice at all. It is rape, though I suppose some would try to argue that Bathsheba had some limited agency in this sordid affair. What would David have done, if she had refused to come to his chamber? We do not fully know, though we have our deep suspicions that powerful men like David do not react well when their power is thwarted. The Hebrew uses some rather violent language, saying that David took her, though most English translations read euphemistically he lay with her. And, of course, things become messy, when she becomes pregnant, and David tries to hide the fact of his ignominy by trying to entice Uriah, her husband, to return home and sleep with his wife, which he refuses to do. Uriah is a warrior, a man of honor, and he will not desert his men and do something he considers to be shameful. So, David conspires to have him killed by telling Joab to make sure the men withdraw at the right time, leaving Uriah vulnerable and finally dead.
So, there we have it, a story which is far older than David, yet a story we are all too familiar with today. We hear it time and time again----powerful men abusing their power to sexually have their way with women. Sometimes women claim rape, and at other times they claim their consent came from fear of what would happen if they refused---not unlike Bathsheba. The repetitive details would be almost boring, if we did not know they involve real people with real sufferings. The list of names is long, but hardly exhaustive, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy and Donald Trump whose behaviors with women certainly crossed lines---perhaps even criminal lines. I recall a few years back, listening to a grandmother, being interviewed about her affair with President Kennedy. She had been a young intern in the White House, and she claimed the President seduced her. She never said a word until she was named in a book, and then she came forward, talking about a bath with the President playing with toy boats in the bathtub during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she reported him saying, “I would prefer my children to be Red rather than dead! I was at the Y at the time, watching the television along with the two other women around my age, and we were all were shocked she would make such things public. I mean she was a grandmother, for goodness sakes! What would her grandchildren think? We all agreed: we would keep our mouths shut!
Of course, historically that is what women have done. They have kept quiet, because they saw no advantage in talking. When there is a disequilibrium of power, as there is between a President and in intern or a king and the wife of one of the king’s soldiers, it is all too easy to dismiss the voice of the less powerful one. We have no idea what Bathsheba said other than the text telling us that she told David she was pregnant. She remains voiceless, and that is a major problem. Her side of the story is never told. We see it solely from David’s angle, from the position of a man of power, considered to be a great man.
And despite his major moral failure, greatness did shine. He accomplished great things in battle as well as in politics. He held together both the northern and the southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah, hardly an easy thing to do with diversity threatening to unravel the alliances he also made with other countries. Did these successes justify his treatment of Bathsheba? Of course not, but perhaps we would be wise to consider a truth we often deny: character is rarely consistent. Oh, we expect it to be, and we look for it, and should we discover that the strong and great really do evidence flaws and weaknesses, we are shocked, as many of us were about Martin Luther King’s infidelities. But should we really be so surprised? People are strong and weak in different places and being broken in one place does not mean broken in all places. Now it is true that if there are too many broken places, the character structure is in danger of breaking down, but most human beings are a mixture of both strength and weakness. And the same is true of the so called great men and women. That is simply the way it is. Remember, even Jesus wanted to know why people were calling him good. “No one is good except God,” he insisted.
We would do well to pay greater heed to the Christian doctrine of the human being---the idea that sin lurks in all of us. We are all fallen creatures, which is why Christianity points out that the greatest of saints are also the greatest of sinners, meaning that bold people often are guilty of bold sin. Consider the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who spent his early years in the monastery confessing trivial sins---until the Reformation helped him realize that he might be guilty of spiritual pride---believing that he alone understood God’s Word. The most bedeviling question put to him by the Roman authorities, the one that disquieted his soul was: “Why is it, Martin, that you think you are right, that you alone understand, when for more than one thousand years the church has been teaching what you now reject?” Luther had no answer to that question. Was it God’s truth that was grasping his heart and mind, or was it spiritual pride? He could never be sure, and I suspect it was probably a mixture of both----but without the sin of spiritual pride, would not have been able to do what he did---defy the Roman Church and offer a new way of understanding faith?
Luther was far from perfect; he was partly responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of peasants in the Peasant uprising against the aristocracy. And in later life he penned such filth against the Jews that we can only cringe in horror even as we condemn his words. But do those sins undo his achievements and overturn the brilliance of his insights? If they do, the fault lies with us, not with Luther. It is not perfection we should expect from human beings. It is not even an unblemished goodness, for as Jesus insists, “Only God is good.”
When Larry King interviewed Bill Clinton after he was no longer President, he asked him why he did what he did with Monica Lewinsky. Why would you risk your Presidency? And I give Clinton credit for answering honestly, “For the worst of all reasons,” he said, “because I could.” And King David, like so many others, wrote the same script. They did what they did because they could---and they continue to do it today, because they still think they can get away with it. Without a doubt, such behavior was and is immoral, but again, consider David. He is still in the pages of biblical history, remembered as Israel’s greatest king, the one who ruled over a United Kingdom, the one from whose line Jesus would come. We look at David and so many others, clearly seeing that character is inconsistent. That is the way it is, the way human beings are, which is why, with no ambiguity intended, Jesus told us: “No one is good but God.”
No One is Good But God by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/25/2021
Mark 10: 17-22
2 Samuel 11: 1-17
Consider how this story of David’s lust begins: In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him. So, kings go out to battle in the springtime, but this is not what David did. He remained home, in his palace, where he rose from his couch one late afternoon and walked about. We can almost imagine his boredom. No longer in the flush of youth, David is most likely middle aged. The lust for battle has perhaps passed; he will leave that to his younger officers. But his lust for beautiful flesh has not diminished, and so when spies Bathsheba, bathing, he decides he must have her. Now our text says he sent messengers to get her, which really is an abduction. How could she possibly refuse to go with them?
The incomparable Dutch artist, Rembrandt, paints the scene with a different twist. He imagines Bathsheba reading a letter, commanding her to come to the king. And he paints on her face a look of pensive sadness as she ponders her fate. What else can she do but go? There is no choice at all. It is rape, though I suppose some would try to argue that Bathsheba had some limited agency in this sordid affair. What would David have done, if she had refused to come to his chamber? We do not fully know, though we have our deep suspicions that powerful men like David do not react well when their power is thwarted. The Hebrew uses some rather violent language, saying that David took her, though most English translations read euphemistically he lay with her. And, of course, things become messy, when she becomes pregnant, and David tries to hide the fact of his ignominy by trying to entice Uriah, her husband, to return home and sleep with his wife, which he refuses to do. Uriah is a warrior, a man of honor, and he will not desert his men and do something he considers to be shameful. So, David conspires to have him killed by telling Joab to make sure the men withdraw at the right time, leaving Uriah vulnerable and finally dead.
So, there we have it, a story which is far older than David, yet a story we are all too familiar with today. We hear it time and time again----powerful men abusing their power to sexually have their way with women. Sometimes women claim rape, and at other times they claim their consent came from fear of what would happen if they refused---not unlike Bathsheba. The repetitive details would be almost boring, if we did not know they involve real people with real sufferings. The list of names is long, but hardly exhaustive, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy and Donald Trump whose behaviors with women certainly crossed lines---perhaps even criminal lines. I recall a few years back, listening to a grandmother, being interviewed about her affair with President Kennedy. She had been a young intern in the White House, and she claimed the President seduced her. She never said a word until she was named in a book, and then she came forward, talking about a bath with the President playing with toy boats in the bathtub during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she reported him saying, “I would prefer my children to be Red rather than dead! I was at the Y at the time, watching the television along with the two other women around my age, and we were all were shocked she would make such things public. I mean she was a grandmother, for goodness sakes! What would her grandchildren think? We all agreed: we would keep our mouths shut!
Of course, historically that is what women have done. They have kept quiet, because they saw no advantage in talking. When there is disequilibrium of power, as there is between a President and in intern or a king and the wife of one of the king’s soldiers, it is all too easy to dismiss the voice of the less powerful one. We have no idea what Bathsheba said other than the text telling us that she told David she was pregnant. She remains voiceless, and that is a major problem. Her side of the story is never told. We see it solely from David’s angle, from the position of a man of power, considered to be a great man.
And despite his major moral failure, greatness did shine. He accomplished great things in battle as well as in politics. He held together both the northern and the southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah, hardly an easy thing to do with diversity threatening to unravel the alliances he also made with other countries. Did these successes justify his treatment of Bathsheba? Of course not, but perhaps we would be wise to consider a truth we often deny: character is rarely consistent. Oh, we expect it to be, and we look for it, and should we discover that the strong and great really do evidence flaws and weaknesses; we are shocked, as many of us were about Martin Luther King’s infidelities. But should we really be so surprised? People are strong and weak in different places and being broken in one place does not mean broken in all places. Now it is true that if there are too many broken places, the character structure is in danger of breaking down, but most human beings are a mixture of both strength and weakness. And the same is true of the so called great men and women. That is simply the way it is. Remember, even Jesus wanted to know why people were calling him good. “No one is good except God,” he insisted.
We would do well to pay greater heed to the Christian doctrine of the human being---the idea that sin lurks in all of us. We are all fallen creatures, which is why Christianity points out that the greatest of saints are also the greatest of sinners, meaning that bold people often are guilty of bold sin. Consider the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who spent his early years in the monastery confessing trivial sins---until the Reformation helped him realize that he might be guilty of spiritual pride---believing that he alone understood God’s Word. The most bedeviling question put to him by the Roman authorities, the one that disquieted his soul was: “Why is it, Martin, that you think you are right, that you alone understand, when for more than one thousand years the church has been teaching what you now reject?” Luther had no answer to that question. Was it God’s truth that was grasping his heart and mind, or was it spiritual pride? He could never be sure, and I suspect it was probably a mixture of both----but without the sin of spiritual pride, would not have been able to do what he did---defy the Roman Church and offer a new way of understanding faith?
Luther was far from perfect; he was partly responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of peasants in the Peasant uprising against the aristocracy. And in later life he penned such filth against the Jews that we can only cringe in horror even as we condemn his words. But do those sins undo his achievements and overturn the brilliance of his insights? If they do, the fault lies with us, not with Luther. It is not perfection we should expect from human beings. It is not even an unblemished goodness, for as Jesus insists, “Only God is good.”
When Larry King interviewed Bill Clinton after he was no longer President, he asked him why he did what he did with Monica Lewinsky. Why would you risk your Presidency? And I give Clinton credit for answering honestly, “For the worst of all reasons,” he said, “because I could.” And King David, like so many others, wrote the same script. They did what they did because they could---and they continue to do it today, because they still think they can get away with it. Without a doubt, such behavior was and is immoral, but again, consider David. He is still in the pages of biblical history, remembered as Israel’s greatest king, the one who ruled over a United Kingdom, the one from whose line Jesus would come. We look at David and so many others, clearly seeing that character is inconsistent. That is the way it is, the way human beings are, which is why, with no ambiguity intended, Jesus told us: “No one is good but God.”
Mark 10: 17-22
2 Samuel 11: 1-17
Consider how this story of David’s lust begins: In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him. So, kings go out to battle in the springtime, but this is not what David did. He remained home, in his palace, where he rose from his couch one late afternoon and walked about. We can almost imagine his boredom. No longer in the flush of youth, David is most likely middle aged. The lust for battle has perhaps passed; he will leave that to his younger officers. But his lust for beautiful flesh has not diminished, and so when spies Bathsheba, bathing, he decides he must have her. Now our text says he sent messengers to get her, which really is an abduction. How could she possibly refuse to go with them?
The incomparable Dutch artist, Rembrandt, paints the scene with a different twist. He imagines Bathsheba reading a letter, commanding her to come to the king. And he paints on her face a look of pensive sadness as she ponders her fate. What else can she do but go? There is no choice at all. It is rape, though I suppose some would try to argue that Bathsheba had some limited agency in this sordid affair. What would David have done, if she had refused to come to his chamber? We do not fully know, though we have our deep suspicions that powerful men like David do not react well when their power is thwarted. The Hebrew uses some rather violent language, saying that David took her, though most English translations read euphemistically he lay with her. And, of course, things become messy, when she becomes pregnant, and David tries to hide the fact of his ignominy by trying to entice Uriah, her husband, to return home and sleep with his wife, which he refuses to do. Uriah is a warrior, a man of honor, and he will not desert his men and do something he considers to be shameful. So, David conspires to have him killed by telling Joab to make sure the men withdraw at the right time, leaving Uriah vulnerable and finally dead.
So, there we have it, a story which is far older than David, yet a story we are all too familiar with today. We hear it time and time again----powerful men abusing their power to sexually have their way with women. Sometimes women claim rape, and at other times they claim their consent came from fear of what would happen if they refused---not unlike Bathsheba. The repetitive details would be almost boring, if we did not know they involve real people with real sufferings. The list of names is long, but hardly exhaustive, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein. Then there are leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy and Donald Trump whose behaviors with women certainly crossed lines---perhaps even criminal lines. I recall a few years back, listening to a grandmother, being interviewed about her affair with President Kennedy. She had been a young intern in the White House, and she claimed the President seduced her. She never said a word until she was named in a book, and then she came forward, talking about a bath with the President playing with toy boats in the bathtub during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she reported him saying, “I would prefer my children to be Red rather than dead! I was at the Y at the time, watching the television along with the two other women around my age, and we were all were shocked she would make such things public. I mean she was a grandmother, for goodness sakes! What would her grandchildren think? We all agreed: we would keep our mouths shut!
Of course, historically that is what women have done. They have kept quiet, because they saw no advantage in talking. When there is disequilibrium of power, as there is between a President and in intern or a king and the wife of one of the king’s soldiers, it is all too easy to dismiss the voice of the less powerful one. We have no idea what Bathsheba said other than the text telling us that she told David she was pregnant. She remains voiceless, and that is a major problem. Her side of the story is never told. We see it solely from David’s angle, from the position of a man of power, considered to be a great man.
And despite his major moral failure, greatness did shine. He accomplished great things in battle as well as in politics. He held together both the northern and the southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah, hardly an easy thing to do with diversity threatening to unravel the alliances he also made with other countries. Did these successes justify his treatment of Bathsheba? Of course not, but perhaps we would be wise to consider a truth we often deny: character is rarely consistent. Oh, we expect it to be, and we look for it, and should we discover that the strong and great really do evidence flaws and weaknesses; we are shocked, as many of us were about Martin Luther King’s infidelities. But should we really be so surprised? People are strong and weak in different places and being broken in one place does not mean broken in all places. Now it is true that if there are too many broken places, the character structure is in danger of breaking down, but most human beings are a mixture of both strength and weakness. And the same is true of the so called great men and women. That is simply the way it is. Remember, even Jesus wanted to know why people were calling him good. “No one is good except God,” he insisted.
We would do well to pay greater heed to the Christian doctrine of the human being---the idea that sin lurks in all of us. We are all fallen creatures, which is why Christianity points out that the greatest of saints are also the greatest of sinners, meaning that bold people often are guilty of bold sin. Consider the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who spent his early years in the monastery confessing trivial sins---until the Reformation helped him realize that he might be guilty of spiritual pride---believing that he alone understood God’s Word. The most bedeviling question put to him by the Roman authorities, the one that disquieted his soul was: “Why is it, Martin, that you think you are right, that you alone understand, when for more than one thousand years the church has been teaching what you now reject?” Luther had no answer to that question. Was it God’s truth that was grasping his heart and mind, or was it spiritual pride? He could never be sure, and I suspect it was probably a mixture of both----but without the sin of spiritual pride, would not have been able to do what he did---defy the Roman Church and offer a new way of understanding faith?
Luther was far from perfect; he was partly responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of peasants in the Peasant uprising against the aristocracy. And in later life he penned such filth against the Jews that we can only cringe in horror even as we condemn his words. But do those sins undo his achievements and overturn the brilliance of his insights? If they do, the fault lies with us, not with Luther. It is not perfection we should expect from human beings. It is not even an unblemished goodness, for as Jesus insists, “Only God is good.”
When Larry King interviewed Bill Clinton after he was no longer President, he asked him why he did what he did with Monica Lewinsky. Why would you risk your Presidency? And I give Clinton credit for answering honestly, “For the worst of all reasons,” he said, “because I could.” And King David, like so many others, wrote the same script. They did what they did because they could---and they continue to do it today, because they still think they can get away with it. Without a doubt, such behavior was and is immoral, but again, consider David. He is still in the pages of biblical history, remembered as Israel’s greatest king, the one who ruled over a United Kingdom, the one from whose line Jesus would come. We look at David and so many others, clearly seeing that character is inconsistent. That is the way it is, the way human beings are, which is why, with no ambiguity intended, Jesus told us: “No one is good but God.”
KNOWING AND LOVING THE TRUTH by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/11/2021
Psalm 24
Mark 6: 14-29
John the Baptist ended up dead, his head cut off, for one reason: He spoke truth to power. Herod really did not want to have John killed. In the past he had even enjoyed John’s preaching, but John had said some things that his wife, Herodias, did not like at all. According to Jewish law in the Book of Leviticus, a brother in law should not marry his brother’s wife, and this is exactly what Herod did, so John called them out on it, named it as sin, which infuriated Herodias. Perhaps Herod would have been willing to live with John’s disapproval, but drunken fool that he was, he promised Herodias’ daughter, known as Salome, that she could have anything she wanted, and her mother told her to demand the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And so, Herod, cowardly sycophant that he was, felt he had no option but to comply. And so, there we have it. Now, if John had kept quiet, his head would have remained attached to his body, but this is not what he did, and so he suffered dire consequences. Speaking truth to power often gets one into very deep trouble, because if power does not like the truth, it can do some pretty awful things.
Most of you are probably aware that Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford and later, George W. Bush, died on June 28 at the age of 88. He is known as the architect of the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, though his career in politics spans far more than such service. Rumsfeld was both brilliant and powerful, but if you spoke truth he did not like, you could find yourself in deep trouble. Both Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell found themselves on the wrong side in some battles with Rumsfeld, and the results for them were not pretty. They became sidelined; their voices were ignored, and though that hardly compares to losing one’s head, for those accustomed to asserting power, losing it does not feel good.
There was nothing wrong with Rumsfeld’s brain; he was richly blessed with great intelligence, and under pressure he was cool, articulate and confident, but he had a fatal flaw. His arrogance could overrule his reason, and he would not listen to others, whose views not only differed from his own, but also whose experience in some areas surpassed his. He was notorious for ignoring what military leaders told him, and one thing they told him was that a post-war Iraq could be very challenging. But no, he would not listen, and he would not plan, and we are still living with the terrible consequences of that failure. And unlike Robert Mc Namera who later apologized for the Viet Nam debacle, Rumsfeld never once offered an apology. He thought he had nothing to apologize for. Power has this uncanny ability to ignore the truth that is staring it directly in the face. Power, in fact, can distort the truth and prevent people from truly seeing it.
Now truth is a pretty important component of human life. Even as young children we learned the difference between truth and falsehood, and most of us learned that we could get into deep trouble for lying. That did not necessarily mean that we did not lie, for we also learned that sometimes we could and did get away with it ---but only sometimes, and so we learned something about the virtue of truth. And as we grew older, we also learned something else--- truth is not always a question of black and white. We learned about different shades of grey, and we even learned that sometimes the truth is hidden and sometimes it is served in ways that are not always literal. And so, it is critical to ask the question: What and whom does the truth serve?
Some years ago, when I worked in a big medical center, I heard about this case of a woman, pregnant with her second child. She and her husband had a four year old, stricken with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease that will show up only if the two parents are carrying the gene and the child gets the gene from both parents. The child had almost died a number of times, but now things were stabilized, and so the couple decided to have another baby. There would be genetic testing through an amniocentesis, but when the preliminary blood tests of the parents came back, the doctor called the woman and said, “There is no use proceeding any further, for it is obvious that your husband is not the father of your four year old son. Your husband does not carry the gene”. There was a silence, and the mother continued,” I thought this was a possibility,” she said. “The father of my son is my husband’s brother. We had had an affair, over now for nearly four years, and now things are good between my husband and me. He knows nothing of this.” Well, that is not my business, the doctor said, but there is no need to continue with the test, since your pregnancy is not at risk.”
But you have to do the test, she insisted. My husband is a PhD in genetics; he knows the science, and he will want to know why no test. You must do it, or at least say you did it. I can’t do that, the doctor insisted. I cannot do the test, because it puts the fetus at risk for no reason. And I cannot lie and say I did something I did not do. And so, the argument went. The doctor brought the case to the ethics committee of the hospital, because he genuinely was in a quandary. The woman was his patient, but when he took blood from the husband, he too became a patient. The Committee was composed of 12 people, doctors, my boss, a Roman Catholic priest, who was head of pastoral care as well as a professor of ethics in the medical school, two geneticists, and social workers. The opinion of the Ethics Committee was not binding. It was suggestive, a way of helping people, in this case the doctor, thinking through the options. The Committee, by the way, was evenly divided between men and women. Now I was not on the Committee, but my boss was, and he told us chaplains about the case. And do you know what the recommendation was: it split right down the middle: The six men thought the doctor should not perform the test, nor should he lie and say he performed it. Their argument was that the truth, the literal truth, was the most critical value.
The women, on the other hand, argued that the most important concern in this case was the integrity of the family. The truth, they argued, should serve the preservation of the family and the relationships in it. What would it do to the husband to discover that he was not truly the father of the older child? And what would it also do to his relationship with his brother and his wife. Perhaps at some point the truth needs to come out—but not now, when vulnerability is so stark. The woman needs to tell her brother in law that he has the gene, but more truth than this is not now needed, the women argued.
The doctor received no clarity and though he really should not have told his family anything, he asked his wife and two teenage daughters what they thought. And they all voted with the women. Do the test, they said, or say you did the test, which is what he did. He lied and said the test was negative.
So many times in my life I have thought about this case and the struggle with truth and what truth serves and what and whom it finally protects. Some years later, when I was studying theology at a Roman Catholic seminary, one of the professors said, “We are called to love the truth and serve the truth, but when speaking the truth, we always should consider how others will hear the truth and use the truth.” Considering the scandal of sexual abuse in the Roman Church, we can wonder if the truth was often hidden out of fear for what would happen to the power of the Church if the whole ugly truth came out?
What are we loving and defending when we tell the truth? And are there cases when truth is truly served by hiding at least part of it—as it was in the case of this family? A healthy baby was born, and the family did go on to prosper---at least for a while. I do not know the final outcome. But that is often the way that truth or its lack works. We don’t necessarily know or see the results until much later, and sometimes the threat of harm never comes to be. I don’t know what Jesus would have counseled in this particular case. He told us to love the truth and follow it, but never for the sake of power but always for the sake of love.
Psalm 24
Mark 6: 14-29
John the Baptist ended up dead, his head cut off, for one reason: He spoke truth to power. Herod really did not want to have John killed. In the past he had even enjoyed John’s preaching, but John had said some things that his wife, Herodias, did not like at all. According to Jewish law in the Book of Leviticus, a brother in law should not marry his brother’s wife, and this is exactly what Herod did, so John called them out on it, named it as sin, which infuriated Herodias. Perhaps Herod would have been willing to live with John’s disapproval, but drunken fool that he was, he promised Herodias’ daughter, known as Salome, that she could have anything she wanted, and her mother told her to demand the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And so, Herod, cowardly sycophant that he was, felt he had no option but to comply. And so, there we have it. Now, if John had kept quiet, his head would have remained attached to his body, but this is not what he did, and so he suffered dire consequences. Speaking truth to power often gets one into very deep trouble, because if power does not like the truth, it can do some pretty awful things.
Most of you are probably aware that Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford and later, George W. Bush, died on June 28 at the age of 88. He is known as the architect of the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, though his career in politics spans far more than such service. Rumsfeld was both brilliant and powerful, but if you spoke truth he did not like, you could find yourself in deep trouble. Both Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell found themselves on the wrong side in some battles with Rumsfeld, and the results for them were not pretty. They became sidelined; their voices were ignored, and though that hardly compares to losing one’s head, for those accustomed to asserting power, losing it does not feel good.
There was nothing wrong with Rumsfeld’s brain; he was richly blessed with great intelligence, and under pressure he was cool, articulate and confident, but he had a fatal flaw. His arrogance could overrule his reason, and he would not listen to others, whose views not only differed from his own, but also whose experience in some areas surpassed his. He was notorious for ignoring what military leaders told him, and one thing they told him was that a post-war Iraq could be very challenging. But no, he would not listen, and he would not plan, and we are still living with the terrible consequences of that failure. And unlike Robert Mc Namera who later apologized for the Viet Nam debacle, Rumsfeld never once offered an apology. He thought he had nothing to apologize for. Power has this uncanny ability to ignore the truth that is staring it directly in the face. Power, in fact, can distort the truth and prevent people from truly seeing it.
Now truth is a pretty important component of human life. Even as young children we learned the difference between truth and falsehood, and most of us learned that we could get into deep trouble for lying. That did not necessarily mean that we did not lie, for we also learned that sometimes we could and did get away with it ---but only sometimes, and so we learned something about the virtue of truth. And as we grew older, we also learned something else--- truth is not always a question of black and white. We learned about different shades of grey, and we even learned that sometimes the truth is hidden and sometimes it is served in ways that are not always literal. And so, it is critical to ask the question: What and whom does the truth serve?
Some years ago, when I worked in a big medical center, I heard about this case of a woman, pregnant with her second child. She and her husband had a four year old, stricken with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease that will show up only if the two parents are carrying the gene and the child gets the gene from both parents. The child had almost died a number of times, but now things were stabilized, and so the couple decided to have another baby. There would be genetic testing through an amniocentesis, but when the preliminary blood tests of the parents came back, the doctor called the woman and said, “There is no use proceeding any further, for it is obvious that your husband is not the father of your four year old son. Your husband does not carry the gene”. There was a silence, and the mother continued,” I thought this was a possibility,” she said. “The father of my son is my husband’s brother. We had had an affair, over now for nearly four years, and now things are good between my husband and me. He knows nothing of this.” Well, that is not my business, the doctor said, but there is no need to continue with the test, since your pregnancy is not at risk.”
But you have to do the test, she insisted. My husband is a PhD in genetics; he knows the science, and he will want to know why no test. You must do it, or at least say you did it. I can’t do that, the doctor insisted. I cannot do the test, because it puts the fetus at risk for no reason. And I cannot lie and say I did something I did not do. And so, the argument went. The doctor brought the case to the ethics committee of the hospital, because he genuinely was in a quandary. The woman was his patient, but when he took blood from the husband, he too became a patient. The Committee was composed of 12 people, doctors, my boss, a Roman Catholic priest, who was head of pastoral care as well as a professor of ethics in the medical school, two geneticists, and social workers. The opinion of the Ethics Committee was not binding. It was suggestive, a way of helping people, in this case the doctor, thinking through the options. The Committee, by the way, was evenly divided between men and women. Now I was not on the Committee, but my boss was, and he told us chaplains about the case. And do you know what the recommendation was: it split right down the middle: The six men thought the doctor should not perform the test, nor should he lie and say he performed it. Their argument was that the truth, the literal truth, was the most critical value.
The women, on the other hand, argued that the most important concern in this case was the integrity of the family. The truth, they argued, should serve the preservation of the family and the relationships in it. What would it do to the husband to discover that he was not truly the father of the older child? And what would it also do to his relationship with his brother and his wife. Perhaps at some point the truth needs to come out—but not now, when vulnerability is so stark. The woman needs to tell her brother in law that he has the gene, but more truth than this is not now needed, the women argued.
The doctor received no clarity and though he really should not have told his family anything, he asked his wife and two teenage daughters what they thought. And they all voted with the women. Do the test, they said, or say you did the test, which is what he did. He lied and said the test was negative.
So many times in my life I have thought about this case and the struggle with truth and what truth serves and what and whom it finally protects. Some years later, when I was studying theology at a Roman Catholic seminary, one of the professors said, “We are called to love the truth and serve the truth, but when speaking the truth, we always should consider how others will hear the truth and use the truth.” Considering the scandal of sexual abuse in the Roman Church, we can wonder if the truth was often hidden out of fear for what would happen to the power of the Church if the whole ugly truth came out?
What are we loving and defending when we tell the truth? And are there cases when truth is truly served by hiding at least part of it—as it was in the case of this family? A healthy baby was born, and the family did go on to prosper---at least for a while. I do not know the final outcome. But that is often the way that truth or its lack works. We don’t necessarily know or see the results until much later, and sometimes the threat of harm never comes to be. I don’t know what Jesus would have counseled in this particular case. He told us to love the truth and follow it, but never for the sake of power but always for the sake of love.
July 13, 2021
Dear Friends,
I must admit that I am not very enthusiastic about space travel tourism. To be honest, I felt a bit sickened by these billionaires trying to outdo each other by going into space. Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Atlantic and the space company, Virgin Galactic, took a ride into space, 53 miles above the earth, which is considered the edge of space, on Sunday, July 11. I guess he found the ride quite thrilling. On July 20 Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and his brother, Mark Bezos along with two other unnamed persons, one of whom paid $28 million for the ride, will take a trip that goes beyond the edge of space, which is defined as 62 miles above the earth. Furthermore, on June 25 Virgin Galactic received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to take passengers into space, which should begin sometime in 2022. With all the world’s problems, many of them, screaming out for funding, it does seem wasteful and self-obsessive thrill seeking to be spending money this way. Why not figure out how to be more helpful to a humanity in pain? While Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, McKenzie Scott, is giving away billions, Jeff has a very different center of gravity. He is worth about $211 billion, the richest man in the world.
But this is not the end of it. Jane Poynter, co-founder of Space Perspectives, is working to develop giant balloons that will send eight tourists at a time 19 miles into the atmosphere beginning in 2024. Now 19 miles above the earth is not space, but Ms. Poynter believes that seeing the earth from this new perspective could have a profound impact on how people understand our swirling, blue planet and our place in it. She points out that many of the astronauts were changed people after their forays into space, involving themselves in environmental and humanitarian causes. But wait! Should we not consider the carbon footprint space travel makes before we start touting it as a way of transforming people. One rocket launch uses as much fuel as a car would over the course of 200 years! Our planet is in peril, and faith tells us that. God loves the world and declares it good. Should we not do the same?
Until quite recently NASA was very hesitant and circumspect about the possibilities of space travel tourism. But now it is beginning to see some benefit. But it isn’t clear what those benefits are. So much remains unknown and space travel is dangerous. There will be casualties. But perhaps this is the price paid for facing challenges and pushing the frontiers of technology. The truth is we simply do not know what lies on the other side of space travel. We have no idea what we might learn or how it might alter our perspective. There is something in we human beings that drives us to push against limits, and that being the case, when the line of space travel has been crossed, there is probably no turning back. II seriously doubt this is the best use of our limited resources, but human beings are not always practical in this regard. We hear this call, “Go forward,” even when, especially when, we do not know what we will find ahead or on the other side. I guess this is the way we are made, and God seems to have adjusted to our reach being beyond our grasp. God keeps hoping we will learn our lessons, but maybe we are just incredibly slow learners, and so God has learned to be patient with our slowness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I must admit that I am not very enthusiastic about space travel tourism. To be honest, I felt a bit sickened by these billionaires trying to outdo each other by going into space. Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Atlantic and the space company, Virgin Galactic, took a ride into space, 53 miles above the earth, which is considered the edge of space, on Sunday, July 11. I guess he found the ride quite thrilling. On July 20 Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and his brother, Mark Bezos along with two other unnamed persons, one of whom paid $28 million for the ride, will take a trip that goes beyond the edge of space, which is defined as 62 miles above the earth. Furthermore, on June 25 Virgin Galactic received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to take passengers into space, which should begin sometime in 2022. With all the world’s problems, many of them, screaming out for funding, it does seem wasteful and self-obsessive thrill seeking to be spending money this way. Why not figure out how to be more helpful to a humanity in pain? While Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, McKenzie Scott, is giving away billions, Jeff has a very different center of gravity. He is worth about $211 billion, the richest man in the world.
But this is not the end of it. Jane Poynter, co-founder of Space Perspectives, is working to develop giant balloons that will send eight tourists at a time 19 miles into the atmosphere beginning in 2024. Now 19 miles above the earth is not space, but Ms. Poynter believes that seeing the earth from this new perspective could have a profound impact on how people understand our swirling, blue planet and our place in it. She points out that many of the astronauts were changed people after their forays into space, involving themselves in environmental and humanitarian causes. But wait! Should we not consider the carbon footprint space travel makes before we start touting it as a way of transforming people. One rocket launch uses as much fuel as a car would over the course of 200 years! Our planet is in peril, and faith tells us that. God loves the world and declares it good. Should we not do the same?
Until quite recently NASA was very hesitant and circumspect about the possibilities of space travel tourism. But now it is beginning to see some benefit. But it isn’t clear what those benefits are. So much remains unknown and space travel is dangerous. There will be casualties. But perhaps this is the price paid for facing challenges and pushing the frontiers of technology. The truth is we simply do not know what lies on the other side of space travel. We have no idea what we might learn or how it might alter our perspective. There is something in we human beings that drives us to push against limits, and that being the case, when the line of space travel has been crossed, there is probably no turning back. II seriously doubt this is the best use of our limited resources, but human beings are not always practical in this regard. We hear this call, “Go forward,” even when, especially when, we do not know what we will find ahead or on the other side. I guess this is the way we are made, and God seems to have adjusted to our reach being beyond our grasp. God keeps hoping we will learn our lessons, but maybe we are just incredibly slow learners, and so God has learned to be patient with our slowness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
July 7, 2021
Dear Friends,
There is no doubt that this past year has been a challenging one with a worldwide pandemic that has left over four million people dead. And yet, despite that bad news, we are celebrating the vaccine, which is helping many countries return to normal. There is other good news as well, and some of it might surprise you.
Despite the turbulence, fear and uncertainty of this past year, the world has witnessed a rise in giving. Take Myanmar, for example, which has increased its giving, though on the edge of an economic meltdown because of a military coup last February that disposed of the democratically elected government. Myanmar is known as one of the most altruistic countries in the world, and they continue to live up to that reputation in spite of grave hardship.
Our own country has also witnessed an uptake in giving. During most recessions giving goes down, but this past year charitable giving reached a record high. Americans donated $471 billion dollars, which is a 3.8% increase over the previous year. A bull stock market certainly helped, but it is also true that the call for racial justice as well as the pandemic have moved people to feel generous. Charities that deal with basic needs like food saw over an 8% increase in giving. Food banks experienced a doubling of donations, and overall the number of individual donors grew by 7.3%. Another surprising turn in our country was among the 18 to 30 year olds, whose giving doubled. According to the 2021 World Giving Index, more than half of adults worldwide helped someone in the past year they did not personally know
There is also another giving story, this one quite dramatic. McKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, who in 2019 received 4 % of Amazon’s stock, valued at the time about $36 billion, has pledged to give it all away. The challenge is that her wealth keeps growing faster than she can donate. Her estimated wealth is now $60 billion, and this is after she gave many billions away. In 2020 she gave $6 billion to 500 different organizations, and for the third time in under a year, she has announced a new gift, amounting to 2.74 billion to 286 organizations, including universities, art groups and other nonprofits, working to combat racial injustice and domestic violence. Among those receiving grants were the Alaska Heritage Foundation, Broward College in Florida and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The interesting thing about Ms. Scott is that unlike most wealthy people into philanthropy, she does not have a Foundation. Foundations require a staff and a lot of paper filing, but this is not how she wants to spend her time or her money. Instead, she deals directly with the organizations she is interested in supporting. There is no formal application process, but she does rely on friends, and advisors as well as her new husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher at one of her children’s schools.
Ms. Scott does seem to have some discomfort about where her wealth comes from. She is very aware of the criticism Amazon receives about its pay scale and working conditions. Though an intensely private person, she did write in a blog that it would be preferable if “disproportionate wealth was not concentrated in a small number of hands.” She also wrote that she hoped to “de-emphasize privileged voices and cede focus to others.” Yet she shows no interest in countering Amazon’s mega influence, and so far, she has not supported any think tanks or research groups that feed information and knowledge to Washington and state capitals that are in a position to make changes. Some think that if she really wants to see structural change, she should support people and groups who are researching how change does and can occur. While change often occurs from the top down, it also happens from the bottom up.
MacKenzie Scott does not attempt to micromanage any of the organizations to whom she gives. She does not tell organizations how to spend the money they receive, because she insists that organizations best know their needs. This is also part of her anti-elitist approach to giving. She is certainly changing how big philanthropy is done, and indeed, people are taking notice. And perhaps those of us, who by comparison are tiny givers, can take note as well. Her life shows how important giving is, and whether we are in a position to give little or much, there is always something for us to learn in the process of giving.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
There is no doubt that this past year has been a challenging one with a worldwide pandemic that has left over four million people dead. And yet, despite that bad news, we are celebrating the vaccine, which is helping many countries return to normal. There is other good news as well, and some of it might surprise you.
Despite the turbulence, fear and uncertainty of this past year, the world has witnessed a rise in giving. Take Myanmar, for example, which has increased its giving, though on the edge of an economic meltdown because of a military coup last February that disposed of the democratically elected government. Myanmar is known as one of the most altruistic countries in the world, and they continue to live up to that reputation in spite of grave hardship.
Our own country has also witnessed an uptake in giving. During most recessions giving goes down, but this past year charitable giving reached a record high. Americans donated $471 billion dollars, which is a 3.8% increase over the previous year. A bull stock market certainly helped, but it is also true that the call for racial justice as well as the pandemic have moved people to feel generous. Charities that deal with basic needs like food saw over an 8% increase in giving. Food banks experienced a doubling of donations, and overall the number of individual donors grew by 7.3%. Another surprising turn in our country was among the 18 to 30 year olds, whose giving doubled. According to the 2021 World Giving Index, more than half of adults worldwide helped someone in the past year they did not personally know
There is also another giving story, this one quite dramatic. McKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, who in 2019 received 4 % of Amazon’s stock, valued at the time about $36 billion, has pledged to give it all away. The challenge is that her wealth keeps growing faster than she can donate. Her estimated wealth is now $60 billion, and this is after she gave many billions away. In 2020 she gave $6 billion to 500 different organizations, and for the third time in under a year, she has announced a new gift, amounting to 2.74 billion to 286 organizations, including universities, art groups and other nonprofits, working to combat racial injustice and domestic violence. Among those receiving grants were the Alaska Heritage Foundation, Broward College in Florida and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The interesting thing about Ms. Scott is that unlike most wealthy people into philanthropy, she does not have a Foundation. Foundations require a staff and a lot of paper filing, but this is not how she wants to spend her time or her money. Instead, she deals directly with the organizations she is interested in supporting. There is no formal application process, but she does rely on friends, and advisors as well as her new husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher at one of her children’s schools.
Ms. Scott does seem to have some discomfort about where her wealth comes from. She is very aware of the criticism Amazon receives about its pay scale and working conditions. Though an intensely private person, she did write in a blog that it would be preferable if “disproportionate wealth was not concentrated in a small number of hands.” She also wrote that she hoped to “de-emphasize privileged voices and cede focus to others.” Yet she shows no interest in countering Amazon’s mega influence, and so far, she has not supported any think tanks or research groups that feed information and knowledge to Washington and state capitals that are in a position to make changes. Some think that if she really wants to see structural change, she should support people and groups who are researching how change does and can occur. While change often occurs from the top down, it also happens from the bottom up.
MacKenzie Scott does not attempt to micromanage any of the organizations to whom she gives. She does not tell organizations how to spend the money they receive, because she insists that organizations best know their needs. This is also part of her anti-elitist approach to giving. She is certainly changing how big philanthropy is done, and indeed, people are taking notice. And perhaps those of us, who by comparison are tiny givers, can take note as well. Her life shows how important giving is, and whether we are in a position to give little or much, there is always something for us to learn in the process of giving.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
DESPERATE PEOPLE DOING DESPERATE AND BOLD THINGS
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/4/2021
2 Samuel 1: 17-27
Mark 5: 25-54
Many decades ago, probably in the 70’s, when so many plane hijackings occurred, I recall this one story about a man, who tried to hijack a plane, because his son had leukemia and he had no money (or apparently insurance) for treatment. I don’t recall the outcome and I could find no reference to the deed online, but at the time it really struck me as incredibly sad. A poor desperate father trying to save the life of his young son: As we all know, desperate people will sometimes try desperate things.
Well, the Bible is really a lens through which we can look at life, and in today’s readings we have two biblical stories about desperate people trying desperate things. Mark’s story tells us about a woman, suffering from excessive bleeding, most probably a female problem. Now blood---any kind of blood--- was considered unclean, but blood from female organs, including menstruation and childbirth, was characterized as particularly unclean and there were all kinds of rules to deal with it. So, right away we should be aware that we have a woman, who is deemed unclean. No one should touch her---that was the rule.
Secondly, she is out in public in the middle of the day with no male to protect her, another social taboo. The expectation would have been that she remain at home, and if she had to be out in the public square, she either had to be surrounded by other women, doing women’s chores, like fetching water, or she should have been accompanied by a male relative. Thirdly, she, a female, is about to approach Jesus, a male. That is completely contrary to Jewish behavior and law. Women were not allowed to approach strange men, and men were never to speak to a woman in public. Now she knew this, because her whole plan was simply to touch Jesus’ robe in faith and confidence that the touch would be enough. And it was enough, and though she had no desire to be noticed, Jesus felt some power flow from him into her. “Who touched me,” he demanded to know? And she came forward to admit her bold act. “Faith has made you well,” he said, a bold act on his part, since men were not to speak in public to a woman. Yes, her faith did make her well, but it was faith coupled with bold action. A shier, more retiring type, too afraid to move beyond the confines of her home would never have obtained the healing she desperately needed. Sometimes faith requires also bold action.
And then we have this fascinating story about David. Now it is difficult for you to appreciate David’s lament, because we have not read much of what has gone before. Some weeks ago, we did read the lesson about David being chosen as king, when God’s favor had turned away from King Saul toward David. We also heard how David played the lyre for Saul to soothe his terrible torment and excruciating headaches. Most of you probably do not know that David would eventually marry Saul’s daughter, Michel, and David would also become best friends with Jonathan, Saul’s son. David became a great warrior, and the people acclaimed him, shouting, “Saul has killed thousands, but David has killed tens of thousands.” And though David did love Saul and Saul had indeed loved David, jealousy intervened to the point where Saul wanted David dead. And so David ran for his life, at one point even hiring himself out as a mercenary to the Philistines, who were enemies of Israel. So this is quite a drama.
In our story for today Saul and Jonathan are dead, people whom David had deeply loved, and here all enmity is gone or at least hidden, and David pours out his grief in heartfelt lament. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” David cries. Saul, the great king, who had tried to kill David and Jonathan, Saul’s son, and David’s beloved friend, are now dead. And David unashamedly mourns for both, putting behind him any enmity he might have felt for Saul’s betrayal. Though we do not know David’s true motivations, we do know that grief can sometimes drive people to do desperate and even bold things, including forgiving people, who do things that at the time seem unforgivable.
Some years ago, in the late 80’s, when I was a hospital chaplain, I had this case of a three year old, stricken with Aids. Katie had been sick from the time she was six months; yet all the tests showed nothing. Finally in exasperation, the doctor said he was going to test for HIV, and it turned up positive, a full blown case of AIDS. It was a complete shock---at least to the mother. But the father, a brilliant and successful Wall Street lawyer, was an IV drug user, and apparently he had used a dirty needle. So, he passed the virus on to his wife and she onto the fetus, though neither parents were showing any symptoms of the disease. As you might imagine, she immediately divorced him, while blaming herself for being so blind. Why did I never see the needle marks, she lamented over and over again? The truth was he had hidden them all too well.
Well, finally Katie died, and I can tell Katie’s death was a horror show and so was the desperate mother’s grief. There was simply no consolation at all, and grief intertwined with guilt sometimes issues in pain that transcends the bearable. I left the hospital a few months later, but three years after that, I heard the completion of the story from another chaplain, who had become close to the mother, who although HIV positive still had no active disease. But when her ex-husband was dying, against all reason, she took him into her home and cared for him until he died.
She did not have to do this. She too was a lawyer with plenty of money, and her ex-husband was also quite wealthy with enough money to pay for the best private care available. But these were two desperate people, pulled together by grief and guilt. By caring for her ex-husband, the alchemy of grief and guilt no longer had its way with her. And he died, forgiven by the one whose heart he had broken apart.
Sometimes desperation drives people to do things that we would never expect—like the people in Jesus’ day would not have expected a woman to leave her home unaccompanied to seek healing from a man she did not know but had only heard about. How many of David’s peers would have expected him to publicly praise Saul, when this same man had tried to kill him? At one time Saul had been like a father to David, and perhaps because Saul was also his father in law and the father of his dear friend, he put his hurt behind him and offered a lament for all the ages.
Sometimes desperation does drive people to do bold things, and thank God that it does, for we can learn from their examples. And learning is sometimes exactly what God intends us to do.
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/4/2021
2 Samuel 1: 17-27
Mark 5: 25-54
Many decades ago, probably in the 70’s, when so many plane hijackings occurred, I recall this one story about a man, who tried to hijack a plane, because his son had leukemia and he had no money (or apparently insurance) for treatment. I don’t recall the outcome and I could find no reference to the deed online, but at the time it really struck me as incredibly sad. A poor desperate father trying to save the life of his young son: As we all know, desperate people will sometimes try desperate things.
Well, the Bible is really a lens through which we can look at life, and in today’s readings we have two biblical stories about desperate people trying desperate things. Mark’s story tells us about a woman, suffering from excessive bleeding, most probably a female problem. Now blood---any kind of blood--- was considered unclean, but blood from female organs, including menstruation and childbirth, was characterized as particularly unclean and there were all kinds of rules to deal with it. So, right away we should be aware that we have a woman, who is deemed unclean. No one should touch her---that was the rule.
Secondly, she is out in public in the middle of the day with no male to protect her, another social taboo. The expectation would have been that she remain at home, and if she had to be out in the public square, she either had to be surrounded by other women, doing women’s chores, like fetching water, or she should have been accompanied by a male relative. Thirdly, she, a female, is about to approach Jesus, a male. That is completely contrary to Jewish behavior and law. Women were not allowed to approach strange men, and men were never to speak to a woman in public. Now she knew this, because her whole plan was simply to touch Jesus’ robe in faith and confidence that the touch would be enough. And it was enough, and though she had no desire to be noticed, Jesus felt some power flow from him into her. “Who touched me,” he demanded to know? And she came forward to admit her bold act. “Faith has made you well,” he said, a bold act on his part, since men were not to speak in public to a woman. Yes, her faith did make her well, but it was faith coupled with bold action. A shier, more retiring type, too afraid to move beyond the confines of her home would never have obtained the healing she desperately needed. Sometimes faith requires also bold action.
And then we have this fascinating story about David. Now it is difficult for you to appreciate David’s lament, because we have not read much of what has gone before. Some weeks ago, we did read the lesson about David being chosen as king, when God’s favor had turned away from King Saul toward David. We also heard how David played the lyre for Saul to soothe his terrible torment and excruciating headaches. Most of you probably do not know that David would eventually marry Saul’s daughter, Michel, and David would also become best friends with Jonathan, Saul’s son. David became a great warrior, and the people acclaimed him, shouting, “Saul has killed thousands, but David has killed tens of thousands.” And though David did love Saul and Saul had indeed loved David, jealousy intervened to the point where Saul wanted David dead. And so David ran for his life, at one point even hiring himself out as a mercenary to the Philistines, who were enemies of Israel. So this is quite a drama.
In our story for today Saul and Jonathan are dead, people whom David had deeply loved, and here all enmity is gone or at least hidden, and David pours out his grief in heartfelt lament. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” David cries. Saul, the great king, who had tried to kill David and Jonathan, Saul’s son, and David’s beloved friend, are now dead. And David unashamedly mourns for both, putting behind him any enmity he might have felt for Saul’s betrayal. Though we do not know David’s true motivations, we do know that grief can sometimes drive people to do desperate and even bold things, including forgiving people, who do things that at the time seem unforgivable.
Some years ago, in the late 80’s, when I was a hospital chaplain, I had this case of a three year old, stricken with Aids. Katie had been sick from the time she was six months; yet all the tests showed nothing. Finally in exasperation, the doctor said he was going to test for HIV, and it turned up positive, a full blown case of AIDS. It was a complete shock---at least to the mother. But the father, a brilliant and successful Wall Street lawyer, was an IV drug user, and apparently he had used a dirty needle. So, he passed the virus on to his wife and she onto the fetus, though neither parents were showing any symptoms of the disease. As you might imagine, she immediately divorced him, while blaming herself for being so blind. Why did I never see the needle marks, she lamented over and over again? The truth was he had hidden them all too well.
Well, finally Katie died, and I can tell Katie’s death was a horror show and so was the desperate mother’s grief. There was simply no consolation at all, and grief intertwined with guilt sometimes issues in pain that transcends the bearable. I left the hospital a few months later, but three years after that, I heard the completion of the story from another chaplain, who had become close to the mother, who although HIV positive still had no active disease. But when her ex-husband was dying, against all reason, she took him into her home and cared for him until he died.
She did not have to do this. She too was a lawyer with plenty of money, and her ex-husband was also quite wealthy with enough money to pay for the best private care available. But these were two desperate people, pulled together by grief and guilt. By caring for her ex-husband, the alchemy of grief and guilt no longer had its way with her. And he died, forgiven by the one whose heart he had broken apart.
Sometimes desperation drives people to do things that we would never expect—like the people in Jesus’ day would not have expected a woman to leave her home unaccompanied to seek healing from a man she did not know but had only heard about. How many of David’s peers would have expected him to publicly praise Saul, when this same man had tried to kill him? At one time Saul had been like a father to David, and perhaps because Saul was also his father in law and the father of his dear friend, he put his hurt behind him and offered a lament for all the ages.
Sometimes desperation does drive people to do bold things, and thank God that it does, for we can learn from their examples. And learning is sometimes exactly what God intends us to do.
June 29, 2021
Dear Friends,
People often wring their hands in consternation when the Church gets mixed up with politics. Obviously, politics has a moral dimension to it, so yes, it is no surprise that there are times when the Church has something significant to say about a particular issue. We can all understand that. But lately there has been quite a mix up, which has caused uproar in the Roman Catholic Church and beyond.
The Roman Catholic Church has been declaring its anti-abortion stand for as long as abortion has existed, which is a great deal longer than Roe v Wade. But over the past few weeks American Catholic bishops have raised the bar on controversy. The latest fight has been over the Sacrament of Holy Communion and who is worthy to receive it. Since President Joe Biden, a devout Roman Catholic, and the most overtly religious President since Jimmy Carter, is pro-choice, the American College of Bishops met to consider denying him the Sacrament---along with other Roman Catholic politicians, who are also pro-choice. Never mind that President Biden has made it clear that although he personally does not believe in abortion, he does not think he has the right to decide for others whose religious or non-religious convictions and consciences lead them to different conclusions.
Seventy five percent of the American bishops wanted to write a pastoral letter, which would not only be directed against President Biden and other Roman Catholic politicians like him, but also against Pope Francis, who does not want the American bishops to move in this direction. The Pope sees such a stand as divisive, pushing away people, who disagree on abortion, while also weaponizing the Sacrament, using it to punish people who hold a different view. Furthermore, the Pope wants the Church to be seen as a beacon of light in a world that is often dark, cruel and unjust. He wants the Church to defend the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, those who are already alive, needing help and support. Why the obsessive concern about the unborn when the living are not being properly cared for?
Make no mistake about it: Pope Francis is not pro-choice, but he understands that the Church has limited resources and limited time, and he wants commitments spent on those issues, which strengthen rather than weaken and divide the Church. Like President Biden, Pope Francis also understands that the abortion issue is a very complicated one as he is faced with the reality that a strong majority of American Catholics support the right of a woman to choose. Though many Catholics will not choose abortion for themselves, they do not want to make the choice for others. Many Americans of all religious and non-religious persuasions feel the same way.
However, the issue before the American Bishops was not a discussion about the ethics of abortion. On that subject their minds have been made up. The issue was about the Sacrament of Holy Communion and whether a person who persists in holding to an ethical position which the Church names as evil and sinful can receive. In this case it is not only what one does, it is also what one believes. A person can be deemed worthy or unworthy to receive the Sacrament based on thoughts and beliefs. This is why we Protestants are not welcome at their table. Some of us do hold different beliefs about the Sacrament.
But the Roman Church has been quite selective about what it chooses to deem unacceptable beliefs. It did not deny the Sacrament to those who professed Nazi beliefs during the Second World War. It did not withhold the Sacrament from those Roman Catholics who herded Jews into cattle cars headed for Auschwitz. The Church did not deny Communion to persons who fought for the South during the Civil War and defended the right of people to own slaves. And more recently the Church did not utter one word, let along advocate the withdrawal of Communion from the former Attorney General, William Barr, when he decided to begin federal executions once again, which is against Roman Catholic ethics and teaching. Nor did it do a thing about Holy Communion when children were separated from their parents at the Southern Border, aided by some people, professing to be faithful Catholics. Why did the bishops choose to make abortion the single most important issue?
Pope Francis made clear that the Sacrament is not a rite for the perfect, but a gift for the sinful, which to his mind includes all Roman Catholics, and to my mind includes all who would choose to come to Christ’s table. It is not our table, but it is Christ’s, and who are we to decide who is worthy to receive?
It seems that The American College of Bishops realized they were creating a mess, and so they pulled back, saying they would make no recommendations about withholding the Sacrament from anyone. Perhaps they did not want to be on the side against Pope Francis, though many of them are already opposed to his more open views. Furthermore, the bishops in Washington, DC and Delaware, where President Biden's worships, had already declared they would not withhold the Sacrament from the President, so perhaps the rest of the bishops realized it would not look good to take a stand that would be ignored by other bishops.
Withholding the Sacrament is not new. In centuries past our own tradition—the Congregational Church in New England---did sometimes refuse the Sacrament to the sinful. You can read church minutes from centuries ago and learn that persons were denied Communion for the sin of public inebriation or the sin of adultery as well as a host of other sins. Mercifully, we no longer try to decide who is worthy or unworthy. That decision is left to individual consciences. Though an imperfect guide, conscience is often the best we have. And the rest we leave to God in Jesus Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
People often wring their hands in consternation when the Church gets mixed up with politics. Obviously, politics has a moral dimension to it, so yes, it is no surprise that there are times when the Church has something significant to say about a particular issue. We can all understand that. But lately there has been quite a mix up, which has caused uproar in the Roman Catholic Church and beyond.
The Roman Catholic Church has been declaring its anti-abortion stand for as long as abortion has existed, which is a great deal longer than Roe v Wade. But over the past few weeks American Catholic bishops have raised the bar on controversy. The latest fight has been over the Sacrament of Holy Communion and who is worthy to receive it. Since President Joe Biden, a devout Roman Catholic, and the most overtly religious President since Jimmy Carter, is pro-choice, the American College of Bishops met to consider denying him the Sacrament---along with other Roman Catholic politicians, who are also pro-choice. Never mind that President Biden has made it clear that although he personally does not believe in abortion, he does not think he has the right to decide for others whose religious or non-religious convictions and consciences lead them to different conclusions.
Seventy five percent of the American bishops wanted to write a pastoral letter, which would not only be directed against President Biden and other Roman Catholic politicians like him, but also against Pope Francis, who does not want the American bishops to move in this direction. The Pope sees such a stand as divisive, pushing away people, who disagree on abortion, while also weaponizing the Sacrament, using it to punish people who hold a different view. Furthermore, the Pope wants the Church to be seen as a beacon of light in a world that is often dark, cruel and unjust. He wants the Church to defend the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, those who are already alive, needing help and support. Why the obsessive concern about the unborn when the living are not being properly cared for?
Make no mistake about it: Pope Francis is not pro-choice, but he understands that the Church has limited resources and limited time, and he wants commitments spent on those issues, which strengthen rather than weaken and divide the Church. Like President Biden, Pope Francis also understands that the abortion issue is a very complicated one as he is faced with the reality that a strong majority of American Catholics support the right of a woman to choose. Though many Catholics will not choose abortion for themselves, they do not want to make the choice for others. Many Americans of all religious and non-religious persuasions feel the same way.
However, the issue before the American Bishops was not a discussion about the ethics of abortion. On that subject their minds have been made up. The issue was about the Sacrament of Holy Communion and whether a person who persists in holding to an ethical position which the Church names as evil and sinful can receive. In this case it is not only what one does, it is also what one believes. A person can be deemed worthy or unworthy to receive the Sacrament based on thoughts and beliefs. This is why we Protestants are not welcome at their table. Some of us do hold different beliefs about the Sacrament.
But the Roman Church has been quite selective about what it chooses to deem unacceptable beliefs. It did not deny the Sacrament to those who professed Nazi beliefs during the Second World War. It did not withhold the Sacrament from those Roman Catholics who herded Jews into cattle cars headed for Auschwitz. The Church did not deny Communion to persons who fought for the South during the Civil War and defended the right of people to own slaves. And more recently the Church did not utter one word, let along advocate the withdrawal of Communion from the former Attorney General, William Barr, when he decided to begin federal executions once again, which is against Roman Catholic ethics and teaching. Nor did it do a thing about Holy Communion when children were separated from their parents at the Southern Border, aided by some people, professing to be faithful Catholics. Why did the bishops choose to make abortion the single most important issue?
Pope Francis made clear that the Sacrament is not a rite for the perfect, but a gift for the sinful, which to his mind includes all Roman Catholics, and to my mind includes all who would choose to come to Christ’s table. It is not our table, but it is Christ’s, and who are we to decide who is worthy to receive?
It seems that The American College of Bishops realized they were creating a mess, and so they pulled back, saying they would make no recommendations about withholding the Sacrament from anyone. Perhaps they did not want to be on the side against Pope Francis, though many of them are already opposed to his more open views. Furthermore, the bishops in Washington, DC and Delaware, where President Biden's worships, had already declared they would not withhold the Sacrament from the President, so perhaps the rest of the bishops realized it would not look good to take a stand that would be ignored by other bishops.
Withholding the Sacrament is not new. In centuries past our own tradition—the Congregational Church in New England---did sometimes refuse the Sacrament to the sinful. You can read church minutes from centuries ago and learn that persons were denied Communion for the sin of public inebriation or the sin of adultery as well as a host of other sins. Mercifully, we no longer try to decide who is worthy or unworthy. That decision is left to individual consciences. Though an imperfect guide, conscience is often the best we have. And the rest we leave to God in Jesus Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
SALVATION, NOW? by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/4/2021
2 Corinthians 6: 1-13
David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, had some interesting reflections on addresses given at college graduations. So many of them, he said, encourage the graduates to look within themselves. Find your deepest heart’s desire and then follow your bliss, heed your passion, for that road is the one most likely to lead to success and happiness. But Brooks has a different take on the matter. “You don’t first look inside yourself”, he said, “and then go ahead and plan your life. You must see what is out there, what problems need solving; what questions call forth your energy and passion; what out there summons your life? In other words, Brooks wants to say, “It’s not all about you and what you want to do. It’s about what needs doing, what needs solving, what needs answering and how your skills and passions can go about doing, solving and answering.
When Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Corinth, one of the questions or problems people were facing was the question of death and infinitude. Let’s face it, death poses a major question and problem for human beings. While all created life is limited, it seems that we humans are the creatures who reflect on this, who wonder what it means that we live and die. And with that question in mind, we run into this word, salvation, a word, which in our everyday spoken language is not commonly used. What does it mean to be saved? What are we saved from and what are we saved for?
Now I suspect that for many of you the word salvation might suggest something about going to heaven after you die, where you will be with God and perhaps with friends and family, at least those you can stand. For many people salvation is tantamount to heaven, being saved from the torments of hell, or as modern theology is prone to say, saved from non-being. But the truth is Jesus spent almost no time at all speaking about life after death and heaven. After Jesus’ resurrection, when he appeared to his disciples, he did not teach them about heaven; he did not tell them anything at all about what it was like after he died, or where he went and what happened there. No, he told them to do something; get busy; heal the sick, cast out the demons, feed the hungry, show mercy, forgive sins and announce the new creation, which in him and through him was and is already dawning. This is the kingdom of God, or at least the kingdom’s beginning. It is not yet final; it has not yet completely come. But in and through Jesus Christ and the community that has grown up around him, the kingdom is both already and not yet. And this kingdom is salvation---salvation now and salvation then.
When Paul wrote to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, he did not describe heaven. Instead he wrote, “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.” He was actually quoting here a line from the Prophet Isaiah, where God pronounced forgiveness on the people for all their sins against him. Paul not only meant to announce God’s forgiveness, he also meant to remind the Corinthian Church that the new creation was now upon them, and so they were invited to live in that newness now. “Be reconciled to God,” he said. Allow God’s grace to flow into your life and change it”.
Now Paul was not suggesting here that the new creation, which was already dawning, would mean an easy life, free from struggle and woes. In fact, he listed the struggles he and other disciples had borne for the sake of the gospel---probably in effort to gain credibility. See what we have gone through---hardships, beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, hunger. And we have faced all this, he said, using the weapons of righteousness God has given us. It does sound a bit like bragging. But the Corinthian Church was not always receptive to Paul; they were not sure they could trust him. After all, he was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. He had never even met Jesus, and he had also been a persecutor of Christians, a zealous Jew, faithful to the Law, who had seen himself as an enemy of the Christians. So why should they trust him? Paul had a great deal of work to do to gain their trust. And work he did. No matter what anyone of us might think or say about Paul, no one can accuse him of being a slacker.
Now many Christians blame Paul for spiritualizing the message of Jesus---that is, proclaiming the central message of Jesus to be about the forgiveness of sin and the future life, the resurrected life after death. They blame Paul for denigrating the body and ignoring the actual call of Jesus to help repair the brokenness of the world. Admittedly, Paul does not point to Jesus’ life as an example of a life to be followed and imitated. He never once used Jesus’ parables and teachings to lay down the ethical standards by which we are called to live. When we read, for example, the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, or the Sermon on the Mount or the great judgment in Matthew 25, we understand that we are being told how to treat others. None of this was ever mentioned by Paul, and so it is very easy for people to get the impression that for Paul what we do does not matter nearly as much as what we believe about Jesus Christ.
But neither deeds nor belief earn salvation. The salvation that is now; the time that is the acceptable time---all this is a gift, something God in Jesus Christ has done and is doing. What Paul is trying to say here is ---Open your eyes; see what is before you, and in response to what you see, in response to what is being done for you, live a new way; live into the new creation. Open wide your hearts. That is the last sentence from Paul in our text for today.
Something new does indeed happen when we choose to open wide our hearts. We begin to notice what and whom we did not notice before. A wide heart makes room for others; it notices what is out there and is not preoccupied with self. One of my sons, who is a PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told me about a friend of his, who has just finished his third year of medical school there, and understandably was very preoccupied with what kind of residency he will apply for in the fall. And so he was thinking about the rotations he had so far done and what ones he would do next year, worrying about how he would or even could make a choice, since he would have to apply for his residency even before he finished all his rotations. As he was quickly walking down the street, on the way to the hospital, where he was already late for some instruction in radiology, a specialty in which he was quite interested, he went by an apartment building, where a little boy of no more than 4 or 5 was sitting and crying on the steps. Josh continued to hurry by, and then he suddenly stopped and turned around. “What’s wrong?” he asked the child. “My Mommy’s sick; she’s on the floor,” and in a flash the young man ran upstairs with the child and found the woman barely breathing. It turned out she had a serious heart defect, which could be corrected through surgery and medication.
By the end of the week, Josh had made his choice for residency---family medicine among the poor. What made your friend turn around and go back? I asked. I don’t know, Aaron said. All he could say was that suddenly he noticed someone there he could not ignore. Notice what is out there, David Brooks wanted to say to the new college graduates. It is not all about you but what you can do in relationship to a world that needs something you can help do or solve. See what is before you and respond. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Salvation is not only about life after death, but is also about the life we choose to live now and the heart we are called to open wide today and the new person we are challenged to become.
2 Corinthians 6: 1-13
David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, had some interesting reflections on addresses given at college graduations. So many of them, he said, encourage the graduates to look within themselves. Find your deepest heart’s desire and then follow your bliss, heed your passion, for that road is the one most likely to lead to success and happiness. But Brooks has a different take on the matter. “You don’t first look inside yourself”, he said, “and then go ahead and plan your life. You must see what is out there, what problems need solving; what questions call forth your energy and passion; what out there summons your life? In other words, Brooks wants to say, “It’s not all about you and what you want to do. It’s about what needs doing, what needs solving, what needs answering and how your skills and passions can go about doing, solving and answering.
When Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Corinth, one of the questions or problems people were facing was the question of death and infinitude. Let’s face it, death poses a major question and problem for human beings. While all created life is limited, it seems that we humans are the creatures who reflect on this, who wonder what it means that we live and die. And with that question in mind, we run into this word, salvation, a word, which in our everyday spoken language is not commonly used. What does it mean to be saved? What are we saved from and what are we saved for?
Now I suspect that for many of you the word salvation might suggest something about going to heaven after you die, where you will be with God and perhaps with friends and family, at least those you can stand. For many people salvation is tantamount to heaven, being saved from the torments of hell, or as modern theology is prone to say, saved from non-being. But the truth is Jesus spent almost no time at all speaking about life after death and heaven. After Jesus’ resurrection, when he appeared to his disciples, he did not teach them about heaven; he did not tell them anything at all about what it was like after he died, or where he went and what happened there. No, he told them to do something; get busy; heal the sick, cast out the demons, feed the hungry, show mercy, forgive sins and announce the new creation, which in him and through him was and is already dawning. This is the kingdom of God, or at least the kingdom’s beginning. It is not yet final; it has not yet completely come. But in and through Jesus Christ and the community that has grown up around him, the kingdom is both already and not yet. And this kingdom is salvation---salvation now and salvation then.
When Paul wrote to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, he did not describe heaven. Instead he wrote, “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.” He was actually quoting here a line from the Prophet Isaiah, where God pronounced forgiveness on the people for all their sins against him. Paul not only meant to announce God’s forgiveness, he also meant to remind the Corinthian Church that the new creation was now upon them, and so they were invited to live in that newness now. “Be reconciled to God,” he said. Allow God’s grace to flow into your life and change it”.
Now Paul was not suggesting here that the new creation, which was already dawning, would mean an easy life, free from struggle and woes. In fact, he listed the struggles he and other disciples had borne for the sake of the gospel---probably in effort to gain credibility. See what we have gone through---hardships, beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, hunger. And we have faced all this, he said, using the weapons of righteousness God has given us. It does sound a bit like bragging. But the Corinthian Church was not always receptive to Paul; they were not sure they could trust him. After all, he was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. He had never even met Jesus, and he had also been a persecutor of Christians, a zealous Jew, faithful to the Law, who had seen himself as an enemy of the Christians. So why should they trust him? Paul had a great deal of work to do to gain their trust. And work he did. No matter what anyone of us might think or say about Paul, no one can accuse him of being a slacker.
Now many Christians blame Paul for spiritualizing the message of Jesus---that is, proclaiming the central message of Jesus to be about the forgiveness of sin and the future life, the resurrected life after death. They blame Paul for denigrating the body and ignoring the actual call of Jesus to help repair the brokenness of the world. Admittedly, Paul does not point to Jesus’ life as an example of a life to be followed and imitated. He never once used Jesus’ parables and teachings to lay down the ethical standards by which we are called to live. When we read, for example, the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, or the Sermon on the Mount or the great judgment in Matthew 25, we understand that we are being told how to treat others. None of this was ever mentioned by Paul, and so it is very easy for people to get the impression that for Paul what we do does not matter nearly as much as what we believe about Jesus Christ.
But neither deeds nor belief earn salvation. The salvation that is now; the time that is the acceptable time---all this is a gift, something God in Jesus Christ has done and is doing. What Paul is trying to say here is ---Open your eyes; see what is before you, and in response to what you see, in response to what is being done for you, live a new way; live into the new creation. Open wide your hearts. That is the last sentence from Paul in our text for today.
Something new does indeed happen when we choose to open wide our hearts. We begin to notice what and whom we did not notice before. A wide heart makes room for others; it notices what is out there and is not preoccupied with self. One of my sons, who is a PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told me about a friend of his, who has just finished his third year of medical school there, and understandably was very preoccupied with what kind of residency he will apply for in the fall. And so he was thinking about the rotations he had so far done and what ones he would do next year, worrying about how he would or even could make a choice, since he would have to apply for his residency even before he finished all his rotations. As he was quickly walking down the street, on the way to the hospital, where he was already late for some instruction in radiology, a specialty in which he was quite interested, he went by an apartment building, where a little boy of no more than 4 or 5 was sitting and crying on the steps. Josh continued to hurry by, and then he suddenly stopped and turned around. “What’s wrong?” he asked the child. “My Mommy’s sick; she’s on the floor,” and in a flash the young man ran upstairs with the child and found the woman barely breathing. It turned out she had a serious heart defect, which could be corrected through surgery and medication.
By the end of the week, Josh had made his choice for residency---family medicine among the poor. What made your friend turn around and go back? I asked. I don’t know, Aaron said. All he could say was that suddenly he noticed someone there he could not ignore. Notice what is out there, David Brooks wanted to say to the new college graduates. It is not all about you but what you can do in relationship to a world that needs something you can help do or solve. See what is before you and respond. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Salvation is not only about life after death, but is also about the life we choose to live now and the heart we are called to open wide today and the new person we are challenged to become.
June 24, 2021
Dear Friends,
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He is a masterful storyteller, and the first time I heard of him was when I was in seminary and was assigned a few of his short stories to read. He was born in 1902 near Warsaw, Poland, and he died in 1991 in Miami, Florida. He immigrated to the United States in 1935 as anti-Semitism was growing in Europe.
Singer grew up in a very religious family with a father who was a rabbi. As a child he recalled that his parents referred to “people of letters” as godless and liars, so it is ironic that he and all his siblings, except the youngest, became writers. On the other hand, his siblings and he had no toys to play with, so books became their great companions. He was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes and at the age of ten would read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Though he admitted he could not understand Dostoevsky’s novel at such a tender age, he realized that its characters were dealing with some of life’s most engaging questions. And indeed, that is what his characters do---they deal with life’s big questions. Singer portrays both saints and sinners because life is full of both.
I do not recall what short stories I was assigned in seminary, but I do remember the professor saying that Singer approved of Abraham as the first real agnostic, because he was unafraid to argue with God. In Singer’s mind, agnostic implied the willingness to keep options open, the capacity to wonder about truth, to weigh the various details without being totally confident of the outcome. Singer greatly admired Abraham’s willingness to bargain with God.
I had not thought about Singer in years, but last week I came across a prayer he had written in 1952. I think it is beautiful and well worth our reflection:
Master of the Universe, fill my heart with love for my people, and rest for the soul.
Let me see the Creator in each and every creature, its mercy for each thing it creates.
There’s not a single drop of water or particle of dust in which your light is lacking, or that is outside your domain.
There is no creature without its creator.
Those who know this live always in joy.
Their parents are but bodies that are here today, and are tomorrow in their graves.
All their friends, all their possessions and honors, are like a passing shadow.
They are themselves like passing clouds, like Jonah’s tree.
But you – you have always existed and will always exist.
You are the only true being, the essence of all things.
Only for you are all problems solved, all challenges effortless.
There is nothing devious in you – no retribution, injustice, or fault.
Evil lives in all things temporary, not in what exists eternally.
You know why you created evil – and who are we to question your integrity?
We have only one comfort in this world – that you are our maker and that we have the power to serve you with joy, awe, and love, all our lives – and that you have given us the ability to understand such things.
Though we may not know the purpose of life, or why you sent us into this world to suffer, we understand that it is our duty to build and not to destroy, to comfort and not to torment, to bring joy rather than sorrow to your creatures.
There is only one joy: to increase and not to lessen the world’s joy.
Seek happiness, but not on account of your neighbors or family, for you are they and they are you, you are bonded, children of God.
God, guard my tongue from evil, my lips from deceit, my mind from sin.
Open my heart to your commands, let my heart seek your teaching, and let all my actions serve a higher purpose.
Those who fear God are the only ones who do not hurt each other, neither in fact nor in principle.
They will never wage war against each other, and for this reason they are the symbol of peace, as it is written: “and your children’s peace shall grow.”
Blessings always,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He is a masterful storyteller, and the first time I heard of him was when I was in seminary and was assigned a few of his short stories to read. He was born in 1902 near Warsaw, Poland, and he died in 1991 in Miami, Florida. He immigrated to the United States in 1935 as anti-Semitism was growing in Europe.
Singer grew up in a very religious family with a father who was a rabbi. As a child he recalled that his parents referred to “people of letters” as godless and liars, so it is ironic that he and all his siblings, except the youngest, became writers. On the other hand, his siblings and he had no toys to play with, so books became their great companions. He was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes and at the age of ten would read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Though he admitted he could not understand Dostoevsky’s novel at such a tender age, he realized that its characters were dealing with some of life’s most engaging questions. And indeed, that is what his characters do---they deal with life’s big questions. Singer portrays both saints and sinners because life is full of both.
I do not recall what short stories I was assigned in seminary, but I do remember the professor saying that Singer approved of Abraham as the first real agnostic, because he was unafraid to argue with God. In Singer’s mind, agnostic implied the willingness to keep options open, the capacity to wonder about truth, to weigh the various details without being totally confident of the outcome. Singer greatly admired Abraham’s willingness to bargain with God.
I had not thought about Singer in years, but last week I came across a prayer he had written in 1952. I think it is beautiful and well worth our reflection:
Master of the Universe, fill my heart with love for my people, and rest for the soul.
Let me see the Creator in each and every creature, its mercy for each thing it creates.
There’s not a single drop of water or particle of dust in which your light is lacking, or that is outside your domain.
There is no creature without its creator.
Those who know this live always in joy.
Their parents are but bodies that are here today, and are tomorrow in their graves.
All their friends, all their possessions and honors, are like a passing shadow.
They are themselves like passing clouds, like Jonah’s tree.
But you – you have always existed and will always exist.
You are the only true being, the essence of all things.
Only for you are all problems solved, all challenges effortless.
There is nothing devious in you – no retribution, injustice, or fault.
Evil lives in all things temporary, not in what exists eternally.
You know why you created evil – and who are we to question your integrity?
We have only one comfort in this world – that you are our maker and that we have the power to serve you with joy, awe, and love, all our lives – and that you have given us the ability to understand such things.
Though we may not know the purpose of life, or why you sent us into this world to suffer, we understand that it is our duty to build and not to destroy, to comfort and not to torment, to bring joy rather than sorrow to your creatures.
There is only one joy: to increase and not to lessen the world’s joy.
Seek happiness, but not on account of your neighbors or family, for you are they and they are you, you are bonded, children of God.
God, guard my tongue from evil, my lips from deceit, my mind from sin.
Open my heart to your commands, let my heart seek your teaching, and let all my actions serve a higher purpose.
Those who fear God are the only ones who do not hurt each other, neither in fact nor in principle.
They will never wage war against each other, and for this reason they are the symbol of peace, as it is written: “and your children’s peace shall grow.”
Blessings always,
Sandra
FATHERS: WORKING TO SAVE THEIR CHILDREN by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 6/13/2021
Mark 5: 23-24, 35-43
Luke 15: 11-32
About a month ago a small group of clergy women, including me, were discussing images of mothers and fathers in scripture. Someone noted how violent many of the Old Testament stories were about fathers and their children---the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham comes immediately to mind, and then there is the story of the father who would prefer to have his daughter raped by a brood of licentious men rather than give them his male guests, which, he said, would be a horrendous breach of the rule of hospitality. Better to take the daughter than the guests. And then the conversation turned to the New Testament--- the story of the Jewish leader, who was seeking healing for his daughter, and of course, the beloved story of the Prodigal Son and his forgiving father. In these last two stories we have examples of fathers working to save their children---one from physical death and the second from a life of dissipation and hunger, which, if unchecked, could lead to physical death.
The conversation then evolved to stories about our own fathers. Were there any examples among us of fathers saving us from serious blunders or life threatening actions? There were a few, but one in particular stands out. The woman who told it was in her latter 50’s, and she began by saying, “I have never told anyone this story. On many levels it is so embarrassing for me as well as my parents. But my father saved me.
I was 22 years old, self-consumed and utterly insensitive to the man I was about to marry. It was my wedding day, and there I was all dressed in my finery, at the church in the room designated for brides only. Suddenly, there stood my father. Looking at me as only he could do with that knowing stare of his, boring deep into my heart and soul, “Pumpkin,” he asked, “how are you?” “OK,” I muttered, and then two big tears began to roll down my cheeks. What’s this for? he wanted to know. “Are you having second thoughts?”
Oh, Daddy, I sobbed. I do not love this man. Sometimes I even think I hate him. But I don’t know why. He is good, really, but I don’t love him, and maybe I don’t even like him.
“OK,” he said, looking a bit relieved himself. I don’t think he liked the man I was about to marry. “I’ll tell you what we are going to do. My car is right out front, you know the Impala red convertible, the one you always wanted to drive, but I wouldn’t let you, because I am very protective of it. We are going to go out this back door and get in the car and drive away---the Mexican border isn’t too far, and we will have a great time for a week or so. We will leave your mother to clean up the mess. She is very good at that, much better than you or I could ever dream of being.
“Daddy,” I said. “We can’t do such a thing. It would be so, so embarrassing.”
“Right you are,” he said, “but not as embarrassing as marrying someone you do not love and then living through the mess of that grave miscalculation and being miserable for who knows how long before you have the guts to correct the mistake you can correct right this minute. Come on, let’s go now.”
“I just can’t do it,” I protested. “I can’t. The music is already playing, the second time. People must be wondering where we are.”
And so, I walked out of the room to the end of the aisle and waited for my father. He did not come at first, but I knew he would not leave me there to stand alone, and soon there he was. We began the wedding march, which felt like a death march, until I reached the middle of the aisle, and turning to my Father, I said, “Let’s go now”. And he and I just ran as fast as we could out of the church. We jumped into the car and off he sped. We drove for hours and hours without saying one world to each other. I mean what could we say? Finally, I began to laugh. I laughed out loud. Daddy, I said, I should be crying, but I can’t cry. All I can do is laugh.
We didn’t go to Mexico, but we had a great time in southern California. My father and I talked about things we had never talked about before. He told me all about his time in the South Pacific during the Second World War, how utterly horrible it was, how he had lost not one, not two, but three of his best buddies.
“I don’t know why I was spared,” he said to his daughter. “I think it was just dumb luck. Some people would try to tell me God had a special plan for me, but why wouldn’t God have a special plan for my best buddies. One of them, Gene, was a brilliant surgeon, a father of two. He should not have died, but war doesn’t care about how brilliant or gifted you are. After surviving that horror, I pledged that I would make each day count, that I would not take life for granted, that I would try to find happiness for me and for others. That’s why I teach history. I don’t want the follies of the past repeated.
And then my father listened to me talk about Peter, my high school boyfriend, who went to Cornell and then later got drafted when his number came up. Peter talked about going to Canada, but he didn’t, because he knew his father would never approve. And Peter died, shot down in a helicopter.
You never mentioned this to your mother and me. We never knew you lost someone in Viet Nam.
He wasn’t the only one, Daddy, I said. There were two others. I just could never bear to talk about it.
And so, it was for one week. We talked, and then we returned home.
My father was right. My mother had taken care of everything. Oh, people were upset, but they got over it. And my jilted groom: the truth is he was as relieved as I was. He knew we did not love each other. My mother said she knew it too. And she was just as relieved as my father and I were.
I don’t know why, but in my family, we never used to talk about things. Everything was always under the rug, under the table. But after this, well, the whole family began to open up. We talked about everything. It was like a dam broke, and the flood came pouring in. So, my father literally saved me—saved me from a marriage that never would have survived and saved me from the fear of opening up, the fear of talking about what really matters. And it all began with my father talking about the horrors of his experience in the war. If he had not dared to do that, I think I would have kept myself all shut down and shut in---at least for a long time. He saved me from that, and I am so grateful.” As well she should be.
The fathers in our two biblical stories also saved their children from some very negative experiences. One father, a leader in the Jewish synagogue, decided to trust Jesus to heal his daughter. Here this Jesus character was, someone who lived outside the normal boundaries of Jewish law, someone who was already showing himself to be an enemy of convention, and yet this father decided to take a chance on Jesus. After all, the father was a leader in the synagogue, and he would be expected to follow the rules. We can imagine the tongues wagging. Why is he inviting this renegade into his house? Doesn’t he know all the trouble this man has caused? And yet this troublemaker would heal his daughter---even though the daughter appeared to be already dead.
And what about the father, who ran to meet that wastrel of a son, forgiving and embracing the one who had insulted and betrayed him. First of all, when the son asked for his share of the inheritance, it was like saying, “I wish you were dead.” It was a completely inappropriate thing to do. And talk about inappropriate the father running out to meet his wayward son was also improper, again according to the conventions of the day. No father should run to the son first; the son should come to the father. People must have scratched their heads in confusion and wonderment: What the heck is going on here? What was going on was that this father had made a decision to let God’s grace flow in, allowing him to forgive and embrace the son, who had betrayed him.
Sometimes fathers do save their children, even adult children, from terrible errors. Perhaps there are those who would say, “Let the children live with the consequences of their actions. That is the only way they will learn.” But fathers (like mothers sometimes) and even like God, who really is symbolized by the forgiving father, sometime intervene at exactly the right time for the right lesson.
Mark 5: 23-24, 35-43
Luke 15: 11-32
About a month ago a small group of clergy women, including me, were discussing images of mothers and fathers in scripture. Someone noted how violent many of the Old Testament stories were about fathers and their children---the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham comes immediately to mind, and then there is the story of the father who would prefer to have his daughter raped by a brood of licentious men rather than give them his male guests, which, he said, would be a horrendous breach of the rule of hospitality. Better to take the daughter than the guests. And then the conversation turned to the New Testament--- the story of the Jewish leader, who was seeking healing for his daughter, and of course, the beloved story of the Prodigal Son and his forgiving father. In these last two stories we have examples of fathers working to save their children---one from physical death and the second from a life of dissipation and hunger, which, if unchecked, could lead to physical death.
The conversation then evolved to stories about our own fathers. Were there any examples among us of fathers saving us from serious blunders or life threatening actions? There were a few, but one in particular stands out. The woman who told it was in her latter 50’s, and she began by saying, “I have never told anyone this story. On many levels it is so embarrassing for me as well as my parents. But my father saved me.
I was 22 years old, self-consumed and utterly insensitive to the man I was about to marry. It was my wedding day, and there I was all dressed in my finery, at the church in the room designated for brides only. Suddenly, there stood my father. Looking at me as only he could do with that knowing stare of his, boring deep into my heart and soul, “Pumpkin,” he asked, “how are you?” “OK,” I muttered, and then two big tears began to roll down my cheeks. What’s this for? he wanted to know. “Are you having second thoughts?”
Oh, Daddy, I sobbed. I do not love this man. Sometimes I even think I hate him. But I don’t know why. He is good, really, but I don’t love him, and maybe I don’t even like him.
“OK,” he said, looking a bit relieved himself. I don’t think he liked the man I was about to marry. “I’ll tell you what we are going to do. My car is right out front, you know the Impala red convertible, the one you always wanted to drive, but I wouldn’t let you, because I am very protective of it. We are going to go out this back door and get in the car and drive away---the Mexican border isn’t too far, and we will have a great time for a week or so. We will leave your mother to clean up the mess. She is very good at that, much better than you or I could ever dream of being.
“Daddy,” I said. “We can’t do such a thing. It would be so, so embarrassing.”
“Right you are,” he said, “but not as embarrassing as marrying someone you do not love and then living through the mess of that grave miscalculation and being miserable for who knows how long before you have the guts to correct the mistake you can correct right this minute. Come on, let’s go now.”
“I just can’t do it,” I protested. “I can’t. The music is already playing, the second time. People must be wondering where we are.”
And so, I walked out of the room to the end of the aisle and waited for my father. He did not come at first, but I knew he would not leave me there to stand alone, and soon there he was. We began the wedding march, which felt like a death march, until I reached the middle of the aisle, and turning to my Father, I said, “Let’s go now”. And he and I just ran as fast as we could out of the church. We jumped into the car and off he sped. We drove for hours and hours without saying one world to each other. I mean what could we say? Finally, I began to laugh. I laughed out loud. Daddy, I said, I should be crying, but I can’t cry. All I can do is laugh.
We didn’t go to Mexico, but we had a great time in southern California. My father and I talked about things we had never talked about before. He told me all about his time in the South Pacific during the Second World War, how utterly horrible it was, how he had lost not one, not two, but three of his best buddies.
“I don’t know why I was spared,” he said to his daughter. “I think it was just dumb luck. Some people would try to tell me God had a special plan for me, but why wouldn’t God have a special plan for my best buddies. One of them, Gene, was a brilliant surgeon, a father of two. He should not have died, but war doesn’t care about how brilliant or gifted you are. After surviving that horror, I pledged that I would make each day count, that I would not take life for granted, that I would try to find happiness for me and for others. That’s why I teach history. I don’t want the follies of the past repeated.
And then my father listened to me talk about Peter, my high school boyfriend, who went to Cornell and then later got drafted when his number came up. Peter talked about going to Canada, but he didn’t, because he knew his father would never approve. And Peter died, shot down in a helicopter.
You never mentioned this to your mother and me. We never knew you lost someone in Viet Nam.
He wasn’t the only one, Daddy, I said. There were two others. I just could never bear to talk about it.
And so, it was for one week. We talked, and then we returned home.
My father was right. My mother had taken care of everything. Oh, people were upset, but they got over it. And my jilted groom: the truth is he was as relieved as I was. He knew we did not love each other. My mother said she knew it too. And she was just as relieved as my father and I were.
I don’t know why, but in my family, we never used to talk about things. Everything was always under the rug, under the table. But after this, well, the whole family began to open up. We talked about everything. It was like a dam broke, and the flood came pouring in. So, my father literally saved me—saved me from a marriage that never would have survived and saved me from the fear of opening up, the fear of talking about what really matters. And it all began with my father talking about the horrors of his experience in the war. If he had not dared to do that, I think I would have kept myself all shut down and shut in---at least for a long time. He saved me from that, and I am so grateful.” As well she should be.
The fathers in our two biblical stories also saved their children from some very negative experiences. One father, a leader in the Jewish synagogue, decided to trust Jesus to heal his daughter. Here this Jesus character was, someone who lived outside the normal boundaries of Jewish law, someone who was already showing himself to be an enemy of convention, and yet this father decided to take a chance on Jesus. After all, the father was a leader in the synagogue, and he would be expected to follow the rules. We can imagine the tongues wagging. Why is he inviting this renegade into his house? Doesn’t he know all the trouble this man has caused? And yet this troublemaker would heal his daughter---even though the daughter appeared to be already dead.
And what about the father, who ran to meet that wastrel of a son, forgiving and embracing the one who had insulted and betrayed him. First of all, when the son asked for his share of the inheritance, it was like saying, “I wish you were dead.” It was a completely inappropriate thing to do. And talk about inappropriate the father running out to meet his wayward son was also improper, again according to the conventions of the day. No father should run to the son first; the son should come to the father. People must have scratched their heads in confusion and wonderment: What the heck is going on here? What was going on was that this father had made a decision to let God’s grace flow in, allowing him to forgive and embrace the son, who had betrayed him.
Sometimes fathers do save their children, even adult children, from terrible errors. Perhaps there are those who would say, “Let the children live with the consequences of their actions. That is the only way they will learn.” But fathers (like mothers sometimes) and even like God, who really is symbolized by the forgiving father, sometime intervene at exactly the right time for the right lesson.
June 15, 2021
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago I was in CVS, when I happened to walk by the card section with a display of Father’s Day cards staring me in the face. It has been a long time since I have purchased cards for my own father as well as my father- in- law. (My husband would never remember to buy cards.). My father- in- law died in June, 2002, and my father died in January, 2003. I decided to read some of the cards, imagining which ones I would have purchased for my father- in -law and my father. For my father I usually would purchase something humorous, but my father- in- law was more of a challenge. The relationship between my husband and his father was somewhat strained due to a second marriage and a step mother, whom my husband (and his brother) never liked. They were well into their 20’s, when he remarried, so they were never mothered by this woman, but that made no difference. They just did not like her at all.
Anyway, as I stood there, reading some of the cards, suddenly I was flooded with all kinds of memories of both men. I remembered sitting at the dinner table, staring at the vegetables I absolutely hated with my mother insisting I had to eat EVERYTHING on my plate. And so there I would sit, long after everyone else had left the table. My father, who like me, was a fussy eater, would sometimes sneak into the kitchen and take the vegetables away. One time he was caught, and she made me eat double the beets, which to this day I despise. And then I remembered all the stories my father would make up. He had a great imagination, and to this day I still think his stories were every bit as good as Winnie the Pooh---maybe even better!
When I was in high school, I would often sit reading in the living room, and my father would enter, saying, “What are you up to, plotting against the government?” Though he and I were often on the same political side, somehow we always ended up arguing about politics. It was more of a personality thing rather than ideology. The two of us just liked to argue!
I picked up a card that had a pile of books on the front, and I immediately remembered being very little and touching the books in my father’s bookcase. I knew his books were precious, and I thought it would be the most wonderful thing in the world to be able to read all those books. Sometimes I would dare to take one or two out, but I was always very careful to put them back exactly where he had placed them. He was crazy about his books and very protective of them.
Of course, my father -in- law loved his books as well. He was a professor at Harvard, so reading and thinking were his life, and like my own father, he too loved to argue. My husband to this day claims that his father was the single most important intellectual influence on his life. They were not in the same fields at all, but his father used to take the opposite side, just to get his children to defend their ideas. When I first married into the family, I could never tell what my father- in -law truly believed, because he was always taking a position just for the sake of argument.
Standing there in the store, I suddenly remembered this one time my father -in- law was very upset about his department at Harvard. He was the chairman, and there was this one young secretary, who was just terrible at her job. It was obvious she hated it. My father -in -law claimed she was very smart and being a secretary was simply not what she wanted to do with her life, but she had not yet figured out a path. Well, the rest of the department wanted to fire her, but my father- in-law would not let them. “You can’t fire her,” he insisted. “She is a single woman, and she needs a job. How do you think she will pay her rent and her bills? Besides, do any of us think we would want to do this job?” No one said a word, and so he responded, “I didn’t think so. He protected her until she found another job. Eventually, she returned to school and became a professor of philosophy!
There was this one card with a picture of boat on a lake, which immediately took me back to the modest summer home on a lake my in laws had purchased years ago. When they divorced, my father -in -law got the lake house. The house and property were called Loomer Place in honor of the man, who literally built the house with his bare hands. One day the sign fell down, and as my father- in -law was putting it back up, I asked him why he didn’t change the name of the place to Oliver Place, which was his family name. I will never forget how he glowered at me. “Do you think I would dare to change the name of this place? Why, that would be a sacrilege. I owe it to Mr. Loomer and his wife to keep the name. They loved it, and they built it, and I have no right to take what they built and put my own name on it.” He was practically yelling at me, and I asked him why he was so mad. “I was just asking a simple question,” I said. “No, it’s not simple,” he insisted. “It shows a complete lack of respect.” And then he walked away, leaving me standing there, embarrassed and a little bit ashamed.
So, there I stood in CVS, flooded with these happy-sad memories. As I stood there, I decided to buy two cards, one for my father and one for my father-in -law. The one for my father-in -law had the lake and boat on the cover and read “You Taught Me Things I Didn’t Want to Learn But Needed To. Thanks, Dad.” And for my own father I chose the one that had a pile of books on the front that read, “Thanks for All the Lessons and the Memories” Simple messages, but oh, so profoundly true.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago I was in CVS, when I happened to walk by the card section with a display of Father’s Day cards staring me in the face. It has been a long time since I have purchased cards for my own father as well as my father- in- law. (My husband would never remember to buy cards.). My father- in- law died in June, 2002, and my father died in January, 2003. I decided to read some of the cards, imagining which ones I would have purchased for my father- in -law and my father. For my father I usually would purchase something humorous, but my father- in- law was more of a challenge. The relationship between my husband and his father was somewhat strained due to a second marriage and a step mother, whom my husband (and his brother) never liked. They were well into their 20’s, when he remarried, so they were never mothered by this woman, but that made no difference. They just did not like her at all.
Anyway, as I stood there, reading some of the cards, suddenly I was flooded with all kinds of memories of both men. I remembered sitting at the dinner table, staring at the vegetables I absolutely hated with my mother insisting I had to eat EVERYTHING on my plate. And so there I would sit, long after everyone else had left the table. My father, who like me, was a fussy eater, would sometimes sneak into the kitchen and take the vegetables away. One time he was caught, and she made me eat double the beets, which to this day I despise. And then I remembered all the stories my father would make up. He had a great imagination, and to this day I still think his stories were every bit as good as Winnie the Pooh---maybe even better!
When I was in high school, I would often sit reading in the living room, and my father would enter, saying, “What are you up to, plotting against the government?” Though he and I were often on the same political side, somehow we always ended up arguing about politics. It was more of a personality thing rather than ideology. The two of us just liked to argue!
I picked up a card that had a pile of books on the front, and I immediately remembered being very little and touching the books in my father’s bookcase. I knew his books were precious, and I thought it would be the most wonderful thing in the world to be able to read all those books. Sometimes I would dare to take one or two out, but I was always very careful to put them back exactly where he had placed them. He was crazy about his books and very protective of them.
Of course, my father -in- law loved his books as well. He was a professor at Harvard, so reading and thinking were his life, and like my own father, he too loved to argue. My husband to this day claims that his father was the single most important intellectual influence on his life. They were not in the same fields at all, but his father used to take the opposite side, just to get his children to defend their ideas. When I first married into the family, I could never tell what my father- in -law truly believed, because he was always taking a position just for the sake of argument.
Standing there in the store, I suddenly remembered this one time my father -in- law was very upset about his department at Harvard. He was the chairman, and there was this one young secretary, who was just terrible at her job. It was obvious she hated it. My father -in -law claimed she was very smart and being a secretary was simply not what she wanted to do with her life, but she had not yet figured out a path. Well, the rest of the department wanted to fire her, but my father- in-law would not let them. “You can’t fire her,” he insisted. “She is a single woman, and she needs a job. How do you think she will pay her rent and her bills? Besides, do any of us think we would want to do this job?” No one said a word, and so he responded, “I didn’t think so. He protected her until she found another job. Eventually, she returned to school and became a professor of philosophy!
There was this one card with a picture of boat on a lake, which immediately took me back to the modest summer home on a lake my in laws had purchased years ago. When they divorced, my father -in -law got the lake house. The house and property were called Loomer Place in honor of the man, who literally built the house with his bare hands. One day the sign fell down, and as my father- in -law was putting it back up, I asked him why he didn’t change the name of the place to Oliver Place, which was his family name. I will never forget how he glowered at me. “Do you think I would dare to change the name of this place? Why, that would be a sacrilege. I owe it to Mr. Loomer and his wife to keep the name. They loved it, and they built it, and I have no right to take what they built and put my own name on it.” He was practically yelling at me, and I asked him why he was so mad. “I was just asking a simple question,” I said. “No, it’s not simple,” he insisted. “It shows a complete lack of respect.” And then he walked away, leaving me standing there, embarrassed and a little bit ashamed.
So, there I stood in CVS, flooded with these happy-sad memories. As I stood there, I decided to buy two cards, one for my father and one for my father-in -law. The one for my father-in -law had the lake and boat on the cover and read “You Taught Me Things I Didn’t Want to Learn But Needed To. Thanks, Dad.” And for my own father I chose the one that had a pile of books on the front that read, “Thanks for All the Lessons and the Memories” Simple messages, but oh, so profoundly true.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHEN IMAGE ISN’T EVERYTHING by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 6/13/2021
1 Samuel 15: 34-16:13
Mark 4: 26-34
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article in the New York Times about the Hamptons---the eastern end of Long Island, where the rich and super-rich live and play. The article was describing some of the stores, filled with designer objects and clothes, most of whose names I did not even recognize. Everything about the Hamptons seems to point to an obsession with image.
We all know about image, but did you also know that there are industries that have arisen to give people the feel and experience of an image that they really cannot afford. One of my sons says there are companies that rent out designer dresses for an evening for $200, or a $25,000 diamond necklace for $350. And should you want to go to the ball in style, you can rent a $430,000 Rolls Royce for $2500 a day. But that’s not all. If you are feeling ignored, for $500 you can rent four paparazzi to follow you around for 30 minutes, taking pictures of your every move. And as absurd as it sounds, these businesses are making piles of money---helping people to pretend that image is everything, even when it is not.
Of course, on some level, concern with image is not completely new. If we turn to the book of Samuel, we have the story of Israel, which began as a loose federation of 12 tribes. The authority structure was decentralized, and Israel was ruled by judges, not kings. But Israel wanted a king because they wanted to be like other nations. Never mind that God had told them they were not to be like others; never mind that they were told kings would bring them trouble. Samuel was a kind of prophet, appointed by God to lead and give advice, and though he tried to dissuade the people from this king idea, he could not convince them. So, God told Samuel to give them what they wanted. Sometimes that is the punishment: getting what you want. And so, Israel got Saul, their first king.
Now back in the book of Deuteronomy God had pretty much told Israel what an ideal ruler should look like. It wasn’t someone whose image projected wealth and power. No, Israel’s ideal ruler was to keep two copies of the Torah so he might read and ponder God’s Word and Law. This leader would be a servant, not a celebrity. But the people wanted Saul because he projected a great image---- tall, dark, and handsome, and from a good family. Saul, like many people who are admired, looked good without really being good. Now there is much about Saul that should elicit our sympathy. He probably never wanted to be king. When lots were drawn and Saul was chosen, he had to be pulled out of hiding. He was a reluctant leader, who feared his own people, and so he was often manipulated into following their inclinations rather than God’s. So, God finally rejected him as king and commanded Samuel to go to Bethlehem to choose another.
Notice the first question the Bethlehem elders put to Samuel: Do you come peaceably? They had every reason to be nervous and afraid, because there was so much instability all around them. Not only was the throne unstable, but there was also this war with the Philistines, so no wonder they wanted to know if Samuel came peaceably. Samuel reassured them that he did come in peace, but that was not exactly true, because at God’s command he had come to stir up trouble. Though Saul was still on the throne, God wanted the people to choose another king, which is really an act of treason. This was a very messy situation, indeed.
Samuel was there to find the new king, hidden among the sons of Jesse. And his eyes laid upon Eliab, the oldest son, a big, strong, good looking guy. Surely, this must be the one, thought Samuel. But no, he was not the one. Remember, Saul too had been big and strong and good looking. So God reminded Samuel that image is not everything. “Do not look on his appearance or the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the onward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And so, Samuel went through all seven of Jesse’s sons, but still no promise of a king. We can imagine Samuel’s frustration. “Are all your sons here?” he wanted to know. And Jesse told him there was one more, the youngest, who was out in the fields, tending the sheep. Bring him in, came the command. And this was the one---the youngest, the smallest, the one who was doing the dirty job of caring for the sheep---this was the one God had chosen. By the way, you may not know that tending sheep was considered an unclean job, putting such a person way down on the social scale. But God does not see as humans see, so this low status boy, whose promise was hidden from human sight, was God’s choice.
Notice that we do not even learn the name of this youngest son until after Samuel anointed him, until after the spirit of the Lord came upon him. David’s name was hidden in the story, just as David himself was hidden in the pasture, just as the future was hidden from Israel and is hidden from us. The future and the name by which and through the future comes are always hidden from those who see as mortals see. And, of course, how else can we see? We are mortals, and so we see as mortals. We see the images, the outward appearance, and we are often fooled by what we see. There is inevitability to this limitation, but we are reminded: this is not as God sees. Image, the outward appearance, isn’t everything.
The so called historical books of the bible, like Samuel and Kings, interpret history through the lens of faith---faith that God was acting in and through Israel’s story. God would build a new history out of the dying past, even when mortals could not and cannot see what the future holds. Yes, God’s spirit would depart from Saul, and yes, from a mortal point of view that departure is sad, even tragic. No wonder Samuel mourned over Saul. He saw as we see, and when he looked upon this small, young and beautiful boy, Samuel must have wondered what was so promising about this shepherd boy. And Samuel must have also worried about the future---not unlike the way we all worry about the future.
As our reading for today ends, Saul remains king, but God’s spirit has already fallen upon David. A new wind was blowing, and chapter 16 continues by telling us that Saul was a tormented king, who could find no rest, no peace, and no comfort. And yet David will help. He will play his lyre, and the music will soothe, comfort and quiet the tormented king. But only for a moment. The future will prove to be deadly for Saul and for many others, who live fully by and through the power of earthly images. David too will sometimes be impressed by outward appearance—like the beautiful Bathsheba, bathing on the roof. David too will experience God’s judgment. He too will learn that outward appearance is not everything, for God does not see as mortals see. That lesson was not only David’s to learn. In our image obsessed age, we too must learn, painfully at times, the limitation of image. God does not see as mortals do, and no matter how impressive the outward images look to our eyes, they are not the ones God sees and chooses.
1 Samuel 15: 34-16:13
Mark 4: 26-34
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article in the New York Times about the Hamptons---the eastern end of Long Island, where the rich and super-rich live and play. The article was describing some of the stores, filled with designer objects and clothes, most of whose names I did not even recognize. Everything about the Hamptons seems to point to an obsession with image.
We all know about image, but did you also know that there are industries that have arisen to give people the feel and experience of an image that they really cannot afford. One of my sons says there are companies that rent out designer dresses for an evening for $200, or a $25,000 diamond necklace for $350. And should you want to go to the ball in style, you can rent a $430,000 Rolls Royce for $2500 a day. But that’s not all. If you are feeling ignored, for $500 you can rent four paparazzi to follow you around for 30 minutes, taking pictures of your every move. And as absurd as it sounds, these businesses are making piles of money---helping people to pretend that image is everything, even when it is not.
Of course, on some level, concern with image is not completely new. If we turn to the book of Samuel, we have the story of Israel, which began as a loose federation of 12 tribes. The authority structure was decentralized, and Israel was ruled by judges, not kings. But Israel wanted a king because they wanted to be like other nations. Never mind that God had told them they were not to be like others; never mind that they were told kings would bring them trouble. Samuel was a kind of prophet, appointed by God to lead and give advice, and though he tried to dissuade the people from this king idea, he could not convince them. So, God told Samuel to give them what they wanted. Sometimes that is the punishment: getting what you want. And so, Israel got Saul, their first king.
Now back in the book of Deuteronomy God had pretty much told Israel what an ideal ruler should look like. It wasn’t someone whose image projected wealth and power. No, Israel’s ideal ruler was to keep two copies of the Torah so he might read and ponder God’s Word and Law. This leader would be a servant, not a celebrity. But the people wanted Saul because he projected a great image---- tall, dark, and handsome, and from a good family. Saul, like many people who are admired, looked good without really being good. Now there is much about Saul that should elicit our sympathy. He probably never wanted to be king. When lots were drawn and Saul was chosen, he had to be pulled out of hiding. He was a reluctant leader, who feared his own people, and so he was often manipulated into following their inclinations rather than God’s. So, God finally rejected him as king and commanded Samuel to go to Bethlehem to choose another.
Notice the first question the Bethlehem elders put to Samuel: Do you come peaceably? They had every reason to be nervous and afraid, because there was so much instability all around them. Not only was the throne unstable, but there was also this war with the Philistines, so no wonder they wanted to know if Samuel came peaceably. Samuel reassured them that he did come in peace, but that was not exactly true, because at God’s command he had come to stir up trouble. Though Saul was still on the throne, God wanted the people to choose another king, which is really an act of treason. This was a very messy situation, indeed.
Samuel was there to find the new king, hidden among the sons of Jesse. And his eyes laid upon Eliab, the oldest son, a big, strong, good looking guy. Surely, this must be the one, thought Samuel. But no, he was not the one. Remember, Saul too had been big and strong and good looking. So God reminded Samuel that image is not everything. “Do not look on his appearance or the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the onward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And so, Samuel went through all seven of Jesse’s sons, but still no promise of a king. We can imagine Samuel’s frustration. “Are all your sons here?” he wanted to know. And Jesse told him there was one more, the youngest, who was out in the fields, tending the sheep. Bring him in, came the command. And this was the one---the youngest, the smallest, the one who was doing the dirty job of caring for the sheep---this was the one God had chosen. By the way, you may not know that tending sheep was considered an unclean job, putting such a person way down on the social scale. But God does not see as humans see, so this low status boy, whose promise was hidden from human sight, was God’s choice.
Notice that we do not even learn the name of this youngest son until after Samuel anointed him, until after the spirit of the Lord came upon him. David’s name was hidden in the story, just as David himself was hidden in the pasture, just as the future was hidden from Israel and is hidden from us. The future and the name by which and through the future comes are always hidden from those who see as mortals see. And, of course, how else can we see? We are mortals, and so we see as mortals. We see the images, the outward appearance, and we are often fooled by what we see. There is inevitability to this limitation, but we are reminded: this is not as God sees. Image, the outward appearance, isn’t everything.
The so called historical books of the bible, like Samuel and Kings, interpret history through the lens of faith---faith that God was acting in and through Israel’s story. God would build a new history out of the dying past, even when mortals could not and cannot see what the future holds. Yes, God’s spirit would depart from Saul, and yes, from a mortal point of view that departure is sad, even tragic. No wonder Samuel mourned over Saul. He saw as we see, and when he looked upon this small, young and beautiful boy, Samuel must have wondered what was so promising about this shepherd boy. And Samuel must have also worried about the future---not unlike the way we all worry about the future.
As our reading for today ends, Saul remains king, but God’s spirit has already fallen upon David. A new wind was blowing, and chapter 16 continues by telling us that Saul was a tormented king, who could find no rest, no peace, and no comfort. And yet David will help. He will play his lyre, and the music will soothe, comfort and quiet the tormented king. But only for a moment. The future will prove to be deadly for Saul and for many others, who live fully by and through the power of earthly images. David too will sometimes be impressed by outward appearance—like the beautiful Bathsheba, bathing on the roof. David too will experience God’s judgment. He too will learn that outward appearance is not everything, for God does not see as mortals see. That lesson was not only David’s to learn. In our image obsessed age, we too must learn, painfully at times, the limitation of image. God does not see as mortals do, and no matter how impressive the outward images look to our eyes, they are not the ones God sees and chooses.
OUT OF HIS/YOUR MIND by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 6/6/2021
Mark 3: 20-35
Out of his mind: that’s what people said about Jesus. His enemies said it, because in their mind he was undermining the law, like healing and picking grain on the Sabbath. But his family, his mother, brothers, and sisters, also thought he was not quite right in the head. Some scholars think that was such an embarrassing judgment on his family that Luke and Matthew, who borrow so much from Mark, did not include this judgment of Jesus’ family. Mark is the one gospel, which is very hard on the people closest to Jesus---including the disciples, whom Mark presents as bumbling idiots.
Now let’s consider for a moment this term, out of his mind. We have used the term ourselves, sometimes to indicate nothing more than a very strong or even excessive emotion, like “She is out of her mind with anger or grief.” I knew this couple from one of my former churches, who had a summer home in the Berkshires, and loved to attend the Tanglewood concerts, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They had a summer home in the Berkshires, and they faithfully attended the concerts. But after the husband suddenly died, the wife not only refused to go to their summer home and the concerts, but she also could not bear to listen to the music they both had loved. She was out of her mind with grief, which destroyed for a while her love of music since the music reminded her of whom she had lost. It took almost five years for her love of music to return, and she would later say, “Beauty has a way of overcoming even the depths of grief.”
There are terrifying aspects of being out of one’s mind. My father in law, a professor at Harvard for nearly 48 years, died from gleocell blastoma, a raging form of brain cancer. He died “out of his mind”, or should I say with no mind, because the radiation killed his brain cells. Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, which destroy the mind, can leave behind a shell of a human being whom no one recognizes as the person they knew and loved. It is a terrible path to travel upon.
And we can imagine that Jesus was traveling on a path of others did not approve. His family expected him to live his life within certain boundaries.
A 30 year old man in first century Palestine, who was apparently unmarried and content to stay that way; a man, who went around not only healing but also forgiving sins--- the latter something people believed only God could do--- a man so concentrated on the coming of God’s kingdom that he was willing to die for it----well to some people that did look like madness.
Oh, we like to sanitize and rationalize Jesus by pointing to him as a great moral teacher and leader, and yet he told stories that insult our morality. He told a parable about workers who were all paid the same amount of money, whether they worked for an hour or the whole day. And then there was this story about a man who found a treasure in a field, covered it up, sold everything he had and bought the field without saying a word to the owner about the treasure on the property. This is great morality? If you and I tried to live by such a code, we would find ourselves in trouble with the law in no time at all.
The truth is Jesus was not harmless, and those who truly take or took his teachings seriously often find themselves in harm’s way as well. Saint Francis walked away from his father’s wealth after coming out of a serous depression, a result of trauma he suffered in a war. He came out the other side as a follower of Jesus, talking to the birds and trees and begging for his living. A saint or a madman?
Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English mystic, suffered blinding headaches and visions and then wrote what she claimed were revelations from Jesus in a book named Showings of Divine Love. Living in the Age of the Black Death, when so many pointed to God’s wrath and punishment of sin, Julian wrote of God’s compassion and desire to save all. “Jesus is our Mother”, she said, “who nurses us at her breast”. Some thought her mad, while others called her a mystic, deserving of sainthood. In modern time, we have Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who lived and worked among the poorest of the poor in New York City and took quite literally Jesus’ teaching that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him. All out of their minds? Well, maybe, at least out of the normal mind of the society in which they lived.
So, what do you think? Was Jesus out of his mind? After all, he did not value what so many others put at the top of the list—like family. In today’s text we hear Jesus define family outside the bloodline. Who are my mother and my brothers? Whoever does the will of God are my brother and sister and mother. This is simply not what most families want to hear in Jesus’ day or in our own. And as for churches, let’s be honest. Churches spend their money on staff and on their buildings, but Jesus didn’t care about such things. He spoke about the Temple’s destruction with such assurance that the religious leadership became even more determined to get rid of him.
Out of his mind: I think he was, out of his mind with a burning love for God, and yes, that does make him different. Flannery O’Connor, a faithful Roman Catholic and masterful short story writer, once said: Know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd. Odd, yes, and even out of your mind.
Mark 3: 20-35
Out of his mind: that’s what people said about Jesus. His enemies said it, because in their mind he was undermining the law, like healing and picking grain on the Sabbath. But his family, his mother, brothers, and sisters, also thought he was not quite right in the head. Some scholars think that was such an embarrassing judgment on his family that Luke and Matthew, who borrow so much from Mark, did not include this judgment of Jesus’ family. Mark is the one gospel, which is very hard on the people closest to Jesus---including the disciples, whom Mark presents as bumbling idiots.
Now let’s consider for a moment this term, out of his mind. We have used the term ourselves, sometimes to indicate nothing more than a very strong or even excessive emotion, like “She is out of her mind with anger or grief.” I knew this couple from one of my former churches, who had a summer home in the Berkshires, and loved to attend the Tanglewood concerts, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They had a summer home in the Berkshires, and they faithfully attended the concerts. But after the husband suddenly died, the wife not only refused to go to their summer home and the concerts, but she also could not bear to listen to the music they both had loved. She was out of her mind with grief, which destroyed for a while her love of music since the music reminded her of whom she had lost. It took almost five years for her love of music to return, and she would later say, “Beauty has a way of overcoming even the depths of grief.”
There are terrifying aspects of being out of one’s mind. My father in law, a professor at Harvard for nearly 48 years, died from gleocell blastoma, a raging form of brain cancer. He died “out of his mind”, or should I say with no mind, because the radiation killed his brain cells. Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, which destroy the mind, can leave behind a shell of a human being whom no one recognizes as the person they knew and loved. It is a terrible path to travel upon.
And we can imagine that Jesus was traveling on a path of others did not approve. His family expected him to live his life within certain boundaries.
A 30 year old man in first century Palestine, who was apparently unmarried and content to stay that way; a man, who went around not only healing but also forgiving sins--- the latter something people believed only God could do--- a man so concentrated on the coming of God’s kingdom that he was willing to die for it----well to some people that did look like madness.
Oh, we like to sanitize and rationalize Jesus by pointing to him as a great moral teacher and leader, and yet he told stories that insult our morality. He told a parable about workers who were all paid the same amount of money, whether they worked for an hour or the whole day. And then there was this story about a man who found a treasure in a field, covered it up, sold everything he had and bought the field without saying a word to the owner about the treasure on the property. This is great morality? If you and I tried to live by such a code, we would find ourselves in trouble with the law in no time at all.
The truth is Jesus was not harmless, and those who truly take or took his teachings seriously often find themselves in harm’s way as well. Saint Francis walked away from his father’s wealth after coming out of a serous depression, a result of trauma he suffered in a war. He came out the other side as a follower of Jesus, talking to the birds and trees and begging for his living. A saint or a madman?
Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English mystic, suffered blinding headaches and visions and then wrote what she claimed were revelations from Jesus in a book named Showings of Divine Love. Living in the Age of the Black Death, when so many pointed to God’s wrath and punishment of sin, Julian wrote of God’s compassion and desire to save all. “Jesus is our Mother”, she said, “who nurses us at her breast”. Some thought her mad, while others called her a mystic, deserving of sainthood. In modern time, we have Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who lived and worked among the poorest of the poor in New York City and took quite literally Jesus’ teaching that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him. All out of their minds? Well, maybe, at least out of the normal mind of the society in which they lived.
So, what do you think? Was Jesus out of his mind? After all, he did not value what so many others put at the top of the list—like family. In today’s text we hear Jesus define family outside the bloodline. Who are my mother and my brothers? Whoever does the will of God are my brother and sister and mother. This is simply not what most families want to hear in Jesus’ day or in our own. And as for churches, let’s be honest. Churches spend their money on staff and on their buildings, but Jesus didn’t care about such things. He spoke about the Temple’s destruction with such assurance that the religious leadership became even more determined to get rid of him.
Out of his mind: I think he was, out of his mind with a burning love for God, and yes, that does make him different. Flannery O’Connor, a faithful Roman Catholic and masterful short story writer, once said: Know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd. Odd, yes, and even out of your mind.
June 4, 2021
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, I wrote that sometimes I am amazed by what makes it onto the front pages of a newspaper. I was specifically referring to an article on the front page of the New York Times about a nun whose message is, “Remember, you will die.” Well, just this past Sunday, I came across another article, this time not on the front page, but still it surprised me a bit, because again it was about death, and as I said in my earlier reflection, death in our culture is often an ignored or denied topic.
While I suppose there are some who would find this article sad or depressing, I actually found it quite inspiring, while also acknowledging its sadness. Written by a woman, Genevieve Kingston, it tells the story of her mother, who died of cancer at the age of 49, when Genevieve was ten days away from her 12th birthday, a day she shared with her mother. When Genevieve was three, her mother was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and over the next nine years, she fought hard to stay alive while researching all kinds of different treatments, everything from the conventional chemotherapy to drinking carrot juice.
What impressed me about this mother was how she decided to prepare her two children, a son and a daughter, for her eventual death. By the time Genevieve was seven, her mother must have realized that the battle would finally be lost, and so she prepared gift boxes for her two children. Into the boxes went letters and gifts to mark each milestone---birthdays---every year up to age 30, the passing of the test for a driver’s license, graduations, engagement, marriage, first baby.
Ten days after her mother’s death, Genevieve sat at the foot of her bed and opened the box. She opened the package marked, 12th birthday, and there it was: an amethyst birthstone ring with a note card: I always wanted a birthstone ring when I was a little girl. Your Granny finally brought me one, and I loved it more than I can say. I hope you like it, too. Happy birthday, darling girl. Love, Your Mommy. I must admit I had to wipe away a few tears as I read it, but I went one, nonetheless, because I was impressed that this woman was able to get outside herself enough to do this project. One of the great temptations of illness is that it can become all-consuming so that everything becomes about oneself, one’s sick body. Self-obsession when sick is certainly understandable. Illness makes us hyper aware of how our body feels. When we physically hurt, when our bodies seem to betray us, it is so easy to withdraw into the self and block everything and everyone else out. But over the years of this mother’s illness, she thought a great deal about what she wanted her children to know and to learn.
On the morning of Genevieve’s graduation from high school, a string of pearls appeared. Her mother wrote that this was a tradition in her family, so Genevieve wore those pearls as she walked across the field that day to receive her high school diploma. All the presents were wrapped with a pink ribbon and a while note card: Happy 15th, Happy 16th, Happy Graduation, You’re a College Girl Now, Happy 21st.
Genevieve wrote that when she was young, opening the packages was like being on a treasure hunt, but as she grew older, she recognized there was something foundational in the experience. Her mother was coming to meet her where she was, and Genevieve appreci ated how hard her mother tried to guide her forward. “Her messages met me like guideposts in a dark forest; if her words couldn’t point the way, at least they offered the comfort of knowing someone had been there before.” That word comfort really struck me, because so often that is what we are looking for in life---the assurance of comfort. As we mature, we realize that no one can live our lives for us; no one can solve our problems or give us the definitive answer to life’s big questions. We pray that God will lead us forward, but we also acknowledge that at times God remains elusive. Especially when it comes to supplying direct answers and aid, and so we come to rely upon the COMFORT of God’s presence, even when we do not know exactly what God is intending. I remember years ago someone telling me after she lost her eight year old daughter to a bicycle accident, “God is not giving me any specific directions, but I do believe God is with me, even when I cannot feel God’s presence.” I remember thinking at the time that this was an example of great faith---belief over feeling.
Ten years after Genevieve lost her mother, her father suddenly died. There was no warning, no preparation, no messages, and perhaps hardest of all, there was no letter from her mother on how to navigate through this loss. Her mother never thought to prepare her for this. She remembers thinking that now the only parenting she would have would come from a box.
When she hit the age of thirty, besides the birthday wish and present, there were only three packages remaining: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Genevieve did not know if she would ever be engaged, married, or have a baby. Though she was in a loving, committed relationship, she did not know where that would lead, and so she decided she wanted to hear her mother’s wisdom NOW. Feeling rebellious, she opened the box, not confident her mother would approve. She read: “My dearest little girl, of course you aren’t so little anymore as you read this, but you are little as I wrote. You are only seven, and I am facing the terrible sadness that you will be growing up without me.” Her mother wrote about the capacity to give, receive, and forgive. She wrote about the striving for balance that is not dependent on the balance of the other, “a kind of loving detachment.” Genevieve pondered that word detachment as she realized there was no detachment in the love that made the box or the love that drove her to open it. And then she read: “I’m so sorry to be leaving you. Please forgive me. I know a box of letters and tokens can’t begin to take my place, but I wanted so badly to do something to ease your way through the future. Love, Your Mommy”.
Carefully, Genevieve put everything back in the box. She did not open the package that went along with the engagement letter. She remains unsure if or even when she will open the other letters and packages. What if she never marries or has a child? But she does not have to decide now what she will do. Time will tell, as it does with all of us. For now, Genevieve realizes how blessed she is. She has been “fiercely, extravagantly, wildly loved”. And she is grateful.
As Christians we do believe God loves us fiercely, extravagantly, and wildly, but very often, people do not know, believe, or feel it. It may well be that people who are greatly loved by others have an easier time believing that God loves them with a love even beyond human love.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, I wrote that sometimes I am amazed by what makes it onto the front pages of a newspaper. I was specifically referring to an article on the front page of the New York Times about a nun whose message is, “Remember, you will die.” Well, just this past Sunday, I came across another article, this time not on the front page, but still it surprised me a bit, because again it was about death, and as I said in my earlier reflection, death in our culture is often an ignored or denied topic.
While I suppose there are some who would find this article sad or depressing, I actually found it quite inspiring, while also acknowledging its sadness. Written by a woman, Genevieve Kingston, it tells the story of her mother, who died of cancer at the age of 49, when Genevieve was ten days away from her 12th birthday, a day she shared with her mother. When Genevieve was three, her mother was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and over the next nine years, she fought hard to stay alive while researching all kinds of different treatments, everything from the conventional chemotherapy to drinking carrot juice.
What impressed me about this mother was how she decided to prepare her two children, a son and a daughter, for her eventual death. By the time Genevieve was seven, her mother must have realized that the battle would finally be lost, and so she prepared gift boxes for her two children. Into the boxes went letters and gifts to mark each milestone---birthdays---every year up to age 30, the passing of the test for a driver’s license, graduations, engagement, marriage, first baby.
Ten days after her mother’s death, Genevieve sat at the foot of her bed and opened the box. She opened the package marked, 12th birthday, and there it was: an amethyst birthstone ring with a note card: I always wanted a birthstone ring when I was a little girl. Your Granny finally brought me one, and I loved it more than I can say. I hope you like it, too. Happy birthday, darling girl. Love, Your Mommy. I must admit I had to wipe away a few tears as I read it, but I went one, nonetheless, because I was impressed that this woman was able to get outside herself enough to do this project. One of the great temptations of illness is that it can become all-consuming so that everything becomes about oneself, one’s sick body. Self-obsession when sick is certainly understandable. Illness makes us hyper aware of how our body feels. When we physically hurt, when our bodies seem to betray us, it is so easy to withdraw into the self and block everything and everyone else out. But over the years of this mother’s illness, she thought a great deal about what she wanted her children to know and to learn.
On the morning of Genevieve’s graduation from high school, a string of pearls appeared. Her mother wrote that this was a tradition in her family, so Genevieve wore those pearls as she walked across the field that day to receive her high school diploma. All the presents were wrapped with a pink ribbon and a while note card: Happy 15th, Happy 16th, Happy Graduation, You’re a College Girl Now, Happy 21st.
Genevieve wrote that when she was young, opening the packages was like being on a treasure hunt, but as she grew older, she recognized there was something foundational in the experience. Her mother was coming to meet her where she was, and Genevieve appreci ated how hard her mother tried to guide her forward. “Her messages met me like guideposts in a dark forest; if her words couldn’t point the way, at least they offered the comfort of knowing someone had been there before.” That word comfort really struck me, because so often that is what we are looking for in life---the assurance of comfort. As we mature, we realize that no one can live our lives for us; no one can solve our problems or give us the definitive answer to life’s big questions. We pray that God will lead us forward, but we also acknowledge that at times God remains elusive. Especially when it comes to supplying direct answers and aid, and so we come to rely upon the COMFORT of God’s presence, even when we do not know exactly what God is intending. I remember years ago someone telling me after she lost her eight year old daughter to a bicycle accident, “God is not giving me any specific directions, but I do believe God is with me, even when I cannot feel God’s presence.” I remember thinking at the time that this was an example of great faith---belief over feeling.
Ten years after Genevieve lost her mother, her father suddenly died. There was no warning, no preparation, no messages, and perhaps hardest of all, there was no letter from her mother on how to navigate through this loss. Her mother never thought to prepare her for this. She remembers thinking that now the only parenting she would have would come from a box.
When she hit the age of thirty, besides the birthday wish and present, there were only three packages remaining: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Genevieve did not know if she would ever be engaged, married, or have a baby. Though she was in a loving, committed relationship, she did not know where that would lead, and so she decided she wanted to hear her mother’s wisdom NOW. Feeling rebellious, she opened the box, not confident her mother would approve. She read: “My dearest little girl, of course you aren’t so little anymore as you read this, but you are little as I wrote. You are only seven, and I am facing the terrible sadness that you will be growing up without me.” Her mother wrote about the capacity to give, receive, and forgive. She wrote about the striving for balance that is not dependent on the balance of the other, “a kind of loving detachment.” Genevieve pondered that word detachment as she realized there was no detachment in the love that made the box or the love that drove her to open it. And then she read: “I’m so sorry to be leaving you. Please forgive me. I know a box of letters and tokens can’t begin to take my place, but I wanted so badly to do something to ease your way through the future. Love, Your Mommy”.
Carefully, Genevieve put everything back in the box. She did not open the package that went along with the engagement letter. She remains unsure if or even when she will open the other letters and packages. What if she never marries or has a child? But she does not have to decide now what she will do. Time will tell, as it does with all of us. For now, Genevieve realizes how blessed she is. She has been “fiercely, extravagantly, wildly loved”. And she is grateful.
As Christians we do believe God loves us fiercely, extravagantly, and wildly, but very often, people do not know, believe, or feel it. It may well be that people who are greatly loved by others have an easier time believing that God loves them with a love even beyond human love.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
May 26, 2021
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, I always would get a red poppy on Memorial Day week-end. They were sold in front of grocery stores, banks, even the post office had veterans standing in front, accepting modest donations for the red flowers with green stems. I asked my mother the significance of the red flower, and she said something about war being bloody, and so we remember the people who died in these terrible wars. My mother did not mince words, and the bloodiness of war made a deep impression on me.
Years later, however, I did learn the story of the red poppy and the woman and teacher, Moina Belle Michael, whose idea it was to memorialize World War l with a red poppy. On November 9, 1918, Moina was on duty for a Conference being held at Columbia University in a room where soldiers and other military people had come for gatherings before leaving for war overseas. This was just a few days before the November 11 Armistice, and the hopeful feelings about the end of the war were jubilant. A soldier gave Moina a copy of the November issue of The Ladies Home Journal in which the poem by Colonel John McCrae, We Shall Not Sleep, later known as In Flanders Fields was printed and vividly illustrated in color. Moina had read the poem before, but on this particular day, the last verse hit her hard: To you from failing hands we throw the Torch: be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields. Moina made a pledge that she would never break faith with those who died, and she decided that she must find poppies. And so she searched the stores of New York to find the flowers.
It was not an easy thing to find (artificial) poppies in November, but at the store, Wanamker’s, she found a large red poppy and two dozen small silk four petaled poppies. When Moina told the saleswoman why she wanted the poppies, the young woman was deeply touched, tearfully telling Moina that she had a brother who was sleeping in the poppy fields of Flanders. Moina returned to Columbia University later that day to continue her work while giving out the poppies she had purchased to veterans who were asking for them.
After the conclusion of World War l Veterans groups began to adopt the poppy as a symbol of remembrance for those who had lost their lives in the Great War, and the funds from the sale of the poppies were used to help the survivors of the war.
Moina had pledged to keep the faith to the soldiers who fought and died in that terrible war, and in response to the poem, In Flanders Field, she wrote a poem, We Shall Keep the Faith. The Ladies Home Journal would print her poem along with In Flanders Fields.
Sadly, we now have more wars and veterans to remember than the First World War and those who fought and died in it. The poppies are still sold, and war is still terrible and bloody. The question before us is: How do we keep faith with those who died and made the bloody sacrifice? Jesus is called The Prince of Peace, and early Christians, until the fourth century, were forbidden to be soldiers or participate in any wars. It was the great Augustine, (354-430), a brilliant thinker and theologian as well as bishop of Hippo, who gave us the theory of Just War. And ever since that time Christians have been trying to figure out when and if certain wars are just.
Now read the two poems:
In Flanders Fields, written by Colonel John McCrae, who was a physician, serving in World War l. The day before he wrote this poem, his closest friend was killed and then buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross, surrounded by poppies.
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poem, We Shall Keep the Faith, by Moina Belle Michael, was written in response to In Flanders Fields.
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, I always would get a red poppy on Memorial Day week-end. They were sold in front of grocery stores, banks, even the post office had veterans standing in front, accepting modest donations for the red flowers with green stems. I asked my mother the significance of the red flower, and she said something about war being bloody, and so we remember the people who died in these terrible wars. My mother did not mince words, and the bloodiness of war made a deep impression on me.
Years later, however, I did learn the story of the red poppy and the woman and teacher, Moina Belle Michael, whose idea it was to memorialize World War l with a red poppy. On November 9, 1918, Moina was on duty for a Conference being held at Columbia University in a room where soldiers and other military people had come for gatherings before leaving for war overseas. This was just a few days before the November 11 Armistice, and the hopeful feelings about the end of the war were jubilant. A soldier gave Moina a copy of the November issue of The Ladies Home Journal in which the poem by Colonel John McCrae, We Shall Not Sleep, later known as In Flanders Fields was printed and vividly illustrated in color. Moina had read the poem before, but on this particular day, the last verse hit her hard: To you from failing hands we throw the Torch: be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields. Moina made a pledge that she would never break faith with those who died, and she decided that she must find poppies. And so she searched the stores of New York to find the flowers.
It was not an easy thing to find (artificial) poppies in November, but at the store, Wanamker’s, she found a large red poppy and two dozen small silk four petaled poppies. When Moina told the saleswoman why she wanted the poppies, the young woman was deeply touched, tearfully telling Moina that she had a brother who was sleeping in the poppy fields of Flanders. Moina returned to Columbia University later that day to continue her work while giving out the poppies she had purchased to veterans who were asking for them.
After the conclusion of World War l Veterans groups began to adopt the poppy as a symbol of remembrance for those who had lost their lives in the Great War, and the funds from the sale of the poppies were used to help the survivors of the war.
Moina had pledged to keep the faith to the soldiers who fought and died in that terrible war, and in response to the poem, In Flanders Field, she wrote a poem, We Shall Keep the Faith. The Ladies Home Journal would print her poem along with In Flanders Fields.
Sadly, we now have more wars and veterans to remember than the First World War and those who fought and died in it. The poppies are still sold, and war is still terrible and bloody. The question before us is: How do we keep faith with those who died and made the bloody sacrifice? Jesus is called The Prince of Peace, and early Christians, until the fourth century, were forbidden to be soldiers or participate in any wars. It was the great Augustine, (354-430), a brilliant thinker and theologian as well as bishop of Hippo, who gave us the theory of Just War. And ever since that time Christians have been trying to figure out when and if certain wars are just.
Now read the two poems:
In Flanders Fields, written by Colonel John McCrae, who was a physician, serving in World War l. The day before he wrote this poem, his closest friend was killed and then buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross, surrounded by poppies.
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poem, We Shall Keep the Faith, by Moina Belle Michael, was written in response to In Flanders Fields.
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
When the Spirit Overcomes by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 5/23/2021
In all my 38 years of ordination I have had only one REALLY serious question about hell, and it came from an eight year old girl, whose 37 year old mother, Elizabeth, had just died of a brain tumor. Such deaths are always crushing, but this one was beyond crushing. Some of you have heard me talk about Elizabeth before. She was a surgeon, and so was her husband, but when Elizabeth became ill, and the prognosis looked grim, her husband lost courage and ran, leaving his wife and kids. He sent money, a lot of it, and through his lawyer communicated that he simply could not bear to watch his wife, the love of his life, die. “God forgive me,” he said, “I just cannot do it.” Elizabeth was a remarkable woman, someone I came to know quite well as a patient in the hospital, where I worked. “My husband could never accept death,” she told me; “he couldn’t bear to lose a patient; he fought against death the way Luke Skywalker fought against Darth Vader. Death was his greatest enemy and his greatest fear. “Yes, I am heart broken, but I do understand. And understanding removes my bitterness and anger.” And that is how Elizabeth died: with a broken heart but an understanding spirit. I had no doubt that she had Christ’s spirit within her.
At the end of Elizabeth’s memorial service, her eight year old daughter, Katie, asked me, “Is my Daddy going to hell? That’s what I heard my Nana say, but I don’t want my Daddy to go to hell. God already has my Mommy in heaven, so why would God put my Daddy in hell?”
I would have given anything not to have been there at that moment, but I had to say something, so I said in so many words what I truly believe. God does not send anyone to hell, and if people get themselves there, it’s God’s job to get them out.” I also told her that I knew how much her Daddy had hurt her and her brother and mother, but sometimes people are weak and afraid. “I know you love your Daddy,” I said, “and so does God. And love never put people in hell. It works hard to get them out.”
Imagine if you had been in my situation. What would you have said to Katie? It is true that many of us simply do not believe in hell as a place of eternal, torturous punishment. I have read that over 60% of mainline Protestants reject the idea of an eternal hell, though they do believe in some kind of heaven. Some people say, “Hell is here on earth,” pointing to situations of extreme suffering like war and illness, and the abandonment suffered by Elizabeth and her children. Theologically, hell is defined as separation from God, something that people do when they commit evil acts or turn in on themselves so completely, they see nothing beyond themselves. So, hell or separation from God is not something God does to us as punishment for sin; it is what we do to God and ourselves when we reject the command to love and serve God by also loving and serving others.
While the idea of hell has been around for a very long time, so too has the idea of universal salvation, the belief that all shall finally be saved by a loving God. By the second century there were strong defenders of this idea, though until quite recently it has been a minority view. In our own nation after the Civil War the Universalists became one of the fastest growing denominations. The nation had been traumatized by a bloody and terrible war, and the Good News preached by the Universalists declared that God’s love is the supreme reality, the ultimate truth and force, which will in the end overcome evil by the sheer power of its attraction. Nothing is more powerful than God’s love, they preached, and so love cannot ultimately be defeated by evil. God’s love cannot be thwarted.
The strict Calvinists, who stood in many pulpits across New England, were appalled by the universalist claim. They countered by saying that God never intended the salvation of all. God, they said, from the very beginning willed a select few, the elected, for salvation and the rest for damnation. This decision lay in God’s inscrutable will, and God’s will, they said, cannot be fully grasped by human reason. While that satisfied the rigorous Calvinists, there were others, who although not Universalists, found that idea repugnant, and so they argued for heaven or hell on the basis of human free will. Human beings can choose rightly or wrongly, and they reap the results of their choices. If all are finally saved, they argued, human freedom has no meaning or consequence, and this, they claimed, trivializes human life and choice. But does it really?
Is human life made ultimately meaningful because of God’s love or because of human freedom? What do we hold up as the most important thing? God’s love gives us our freedom, but this does not mean that our freedom replaces God or that it is more important than God. Remember what idolatry is---to treat something finite and limited as if it were infinite and unlimited, that is, as if it were God. If we make our human ability to choose to be the most important ingredient of our salvation or damnation---then why do we need God? God then would simply affirm what we have already chosen to do. In the end then it is God’s love, which is made trivial, because it would be impotent against human choice.
Now you may be thinking to yourself---why is she talking about this on Pentecost Sunday, the Church’s birthday, a day we remember and celebrate the sending of the spirit---the spirit of Christ. As we celebrate this spirit, we are called to remember who Christ was and is. He is the one who shows us what God is like, when God shows up in a human life. And what we see in Jesus is a life of radical inclusion, reaching out to the least of these, persons, who were on the margins of society, because they were sick, like lepers, or morally compromised, like tax collectors and prostitutes, or social failures, like the poor, or simply the hated Other---like the Samaritan. Jesus did not cast any people away; he did not use any of those categories as an excuse for exclusion and rejection. And we too are not to use such categories to exclude, whatever those categories happen to be: race, class, gender, sexual orientation---you name it. When we consider the story of Pentecost, the crowd who gathered to hear Peter preach, we see that they were from all over the place---a vastly diverse group of people, symbolizing Christ’s gracious welcome to all who desire to hear and understand, each in their own languages.
So, if Jesus was radically inclusive in this life, cannot that inclusion also apply to what lies beyond? Cannot God’s love, which today we celebrate in the coming of Christ’s Spirit, work so that finally all resistance is overcome in the new creation, overcome by the attractive power of God’s love. Now perhaps this sounds like too much theological speculation, but consider again Katie, who overheard her Nana wish hell for Katie’s father, the man, who had broken her mother’s heart and abandoned the children, because he was too fearful to face the pain. He did not have the strength to do it. Hell was the grandmother’s consolation, and though we can well understand her feelings, we should ask ourselves, is this truly what we human beings are made to be consoled by---hell for others.
The Spirit we celebrate today tells us why we need God. We need God because our freedom, which sometimes is more like slavery, when we choose wrongly, when we are consoled by the wrong things, is not the ultimate truth in our lives. One of the early church fathers, Tertullian, who lived around 200, wrote that the blessed in heaven will feel even greater blessedness and joy as they look down at the condemned, writhing in hell. How wrong he was. To exalt in anyone’s suffering is a sin; to wish hell for anyone is sinful. And that is why we need God and why we celebrate today the coming of Christ’s Spirit, because on our own we so often desire the wrong things and are consoled by the wrong things. But when the Spirit comes, it can heal us of our disordered desires and consolations, pointing us toward the truth that finally all manner of things shall be made well. God does not put anyone in hell but works to overcome the separation that human beings so tragically often choose. In our separation we do say NO to God, but God says No to our No, and heals what we on our own cannot heal. And today we thank God for the coming of the healing spirit.
In all my 38 years of ordination I have had only one REALLY serious question about hell, and it came from an eight year old girl, whose 37 year old mother, Elizabeth, had just died of a brain tumor. Such deaths are always crushing, but this one was beyond crushing. Some of you have heard me talk about Elizabeth before. She was a surgeon, and so was her husband, but when Elizabeth became ill, and the prognosis looked grim, her husband lost courage and ran, leaving his wife and kids. He sent money, a lot of it, and through his lawyer communicated that he simply could not bear to watch his wife, the love of his life, die. “God forgive me,” he said, “I just cannot do it.” Elizabeth was a remarkable woman, someone I came to know quite well as a patient in the hospital, where I worked. “My husband could never accept death,” she told me; “he couldn’t bear to lose a patient; he fought against death the way Luke Skywalker fought against Darth Vader. Death was his greatest enemy and his greatest fear. “Yes, I am heart broken, but I do understand. And understanding removes my bitterness and anger.” And that is how Elizabeth died: with a broken heart but an understanding spirit. I had no doubt that she had Christ’s spirit within her.
At the end of Elizabeth’s memorial service, her eight year old daughter, Katie, asked me, “Is my Daddy going to hell? That’s what I heard my Nana say, but I don’t want my Daddy to go to hell. God already has my Mommy in heaven, so why would God put my Daddy in hell?”
I would have given anything not to have been there at that moment, but I had to say something, so I said in so many words what I truly believe. God does not send anyone to hell, and if people get themselves there, it’s God’s job to get them out.” I also told her that I knew how much her Daddy had hurt her and her brother and mother, but sometimes people are weak and afraid. “I know you love your Daddy,” I said, “and so does God. And love never put people in hell. It works hard to get them out.”
Imagine if you had been in my situation. What would you have said to Katie? It is true that many of us simply do not believe in hell as a place of eternal, torturous punishment. I have read that over 60% of mainline Protestants reject the idea of an eternal hell, though they do believe in some kind of heaven. Some people say, “Hell is here on earth,” pointing to situations of extreme suffering like war and illness, and the abandonment suffered by Elizabeth and her children. Theologically, hell is defined as separation from God, something that people do when they commit evil acts or turn in on themselves so completely, they see nothing beyond themselves. So, hell or separation from God is not something God does to us as punishment for sin; it is what we do to God and ourselves when we reject the command to love and serve God by also loving and serving others.
While the idea of hell has been around for a very long time, so too has the idea of universal salvation, the belief that all shall finally be saved by a loving God. By the second century there were strong defenders of this idea, though until quite recently it has been a minority view. In our own nation after the Civil War the Universalists became one of the fastest growing denominations. The nation had been traumatized by a bloody and terrible war, and the Good News preached by the Universalists declared that God’s love is the supreme reality, the ultimate truth and force, which will in the end overcome evil by the sheer power of its attraction. Nothing is more powerful than God’s love, they preached, and so love cannot ultimately be defeated by evil. God’s love cannot be thwarted.
The strict Calvinists, who stood in many pulpits across New England, were appalled by the universalist claim. They countered by saying that God never intended the salvation of all. God, they said, from the very beginning willed a select few, the elected, for salvation and the rest for damnation. This decision lay in God’s inscrutable will, and God’s will, they said, cannot be fully grasped by human reason. While that satisfied the rigorous Calvinists, there were others, who although not Universalists, found that idea repugnant, and so they argued for heaven or hell on the basis of human free will. Human beings can choose rightly or wrongly, and they reap the results of their choices. If all are finally saved, they argued, human freedom has no meaning or consequence, and this, they claimed, trivializes human life and choice. But does it really?
Is human life made ultimately meaningful because of God’s love or because of human freedom? What do we hold up as the most important thing? God’s love gives us our freedom, but this does not mean that our freedom replaces God or that it is more important than God. Remember what idolatry is---to treat something finite and limited as if it were infinite and unlimited, that is, as if it were God. If we make our human ability to choose to be the most important ingredient of our salvation or damnation---then why do we need God? God then would simply affirm what we have already chosen to do. In the end then it is God’s love, which is made trivial, because it would be impotent against human choice.
Now you may be thinking to yourself---why is she talking about this on Pentecost Sunday, the Church’s birthday, a day we remember and celebrate the sending of the spirit---the spirit of Christ. As we celebrate this spirit, we are called to remember who Christ was and is. He is the one who shows us what God is like, when God shows up in a human life. And what we see in Jesus is a life of radical inclusion, reaching out to the least of these, persons, who were on the margins of society, because they were sick, like lepers, or morally compromised, like tax collectors and prostitutes, or social failures, like the poor, or simply the hated Other---like the Samaritan. Jesus did not cast any people away; he did not use any of those categories as an excuse for exclusion and rejection. And we too are not to use such categories to exclude, whatever those categories happen to be: race, class, gender, sexual orientation---you name it. When we consider the story of Pentecost, the crowd who gathered to hear Peter preach, we see that they were from all over the place---a vastly diverse group of people, symbolizing Christ’s gracious welcome to all who desire to hear and understand, each in their own languages.
So, if Jesus was radically inclusive in this life, cannot that inclusion also apply to what lies beyond? Cannot God’s love, which today we celebrate in the coming of Christ’s Spirit, work so that finally all resistance is overcome in the new creation, overcome by the attractive power of God’s love. Now perhaps this sounds like too much theological speculation, but consider again Katie, who overheard her Nana wish hell for Katie’s father, the man, who had broken her mother’s heart and abandoned the children, because he was too fearful to face the pain. He did not have the strength to do it. Hell was the grandmother’s consolation, and though we can well understand her feelings, we should ask ourselves, is this truly what we human beings are made to be consoled by---hell for others.
The Spirit we celebrate today tells us why we need God. We need God because our freedom, which sometimes is more like slavery, when we choose wrongly, when we are consoled by the wrong things, is not the ultimate truth in our lives. One of the early church fathers, Tertullian, who lived around 200, wrote that the blessed in heaven will feel even greater blessedness and joy as they look down at the condemned, writhing in hell. How wrong he was. To exalt in anyone’s suffering is a sin; to wish hell for anyone is sinful. And that is why we need God and why we celebrate today the coming of Christ’s Spirit, because on our own we so often desire the wrong things and are consoled by the wrong things. But when the Spirit comes, it can heal us of our disordered desires and consolations, pointing us toward the truth that finally all manner of things shall be made well. God does not put anyone in hell but works to overcome the separation that human beings so tragically often choose. In our separation we do say NO to God, but God says No to our No, and heals what we on our own cannot heal. And today we thank God for the coming of the healing spirit.
May 20, 2021
Dear Friends,
Sometimes I am amazed by what makes it onto the front page of a newspaper, like last Saturday, May 15, when The New York Times had a front page article, titled, A Nun’s Words of Comfort: “You Are Going to Die.” I would guess that I was not the only person who read the article with a sense of surprise and curiosity. Most newspapers don’t write about nuns, and the subject of death, at least until the pandemic, which has claimed nearly 600,000 American lives, is covered only when it is dramatic and horrific, like mass shootings or plane crashes. The ordinary reality of death that comes to everyone is hardly a subject newspapers tackle. And yet on a particular Saturday on May 15, 2021, it made the front page.
Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble is pictured (again on the front page) in her black, traditional habit with words underneath her picture saying that she wants you to think about death. She entered the Daughters of St. Paul Convent in 2010, where she now surrounds herself with images of skulls. She has a ceramic one on her desk, and people send her skull mugs and skull rosaries. However, she is not morbid, but is lively and joyful, while practicing the spiritual discipline of memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning, “Remember your death,” so that you might live each day fully and gratefully. “Suffering and death,” she says, are “facts of life,” and to concentrate only on the bright and happy “is superficial and inauthentic.” And yet there is no denying we live in a culture that denies death as Ernest Becker claimed in his brilliant book, The Denial of Death from 1973. It is not difficult to deny death, when it is shut away nursing homes or in hospitals. There are many people, who simply refuse to visit someone who is dying, even if the person happens to be a close friend or relative, and it is not uncommon these days to reach adulthood without having lost a significant person to death. With medicine’s advancement, we have been able to keep death away for a longer period of time than our great grandparents ever thought possible. Sister Theresa claims that we mistakenly think that keeping death away from our consciousness is the road to happiness, but she says that only by facing the “darkest realities of life do we find light in them.”
She is not someone who was naturally religious. Though her parents were active in the Roman Catholic Church, and her father had a PhD in theology, she was a skeptic and as a teenager she declared herself an atheist. She went to Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate, where she became involved in animal rights, but that experience left her with a sense that there was something distinctive about the human being. Though she could not explain it or define the reason, she had this intuitive sense that human beings alone have a soul. After graduating from college, she worked for Teach for America, and then she headed to an organic farm in Costa Rica. Her plan was to go to law school, but she had a sudden and dramatic conversion, which left her with the conviction that God is real. She dumped her boyfriend, and four years later joined the convent.
Twitter became the means she used to communicate her ideas about death. At first, she had no goal beyond her own spiritual discipline, but because her tweets were such a hit, her project expanded. Her order now sells decals and sweatshirts, decorated with images of skulls, and she has also published a prayer journal and devotional. She is currently writing another prayer book to be used during the Advent season.
Sister Theresa believes that facing the reality of our own death helps us live with a greater sense of joy and peace. Yet we live in a culture that has trained us to fight death as the great enemy, the great intruder that has no business making its appearance known. But, she claims, “remembering death keeps us awake, focused, and ready for whatever might happen---both the excruciatingly difficult and the breathtakingly beautiful.” That perspective is not hers alone, but is part of a whole religious tradition, which in our post-modern world has been silenced and hidden away. And sadly, most of us do not even realize the depth of meaning we have lost.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Sometimes I am amazed by what makes it onto the front page of a newspaper, like last Saturday, May 15, when The New York Times had a front page article, titled, A Nun’s Words of Comfort: “You Are Going to Die.” I would guess that I was not the only person who read the article with a sense of surprise and curiosity. Most newspapers don’t write about nuns, and the subject of death, at least until the pandemic, which has claimed nearly 600,000 American lives, is covered only when it is dramatic and horrific, like mass shootings or plane crashes. The ordinary reality of death that comes to everyone is hardly a subject newspapers tackle. And yet on a particular Saturday on May 15, 2021, it made the front page.
Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble is pictured (again on the front page) in her black, traditional habit with words underneath her picture saying that she wants you to think about death. She entered the Daughters of St. Paul Convent in 2010, where she now surrounds herself with images of skulls. She has a ceramic one on her desk, and people send her skull mugs and skull rosaries. However, she is not morbid, but is lively and joyful, while practicing the spiritual discipline of memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning, “Remember your death,” so that you might live each day fully and gratefully. “Suffering and death,” she says, are “facts of life,” and to concentrate only on the bright and happy “is superficial and inauthentic.” And yet there is no denying we live in a culture that denies death as Ernest Becker claimed in his brilliant book, The Denial of Death from 1973. It is not difficult to deny death, when it is shut away nursing homes or in hospitals. There are many people, who simply refuse to visit someone who is dying, even if the person happens to be a close friend or relative, and it is not uncommon these days to reach adulthood without having lost a significant person to death. With medicine’s advancement, we have been able to keep death away for a longer period of time than our great grandparents ever thought possible. Sister Theresa claims that we mistakenly think that keeping death away from our consciousness is the road to happiness, but she says that only by facing the “darkest realities of life do we find light in them.”
She is not someone who was naturally religious. Though her parents were active in the Roman Catholic Church, and her father had a PhD in theology, she was a skeptic and as a teenager she declared herself an atheist. She went to Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate, where she became involved in animal rights, but that experience left her with a sense that there was something distinctive about the human being. Though she could not explain it or define the reason, she had this intuitive sense that human beings alone have a soul. After graduating from college, she worked for Teach for America, and then she headed to an organic farm in Costa Rica. Her plan was to go to law school, but she had a sudden and dramatic conversion, which left her with the conviction that God is real. She dumped her boyfriend, and four years later joined the convent.
Twitter became the means she used to communicate her ideas about death. At first, she had no goal beyond her own spiritual discipline, but because her tweets were such a hit, her project expanded. Her order now sells decals and sweatshirts, decorated with images of skulls, and she has also published a prayer journal and devotional. She is currently writing another prayer book to be used during the Advent season.
Sister Theresa believes that facing the reality of our own death helps us live with a greater sense of joy and peace. Yet we live in a culture that has trained us to fight death as the great enemy, the great intruder that has no business making its appearance known. But, she claims, “remembering death keeps us awake, focused, and ready for whatever might happen---both the excruciatingly difficult and the breathtakingly beautiful.” That perspective is not hers alone, but is part of a whole religious tradition, which in our post-modern world has been silenced and hidden away. And sadly, most of us do not even realize the depth of meaning we have lost.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Virtue of Happiness by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 5/16/2021
Psalm 1
Acts 1: 15-17; 21-26
Willa Cather, an American writer, famous for such works as O Pioneers, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and My Antonia, once said that we human beings stumble on happiness, because outward circumstances remain beyond our control and so our earthly happiness can easily be interfered with when things go very badly. It is interesting that for her tombstone she chose these words: This is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
The words happy or happiness are not common words in the bible; in fact, they do not even appear at all in the New Testament, and so it is no trivial matter that Psalm 1 begins with the word happy. Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, they meditate day and night. Happiness for this psalmist is not the goal; following God’s law is, and to follow the law rightly, requires deep and persistent thought and meditation, because as Jesus himself taught, it is not always the letter of the law that should be followed, but rather the spirit of the law. But does following the spirit of the law necessarily guarantee human happiness?
It is fascinating that the 6th and 5th centuries BC saw a vast explosion of ponderings on the subject of happiness. We have Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tse and Socrates, and by the first century CE, we have the growth of Christianity and a profusion of eastern cults and mystery religions, as well as the thought of Greek and Roman philosophers. It seems that happiness was on everyone’s mind. Why?
Perhaps, because it is in times of great danger and turmoil that concerns about happiness are most strongly voiced. The Roman stoic, Seneca, wrote his most moving letters on the subject while he was being hunted by the Emperor Nero’s henchmen, who finally found him and forced him to commit suicide. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most influential books in Western literature from the time it was written in 524 until the end of the Renaissance, when he was facing execution under the Emperor Theodoric. And our own Thomas Jefferson, who included in the American Declaration of Independence the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, wrote in a time of great insecurity and approaching war. Now we do not know exactly when the first Psalm was written, but it is certainly possible it was composed during the reign of King David, when empire building was causing many stresses and strains.
And so in the last few about happiness, we can well wonder why the obsession. Since 2012 we have these yearly lists of the happiest countries, using such measures as GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom and levels of corruption. The most recent list has Finland as number 1, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The United States has moved up to 14 from 18 while the United Kingdom has moved from 13 to 18! Does this interest in the subject of happiness come from the anxiety and insecurity that so many people experience these days?
Now most of us probably consider happiness a feeling, but many thinkers throughout history have understood happiness as a virtue, that is, something, which is good and right. The philosopher Robert Nozick has pointed out that when he asks people if they would choose to be hooked up to a machine that would give them the sensation or the feeling of happiness, almost everyone says “No,” because the happiness would not be real happiness. So, that suggests that happiness is more than a feeling.
In the first century the Roman Cicero, who considered that true happiness is a virtue that comes from loving and serving the good, the true, the beautiful, wrote, “Happiness will not tremble, however much it is tortured.” This does not mean that a virtuously happy person who is being tortured is happy about his torture, and indeed, he or she may scream out in pain. But what Cicero meant, and I think this perspective would be shared by the Psalmist as well as Jesus—the true and deepest happiness that comes from loving God as the good, the true and the beautiful, is not necessarily destroyed by torture. Now in no way should we ever minimize the horrific experience of a body in extreme pain, but the point is that the mind and the soul can be rightly oriented toward God, which is happiness, even when the body is under extreme duress.
There is this extraordinarily beautiful passage in Victor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl, imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War ll, describes how happy he was one morning contemplating his beloved wife, whom he did not even know was dead or alive. Though he was cold and hungry and forced to work under extreme conditions, just the thought, the memory of his beloved brought him happiness in the midst of extreme suffering. His point is that love is a virtue, and the happiness loves gives is also a virtue.
It is a fascinating to me that the lectionary readings for this morning pair Psalm 1, which begins with happiness with the story in Acts about Judas being replaced. Notice how boldly the awful truth is faced: Judas, one of the original twelve, became a betrayer. He turned his back on what Jesus had taught, and with a kiss, he betrayed Jesus to the enemy. Why did he do this? We don’t know, though some have offered the conjecture that Judas was trying to force Jesus to take a revolutionary stand against Rome. But Peter did not try to explain Judas’ betrayal. He made no excuses; offered no explanations. He neither attempted to deny it nor pervert it. No, the awful truth had to be firmly faced. And that is no small task—when the betrayal comes from within the circle of intimacy and power. To face that kind of truth takes courage, and courage, then as now is often sorely lacking. But Peter, the same man, afraid of what would happen to him, if he were identified as one of Jesus’ followers, denied Jesus not just one time, but three times now shows courage when facing hard truths. He does not flinch, and neither do the other disciples. Mathias is chosen.
What the pairing of these two readings suggests is that happiness can never be achieved at the expense of truth. Truth is a virtue, and if we outgrow the idea that happiness can be reduced to a feeling, and see it as a virtue, we should then understand that no virtue can truly grow from lies and ignorance. Jesus said, Know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And we might add that truth as a virtue can also grow the virtue of happiness, just as the virtue of happiness can also grow from the virtue of truth.
Psalm 1
Acts 1: 15-17; 21-26
Willa Cather, an American writer, famous for such works as O Pioneers, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and My Antonia, once said that we human beings stumble on happiness, because outward circumstances remain beyond our control and so our earthly happiness can easily be interfered with when things go very badly. It is interesting that for her tombstone she chose these words: This is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
The words happy or happiness are not common words in the bible; in fact, they do not even appear at all in the New Testament, and so it is no trivial matter that Psalm 1 begins with the word happy. Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, they meditate day and night. Happiness for this psalmist is not the goal; following God’s law is, and to follow the law rightly, requires deep and persistent thought and meditation, because as Jesus himself taught, it is not always the letter of the law that should be followed, but rather the spirit of the law. But does following the spirit of the law necessarily guarantee human happiness?
It is fascinating that the 6th and 5th centuries BC saw a vast explosion of ponderings on the subject of happiness. We have Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tse and Socrates, and by the first century CE, we have the growth of Christianity and a profusion of eastern cults and mystery religions, as well as the thought of Greek and Roman philosophers. It seems that happiness was on everyone’s mind. Why?
Perhaps, because it is in times of great danger and turmoil that concerns about happiness are most strongly voiced. The Roman stoic, Seneca, wrote his most moving letters on the subject while he was being hunted by the Emperor Nero’s henchmen, who finally found him and forced him to commit suicide. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most influential books in Western literature from the time it was written in 524 until the end of the Renaissance, when he was facing execution under the Emperor Theodoric. And our own Thomas Jefferson, who included in the American Declaration of Independence the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, wrote in a time of great insecurity and approaching war. Now we do not know exactly when the first Psalm was written, but it is certainly possible it was composed during the reign of King David, when empire building was causing many stresses and strains.
And so in the last few about happiness, we can well wonder why the obsession. Since 2012 we have these yearly lists of the happiest countries, using such measures as GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom and levels of corruption. The most recent list has Finland as number 1, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The United States has moved up to 14 from 18 while the United Kingdom has moved from 13 to 18! Does this interest in the subject of happiness come from the anxiety and insecurity that so many people experience these days?
Now most of us probably consider happiness a feeling, but many thinkers throughout history have understood happiness as a virtue, that is, something, which is good and right. The philosopher Robert Nozick has pointed out that when he asks people if they would choose to be hooked up to a machine that would give them the sensation or the feeling of happiness, almost everyone says “No,” because the happiness would not be real happiness. So, that suggests that happiness is more than a feeling.
In the first century the Roman Cicero, who considered that true happiness is a virtue that comes from loving and serving the good, the true, the beautiful, wrote, “Happiness will not tremble, however much it is tortured.” This does not mean that a virtuously happy person who is being tortured is happy about his torture, and indeed, he or she may scream out in pain. But what Cicero meant, and I think this perspective would be shared by the Psalmist as well as Jesus—the true and deepest happiness that comes from loving God as the good, the true and the beautiful, is not necessarily destroyed by torture. Now in no way should we ever minimize the horrific experience of a body in extreme pain, but the point is that the mind and the soul can be rightly oriented toward God, which is happiness, even when the body is under extreme duress.
There is this extraordinarily beautiful passage in Victor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl, imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War ll, describes how happy he was one morning contemplating his beloved wife, whom he did not even know was dead or alive. Though he was cold and hungry and forced to work under extreme conditions, just the thought, the memory of his beloved brought him happiness in the midst of extreme suffering. His point is that love is a virtue, and the happiness loves gives is also a virtue.
It is a fascinating to me that the lectionary readings for this morning pair Psalm 1, which begins with happiness with the story in Acts about Judas being replaced. Notice how boldly the awful truth is faced: Judas, one of the original twelve, became a betrayer. He turned his back on what Jesus had taught, and with a kiss, he betrayed Jesus to the enemy. Why did he do this? We don’t know, though some have offered the conjecture that Judas was trying to force Jesus to take a revolutionary stand against Rome. But Peter did not try to explain Judas’ betrayal. He made no excuses; offered no explanations. He neither attempted to deny it nor pervert it. No, the awful truth had to be firmly faced. And that is no small task—when the betrayal comes from within the circle of intimacy and power. To face that kind of truth takes courage, and courage, then as now is often sorely lacking. But Peter, the same man, afraid of what would happen to him, if he were identified as one of Jesus’ followers, denied Jesus not just one time, but three times now shows courage when facing hard truths. He does not flinch, and neither do the other disciples. Mathias is chosen.
What the pairing of these two readings suggests is that happiness can never be achieved at the expense of truth. Truth is a virtue, and if we outgrow the idea that happiness can be reduced to a feeling, and see it as a virtue, we should then understand that no virtue can truly grow from lies and ignorance. Jesus said, Know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And we might add that truth as a virtue can also grow the virtue of happiness, just as the virtue of happiness can also grow from the virtue of truth.
May 13, 2021
Dear Friends,
A few months ago, I came across an article in the Christian Science Monitor, written by an art and museum lover, who had been living with the painful closure of museums and galleries in Los Angeles, where she lived. While Boston, New York and Chicago were allowing small numbers of pre-registered people into their museum galleries, Los Angeles’ collections remained shut down. Though Los Angeles cannot compete with the great western art collections of the East Coast or the Chicago Institute, it is a vibrant center of contemporary art. Right before the onset of the pandemic, Los Angeles was brimming with new artistic life, and then suddenly it was closed. For some people art is a means of nurturing joy, so what happens when that avenue of joy is no longer available?
What is it about art that nurtures joy? I used to think it was all about the experience of beauty. After all, the Church throughout its 2000 year history has invested heavily in beauty---beautiful music as well as beautiful paintings, sculpture, and drawings. There is this sense that beauty nurtures the human spirit and soul, uplifting us out of the ordinary plane of human experience into a different realm and onto a different plane. Many people will say that God speaks to us in and through the experience of the beautiful, and surely this must be one reason the Church has not been shy about investing in art. But not all art is beautiful, and yet, even the unlovely, can still communicate something of the divine.
Consider, for example Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, painted in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. It is probably the world’s most famous anti-war painting, showing dismembered humans, a gored horse and a bull. The painting is about a real event on April 27, 1937, when the German Air Force bombed the Basque village of Guernica in an effort to help the fascist dictator, Franco. The painting is clearly upsetting, and yet, according to people who study art and its impact upon the human brain and psyche, taking the time to gaze at and study the painting actually reduces the level of cortisol, a stress hormone. Looking at art can invigorate thinking, and thought can reduce stress, since stress often arises, when we feel we have little control over what is happening to us. And when we see art, which we find beautiful, recent research has shown that the “feel good” chemical, dopamine, is released, giving us a feeling not unlike being in love. So, all this is a way of saying that art is good for you---both creating it and viewing it.
When the Los Angeles resident learned that a gallery in Beverly Hills, CA was going to show six contemporary paintings by the German painter, Gerhard Richter, she immediately registered to go. None of these paintings to me looked the least bit beautiful, and I was not really sure what I was seeing. Wide swaths of color, moving up, down and across in an inexact and lopsided grid did not say much to me---though looking at copies in a magazine is not at all the same as being in a room where the paintings are displayed. But for this Los Angeles resident, hungry for art, she saw each of the six works as a rich display of nature. She felt, as she stood before each painting, that she was on a walk. The green that stretched across one painting, reminded her of moss. In another painting the fiery red exploded like a volcano and another painting invited her to immerse herself in shimmering, silver water for a swim. She wrote that art speaks uniquely and subjectively to each person, and indeed, that is obvious, since we do not all see the same thing when we look at art.
Gerhard Richter, by the way, is 90 years old, still active, still mentally vibrant, still engaged in creating art. In fact, creating art is supposed to be good for humans, maybe even more inducing of good health than merely looking at it. Some people have called God the great artist, and indeed, when we gaze at the wonders of the natural world, awash with beauty and sometimes even terror, we can surely appreciate the handiwork of God. While we have no reference to Jesus making art, he was certainly a masterful storyteller, and who is to say that stories are not every bit as life enhancing and promoting of good health as the visual arts?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
A few months ago, I came across an article in the Christian Science Monitor, written by an art and museum lover, who had been living with the painful closure of museums and galleries in Los Angeles, where she lived. While Boston, New York and Chicago were allowing small numbers of pre-registered people into their museum galleries, Los Angeles’ collections remained shut down. Though Los Angeles cannot compete with the great western art collections of the East Coast or the Chicago Institute, it is a vibrant center of contemporary art. Right before the onset of the pandemic, Los Angeles was brimming with new artistic life, and then suddenly it was closed. For some people art is a means of nurturing joy, so what happens when that avenue of joy is no longer available?
What is it about art that nurtures joy? I used to think it was all about the experience of beauty. After all, the Church throughout its 2000 year history has invested heavily in beauty---beautiful music as well as beautiful paintings, sculpture, and drawings. There is this sense that beauty nurtures the human spirit and soul, uplifting us out of the ordinary plane of human experience into a different realm and onto a different plane. Many people will say that God speaks to us in and through the experience of the beautiful, and surely this must be one reason the Church has not been shy about investing in art. But not all art is beautiful, and yet, even the unlovely, can still communicate something of the divine.
Consider, for example Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, painted in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. It is probably the world’s most famous anti-war painting, showing dismembered humans, a gored horse and a bull. The painting is about a real event on April 27, 1937, when the German Air Force bombed the Basque village of Guernica in an effort to help the fascist dictator, Franco. The painting is clearly upsetting, and yet, according to people who study art and its impact upon the human brain and psyche, taking the time to gaze at and study the painting actually reduces the level of cortisol, a stress hormone. Looking at art can invigorate thinking, and thought can reduce stress, since stress often arises, when we feel we have little control over what is happening to us. And when we see art, which we find beautiful, recent research has shown that the “feel good” chemical, dopamine, is released, giving us a feeling not unlike being in love. So, all this is a way of saying that art is good for you---both creating it and viewing it.
When the Los Angeles resident learned that a gallery in Beverly Hills, CA was going to show six contemporary paintings by the German painter, Gerhard Richter, she immediately registered to go. None of these paintings to me looked the least bit beautiful, and I was not really sure what I was seeing. Wide swaths of color, moving up, down and across in an inexact and lopsided grid did not say much to me---though looking at copies in a magazine is not at all the same as being in a room where the paintings are displayed. But for this Los Angeles resident, hungry for art, she saw each of the six works as a rich display of nature. She felt, as she stood before each painting, that she was on a walk. The green that stretched across one painting, reminded her of moss. In another painting the fiery red exploded like a volcano and another painting invited her to immerse herself in shimmering, silver water for a swim. She wrote that art speaks uniquely and subjectively to each person, and indeed, that is obvious, since we do not all see the same thing when we look at art.
Gerhard Richter, by the way, is 90 years old, still active, still mentally vibrant, still engaged in creating art. In fact, creating art is supposed to be good for humans, maybe even more inducing of good health than merely looking at it. Some people have called God the great artist, and indeed, when we gaze at the wonders of the natural world, awash with beauty and sometimes even terror, we can surely appreciate the handiwork of God. While we have no reference to Jesus making art, he was certainly a masterful storyteller, and who is to say that stories are not every bit as life enhancing and promoting of good health as the visual arts?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
I Have Called You Friends by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 5/9/2021
JOB 42: 1-9
JOHN 15: 12-17
Some years ago, when I was a chaplain one of my colleagues, Suella, a Roman Catholic laywoman and chaplain, asked me to visit with her one of her patients, a 32 year old Catholic mother of three young children, dying of a brain tumor. Suella told me that the woman was furious with God, and then she said, “Sandra, you do anger at God better than anyone I know, so would you come with me and speak with her? And so I did. At the end of the conversation, Suella asked the woman if she wanted us to pray. “No,” the woman replied . “I am too angry to pray. I don’t even believe in prayer; I don’t even think I believe in God.” And Suella very calmly replied, “That’s alright; you don’t have to believe. That is what the communion of saints is for. It carries us and even believes for us, when we are too angry or hurt or defeated to do it ourselves.”
Suddenly the light went on for me. In spite of what Martin Luther said about having to do our own believing as well as our own dying, we Protestants would do well to grow beyond our excessive spiritual individualism. The Communion of Saints means that we are carried by more than our own little spirutual selves. When we are friends in Jesus Christ, we are upheld not only by our immediate community of faith, but also by a long and deep tradition, stretching back into the past and moving forward into the future. As friends in Christ individuals and churches can all learn from each other.
The word friend does not often appear in the Bible, but in the Book of Job we have a portrayal of friendship. Recall Job’s sufferings, when in a bet with God The Satan as the challenger with God’s permission afflicted Job with the loss of his wealth, his family and his health. Job protested his innocence, while his friends in so many words tried to tell him that he must have done something to deserve his punishment. Now It is very easy for us to be hard on Job’s friends, but at least they came, which is more than some will do. When his three friends saw how great Job’s sufferings were, they wept, they tore their clothes, and they sat in silence with Job for seven days and nights. And when they finally did speak, they were trying to be helpful, offering to Job what they believed was the best of their religious tradition. But what they said was grossly inadequate and even untrue, and so God, after making an appearance to Job out of the whirlwind, told Job’s friends to make proper sacrifice, because they are not spoken truthfully. And God also told them that Job would pray for them, and Job’s prayer would be accepted.
So yes, Job’s friends had disappointed and failed him, but they were yet his friends, and so he would pray for them. And that is what we are called to do. Friends may indeed disappoint and fail us, but in Christ we remain friends, not because we always agree or believe the same things, but because together we are the Church, the Body of Christ in the world. We are part of the Communion of Saints, with both a past and a future.
Now there is very little about friendship in the New Testament. Matthew’s gospel has only one reference; in Luke there are ten and in John the word friend only appears in the reading you heard this morning, when Jesus called his disciples his friends. And the friendship they were called to was tough and demanding. Christianity grew in a world familiar with ideas of friendship developed by both the Greeks and the Romans, who understood that true, deep and abiding friendship develops character, because it leads to higher ground, to places we may not want to go, but need to go. And our friends can help move us there by speaking the truth to us---not necessarily what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.
In the fall of 2016, I took a trip to Viet Nam, of the most moving trips I have ever taken. I was with a small group of 15 people through Overseas Adventure Travel, a fabulous tour group, I might add. Our extraordinary leader, Tom, told us we were the first group he had ever led with no former Viet Nam vets. Many of us, Baby Boomers all, were Viet Nam War protesters, but no veterans. We met so many different people, including former Viet Cong, who bore no ill will at all toward the United States. “You were never colonizers,” they said, “unlike the French”, whom even today are hated by many Vietnamese.
In Saigon, which is now called Ho Chi Ming City, we visited this museum, which used to be called, The Museum of American War Crimes, now changed to The War Remnants Museum, since currently there is a good relationship between the States and Viet Nam. It is not an easy museum to visit, and I remember standing before this huge picture of Bob Kerry, former senator from Nebraska, who was standing over a pile of bodies, women and children. A man from my tour group was with me, and he told me he remembered Kerry addressing this incident, admitting the horrors that soldiers committed, because all too often they did not really know who the enemy was.
After leaving the museum and getting on the bus, Tom told us a story from one of his former tour groups. One of the men on that tour told the group he had fought in Viet Nam and along with others had done some regrettable things. He told the story about how he was in the jungle with a group of other Marines, and suddenly came across people he was sure were the enemy---though they were all women and children. I hated them all, he said. And as he picked up his M-16 rifle to begin the slaughter, one of his friends, his best buddy, pushed him to the ground. “You are not going to do this. I will not let you do this.” So, he said, I was prevented from committing the deed, but that action on my friend’s part ended our friendship. I would never have anything to do with him again. He was killed a few months later, and I never had the chance to thank him for what he did and to tell him I was wrong. We were friends, best friends, and he did for me what best friends are supposed to do---help us step up to a higher plane, help us to do what is right and good. Best friends tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear---the truth.
Sometimes friendship grows because we come from similar background sand share the same interests, but there are other times friendship grows because we are on a journey together toward something bigger than ourselves. I think the disciples and Jesus were bound together in this way. They were friends, because they were engaged in a way of life that was bigger than any one of them. They were in service to a God who, though beyond knowing and understanding, was not beyond loving. They were friends, and though Jesus would suffer their denial and desertion, still they were his disciples, still his friends, because they were bound together in something that God was doing in their midst.
This is what Christian friendship is. It is being bound together by something transcending our own little lives and opinions. It is being helped to struggle with the discomfort of being human, because we are people who want to be better than we actually are. It is knowing, really knowing, that together we can become more than we can ever be alone and separate.
JOB 42: 1-9
JOHN 15: 12-17
Some years ago, when I was a chaplain one of my colleagues, Suella, a Roman Catholic laywoman and chaplain, asked me to visit with her one of her patients, a 32 year old Catholic mother of three young children, dying of a brain tumor. Suella told me that the woman was furious with God, and then she said, “Sandra, you do anger at God better than anyone I know, so would you come with me and speak with her? And so I did. At the end of the conversation, Suella asked the woman if she wanted us to pray. “No,” the woman replied . “I am too angry to pray. I don’t even believe in prayer; I don’t even think I believe in God.” And Suella very calmly replied, “That’s alright; you don’t have to believe. That is what the communion of saints is for. It carries us and even believes for us, when we are too angry or hurt or defeated to do it ourselves.”
Suddenly the light went on for me. In spite of what Martin Luther said about having to do our own believing as well as our own dying, we Protestants would do well to grow beyond our excessive spiritual individualism. The Communion of Saints means that we are carried by more than our own little spirutual selves. When we are friends in Jesus Christ, we are upheld not only by our immediate community of faith, but also by a long and deep tradition, stretching back into the past and moving forward into the future. As friends in Christ individuals and churches can all learn from each other.
The word friend does not often appear in the Bible, but in the Book of Job we have a portrayal of friendship. Recall Job’s sufferings, when in a bet with God The Satan as the challenger with God’s permission afflicted Job with the loss of his wealth, his family and his health. Job protested his innocence, while his friends in so many words tried to tell him that he must have done something to deserve his punishment. Now It is very easy for us to be hard on Job’s friends, but at least they came, which is more than some will do. When his three friends saw how great Job’s sufferings were, they wept, they tore their clothes, and they sat in silence with Job for seven days and nights. And when they finally did speak, they were trying to be helpful, offering to Job what they believed was the best of their religious tradition. But what they said was grossly inadequate and even untrue, and so God, after making an appearance to Job out of the whirlwind, told Job’s friends to make proper sacrifice, because they are not spoken truthfully. And God also told them that Job would pray for them, and Job’s prayer would be accepted.
So yes, Job’s friends had disappointed and failed him, but they were yet his friends, and so he would pray for them. And that is what we are called to do. Friends may indeed disappoint and fail us, but in Christ we remain friends, not because we always agree or believe the same things, but because together we are the Church, the Body of Christ in the world. We are part of the Communion of Saints, with both a past and a future.
Now there is very little about friendship in the New Testament. Matthew’s gospel has only one reference; in Luke there are ten and in John the word friend only appears in the reading you heard this morning, when Jesus called his disciples his friends. And the friendship they were called to was tough and demanding. Christianity grew in a world familiar with ideas of friendship developed by both the Greeks and the Romans, who understood that true, deep and abiding friendship develops character, because it leads to higher ground, to places we may not want to go, but need to go. And our friends can help move us there by speaking the truth to us---not necessarily what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.
In the fall of 2016, I took a trip to Viet Nam, of the most moving trips I have ever taken. I was with a small group of 15 people through Overseas Adventure Travel, a fabulous tour group, I might add. Our extraordinary leader, Tom, told us we were the first group he had ever led with no former Viet Nam vets. Many of us, Baby Boomers all, were Viet Nam War protesters, but no veterans. We met so many different people, including former Viet Cong, who bore no ill will at all toward the United States. “You were never colonizers,” they said, “unlike the French”, whom even today are hated by many Vietnamese.
In Saigon, which is now called Ho Chi Ming City, we visited this museum, which used to be called, The Museum of American War Crimes, now changed to The War Remnants Museum, since currently there is a good relationship between the States and Viet Nam. It is not an easy museum to visit, and I remember standing before this huge picture of Bob Kerry, former senator from Nebraska, who was standing over a pile of bodies, women and children. A man from my tour group was with me, and he told me he remembered Kerry addressing this incident, admitting the horrors that soldiers committed, because all too often they did not really know who the enemy was.
After leaving the museum and getting on the bus, Tom told us a story from one of his former tour groups. One of the men on that tour told the group he had fought in Viet Nam and along with others had done some regrettable things. He told the story about how he was in the jungle with a group of other Marines, and suddenly came across people he was sure were the enemy---though they were all women and children. I hated them all, he said. And as he picked up his M-16 rifle to begin the slaughter, one of his friends, his best buddy, pushed him to the ground. “You are not going to do this. I will not let you do this.” So, he said, I was prevented from committing the deed, but that action on my friend’s part ended our friendship. I would never have anything to do with him again. He was killed a few months later, and I never had the chance to thank him for what he did and to tell him I was wrong. We were friends, best friends, and he did for me what best friends are supposed to do---help us step up to a higher plane, help us to do what is right and good. Best friends tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear---the truth.
Sometimes friendship grows because we come from similar background sand share the same interests, but there are other times friendship grows because we are on a journey together toward something bigger than ourselves. I think the disciples and Jesus were bound together in this way. They were friends, because they were engaged in a way of life that was bigger than any one of them. They were in service to a God who, though beyond knowing and understanding, was not beyond loving. They were friends, and though Jesus would suffer their denial and desertion, still they were his disciples, still his friends, because they were bound together in something that God was doing in their midst.
This is what Christian friendship is. It is being bound together by something transcending our own little lives and opinions. It is being helped to struggle with the discomfort of being human, because we are people who want to be better than we actually are. It is knowing, really knowing, that together we can become more than we can ever be alone and separate.
"Disenthralled"
April 28, 2021
Dear Friends,
I had a 6th grade teacher, who just loved words and language. I recall how excited she became when teaching us about the power of prefixes and suffixes, how you can take a word and completely change its meaning by simply adding two letters: do becomes undo or redo; lovely becomes unlovely, mix becomes unmix. My best friend, Debbie, very smart and clever, pointed out that this does not always “work.” While we can say unlovely, we do not say unbeautiful. “Why is that?” she wanted to know. The teacher was completely stumped and could offer no reason for this. “Well,” Debbie, mused, “if there is no explanation, our language is not rational!” While most of us had no idea what rationality meant, Debbie’s father was a professor of chemistry at the University in Buffalo, so she must have learned something from him!
The only reason I thought about this is because I read something in The Christian Century, which jogged my memory. We all know the word enthrall or enthralled. Most of us have probably used it now and then. But how many of us have ever used the word disenthrall or disenthralled? Perhaps none of us. But Abraham Lincoln did in a very important speech he gave to Congress on December 1, 1862, exactly one month before he issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was trying to encourage the country to think about slavery in a new and different way. Remember, when the war began, Lincoln saw the war’s goal as the preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, though he was very much personally opposed to slavery. But things had changed in the country as well as in his own mind and heart. This is what he said toward the very end of his speech:
We can succeed only by concert. It is not, “Can any of us imagine
better?” but, “Can we all do better?” The dogmas of the quiet past are
Inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with
difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so
must we think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then
we shall save our country. We know how to save the Union. We, even
we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.
Lincoln was trying to push the country to think about slavery in a new way. He wanted the citizens to disenthrall themselves from their old ways of understanding not only the conflict that was the Civil War, but also how they understood the institution of slavery. He wanted them to face the hard truth that slavery meant that black people were owned by white people, who forced them to work not for their own benefit but for the benefit of the slave owner. He wanted the citizens to pull away from ideas they had embraced, probably without thinking about them very deeply---the same way we all accept notions and ideas that are part of our national consciousness without much thought. So, the question before us now is: Of what do we need to be disenthralled? We probably all have our lists. Peter Marty, the editor of The Christian Century, wrote movingly of our need to disenthrall ourselves of our nation’s love affair with guns. Though I agree with him, I also think the problem goes much deeper than the nation’s enthrallment with weapons. We are enthralled with particular ideas about freedom. Too many people think of freedom as the right to do what he or she wants as long as no one is directly hurt by our actions. While we do not have a right, for example, to commit mass murder, we do, according to some people, have the right to own weapons capable of being used in mass murder.
Consider too the number of people who have resisted the wearing of masks as an abridgment of their freedom. One of the U.S. Congress representatives was downright abusive toward Dr. Fauci, accusing him of taking away the freedom of the American people. “I don’t look at it that way,” the Doctor responded. “This is about safety and public health, not about freedom.” While many of us agree with Dr. Fauci, others do not. And that is a big problem and a huge challenge.
Some of you may recall a few years ago the outbreak of measles in the New York City Public Schools. My son, who has a PhD in infectious disease, works for the New York City Health Department, and he was furious, because the outbreak was due to the refusal of the Orthodox Jewish community to vaccinate their children against measles. They use the public schools, but they tend to be concentrated in particular schools, and Aaron told me that they took over school boards and voted to change all kinds of things---like doing away with before and after school programs, which most of them did not need anyway. They also do not require children to adhere to the state mandate about shots---though New York does allow people to opt out for “religious reasons.” I told my son I would not allow that. If you want to use public schools, you must adhere to certain rules and regulations. When my children were registered for school, I had to show proof of vaccination. There were no exceptions back then----but it is a simple fact that our nation is much more diverse now, and so accommodation has been made---sometime for better, and in some cases (like health and safety) for worse.
There are undoubtedly many things we could stand to be disenthralled from, but perhaps one of the most salient is the idea that everyone can be pleased and made happy and content. There are tough and demanding conversations that call out for attention, but we are too often afraid to engage, because we know how touchy and sensitive people’s feelings are. So, we are silent. We need wisdom, but we are unsure where and how to find it. In Proverbs we read: The Lord gives wisdom. From God’s mouth come knowledge and understanding. And the Book of James counsels us to ask God for wisdom, but how often do we ever ask? And would we even recognize the wisdom, if it came our way?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
April 28, 2021
Dear Friends,
I had a 6th grade teacher, who just loved words and language. I recall how excited she became when teaching us about the power of prefixes and suffixes, how you can take a word and completely change its meaning by simply adding two letters: do becomes undo or redo; lovely becomes unlovely, mix becomes unmix. My best friend, Debbie, very smart and clever, pointed out that this does not always “work.” While we can say unlovely, we do not say unbeautiful. “Why is that?” she wanted to know. The teacher was completely stumped and could offer no reason for this. “Well,” Debbie, mused, “if there is no explanation, our language is not rational!” While most of us had no idea what rationality meant, Debbie’s father was a professor of chemistry at the University in Buffalo, so she must have learned something from him!
The only reason I thought about this is because I read something in The Christian Century, which jogged my memory. We all know the word enthrall or enthralled. Most of us have probably used it now and then. But how many of us have ever used the word disenthrall or disenthralled? Perhaps none of us. But Abraham Lincoln did in a very important speech he gave to Congress on December 1, 1862, exactly one month before he issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was trying to encourage the country to think about slavery in a new and different way. Remember, when the war began, Lincoln saw the war’s goal as the preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, though he was very much personally opposed to slavery. But things had changed in the country as well as in his own mind and heart. This is what he said toward the very end of his speech:
We can succeed only by concert. It is not, “Can any of us imagine
better?” but, “Can we all do better?” The dogmas of the quiet past are
Inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with
difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so
must we think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then
we shall save our country. We know how to save the Union. We, even
we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.
Lincoln was trying to push the country to think about slavery in a new way. He wanted the citizens to disenthrall themselves from their old ways of understanding not only the conflict that was the Civil War, but also how they understood the institution of slavery. He wanted them to face the hard truth that slavery meant that black people were owned by white people, who forced them to work not for their own benefit but for the benefit of the slave owner. He wanted the citizens to pull away from ideas they had embraced, probably without thinking about them very deeply---the same way we all accept notions and ideas that are part of our national consciousness without much thought. So, the question before us now is: Of what do we need to be disenthralled? We probably all have our lists. Peter Marty, the editor of The Christian Century, wrote movingly of our need to disenthrall ourselves of our nation’s love affair with guns. Though I agree with him, I also think the problem goes much deeper than the nation’s enthrallment with weapons. We are enthralled with particular ideas about freedom. Too many people think of freedom as the right to do what he or she wants as long as no one is directly hurt by our actions. While we do not have a right, for example, to commit mass murder, we do, according to some people, have the right to own weapons capable of being used in mass murder.
Consider too the number of people who have resisted the wearing of masks as an abridgment of their freedom. One of the U.S. Congress representatives was downright abusive toward Dr. Fauci, accusing him of taking away the freedom of the American people. “I don’t look at it that way,” the Doctor responded. “This is about safety and public health, not about freedom.” While many of us agree with Dr. Fauci, others do not. And that is a big problem and a huge challenge.
Some of you may recall a few years ago the outbreak of measles in the New York City Public Schools. My son, who has a PhD in infectious disease, works for the New York City Health Department, and he was furious, because the outbreak was due to the refusal of the Orthodox Jewish community to vaccinate their children against measles. They use the public schools, but they tend to be concentrated in particular schools, and Aaron told me that they took over school boards and voted to change all kinds of things---like doing away with before and after school programs, which most of them did not need anyway. They also do not require children to adhere to the state mandate about shots---though New York does allow people to opt out for “religious reasons.” I told my son I would not allow that. If you want to use public schools, you must adhere to certain rules and regulations. When my children were registered for school, I had to show proof of vaccination. There were no exceptions back then----but it is a simple fact that our nation is much more diverse now, and so accommodation has been made---sometime for better, and in some cases (like health and safety) for worse.
There are undoubtedly many things we could stand to be disenthralled from, but perhaps one of the most salient is the idea that everyone can be pleased and made happy and content. There are tough and demanding conversations that call out for attention, but we are too often afraid to engage, because we know how touchy and sensitive people’s feelings are. So, we are silent. We need wisdom, but we are unsure where and how to find it. In Proverbs we read: The Lord gives wisdom. From God’s mouth come knowledge and understanding. And the Book of James counsels us to ask God for wisdom, but how often do we ever ask? And would we even recognize the wisdom, if it came our way?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
When Life on Earth Is Not Enough by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 4/25/2021
1 Corinthians 15: 12-22
My husband rarely has any religious conversations with anyone, but there is one he still remembers to this day, though it happened around 30 years ago. It was a Sunday morning, when I was at church, and a woman came to the door, who was a Jehovah Witness. She was relatively young, probably in her early 30’s, and since she seemed very eager to talk, my husband invited her in. She asked him if he were a believer, and it was quickly established that he was an agnostic. “In my younger days,” he told her, “I was an atheist, but now I recognize I don’t know enough to either affirm or deny God.” The woman told him how a few years before, she had lost a 6 year old son to leukemia, and it was her religion that saved her from not only despair but also from suicide. If I did not believe I would see my son again, I could not have continued to live, she said. And then she asked my husband how he could possibly cope if he lost one of his children. Well, he said, it would be incredibly difficult, and I am sure I would have to deal with depression. But many others have suffered such a loss, without believing in God or an afterlife, so I guess I would have to cope as others have done. She was incredulous that such coping was possible. But it is, Donald insisted. Perhaps you need to step outside the church and expose yourself to others who see reality in a very different way from you.
That woman raised one of life’s most heart searing issues. It is not only death that is the problem here; it is unjust death, death that comes far too early and leaves everyone with the aching heart that protests, “This should not be! This must not be, and yet, sadly and tragically, it is!” Everything that lives dies, but as far as we can tell, human beings are the only creatures who actively consider death and what finitude means. This is not only a religious question, but also deeply philosophical and psychological. I remember when I was an undergraduate and took a social psychology course. One of the psychologists we read was Abraham Maslow, the psychologist of self-actualization, who believed that the human project is to find one’s gifts and passions and use them that life might indeed be full and meaningful. But what I remember most about Maslow was his insistence that If we did not die, we would be unable to love. In his mind there was something about the limitation of time that imposed on human beings a serious quest for meaning. Time means that our choices have consequences, since we cannot choose everything. If we lived forever, our choices would have very little meaning, since we could simply choose at a later time a choice we had once given up. I was only 19 at the time, far too young to understand the wisdom of his words, but now I get what he was driving at.
Just as now I get what Paul is driving at in his famous Letter to the Christian Church in Corinth. I know that are many faithful Christians, who have very little use for Paul. His opinions on women and sex are troubling and even offensive. And he pays no attention at all to the life that Jesus actually lived on this earth. We never hear from him a word about Jesus’ healings and teachings or the stories we love so much, like the Good Samaritan or The Prodigal Son. Yet he is the early Church’s thinker, and without Paul it is doubtful that Christianity ever would have succeeded in making its way into the world.
Paul preached Christ crucified and Christ resurrected. This is the heart of the Christian message, according to Paul. Without the resurrection he claims that our faith is in vain. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people to be pitied.” Pretty stark words, are they not? Pitied is the word that strikes hard at me.
So, all these Christian humanists, of which there are many, fervently believing that loving God means loving the good and doing the good on this earth, fighting for justice, supporting the oppressed and the marginalized, placing limits on greed and wealth without any firm belief in an afterlife---all that, Paul would say, is not only NOT enough, it is not the Christian gospel. It may be Christian ethics, but Paul would insist that without the resurrection the ethics, while noble, are pitiable, incomplete. And yet there is no denying that are many committed Christians today, who understand following Jesus Christ to be an ethical commitment---not a commitment to belief in a resurrection.
I do understand that kind of ethical faith, and it does and can work, especially for those who are relatively privileged. I can admit that if this earthly life were the only life I shall ever have, I can still say, “Thank you, God,” because I recognize that I have had more privilege and opportunities than many others have ever had. So, do I personally need eternal life in order to affirm that life is meaningful and God is good? Would I feel cheated if I never see my family and friends in another life beyond this one, including a brother, who died at 2 from leukemia, before I was born? No, I would not feel cheated, but in saying that I realize I am then speaking from a position of privilege, and my privilege cannot speak for the fullness of the human condition. Such a privileged perspective says nothing about the injustice of children dying from leukemia at age 2 or 6. And it certainly does not address the question of evil, which has made of this life a hell for far too many people. If there is nothing for them beyond this life, if there is no resurrection for them, what do we say? Too bad? Tough luck? You are pitied?
We all know that many atheists and agnostics say that belief in the resurrection is a consolation prize for all the injustices and sorrows suffered on this earth, making it easier to cope with the pain. Yes, there is consolation in such a belief, but that does not automatically make the belief false. And belief in the resurrection is never, ever to be used as a substitute for working against injustice and evil. WE do not simply let evil stand, because we hope and have faith that finally God will make all manner of things well. Faith tells us that God calls us to act against evil, just as it tells us that God will not let evil have the final word.
In 2012 my husband and I made a trip to Poland. A very good friend and colleague of mine, Kaz, who is Polish, invited us to stay with him and his parents. So, we went. And while there we made a pilgrimage to the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pilgrimage is exactly what it felt like. We felt obligated to go, not because we wanted to go, but because we owed it to the victims and to history. And while there we placed on one of the wooden beds in the children and women’s area some words given to me by a teacher, who had written them in memory of his neighbor’s daughter, who died there in 1943 at the age of 8.
God persists in love, even when we are tempted to hate.
God persists in mercy, even when we might rightly choose vengeance.
God persists to call us to new life, even when,
especially when our lives have been pulverized by an evil
so bitterly deep we cannot begin to understand or name it.
Yes, God persists in love, a deep heart wrenching love for the victim
And most appallingly of all, a deep heart wrenching love for the victimizer.
We cannot understand this.
We do not want to understand this: why God persists in this kind of tormented love.
And yet it is this love and mercy of God that moves the universe and make all life new.
And as I placed those words on the bunk, I thought to myself: this persistent God is the God who resurrects. We may not be able to prove it, and we must admit that we could be wrong. But even if we are wrong, God is not.
1 Corinthians 15: 12-22
My husband rarely has any religious conversations with anyone, but there is one he still remembers to this day, though it happened around 30 years ago. It was a Sunday morning, when I was at church, and a woman came to the door, who was a Jehovah Witness. She was relatively young, probably in her early 30’s, and since she seemed very eager to talk, my husband invited her in. She asked him if he were a believer, and it was quickly established that he was an agnostic. “In my younger days,” he told her, “I was an atheist, but now I recognize I don’t know enough to either affirm or deny God.” The woman told him how a few years before, she had lost a 6 year old son to leukemia, and it was her religion that saved her from not only despair but also from suicide. If I did not believe I would see my son again, I could not have continued to live, she said. And then she asked my husband how he could possibly cope if he lost one of his children. Well, he said, it would be incredibly difficult, and I am sure I would have to deal with depression. But many others have suffered such a loss, without believing in God or an afterlife, so I guess I would have to cope as others have done. She was incredulous that such coping was possible. But it is, Donald insisted. Perhaps you need to step outside the church and expose yourself to others who see reality in a very different way from you.
That woman raised one of life’s most heart searing issues. It is not only death that is the problem here; it is unjust death, death that comes far too early and leaves everyone with the aching heart that protests, “This should not be! This must not be, and yet, sadly and tragically, it is!” Everything that lives dies, but as far as we can tell, human beings are the only creatures who actively consider death and what finitude means. This is not only a religious question, but also deeply philosophical and psychological. I remember when I was an undergraduate and took a social psychology course. One of the psychologists we read was Abraham Maslow, the psychologist of self-actualization, who believed that the human project is to find one’s gifts and passions and use them that life might indeed be full and meaningful. But what I remember most about Maslow was his insistence that If we did not die, we would be unable to love. In his mind there was something about the limitation of time that imposed on human beings a serious quest for meaning. Time means that our choices have consequences, since we cannot choose everything. If we lived forever, our choices would have very little meaning, since we could simply choose at a later time a choice we had once given up. I was only 19 at the time, far too young to understand the wisdom of his words, but now I get what he was driving at.
Just as now I get what Paul is driving at in his famous Letter to the Christian Church in Corinth. I know that are many faithful Christians, who have very little use for Paul. His opinions on women and sex are troubling and even offensive. And he pays no attention at all to the life that Jesus actually lived on this earth. We never hear from him a word about Jesus’ healings and teachings or the stories we love so much, like the Good Samaritan or The Prodigal Son. Yet he is the early Church’s thinker, and without Paul it is doubtful that Christianity ever would have succeeded in making its way into the world.
Paul preached Christ crucified and Christ resurrected. This is the heart of the Christian message, according to Paul. Without the resurrection he claims that our faith is in vain. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people to be pitied.” Pretty stark words, are they not? Pitied is the word that strikes hard at me.
So, all these Christian humanists, of which there are many, fervently believing that loving God means loving the good and doing the good on this earth, fighting for justice, supporting the oppressed and the marginalized, placing limits on greed and wealth without any firm belief in an afterlife---all that, Paul would say, is not only NOT enough, it is not the Christian gospel. It may be Christian ethics, but Paul would insist that without the resurrection the ethics, while noble, are pitiable, incomplete. And yet there is no denying that are many committed Christians today, who understand following Jesus Christ to be an ethical commitment---not a commitment to belief in a resurrection.
I do understand that kind of ethical faith, and it does and can work, especially for those who are relatively privileged. I can admit that if this earthly life were the only life I shall ever have, I can still say, “Thank you, God,” because I recognize that I have had more privilege and opportunities than many others have ever had. So, do I personally need eternal life in order to affirm that life is meaningful and God is good? Would I feel cheated if I never see my family and friends in another life beyond this one, including a brother, who died at 2 from leukemia, before I was born? No, I would not feel cheated, but in saying that I realize I am then speaking from a position of privilege, and my privilege cannot speak for the fullness of the human condition. Such a privileged perspective says nothing about the injustice of children dying from leukemia at age 2 or 6. And it certainly does not address the question of evil, which has made of this life a hell for far too many people. If there is nothing for them beyond this life, if there is no resurrection for them, what do we say? Too bad? Tough luck? You are pitied?
We all know that many atheists and agnostics say that belief in the resurrection is a consolation prize for all the injustices and sorrows suffered on this earth, making it easier to cope with the pain. Yes, there is consolation in such a belief, but that does not automatically make the belief false. And belief in the resurrection is never, ever to be used as a substitute for working against injustice and evil. WE do not simply let evil stand, because we hope and have faith that finally God will make all manner of things well. Faith tells us that God calls us to act against evil, just as it tells us that God will not let evil have the final word.
In 2012 my husband and I made a trip to Poland. A very good friend and colleague of mine, Kaz, who is Polish, invited us to stay with him and his parents. So, we went. And while there we made a pilgrimage to the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pilgrimage is exactly what it felt like. We felt obligated to go, not because we wanted to go, but because we owed it to the victims and to history. And while there we placed on one of the wooden beds in the children and women’s area some words given to me by a teacher, who had written them in memory of his neighbor’s daughter, who died there in 1943 at the age of 8.
God persists in love, even when we are tempted to hate.
God persists in mercy, even when we might rightly choose vengeance.
God persists to call us to new life, even when,
especially when our lives have been pulverized by an evil
so bitterly deep we cannot begin to understand or name it.
Yes, God persists in love, a deep heart wrenching love for the victim
And most appallingly of all, a deep heart wrenching love for the victimizer.
We cannot understand this.
We do not want to understand this: why God persists in this kind of tormented love.
And yet it is this love and mercy of God that moves the universe and make all life new.
And as I placed those words on the bunk, I thought to myself: this persistent God is the God who resurrects. We may not be able to prove it, and we must admit that we could be wrong. But even if we are wrong, God is not.
Peace Be with You by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 4/18/2021
Luke 24: 36-49
In February, 2006, I went on a trip to Israel as part of inter-religious group of Jews and Christians. There are two incidents, which stand out in my mind, even after 15 years. The first was on the Golan Heights, where we were looking through telescopes with our guide pointing in the direction from where an invasion of Israel began. It was Yom Kippur 1973, and the Israeli troops at the lookout were all relatively new and young. Many of the more experienced soldiers were given time off to observe the religious holiday. These inexperienced soldiers noticed the movement of what looked like troops, but it took them a while to believe what they saw. Our guide was a teenager at the time, in worship at one of the Jerusalem synagogues, and outside he could hear the sound of truck engines roaring. How strange our guide told us to hear such sounds on this holy night. But before he had time to reflect, soldiers entered, calling on all adult men as well as any members of the military, male or female, to leave for the purpose of defending the country. Two days later, we stood on the Temple Mount, where the Jerusalem Temple was believed to have been built and the Muslim Mosque now sits. This is also the area where Jesus wandered and taught. I remember feeling with great emotion that three great religions claim this space as sacred, and yet this space has not yielded peace.
“Peace be with you.” We heard Jesus say these words to his disciples last week in our reading from John, and in today’s lesson from Luke’s gospel, they are the first words Jesus spoke to his gathered disciples after his resurrection. Peace: Jesus spoke of it, nations hope for it, religious people pray for it, and diplomats work for it. Even popes have traveled to Israel with the hope of building bridges of peace in an area of the world, which has been a tinderbox of tension for quite some time. Paul VI was the first pope to visit Israel on January 4, 1964. The Vatican had not yet recognized Israel as a legitimate nation state, and Jews felt antipathy against Rome for that non-recognition as well as the blame leveled against them for Christ’s death. In 2000 Pope John Paul made a visit, saying he was deeply saddened by displays of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict visited in 2009 and Pope Francis in 2014, taking with him two friends from Argentina, a rabbi and an Islamic scholar. These visits were an effort to mend ruptures between Catholics and Jews, and also in recent years to help the cause of peace between Jews and Palestinians.
Peace: it can be the first word as it is in this morning’s reading, or even the last word. A former parishioner of mine told me that her mother’s last word before she died was the single word, peace. “She looked at me with her eyes wide open, and though she had not spoken in days, she clearly said out loud, “Peace.” And then she closed her eyes and died a few minutes later. “My mother,” the woman told me, “never spoke of peace. She disapproved of all the peace marches I went on,” she said, “and I never once heard her speak of inner peace, but there it was the last word on her dying lips: Peace.” Whatever she meant by that one word her daughter would never know.
Jesus, of course, did speak of peace quite often. Not only did he wish peace on his disciples, but in the Beatitudes as reported in Matthew he called the peacemakers the children of God. Jesus certainly knew how hard peace was to achieve, having lived his life in occupied territory with Rome’s boot on Israel’s neck. He understood all too well that peace was not something achieved by human efforts alone.
He surely would have embraced Micah’s vision of peace, when the Lord would judge between nations, and the people would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations shall not learn war anymore. But such an achievement did not belong solely to humans. It was God’s work, initiated by God with instruction from on high. Micah firmly believed such a day and time were coming as did Jesus. And it was Israel’s duty to wait for that time.
But in the meantime, even in the time of empire and great disequilibrium of political power, Jesus taught and believed that peace could reign among his followers. It wasn’t political peace; it did not immediately solve all the problems of war and violence. It is a different kind of peace, one passing all human understanding, a divine gift that Jesus would pass on to his followers. It was the peace that came from the assurance that God had already granted victory, because in Jesus’ resurrection evil was put on notice that its defeat was assured. Oh, there were still battles to be fought, and some of those battles might result in defeats, but all that could be faced, because the final battle had already been won. This was the peace that was supposed to make despair impossibility for faithful Christians. In fact, the medieval church considered despair a deadly sin, understanding it as an affront against God, who gives the assurance that all manner of things shall finally be made well. In the midst of great trials and tribulations, when defeats come upon us, it is hard to believe that, and when we see people embrace that belief and live the peace of Christ, we are rightly moved and inspired.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed in that peace with his whole heart, mind, soul and body. Theologian, ordained minister in the State Lutheran Church of Germany, resistor to Hitler’s evil empire, Bonhoeffer was hanged for his participation in the plot against Hitler’s life on April 9, 1945---just two weeks before Americans liberated the Flossenburg Camp. On the final morning of his life, he preached his final sermon to a group of prisoners. His final words were, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” He displayed no fear, and the camp doctor said, he had never seen someone die with such quiet dignity, courage and peace. Surely, the doctor said, “The peace of Christ was with him.”
For two years Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned, and during those years he wrote and pondered what Christian faith in such a time meant. And for Bonhoeffer it meant that God in Jesus Christ could be trusted and finally there was nothing that could ever destroy the assurance of Christ’s peace. Some months before his death, he had written to one of his friends, who would later become his biographer: How should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one’s failures when one shares in God’s suffering in the life of this world? You understand what I mean even when I put it so briefly. I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight, and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things. May God lead us kindly through these times, but above all, may God lead us to himself.
Luke 24: 36-49
In February, 2006, I went on a trip to Israel as part of inter-religious group of Jews and Christians. There are two incidents, which stand out in my mind, even after 15 years. The first was on the Golan Heights, where we were looking through telescopes with our guide pointing in the direction from where an invasion of Israel began. It was Yom Kippur 1973, and the Israeli troops at the lookout were all relatively new and young. Many of the more experienced soldiers were given time off to observe the religious holiday. These inexperienced soldiers noticed the movement of what looked like troops, but it took them a while to believe what they saw. Our guide was a teenager at the time, in worship at one of the Jerusalem synagogues, and outside he could hear the sound of truck engines roaring. How strange our guide told us to hear such sounds on this holy night. But before he had time to reflect, soldiers entered, calling on all adult men as well as any members of the military, male or female, to leave for the purpose of defending the country. Two days later, we stood on the Temple Mount, where the Jerusalem Temple was believed to have been built and the Muslim Mosque now sits. This is also the area where Jesus wandered and taught. I remember feeling with great emotion that three great religions claim this space as sacred, and yet this space has not yielded peace.
“Peace be with you.” We heard Jesus say these words to his disciples last week in our reading from John, and in today’s lesson from Luke’s gospel, they are the first words Jesus spoke to his gathered disciples after his resurrection. Peace: Jesus spoke of it, nations hope for it, religious people pray for it, and diplomats work for it. Even popes have traveled to Israel with the hope of building bridges of peace in an area of the world, which has been a tinderbox of tension for quite some time. Paul VI was the first pope to visit Israel on January 4, 1964. The Vatican had not yet recognized Israel as a legitimate nation state, and Jews felt antipathy against Rome for that non-recognition as well as the blame leveled against them for Christ’s death. In 2000 Pope John Paul made a visit, saying he was deeply saddened by displays of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict visited in 2009 and Pope Francis in 2014, taking with him two friends from Argentina, a rabbi and an Islamic scholar. These visits were an effort to mend ruptures between Catholics and Jews, and also in recent years to help the cause of peace between Jews and Palestinians.
Peace: it can be the first word as it is in this morning’s reading, or even the last word. A former parishioner of mine told me that her mother’s last word before she died was the single word, peace. “She looked at me with her eyes wide open, and though she had not spoken in days, she clearly said out loud, “Peace.” And then she closed her eyes and died a few minutes later. “My mother,” the woman told me, “never spoke of peace. She disapproved of all the peace marches I went on,” she said, “and I never once heard her speak of inner peace, but there it was the last word on her dying lips: Peace.” Whatever she meant by that one word her daughter would never know.
Jesus, of course, did speak of peace quite often. Not only did he wish peace on his disciples, but in the Beatitudes as reported in Matthew he called the peacemakers the children of God. Jesus certainly knew how hard peace was to achieve, having lived his life in occupied territory with Rome’s boot on Israel’s neck. He understood all too well that peace was not something achieved by human efforts alone.
He surely would have embraced Micah’s vision of peace, when the Lord would judge between nations, and the people would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations shall not learn war anymore. But such an achievement did not belong solely to humans. It was God’s work, initiated by God with instruction from on high. Micah firmly believed such a day and time were coming as did Jesus. And it was Israel’s duty to wait for that time.
But in the meantime, even in the time of empire and great disequilibrium of political power, Jesus taught and believed that peace could reign among his followers. It wasn’t political peace; it did not immediately solve all the problems of war and violence. It is a different kind of peace, one passing all human understanding, a divine gift that Jesus would pass on to his followers. It was the peace that came from the assurance that God had already granted victory, because in Jesus’ resurrection evil was put on notice that its defeat was assured. Oh, there were still battles to be fought, and some of those battles might result in defeats, but all that could be faced, because the final battle had already been won. This was the peace that was supposed to make despair impossibility for faithful Christians. In fact, the medieval church considered despair a deadly sin, understanding it as an affront against God, who gives the assurance that all manner of things shall finally be made well. In the midst of great trials and tribulations, when defeats come upon us, it is hard to believe that, and when we see people embrace that belief and live the peace of Christ, we are rightly moved and inspired.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed in that peace with his whole heart, mind, soul and body. Theologian, ordained minister in the State Lutheran Church of Germany, resistor to Hitler’s evil empire, Bonhoeffer was hanged for his participation in the plot against Hitler’s life on April 9, 1945---just two weeks before Americans liberated the Flossenburg Camp. On the final morning of his life, he preached his final sermon to a group of prisoners. His final words were, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” He displayed no fear, and the camp doctor said, he had never seen someone die with such quiet dignity, courage and peace. Surely, the doctor said, “The peace of Christ was with him.”
For two years Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned, and during those years he wrote and pondered what Christian faith in such a time meant. And for Bonhoeffer it meant that God in Jesus Christ could be trusted and finally there was nothing that could ever destroy the assurance of Christ’s peace. Some months before his death, he had written to one of his friends, who would later become his biographer: How should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one’s failures when one shares in God’s suffering in the life of this world? You understand what I mean even when I put it so briefly. I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight, and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things. May God lead us kindly through these times, but above all, may God lead us to himself.
April 13, 2021
Dear Friends,
I love books. When I moved into my present home in the spring of 2003, I had 165 boxes of books. They were all piled up in the dining room while work was being done in the rest of the house. Every room in the house has bookcases, except the kitchen, dining room and bathrooms. After 18 years in this house I now have even more books, so I would guess if I had to pack them all into boxes there would be well over 200. My children have begun to complain that I should begin to clean them out NOW, but I told them, “No way, I am leaving it for you to do after I am gone. I do not plan to make it easy for you. Consider it payback time.” Besides my books, I have t-shirts and mugs about books. One t-shirt reads, “It’s Not Hoarding, If It’s Books.” Another one says: Books Are My Superpower. What’s Yours? And then I have a mug, which has a quote from Louisa May Alcott: She Is Too Fond of Books and It Has Turned Her Brain. And last night I ordered a t-shirt with the same quote.
So, given my love of books it was with great interest I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor about an unusual library in Kashmir. Dal Lake, with his sparkling waters and 360 degree views of the Himalayas, is one of the most picturesque places in Kashmir, attracting tourists, photographers and filmmakers. But it also has a Traveler’s Library---only 600 books, which is not much, but it is the labor of love of a man named Mr. Muhammad Latief Oata. Born in Kashmir, the oldest son of a plumber and a housewife, he left home at 16 to support himself by selling arts and crafts to tourists. He had a stall from which he sold his crafts, and now and then, he would get books, mainly from tourists, to sell from various people. Mr. Oata could not read, but he asked people to summarize the books for him, which they happily did.
For years Mr. Oata had sold his crafts in India, but his desire was to return to Kashmir, which he finally was able to do. He built a small craft store and opened a travel agency. Then the idea for a library was born. At first, he had piles of books all around his home and his store, but he realized they needed a permanent home, and so made part of his store into a library. Though he still cannot read, he does remember the books: their themes, authors and the countries from which the authors came. He remembers the very first book he received: The God of Small Things by the Indian writer, Arundhati Roy. It’s the story of a family, a very messy one, whose dysfunction goes on for many decades. And then there is Asking for Trouble by Donald Woods, a banned journalist from South Africa, who was in trouble for criticizing the government that supported apartheid.
Tourists are fascinated by Mr. Oata’s love of books, which he claims are his “most prized possession.” Some have even helped him organize his library while talking to him about the books they have read and left for his library. When the Valley was flooded in 2014, the waters washed over his library shelves. He cried like a child, he admitted, and the family as well as kind tourists helped him to clean the books and move them to the second floor.
In 2019 the Indian government imposed direct rule on Kashmir, which was resisted, so India then imposed a media blackout. For a while Kashmir was cut off from the world with no tourists, no visitors, and no work. Then Covid-19 struck, and another set of restrictions was imposed. To survive Mr. Oata began to work as a day laborer, and his wife has done the same. They are committed to giving their children an education. Their daughter is a first year medical student, and their son is a senior in high school. Of course, their son and daughter know how to read, which especially delights Mr. Oata. Work often takes Mr. Oata away from home, but his wife, he insists, takes good care of the library. And whenever he gets the chance, he climbs the steps to the second floor and touches, feels and smells his beloved books. He is waiting and hoping for normal to return, when once again his library will be filled with people, who delight in his books as much as he does.
Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Egypt, where we visited the city of Alexandria, site of one of the world’s great libraries, founded sometime around 295 BC. At one time it might have had as many as 400,000 scrolls. There is a modern library there now, and I remember being overwhelmed with emotion thinking about the perseverance of knowledge through time. Consider the labor of love involved in writing 400,000 scrolls, many of them later copied as an insurance against the loss of knowledge.
But knowledge can be lost, and it has been lost. We have no idea how much was lost at Alexandria in a fire said to be the result of Julius Caesar’s civil war. And then there was the German burning of the Louvain Library in Belgium during World War I, when 300,000 books, 1000 manuscripts and 800 ancient pieces of art went up in flames---most of it irreplaceable. Louvain’s librarians wept, and I think Mr. Oata would have understood why. God has made us knowledge loving creatures.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I love books. When I moved into my present home in the spring of 2003, I had 165 boxes of books. They were all piled up in the dining room while work was being done in the rest of the house. Every room in the house has bookcases, except the kitchen, dining room and bathrooms. After 18 years in this house I now have even more books, so I would guess if I had to pack them all into boxes there would be well over 200. My children have begun to complain that I should begin to clean them out NOW, but I told them, “No way, I am leaving it for you to do after I am gone. I do not plan to make it easy for you. Consider it payback time.” Besides my books, I have t-shirts and mugs about books. One t-shirt reads, “It’s Not Hoarding, If It’s Books.” Another one says: Books Are My Superpower. What’s Yours? And then I have a mug, which has a quote from Louisa May Alcott: She Is Too Fond of Books and It Has Turned Her Brain. And last night I ordered a t-shirt with the same quote.
So, given my love of books it was with great interest I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor about an unusual library in Kashmir. Dal Lake, with his sparkling waters and 360 degree views of the Himalayas, is one of the most picturesque places in Kashmir, attracting tourists, photographers and filmmakers. But it also has a Traveler’s Library---only 600 books, which is not much, but it is the labor of love of a man named Mr. Muhammad Latief Oata. Born in Kashmir, the oldest son of a plumber and a housewife, he left home at 16 to support himself by selling arts and crafts to tourists. He had a stall from which he sold his crafts, and now and then, he would get books, mainly from tourists, to sell from various people. Mr. Oata could not read, but he asked people to summarize the books for him, which they happily did.
For years Mr. Oata had sold his crafts in India, but his desire was to return to Kashmir, which he finally was able to do. He built a small craft store and opened a travel agency. Then the idea for a library was born. At first, he had piles of books all around his home and his store, but he realized they needed a permanent home, and so made part of his store into a library. Though he still cannot read, he does remember the books: their themes, authors and the countries from which the authors came. He remembers the very first book he received: The God of Small Things by the Indian writer, Arundhati Roy. It’s the story of a family, a very messy one, whose dysfunction goes on for many decades. And then there is Asking for Trouble by Donald Woods, a banned journalist from South Africa, who was in trouble for criticizing the government that supported apartheid.
Tourists are fascinated by Mr. Oata’s love of books, which he claims are his “most prized possession.” Some have even helped him organize his library while talking to him about the books they have read and left for his library. When the Valley was flooded in 2014, the waters washed over his library shelves. He cried like a child, he admitted, and the family as well as kind tourists helped him to clean the books and move them to the second floor.
In 2019 the Indian government imposed direct rule on Kashmir, which was resisted, so India then imposed a media blackout. For a while Kashmir was cut off from the world with no tourists, no visitors, and no work. Then Covid-19 struck, and another set of restrictions was imposed. To survive Mr. Oata began to work as a day laborer, and his wife has done the same. They are committed to giving their children an education. Their daughter is a first year medical student, and their son is a senior in high school. Of course, their son and daughter know how to read, which especially delights Mr. Oata. Work often takes Mr. Oata away from home, but his wife, he insists, takes good care of the library. And whenever he gets the chance, he climbs the steps to the second floor and touches, feels and smells his beloved books. He is waiting and hoping for normal to return, when once again his library will be filled with people, who delight in his books as much as he does.
Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Egypt, where we visited the city of Alexandria, site of one of the world’s great libraries, founded sometime around 295 BC. At one time it might have had as many as 400,000 scrolls. There is a modern library there now, and I remember being overwhelmed with emotion thinking about the perseverance of knowledge through time. Consider the labor of love involved in writing 400,000 scrolls, many of them later copied as an insurance against the loss of knowledge.
But knowledge can be lost, and it has been lost. We have no idea how much was lost at Alexandria in a fire said to be the result of Julius Caesar’s civil war. And then there was the German burning of the Louvain Library in Belgium during World War I, when 300,000 books, 1000 manuscripts and 800 ancient pieces of art went up in flames---most of it irreplaceable. Louvain’s librarians wept, and I think Mr. Oata would have understood why. God has made us knowledge loving creatures.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
BACK IN GALILEE by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 4/11/2021
John 20: 19-31
Now let’s get one thing straight: No one can believe what he or she cannot believe. If you do not believe something---like dead bodies coming back to life---- trying to force yourself to believe is futile. Oh, you can play all kinds of clever mind games, convincing yourself something must be true, because you want it to be true, but to my way of thinking, wanting to believe something is not the same thing as actually believing. Sometimes you need your own reason to believe. Other peoples’ reasons may not be good enough!
And that was all I was asking for---my own reason to believe. You have probably guessed by now who I am--- Thomas, the so called Doubter, though why I have been so designated remains mystery to me. After all, I only wanted to see what the other disciples had already seen---the risen Christ. They believed because they had seen. And I told them I would not believe until I saw, until I could see the nail prints on his hands and the wound in his side. And so, Jesus came, but not only to me, to all of us, who were gathered together.
I recognized him immediately by his wounds. Does that strike you as strange---the resurrected Christ still bearing his wounds? They were not causing him any pain; they were more like a mark of identity, something that could not be taken away without denying and trivializing who he was and is. And when you really think about it that is probably true for all of us. The wounds we bear do help to make us who we are. Yes, we are our wounds, but of course, also more than wounds. Isn’t that what Jesus’ resurrection revealed--- God’s victory over the wounds of the human condition!
So, I recognized Jesus by his wounds. That is my first point. And my second point is that I recognized him in an ordinary place, a room in Galilee. Galilee was the place most of his ministry had occurred. You may not realize this, but the Gospel writers pay a great deal of attention to where things happen. Place matters. It matters to you too, doesn’t it? We are, after all, people of a place. Place marks us, leaves an imprint on us. Place helps to make us who we are---like the first line in one of your modern novels, The Prince of Tides: My wound is my geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. And that is what Galilee was for all of us, both our wound and our anchorage. Jesus’ ministry was made in Galilee. Oh, he was crucified in Jerusalem, but John tells you that Jesus headed back to Galilee. Galilee---that no count backwater of a region; not much to expect from there, except for the fact that this was our home. This was where Jesus taught and healed and lived. We all came from the region of Galilee.
Jerusalem, on the other hand, was the seat of temple power and the place of an occupying Roman army. And yes, it was the place where Jesus died and was probably resurrected---though no one saw exactly where and how he rose. But make no mistake, Jerusalem was not where he remained. Did you ever wonder why Jesus didn’t directly go to Pilate and rub his ruddy Roman face in God’s victory? I mean isn’t power always impressed by power? Rome had the power of the sword, and anyone who had power over the sword that is, over death was a formidable foe.
You would have thought that Jesus would have wanted to teach Rome and Jerusalem the limits of empire. But that is not what we did. Instead, he returned to Galilee---back to the site of his teaching and healing. Why? Well, the way I figure it is this: When power meets power, especially when power confronts a new kind of power, all the old power knows how to do is feverishly work to increase itself---like nations aspiring to make more impressive bombs, a more sophisticated military. But Jesus wasn’t going to waste his time fighting that old kind of power. He knew it was already finished, done with. He had already fought the battle, and the victory was won---even if Pilate and Herod did not yet know it. I guess he figured that in time they would learn---in God’s time, not theirs.
And so, Jesus did not waste any time in Jerusalem. He came back, back to Galilee, back to us. He came looking for us. And that is my third point. He was the one doing the looking. He was the one doing the finding. He found us; we did not find him. But you---you all live in a different kind of age, a different kind of world. You are seekers, travelers on a journey. I even heard there are congregations today calling themselves seeker churches, welcoming people, who are searching, searching for meaning, I guess, searching for God.
Well, all I can say is: Good luck! I have never been impressed that anyone finds God by searching. God finds us. God comes to us. That is how it was with Jesus. From the very beginning he came looking for us. He came to us, called us to be his disciples. It wasn’t our idea; it was his. And after it was all over, after he died, and we were terrified of what would happen next, there we were, huddled together in a room, behind locked doors. We were too afraid to look for anyone or anything. And if the truth were told, I think some of us even hoped that this whole Jesus thing would stay away. I said that I wanted to see Jesus like the other disciples had seen him, but I can tell you there was a side to all of us that hoped he would not come back. “Just leave us alone, so we can get back to our normal lives.” You know what that feels like---just wanting to get back to your normal lives.
And then he came. He appeared to us and said, “Peace be with you.” Can you imagine that? Peace—after all he and we had been through! How could any of us have peace? We weren’t even looking for it, and we certainly were not expecting it. We were trying to stay alive, terrified as we were of the Romans as well as the Jewish leaders. Getting our old lives back would have been enough! And that is when he came: in the midst of our fear and anxiety, he came. He came back. We did not have to search or find. Instead, we were the ones found, found by Jesus back in Galilee. You know the text tells you we were afraid of the Jews, but I can also tell you we were more afraid of what might happen if Jesus came back. I mean if Jesus really were alive, then we could not go back home and pretend that nothing had changed. The truth was: everything had changed. And we were as afraid of that change as we were of anything else---though I don’t think we could have put our fear into words.
We had thought the story was over, but oh how wrong we were. The truth was and is that everything had changed. Oh, I know, you don’t see how. I mean you still live with the same old problems, and life, as beautiful as it is, still can be a struggle, and human beings continue their destructive habits. Greed and cruelty still have their say. But the victory is won, and it is history’s job (and yours too) to move along until finally you catch up (or maybe God catches you up) to the victory given in Jesus Christ. And when will that be? In God’s own time, my friends, in God’s own time.
John 20: 19-31
Now let’s get one thing straight: No one can believe what he or she cannot believe. If you do not believe something---like dead bodies coming back to life---- trying to force yourself to believe is futile. Oh, you can play all kinds of clever mind games, convincing yourself something must be true, because you want it to be true, but to my way of thinking, wanting to believe something is not the same thing as actually believing. Sometimes you need your own reason to believe. Other peoples’ reasons may not be good enough!
And that was all I was asking for---my own reason to believe. You have probably guessed by now who I am--- Thomas, the so called Doubter, though why I have been so designated remains mystery to me. After all, I only wanted to see what the other disciples had already seen---the risen Christ. They believed because they had seen. And I told them I would not believe until I saw, until I could see the nail prints on his hands and the wound in his side. And so, Jesus came, but not only to me, to all of us, who were gathered together.
I recognized him immediately by his wounds. Does that strike you as strange---the resurrected Christ still bearing his wounds? They were not causing him any pain; they were more like a mark of identity, something that could not be taken away without denying and trivializing who he was and is. And when you really think about it that is probably true for all of us. The wounds we bear do help to make us who we are. Yes, we are our wounds, but of course, also more than wounds. Isn’t that what Jesus’ resurrection revealed--- God’s victory over the wounds of the human condition!
So, I recognized Jesus by his wounds. That is my first point. And my second point is that I recognized him in an ordinary place, a room in Galilee. Galilee was the place most of his ministry had occurred. You may not realize this, but the Gospel writers pay a great deal of attention to where things happen. Place matters. It matters to you too, doesn’t it? We are, after all, people of a place. Place marks us, leaves an imprint on us. Place helps to make us who we are---like the first line in one of your modern novels, The Prince of Tides: My wound is my geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. And that is what Galilee was for all of us, both our wound and our anchorage. Jesus’ ministry was made in Galilee. Oh, he was crucified in Jerusalem, but John tells you that Jesus headed back to Galilee. Galilee---that no count backwater of a region; not much to expect from there, except for the fact that this was our home. This was where Jesus taught and healed and lived. We all came from the region of Galilee.
Jerusalem, on the other hand, was the seat of temple power and the place of an occupying Roman army. And yes, it was the place where Jesus died and was probably resurrected---though no one saw exactly where and how he rose. But make no mistake, Jerusalem was not where he remained. Did you ever wonder why Jesus didn’t directly go to Pilate and rub his ruddy Roman face in God’s victory? I mean isn’t power always impressed by power? Rome had the power of the sword, and anyone who had power over the sword that is, over death was a formidable foe.
You would have thought that Jesus would have wanted to teach Rome and Jerusalem the limits of empire. But that is not what we did. Instead, he returned to Galilee---back to the site of his teaching and healing. Why? Well, the way I figure it is this: When power meets power, especially when power confronts a new kind of power, all the old power knows how to do is feverishly work to increase itself---like nations aspiring to make more impressive bombs, a more sophisticated military. But Jesus wasn’t going to waste his time fighting that old kind of power. He knew it was already finished, done with. He had already fought the battle, and the victory was won---even if Pilate and Herod did not yet know it. I guess he figured that in time they would learn---in God’s time, not theirs.
And so, Jesus did not waste any time in Jerusalem. He came back, back to Galilee, back to us. He came looking for us. And that is my third point. He was the one doing the looking. He was the one doing the finding. He found us; we did not find him. But you---you all live in a different kind of age, a different kind of world. You are seekers, travelers on a journey. I even heard there are congregations today calling themselves seeker churches, welcoming people, who are searching, searching for meaning, I guess, searching for God.
Well, all I can say is: Good luck! I have never been impressed that anyone finds God by searching. God finds us. God comes to us. That is how it was with Jesus. From the very beginning he came looking for us. He came to us, called us to be his disciples. It wasn’t our idea; it was his. And after it was all over, after he died, and we were terrified of what would happen next, there we were, huddled together in a room, behind locked doors. We were too afraid to look for anyone or anything. And if the truth were told, I think some of us even hoped that this whole Jesus thing would stay away. I said that I wanted to see Jesus like the other disciples had seen him, but I can tell you there was a side to all of us that hoped he would not come back. “Just leave us alone, so we can get back to our normal lives.” You know what that feels like---just wanting to get back to your normal lives.
And then he came. He appeared to us and said, “Peace be with you.” Can you imagine that? Peace—after all he and we had been through! How could any of us have peace? We weren’t even looking for it, and we certainly were not expecting it. We were trying to stay alive, terrified as we were of the Romans as well as the Jewish leaders. Getting our old lives back would have been enough! And that is when he came: in the midst of our fear and anxiety, he came. He came back. We did not have to search or find. Instead, we were the ones found, found by Jesus back in Galilee. You know the text tells you we were afraid of the Jews, but I can also tell you we were more afraid of what might happen if Jesus came back. I mean if Jesus really were alive, then we could not go back home and pretend that nothing had changed. The truth was: everything had changed. And we were as afraid of that change as we were of anything else---though I don’t think we could have put our fear into words.
We had thought the story was over, but oh how wrong we were. The truth was and is that everything had changed. Oh, I know, you don’t see how. I mean you still live with the same old problems, and life, as beautiful as it is, still can be a struggle, and human beings continue their destructive habits. Greed and cruelty still have their say. But the victory is won, and it is history’s job (and yours too) to move along until finally you catch up (or maybe God catches you up) to the victory given in Jesus Christ. And when will that be? In God’s own time, my friends, in God’s own time.
THE SILENCE: RELECTIONS ON GERRIT VAN HONTHORST’S
CHRIST BEFORE THE HIGH PRIEST by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen, Maundy Thursday 4/1/2021
Matthew 26: 37-68
Words: they are important tools of communication, and learning to use words well is one of the hallmarks of a good education. We Protestants have an especially close relationship to words, because we are known as people of the Book, people of the Word. And yet we also know that silence has its place, as a little plaque I have in my office reminds me, “Remember, sometimes silence is the best answer.”
On this night especially, we pay close attention to the words of scripture, which tell the story of Jesus’ final hours. And we also celebrate the sacrament of communion, when we remember particular words spoken over a meal: This is my body, given for you; this is my blood shed for you. And yet we also know the sacrament is more than words. As we take the elements, we can allow ourselves to descend into a deep kind of silence, inviting us into deep truth. So, this evening, with the help of a painting, I want to reflect on a particular moment of silence, when Jesus stood before the high priest Caiaphas. On the cover of your bulletin is a copy of a painting I saw some years ago at London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I actually purchased a copy of this painting and had it framed for my study at home.
Here Jesus stands before the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas. Look at the placement of the candle---at the center of the painting, as God is at the center. See how it illuminates Jesus, as the light of the world, but notice something else. The candle also illuminates (though not as brightly as Jesus) the law which lies open on the table as well as the high priest’s face and hand with his finger pointing upward. Note that the finger is not pointed at Jesus in stern accusation, but rather is poised upward, symbolic of a movement toward God. So we have here, it seems to me, a sympathetic interpretation of Caiaphas as one who is concerned for God and the truth. If the artist had no sympathy for Caiaphas, he would have cast him in darkness, not in the light. So Caiaphas too is a seeker after truth.
Now look at Jesus. His hands are crossed at his waist; they seem to be bound at the wrists, but not too tightly, and his robe falls off his left shoulder. And his face looks with such compassion upon Caiaphas. The scene from Matthew’s Gospel as we heard this morning is not kind toward Caiaphas or the Jews, for it says they were looking for false testimony to put Jesus to death. At least two witnesses came forward and they said that Jesus claimed he was able to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. These are the figures over in the left hand corner of the painting.
Caiaphas demanded an answer, but the text says, Jesus was at first silent. So we have a somewhat agitated Caiaphas, and we have Jesus, standing calmly and silently before his accusers. He knows his life is on the line; he knows where he is headed, but there is not a trace of enmity or hatred on his face, but rather a look of studied compassion offered in silence.
When I first saw the painting, I knew nothing about it or its artist, Gerrit van Honthorst, but I learned that it was very popular and influential, and many copies were made, including one which ended up in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in the year 1831. Now there is some speculation that the great 19th century Russian writer, Dostoevsky, saw the painting and perhaps mentally used it in the writing of the Grand Inquisitor’s scene from his novel, The Brother’s Karamazov.
In this scene Jesus comes into the city of Seville in Spain, and is immediately recognized by everyone. He gives sight to the blind, health to the sick, the children parade before him, throwing down flowers and singing to him Hosanna. Then the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, appears, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, but with a gleam of light still in his eyes. Now over 90, he is dressed in a course robe, not the fine attire he was wearing the day before while burning the enemies of the church at the stake. The cardinal takes one look at Jesus and holds out his finger and bids the guards, “Arrest that man.” And they do.
Dostoevsky writes: “The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient palace of the Holy Inquisition and shut Jesus in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark breathless night of Seville, and in the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed, and finally he goes up to the table and puts his light on it. Is it You? You?, but receiving no answer, he adds at once, “Be silent. What can You say, indeed? I know what you would say.”
And then for the next 20 pages or so, the Cardinal charges Jesus with bringing freedom to human beings, freedom, the one thing the cardinal claims human beings cannot handle or tolerate. They fear freedom more than anything, the cardinal says, and so we, the church, have taken away their freedom, and have given them what they want even more: miracle, mystery and authority. And so the cardinal tells Jesus that he must be burned at the stake as the greatest of heretics. “I cannot let you destroy what it has taken us so many centuries to build up.”
Again Dostoevsky writes: “When the Inquisitor ceased speaking, he waited for Jesus to answer, but the prisoner was silent, and his silence weighed heavily on the old man. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, while looking gently into his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But Jesus suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless, aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Jesus, Go and come no more, come not at all, never, never! And he let Jesus out into the dark alleys of the town, and the Prisoner went away. And the old man: the kiss still glows in his heart, but he still adheres to his ideas.”
CHRIST BEFORE THE HIGH PRIEST by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen, Maundy Thursday 4/1/2021
Matthew 26: 37-68
Words: they are important tools of communication, and learning to use words well is one of the hallmarks of a good education. We Protestants have an especially close relationship to words, because we are known as people of the Book, people of the Word. And yet we also know that silence has its place, as a little plaque I have in my office reminds me, “Remember, sometimes silence is the best answer.”
On this night especially, we pay close attention to the words of scripture, which tell the story of Jesus’ final hours. And we also celebrate the sacrament of communion, when we remember particular words spoken over a meal: This is my body, given for you; this is my blood shed for you. And yet we also know the sacrament is more than words. As we take the elements, we can allow ourselves to descend into a deep kind of silence, inviting us into deep truth. So, this evening, with the help of a painting, I want to reflect on a particular moment of silence, when Jesus stood before the high priest Caiaphas. On the cover of your bulletin is a copy of a painting I saw some years ago at London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I actually purchased a copy of this painting and had it framed for my study at home.
Here Jesus stands before the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas. Look at the placement of the candle---at the center of the painting, as God is at the center. See how it illuminates Jesus, as the light of the world, but notice something else. The candle also illuminates (though not as brightly as Jesus) the law which lies open on the table as well as the high priest’s face and hand with his finger pointing upward. Note that the finger is not pointed at Jesus in stern accusation, but rather is poised upward, symbolic of a movement toward God. So we have here, it seems to me, a sympathetic interpretation of Caiaphas as one who is concerned for God and the truth. If the artist had no sympathy for Caiaphas, he would have cast him in darkness, not in the light. So Caiaphas too is a seeker after truth.
Now look at Jesus. His hands are crossed at his waist; they seem to be bound at the wrists, but not too tightly, and his robe falls off his left shoulder. And his face looks with such compassion upon Caiaphas. The scene from Matthew’s Gospel as we heard this morning is not kind toward Caiaphas or the Jews, for it says they were looking for false testimony to put Jesus to death. At least two witnesses came forward and they said that Jesus claimed he was able to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. These are the figures over in the left hand corner of the painting.
Caiaphas demanded an answer, but the text says, Jesus was at first silent. So we have a somewhat agitated Caiaphas, and we have Jesus, standing calmly and silently before his accusers. He knows his life is on the line; he knows where he is headed, but there is not a trace of enmity or hatred on his face, but rather a look of studied compassion offered in silence.
When I first saw the painting, I knew nothing about it or its artist, Gerrit van Honthorst, but I learned that it was very popular and influential, and many copies were made, including one which ended up in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in the year 1831. Now there is some speculation that the great 19th century Russian writer, Dostoevsky, saw the painting and perhaps mentally used it in the writing of the Grand Inquisitor’s scene from his novel, The Brother’s Karamazov.
In this scene Jesus comes into the city of Seville in Spain, and is immediately recognized by everyone. He gives sight to the blind, health to the sick, the children parade before him, throwing down flowers and singing to him Hosanna. Then the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, appears, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, but with a gleam of light still in his eyes. Now over 90, he is dressed in a course robe, not the fine attire he was wearing the day before while burning the enemies of the church at the stake. The cardinal takes one look at Jesus and holds out his finger and bids the guards, “Arrest that man.” And they do.
Dostoevsky writes: “The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient palace of the Holy Inquisition and shut Jesus in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark breathless night of Seville, and in the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed, and finally he goes up to the table and puts his light on it. Is it You? You?, but receiving no answer, he adds at once, “Be silent. What can You say, indeed? I know what you would say.”
And then for the next 20 pages or so, the Cardinal charges Jesus with bringing freedom to human beings, freedom, the one thing the cardinal claims human beings cannot handle or tolerate. They fear freedom more than anything, the cardinal says, and so we, the church, have taken away their freedom, and have given them what they want even more: miracle, mystery and authority. And so the cardinal tells Jesus that he must be burned at the stake as the greatest of heretics. “I cannot let you destroy what it has taken us so many centuries to build up.”
Again Dostoevsky writes: “When the Inquisitor ceased speaking, he waited for Jesus to answer, but the prisoner was silent, and his silence weighed heavily on the old man. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, while looking gently into his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But Jesus suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless, aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Jesus, Go and come no more, come not at all, never, never! And he let Jesus out into the dark alleys of the town, and the Prisoner went away. And the old man: the kiss still glows in his heart, but he still adheres to his ideas.”
The Comedy that is Easter by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 4/4/2021
John 20: 1-18
My father used to love reading, Bartlett’s Book of Quotations, and he would make all these file cards with his favorite quotes, one being: “Life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that what draws people to tragedy is emotion, the catharsis of emotion in which feelings of pity and/or fear are excited. People who prefer comedy might say they love to laugh. But it is not simply laughter or tears that define something as comic or tragic. It is the direction of the story’s movement. In tragedy the movement is downward; in comedy it is upward, and this is why Christianity is essentially comedy. Easter gives us the upward movement, a movement we should not expect, given everything that has happened.
Consider where we have been and what we have seen this past week. Last Sunday we saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a colt, with his disciples cheering him and crowds welcoming him. He was hailed as a king, ridiculous, because kings don’t ride into town on donkeys. And then shortly after all this praise and adoration, he is betrayed by one of his own, brought before the high priest, who accuses him of perverting Jewish law. Then Jesus is sent to Pilate, who can find in him no wrong, but hands him over to be crucified anyway. In John’s version of the story there is no agony in the garden, no begging for the cup to pass from him, no cry of abandonment from the cross, only three words spoken by Jesus, “It is finished,” and then he gives up his spirit. The writer of John’s Gospel wants to make the point that Jesus gave up his spirit of his own will; his life was given by him, not taken from him---though no one, neither the powerful nor the lowly truly understand what has happened.
And now it is Easter morning, what John calls the first day of the week. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb while it is still dark and sees that the stone has been removed. We have no idea why she went to the tomb; unlike the other gospels, in John, Jesus’ body has already been anointed by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea. Darkness in John’s gospel is always a symbol for ignorance, or confusion, or even evil. Jesus Christ is the light, and so to be in the dark is to fail to see the light of Christ. So, Mary is in darkness; it is not the darkness of Judas or Pilate, but it is darkness, nonetheless. Not bothering to enter the tomb to see what is there, she assumes the body is gone, and immediately runs to Peter and the beloved disciple.
The Beloved disciple and Peter take off for the tomb with the Beloved disciple outrunning Peter. He looks into the tomb, where he sees the linen wrappings, but he does not enter. Peter arrives and enters immediately, seeing what the Beloved disciple has seen---the grave cloths lying there, which suggest that the body had not been stolen, because grave robbers would never bother to unwrap the body. And the cloth, which covered Jesus’ head and face, is probably a coded reference to the veil, which Moses wore after he had been to the mountain top to receive the law. Moses had to cover his face, because the people could not bear to behold the glory of God which shone on Moses’ face. But now the veil is removed, and the glory of God can be seen and known in Jesus Christ.
And then the text says something very interesting. It tells us that the beloved disciple believed, though we have no idea what he believed, since the very next line says that they did not understand the scriptures—that Jesus must rise from the dead. Then the two disciples go home. After all the drama and excitement, they have nowhere else to go but home? Why didn’t they run to tell the other disciples that something new and wonderful has happened? It’s comic in a poignant sort of way, this return home---home, that place, which is comfort and security and safety. That’s where they go, because that is where human beings often want to go when something big and important and incomprehensible and even frightening happens---home!
But not Mary Magdalene. She does not go home. She returns to the tomb. Standing and weeping outside the tomb, she looks in and sees two angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. She doesn’t act surprised or disturbed by their presence, as if it were normal to see two angels. She has only one question in mind: where is her Lord? When she turns around and sees Jesus, whom she mistakes for the gardener, she asks him where the body of Jesus is. And when he says her name, Mary, she recognizes him. She sees who he is, and her journey that morning, which began in darkness, ends in light. She sees, she knows and she understands---not everything, of course, because she wants to hold on to him, to cling to him would be a better translation, but he tells her she cannot. There will be no clinging, no hanging on, no going back to what once was. Now the movement will be forward. But she probably did not know that at the time, and so she simply left and informed the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”
To most of us this does not seem like comedy, though I could imagine someone like Woody Allen making the scene in such a way that our sides would ache with laughter. After all, when we human trip over our ignorance and misunderstanding, it can be funny, even as it can also be tragic. Tragedy and comedy use the same material; it is simply a question of how the material moves---upward or downward. If upward, we can laugh; if downward, we can cry.
We don’t laugh on Maundy Thursday, as the story of Jesus’ final days on earth are read. We don’t laugh on Good Friday, when the seven last words Jesus spoke from the cross are traditionally read and preached upon. Laughter on those days would not be appropriate. But today is different, because God played a joke---on evil, on death, on us. Satan thought he had won, but he didn’t. We thought we were lost, but we aren’t. Death did its victory dance, but the dance was premature, because the story was not over.
Some years ago, while taking a course on classics at Wesleyan, one of the students was a retired high school history teacher. It was a week before Easter, and this one evening after class he and I began to talk. I told him that the Easter sermon was the hardest sermon to preach, because it seems so existentially beyond our human experience. Who really returns from the grave? And then---guess what---he told me a story about his own life.
I am a Polish Jew, he said, born during the Second World War in 1942. And do you know where I was born? In a grave in a Catholic cemetery outside of Warsaw. That is where my mother went, thinking the Germans would not be looking for Jews in a Catholic cemetery. A gravedigger assisted at my birth. My mother died the night I was born. Exhausted, starving, she brought me into the world and then died. And that gravedigger buried her, and then, a devout Roman Catholic, he hid me, took care of me and when I was six, sent me to Israel, where I grew up, with another Jewish family.
When I was 17, I made my way to this country, was educated at Columbia in New York, and became a history high school teacher. I am Jewish, but I believe in resurrection. When I was 40, I returned to Poland, where I met the gravedigger. And do you know what he told me? He said that on the night I was born, the night my mother died, he actually laughed out loud. “I had not been able to laugh for a very long time,” he told me. “I had dug so many graves during those war years, but on that night, when I delivered you, I knew that God was up to something. God had played a trick on the enemies of love.” And indeed, that is what Easter is all about: the upward movement that is the essence of comedy, for those who bother to think and realize that God has indeed played a trick on the enemies of love.
John 20: 1-18
My father used to love reading, Bartlett’s Book of Quotations, and he would make all these file cards with his favorite quotes, one being: “Life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that what draws people to tragedy is emotion, the catharsis of emotion in which feelings of pity and/or fear are excited. People who prefer comedy might say they love to laugh. But it is not simply laughter or tears that define something as comic or tragic. It is the direction of the story’s movement. In tragedy the movement is downward; in comedy it is upward, and this is why Christianity is essentially comedy. Easter gives us the upward movement, a movement we should not expect, given everything that has happened.
Consider where we have been and what we have seen this past week. Last Sunday we saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a colt, with his disciples cheering him and crowds welcoming him. He was hailed as a king, ridiculous, because kings don’t ride into town on donkeys. And then shortly after all this praise and adoration, he is betrayed by one of his own, brought before the high priest, who accuses him of perverting Jewish law. Then Jesus is sent to Pilate, who can find in him no wrong, but hands him over to be crucified anyway. In John’s version of the story there is no agony in the garden, no begging for the cup to pass from him, no cry of abandonment from the cross, only three words spoken by Jesus, “It is finished,” and then he gives up his spirit. The writer of John’s Gospel wants to make the point that Jesus gave up his spirit of his own will; his life was given by him, not taken from him---though no one, neither the powerful nor the lowly truly understand what has happened.
And now it is Easter morning, what John calls the first day of the week. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb while it is still dark and sees that the stone has been removed. We have no idea why she went to the tomb; unlike the other gospels, in John, Jesus’ body has already been anointed by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea. Darkness in John’s gospel is always a symbol for ignorance, or confusion, or even evil. Jesus Christ is the light, and so to be in the dark is to fail to see the light of Christ. So, Mary is in darkness; it is not the darkness of Judas or Pilate, but it is darkness, nonetheless. Not bothering to enter the tomb to see what is there, she assumes the body is gone, and immediately runs to Peter and the beloved disciple.
The Beloved disciple and Peter take off for the tomb with the Beloved disciple outrunning Peter. He looks into the tomb, where he sees the linen wrappings, but he does not enter. Peter arrives and enters immediately, seeing what the Beloved disciple has seen---the grave cloths lying there, which suggest that the body had not been stolen, because grave robbers would never bother to unwrap the body. And the cloth, which covered Jesus’ head and face, is probably a coded reference to the veil, which Moses wore after he had been to the mountain top to receive the law. Moses had to cover his face, because the people could not bear to behold the glory of God which shone on Moses’ face. But now the veil is removed, and the glory of God can be seen and known in Jesus Christ.
And then the text says something very interesting. It tells us that the beloved disciple believed, though we have no idea what he believed, since the very next line says that they did not understand the scriptures—that Jesus must rise from the dead. Then the two disciples go home. After all the drama and excitement, they have nowhere else to go but home? Why didn’t they run to tell the other disciples that something new and wonderful has happened? It’s comic in a poignant sort of way, this return home---home, that place, which is comfort and security and safety. That’s where they go, because that is where human beings often want to go when something big and important and incomprehensible and even frightening happens---home!
But not Mary Magdalene. She does not go home. She returns to the tomb. Standing and weeping outside the tomb, she looks in and sees two angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. She doesn’t act surprised or disturbed by their presence, as if it were normal to see two angels. She has only one question in mind: where is her Lord? When she turns around and sees Jesus, whom she mistakes for the gardener, she asks him where the body of Jesus is. And when he says her name, Mary, she recognizes him. She sees who he is, and her journey that morning, which began in darkness, ends in light. She sees, she knows and she understands---not everything, of course, because she wants to hold on to him, to cling to him would be a better translation, but he tells her she cannot. There will be no clinging, no hanging on, no going back to what once was. Now the movement will be forward. But she probably did not know that at the time, and so she simply left and informed the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”
To most of us this does not seem like comedy, though I could imagine someone like Woody Allen making the scene in such a way that our sides would ache with laughter. After all, when we human trip over our ignorance and misunderstanding, it can be funny, even as it can also be tragic. Tragedy and comedy use the same material; it is simply a question of how the material moves---upward or downward. If upward, we can laugh; if downward, we can cry.
We don’t laugh on Maundy Thursday, as the story of Jesus’ final days on earth are read. We don’t laugh on Good Friday, when the seven last words Jesus spoke from the cross are traditionally read and preached upon. Laughter on those days would not be appropriate. But today is different, because God played a joke---on evil, on death, on us. Satan thought he had won, but he didn’t. We thought we were lost, but we aren’t. Death did its victory dance, but the dance was premature, because the story was not over.
Some years ago, while taking a course on classics at Wesleyan, one of the students was a retired high school history teacher. It was a week before Easter, and this one evening after class he and I began to talk. I told him that the Easter sermon was the hardest sermon to preach, because it seems so existentially beyond our human experience. Who really returns from the grave? And then---guess what---he told me a story about his own life.
I am a Polish Jew, he said, born during the Second World War in 1942. And do you know where I was born? In a grave in a Catholic cemetery outside of Warsaw. That is where my mother went, thinking the Germans would not be looking for Jews in a Catholic cemetery. A gravedigger assisted at my birth. My mother died the night I was born. Exhausted, starving, she brought me into the world and then died. And that gravedigger buried her, and then, a devout Roman Catholic, he hid me, took care of me and when I was six, sent me to Israel, where I grew up, with another Jewish family.
When I was 17, I made my way to this country, was educated at Columbia in New York, and became a history high school teacher. I am Jewish, but I believe in resurrection. When I was 40, I returned to Poland, where I met the gravedigger. And do you know what he told me? He said that on the night I was born, the night my mother died, he actually laughed out loud. “I had not been able to laugh for a very long time,” he told me. “I had dug so many graves during those war years, but on that night, when I delivered you, I knew that God was up to something. God had played a trick on the enemies of love.” And indeed, that is what Easter is all about: the upward movement that is the essence of comedy, for those who bother to think and realize that God has indeed played a trick on the enemies of love.
March 31, 2021
I have two best women friends from college, and we have been best buddies for over 50 years! Since the pandemic, we have promised to Zoom at least once or twice a month, and for a while, we zoomed weekly. Just this past Monday, we spent two hours zooming, which should tell you something about the love I have for my friends, since those of you who know me well, also know that I hate ZOOM! All three of us feel that we have grown up together as we have shared and gone through many of life’s major passages---everything from the politics of the late 60’s and early 70’s to falling in love, finding jobs and establishing professions, raising kids, etc--- and now as we age, losing parents. All three of us have lost our mothers in the past two years, one of us just four months ago. Ann’s mother died at 103.5! Anyway, this past Monday we were talking, and the subject came around to Easter and what it means.
My two friends are both atheists, though one of them is a very active member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Princeton, New Jersey. But Unitarian-Universalists have no set doctrine or theology, and a good many of them are atheists or at least agnostics. So, both friends were very interested to hear what I had to say about Easter and resurrection. They directly asked me if I believed that Jesus’ physical body came back to life. I told them I do not believe in a resuscitated corpse. Whatever Jesus came back to, it was not the same form of life he had before. And I also said I had no idea or understanding of what happened. I don’t so much believe in resurrection as I hope in it. I mean it is very hard to believe what we do not know from experience. And like everyone else, I have had no experience of seeing a dead person come back to life.
For me resurrection is a way to talk about and affirm that the forces of evil and cruelty do not have the final word. As I told my friends, if this life were all we three would ever have, we could accept that, because we realize how very fortunate we have been and are. In so many ways, we have been lottery winners. Most people simply have not had the kind of opportunities that we take for granted. We have not known hunger, disease, homeless, or war. All three of us received elite educations, have had meaningful professions and even managed to stay married to our original spouses. Two of us have raised children, and so far, we have not lost any of them to accidents or diseases. We have even travelled and seen parts of the world, which only makes us more aware of our privilege. Yes, we have been fortunate, blessed, to use religious language. But our being blessed does not mean that God curses those who are not so fortunate. I have never been one to believe that God has a particular plan for every person. There is so much luck and randomness in life, and that is simply the way the world is. God, to my way of thinking, is not some magician, who has all these tricks and plans, allowing some people to flourish and others to languish or even suffer. God does not completely control the creation, since it has an identity separate from God and proceeds on its own way, according to certain laws and sometimes succumbing to accidents.
So, is there anything final or absolute? If God is not always pulling the strings and repairing the brokenness that we see or hear about on a daily basis, is there anything like a final solution or resting place? Do things just go on and on and on until the creation either explodes or perhaps implodes? Do people simply live and then die, some very fortunate, others the victims of terrible cruelty and bad luck?
Christianity speaks of a new heaven and a new earth, and the Jewish scriptures (Isaiah) speak of a time when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, when destruction and war will be no more.
We may think of such a time and place as “heaven,” the new creation, where all the hurt and sorrow of life have been repaired. Perhaps we hope that more than we believe it, since it transcends our human experience and our capacity to know anything definitely about what lies beyond this life.
When we hear the stories of Jesus’ resurrection----and remember, the Bible is very clear about avoiding any description of how it happened---we only have hints that allow us to hope for more than we can now see or understand. Yes, there is suffering in this life, and sometimes that suffering is terrible and unjust, but the daring hope is that such defeat is not the final word. We hope there is more to come. We hope God is not yet finished with us or the creation.
As I read last week an article in the New York Times about the victims of the mass shooting in the Atlanta region, I could not help but find myself thinking about resurrection. What emerged from that article was a story of people trying to make it in what was for six of them a foreign culture. They had come to this country to make a new life for themselves and their families, and that is what they were trying to do. Sancha Kim had left South Korea in 1980, and over the years she had worked at all kinds of jobs, including dish washing, office cleaning and now at Gold Spa. She was 69 years old and had been married for over 50 years. All she wanted was life to be better for her two children. Soon Chung Park was 74 and was the cook and housekeeper for the Spa. Her husband drove for Lyft and even painted houses. Last year together they made $30,000. She hoped to retire soon and move back to New Jersey to be near family. One victim, Daoyou Feng, who was 44, had no known address, and so far, no one has come forward to say that “she too was loved.” As the article said, “Her life has remained in the shadows.” Hyun Jung Grant, 51, was a single mother, working at multiple jobs to put her two sons through college. Xiaogie Tan owned two spas and worked twelve hour days, accomplishments of which she was very proud. Yong Ae Yue, 68, left Korea in 1979 after marrying an American serviceman she met in Korea. They were eventually divorced in the 1980’s, and she worked hard, raising two sons and sending them to college. One of her sons said, ‘She preached education; she preached hard work and she preached opportunity.” There were two non-Asian victims: Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, a new mother, recently married to the baby’s father. The two of them went to Delaina is now dead, and her daughter is motherless. Then there was Paul Andre Michels, 54, a handyman for the business and an electrician. His brother said, “Paul was a workaholic. He always wanted to be busy.
Is this how it all ends for these people---in a terrible blood bath, the distorted action of some tortured soul, who thought this was the way to solve his sex addiction? And what of the perpetrator, Robert Aaron Long, who so pathetically asked the police, “Do you think I will spend the rest of my life in jail? How does it all end for him? If resurrection means anything, for me it means that the ends we see are not the ends God sees. God can make a new way, when the old ways have run their course. And though my friends told me they believe this is all delusion, the sorry inability to accept that life is terribly unfair, my response was, “You could be right, but we human beings have within us this longing for something more, and what if there truly is “something more” to satisfy the longing? So as Sunday morning approaches, and Easter morning makes its appearance, and we gather to sing, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, let us dare to be bold in our hoping that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God is showing us the first fruits of the new creation.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
I have two best women friends from college, and we have been best buddies for over 50 years! Since the pandemic, we have promised to Zoom at least once or twice a month, and for a while, we zoomed weekly. Just this past Monday, we spent two hours zooming, which should tell you something about the love I have for my friends, since those of you who know me well, also know that I hate ZOOM! All three of us feel that we have grown up together as we have shared and gone through many of life’s major passages---everything from the politics of the late 60’s and early 70’s to falling in love, finding jobs and establishing professions, raising kids, etc--- and now as we age, losing parents. All three of us have lost our mothers in the past two years, one of us just four months ago. Ann’s mother died at 103.5! Anyway, this past Monday we were talking, and the subject came around to Easter and what it means.
My two friends are both atheists, though one of them is a very active member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Princeton, New Jersey. But Unitarian-Universalists have no set doctrine or theology, and a good many of them are atheists or at least agnostics. So, both friends were very interested to hear what I had to say about Easter and resurrection. They directly asked me if I believed that Jesus’ physical body came back to life. I told them I do not believe in a resuscitated corpse. Whatever Jesus came back to, it was not the same form of life he had before. And I also said I had no idea or understanding of what happened. I don’t so much believe in resurrection as I hope in it. I mean it is very hard to believe what we do not know from experience. And like everyone else, I have had no experience of seeing a dead person come back to life.
For me resurrection is a way to talk about and affirm that the forces of evil and cruelty do not have the final word. As I told my friends, if this life were all we three would ever have, we could accept that, because we realize how very fortunate we have been and are. In so many ways, we have been lottery winners. Most people simply have not had the kind of opportunities that we take for granted. We have not known hunger, disease, homeless, or war. All three of us received elite educations, have had meaningful professions and even managed to stay married to our original spouses. Two of us have raised children, and so far, we have not lost any of them to accidents or diseases. We have even travelled and seen parts of the world, which only makes us more aware of our privilege. Yes, we have been fortunate, blessed, to use religious language. But our being blessed does not mean that God curses those who are not so fortunate. I have never been one to believe that God has a particular plan for every person. There is so much luck and randomness in life, and that is simply the way the world is. God, to my way of thinking, is not some magician, who has all these tricks and plans, allowing some people to flourish and others to languish or even suffer. God does not completely control the creation, since it has an identity separate from God and proceeds on its own way, according to certain laws and sometimes succumbing to accidents.
So, is there anything final or absolute? If God is not always pulling the strings and repairing the brokenness that we see or hear about on a daily basis, is there anything like a final solution or resting place? Do things just go on and on and on until the creation either explodes or perhaps implodes? Do people simply live and then die, some very fortunate, others the victims of terrible cruelty and bad luck?
Christianity speaks of a new heaven and a new earth, and the Jewish scriptures (Isaiah) speak of a time when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, when destruction and war will be no more.
We may think of such a time and place as “heaven,” the new creation, where all the hurt and sorrow of life have been repaired. Perhaps we hope that more than we believe it, since it transcends our human experience and our capacity to know anything definitely about what lies beyond this life.
When we hear the stories of Jesus’ resurrection----and remember, the Bible is very clear about avoiding any description of how it happened---we only have hints that allow us to hope for more than we can now see or understand. Yes, there is suffering in this life, and sometimes that suffering is terrible and unjust, but the daring hope is that such defeat is not the final word. We hope there is more to come. We hope God is not yet finished with us or the creation.
As I read last week an article in the New York Times about the victims of the mass shooting in the Atlanta region, I could not help but find myself thinking about resurrection. What emerged from that article was a story of people trying to make it in what was for six of them a foreign culture. They had come to this country to make a new life for themselves and their families, and that is what they were trying to do. Sancha Kim had left South Korea in 1980, and over the years she had worked at all kinds of jobs, including dish washing, office cleaning and now at Gold Spa. She was 69 years old and had been married for over 50 years. All she wanted was life to be better for her two children. Soon Chung Park was 74 and was the cook and housekeeper for the Spa. Her husband drove for Lyft and even painted houses. Last year together they made $30,000. She hoped to retire soon and move back to New Jersey to be near family. One victim, Daoyou Feng, who was 44, had no known address, and so far, no one has come forward to say that “she too was loved.” As the article said, “Her life has remained in the shadows.” Hyun Jung Grant, 51, was a single mother, working at multiple jobs to put her two sons through college. Xiaogie Tan owned two spas and worked twelve hour days, accomplishments of which she was very proud. Yong Ae Yue, 68, left Korea in 1979 after marrying an American serviceman she met in Korea. They were eventually divorced in the 1980’s, and she worked hard, raising two sons and sending them to college. One of her sons said, ‘She preached education; she preached hard work and she preached opportunity.” There were two non-Asian victims: Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, a new mother, recently married to the baby’s father. The two of them went to Delaina is now dead, and her daughter is motherless. Then there was Paul Andre Michels, 54, a handyman for the business and an electrician. His brother said, “Paul was a workaholic. He always wanted to be busy.
Is this how it all ends for these people---in a terrible blood bath, the distorted action of some tortured soul, who thought this was the way to solve his sex addiction? And what of the perpetrator, Robert Aaron Long, who so pathetically asked the police, “Do you think I will spend the rest of my life in jail? How does it all end for him? If resurrection means anything, for me it means that the ends we see are not the ends God sees. God can make a new way, when the old ways have run their course. And though my friends told me they believe this is all delusion, the sorry inability to accept that life is terribly unfair, my response was, “You could be right, but we human beings have within us this longing for something more, and what if there truly is “something more” to satisfy the longing? So as Sunday morning approaches, and Easter morning makes its appearance, and we gather to sing, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, let us dare to be bold in our hoping that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God is showing us the first fruits of the new creation.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Two Different Stories by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 3/28/2021
Palm/Passion Sunday
Mark 11: 1-11
This Sunday is one of contrast, because it has within it two very different stories. While many of us refer to this Sunday before Easter as Palm Sunday, its official name is really The Sunday of the Passion. Even if the story of Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem is read, it is liturgically correct to also read the story of Jesus’ passion. Many Protestant churches, however, avoid the passion story this Sunday, which means that their parishioners, who avoid Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, will move from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter Sunday without ever confronting the cross. And whether we like it or not, the cross is at the center of the Christian story.
When we consider Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, most of us do not see it as the ridiculous event it really was. Mark claims Jesus was riding on the back of a baby donkey, which would have been very uncomfortable for both the donkey and Jesus. Mark also claims that Jesus entered from the east, that is, the direction of the Mount of Olives, the place, according to the Old Testament, where God will fight the nations and restore Jerusalem to its rightful place of power. This is the same direction from which the liberator Judas Maccabees entered into Jerusalem, when in 160 BC he expelled the Greeks, who had defiled the Temple, so there is no doubt that Mark’s gospel sees Jesus as a liberator. But a strange liberator he was, who rode not on a magnificent war horse as the Romans did but sat upon a baby donkey.
As Jesus entered the city, we read that enthusiastic crowds greeted him with shouts of Hosanna, a cry, which is both a call for mercy and a word of praise. They laid down their cloaks for him as they waved branches of palms. He was greeted as both king and liberator, and the expectation was that he would do something spectacular to restore the Jews to their place of pride and power. In other words, he would make them into a mighty kingdom, not unlike the one Solomon and David ruled.
Jesus then went to the Temple, and perhaps the people thought, “Surely, this is it!” This is the time and place he will act to liberate and make new. The Temple, after all, was the symbol of Jewish religious power and piety, the place where the Ark of the Covenant, believed to be the residence of God, was stored. But all Jesus did was enter, look around and then return to Bethany, the home of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. We can imagine that the crowds who had just extolled him as king and liberator were disappointed. What was he up to, they must have wondered?
And it would not take them very long to find out. The very next day, according to Mark’s gospel, Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple, which probably made him a marked man, leading the religious authorities to manipulate his death at the hands of the Romans. Mark gives us a few more chapters of Jesus’ teaching, but by chapter 14, the end game is coming into clear sight. In that chapter we have this extraordinary scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, which we will hear at the end of the service as part of the passion narrative. This is where Jesus begged God to take the cup of suffering from him. At first, he called God, Abba, a familiar, intimate term of address, like papa or daddy, but then as time elapsed, he moved to the more formal, Father. Jesus was straining to hear God’s response, but what he heard was God’s silence. And Jesus, along with his disciples and other followers would quickly learn that there was going to be no dramatic divine intervention to save Jesus from the cross. The course of human depravity will play out, and the forces of power and evil will crucify the Beloved Son.
Why? Not because God required Jesus to die as the perfect sacrifice for human sin. Jesus died on account of human sin. It was sin that put Jesus to death, and because that is so often the way of the world, Jesus would be subjected to the same experience so many others have also known. He suffered and died, and according to both Mark and Matthew he let out a terrible cry of abandonment: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And that question is never fully answered. How many others have also asked the same question? Just yesterday I saw the most heart wrenching story of mother, crossing the Rio Grande River to escape a terrible life, and her nine year old daughter, drowned. In the throes of overwhelming grief and pain, she too wanted to know, Why?
We do not get to Easter without the cross, because this is the way of the world, not the world God made, but the world we human beings have made. And if God is going to redeem not only human beings, but also the whole creation, then God is going to do it in the midst of what looks like and feels like overwhelming defeat.
Five of us have been reading and discussing a book, Lives of Moral Leadership by the psychiatrist and now emeritus professor at Harvard, Robert Coles. In one of the chapters toward the end of the book, Coles wrote very personally about some of his teachers who functioned as moral leaders for him, one of them, a medical school teacher, Professor Kneeland. Coles is now 91, so he was in medical school in the 50’s, just a decade after the end of World War ll. And Coles recalled how Professor Kneeland told the class about some of his medical school friends in Germany, who were part of the resistance group, The White Rose. They wrote, published and distributed resistance literature against Hitler and his henchmen. Some were caught and executed by beheading.
Coles wrote that the class sat in rapt attention as it dawned on them that these medical students, the same age as they, had become protagonists in a struggle against evil. Indeed, some of those resisters were devout Christians, and one in particular, Sophie Scholl, when asked by a Nazi judge why she, a good Aryan, would enter into a plot against the state, quietly answered in three words, “Because of God,”---- because of who God is and what God calls God’s people to do and to become, because Jesus revealed what intimacy with God truly looks like--- obedience to compassion, truth and love. It isn’t that God desired Jesus to die. Death came to Jesus as the result of his obedience to the demands of radical love.
So, Jesus entered into the city from the east gate, on the back of a colt, the foal of a donkey, while Roman soldiers entered from the west gate on their magnificent war horses, brandishing their shields and swords. Those Romans knew what power was, just as we do too. The palms were waved; the hosannas were sung, and the garments were laid on the ground so Jesus’ feet or the feet of his donkey would not touch the dirt. But there would be no escaping the dirt. And that is the irony of Palm Sunday which turns it into Passion Sunday. Jesus rode into Jerusalem not to conquer but to die.
Palm/Passion Sunday
Mark 11: 1-11
This Sunday is one of contrast, because it has within it two very different stories. While many of us refer to this Sunday before Easter as Palm Sunday, its official name is really The Sunday of the Passion. Even if the story of Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem is read, it is liturgically correct to also read the story of Jesus’ passion. Many Protestant churches, however, avoid the passion story this Sunday, which means that their parishioners, who avoid Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, will move from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter Sunday without ever confronting the cross. And whether we like it or not, the cross is at the center of the Christian story.
When we consider Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, most of us do not see it as the ridiculous event it really was. Mark claims Jesus was riding on the back of a baby donkey, which would have been very uncomfortable for both the donkey and Jesus. Mark also claims that Jesus entered from the east, that is, the direction of the Mount of Olives, the place, according to the Old Testament, where God will fight the nations and restore Jerusalem to its rightful place of power. This is the same direction from which the liberator Judas Maccabees entered into Jerusalem, when in 160 BC he expelled the Greeks, who had defiled the Temple, so there is no doubt that Mark’s gospel sees Jesus as a liberator. But a strange liberator he was, who rode not on a magnificent war horse as the Romans did but sat upon a baby donkey.
As Jesus entered the city, we read that enthusiastic crowds greeted him with shouts of Hosanna, a cry, which is both a call for mercy and a word of praise. They laid down their cloaks for him as they waved branches of palms. He was greeted as both king and liberator, and the expectation was that he would do something spectacular to restore the Jews to their place of pride and power. In other words, he would make them into a mighty kingdom, not unlike the one Solomon and David ruled.
Jesus then went to the Temple, and perhaps the people thought, “Surely, this is it!” This is the time and place he will act to liberate and make new. The Temple, after all, was the symbol of Jewish religious power and piety, the place where the Ark of the Covenant, believed to be the residence of God, was stored. But all Jesus did was enter, look around and then return to Bethany, the home of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. We can imagine that the crowds who had just extolled him as king and liberator were disappointed. What was he up to, they must have wondered?
And it would not take them very long to find out. The very next day, according to Mark’s gospel, Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple, which probably made him a marked man, leading the religious authorities to manipulate his death at the hands of the Romans. Mark gives us a few more chapters of Jesus’ teaching, but by chapter 14, the end game is coming into clear sight. In that chapter we have this extraordinary scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, which we will hear at the end of the service as part of the passion narrative. This is where Jesus begged God to take the cup of suffering from him. At first, he called God, Abba, a familiar, intimate term of address, like papa or daddy, but then as time elapsed, he moved to the more formal, Father. Jesus was straining to hear God’s response, but what he heard was God’s silence. And Jesus, along with his disciples and other followers would quickly learn that there was going to be no dramatic divine intervention to save Jesus from the cross. The course of human depravity will play out, and the forces of power and evil will crucify the Beloved Son.
Why? Not because God required Jesus to die as the perfect sacrifice for human sin. Jesus died on account of human sin. It was sin that put Jesus to death, and because that is so often the way of the world, Jesus would be subjected to the same experience so many others have also known. He suffered and died, and according to both Mark and Matthew he let out a terrible cry of abandonment: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And that question is never fully answered. How many others have also asked the same question? Just yesterday I saw the most heart wrenching story of mother, crossing the Rio Grande River to escape a terrible life, and her nine year old daughter, drowned. In the throes of overwhelming grief and pain, she too wanted to know, Why?
We do not get to Easter without the cross, because this is the way of the world, not the world God made, but the world we human beings have made. And if God is going to redeem not only human beings, but also the whole creation, then God is going to do it in the midst of what looks like and feels like overwhelming defeat.
Five of us have been reading and discussing a book, Lives of Moral Leadership by the psychiatrist and now emeritus professor at Harvard, Robert Coles. In one of the chapters toward the end of the book, Coles wrote very personally about some of his teachers who functioned as moral leaders for him, one of them, a medical school teacher, Professor Kneeland. Coles is now 91, so he was in medical school in the 50’s, just a decade after the end of World War ll. And Coles recalled how Professor Kneeland told the class about some of his medical school friends in Germany, who were part of the resistance group, The White Rose. They wrote, published and distributed resistance literature against Hitler and his henchmen. Some were caught and executed by beheading.
Coles wrote that the class sat in rapt attention as it dawned on them that these medical students, the same age as they, had become protagonists in a struggle against evil. Indeed, some of those resisters were devout Christians, and one in particular, Sophie Scholl, when asked by a Nazi judge why she, a good Aryan, would enter into a plot against the state, quietly answered in three words, “Because of God,”---- because of who God is and what God calls God’s people to do and to become, because Jesus revealed what intimacy with God truly looks like--- obedience to compassion, truth and love. It isn’t that God desired Jesus to die. Death came to Jesus as the result of his obedience to the demands of radical love.
So, Jesus entered into the city from the east gate, on the back of a colt, the foal of a donkey, while Roman soldiers entered from the west gate on their magnificent war horses, brandishing their shields and swords. Those Romans knew what power was, just as we do too. The palms were waved; the hosannas were sung, and the garments were laid on the ground so Jesus’ feet or the feet of his donkey would not touch the dirt. But there would be no escaping the dirt. And that is the irony of Palm Sunday which turns it into Passion Sunday. Jesus rode into Jerusalem not to conquer but to die.
March 25, 2021
Dear Friends,
Charlotte Sorenson was living in Stockbridge, MA, a lovely New England town, nestled in the Berkshires, right next to Lenox, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1954 she was 15 years old, a sophomore at Stockbridge Plains School. Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, was also living in Stockbridge, and he had this habit of noticing people and then inviting them to his studio, where they would pose for a drawing or a painting he had in mind. His subjects did not pose for days, weeks or months on end, but usually for about twenty minutes, when he would get the look from them he wanted, and then an assistant would snap a picture from which he worked. Sometimes the look was a facial expression, at other times a pose. He apparently knew what he was looking for, and it was common for Rockwell to notice someone as he or she sat on a bench or walked down the street. His studio was on Main Street from which he had a great view of what was going on all around him.
Rockwell thought of himself as a kind of movie director, casting roles for his pictures. He would often try out four or five people for a role, sometimes using a face from one person and a body from another. But he always brought in only one subject at a time. He would explain to them the painting and what kind of look or pose he wanted, and for their time they would get a check for $5 or $10. Apparently, there was something about Charlotte that caught his eye, and so he used her in one of his less well known paintings, called Bright Future for Banking, where she is clustered with a group of teenagers, all wearing graduation caps and gowns.
Charlotte liked to go the drugstore after school, where she and her friends would often buy a soda or a root beer float. She does not remember if Rockwell was the one to directly invite her to his studio, or if he had someone else ask her. And she also says that she remembers almost nothing of the modeling moment. It must not have taken very long, she said, or else I would remember more about it. Charlotte, who is 81, living in Boulder, CO, said she must have seen the painting when it was finished, but it did not make much of an impression. she does not remember much about that either, just that it was not on the And then she just forgot about it. She graduated, and life happened.
Well one day last December, she was looking through a magazine, and suddenly she recognized herself. There she was in a gallery advertisement for a painting she had not seen or thought about for years. There are some Rockwell paintings that are famous: The Problem We All Live With, which shows federal marshals walking an African-American child to school. Then there is The Runaway, where a policeman is sitting at a lunch counter with a little boy who is running away from home, and four paintings, named, The Four Freedoms, based on Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress in 1941, when he outlined his vision for a post-war world: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from hunger and freedom from fear. Bright Future never had the impact those other paintings did.
In fact, it was almost thrown away in the garbage. A man, walking down a Manhattan street, noticed the painting in the trash and asked the janitor, who was cleaning up, if he might have it. The man had two sons, and the painting ended up on the older son’s wall. It was later sold to a gallery, when neither son wanted to buy the other out, although the owner of the gallery refused to say how much he paid for it. It is now up for sale with an asking price of $885,000.
Rockwell, I am sure, would be quite shocked at the asking price---just as he would be shocked at what some of his other paintings have sold for---Saying Grace sold for $46 million in 2013, Breaking Home Ties went for 15.4 in 2006, and Two Plumbers sold for 1.6 million in 2017. Though the public loved Rockwell’s work and eagerly awaited the latest copy of the Saturday Evening Post on whose covers Rockwell’s work was often placed, serious critics were often disdainful of his work, finding it too sentimental. After Rockwell painted The Four Freedoms, a Time Magazine reviewer complained that Rockwell would be incapable of painting a really evil person or even a complex one! Whether that is true or not, the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were apparently not looking for the portrayal of evil or complexity. They simply wanted to see displayed a snapshot of their lives, people who were living and doing ordinary things.
Charlotte Sorenson said she can remember feeling a bit disappointed that the painting did not make it on the cover. It was inside the magazine, in an ad for a bank. “It was not one of his famous or exciting paintings,” she said. “It was just kind of boring.” But then that is indeed how life often is, made up of ordinary moments that perhaps do seem boring. Maybe that is why Jesus chose ordinary people to be his disciples. They were not particularly exciting or dynamic. Some of them were fisherman, though Matthew was a tax collector, hardly an ordinary thing for a Jewish person to do, since it made you an enemy of the people. Nonetheless, his disciples were not the movers and shakers of their society, and yet in the ordinary and not so ordinary burdens and challenges of life, somehow God does show us grace filled moments. And perhaps that is why so many “ordinary Americans” loved Norman Rockwell’s work.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Charlotte Sorenson was living in Stockbridge, MA, a lovely New England town, nestled in the Berkshires, right next to Lenox, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1954 she was 15 years old, a sophomore at Stockbridge Plains School. Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, was also living in Stockbridge, and he had this habit of noticing people and then inviting them to his studio, where they would pose for a drawing or a painting he had in mind. His subjects did not pose for days, weeks or months on end, but usually for about twenty minutes, when he would get the look from them he wanted, and then an assistant would snap a picture from which he worked. Sometimes the look was a facial expression, at other times a pose. He apparently knew what he was looking for, and it was common for Rockwell to notice someone as he or she sat on a bench or walked down the street. His studio was on Main Street from which he had a great view of what was going on all around him.
Rockwell thought of himself as a kind of movie director, casting roles for his pictures. He would often try out four or five people for a role, sometimes using a face from one person and a body from another. But he always brought in only one subject at a time. He would explain to them the painting and what kind of look or pose he wanted, and for their time they would get a check for $5 or $10. Apparently, there was something about Charlotte that caught his eye, and so he used her in one of his less well known paintings, called Bright Future for Banking, where she is clustered with a group of teenagers, all wearing graduation caps and gowns.
Charlotte liked to go the drugstore after school, where she and her friends would often buy a soda or a root beer float. She does not remember if Rockwell was the one to directly invite her to his studio, or if he had someone else ask her. And she also says that she remembers almost nothing of the modeling moment. It must not have taken very long, she said, or else I would remember more about it. Charlotte, who is 81, living in Boulder, CO, said she must have seen the painting when it was finished, but it did not make much of an impression. she does not remember much about that either, just that it was not on the And then she just forgot about it. She graduated, and life happened.
Well one day last December, she was looking through a magazine, and suddenly she recognized herself. There she was in a gallery advertisement for a painting she had not seen or thought about for years. There are some Rockwell paintings that are famous: The Problem We All Live With, which shows federal marshals walking an African-American child to school. Then there is The Runaway, where a policeman is sitting at a lunch counter with a little boy who is running away from home, and four paintings, named, The Four Freedoms, based on Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress in 1941, when he outlined his vision for a post-war world: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from hunger and freedom from fear. Bright Future never had the impact those other paintings did.
In fact, it was almost thrown away in the garbage. A man, walking down a Manhattan street, noticed the painting in the trash and asked the janitor, who was cleaning up, if he might have it. The man had two sons, and the painting ended up on the older son’s wall. It was later sold to a gallery, when neither son wanted to buy the other out, although the owner of the gallery refused to say how much he paid for it. It is now up for sale with an asking price of $885,000.
Rockwell, I am sure, would be quite shocked at the asking price---just as he would be shocked at what some of his other paintings have sold for---Saying Grace sold for $46 million in 2013, Breaking Home Ties went for 15.4 in 2006, and Two Plumbers sold for 1.6 million in 2017. Though the public loved Rockwell’s work and eagerly awaited the latest copy of the Saturday Evening Post on whose covers Rockwell’s work was often placed, serious critics were often disdainful of his work, finding it too sentimental. After Rockwell painted The Four Freedoms, a Time Magazine reviewer complained that Rockwell would be incapable of painting a really evil person or even a complex one! Whether that is true or not, the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were apparently not looking for the portrayal of evil or complexity. They simply wanted to see displayed a snapshot of their lives, people who were living and doing ordinary things.
Charlotte Sorenson said she can remember feeling a bit disappointed that the painting did not make it on the cover. It was inside the magazine, in an ad for a bank. “It was not one of his famous or exciting paintings,” she said. “It was just kind of boring.” But then that is indeed how life often is, made up of ordinary moments that perhaps do seem boring. Maybe that is why Jesus chose ordinary people to be his disciples. They were not particularly exciting or dynamic. Some of them were fisherman, though Matthew was a tax collector, hardly an ordinary thing for a Jewish person to do, since it made you an enemy of the people. Nonetheless, his disciples were not the movers and shakers of their society, and yet in the ordinary and not so ordinary burdens and challenges of life, somehow God does show us grace filled moments. And perhaps that is why so many “ordinary Americans” loved Norman Rockwell’s work.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Wanting to See Jesus by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 3/21/2021
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
John 12: 20-33
“We want to see Jesus.” John’s Gospel is very clear about the identity of the people who made this request of Philip. They were Greeks, not Jews, and if the Greeks were known for anything, it is for their tradition of seeking wisdom. This is the culture that produced not only the philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but also the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. When Robert Kennedy, sorrowfully undone by the assassination of his brother, was trying to work his way through his grief, Jacqueline Kennedy gave him Edith Hamilton’s book, The Way of the Greeks, in which he read that wisdom comes by way of suffering. So wrote Aeschulus, “Pain that we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our sleep, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” So, it should not surprise us that the Greeks with all kinds of wisdom at their disposal, should come to seek more wisdom, or perhaps something more than wisdom.
Now this word see in John is very interesting, because sight in this gospel is more than what the eye is designed to do. To see in John means to understand in a new way, to know the truth deeply and to be transformed by that truth. John makes it perfectly clear that although all kinds of people came to see Jesus, some out of curiosity, others wanting healing, not all of them really saw Jesus, that is truly grasped who he was and what he was trying to do.
And we are not so different from all those crowds, including the Greeks, because we too want to see Jesus. We want to understand what so often transcends our understanding. But we can’t see Jesus directly. We see him through all the stories we know and love, stories like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. We see Jesus in his teachings on forgiveness, when he tells the crowd, who had just caught a woman in adultery, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” Most of us probably see him more clearly in those stories than we do in the doctrine we might have been taught in catechism class or Sunday School. Many peoples’ eyes glaze over when they hear Jesus is one person in two natures, and because reason cannot fully explain, people often prefer to know Jesus through the beloved stories--- walking down the streets and paths of Galilee, while he teaches and heals.
Some years ago I worked as a chaplain at University Hospital in Stony Brook, New York. It was part of a huge medical complex with a medical school as well as departments of applied and pure science. My boss, Bob, was a Roman Catholic priest, who also had an appointment as a professor of ethics in the medical school. And one day, he returned to the office, clearly upset. He had been called for an emergency, when a 32 year old woman, the wife of one of the hospital doctors, threw a blood clot during delivery, and in no time at all, she and the baby were dead. The husband was present at the birth, so he knew what had happened, and because he was close to Bob, he asked Bob to be with him when he told his wife’s parents their daughter and grandchild were dead. So Bob agreed. And, as you can imagine, it was pretty horrible.
The grandmother, a devout Roman Catholic, then wanted Bob to accompany her to the hospital chapel, where they both prayed. Now, of course, Bob was extremely upset over these deaths, but he was also upset, because he could not understand how it was that this woman, a devout Roman Catholic, should be so completely clueless about Jesus.
She goes to a Roman Catholic Church every single Sunday, he said, and she stares at the giant crucifix in the front of the church. She sees this image of a suffering, dying man, whom she thinks is supposed to save her and her family from suffering. He shook his head in disbelief. She doesn’t really see Jesus at all. And so now, she feels cheated, let down. Her faith is of no help, because things like this are not supposed to happen.” But, of course, such things do happen all the time. And unless we want to say that faith is of no use to us, we have to find and see Jesus in the suffering. That is where the real challenge is. Anyone can go out on a walk and behold the beauty of the world and be impressed by God’s creative cleverness, but it is when you are beaten down and back, when you feel your back painfully pressed hard against the wall, trapped by the pain that is ripping your heart apart, that is the place where Jesus meets us. That is when we really need to see.
And because that experience was so seminal for my boss, he decided to run a discussion on “Seeing Jesus” for staff and students. And about 15 people joined, including me. Two of the participants offered quite a challenge, one, the President of the local Right to Life Chapter, an anti-abortion group, and the other a doctor, who regularly performed abortions. In fact, one of this man’s medical school colleagues and friends had been shot to death by someone totally opposed to abortion. Luckily, these two people were mature, mature enough to be able to listen to each other as well as to the other people in the group, all with varied ways of seeing Jesus and knowing Jesus.
The Right to Lifer saw Jesus in her gallant efforts to save unborn children. She saw Jesus’ presence as she marched, petitioned and even attempted to block entrances to clinics where abortions were performed. And the doctor, well, he saw Jesus with people in some of the most agonized moments of their lives, when they learned for example that the fetus had three number 13 chromosomes and would be horribly deformed and struggling for breath before it died a few days later. And he saw Jesus in a terrified 15 year old, who could tell no one of what she claimed was her shame, and though she did not believe in abortion, she could not have that baby. I see Jesus with her. And so, I help her.
And his adversary asked, “You mean you see Jesus when you destroy life?” I did not say that,” he countered. I said. I see Jesus with people in their pain and their sorrow and the struggles they are trying to get through. I don’t see Jesus offering definitive answers to difficult questions. He is the one who is with us, assuring us we are not alone. But the answers we come to ---they belong to us, not to Jesus.”
That doctor reminds us that God calls us to act not with certainty but with faith—not faith in the rightness of our actions and the purity of our consciences, but faith in the love and mercy of God.
In today’s reading from the book of Jeremiah, we see an Israel, who has forsaken the covenant and broken the law time and time again. Nonetheless, God will make with them a new covenant, written on their hearts. Christians see the new covenant in Jesus Christ, whose lifting up on the cross neither saves us from the responsibility and ambiguity of our decisions and actions, nor gives us the definitive answers to our most troubling questions. The Greeks told Philip, “We want to see Jesus”, and we too want to see Jesus. But when we see him, really see him, we don’t necessarily find a list of absolute beliefs to which we must consent, but rather we come face to face with the cross, with the agony and challenge of good and evil. We see, despite the horror, what the mercy and love of God really look like. And that’s when we see Jesus.
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
John 12: 20-33
“We want to see Jesus.” John’s Gospel is very clear about the identity of the people who made this request of Philip. They were Greeks, not Jews, and if the Greeks were known for anything, it is for their tradition of seeking wisdom. This is the culture that produced not only the philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but also the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. When Robert Kennedy, sorrowfully undone by the assassination of his brother, was trying to work his way through his grief, Jacqueline Kennedy gave him Edith Hamilton’s book, The Way of the Greeks, in which he read that wisdom comes by way of suffering. So wrote Aeschulus, “Pain that we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our sleep, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” So, it should not surprise us that the Greeks with all kinds of wisdom at their disposal, should come to seek more wisdom, or perhaps something more than wisdom.
Now this word see in John is very interesting, because sight in this gospel is more than what the eye is designed to do. To see in John means to understand in a new way, to know the truth deeply and to be transformed by that truth. John makes it perfectly clear that although all kinds of people came to see Jesus, some out of curiosity, others wanting healing, not all of them really saw Jesus, that is truly grasped who he was and what he was trying to do.
And we are not so different from all those crowds, including the Greeks, because we too want to see Jesus. We want to understand what so often transcends our understanding. But we can’t see Jesus directly. We see him through all the stories we know and love, stories like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. We see Jesus in his teachings on forgiveness, when he tells the crowd, who had just caught a woman in adultery, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” Most of us probably see him more clearly in those stories than we do in the doctrine we might have been taught in catechism class or Sunday School. Many peoples’ eyes glaze over when they hear Jesus is one person in two natures, and because reason cannot fully explain, people often prefer to know Jesus through the beloved stories--- walking down the streets and paths of Galilee, while he teaches and heals.
Some years ago I worked as a chaplain at University Hospital in Stony Brook, New York. It was part of a huge medical complex with a medical school as well as departments of applied and pure science. My boss, Bob, was a Roman Catholic priest, who also had an appointment as a professor of ethics in the medical school. And one day, he returned to the office, clearly upset. He had been called for an emergency, when a 32 year old woman, the wife of one of the hospital doctors, threw a blood clot during delivery, and in no time at all, she and the baby were dead. The husband was present at the birth, so he knew what had happened, and because he was close to Bob, he asked Bob to be with him when he told his wife’s parents their daughter and grandchild were dead. So Bob agreed. And, as you can imagine, it was pretty horrible.
The grandmother, a devout Roman Catholic, then wanted Bob to accompany her to the hospital chapel, where they both prayed. Now, of course, Bob was extremely upset over these deaths, but he was also upset, because he could not understand how it was that this woman, a devout Roman Catholic, should be so completely clueless about Jesus.
She goes to a Roman Catholic Church every single Sunday, he said, and she stares at the giant crucifix in the front of the church. She sees this image of a suffering, dying man, whom she thinks is supposed to save her and her family from suffering. He shook his head in disbelief. She doesn’t really see Jesus at all. And so now, she feels cheated, let down. Her faith is of no help, because things like this are not supposed to happen.” But, of course, such things do happen all the time. And unless we want to say that faith is of no use to us, we have to find and see Jesus in the suffering. That is where the real challenge is. Anyone can go out on a walk and behold the beauty of the world and be impressed by God’s creative cleverness, but it is when you are beaten down and back, when you feel your back painfully pressed hard against the wall, trapped by the pain that is ripping your heart apart, that is the place where Jesus meets us. That is when we really need to see.
And because that experience was so seminal for my boss, he decided to run a discussion on “Seeing Jesus” for staff and students. And about 15 people joined, including me. Two of the participants offered quite a challenge, one, the President of the local Right to Life Chapter, an anti-abortion group, and the other a doctor, who regularly performed abortions. In fact, one of this man’s medical school colleagues and friends had been shot to death by someone totally opposed to abortion. Luckily, these two people were mature, mature enough to be able to listen to each other as well as to the other people in the group, all with varied ways of seeing Jesus and knowing Jesus.
The Right to Lifer saw Jesus in her gallant efforts to save unborn children. She saw Jesus’ presence as she marched, petitioned and even attempted to block entrances to clinics where abortions were performed. And the doctor, well, he saw Jesus with people in some of the most agonized moments of their lives, when they learned for example that the fetus had three number 13 chromosomes and would be horribly deformed and struggling for breath before it died a few days later. And he saw Jesus in a terrified 15 year old, who could tell no one of what she claimed was her shame, and though she did not believe in abortion, she could not have that baby. I see Jesus with her. And so, I help her.
And his adversary asked, “You mean you see Jesus when you destroy life?” I did not say that,” he countered. I said. I see Jesus with people in their pain and their sorrow and the struggles they are trying to get through. I don’t see Jesus offering definitive answers to difficult questions. He is the one who is with us, assuring us we are not alone. But the answers we come to ---they belong to us, not to Jesus.”
That doctor reminds us that God calls us to act not with certainty but with faith—not faith in the rightness of our actions and the purity of our consciences, but faith in the love and mercy of God.
In today’s reading from the book of Jeremiah, we see an Israel, who has forsaken the covenant and broken the law time and time again. Nonetheless, God will make with them a new covenant, written on their hearts. Christians see the new covenant in Jesus Christ, whose lifting up on the cross neither saves us from the responsibility and ambiguity of our decisions and actions, nor gives us the definitive answers to our most troubling questions. The Greeks told Philip, “We want to see Jesus”, and we too want to see Jesus. But when we see him, really see him, we don’t necessarily find a list of absolute beliefs to which we must consent, but rather we come face to face with the cross, with the agony and challenge of good and evil. We see, despite the horror, what the mercy and love of God really look like. And that’s when we see Jesus.
March 18, 2021
Dear Friends,
This past Monday was March 15th, known as the Ides of March. In 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15th, stabbed to death by a number of conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius. The story goes that a seer had predicted that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of March, and on his way to the Senate, where Caesar would meet his terrible fate, he is reported to have said to the seer, “The Ides of March has come,” to which the seer replied, “Aye, Caesar, but not gone.”
March 15th is also important in our own American history, because it is the date Maine became a state: March 15, 1820. Maine did not allow slavery, and so its admission for statehood was held up by southerners, insisting that if Maine were admitted as a free state, then a slave state must also be admitted, and so Missouri was put forth as a state. Anti-slavery Mainers were furious that their statehood was held hostage by people defending slavery! But Congress was in the mood for compromise, and so it passed what became known as the Missouri Compromise, when both Maine and Missouri were admitted as states. But the Compromise did not quell the anger of Maine’s anti-slavery people, and so when the Erie Canal was opened in 1825, some passionate anti-slavery Mainers moved west. One such man was Elijah P. Lovejoy, who moved from Maine to Illinois in 1837. He began a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of slavery, and for that commitment, he was murdered by pro-slavery people, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River! Elijah had a younger brother named Owen, who was just as passionately anti-slavery as Elijah had been, and he swore he would continue his brother’s work to extirpate the curse of slavery. But rather than running a newspaper, he decided to enter into politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature, where he became friends with Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer, who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky.
Both Lincoln and Lovejoy made friends with another Maine man, who had come to Illinois, Elihu Washburn. Elihu and his brother, Israel, were both serving in Congress in 1854, when a landmark bill was passed, The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the Missouri Compromise, thus allowing the spread of slavery across the West. This infuriated Elihu and Israel, and a meeting was called in May with other anti-slavery congressmen to figure out how to stop the spread of slavery. The men gathered in the rooms of a representative from Massachusetts, Edward Dickinson, who had a gifted poetry writing daughter named Emily. Their one stated goal, however, was not to read poetry, but to stop the spread of slavery.
The summer of 1854 would see the passion about slavery grow deeper and wider. The anti-slavery people were convinced a new party must be formed, and so the Republican Party was born. The state of Maine was right there with the new party, fully committed to anti-slavery. By 1859 Abraham Lincoln was articulating a platform for the Republican Party, which presented itself as the party for ordinary Americans, standing against the rich oligarchs, who owned slaves. In the election of 1860, which Lincoln won, Maine gave him 62% of its votes. When Lincoln arrived in Washington DC to take office in March, Elihu Washburn was at the railway station to meet the new President.
Now I happen to love the state of Maine. It is stunningly beautiful. When my husband was 16, he spent a summer at Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, studying biology, which he loved. But he also fell in love with Acadia National Park, and when I married him, he showed me Acadia and helped me to fall in love with the Park as well. We have been going there for more decades than I care to count, hiking the trials in the different seasons, each with its unique beauty.
Though I love the state’s geography, I have always thought Maine too conservative for my taste. My husband would retire there someday, but I told him, “No way.” Not only are my friends here, but also I love being (relatively) close to both Boston and New York and my siblings in New Jersey. Besides, I don’t like being reminded that “you are not a real Mainer, if you cannot trace your roots back at least three or four generations.” Everyone else is a newcomer, a potential threat to a way of life they do not want to see changed. Mainers like to take life slowly, “the way life is supposed to be,” they say. In fact, they are among the pokiest drivers I have ever seen. Never in a hurry to arrive anyplace, no matter the speed limit, they insist on driving at least five or ten miles below it.
I must admit I had forgotten the central role Maine had played in the fight against slavery. Maine was not a place of great wealth, except the wealth of its natural beauty, so perhaps its citizens were never much tempted to become slaveholders. Most Mainers understood themselves to be God-fearing people, who saw the Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land to be the paradigm for their own fight against slavery.
We are now living in a time when our nation is compelled to revisit its past as it confronts its original sins of racism and sexism. Remember, women did not get the vote until 1920, well after black males, who were enfranchised by the 15th Amendment in 1870---though their vote was destroyed by Jim Crow. Sometimes we do need to confront our past and be reminded how we have arrived at the place we are today as we try to grow the wisdom that can embrace the pride of our history while also owning its shame. This is hardly an easy or comfortable thing to do, but God does not call us to be comfortable but faithful. And faithfulness demands truthfulness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
This past Monday was March 15th, known as the Ides of March. In 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15th, stabbed to death by a number of conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius. The story goes that a seer had predicted that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of March, and on his way to the Senate, where Caesar would meet his terrible fate, he is reported to have said to the seer, “The Ides of March has come,” to which the seer replied, “Aye, Caesar, but not gone.”
March 15th is also important in our own American history, because it is the date Maine became a state: March 15, 1820. Maine did not allow slavery, and so its admission for statehood was held up by southerners, insisting that if Maine were admitted as a free state, then a slave state must also be admitted, and so Missouri was put forth as a state. Anti-slavery Mainers were furious that their statehood was held hostage by people defending slavery! But Congress was in the mood for compromise, and so it passed what became known as the Missouri Compromise, when both Maine and Missouri were admitted as states. But the Compromise did not quell the anger of Maine’s anti-slavery people, and so when the Erie Canal was opened in 1825, some passionate anti-slavery Mainers moved west. One such man was Elijah P. Lovejoy, who moved from Maine to Illinois in 1837. He began a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of slavery, and for that commitment, he was murdered by pro-slavery people, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River! Elijah had a younger brother named Owen, who was just as passionately anti-slavery as Elijah had been, and he swore he would continue his brother’s work to extirpate the curse of slavery. But rather than running a newspaper, he decided to enter into politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature, where he became friends with Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer, who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky.
Both Lincoln and Lovejoy made friends with another Maine man, who had come to Illinois, Elihu Washburn. Elihu and his brother, Israel, were both serving in Congress in 1854, when a landmark bill was passed, The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the Missouri Compromise, thus allowing the spread of slavery across the West. This infuriated Elihu and Israel, and a meeting was called in May with other anti-slavery congressmen to figure out how to stop the spread of slavery. The men gathered in the rooms of a representative from Massachusetts, Edward Dickinson, who had a gifted poetry writing daughter named Emily. Their one stated goal, however, was not to read poetry, but to stop the spread of slavery.
The summer of 1854 would see the passion about slavery grow deeper and wider. The anti-slavery people were convinced a new party must be formed, and so the Republican Party was born. The state of Maine was right there with the new party, fully committed to anti-slavery. By 1859 Abraham Lincoln was articulating a platform for the Republican Party, which presented itself as the party for ordinary Americans, standing against the rich oligarchs, who owned slaves. In the election of 1860, which Lincoln won, Maine gave him 62% of its votes. When Lincoln arrived in Washington DC to take office in March, Elihu Washburn was at the railway station to meet the new President.
Now I happen to love the state of Maine. It is stunningly beautiful. When my husband was 16, he spent a summer at Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, studying biology, which he loved. But he also fell in love with Acadia National Park, and when I married him, he showed me Acadia and helped me to fall in love with the Park as well. We have been going there for more decades than I care to count, hiking the trials in the different seasons, each with its unique beauty.
Though I love the state’s geography, I have always thought Maine too conservative for my taste. My husband would retire there someday, but I told him, “No way.” Not only are my friends here, but also I love being (relatively) close to both Boston and New York and my siblings in New Jersey. Besides, I don’t like being reminded that “you are not a real Mainer, if you cannot trace your roots back at least three or four generations.” Everyone else is a newcomer, a potential threat to a way of life they do not want to see changed. Mainers like to take life slowly, “the way life is supposed to be,” they say. In fact, they are among the pokiest drivers I have ever seen. Never in a hurry to arrive anyplace, no matter the speed limit, they insist on driving at least five or ten miles below it.
I must admit I had forgotten the central role Maine had played in the fight against slavery. Maine was not a place of great wealth, except the wealth of its natural beauty, so perhaps its citizens were never much tempted to become slaveholders. Most Mainers understood themselves to be God-fearing people, who saw the Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land to be the paradigm for their own fight against slavery.
We are now living in a time when our nation is compelled to revisit its past as it confronts its original sins of racism and sexism. Remember, women did not get the vote until 1920, well after black males, who were enfranchised by the 15th Amendment in 1870---though their vote was destroyed by Jim Crow. Sometimes we do need to confront our past and be reminded how we have arrived at the place we are today as we try to grow the wisdom that can embrace the pride of our history while also owning its shame. This is hardly an easy or comfortable thing to do, but God does not call us to be comfortable but faithful. And faithfulness demands truthfulness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
IN THE NIGHT by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 3/14/2021
Numbers 21: 4-9
John 3: 1-3; 14-21
Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, came to Jesus in the night. He did not come in the bright light of midday, or in the muted light of daybreak or in the deep shadows of a setting sun. No, the text tells us he came to Jesus by night. And if we have any imagination at all, remembering that Jesus’ world was completely devoid of electricity, we can picture Nicodemus carefully making his way, maybe even stumbling though the pitch blackness of night. That the writer of this gospel bothered to tell us, when Nicodemus made his visit to Jesus must mean something. The gospels are pretty terse, compact in their language and details, so when we are given a specific piece of information, it is probably a good thing to pay attention, in this case, to the night.
Perhaps the explanation is as easy as Nicodemus’ desire to escape detection. After all, he was a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, and he might have feared what people would say or think if they saw him with the man, who had made such a disturbance in the temple by throwing out the moneychangers. What is a leader of the Jews doing with a renegade? And then there is the symbolism of night and dark, which John’s gospel uses as a stark contrast to light. Light in John’s gospel reveals; dark conceals. Jesus is the light of all people, John says in the opening words of his gospel, and “this light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” So perhaps the writer is telling us that Nicodemus is a man, living in darkness, but he sees enough to realize that he wants more. And so he shows up, even if it is in the night.
Nicodemus tells Jesus that he knows that Jesus is a teacher from God, because. He says, “no one can do these signs apart from the presence of God. So, Nicodemus had seen enough to be impressed. In today’s world, we might call him a seeker. He was looking for something, though he was not exactly sure what that something was. And he was confused when Jesus told him that he must be born again. How is that possible? Nicodemus demanded to know. Can we re-enter our mother’s womb?
Now after the exchange about being born again, we hear Jesus remind Nicodemus how Moses in the desert had lifted up the bronze serpent so that the Jews, who looked at it would be saved from the lethal serpent bites. Nicodemus would have known the story---how the people of Israel, while wandering through the desert after their escape from Egypt, had lost their trust in God. Why are we here in this barren wasteland, they wanted to know? Why did you bring us here to perish? And they blamed Moses and God, and for their lack of faith, they were bitten by serpents. I guess there is nothing like a serpent bite to encourage immediate repentance, and so they asked Moses to pray to God on their behalf. And Moses did, and God responded with the idea of a bronze serpent.
Now the lifting up of the bronze serpent is symbolic, as you heard in the introduction to this text, analogous to the lifting up of Jesus on the cross. In other words, Nicodemus is being told that just as the serpent saved, so will Jesus save. And then Jesus says the words which Martin Luther claimed are the heart of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” How ironic! Here we are, in the darkness of night, which for John’s gospel means confusion, ignorance, inability to see and understand, and yet this dark night is the place and the time where the truth is fully told. Here is the heart of the gospel: God’s love for the world, expressed fully in Jesus Christ, a love that is not for condemnation but for salvation---new and abundant life.
So why would the writer of this gospel put the good news right smack in the middle of the night, the place and the time, human beings are least able to see? Maybe it is because the night, as much as it hides, can sometimes reveal. Sometimes the night is the place and the time, where truth does come out. Things happen in the night. Babies are more likely to be born in the night and people are more likely to die at night than in the daylight. A policeman at my former church once told me that he was far more likely to get a confession in the night than during the day. Bright lights, he said, are a dumb way to coax out the truth. Remember all night college rap sessions, when you and your friends discussed the big questions of life? It seemed to me that sometimes people would say things in the night they never would say in the light of day, admitting to feelings and thoughts they would not own in the sunlight. Yes, the night can hide the truth, but sometimes, ironically, the truth is revealed, in the dark.
Some years ago, in one of former churches, there was this prominent elderly couple, who had been married for 67 years. I remember when they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, and when it was announced in church, the congregation stood up and gave them a resounding ovation. I was very close to the wife. She and I would have these long conversations about life. Well one evening a few nights after her husband’s death, I happened to be driving home, when I noticed that the light was on in their home, and I could see the wife sitting in the living room. To this day I don’t know why I stopped my car. It was nearly 10 P.M., far too late to bother her, an inappropriate invasion on her grief, perhaps, but I rang the bell anyway, and she immediately let me in. She had been sitting in a rocking chair with one light illuminating her figure against the large picture window, but the rest of the room was dark.
With no easement into the story, she began to tell me how her marriage of 67 years had been a sham. I should have left him years ago, she said. He cheated on me; humiliated me, abused me physically and mentally. And then she poured out to me a catalogue of details. At the end of it all, as the grandfather clock struck midnight, she said something like this. “In a few days we will bury him, and people will see me grieve. But now you know that I will be grieving for something else---for the husband, life and marriage I never had.”
To this day I wonder if she would ever have told me that had it not been night. There was something about that room and that Victorian lamp, sitting on a table next to her chair, casting shadows across the room. We could hear the grandfather clock ticking, marking the advancement of the night, and as time belonged fully to the night, so did her confession. She would never speak of it openly again, except to say, “It is night’s secret.”
And so is the Gospel: night’s secret, night’s truth. It belongs to the night in the sense that this is where we human beings often live, and so this is where the truth must meet us—exactly where we live---often in confusion, in ignorance, in sin, in darkness. But isn’t that precisely when and where we need to hear the truth and meet the truth? John’s gospel tells the truth: the light has come into the world and the people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Consider human history; take a sharp look at our world. No wonder Jesus said that people love the darkness. And yet the good news is that even in the night, when we may be hiding from the truth, the truth of God in Jesus Christ sometimes finds us.
Numbers 21: 4-9
John 3: 1-3; 14-21
Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, came to Jesus in the night. He did not come in the bright light of midday, or in the muted light of daybreak or in the deep shadows of a setting sun. No, the text tells us he came to Jesus by night. And if we have any imagination at all, remembering that Jesus’ world was completely devoid of electricity, we can picture Nicodemus carefully making his way, maybe even stumbling though the pitch blackness of night. That the writer of this gospel bothered to tell us, when Nicodemus made his visit to Jesus must mean something. The gospels are pretty terse, compact in their language and details, so when we are given a specific piece of information, it is probably a good thing to pay attention, in this case, to the night.
Perhaps the explanation is as easy as Nicodemus’ desire to escape detection. After all, he was a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, and he might have feared what people would say or think if they saw him with the man, who had made such a disturbance in the temple by throwing out the moneychangers. What is a leader of the Jews doing with a renegade? And then there is the symbolism of night and dark, which John’s gospel uses as a stark contrast to light. Light in John’s gospel reveals; dark conceals. Jesus is the light of all people, John says in the opening words of his gospel, and “this light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” So perhaps the writer is telling us that Nicodemus is a man, living in darkness, but he sees enough to realize that he wants more. And so he shows up, even if it is in the night.
Nicodemus tells Jesus that he knows that Jesus is a teacher from God, because. He says, “no one can do these signs apart from the presence of God. So, Nicodemus had seen enough to be impressed. In today’s world, we might call him a seeker. He was looking for something, though he was not exactly sure what that something was. And he was confused when Jesus told him that he must be born again. How is that possible? Nicodemus demanded to know. Can we re-enter our mother’s womb?
Now after the exchange about being born again, we hear Jesus remind Nicodemus how Moses in the desert had lifted up the bronze serpent so that the Jews, who looked at it would be saved from the lethal serpent bites. Nicodemus would have known the story---how the people of Israel, while wandering through the desert after their escape from Egypt, had lost their trust in God. Why are we here in this barren wasteland, they wanted to know? Why did you bring us here to perish? And they blamed Moses and God, and for their lack of faith, they were bitten by serpents. I guess there is nothing like a serpent bite to encourage immediate repentance, and so they asked Moses to pray to God on their behalf. And Moses did, and God responded with the idea of a bronze serpent.
Now the lifting up of the bronze serpent is symbolic, as you heard in the introduction to this text, analogous to the lifting up of Jesus on the cross. In other words, Nicodemus is being told that just as the serpent saved, so will Jesus save. And then Jesus says the words which Martin Luther claimed are the heart of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” How ironic! Here we are, in the darkness of night, which for John’s gospel means confusion, ignorance, inability to see and understand, and yet this dark night is the place and the time where the truth is fully told. Here is the heart of the gospel: God’s love for the world, expressed fully in Jesus Christ, a love that is not for condemnation but for salvation---new and abundant life.
So why would the writer of this gospel put the good news right smack in the middle of the night, the place and the time, human beings are least able to see? Maybe it is because the night, as much as it hides, can sometimes reveal. Sometimes the night is the place and the time, where truth does come out. Things happen in the night. Babies are more likely to be born in the night and people are more likely to die at night than in the daylight. A policeman at my former church once told me that he was far more likely to get a confession in the night than during the day. Bright lights, he said, are a dumb way to coax out the truth. Remember all night college rap sessions, when you and your friends discussed the big questions of life? It seemed to me that sometimes people would say things in the night they never would say in the light of day, admitting to feelings and thoughts they would not own in the sunlight. Yes, the night can hide the truth, but sometimes, ironically, the truth is revealed, in the dark.
Some years ago, in one of former churches, there was this prominent elderly couple, who had been married for 67 years. I remember when they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, and when it was announced in church, the congregation stood up and gave them a resounding ovation. I was very close to the wife. She and I would have these long conversations about life. Well one evening a few nights after her husband’s death, I happened to be driving home, when I noticed that the light was on in their home, and I could see the wife sitting in the living room. To this day I don’t know why I stopped my car. It was nearly 10 P.M., far too late to bother her, an inappropriate invasion on her grief, perhaps, but I rang the bell anyway, and she immediately let me in. She had been sitting in a rocking chair with one light illuminating her figure against the large picture window, but the rest of the room was dark.
With no easement into the story, she began to tell me how her marriage of 67 years had been a sham. I should have left him years ago, she said. He cheated on me; humiliated me, abused me physically and mentally. And then she poured out to me a catalogue of details. At the end of it all, as the grandfather clock struck midnight, she said something like this. “In a few days we will bury him, and people will see me grieve. But now you know that I will be grieving for something else---for the husband, life and marriage I never had.”
To this day I wonder if she would ever have told me that had it not been night. There was something about that room and that Victorian lamp, sitting on a table next to her chair, casting shadows across the room. We could hear the grandfather clock ticking, marking the advancement of the night, and as time belonged fully to the night, so did her confession. She would never speak of it openly again, except to say, “It is night’s secret.”
And so is the Gospel: night’s secret, night’s truth. It belongs to the night in the sense that this is where we human beings often live, and so this is where the truth must meet us—exactly where we live---often in confusion, in ignorance, in sin, in darkness. But isn’t that precisely when and where we need to hear the truth and meet the truth? John’s gospel tells the truth: the light has come into the world and the people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Consider human history; take a sharp look at our world. No wonder Jesus said that people love the darkness. And yet the good news is that even in the night, when we may be hiding from the truth, the truth of God in Jesus Christ sometimes finds us.
March 10, 2021
Dear Friends,
Some of you might have heard about Pope Francis’ historic visit to Iraq, the first Pope to ever visit that country. The Papacy does have some history to live down. In 1263 Pope Urban IV promulgated a papal bull that welcomed, Hulagu Khan, a Mongul warlord, whom the Pope was hoping would convert to Christianity. Tragically many Christians at that time cheered on Hulagu and his allies, who rampaged and slaughtered their way through some of the grandest cities of the Middle East.
A number of people were rightly concerned about safety, given the Coronavirus’ recent surge in Iraq. While the Pope and his retinue were vaccinated, most Iraqis do not yet have access to the vaccine. Crowds enthusiastically greeted the Pope, but most of them were maskless. Nonetheless, the Pope had fervently prayed and concluding that God truly wanted him to visit Iraq, he believed God would protect the Iraqi people. Let us hope the Pope is correct.
There were a number of reasons for the Pope’s visit, including a desire to encourage inter-religious tolerance and understanding. To that end he met with Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who greeted the Pope by standing, a gesture he almost never makes. The Pope said he was deeply moved by al-Sistani’s kindness and generosity of spirit. Yet perhaps the most important reason for the Pope’s visit was to show his support and concern for Iraq’s Christians, who since the American invasion in 2003, have suffered not only the destruction of their churches, when the Islamic State ruled, but also the displacement of their people. Right before the 2003 invasion, Iraq had about 1.5 million Christians. Now their number hovers around a few hundred thousand.
The Pope’s message was clear and also challenging: He told Christians to forgive the injustices leveled against them while also rebuilding churches that were left as wrecked shells. “Fraternity is more durable than fratricide, hope is more powerful than hatred, peace more powerful than war,” the Pope said. “The road to a full recovery may still be long, but I ask you, please, do not grow discouraged. What is needed is the ability to forgive, but also the courage not to give up. Forgiveness is necessary to remain in love as a Christian.”
When Pope Francis climbed onto the stage in Mosul, he was surrounded by the grey hollowed out shells of four churches: Syriac Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean. Mosul was where the Islamic State claimed the seat of the Caliphate, and it was also the site of cruelty directed not only against Christians but also Muslims and Yazidis, who did not embrace their rule. Mass killings and beheadings were common daily occurrences. The second largest city in Iraq, Mosul became the backbone of the Islamic State and in 2017 it took a fierce nine month battle to free the city from its awful grip. By July 2017 Mosul was free, but only after more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians had died.
The Rev. Raed Kallo was among the few Christians to return after the defeat of the Islamic State. Before the war, his church had about 500 families. Now there are barely 70 families. The Muslim head of the Independent Social and Cultural Council invited “all our Christian brothers to return to this, their city, their properties and their businesses.” One resident told the Pope how her son along with two other people were killed in a mortar strike as the Islamic State neared the town. “Their deaths alerted the other residents to flee, saving the entire city. But now it is time for the survivors to try to forgive the aggressors.”
Under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein, Christians, who date back to the first centuries of the faith, were granted full legal status, and shared the same rights as Muslims. But with the American invasion in 2003 and the subsequent chaos, Christians were among the first to suffer attacks by militants. There were four main Christian groups: Chaldean, Syriac, Assyrian and Armenian, and their churches were repeatedly bombed by Sunni militants. In 2008 a Chaldean Catholic archbishop was abducted and murdered, and in 2010 Islamic militants invaded a church in Baghdad during a Sunday evening mass, a siege, lasting four hours, leaving dozens of people, including two priests, dead. And so most Christians left Iraq, becoming refugees in Canada, Sweden, Australia and some neighboring Middle East countries. There is now a painful history to face, and many Christian Iraqis are too fearful to return. For those Christians, who have remained in Iraq, there is wariness of Muslim neighbors, whom some blame for turning their backs on them.
And so, it remains to be seen how Pope Francis’ call for forgiveness is received. Only time will tell. For years the Vatican has been voicing its concern about the Christian flight from the Middle East. War, poverty, persecution and discrimination have made life difficult for Christians in Iraq and elsewhere, and now the Pope is asking them to forgive that they might begin again in hope. This is the first visit the Pope has made since the beginning of the virus, now a year ago. That he chose to go to Iraq and make a plea for forgiveness as Christians are making their journey through Lent, leading to Easter, was no casual decision. Forgiveness is never easy. Families and friends struggle to find their way when hurts dominate the landscape of their lives. So much of the time forgiveness is deeply personal, but when a people have to contend with the politics of brutality and murder, the challenge is magnified beyond the personal. In such situations neither you nor your enemy knows each other’s name. You and your enemy became nameless members of a despised group. To many people in such circumstances forgiveness hardly feels possible or even appropriate. Yet perhaps that is the reason for the Pope’s visit. He wanted to make it plain through his actions and voice that Christianity stands squarely on forgiveness. It is the main thread, weaving all the other parts together.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Some of you might have heard about Pope Francis’ historic visit to Iraq, the first Pope to ever visit that country. The Papacy does have some history to live down. In 1263 Pope Urban IV promulgated a papal bull that welcomed, Hulagu Khan, a Mongul warlord, whom the Pope was hoping would convert to Christianity. Tragically many Christians at that time cheered on Hulagu and his allies, who rampaged and slaughtered their way through some of the grandest cities of the Middle East.
A number of people were rightly concerned about safety, given the Coronavirus’ recent surge in Iraq. While the Pope and his retinue were vaccinated, most Iraqis do not yet have access to the vaccine. Crowds enthusiastically greeted the Pope, but most of them were maskless. Nonetheless, the Pope had fervently prayed and concluding that God truly wanted him to visit Iraq, he believed God would protect the Iraqi people. Let us hope the Pope is correct.
There were a number of reasons for the Pope’s visit, including a desire to encourage inter-religious tolerance and understanding. To that end he met with Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who greeted the Pope by standing, a gesture he almost never makes. The Pope said he was deeply moved by al-Sistani’s kindness and generosity of spirit. Yet perhaps the most important reason for the Pope’s visit was to show his support and concern for Iraq’s Christians, who since the American invasion in 2003, have suffered not only the destruction of their churches, when the Islamic State ruled, but also the displacement of their people. Right before the 2003 invasion, Iraq had about 1.5 million Christians. Now their number hovers around a few hundred thousand.
The Pope’s message was clear and also challenging: He told Christians to forgive the injustices leveled against them while also rebuilding churches that were left as wrecked shells. “Fraternity is more durable than fratricide, hope is more powerful than hatred, peace more powerful than war,” the Pope said. “The road to a full recovery may still be long, but I ask you, please, do not grow discouraged. What is needed is the ability to forgive, but also the courage not to give up. Forgiveness is necessary to remain in love as a Christian.”
When Pope Francis climbed onto the stage in Mosul, he was surrounded by the grey hollowed out shells of four churches: Syriac Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean. Mosul was where the Islamic State claimed the seat of the Caliphate, and it was also the site of cruelty directed not only against Christians but also Muslims and Yazidis, who did not embrace their rule. Mass killings and beheadings were common daily occurrences. The second largest city in Iraq, Mosul became the backbone of the Islamic State and in 2017 it took a fierce nine month battle to free the city from its awful grip. By July 2017 Mosul was free, but only after more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians had died.
The Rev. Raed Kallo was among the few Christians to return after the defeat of the Islamic State. Before the war, his church had about 500 families. Now there are barely 70 families. The Muslim head of the Independent Social and Cultural Council invited “all our Christian brothers to return to this, their city, their properties and their businesses.” One resident told the Pope how her son along with two other people were killed in a mortar strike as the Islamic State neared the town. “Their deaths alerted the other residents to flee, saving the entire city. But now it is time for the survivors to try to forgive the aggressors.”
Under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein, Christians, who date back to the first centuries of the faith, were granted full legal status, and shared the same rights as Muslims. But with the American invasion in 2003 and the subsequent chaos, Christians were among the first to suffer attacks by militants. There were four main Christian groups: Chaldean, Syriac, Assyrian and Armenian, and their churches were repeatedly bombed by Sunni militants. In 2008 a Chaldean Catholic archbishop was abducted and murdered, and in 2010 Islamic militants invaded a church in Baghdad during a Sunday evening mass, a siege, lasting four hours, leaving dozens of people, including two priests, dead. And so most Christians left Iraq, becoming refugees in Canada, Sweden, Australia and some neighboring Middle East countries. There is now a painful history to face, and many Christian Iraqis are too fearful to return. For those Christians, who have remained in Iraq, there is wariness of Muslim neighbors, whom some blame for turning their backs on them.
And so, it remains to be seen how Pope Francis’ call for forgiveness is received. Only time will tell. For years the Vatican has been voicing its concern about the Christian flight from the Middle East. War, poverty, persecution and discrimination have made life difficult for Christians in Iraq and elsewhere, and now the Pope is asking them to forgive that they might begin again in hope. This is the first visit the Pope has made since the beginning of the virus, now a year ago. That he chose to go to Iraq and make a plea for forgiveness as Christians are making their journey through Lent, leading to Easter, was no casual decision. Forgiveness is never easy. Families and friends struggle to find their way when hurts dominate the landscape of their lives. So much of the time forgiveness is deeply personal, but when a people have to contend with the politics of brutality and murder, the challenge is magnified beyond the personal. In such situations neither you nor your enemy knows each other’s name. You and your enemy became nameless members of a despised group. To many people in such circumstances forgiveness hardly feels possible or even appropriate. Yet perhaps that is the reason for the Pope’s visit. He wanted to make it plain through his actions and voice that Christianity stands squarely on forgiveness. It is the main thread, weaving all the other parts together.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
ANGER: RIGHTEOUS OR SINFUL? by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 3/7/2021
John 2: 13-22
A friend of mine recently told me about an article she came across about a therapist, who was treating a man for his uncontrollable temper. His marriage was pretty much on the rocks, because he would descend into fits of rage with his wife and children. As a district attorney in a large west coast city, he was renown for his quick and caustic style in the courtroom and was considered brilliant in his ability to sniff out guilt. He never lost his cool in court, but his dealings with staff were becoming so abusive that the complaints could not be ignored. He realized he needed help and so he entered therapy. The therapist tried to get at the source of his anger. Yes, he had strict, perfectionist parents, who expected him to be at the top of his class in college and law school, which he was. “So maybe I am angry at my parents” he mused, “but that is no reason for me to behave the way I do.”
The therapy continued, but so did his rage until finally in in exasperation the therapist came up with a plan. The next time you come to therapy, he said, I want you to bring your checkbook with at least 20 blank checks, which I am going to make out to the leader of the Klu Klux Klan in South Carolina. Every time you inappropriately lose your temper, he will receive $100 from you!
The therapist knew exactly what he was doing. The lawyer was Jewish, and his father, also a lawyer, had spent his career going after the Klan in South Carolina. “My parents,” the lawyer had told his therapist,” had the courage of titans, but we three kids paid a heavy price for their courage. We were terrified. I was spat upon in school, and even in high school I was beaten up by the sons of Klan members. And every time I came home and told my parents, my father would resolve to work even harder against the Klan. He even went to Mississippi after the three civil rights workers were murdered, and he helped there with the investigation. When the first trial brought a no guilty verdict, I remember my father crying.” Well, the problem was solved, because the man would simply not allow himself to lose his temper and thereby give a donation to people and a cause he despised.
Anger is a persistent challenge in human life, which is why it is named as one of the seven deadly sins, labeled number three, and coming right after pride and envy. These seven deadly sins, by the way, are not biblical. They were actually catalogued in the Middle Ages and with Dante’s Divine Comedy we have the perfect description of their workings. The punishment of the angry in Dante’s masterpiece is to be enveloped in suffocating smoke. Think of that image---to be unable to breathe and thus to live, because you inhale nothing but smoke, which chokes and finally kills you!
Of course, we should realize that it is the mark of a healthy life to recognize when we are angry and deal with it. The reason anger is named as sin is not because anger is NEVER appropriate, because, of course, sometimes it is. It is sin when we misuse anger, misdirect and misunderstand it. Anger may indeed be purging and yes, even righteous---Jesus’ anger in the Temple was certainly righteous--- but we should also be wary of it. Someone once compared anger to nuclear energy. It cannot be entirely trusted in the hands of mere mortals, because it sometimes overlaps itself and sets up a rhythm of violence, difficult to control.
Some years ago I took a classics course at Wesleyan, where we read classics---like Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s King Lear and portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I recall the professor taking one whole class to discuss this very human emotion called anger and how some of the greatest literary geniuses worked with it in some of the greatest literature ever written. Think of Achilles, the great Greek hero, who refused to fight in the Trojan War, after he was forced to give to King Agamemnon the woman Achilles considered to be his war booty. Achilles was enraged, but when his friend, Patrolus was killed in battle, while wearing Achilles armor, Achilles rage rose to a fevered pitch, and in revenge he killed Hector. And then there is King Lear, who becomes enraged at his daughter, Cordelia, when she tells him she loves him as a daughter should and does not offer him the exaggerated and dishonest devotion of her other two sisters. Lear makes a series of tragic choices, which brings down destruction on his kingdom and on the one daughter he finally comes to understand loves him best. Anger is not an emotion easily trusted, because all too often, it hides behind self-righteousness, which functions to make us look better than we really are.
Consider our Gospel reading from John---the cleansing of the Temple. This incident is described in all four gospels, but its placement in John is completely different from Matthew, Mark and Luke. In the synoptics (as the three other gospels are called) the cleansing of the Temple comes toward the end of Jesus’ ministry as he returns to Jerusalem. Shortly after this incident he goes to Gethsemane, where he is arrested. In the synoptics, in fact, it is Jesus’ action in the Temple, which put the final nail in his coffin. He has been viewed as a trouble maker all along by the religious authorities for refusing to play by the purity codes and laws of Judaism, and in the Temple he has gone after the very heart of the sacrificial system. And so, he must go!
But this is not how the cleansing of the Temple works in John, who puts it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, not at the end. In John’s Gospel Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple does not lead to his arrest, but it does lead to an immediate confrontation, making Jesus’ separation from Judaism more immediately apparent. John’s Gospel uses this story of the Temple cleansing to point to what is truly religiously significant---not the temple as a building, but the temple that is Jesus, who will die and be resurrected. Jesus, in other words, is the Temple’s replacement.
Now most scholars think that the cleansing of the Temple probably did occur toward the end of Jesus’ ministry and was viewed as the last straw by the religious establishment. John’s gospel, however, is not so interested in history as it is in proclaiming who Christ is----- the one who is with God from the very beginning, the one who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, the one who is the new Temple.
In all four gospel’s Jesus anger does look like the expression of righteous anger against the religious establishment, but it is only in John’s Gospel that Jesus says, “Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!” But the buying and selling of animals was part of the sacrificial system of Judaism and the changing of money was necessary so that the offering to the Temple could be made with Jewish, not pagan coins. If you were a priest, trying to do your job, perhaps even recognizing the imperfection of the system, but also seeing it as a means of giving order and structure to Jewish life in a time of national calamity, you would have had a very different perspective on what Jesus did. Understandably you would be angry.
Anger erupts in all our lives. We all have a catalogue of things we are angry about. I once heard a minister say she was asked at an interview to list things that really made her angry. Perhaps that is an exercise we all should do. There are many good reasons to be angry, but there are even more good reasons to be wary of our anger. Righteous anger lets go of illusions---especially the illusion that that we are the holy innocents, free from all guilt. Once that illusion is gone, we can have our anger. While it can be righteous, it is never legitimately self-righteous.
John 2: 13-22
A friend of mine recently told me about an article she came across about a therapist, who was treating a man for his uncontrollable temper. His marriage was pretty much on the rocks, because he would descend into fits of rage with his wife and children. As a district attorney in a large west coast city, he was renown for his quick and caustic style in the courtroom and was considered brilliant in his ability to sniff out guilt. He never lost his cool in court, but his dealings with staff were becoming so abusive that the complaints could not be ignored. He realized he needed help and so he entered therapy. The therapist tried to get at the source of his anger. Yes, he had strict, perfectionist parents, who expected him to be at the top of his class in college and law school, which he was. “So maybe I am angry at my parents” he mused, “but that is no reason for me to behave the way I do.”
The therapy continued, but so did his rage until finally in in exasperation the therapist came up with a plan. The next time you come to therapy, he said, I want you to bring your checkbook with at least 20 blank checks, which I am going to make out to the leader of the Klu Klux Klan in South Carolina. Every time you inappropriately lose your temper, he will receive $100 from you!
The therapist knew exactly what he was doing. The lawyer was Jewish, and his father, also a lawyer, had spent his career going after the Klan in South Carolina. “My parents,” the lawyer had told his therapist,” had the courage of titans, but we three kids paid a heavy price for their courage. We were terrified. I was spat upon in school, and even in high school I was beaten up by the sons of Klan members. And every time I came home and told my parents, my father would resolve to work even harder against the Klan. He even went to Mississippi after the three civil rights workers were murdered, and he helped there with the investigation. When the first trial brought a no guilty verdict, I remember my father crying.” Well, the problem was solved, because the man would simply not allow himself to lose his temper and thereby give a donation to people and a cause he despised.
Anger is a persistent challenge in human life, which is why it is named as one of the seven deadly sins, labeled number three, and coming right after pride and envy. These seven deadly sins, by the way, are not biblical. They were actually catalogued in the Middle Ages and with Dante’s Divine Comedy we have the perfect description of their workings. The punishment of the angry in Dante’s masterpiece is to be enveloped in suffocating smoke. Think of that image---to be unable to breathe and thus to live, because you inhale nothing but smoke, which chokes and finally kills you!
Of course, we should realize that it is the mark of a healthy life to recognize when we are angry and deal with it. The reason anger is named as sin is not because anger is NEVER appropriate, because, of course, sometimes it is. It is sin when we misuse anger, misdirect and misunderstand it. Anger may indeed be purging and yes, even righteous---Jesus’ anger in the Temple was certainly righteous--- but we should also be wary of it. Someone once compared anger to nuclear energy. It cannot be entirely trusted in the hands of mere mortals, because it sometimes overlaps itself and sets up a rhythm of violence, difficult to control.
Some years ago I took a classics course at Wesleyan, where we read classics---like Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s King Lear and portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I recall the professor taking one whole class to discuss this very human emotion called anger and how some of the greatest literary geniuses worked with it in some of the greatest literature ever written. Think of Achilles, the great Greek hero, who refused to fight in the Trojan War, after he was forced to give to King Agamemnon the woman Achilles considered to be his war booty. Achilles was enraged, but when his friend, Patrolus was killed in battle, while wearing Achilles armor, Achilles rage rose to a fevered pitch, and in revenge he killed Hector. And then there is King Lear, who becomes enraged at his daughter, Cordelia, when she tells him she loves him as a daughter should and does not offer him the exaggerated and dishonest devotion of her other two sisters. Lear makes a series of tragic choices, which brings down destruction on his kingdom and on the one daughter he finally comes to understand loves him best. Anger is not an emotion easily trusted, because all too often, it hides behind self-righteousness, which functions to make us look better than we really are.
Consider our Gospel reading from John---the cleansing of the Temple. This incident is described in all four gospels, but its placement in John is completely different from Matthew, Mark and Luke. In the synoptics (as the three other gospels are called) the cleansing of the Temple comes toward the end of Jesus’ ministry as he returns to Jerusalem. Shortly after this incident he goes to Gethsemane, where he is arrested. In the synoptics, in fact, it is Jesus’ action in the Temple, which put the final nail in his coffin. He has been viewed as a trouble maker all along by the religious authorities for refusing to play by the purity codes and laws of Judaism, and in the Temple he has gone after the very heart of the sacrificial system. And so, he must go!
But this is not how the cleansing of the Temple works in John, who puts it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, not at the end. In John’s Gospel Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple does not lead to his arrest, but it does lead to an immediate confrontation, making Jesus’ separation from Judaism more immediately apparent. John’s Gospel uses this story of the Temple cleansing to point to what is truly religiously significant---not the temple as a building, but the temple that is Jesus, who will die and be resurrected. Jesus, in other words, is the Temple’s replacement.
Now most scholars think that the cleansing of the Temple probably did occur toward the end of Jesus’ ministry and was viewed as the last straw by the religious establishment. John’s gospel, however, is not so interested in history as it is in proclaiming who Christ is----- the one who is with God from the very beginning, the one who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, the one who is the new Temple.
In all four gospel’s Jesus anger does look like the expression of righteous anger against the religious establishment, but it is only in John’s Gospel that Jesus says, “Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!” But the buying and selling of animals was part of the sacrificial system of Judaism and the changing of money was necessary so that the offering to the Temple could be made with Jewish, not pagan coins. If you were a priest, trying to do your job, perhaps even recognizing the imperfection of the system, but also seeing it as a means of giving order and structure to Jewish life in a time of national calamity, you would have had a very different perspective on what Jesus did. Understandably you would be angry.
Anger erupts in all our lives. We all have a catalogue of things we are angry about. I once heard a minister say she was asked at an interview to list things that really made her angry. Perhaps that is an exercise we all should do. There are many good reasons to be angry, but there are even more good reasons to be wary of our anger. Righteous anger lets go of illusions---especially the illusion that that we are the holy innocents, free from all guilt. Once that illusion is gone, we can have our anger. While it can be righteous, it is never legitimately self-righteous.
March 4, 2021
Dear Friends,
Though it is no longer Black History month, I recently came across an engaging article that deserves attention. In a small French town of 60 inhabitants, named Sechault, located in eastern France, sits a cemetery, the final resting place for Black soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem. As you enter the town, your eyes alight on a small granite monument on which is written the word, “Colored,” the (former) official name of the New York National Guard unit from which the soldiers came. Denied a send-off parade with other (White) soldiers who were going to France in 1917, the men of this unit were assigned to the French Army, because their own countrymen refused to fight along with them. In 191 days of continuous fighting this 2000 member unit suffered grievous losses, but evidenced great courage and tenacity. Their German enemy gave them the name, Hollenkampfer, translated as “Harlem Hellfighters,” but it took the United States Army until this past fall to recognize the name as its official title.
The region of Champagne-Ardenne in which Sechault sits offers a tranquil patchwork of fertile fields where wheat, beets and hops are grown. Gazing at the view, one would never imagine the terrible carnage that took place here in the final days of World War l. From September to November 1918, a bloody battle took place there that left over one half of the Black soldiers wounded and another 144 dead. On September 29 the unit captured Sechault from the Germans and along with other acts of heroism during the siege, the unit was awarded France’s highest military honor, The Croix de Guerre, which was also awarded to individual soldiers, who had shown remarkable gallantry.
Every year on November 11, Armistice Day, there is a small ceremony, attended only by the families of the town. “There are no signs, showing the way to Sechault,” the mayor said, “but after this pandemic is over, I have some ideas about other things we can do.” Mr. Salez, the mayor, would like to have a hiking trail built, leading from the monument to a hill about a mile away. A tattered American flag flies on the hilltop, where a lichen-stained monument sits, commemorating another unit of American Black soldiers from the 371st Regiment, who fought and died there in 1918.
The Hellfighters were all New Yorkers, who worked as doormen, porters, nightwatchmen, mailmen, and elevator operators. When the United States entered the War in 1917, these men persistently lobbied New York’s Governor Charles Whitman, who finally agreed to let them form an all-black unit. When they arrived in South Carolina for military training, they suffered taunts and insults before being shipped to France. When the unit first arrived in France in December 1917, they were assigned menial work and prevented from integrating with other American troops. And so, they were assigned to the French Army, which welcomed them.
France’s universalism code then and even now forbids quantification or categorization by race or religion. While today American academics insist that this refusal on France’s part only camouflages the discrimination of Muslims and other groups, it is also true that many black American writers and artists, such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Henry Ossawa Tanner, found an acceptance in France that they could not find in their own country.
When the Hellfighters returned to New York in 1918, they paraded up Fifth Avenue and on to Harlem. Though they were initially greeted as heroes, the accolades were short lived. When Pvt. Henry Johnson, cited for extraordinary bravery in France, accused white soldiers of racism in 1919, he quite literally went into hiding for fear of his life. He died destitute a decade later, and in 2015 was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by then President Barack Obama.
On the other side of Sechault there is a Germany cemetery for the 6454 German soldiers killed in this area during World War l, more than half of whom were never identified. Row after row of gray crosses stretch for miles. Among these crosses, there were about a dozen stone slabs, engraved with Stars of David. They too fought and died for their country, only to have their country in another generation turn on its Jewish citizens and send them to gas chambers.
So, what is the lesson here? Prejudice and racism abound, but that is no surprise, for such is the human condition. But If God is always attempting to do a new thing, what new thing is God attempting in the midst of a cemetery that brings to mind the terrible costs of war? A recent visitor to the Sechault cemetery noticed the huge oak trees, adorning the grounds, and on these trees, someone had affixed some birdhouses. In the midst of death, there is life, the person wrote, and despite everything---the brutality of war as well as the brutality of racism---there is a glimmer of hope. New life springs forth.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Though it is no longer Black History month, I recently came across an engaging article that deserves attention. In a small French town of 60 inhabitants, named Sechault, located in eastern France, sits a cemetery, the final resting place for Black soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem. As you enter the town, your eyes alight on a small granite monument on which is written the word, “Colored,” the (former) official name of the New York National Guard unit from which the soldiers came. Denied a send-off parade with other (White) soldiers who were going to France in 1917, the men of this unit were assigned to the French Army, because their own countrymen refused to fight along with them. In 191 days of continuous fighting this 2000 member unit suffered grievous losses, but evidenced great courage and tenacity. Their German enemy gave them the name, Hollenkampfer, translated as “Harlem Hellfighters,” but it took the United States Army until this past fall to recognize the name as its official title.
The region of Champagne-Ardenne in which Sechault sits offers a tranquil patchwork of fertile fields where wheat, beets and hops are grown. Gazing at the view, one would never imagine the terrible carnage that took place here in the final days of World War l. From September to November 1918, a bloody battle took place there that left over one half of the Black soldiers wounded and another 144 dead. On September 29 the unit captured Sechault from the Germans and along with other acts of heroism during the siege, the unit was awarded France’s highest military honor, The Croix de Guerre, which was also awarded to individual soldiers, who had shown remarkable gallantry.
Every year on November 11, Armistice Day, there is a small ceremony, attended only by the families of the town. “There are no signs, showing the way to Sechault,” the mayor said, “but after this pandemic is over, I have some ideas about other things we can do.” Mr. Salez, the mayor, would like to have a hiking trail built, leading from the monument to a hill about a mile away. A tattered American flag flies on the hilltop, where a lichen-stained monument sits, commemorating another unit of American Black soldiers from the 371st Regiment, who fought and died there in 1918.
The Hellfighters were all New Yorkers, who worked as doormen, porters, nightwatchmen, mailmen, and elevator operators. When the United States entered the War in 1917, these men persistently lobbied New York’s Governor Charles Whitman, who finally agreed to let them form an all-black unit. When they arrived in South Carolina for military training, they suffered taunts and insults before being shipped to France. When the unit first arrived in France in December 1917, they were assigned menial work and prevented from integrating with other American troops. And so, they were assigned to the French Army, which welcomed them.
France’s universalism code then and even now forbids quantification or categorization by race or religion. While today American academics insist that this refusal on France’s part only camouflages the discrimination of Muslims and other groups, it is also true that many black American writers and artists, such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Henry Ossawa Tanner, found an acceptance in France that they could not find in their own country.
When the Hellfighters returned to New York in 1918, they paraded up Fifth Avenue and on to Harlem. Though they were initially greeted as heroes, the accolades were short lived. When Pvt. Henry Johnson, cited for extraordinary bravery in France, accused white soldiers of racism in 1919, he quite literally went into hiding for fear of his life. He died destitute a decade later, and in 2015 was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by then President Barack Obama.
On the other side of Sechault there is a Germany cemetery for the 6454 German soldiers killed in this area during World War l, more than half of whom were never identified. Row after row of gray crosses stretch for miles. Among these crosses, there were about a dozen stone slabs, engraved with Stars of David. They too fought and died for their country, only to have their country in another generation turn on its Jewish citizens and send them to gas chambers.
So, what is the lesson here? Prejudice and racism abound, but that is no surprise, for such is the human condition. But If God is always attempting to do a new thing, what new thing is God attempting in the midst of a cemetery that brings to mind the terrible costs of war? A recent visitor to the Sechault cemetery noticed the huge oak trees, adorning the grounds, and on these trees, someone had affixed some birdhouses. In the midst of death, there is life, the person wrote, and despite everything---the brutality of war as well as the brutality of racism---there is a glimmer of hope. New life springs forth.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Carry the Cross & Follow by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/28/2021
Mark 8: 31-38
A ministerial colleague of mine tells this story about his growing up in North Carolina. He was around 15, and one summer afternoon he and his friend were fishing for trout in one of the local lakes, an activity, which required a fishing license. Suddenly, the boys saw a police car pull up, and then a policeman emerge, heading toward them. My friend, realizing that he would be expected to produce a fishing license, took off at a lightning speed. He was a strong runner, confident of his ability to outrun the policeman. But the policeman was young and strong, in perfect physical shape, and in very short order, overtook his young prey. As the policeman approached, my friend suddenly took out his fishing license and proudly thrust it in the policeman’s face. “Boy, the policeman said, “you must be the dumbest kid in town, running away when you had a license.” My friend looked at him and smiled. “Not so dumb, Sir, because my friend didn’t have one.”
It was, my colleague claimed, a perfect moment. He had outwitted the adult world, and he stood there in all his pride, gloating. The policeman just smiled. “You’re quick and you’re smart,” he said. I admire that,” and walking toward his car, he called back over his shoulder. “Just use your intelligence for good.” It was, my colleague claimed, a watershed moment. “There I was, so puffed up with arrogance, but suddenly it was deflated. That cop was wise beyond his years. Rather than being mad at my cleverness, he gave me credit for it. And then he did something else: he challenged me use my brains for good.”
I like that story, partly, I suppose because it is not at all what I expected. There are elements of surprise. Did any of you really think the 15 year old had a valid fishing license? And did you expect such maturity from a young policeman, whose wisdom helped to turn the incident into a real teaching moment?
When we consider our reading from Mark, we also have a situation where expectations are overturned. There are surprises for the disciples---but the disciples are nothing like that smart 15 year old. On the contrary, Mark portrays them as pretty dense, not all that bright. By the 8th chapter of Mark, Jesus’ identity as healer, exorcist and teacher has been pretty firmly established. The demons have recognized him as the holy one of God, but no one else seems to understand. Immediately preceding today’s reading, Jesus asks his disciples a pivotal question: Who do people say I am? And they answer, “John the Baptist; others say Elijah and still others say one of the prophets.” Jesus persists, “But who do you say I am?” And it is Peter who answers, “You are the Messiah.” Now the disciples thought they knew what a Messiah was like--- a king, a liberator, a conqueror in the mode of David, who sat on the throne of a kingdom he had united. But Jesus simply did not look like that kind of king.
The disciples already understood that with Jesus expectations did have a way of being overturned, but a Messiah who would suffer and die? That was beyond everyone’s comprehension. Is it any wonder then that Peter objects? He rebukes Jesus, and Jesus in turn rebukes Peter, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
This word rebuke is important to note, because up to this point rebuke is what Jesus did with the demons when he cast them out of people. He rebuked them. And so, we are being told in no uncertain terms that this is a very serious conflict, a conflict as serious as the one Jesus had with the demons. If this was a teachable moment for the disciples, it was nothing like the one between the 15 year old boy and the policeman, where cleverness and then wisdom ruled. On the contrary, this was a tough conflict, where expectations were overturned by sharp, bitter exchanges. Jesus went so far as to call Peter Satan!
Now notice what happens in verse 34. Immediately, after rebuking Peter, he called to the crowd and said to them. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Those who will save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, I will save.” The charge moves beyond the circle of the disciples to the whole crowd, to all those gathered to hear, all who might desire to follow. Jesus lays down the standard for discipleship to the crowd, not just to his band of twelve: “Deny yourselves, take up the cross and follow me”
In our modern day we have tended to make the cross into any difficult challenge----a job, an illness, even a person, impossible to handle. But that is not the meaning here. The cross is not simply a difficult challenge. It is living a difficult challenge in a distinctively Christian way, a way that scorns the conventional wisdom of the world, which, counsels the avoidance of danger and suffering. But when we do that, we may be admirers of Jesus, but we are not his followers.
A friend of mine recently came across a reflection written by a man named Jim Loney about his friend, Tom Fox.” Tom had been a member of the Marine Corps Band for twenty years. He played the clarinet at four successive Presidential inaugurations, the last one being that of George W. Bush. I guess the recent Presidential inauguration and perhaps all the loss and death we have been suffering because of the virus, became the occasion for this reflection.
Jim wrote: In these difficult days my mind flashes back to Baghdad. You’re sitting next to me, in a plastic lawn chair, wearing purple track pants and a grey sweater. Captor clothes. It’s cold; the light is gloomy. Your face is grim, your beard grey and haggard, your body skeletal. There’s a chain around your right ankle and wrist. Your left wrist is handcuffed to my right wrist. Your eyes are closed. I can hear your breathing, your chain clinking on the floor. You’re passing it through your fingers, one link at a time, using it like a rosary to keep track of your meditations.
All of this is because you laid down your clarinet and became a Quaker. If it became necessary, you said you were ready to offer your life. Armies expect casualties when they go to war. Those working for peace in war zones have to expect the same, was how you put it. Under no circumstances would you pick up a gun. A disciple of Jesus, you said, was a disciple of non violence.
Our kidnappers called themselves holy warriors fighting for the freedom of their country. One lost his parents when his house was bombed in Fallujah. Another had lost seven family members, four of them children, when soldiers fired on their vehicle. Because you were an American, they thought you were a spy. They took you away on February 12, 2006. We never say you again. Twenty five days later, your body was found inside a plastic bag wrapped in a sheet. There were eight bullet wounds in your head and chest.”
Loney, a Canadian, was freed along with three others, who had also been kidnapped. None of those freed was American. It is, I think, very tempting to look upon Tom Fox’s death as a complete waste, so unnecessary. I mean he did not have to go to Iraq, and what could he really do there, anyway, in the mist of a war that was also a civil war? But apparently Jim Loney did not think his friend’s death was a complete waste. Deciding to go to Iraq was a watershed moment for Tom, when something new broke through his consciousness and he understood his life in a new and different way---not completely unlike the 15 year old, who not only heard the policeman tell him to use his intelligence for good but also understood what he meant by that charge. Tom Fox understood that working for peace sometimes might mean dying for the effort.
Jesus and Peter were locked in a battle of the spirit and each rebuked the other. Peter understood very well the way of the world, and so did Jesus. Yet Jesus also knew something else---that the way of the world does not speak the final word. The way of the world does not have the final truth. Peter saw things through a human lens, as we all do. After all, we are human. But the Gospel is another lens, which allows people to see in a different way. When a person wears the lens of the gospel he sees suffering in a new way, as Tom Fox did. This does not mean that suffering is a good that should be actively sought. Tom Fox was not looking to be a martyr. He was trying to work for peace by helping people rebuild their homes and their lives in a war torn nation. But he did understand something else as well. Some lives are not only taken; they are also given. And that giving makes all the difference---not that it removes the pain of suffering and loss, but it does remove the despair, and when despair is removed, hope and new life can rush in.
Mark 8: 31-38
A ministerial colleague of mine tells this story about his growing up in North Carolina. He was around 15, and one summer afternoon he and his friend were fishing for trout in one of the local lakes, an activity, which required a fishing license. Suddenly, the boys saw a police car pull up, and then a policeman emerge, heading toward them. My friend, realizing that he would be expected to produce a fishing license, took off at a lightning speed. He was a strong runner, confident of his ability to outrun the policeman. But the policeman was young and strong, in perfect physical shape, and in very short order, overtook his young prey. As the policeman approached, my friend suddenly took out his fishing license and proudly thrust it in the policeman’s face. “Boy, the policeman said, “you must be the dumbest kid in town, running away when you had a license.” My friend looked at him and smiled. “Not so dumb, Sir, because my friend didn’t have one.”
It was, my colleague claimed, a perfect moment. He had outwitted the adult world, and he stood there in all his pride, gloating. The policeman just smiled. “You’re quick and you’re smart,” he said. I admire that,” and walking toward his car, he called back over his shoulder. “Just use your intelligence for good.” It was, my colleague claimed, a watershed moment. “There I was, so puffed up with arrogance, but suddenly it was deflated. That cop was wise beyond his years. Rather than being mad at my cleverness, he gave me credit for it. And then he did something else: he challenged me use my brains for good.”
I like that story, partly, I suppose because it is not at all what I expected. There are elements of surprise. Did any of you really think the 15 year old had a valid fishing license? And did you expect such maturity from a young policeman, whose wisdom helped to turn the incident into a real teaching moment?
When we consider our reading from Mark, we also have a situation where expectations are overturned. There are surprises for the disciples---but the disciples are nothing like that smart 15 year old. On the contrary, Mark portrays them as pretty dense, not all that bright. By the 8th chapter of Mark, Jesus’ identity as healer, exorcist and teacher has been pretty firmly established. The demons have recognized him as the holy one of God, but no one else seems to understand. Immediately preceding today’s reading, Jesus asks his disciples a pivotal question: Who do people say I am? And they answer, “John the Baptist; others say Elijah and still others say one of the prophets.” Jesus persists, “But who do you say I am?” And it is Peter who answers, “You are the Messiah.” Now the disciples thought they knew what a Messiah was like--- a king, a liberator, a conqueror in the mode of David, who sat on the throne of a kingdom he had united. But Jesus simply did not look like that kind of king.
The disciples already understood that with Jesus expectations did have a way of being overturned, but a Messiah who would suffer and die? That was beyond everyone’s comprehension. Is it any wonder then that Peter objects? He rebukes Jesus, and Jesus in turn rebukes Peter, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
This word rebuke is important to note, because up to this point rebuke is what Jesus did with the demons when he cast them out of people. He rebuked them. And so, we are being told in no uncertain terms that this is a very serious conflict, a conflict as serious as the one Jesus had with the demons. If this was a teachable moment for the disciples, it was nothing like the one between the 15 year old boy and the policeman, where cleverness and then wisdom ruled. On the contrary, this was a tough conflict, where expectations were overturned by sharp, bitter exchanges. Jesus went so far as to call Peter Satan!
Now notice what happens in verse 34. Immediately, after rebuking Peter, he called to the crowd and said to them. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Those who will save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, I will save.” The charge moves beyond the circle of the disciples to the whole crowd, to all those gathered to hear, all who might desire to follow. Jesus lays down the standard for discipleship to the crowd, not just to his band of twelve: “Deny yourselves, take up the cross and follow me”
In our modern day we have tended to make the cross into any difficult challenge----a job, an illness, even a person, impossible to handle. But that is not the meaning here. The cross is not simply a difficult challenge. It is living a difficult challenge in a distinctively Christian way, a way that scorns the conventional wisdom of the world, which, counsels the avoidance of danger and suffering. But when we do that, we may be admirers of Jesus, but we are not his followers.
A friend of mine recently came across a reflection written by a man named Jim Loney about his friend, Tom Fox.” Tom had been a member of the Marine Corps Band for twenty years. He played the clarinet at four successive Presidential inaugurations, the last one being that of George W. Bush. I guess the recent Presidential inauguration and perhaps all the loss and death we have been suffering because of the virus, became the occasion for this reflection.
Jim wrote: In these difficult days my mind flashes back to Baghdad. You’re sitting next to me, in a plastic lawn chair, wearing purple track pants and a grey sweater. Captor clothes. It’s cold; the light is gloomy. Your face is grim, your beard grey and haggard, your body skeletal. There’s a chain around your right ankle and wrist. Your left wrist is handcuffed to my right wrist. Your eyes are closed. I can hear your breathing, your chain clinking on the floor. You’re passing it through your fingers, one link at a time, using it like a rosary to keep track of your meditations.
All of this is because you laid down your clarinet and became a Quaker. If it became necessary, you said you were ready to offer your life. Armies expect casualties when they go to war. Those working for peace in war zones have to expect the same, was how you put it. Under no circumstances would you pick up a gun. A disciple of Jesus, you said, was a disciple of non violence.
Our kidnappers called themselves holy warriors fighting for the freedom of their country. One lost his parents when his house was bombed in Fallujah. Another had lost seven family members, four of them children, when soldiers fired on their vehicle. Because you were an American, they thought you were a spy. They took you away on February 12, 2006. We never say you again. Twenty five days later, your body was found inside a plastic bag wrapped in a sheet. There were eight bullet wounds in your head and chest.”
Loney, a Canadian, was freed along with three others, who had also been kidnapped. None of those freed was American. It is, I think, very tempting to look upon Tom Fox’s death as a complete waste, so unnecessary. I mean he did not have to go to Iraq, and what could he really do there, anyway, in the mist of a war that was also a civil war? But apparently Jim Loney did not think his friend’s death was a complete waste. Deciding to go to Iraq was a watershed moment for Tom, when something new broke through his consciousness and he understood his life in a new and different way---not completely unlike the 15 year old, who not only heard the policeman tell him to use his intelligence for good but also understood what he meant by that charge. Tom Fox understood that working for peace sometimes might mean dying for the effort.
Jesus and Peter were locked in a battle of the spirit and each rebuked the other. Peter understood very well the way of the world, and so did Jesus. Yet Jesus also knew something else---that the way of the world does not speak the final word. The way of the world does not have the final truth. Peter saw things through a human lens, as we all do. After all, we are human. But the Gospel is another lens, which allows people to see in a different way. When a person wears the lens of the gospel he sees suffering in a new way, as Tom Fox did. This does not mean that suffering is a good that should be actively sought. Tom Fox was not looking to be a martyr. He was trying to work for peace by helping people rebuild their homes and their lives in a war torn nation. But he did understand something else as well. Some lives are not only taken; they are also given. And that giving makes all the difference---not that it removes the pain of suffering and loss, but it does remove the despair, and when despair is removed, hope and new life can rush in.
February 24, 2021
Dear Friends,
I will always remember my senior high school English teacher, Mr. Verreault. He was brilliant, not only a brilliantly inspiring teacher, but also deeply knowledgeable about literature and composition. From memory he could quote poetry and long sections of novels and plays. Dramatic and amusing, he could also be sarcastic, when a student refused to think. “You have a brain,” he would say, “now use it!”
There are many things I recall about Mr. Verreault’s teaching, but what I remember best are his teaching of the Oedipus plays by the Greek tragedian, Sophocles. Some of you might recall the story. It was foretold at Oedipus’ birth that he would kill his father and marry his mother, so the parents commanded that the infant be left to die. But the man who was told to abandon the baby, overcome by compassion and sorrow, decided to take the child home to his family and raise him as their own. When Oedipus grew up, he learned of the prediction, and so, thinking the people, who had raised him were his biological parents, he left. And it was then that he killed his real father, the King, who interfered with his passage. He then answered the riddle of the Sphinx: What creature moves first on all fours, then two and finally three. The answer, of course, is the human being, who crawls, then walks and finally in old age uses a cane. For answering correctly, Oedipus is rewarded marriage to the Queen, his biological mother. Eventually, the sin of incest infects the city, and Oedipus goes on a journey to discover why his city is so cursed. As he probes and questions, he becomes more and more horrified until finally he discovers the awful truth. He blinds himself, and with his two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, becomes a wanderer. So, there you have the basic outline of the story.
What I remember so well is how our teacher had us debating the question of truth. “Why is it,” he asked, “that Oedipus keeps asking and probing, even as he learns more and more information that horrifies him? Why doesn’t he stop? Is there something about human beings that insists on the truth, even when it hurts or has the capacity to destroy? Do you think he should have stopped before he arrived at the awful truth?” That genius of a teacher managed to spark our youthful passion as we passionately debated and argued the question of truth as if our very lives depended on it. Here we were, a class of 16 and 17 year olds, all honor students, all headed to college the following fall and all of us deeply engaged by this question of truth. We cared about it, and some of us continued the debate after the class was over. Three or four of us sat at the lunch table as we revisited the points that were made in the class that very morning. And then a few days later we were asked to write a paper on this very question: Why did Oedipus continue to search for the truth, even as he learned the truth was horrifying? And did we think this is what he should have done?
The second thing I recall so well is our teacher talking to us about the Greek view of suffering. He told us how the Greeks believed that suffering was a tool of education and that human beings can and do learn from suffering and through suffering. In fact, they believed there was no better teacher. Being as young as we were, we hardly had a huge catalogue of sufferings, and yet there was no denying that there was suffering among us. One student’s grandmother recently had died; another student’s father had abandoned the family; someone else failed to gain admission to any of her top choice colleges. Our teacher had no desire to put anyone on the spot, but he did ask us to ponder what suffering can mean for human beings. Is it possible to learn from what we suffer?
I remember very well when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968. Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana for the Presidential Primary, and when his plane landed, he was met by a group of African-Americans, who had not yet heard of King’s death. Though Kennedy’s advisors did not want him to face the crowd, because they feared violence, Kennedy insisted on telling them the awful truth. He told them of the pain and sorrow of his own brother’s death, who also died by violence, and then he quoted from the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus:
“Pain we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon our hearts,
until in our sleep, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
On Tuesday evening President Biden addressed the nation about the terrible loss we have suffered: 500,000 plus dead Americans from Covid-19. The President spoke of pain and suffering, topics he intimately knew and experienced through the loss of his wife and infant daughter in a car crash and decades later the death of his son, Beau from brain cancer. He told us to remember, to cherish the memories, even as those memories will bring sadness and pain. But he promised that in time there would be something else: “A smile,” he said, “will one day come before the tears.” As I listened to and later read the President’s words, I immediately thought of my wise and brilliant English teacher, who loved Aeschylus as much as he loved Sophocles. “Write this down,” he commanded the class. “Remember, for these words might help you some day.”
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I will always remember my senior high school English teacher, Mr. Verreault. He was brilliant, not only a brilliantly inspiring teacher, but also deeply knowledgeable about literature and composition. From memory he could quote poetry and long sections of novels and plays. Dramatic and amusing, he could also be sarcastic, when a student refused to think. “You have a brain,” he would say, “now use it!”
There are many things I recall about Mr. Verreault’s teaching, but what I remember best are his teaching of the Oedipus plays by the Greek tragedian, Sophocles. Some of you might recall the story. It was foretold at Oedipus’ birth that he would kill his father and marry his mother, so the parents commanded that the infant be left to die. But the man who was told to abandon the baby, overcome by compassion and sorrow, decided to take the child home to his family and raise him as their own. When Oedipus grew up, he learned of the prediction, and so, thinking the people, who had raised him were his biological parents, he left. And it was then that he killed his real father, the King, who interfered with his passage. He then answered the riddle of the Sphinx: What creature moves first on all fours, then two and finally three. The answer, of course, is the human being, who crawls, then walks and finally in old age uses a cane. For answering correctly, Oedipus is rewarded marriage to the Queen, his biological mother. Eventually, the sin of incest infects the city, and Oedipus goes on a journey to discover why his city is so cursed. As he probes and questions, he becomes more and more horrified until finally he discovers the awful truth. He blinds himself, and with his two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, becomes a wanderer. So, there you have the basic outline of the story.
What I remember so well is how our teacher had us debating the question of truth. “Why is it,” he asked, “that Oedipus keeps asking and probing, even as he learns more and more information that horrifies him? Why doesn’t he stop? Is there something about human beings that insists on the truth, even when it hurts or has the capacity to destroy? Do you think he should have stopped before he arrived at the awful truth?” That genius of a teacher managed to spark our youthful passion as we passionately debated and argued the question of truth as if our very lives depended on it. Here we were, a class of 16 and 17 year olds, all honor students, all headed to college the following fall and all of us deeply engaged by this question of truth. We cared about it, and some of us continued the debate after the class was over. Three or four of us sat at the lunch table as we revisited the points that were made in the class that very morning. And then a few days later we were asked to write a paper on this very question: Why did Oedipus continue to search for the truth, even as he learned the truth was horrifying? And did we think this is what he should have done?
The second thing I recall so well is our teacher talking to us about the Greek view of suffering. He told us how the Greeks believed that suffering was a tool of education and that human beings can and do learn from suffering and through suffering. In fact, they believed there was no better teacher. Being as young as we were, we hardly had a huge catalogue of sufferings, and yet there was no denying that there was suffering among us. One student’s grandmother recently had died; another student’s father had abandoned the family; someone else failed to gain admission to any of her top choice colleges. Our teacher had no desire to put anyone on the spot, but he did ask us to ponder what suffering can mean for human beings. Is it possible to learn from what we suffer?
I remember very well when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968. Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana for the Presidential Primary, and when his plane landed, he was met by a group of African-Americans, who had not yet heard of King’s death. Though Kennedy’s advisors did not want him to face the crowd, because they feared violence, Kennedy insisted on telling them the awful truth. He told them of the pain and sorrow of his own brother’s death, who also died by violence, and then he quoted from the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus:
“Pain we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon our hearts,
until in our sleep, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
On Tuesday evening President Biden addressed the nation about the terrible loss we have suffered: 500,000 plus dead Americans from Covid-19. The President spoke of pain and suffering, topics he intimately knew and experienced through the loss of his wife and infant daughter in a car crash and decades later the death of his son, Beau from brain cancer. He told us to remember, to cherish the memories, even as those memories will bring sadness and pain. But he promised that in time there would be something else: “A smile,” he said, “will one day come before the tears.” As I listened to and later read the President’s words, I immediately thought of my wise and brilliant English teacher, who loved Aeschylus as much as he loved Sophocles. “Write this down,” he commanded the class. “Remember, for these words might help you some day.”
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Out Into the Wilderness With the Wild Beasts and the Angels
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/21/2021
Mark 1: 9-15
Immediately (a favorite word of Mark’s), Jesus was driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. Now consider how much is said in that sentence, because if Mark is anything, he is terse. He says a great deal with very few words. So, immediately after Jesus’ baptism, when he alone hears the words that he is the beloved Son with whom God is pleased, the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. He does not have a chance to bask in his newly declared identity, no time to rest or reflect on what this identity might mean for him. No, the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness, the place of temptation. This word drive suggests something strong and tough, even harsh. This is not a pleasant, unrushed and unhurried Sunday afternoon drive, which used to be popular, when I was a kid. No, we are speaking of the Spirit pushing or pulling Jesus to a place he most likely had no interest in going. Now, we might wonder if Jesus could have refused to go. After all, we can be driven by something, but that does not mean that our free will is completely overcome by that which is driving us. We can be acutely aware that we are being driven, and we can consent to that, or we can choose to fight it with everything we have, which does not necessarily mean we will be successful in our fight. Well, apparently Jesus did not fight the Spirit. He went, and remained for 40 days, where he was tempted by Satan.
40 days: that is a long time. The number 40 is a significant biblical number. When the great flood of the Old Testament took Noah’s ark and bobbed it around like a cork, that adventure lasted for 40 days, the same number of years the Jews wandered in the desert, the same number of days it took the prophet Elijah to run away from Queen Jezebel, who was out to get him for murdering her priests. So, that Jesus was out in the wilderness for 40 days and nights makes perfect sense to the story line. Now Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke, says nothing about Jesus not eating or drinking for those forty days. Apparently, Mark does not consider that important information. And while he does say that Jesus was tempted by Satan, again unlike Matthew or Luke, Mark tells us nothing about the nature of those temptations. And then we are told that he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
With the wild beasts: now what does that mean? Some biblical commentators suggest that being with the wild beasts harkens back to the prophet Isaiah, where in the new and healed creation, the lion and lamb shall lie down together, and a child can play over the hole of an asp without fearing a deadly bite. In other words, with Jesus the new creation is beginning, and the relationship between humans and the wild beasts is changing. That is one possible interpretation.
But the wild beasts could also be the temptations that Jesus is facing and must conquer. That term suggests they are not so easily overcome. The battle against them is long and fierce, and victory is not necessarily assured. What might Jesus have been facing right after his baptism, when he has just heard that he is the Beloved Son with whom God is pleased? Is there a temptation to be puffed up with that identity, overconfident that at all costs God will guarantee his victory? Was he tempted to take his identity as the beloved Son as something already granted without any effort on his part to own and embrace it?
But what if the identity given by God at his baptism was more in the form of potentiality than actuality? That would mean that Jesus would have to make decisions every day that would either grow and confirm his God given identity or shrink and distort his identity---not totally unlike us, whose natures, though blessed by God and declared as good, are also tested and tempted as we live our lives. There is no denying that some human beings grow and expand while others, tragically shrink and shrivel up. Everyone has his or her wild beasts--- ambition, addictions of all kinds, fear, anger, sloth, greed, prejudice---any or all can be the wild beasts with which people do battle, and whether they get a hold on their beasts or their beasts get a hold on them is the ongoing saga of human life.
I have just finished a book about the civil rights worker and United States representative, John Lewis, by Jon Meacham, a history professor at Vanderbilt University. And Meacham describes this scene between President Lyndon Johnson, who is trying hard to get a voting rights bill passed and, the Alabama Governor, George Wallace. The marchers had been turned back at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, where many of them were beaten to a bloody pulp. So, Johnson called Wallace and told him to come to Washington, which he did on Saturday, March 13, 1965. Johnson sat Wallace down in the Presidential Office in a chair opposite his, and did his best to convince Wallace that opposition to civil rights is not only morally wrong, but it is also just plain dumb. And Johnson said, “George, why are you doing this? You came into office trying to help the poor in your state. Now I don’t want you to think about the next election in 1968, I want you to think about 1988, when both of us will be dead. And what do you want left after you when you die? Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, George Wallace, He Built? Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh cliche soil that reads, George Wallace: He Hated. Under pressure Wallace agreed to ask for federal help in maintaining order when the march from Selma to Montgomery resumed. He later said, “Hell, I had to get out of there before Johnson got me coming out for civil rights,” which years later he did. After Wallace was shot and paralyzed from the waist down, he admitted that his opposition to civil rights had been wrong. He fought some pretty fierce wild beasts.
And so would Jesus face some pretty fierce wild beasts not only in the wilderness but also throughout his ministry. When he went against the Jewish religious leadership, he must have wrestled with the question from where his opposition arose. Was it on behalf of God and the people, or was he trying to claim power for himself? And then in the Garden, praying for the cup to pass and on the cross, when he screamed out his cry of abandonment----those too were all wild beasts he was facing.
The great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, used to say that people make a big mistake when they characterize Jesus as the perfect man. He was, insisted Luther, the most agonized and tempted man of all, tempted in his humanity and in his divinity. He suffered the temptations of the damned, said Luther, except that he conquered them. Temptation is an essential part of the Christian life, and Luther boldly insisted that to have no temptations is the worst temptation of all.
Jesus had his wild beasts with him but notice what else the text says: And the angels waited on him. Out in the wilderness with the wild beasts and the angels. I think that Mark is trying to say is that both the beasts and the angels are needed for the spiritual life to blossom and grow, and there is no blossoming and growth without struggle, without the real possibility that the struggle might be lost.
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/21/2021
Mark 1: 9-15
Immediately (a favorite word of Mark’s), Jesus was driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. Now consider how much is said in that sentence, because if Mark is anything, he is terse. He says a great deal with very few words. So, immediately after Jesus’ baptism, when he alone hears the words that he is the beloved Son with whom God is pleased, the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. He does not have a chance to bask in his newly declared identity, no time to rest or reflect on what this identity might mean for him. No, the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness, the place of temptation. This word drive suggests something strong and tough, even harsh. This is not a pleasant, unrushed and unhurried Sunday afternoon drive, which used to be popular, when I was a kid. No, we are speaking of the Spirit pushing or pulling Jesus to a place he most likely had no interest in going. Now, we might wonder if Jesus could have refused to go. After all, we can be driven by something, but that does not mean that our free will is completely overcome by that which is driving us. We can be acutely aware that we are being driven, and we can consent to that, or we can choose to fight it with everything we have, which does not necessarily mean we will be successful in our fight. Well, apparently Jesus did not fight the Spirit. He went, and remained for 40 days, where he was tempted by Satan.
40 days: that is a long time. The number 40 is a significant biblical number. When the great flood of the Old Testament took Noah’s ark and bobbed it around like a cork, that adventure lasted for 40 days, the same number of years the Jews wandered in the desert, the same number of days it took the prophet Elijah to run away from Queen Jezebel, who was out to get him for murdering her priests. So, that Jesus was out in the wilderness for 40 days and nights makes perfect sense to the story line. Now Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke, says nothing about Jesus not eating or drinking for those forty days. Apparently, Mark does not consider that important information. And while he does say that Jesus was tempted by Satan, again unlike Matthew or Luke, Mark tells us nothing about the nature of those temptations. And then we are told that he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
With the wild beasts: now what does that mean? Some biblical commentators suggest that being with the wild beasts harkens back to the prophet Isaiah, where in the new and healed creation, the lion and lamb shall lie down together, and a child can play over the hole of an asp without fearing a deadly bite. In other words, with Jesus the new creation is beginning, and the relationship between humans and the wild beasts is changing. That is one possible interpretation.
But the wild beasts could also be the temptations that Jesus is facing and must conquer. That term suggests they are not so easily overcome. The battle against them is long and fierce, and victory is not necessarily assured. What might Jesus have been facing right after his baptism, when he has just heard that he is the Beloved Son with whom God is pleased? Is there a temptation to be puffed up with that identity, overconfident that at all costs God will guarantee his victory? Was he tempted to take his identity as the beloved Son as something already granted without any effort on his part to own and embrace it?
But what if the identity given by God at his baptism was more in the form of potentiality than actuality? That would mean that Jesus would have to make decisions every day that would either grow and confirm his God given identity or shrink and distort his identity---not totally unlike us, whose natures, though blessed by God and declared as good, are also tested and tempted as we live our lives. There is no denying that some human beings grow and expand while others, tragically shrink and shrivel up. Everyone has his or her wild beasts--- ambition, addictions of all kinds, fear, anger, sloth, greed, prejudice---any or all can be the wild beasts with which people do battle, and whether they get a hold on their beasts or their beasts get a hold on them is the ongoing saga of human life.
I have just finished a book about the civil rights worker and United States representative, John Lewis, by Jon Meacham, a history professor at Vanderbilt University. And Meacham describes this scene between President Lyndon Johnson, who is trying hard to get a voting rights bill passed and, the Alabama Governor, George Wallace. The marchers had been turned back at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, where many of them were beaten to a bloody pulp. So, Johnson called Wallace and told him to come to Washington, which he did on Saturday, March 13, 1965. Johnson sat Wallace down in the Presidential Office in a chair opposite his, and did his best to convince Wallace that opposition to civil rights is not only morally wrong, but it is also just plain dumb. And Johnson said, “George, why are you doing this? You came into office trying to help the poor in your state. Now I don’t want you to think about the next election in 1968, I want you to think about 1988, when both of us will be dead. And what do you want left after you when you die? Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, George Wallace, He Built? Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh cliche soil that reads, George Wallace: He Hated. Under pressure Wallace agreed to ask for federal help in maintaining order when the march from Selma to Montgomery resumed. He later said, “Hell, I had to get out of there before Johnson got me coming out for civil rights,” which years later he did. After Wallace was shot and paralyzed from the waist down, he admitted that his opposition to civil rights had been wrong. He fought some pretty fierce wild beasts.
And so would Jesus face some pretty fierce wild beasts not only in the wilderness but also throughout his ministry. When he went against the Jewish religious leadership, he must have wrestled with the question from where his opposition arose. Was it on behalf of God and the people, or was he trying to claim power for himself? And then in the Garden, praying for the cup to pass and on the cross, when he screamed out his cry of abandonment----those too were all wild beasts he was facing.
The great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, used to say that people make a big mistake when they characterize Jesus as the perfect man. He was, insisted Luther, the most agonized and tempted man of all, tempted in his humanity and in his divinity. He suffered the temptations of the damned, said Luther, except that he conquered them. Temptation is an essential part of the Christian life, and Luther boldly insisted that to have no temptations is the worst temptation of all.
Jesus had his wild beasts with him but notice what else the text says: And the angels waited on him. Out in the wilderness with the wild beasts and the angels. I think that Mark is trying to say is that both the beasts and the angels are needed for the spiritual life to blossom and grow, and there is no blossoming and growth without struggle, without the real possibility that the struggle might be lost.
THE BLACK MARK ON THE FOREHEAD by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/17/2021
Ash Wednesday
It’s a strange act, this placement of ashes on the forehead, and yet many churches today had “drive by” ashes, where you drive your car up to a designated spot, and someone marks your forehead with an ashen cross. Ashes are an ancient symbol. In the Old Testament they are as a sign of repentance and contrition. In the book of Jonah, for example, which most of you remember as this fantastic story of a man, who ended up in the belly of a fish after he refused to follow God’s command to warn the people of Nineveh to repent--- when the people were finally warned by Jonah, and to his grave disappointment, repented, all of them, including the king, poured ashes on their bodies as a sign of their deep sorrow for sin.
Christians too used ashes in private devotion to acknowledge sinful acts, but by the time of Pope Gregory, who ruled the Church from 590 to 604, ashes were used in public worship. When a person’s sins were publicly known, and he or she was barred from receiving Holy Communion, as a sign of repentance, the person could come before the gathered faith community with ashes on his head and after expressing sorrow for his sin, would then be reconciled to the church. It was probably during Pope Gregory’s reign that ashes were also incorporated into the Ash Wednesday liturgy, which involves both an acknowledgement of sin and an awareness of mortality. By the year 1091 the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday was universal in the Western church, but not in the Eastern Church. Neither the Russian nor the Greek Orthodox believers receive ashes. Instead, there is something called Clean Monday, seven Mondays before Easter, when worship includes mutual public confession and forgiveness so that the conscience is cleaned and washed of its sins as the Lenten season begins. So, there you have a very brief history.
Some of you might recall that in the fall of 2017 I took a trip to the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Latvia is Orthodox and Lutheran; Estonia is Orthodox, and Lithuania is Catholic. In Lithuania there is a site known as the Hill of Crosses, a massive hilly area, covered by over 200,000 wooden crosses of various sizes and styles. It initially commemorated a November 1831 uprising against Russian dominance, when many Lithuanians were killed. Since often the family could not retrieve the body, a cross was placed on the hill as a memorial to the loved one as well as to the resistance. In time, however, crosses were placed in memory of all kinds of people, some of them resisters to later Soviet aggression and rule.
While visiting the site, my husband and I ran into a young man of 27, who told us he worked for a public television station. When he learned we were Americans, he effusively thanked us for NATO, for without it, he was confident the Soviet Union would reclaim the Baltic states. And then he told us another story. His grandmother was born in 1936, four years before the Soviet Union completely overran the Baltic States. For centuries there had been political tension between the Baltic states and Russia, but with Stalin’s murderous grip, all opposition was destroyed.
“My grandmother,” he said, “grew up under Soviet rule. She knew nothing else, and she claims she has no memories of her parents ever discussing politics.” Her father was a government worker, or so she thought. Now Lithuania was and is a Catholic country, and though the Soviet Union banned religion, some Catholic priests resisted, holding masses in churches as well as embracing an alternative political narrative.
One night, when his grandmother was about 7, she woke up with her father bending over her, lightly touching her forehead as he made some kind of sign. She did not let on that she was awake, because she had this sense that he was doing something very serious and important. And indeed, after that night, she often would be awakened by her father, making what she came to learn was the sign of the cross on her forehead. She never once let on she knew what he was doing. She always pretended to be asleep.
And then when she was 15, she awoke one morning to discover that her forehead was marked with ashes in the shape of a cross. Shocked, she was going to wash it off, but instead went into another room to find her mother. And there she was with a black cross on her forehead and the same for her younger brother and sister---all marked with black crosses of ash. Looking at her mother, she immediately knew something was terribly wrong. “Your father is gone,” she said, uttered with only the smallest emotion in her voice. “He was arrested last night, and we don’t know where he is, or if he will ever return.” And it was then that she learned her father was really an ordained Catholic priest, and he had been arrested for seditious acts. His grandmother said she immediately washed the ashen cross off her face, but her mother left hers on as well as her sister and brother.
And then her mother explained that the previous night had been Ash Wednesday, which was why her father had placed the sign of the cross on her forehead. He had returned from the church late at night after a service, and he apparently had a premonition that he would be arrested. The family never saw him again, and so they had a cross made in his memory, erected on the Hill of Crosses. “Would you like to see it?” the young man asked us. And when we said we would, he showed us this lovely wooden cross, about two feet high, etched with all kinds of Christian symbols: a vine of grapes, a loaf of bread, a chalice, a sheep, a cross and a star, so many beautiful carefully carved symbols. And then the words in Lithuanian: In Christ sin and death are conquered.
“Neither my grandmother nor my mother is a believer”, he told us. “They never had a chance to become Christians. After all, it was dangerous to believe. So, as you might imagine, I was not raised to believe either. But about five years ago, I became very curious about Christianity. I mean if it meant that much to my great grandfather, who was willing to lose his life for the practice of his faith, I felt I owed it to him to learn something of Christian beliefs and practices. And so, I am learning. In fact, I am working on a television program about Christianity, which will be shown sometime next year.” So, I asked him, “Do you consider yourself a Christian?” “Not yet,” he answered, “but who knows where the path might take me.”
It was then that I told him, I am an ordained clergywoman, and he was completely blown away by, convinced that he was led to for the purpose of sharing this story. “There are many people like my great grandfather,” he insisted, “whose story should be remembered and passed on. And I think that is why he placed the ashes on my grandmother’s forehead. He had apparently not done it any other Ash Wednesday, but he must have known something was about to befall him, and he wanted his children to know who he really was, and so he left them with a sign, a black mark on their foreheads, which to this day, though my grandmother is not a believer, still she is haunted by the mysterious truth of her father’s life.”
Jesus warned against practicing piety, so that others see it and are impressed by the devotion it suggests. We live in a time and place, where piety, even if displayed, is often ignored. But the Lithuanian, whose story I learned, practiced his piety by celebrating mass, even as he also tried to placate Soviet officials. In the end his faith, allied, I suspect with his politics, cost him his life, because he believed that worshiping God meant that no human ruler or institution could claim his final loyalty. Only God is God, and nothing finite can ever make that audacious claim.
Ash Wednesday
It’s a strange act, this placement of ashes on the forehead, and yet many churches today had “drive by” ashes, where you drive your car up to a designated spot, and someone marks your forehead with an ashen cross. Ashes are an ancient symbol. In the Old Testament they are as a sign of repentance and contrition. In the book of Jonah, for example, which most of you remember as this fantastic story of a man, who ended up in the belly of a fish after he refused to follow God’s command to warn the people of Nineveh to repent--- when the people were finally warned by Jonah, and to his grave disappointment, repented, all of them, including the king, poured ashes on their bodies as a sign of their deep sorrow for sin.
Christians too used ashes in private devotion to acknowledge sinful acts, but by the time of Pope Gregory, who ruled the Church from 590 to 604, ashes were used in public worship. When a person’s sins were publicly known, and he or she was barred from receiving Holy Communion, as a sign of repentance, the person could come before the gathered faith community with ashes on his head and after expressing sorrow for his sin, would then be reconciled to the church. It was probably during Pope Gregory’s reign that ashes were also incorporated into the Ash Wednesday liturgy, which involves both an acknowledgement of sin and an awareness of mortality. By the year 1091 the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday was universal in the Western church, but not in the Eastern Church. Neither the Russian nor the Greek Orthodox believers receive ashes. Instead, there is something called Clean Monday, seven Mondays before Easter, when worship includes mutual public confession and forgiveness so that the conscience is cleaned and washed of its sins as the Lenten season begins. So, there you have a very brief history.
Some of you might recall that in the fall of 2017 I took a trip to the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Latvia is Orthodox and Lutheran; Estonia is Orthodox, and Lithuania is Catholic. In Lithuania there is a site known as the Hill of Crosses, a massive hilly area, covered by over 200,000 wooden crosses of various sizes and styles. It initially commemorated a November 1831 uprising against Russian dominance, when many Lithuanians were killed. Since often the family could not retrieve the body, a cross was placed on the hill as a memorial to the loved one as well as to the resistance. In time, however, crosses were placed in memory of all kinds of people, some of them resisters to later Soviet aggression and rule.
While visiting the site, my husband and I ran into a young man of 27, who told us he worked for a public television station. When he learned we were Americans, he effusively thanked us for NATO, for without it, he was confident the Soviet Union would reclaim the Baltic states. And then he told us another story. His grandmother was born in 1936, four years before the Soviet Union completely overran the Baltic States. For centuries there had been political tension between the Baltic states and Russia, but with Stalin’s murderous grip, all opposition was destroyed.
“My grandmother,” he said, “grew up under Soviet rule. She knew nothing else, and she claims she has no memories of her parents ever discussing politics.” Her father was a government worker, or so she thought. Now Lithuania was and is a Catholic country, and though the Soviet Union banned religion, some Catholic priests resisted, holding masses in churches as well as embracing an alternative political narrative.
One night, when his grandmother was about 7, she woke up with her father bending over her, lightly touching her forehead as he made some kind of sign. She did not let on that she was awake, because she had this sense that he was doing something very serious and important. And indeed, after that night, she often would be awakened by her father, making what she came to learn was the sign of the cross on her forehead. She never once let on she knew what he was doing. She always pretended to be asleep.
And then when she was 15, she awoke one morning to discover that her forehead was marked with ashes in the shape of a cross. Shocked, she was going to wash it off, but instead went into another room to find her mother. And there she was with a black cross on her forehead and the same for her younger brother and sister---all marked with black crosses of ash. Looking at her mother, she immediately knew something was terribly wrong. “Your father is gone,” she said, uttered with only the smallest emotion in her voice. “He was arrested last night, and we don’t know where he is, or if he will ever return.” And it was then that she learned her father was really an ordained Catholic priest, and he had been arrested for seditious acts. His grandmother said she immediately washed the ashen cross off her face, but her mother left hers on as well as her sister and brother.
And then her mother explained that the previous night had been Ash Wednesday, which was why her father had placed the sign of the cross on her forehead. He had returned from the church late at night after a service, and he apparently had a premonition that he would be arrested. The family never saw him again, and so they had a cross made in his memory, erected on the Hill of Crosses. “Would you like to see it?” the young man asked us. And when we said we would, he showed us this lovely wooden cross, about two feet high, etched with all kinds of Christian symbols: a vine of grapes, a loaf of bread, a chalice, a sheep, a cross and a star, so many beautiful carefully carved symbols. And then the words in Lithuanian: In Christ sin and death are conquered.
“Neither my grandmother nor my mother is a believer”, he told us. “They never had a chance to become Christians. After all, it was dangerous to believe. So, as you might imagine, I was not raised to believe either. But about five years ago, I became very curious about Christianity. I mean if it meant that much to my great grandfather, who was willing to lose his life for the practice of his faith, I felt I owed it to him to learn something of Christian beliefs and practices. And so, I am learning. In fact, I am working on a television program about Christianity, which will be shown sometime next year.” So, I asked him, “Do you consider yourself a Christian?” “Not yet,” he answered, “but who knows where the path might take me.”
It was then that I told him, I am an ordained clergywoman, and he was completely blown away by, convinced that he was led to for the purpose of sharing this story. “There are many people like my great grandfather,” he insisted, “whose story should be remembered and passed on. And I think that is why he placed the ashes on my grandmother’s forehead. He had apparently not done it any other Ash Wednesday, but he must have known something was about to befall him, and he wanted his children to know who he really was, and so he left them with a sign, a black mark on their foreheads, which to this day, though my grandmother is not a believer, still she is haunted by the mysterious truth of her father’s life.”
Jesus warned against practicing piety, so that others see it and are impressed by the devotion it suggests. We live in a time and place, where piety, even if displayed, is often ignored. But the Lithuanian, whose story I learned, practiced his piety by celebrating mass, even as he also tried to placate Soviet officials. In the end his faith, allied, I suspect with his politics, cost him his life, because he believed that worshiping God meant that no human ruler or institution could claim his final loyalty. Only God is God, and nothing finite can ever make that audacious claim.
February 17, 2021
Dear Friends,
Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, which counts forty days to Easter, excluding Sundays. Sundays are not officially included in Lent, since Sunday is God’s Day, and joyful thanksgiving is the order of the day rather than a dour penitential style.
Some of you likely grew up in non-liturgical traditions, such as Congregational, Presbyterian, or Baptist, where Lent was viewed as something the Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians practiced. I grew up Presbyterian, and Lent was little more than a 40-day period proceeding Easter, minus any particular practices of guilt and contrition. There were no Ash Wednesday services in any of the Presbyterian Churches we attended, and the idea that Reformed Protestants would have ashes placed on their foreheads was simply heresy. And yet with the coming of the ecumenical movement in the 60’s and beyond, Christian churches have decided to come together in following the same liturgical calendar.
Ashes do have a history in the Old Testament, where we can read of people putting ashes on their heads and faces in an act of contrition and sorrow for sin. In the Book of Jonah, the people of Ninevah, who were Assyrians, considered the enemies of Jews, wore sackcloth and poured ashes on their bodies to indicate their repentance. Jonah was very angry that they repented. He was hoping that God would give them the divine slap and punish them out of existence. “This is why I did not want to go to Ninevah,” he complained to God. “I know you are a merciful God and would repent of your anger!” And so, Jonah pouted.
Christians too used ashes to indicate their repentance. Sometimes ashes were used in private acts of devotion, but by the fifth century, it seems that ashes became a part of public worship. Persons repenting of their sin and wishing to be reconciled to the Church and receive the sacrament of Holy Communion would put ashes on their heads and publicly confess and ask for forgiveness. Under Pope Gregory, who ruled from 590 to 604, the liturgy for Ash Wednesday used ashes as part of its ritual. Ashes not only were a recognition of sin, but also an acknowledgment of mortality. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Though ashes did invite a recognition of sin and death, Lent was also a season of preparation for the joyful news of Easter. Newly converted persons were baptized on Easter, and the forty days leading up to Easter (minus Sundays) were a time of study and prayer. Newly converted persons were invited to examine their lives in view of the new relationship they would have with God through Christ. They were encouraged to reflect on how they could grow in faith, hope and love.
As the early Church gave way to the medieval Church, rigorous self-examination became reduced to a mandate to punish oneself for sin. This led to the idea that Lent demanded that something be given up for Lent, something much desired and enjoyed. My Roman Catholic friends would often give up chocolate or pizza, and I never could understand how that had anything at all to do with God. Why would one’s relationship with God be strengthened by denying oneself chocolate?
In time giving up something was not so important as taking on something. This became much more popular as the 60’s led to the reformation of the Roman Catholic Church through Vatican ll. Volunteering to work in the local soup kitchen, or helping the elderly neighbor down the street, can become avenues of grace, as we work with God to help build up the beloved community. Faith should never be reduced to some private inner feeling, assuring us of God’s love and forgiveness, but should also invite us to do acts of justice, mercy and compassion that help to heal the brokenness of the world.
As we enter into the mystery of this season, let us not wallow in guilt, but rather let us enter into a season of honesty, discipline and hope that prepare us to embrace the extravagant gift of the new creation that meets us in Easter, when we joyfully proclaim, “Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed!”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, which counts forty days to Easter, excluding Sundays. Sundays are not officially included in Lent, since Sunday is God’s Day, and joyful thanksgiving is the order of the day rather than a dour penitential style.
Some of you likely grew up in non-liturgical traditions, such as Congregational, Presbyterian, or Baptist, where Lent was viewed as something the Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians practiced. I grew up Presbyterian, and Lent was little more than a 40-day period proceeding Easter, minus any particular practices of guilt and contrition. There were no Ash Wednesday services in any of the Presbyterian Churches we attended, and the idea that Reformed Protestants would have ashes placed on their foreheads was simply heresy. And yet with the coming of the ecumenical movement in the 60’s and beyond, Christian churches have decided to come together in following the same liturgical calendar.
Ashes do have a history in the Old Testament, where we can read of people putting ashes on their heads and faces in an act of contrition and sorrow for sin. In the Book of Jonah, the people of Ninevah, who were Assyrians, considered the enemies of Jews, wore sackcloth and poured ashes on their bodies to indicate their repentance. Jonah was very angry that they repented. He was hoping that God would give them the divine slap and punish them out of existence. “This is why I did not want to go to Ninevah,” he complained to God. “I know you are a merciful God and would repent of your anger!” And so, Jonah pouted.
Christians too used ashes to indicate their repentance. Sometimes ashes were used in private acts of devotion, but by the fifth century, it seems that ashes became a part of public worship. Persons repenting of their sin and wishing to be reconciled to the Church and receive the sacrament of Holy Communion would put ashes on their heads and publicly confess and ask for forgiveness. Under Pope Gregory, who ruled from 590 to 604, the liturgy for Ash Wednesday used ashes as part of its ritual. Ashes not only were a recognition of sin, but also an acknowledgment of mortality. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Though ashes did invite a recognition of sin and death, Lent was also a season of preparation for the joyful news of Easter. Newly converted persons were baptized on Easter, and the forty days leading up to Easter (minus Sundays) were a time of study and prayer. Newly converted persons were invited to examine their lives in view of the new relationship they would have with God through Christ. They were encouraged to reflect on how they could grow in faith, hope and love.
As the early Church gave way to the medieval Church, rigorous self-examination became reduced to a mandate to punish oneself for sin. This led to the idea that Lent demanded that something be given up for Lent, something much desired and enjoyed. My Roman Catholic friends would often give up chocolate or pizza, and I never could understand how that had anything at all to do with God. Why would one’s relationship with God be strengthened by denying oneself chocolate?
In time giving up something was not so important as taking on something. This became much more popular as the 60’s led to the reformation of the Roman Catholic Church through Vatican ll. Volunteering to work in the local soup kitchen, or helping the elderly neighbor down the street, can become avenues of grace, as we work with God to help build up the beloved community. Faith should never be reduced to some private inner feeling, assuring us of God’s love and forgiveness, but should also invite us to do acts of justice, mercy and compassion that help to heal the brokenness of the world.
As we enter into the mystery of this season, let us not wallow in guilt, but rather let us enter into a season of honesty, discipline and hope that prepare us to embrace the extravagant gift of the new creation that meets us in Easter, when we joyfully proclaim, “Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed!”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WITH PERFECT CLARITY by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/14/2021
Mark 9: 2-9
Isn’t it a great feeling when you know or understand something with perfect clarity? Can you recall such a time, when you really grasped an idea or concept with a clarity that was well, uplifting? Though math was never my favorite subject---English and history were my forte, I did love plane geometry. I loved doing all those proofs, because I understood with perfect clarity how to use the propositions and axions. And that clear understanding was so marvelously empowering.
Let’s face it, in life rarely do we understand anything with perfect clarity. Our world and our lives are filled to the brim with ambiguity. And when ethical questions enter, we struggle mightily with how to decide the right path for us. Over the 39 years of ordination, I have listened to people struggle with all kinds of difficult decisions. Should I call it quits on my marriage, or should I try counseling yet another time? Should I terminate this unwanted pregnancy, when my two children are now 10 and 12, and I really do not want to start all over again? Should I leave my practice as a lawyer, which is greatly financially rewarding for my family to pursue what I really want to do: teach high school English in the hope of inspiring kids to love literature as much as I do? Such questions do not admit of easy answers, because there are so many competing claims and interests that need to be considered. No wonder clarity often escapes us.
And religious questions rarely issue in clear answers. Someone says, “I come to church faithfully, but the truth is, I’m not sure I believe in God. I mean there is no proof, and I have many more questions than answers. Why does God hide among the shadows?” Or, “I believe in God, but Jesus, to me, is a good and inspiring man. That’s all, so what kind of a Christian am I?” Or “How can I possibly believe in God after what I prayed for more than anything else in my life was not granted? My six year old son died, and I would rather not believe in God than feel that God is my enemy, which is how I have been feeling lately.” Those are all actual questions and struggles, all deep and visceral feelings, behind deep questions, unyielding to clarity. And so, we often live in a shadowed world, where clarity, both a wish and a hope, is rarely a reality.
And clarity was not a reality for Jesus’ disciples. Mark’s gospel is the one most critical of the disciples, painting them as dense, foolish and even cowardly. They understand almost nothing, no matter how many times Jesus tries to explain or show them the way. They just don’t get it, and we might well wonder why Jesus did not choose a more discerning group of followers.
Well, today’s lesson is very instructive, because it shows who Jesus is in stark clarity. Taking Peter, James and John up a mountain, Jesus is suddenly transfigured before their eyes. Now as soon as you hear the word mountain, you should think that something unusual is about to happen, something revelatory. Moses ascended a mountain, where he received the 10 Commandments, and he too was clothed in shining whiteness. So here we have Jesus, clothed in whiteness, in company with Moses and Elijah, two Old Testament men of God, who shared a deep intimacy with God and received prophetic messages. Both Moses and Elijah experienced a clarity of vision and purpose that most human beings lack, though it is also true that this clarity was not with them all the time. So, we probably should not be surprised that Jesus would be in company with these two Old Testament men.
But something more than company happens here: the voice of God speaks and declares, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” At Jesus’ baptism there was also God’s voice, claiming him as the beloved son, but no one besides Jesus heard that voice, not even John the Baptist. This time, James, John and Peter all heard the voice and saw the vision of Jesus transfigured. But while they were given clarity of vision, they had no idea what to do with it, except build three tents or booths to house these “divine” beings---as if you can contain the power and mystery of the divine. But containing and controlling are exactly what they wanted to do. It is, as the Book of Hebrews says, a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” No wonder they were afraid.
And as quickly as it began, it was over. Elijah and Moses left, and there Jesus was, apparently now in his ordinary clothing. Who Jesus was and is---the beloved Son--- was made perfectly clear to the three disciples, but they still did not know what do with that knowledge and understanding. Clarity of vision does not always guarantee clarity of action. But when they do come together, people can act in ways we would never expect or predict.
This happened not too long ago with a colleague of mine. She and I were not close, but I knew her and appreciated her ministry. Three or four years ago her husband and she moved to CA, where their two adult sons lived with their families. They moved into a multi level care center, an independent home and then if needed, assisted living and finally nursing care. A few years ago, Kate was diagnosed with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. I think she was probably in her mid 70’s at the time, and she resolutely decided that at the appropriate time she would starve herself to death while she was still in full possession of her mind. Her husband was initially adamantly opposed, but she was so clear in her commitment, that she finally brought him around. She spoke to the social workers, the psychologists at their place of residence, also to psychiatrists, and all affirmed that she knew exactly what she was doing and why. None of them thought she was clinically depressed, but she was realistic of what the end point of her disease would mean, and she was not going there. She could not have been clearer. And so, she checked herself into the nursing home part of the facility, where her husband could also be with her. And she starved herself, at first taking water, but when it became evident that this was prolonging her life, she stopped that as well. It took her about 8 weeks to finally die.
Now I never spoke to her during this ordeal, but other people whom I know, did, and they affirmed that she resolutely determined that this was the correct path forward. She had no doubts at all. Not everyone agreed with her choice, but all agreed that she was clear about her decision and her conviction that God was with her in her choice.
Kate was a person of deep faith, and also a person of deep questions. She was accustomed to living in a shadowed world of ambiguities and doubts, where her mind often questioned what others might so easily take for granted. Over the course of her life and ministry, she had many arguments with God, sometimes on behalf of other people. While she had no fear of death, she was afraid of living a totally dependent life, devoid of the intelligence, which was one of God’s great gifts to her. While she could tolerate doubt and ambiguity, she would not tolerate a life of radical dependency, and she actively chose to end her life with what she firmly believed was God’s blessing. Such clarity of vision and action was not something most of her friends would have expected. And yet, there it was.
Life is like that sometimes. While we might struggle throughout our lives with unresolved questions of faith and ethics, unsure of the right path, there can be these unexpected moments---some would dare to call them moments of grace--- when the light breaks through and there is this clarity--- which we had no right to demand or even expect. Oh, we can question it, if we want, or try to deny it as well, but there it is, and it can wrap itself around our lives in familiar intimacy until it claims our hearts and minds and moves us toward the future, whatever it may be.
James, Peter and John witnessed something they neither understood nor expected, and though they did not know what to do with at the time, nonetheless that clarity of witness would move them ahead to a future they would never have anticipated. Jesus’ disciples did not know what lay ahead any more than we do. And even if we, like them, sometimes find ourselves in a fog of confusion and ambiguity, we never know when or even if the fog will lift and we suddenly have a clarity we never expected, as my colleague, Kate, did. None of us can predict the kinds of turns life will take, just as we cannot predict how God will be with us as we move toward a future we did not anticipate. But at least let us hopefully anticipate that God will be with us, no matter the circumstances, no matter the time.
Mark 9: 2-9
Isn’t it a great feeling when you know or understand something with perfect clarity? Can you recall such a time, when you really grasped an idea or concept with a clarity that was well, uplifting? Though math was never my favorite subject---English and history were my forte, I did love plane geometry. I loved doing all those proofs, because I understood with perfect clarity how to use the propositions and axions. And that clear understanding was so marvelously empowering.
Let’s face it, in life rarely do we understand anything with perfect clarity. Our world and our lives are filled to the brim with ambiguity. And when ethical questions enter, we struggle mightily with how to decide the right path for us. Over the 39 years of ordination, I have listened to people struggle with all kinds of difficult decisions. Should I call it quits on my marriage, or should I try counseling yet another time? Should I terminate this unwanted pregnancy, when my two children are now 10 and 12, and I really do not want to start all over again? Should I leave my practice as a lawyer, which is greatly financially rewarding for my family to pursue what I really want to do: teach high school English in the hope of inspiring kids to love literature as much as I do? Such questions do not admit of easy answers, because there are so many competing claims and interests that need to be considered. No wonder clarity often escapes us.
And religious questions rarely issue in clear answers. Someone says, “I come to church faithfully, but the truth is, I’m not sure I believe in God. I mean there is no proof, and I have many more questions than answers. Why does God hide among the shadows?” Or, “I believe in God, but Jesus, to me, is a good and inspiring man. That’s all, so what kind of a Christian am I?” Or “How can I possibly believe in God after what I prayed for more than anything else in my life was not granted? My six year old son died, and I would rather not believe in God than feel that God is my enemy, which is how I have been feeling lately.” Those are all actual questions and struggles, all deep and visceral feelings, behind deep questions, unyielding to clarity. And so, we often live in a shadowed world, where clarity, both a wish and a hope, is rarely a reality.
And clarity was not a reality for Jesus’ disciples. Mark’s gospel is the one most critical of the disciples, painting them as dense, foolish and even cowardly. They understand almost nothing, no matter how many times Jesus tries to explain or show them the way. They just don’t get it, and we might well wonder why Jesus did not choose a more discerning group of followers.
Well, today’s lesson is very instructive, because it shows who Jesus is in stark clarity. Taking Peter, James and John up a mountain, Jesus is suddenly transfigured before their eyes. Now as soon as you hear the word mountain, you should think that something unusual is about to happen, something revelatory. Moses ascended a mountain, where he received the 10 Commandments, and he too was clothed in shining whiteness. So here we have Jesus, clothed in whiteness, in company with Moses and Elijah, two Old Testament men of God, who shared a deep intimacy with God and received prophetic messages. Both Moses and Elijah experienced a clarity of vision and purpose that most human beings lack, though it is also true that this clarity was not with them all the time. So, we probably should not be surprised that Jesus would be in company with these two Old Testament men.
But something more than company happens here: the voice of God speaks and declares, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” At Jesus’ baptism there was also God’s voice, claiming him as the beloved son, but no one besides Jesus heard that voice, not even John the Baptist. This time, James, John and Peter all heard the voice and saw the vision of Jesus transfigured. But while they were given clarity of vision, they had no idea what to do with it, except build three tents or booths to house these “divine” beings---as if you can contain the power and mystery of the divine. But containing and controlling are exactly what they wanted to do. It is, as the Book of Hebrews says, a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” No wonder they were afraid.
And as quickly as it began, it was over. Elijah and Moses left, and there Jesus was, apparently now in his ordinary clothing. Who Jesus was and is---the beloved Son--- was made perfectly clear to the three disciples, but they still did not know what do with that knowledge and understanding. Clarity of vision does not always guarantee clarity of action. But when they do come together, people can act in ways we would never expect or predict.
This happened not too long ago with a colleague of mine. She and I were not close, but I knew her and appreciated her ministry. Three or four years ago her husband and she moved to CA, where their two adult sons lived with their families. They moved into a multi level care center, an independent home and then if needed, assisted living and finally nursing care. A few years ago, Kate was diagnosed with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. I think she was probably in her mid 70’s at the time, and she resolutely decided that at the appropriate time she would starve herself to death while she was still in full possession of her mind. Her husband was initially adamantly opposed, but she was so clear in her commitment, that she finally brought him around. She spoke to the social workers, the psychologists at their place of residence, also to psychiatrists, and all affirmed that she knew exactly what she was doing and why. None of them thought she was clinically depressed, but she was realistic of what the end point of her disease would mean, and she was not going there. She could not have been clearer. And so, she checked herself into the nursing home part of the facility, where her husband could also be with her. And she starved herself, at first taking water, but when it became evident that this was prolonging her life, she stopped that as well. It took her about 8 weeks to finally die.
Now I never spoke to her during this ordeal, but other people whom I know, did, and they affirmed that she resolutely determined that this was the correct path forward. She had no doubts at all. Not everyone agreed with her choice, but all agreed that she was clear about her decision and her conviction that God was with her in her choice.
Kate was a person of deep faith, and also a person of deep questions. She was accustomed to living in a shadowed world of ambiguities and doubts, where her mind often questioned what others might so easily take for granted. Over the course of her life and ministry, she had many arguments with God, sometimes on behalf of other people. While she had no fear of death, she was afraid of living a totally dependent life, devoid of the intelligence, which was one of God’s great gifts to her. While she could tolerate doubt and ambiguity, she would not tolerate a life of radical dependency, and she actively chose to end her life with what she firmly believed was God’s blessing. Such clarity of vision and action was not something most of her friends would have expected. And yet, there it was.
Life is like that sometimes. While we might struggle throughout our lives with unresolved questions of faith and ethics, unsure of the right path, there can be these unexpected moments---some would dare to call them moments of grace--- when the light breaks through and there is this clarity--- which we had no right to demand or even expect. Oh, we can question it, if we want, or try to deny it as well, but there it is, and it can wrap itself around our lives in familiar intimacy until it claims our hearts and minds and moves us toward the future, whatever it may be.
James, Peter and John witnessed something they neither understood nor expected, and though they did not know what to do with at the time, nonetheless that clarity of witness would move them ahead to a future they would never have anticipated. Jesus’ disciples did not know what lay ahead any more than we do. And even if we, like them, sometimes find ourselves in a fog of confusion and ambiguity, we never know when or even if the fog will lift and we suddenly have a clarity we never expected, as my colleague, Kate, did. None of us can predict the kinds of turns life will take, just as we cannot predict how God will be with us as we move toward a future we did not anticipate. But at least let us hopefully anticipate that God will be with us, no matter the circumstances, no matter the time.
February 12, 2021
Dear Friends,
February is Black History Month, a time we are reminded of all the many contributions made by Black Americans. But how did such a time come to be? I personally cannot recall that I was even aware of Black History Month in either high school or college, so it was sometime in the mid or latter 70’s that I began to pay attention. And yet the celebration of Black History has been around for quite a while.
Carter G. Woodson is known as the “father of Black History,” and his home in Washington D.C. is preserved as the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site. Woodson was born in 1875, the fourth of nine children, to parents who had been enslaved. He grew up poor, working in the fields and the coal mines of West Virginia, but he always believed that education was the key to not only success but also freedom from poverty, and so, he began his formal education at the age of 20. He graduated from high school two years later, and then earned a bachelor’s degree in literature. He taught in public schools for ever 15 years, earning another BA and later a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. In 1912 he completed a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.
Dr. Woodson and a minister by the name of Jesse Moorland founded The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, which sponsored a Negro History Week during the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson purchased a row house in Washington D.C. in 1922, and this became the center for study of Black History. In the decades that followed Black History became increasingly popular, but it was really the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s that brought Black History to the attention of many more Americans. By the late 60’s many colleges were beginning to offer courses on the subject, and apparently Black faculty and students at Kent State in Ohio became particularly strong advocates for Black History.
1976 was a big birthday celebration for the United States, and Woodson’s organization in Washington, D.C. advocated for a full month’s celebration of Black History. President Gerald Ford in 1976 officially recognized February as Black History Month, and every President since has affirmed that designation. All across the country schools began to make a concerted effort to teach about the important contributions made by Black Americans, and this effort continues to this day.
So, it was quite an unexpected event when some parents in North Ogden, Utah, home to the Maria Montessori Academy, a public charter school, wanted their children to opt out of the curriculum on Black History. North Ogden is 94% White, and there are only three African American students in the school. But for the headmaster, Micah Hirokawa, the number of Black students in the school was definitely NOT the point. Deeply saddened by the request, he knew something of racism’s pain. His own great grandparents had been sent to an internment camp during World War II for the “crime” of being Japanese. Yet he reluctantly agreed to send a form for parents to fill out, allowing them to remove their children from any activities or learning dealing with Black History. When word of this option spread, however, there was a public outcry from all kinds of people, including local political leaders, parents and teachers. In fact, some were outraged that people were even given the option to remove their children from the learning experience. The school immediately reversed its decision, and parents willingly came forward to discuss their concerns and reasons for the decision they made. There is no word on many people this involved or what exactly the concerns were, but the school claims the issues have been resolved, and no children will out of the program.
North Ogden, Utah is not the only site for such controversy. As schools try to teach a fuller story of American history and the ways the country has failed to live up to its creed of equality and freedom, some people have taken offense. The 1619 Project, published by The New York Times and slated to be used as a basis for curriculum, has come under some pretty heavy fire with some historians of note and reputation, decrying what they claim are inaccuracies. The story of slavery needs to be told, they say, but rigorous standards of accuracy should be upheld. I have no idea how or if that particular curriculum is flawed, but a great deal of ink is being spilled over the question.
We all understand that history is far more than facts, but we are learning just how controversial facts can be. Most of us, until recently, have never heard of “alternative facts,” but we are now living in a universe of such alternatives. I certainly recall high school teachers and college professors talking about history as interpretation, but it never occurred to me that we would spend so much time arguing over what the basic facts are. While truth uses and needs facts, truth is never exhausted by facts, and it can never abide by lies and misinformation. We all have a responsibility to love the truth and serve the truth, even as we also have different opinions and beliefs about a variety of subjects, including religious and ethical issues. We inhabit a marvelously complex world, where knowledge is constantly expanding, leading to different perspectives and understandings. The least we can do is be suspicious of any attempts to reduce the marvelous complexity of truth to simplistic slogans and ideologies. The love of truth demands nothing less.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
February is Black History Month, a time we are reminded of all the many contributions made by Black Americans. But how did such a time come to be? I personally cannot recall that I was even aware of Black History Month in either high school or college, so it was sometime in the mid or latter 70’s that I began to pay attention. And yet the celebration of Black History has been around for quite a while.
Carter G. Woodson is known as the “father of Black History,” and his home in Washington D.C. is preserved as the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site. Woodson was born in 1875, the fourth of nine children, to parents who had been enslaved. He grew up poor, working in the fields and the coal mines of West Virginia, but he always believed that education was the key to not only success but also freedom from poverty, and so, he began his formal education at the age of 20. He graduated from high school two years later, and then earned a bachelor’s degree in literature. He taught in public schools for ever 15 years, earning another BA and later a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. In 1912 he completed a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.
Dr. Woodson and a minister by the name of Jesse Moorland founded The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, which sponsored a Negro History Week during the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson purchased a row house in Washington D.C. in 1922, and this became the center for study of Black History. In the decades that followed Black History became increasingly popular, but it was really the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s that brought Black History to the attention of many more Americans. By the late 60’s many colleges were beginning to offer courses on the subject, and apparently Black faculty and students at Kent State in Ohio became particularly strong advocates for Black History.
1976 was a big birthday celebration for the United States, and Woodson’s organization in Washington, D.C. advocated for a full month’s celebration of Black History. President Gerald Ford in 1976 officially recognized February as Black History Month, and every President since has affirmed that designation. All across the country schools began to make a concerted effort to teach about the important contributions made by Black Americans, and this effort continues to this day.
So, it was quite an unexpected event when some parents in North Ogden, Utah, home to the Maria Montessori Academy, a public charter school, wanted their children to opt out of the curriculum on Black History. North Ogden is 94% White, and there are only three African American students in the school. But for the headmaster, Micah Hirokawa, the number of Black students in the school was definitely NOT the point. Deeply saddened by the request, he knew something of racism’s pain. His own great grandparents had been sent to an internment camp during World War II for the “crime” of being Japanese. Yet he reluctantly agreed to send a form for parents to fill out, allowing them to remove their children from any activities or learning dealing with Black History. When word of this option spread, however, there was a public outcry from all kinds of people, including local political leaders, parents and teachers. In fact, some were outraged that people were even given the option to remove their children from the learning experience. The school immediately reversed its decision, and parents willingly came forward to discuss their concerns and reasons for the decision they made. There is no word on many people this involved or what exactly the concerns were, but the school claims the issues have been resolved, and no children will out of the program.
North Ogden, Utah is not the only site for such controversy. As schools try to teach a fuller story of American history and the ways the country has failed to live up to its creed of equality and freedom, some people have taken offense. The 1619 Project, published by The New York Times and slated to be used as a basis for curriculum, has come under some pretty heavy fire with some historians of note and reputation, decrying what they claim are inaccuracies. The story of slavery needs to be told, they say, but rigorous standards of accuracy should be upheld. I have no idea how or if that particular curriculum is flawed, but a great deal of ink is being spilled over the question.
We all understand that history is far more than facts, but we are learning just how controversial facts can be. Most of us, until recently, have never heard of “alternative facts,” but we are now living in a universe of such alternatives. I certainly recall high school teachers and college professors talking about history as interpretation, but it never occurred to me that we would spend so much time arguing over what the basic facts are. While truth uses and needs facts, truth is never exhausted by facts, and it can never abide by lies and misinformation. We all have a responsibility to love the truth and serve the truth, even as we also have different opinions and beliefs about a variety of subjects, including religious and ethical issues. We inhabit a marvelously complex world, where knowledge is constantly expanding, leading to different perspectives and understandings. The least we can do is be suspicious of any attempts to reduce the marvelous complexity of truth to simplistic slogans and ideologies. The love of truth demands nothing less.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHEN YOU CAN'T STAY AT HOME by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 2/7/2021
Isaiah 40: 21-31
Mark 1: 29-39
The man’s home was almost burned to the ground, because of an electrical fire. Staring it the charred remains, he told his best friend, he now understood what Thomas Woolf meant in his famous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, when he wrote: “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I can see it once.” Jim had lived in this particular house for over 30 years, so he had quite literally seen it more than one thousand times, but staring at its charcoaled remains, he said he now really saw it for the first time, because he understood exactly what he had lost.
Home: to lose a home is to lose part of oneself. People not only love their homes, but they also love the things in them, because those things tell stories about where they have been and what they have done. My son, Aaron, who has a PhD in infectious disease and now works for the New York City Health Department, was a history major in college. In his old room are bookshelves filled with his undergraduate books on history, English and philosophy. When I recently asked him to go through them and get rid of the ones he longer is interested in, he said, “I am not so interested in any of them now, but I was at one time, and I should remember that. Getting rid of those books would be like getting rid of a part of me.”
In these days of the pandemic, we have been hearing much about the threatened loss of home, though evictions and foreclosures have been suspended for a while. While some literally fear homelessness, others mourn the loss of a home they have truly made their own. Oh, I am not going to be homeless, one woman said, but I don’t think I will ever feel about another home the way I feel about this one.
Home: it is an important theme in human life, and because the bible is about real life, it has something important to say about home. Consider Isaiah, written in a time of exile, a time of deep loss and mourning. The Jews had lost what had been for them the central symbol of their faith---the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians along with much of the city in 587 B.C., when the elites and the skilled were carried off into captivity in Babylon. They were not treated as slaves. They could have homes and do meaningful work. These were people of education and skill, which is why they were forced into exile. Many of them must have been furious with God for allowing this calamity to happen. They did not know how they would live, how they would sing God’s song in this strange land.
The place they knew and loved was so far away, and as the years went by and children were born and people died, the memory of home for many also died. Fifty years is a long time in a life span, long enough for some people to forget what others among them never knew. And then the Persian Army under Cyrus defeated the Babylonians, and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Not everyone wanted to return. After all, some had adjusted to Babylon, and others had no memory at all of Jerusalem. Some did return, but when they arrived home, they discovered that painful lesson Thomas Woolf wrote about. You can’t go home again, because both you and your home have changed.
Now consider our gospel reading for today. We are only in Mark’s first chapter, and we find Jesus in Capernaum, the home of Andrew and Peter, the place where Jesus had just healed Peter’s mother in law. Now house and home have a significant meaning in Mark, because it was written around the same time as the Second Jerusalem Temple was destroyed, this time by the Romans as punishment for Jewish rebellion. With the Temple destroyed once again, Judaism changed from a Tempe centered religion, administered by the priesthood, to synagogues, local places of gathering, where God’s Word was read, studied and pondered. The priesthood was gone and the Pharisees, who were more like teachers than priests, were now in charge. When Mark used the word home or house, people would have understood those words to designate the places not only where they gathered for worship and study, but also the very places where Jesus taught and healed, because Jesus often went to people’s homes to heal them.
The lesson learned by Jews and carried on by the early Christians was that God does not require a magnificent building or Temple. And indeed, that lesson is learned over and over again. Consider the great cathedrals in Europe that now are little more than museums, and in our own country all the mainline churches that every week close because of lack of membership---between 75 and 150. If there is any lesson to be learned in such losses, it is surely that God does not call us to worship a building.
Neither does God does call us to remain comfortably at home. Notice what happens after Jesus spent a day of healing. He went off to pray alone, and the text tells us his companions pursued him, because they wanted him to remain in Capernaum and continue his work of healing. After all, this is Simon and Andrew’s home, and they felt safe, secure and comfortable there. But Jesus would not remain, exhorting them to move on as well. “Go to the neighboring towns, so I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.”
The lessons here are more than religious; they apply to ordinary life. There are times in life we have to move on and out, and sometimes that means leaving home. I remember so well when Joan and Bruce left their home here in Unionville, it was particularly painful for Joan, who said to me, “Now I am homeless.” And yet it had to be. When Jim’s home burned to the ground, at first he was all ready to rebuild, and then he decided against it. No, I can’t rebuild, because I can’t go home again. His wife had died a few years ago, his children were all grown, and he too was different.
Sometimes you can’t go home again because everything has changed. Once you begin to see life from a different perspective, as the Jews did when they returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, as Jesus’s disciples did when they signed on as his followers, as Jim learned after he lost his home, and as we also learn in life as we change and grow, home is no longer the place we remember. Home is no longer the same and neither are we.
Isaiah 40: 21-31
Mark 1: 29-39
The man’s home was almost burned to the ground, because of an electrical fire. Staring it the charred remains, he told his best friend, he now understood what Thomas Woolf meant in his famous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, when he wrote: “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I can see it once.” Jim had lived in this particular house for over 30 years, so he had quite literally seen it more than one thousand times, but staring at its charcoaled remains, he said he now really saw it for the first time, because he understood exactly what he had lost.
Home: to lose a home is to lose part of oneself. People not only love their homes, but they also love the things in them, because those things tell stories about where they have been and what they have done. My son, Aaron, who has a PhD in infectious disease and now works for the New York City Health Department, was a history major in college. In his old room are bookshelves filled with his undergraduate books on history, English and philosophy. When I recently asked him to go through them and get rid of the ones he longer is interested in, he said, “I am not so interested in any of them now, but I was at one time, and I should remember that. Getting rid of those books would be like getting rid of a part of me.”
In these days of the pandemic, we have been hearing much about the threatened loss of home, though evictions and foreclosures have been suspended for a while. While some literally fear homelessness, others mourn the loss of a home they have truly made their own. Oh, I am not going to be homeless, one woman said, but I don’t think I will ever feel about another home the way I feel about this one.
Home: it is an important theme in human life, and because the bible is about real life, it has something important to say about home. Consider Isaiah, written in a time of exile, a time of deep loss and mourning. The Jews had lost what had been for them the central symbol of their faith---the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians along with much of the city in 587 B.C., when the elites and the skilled were carried off into captivity in Babylon. They were not treated as slaves. They could have homes and do meaningful work. These were people of education and skill, which is why they were forced into exile. Many of them must have been furious with God for allowing this calamity to happen. They did not know how they would live, how they would sing God’s song in this strange land.
The place they knew and loved was so far away, and as the years went by and children were born and people died, the memory of home for many also died. Fifty years is a long time in a life span, long enough for some people to forget what others among them never knew. And then the Persian Army under Cyrus defeated the Babylonians, and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Not everyone wanted to return. After all, some had adjusted to Babylon, and others had no memory at all of Jerusalem. Some did return, but when they arrived home, they discovered that painful lesson Thomas Woolf wrote about. You can’t go home again, because both you and your home have changed.
Now consider our gospel reading for today. We are only in Mark’s first chapter, and we find Jesus in Capernaum, the home of Andrew and Peter, the place where Jesus had just healed Peter’s mother in law. Now house and home have a significant meaning in Mark, because it was written around the same time as the Second Jerusalem Temple was destroyed, this time by the Romans as punishment for Jewish rebellion. With the Temple destroyed once again, Judaism changed from a Tempe centered religion, administered by the priesthood, to synagogues, local places of gathering, where God’s Word was read, studied and pondered. The priesthood was gone and the Pharisees, who were more like teachers than priests, were now in charge. When Mark used the word home or house, people would have understood those words to designate the places not only where they gathered for worship and study, but also the very places where Jesus taught and healed, because Jesus often went to people’s homes to heal them.
The lesson learned by Jews and carried on by the early Christians was that God does not require a magnificent building or Temple. And indeed, that lesson is learned over and over again. Consider the great cathedrals in Europe that now are little more than museums, and in our own country all the mainline churches that every week close because of lack of membership---between 75 and 150. If there is any lesson to be learned in such losses, it is surely that God does not call us to worship a building.
Neither does God does call us to remain comfortably at home. Notice what happens after Jesus spent a day of healing. He went off to pray alone, and the text tells us his companions pursued him, because they wanted him to remain in Capernaum and continue his work of healing. After all, this is Simon and Andrew’s home, and they felt safe, secure and comfortable there. But Jesus would not remain, exhorting them to move on as well. “Go to the neighboring towns, so I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.”
The lessons here are more than religious; they apply to ordinary life. There are times in life we have to move on and out, and sometimes that means leaving home. I remember so well when Joan and Bruce left their home here in Unionville, it was particularly painful for Joan, who said to me, “Now I am homeless.” And yet it had to be. When Jim’s home burned to the ground, at first he was all ready to rebuild, and then he decided against it. No, I can’t rebuild, because I can’t go home again. His wife had died a few years ago, his children were all grown, and he too was different.
Sometimes you can’t go home again because everything has changed. Once you begin to see life from a different perspective, as the Jews did when they returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, as Jesus’s disciples did when they signed on as his followers, as Jim learned after he lost his home, and as we also learn in life as we change and grow, home is no longer the place we remember. Home is no longer the same and neither are we.
February 3, 2021
Dear Friends,
Sometimes really remarkable and unexpected things happen---like the relationship between Palma School and Soledad Correctional Facility. Palma is a Roman Catholic prep school for boys in grades 7 to 12, located in Salinas, CA., which can “brag” about sending its top students to such elite universities as Harvard and Stanford. Soledad Correctional Facility in Soledad, CA can “brag” about having the largest number of lifers of any facility in the state. As unlike as these two institutions are, they came together through a reading program, where students, staff and inmates meet to discuss themes of great literature, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Steinbeck’s novels, The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men. About 25 students and staff participate along with 80 inmates, divided into small groups of about eight persons.
This program is the brainchild of one of Palma’s teachers, and it has been going on for about eight years. Inmates love it, because for the first time in their lives, they say, other people are actually interested in what they think and what they have to say. For many of them this is a revolutionary experience. The program emphasizes emotions of empathy and compassion while also considering issues of justice and fairness. Most of the prisoners never really considered the people whom they harmed or in some instances even killed but reading and discussing literature encourages them to put themselves in other people’s shoes and walk around in them for a while.
When the program was first imagined, everyone was confident the inmates would benefit, but they were less confident about what the students would learn. After all, they were so young and (in some cases) privileged, so would they be able to relate to men whose life stories were so radically different from their own? Would they be able to make leaps of imagination and empathy? The answer has turned out to be a resounding “Yes.” They began to understand how easy it is for people to become lost, to find themselves in the wrong crowd, doing the wrong thing in order to be accepted, to have a feeling of being part of a family, which many of them never really had. And who would have thought that Hamlet’s rage at his uncle and mother for murdering his father would be the occasion for inmates recognizing and owning their own rage at people who had wronged them while also recognizing the wrong they had done to others? Who would expect students and inmates alike to brush tears away when Hamlet dies, and his friend, Horatio, intones: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Some inmates wondered: After the lives we have led, would any angels sing us to our rest?
But something else happened in addition to reading and discussion. The inmates learned about a student, whose parents could not come up with tuition money, even after the school offered scholarship aid. He was only a sophomore, so he had some years to go before graduation. It looked as if he would probably have to leave. But no, over $30,000 was collected from inmates, who had earned small amounts of money from their prison jobs. “The damage to our victims cannot be undone,” one inmate said, “but we can make the choice to sew new things into the world. Now we have the opportunity to sow goodness, to sow charity, to sow love.”
The recipient of the gift, Sy Green, had never met the inmates, or participated in the literary discussions, but when his parents learned of the generous deed, both they and their son began to visit the prison monthly. The inmates really took an interest in the Sy, asking him about his goals and dreams. One of the inmates, Jason Bryant, even coached him in his basketball skills. Sy has now graduated and is off at college, but he still stays in close contact with Jason whose sentence for armed robbery was commuted last year by the governor. Now both Sy and Jason are making new lives for themselves.
Sometimes really remarkable things do happen. Someone gets an idea--- bringing students into a tough prison to read and discuss literature with inmates---and lives are changed. We can never predict how, when or if such change comes, but when it does, we can be grateful there are people who take risks with ideas and with emotions. It is not always an easy or safe thing to do, but then the really big steps in life are rarely safe or easy.
Dear Friends,
Sometimes really remarkable and unexpected things happen---like the relationship between Palma School and Soledad Correctional Facility. Palma is a Roman Catholic prep school for boys in grades 7 to 12, located in Salinas, CA., which can “brag” about sending its top students to such elite universities as Harvard and Stanford. Soledad Correctional Facility in Soledad, CA can “brag” about having the largest number of lifers of any facility in the state. As unlike as these two institutions are, they came together through a reading program, where students, staff and inmates meet to discuss themes of great literature, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Steinbeck’s novels, The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men. About 25 students and staff participate along with 80 inmates, divided into small groups of about eight persons.
This program is the brainchild of one of Palma’s teachers, and it has been going on for about eight years. Inmates love it, because for the first time in their lives, they say, other people are actually interested in what they think and what they have to say. For many of them this is a revolutionary experience. The program emphasizes emotions of empathy and compassion while also considering issues of justice and fairness. Most of the prisoners never really considered the people whom they harmed or in some instances even killed but reading and discussing literature encourages them to put themselves in other people’s shoes and walk around in them for a while.
When the program was first imagined, everyone was confident the inmates would benefit, but they were less confident about what the students would learn. After all, they were so young and (in some cases) privileged, so would they be able to relate to men whose life stories were so radically different from their own? Would they be able to make leaps of imagination and empathy? The answer has turned out to be a resounding “Yes.” They began to understand how easy it is for people to become lost, to find themselves in the wrong crowd, doing the wrong thing in order to be accepted, to have a feeling of being part of a family, which many of them never really had. And who would have thought that Hamlet’s rage at his uncle and mother for murdering his father would be the occasion for inmates recognizing and owning their own rage at people who had wronged them while also recognizing the wrong they had done to others? Who would expect students and inmates alike to brush tears away when Hamlet dies, and his friend, Horatio, intones: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Some inmates wondered: After the lives we have led, would any angels sing us to our rest?
But something else happened in addition to reading and discussion. The inmates learned about a student, whose parents could not come up with tuition money, even after the school offered scholarship aid. He was only a sophomore, so he had some years to go before graduation. It looked as if he would probably have to leave. But no, over $30,000 was collected from inmates, who had earned small amounts of money from their prison jobs. “The damage to our victims cannot be undone,” one inmate said, “but we can make the choice to sew new things into the world. Now we have the opportunity to sow goodness, to sow charity, to sow love.”
The recipient of the gift, Sy Green, had never met the inmates, or participated in the literary discussions, but when his parents learned of the generous deed, both they and their son began to visit the prison monthly. The inmates really took an interest in the Sy, asking him about his goals and dreams. One of the inmates, Jason Bryant, even coached him in his basketball skills. Sy has now graduated and is off at college, but he still stays in close contact with Jason whose sentence for armed robbery was commuted last year by the governor. Now both Sy and Jason are making new lives for themselves.
Sometimes really remarkable things do happen. Someone gets an idea--- bringing students into a tough prison to read and discuss literature with inmates---and lives are changed. We can never predict how, when or if such change comes, but when it does, we can be grateful there are people who take risks with ideas and with emotions. It is not always an easy or safe thing to do, but then the really big steps in life are rarely safe or easy.
KNOWING GOOD AND EVIL by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 1/31/2021
Deuteronomy 18: 15-20
Mark 1: 21-28
My daughter, Caitlin, recently came across a book by Philip Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm that she was required to read as a freshman at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Hallie, who died in 1994, had been a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. A survivor of a tough neighborhood in Chicago, where he grew up, he was also a World War ll vet, who had directly participated in the horrors of war. As a philosopher, Hallie was particularly interested in human cruelty and how and why human beings are capable of evil actions. When later in his career he came across the story of a French pacifist church, whose members saved thousands of Jews during the Second World War without doing any harm to German soldiers, he became fascinated by moral heroism and goodness, which he said, still exists in what the poet Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the human heart.”
The College of Wooster is a classical liberal arts college, so it is hardly surprising that its faculty would think that reading and discussing a book on good and evil was an appropriate activity for college freshmen. One of the questions they discussed was the current preference for words like sick and insane rather than evil when talking about human atrocities. Many of the students thought that the use of the word evil betrays a lack of humility--- as if we truly understood what was driving the commission of such deeds. Sick and insane, on the other hand, suggest a compulsion by a perverse force not of one’s own free will. And yet Caitlin told me that when they read the chapter on Russia in 1943, no one hesitated to use the word evil.
In that year Germans were committing mass atrocities by lining up huge numbers of Russian Jews in front of pits they had been forced to dig and then moving them down with machine guns. Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge, spoke with the German soldiers trying to uplift them out of their depression and self-disgust at what they were doing. He told them, “Of course, you are disgusted by these bloody deeds, and your disgust is a mark of your humanity, which has not been lost.” (Himmler, by the way, was said to be repulsed by sadists---persons who relished the murdering.) “All this horror,” he insisted, “is necessary for the greater glory of the German nation. You are doing your duty while preserving your humanity and of that you can be proud.” But those words were hard to digest, and the cold blooded massacre of Jewish men, women and children left many of the soldiers traumatized. And so, Himmler and the German High Command realized a less intimate and more efficient means of murder was necessary. Thus, the final solution of the gas chambers, which did not involve most soldiers.
While we all would agree that such deeds are evil, that does not mean that human beings have an undifferentiated view of what evil is. War, abortion, capital punishment and torture still continue to elicit controversy even among Christians. Though as Christians we are called to see reality through the lens of Jesus Christ, when we look, we do not all see the same thing or name it in the same way.
Now today’s reading from Mark’s gospel gives us some interesting perspectives on the recognition of good and evil. Jesus has just begun his public ministry in Capernaum after calling his first disciples. Entering the synagogue, he taught them “with authority and not as the scribes.” We are not told how Jesus’ teaching differed from the scribes, or even what his teaching was. Though Mark mentions Jesus’ teaching throughout his gospel, he tells us much less about the actual content of this teaching, when compared with the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
While Jesus was teaching in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit entered. An unclean spirit was probably some kind of mental illness or perhaps even epilepsy---but whatever it was, it was something that people understood as evil, contrary to God’s goodness. Notice that the unclean spirit immediately addresses Jesus, telling him that he knows who he is, “the Holy One of God.” We are only in the first chapter of Mark, and this is the second recognition of Jesus’ identity. The first was at Jesus’ baptism, when a voice from heaven claimed him as the beloved Son, and now we have a recognition by an unclean spirit. How ironic that the ones in Mark’s gospel, who often recognize Jesus are the unclean spirits, the demons, or the outsiders---like a Roman soldier, who knows and sees what others fail to know and see.
In today’s lesson the crowds are astounded by him, but they don’t know who he is. The recognition of Jesus calls for a radical response--- for or against. And the unclean spirit realized that it must be against Jesus, because Jesus has come to destroy it, to take away its terrible power to harm this suffering man. “Be silent, and come out of him,” Jesus commanded, and the spirit obeyed, but not without a struggle, crying out in a loud voice and causing convulsions to the man. It is all high drama, indicating that Jesus has authority even over the unclean spirits. And that authority was recognized by the unclean spirit before it was recognized by any human being.
What does it suggest that the good---in this case Jesus--- is immediately recognized by that which is contrary to the good---the unclean spirit, while the disciples, the religious leadership and the crowds don’t have a clue? And yet the demons know. Why? Well, evil is defined as a corruption of the good, which means that evil has within itself a recognition and knowledge of the good. Its desire is to spread the corruption, as in the story of Adam and Eve, when the serpent actively worked for their downfall. But when the good cannot be corrupted, as it could not in Jesus, evil works to destroy. Goodness is always a threat to evil, and evil always recognizes the good which threatens to overcome it. And that is exactly what the good achieves—it overcomes.
In the fall of 2019, I attended a seminar in Montgomery, Alabama, where a group of us took a tour of the famous Selma- Montgomery march for civil rights. We actually walked across the famous Edmunds-Pettus Bridge, where the marchers were brutally attacked and beaten on a Sunday morning in 1965. Our tour guide was only about 12 at the time of the march, and he told us about this incident that has been forever seared into his mind and soul.
We were crossing the bridge, he said, and suddenly the police on horses charged us, screaming, swearing and beating. I wasn’t hurt; I was small, so I was hidden by everyone else. But Miss Louise, my Sunday School teacher, who taught us kids that love is soul force, and not even the devil can destroy it, well, there she was on the ground, being beaten, kicked, and screamed at by one of the police. “You hate me, don’t you? Tell me that you hate me. Over and over again, he was begging for her hatred. But Miss Louise, she didn’t hate him. She kept saying she loved him, because he was one of God’s beloved. And the more she said that, the harder he beat her. But she wouldn’t give him what he wanted. She wouldn’t give him the hate. He could have killed her, and I thought he was going to, but finally, he threw his club down and ran away. And poor Miss Louise was lying there on the ground, bleeding and sobbing over and over again, Lord, I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody, really Lord, I don’t.
I was only 12 then, so I didn’t understand what I saw. But that policeman, so intent on hurting Miss Louise, because, I think, he could not stand the goodness he saw in her, well, he turned around. The bad that was in him, it changed. And when Miss Louise died, he was there at her funeral to carry her coffin. And he spoke, telling us all that he had been wicked, but Miss Louise, he said, had planted the seeds that helped to change him. And then our tour guide finished his story by saying, I think God was the one who planted those seeds, and Miss Louise watered them.” And that is what we are all supposed to do---water the good seeds that God plants.
Deuteronomy 18: 15-20
Mark 1: 21-28
My daughter, Caitlin, recently came across a book by Philip Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm that she was required to read as a freshman at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Hallie, who died in 1994, had been a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. A survivor of a tough neighborhood in Chicago, where he grew up, he was also a World War ll vet, who had directly participated in the horrors of war. As a philosopher, Hallie was particularly interested in human cruelty and how and why human beings are capable of evil actions. When later in his career he came across the story of a French pacifist church, whose members saved thousands of Jews during the Second World War without doing any harm to German soldiers, he became fascinated by moral heroism and goodness, which he said, still exists in what the poet Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the human heart.”
The College of Wooster is a classical liberal arts college, so it is hardly surprising that its faculty would think that reading and discussing a book on good and evil was an appropriate activity for college freshmen. One of the questions they discussed was the current preference for words like sick and insane rather than evil when talking about human atrocities. Many of the students thought that the use of the word evil betrays a lack of humility--- as if we truly understood what was driving the commission of such deeds. Sick and insane, on the other hand, suggest a compulsion by a perverse force not of one’s own free will. And yet Caitlin told me that when they read the chapter on Russia in 1943, no one hesitated to use the word evil.
In that year Germans were committing mass atrocities by lining up huge numbers of Russian Jews in front of pits they had been forced to dig and then moving them down with machine guns. Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge, spoke with the German soldiers trying to uplift them out of their depression and self-disgust at what they were doing. He told them, “Of course, you are disgusted by these bloody deeds, and your disgust is a mark of your humanity, which has not been lost.” (Himmler, by the way, was said to be repulsed by sadists---persons who relished the murdering.) “All this horror,” he insisted, “is necessary for the greater glory of the German nation. You are doing your duty while preserving your humanity and of that you can be proud.” But those words were hard to digest, and the cold blooded massacre of Jewish men, women and children left many of the soldiers traumatized. And so, Himmler and the German High Command realized a less intimate and more efficient means of murder was necessary. Thus, the final solution of the gas chambers, which did not involve most soldiers.
While we all would agree that such deeds are evil, that does not mean that human beings have an undifferentiated view of what evil is. War, abortion, capital punishment and torture still continue to elicit controversy even among Christians. Though as Christians we are called to see reality through the lens of Jesus Christ, when we look, we do not all see the same thing or name it in the same way.
Now today’s reading from Mark’s gospel gives us some interesting perspectives on the recognition of good and evil. Jesus has just begun his public ministry in Capernaum after calling his first disciples. Entering the synagogue, he taught them “with authority and not as the scribes.” We are not told how Jesus’ teaching differed from the scribes, or even what his teaching was. Though Mark mentions Jesus’ teaching throughout his gospel, he tells us much less about the actual content of this teaching, when compared with the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
While Jesus was teaching in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit entered. An unclean spirit was probably some kind of mental illness or perhaps even epilepsy---but whatever it was, it was something that people understood as evil, contrary to God’s goodness. Notice that the unclean spirit immediately addresses Jesus, telling him that he knows who he is, “the Holy One of God.” We are only in the first chapter of Mark, and this is the second recognition of Jesus’ identity. The first was at Jesus’ baptism, when a voice from heaven claimed him as the beloved Son, and now we have a recognition by an unclean spirit. How ironic that the ones in Mark’s gospel, who often recognize Jesus are the unclean spirits, the demons, or the outsiders---like a Roman soldier, who knows and sees what others fail to know and see.
In today’s lesson the crowds are astounded by him, but they don’t know who he is. The recognition of Jesus calls for a radical response--- for or against. And the unclean spirit realized that it must be against Jesus, because Jesus has come to destroy it, to take away its terrible power to harm this suffering man. “Be silent, and come out of him,” Jesus commanded, and the spirit obeyed, but not without a struggle, crying out in a loud voice and causing convulsions to the man. It is all high drama, indicating that Jesus has authority even over the unclean spirits. And that authority was recognized by the unclean spirit before it was recognized by any human being.
What does it suggest that the good---in this case Jesus--- is immediately recognized by that which is contrary to the good---the unclean spirit, while the disciples, the religious leadership and the crowds don’t have a clue? And yet the demons know. Why? Well, evil is defined as a corruption of the good, which means that evil has within itself a recognition and knowledge of the good. Its desire is to spread the corruption, as in the story of Adam and Eve, when the serpent actively worked for their downfall. But when the good cannot be corrupted, as it could not in Jesus, evil works to destroy. Goodness is always a threat to evil, and evil always recognizes the good which threatens to overcome it. And that is exactly what the good achieves—it overcomes.
In the fall of 2019, I attended a seminar in Montgomery, Alabama, where a group of us took a tour of the famous Selma- Montgomery march for civil rights. We actually walked across the famous Edmunds-Pettus Bridge, where the marchers were brutally attacked and beaten on a Sunday morning in 1965. Our tour guide was only about 12 at the time of the march, and he told us about this incident that has been forever seared into his mind and soul.
We were crossing the bridge, he said, and suddenly the police on horses charged us, screaming, swearing and beating. I wasn’t hurt; I was small, so I was hidden by everyone else. But Miss Louise, my Sunday School teacher, who taught us kids that love is soul force, and not even the devil can destroy it, well, there she was on the ground, being beaten, kicked, and screamed at by one of the police. “You hate me, don’t you? Tell me that you hate me. Over and over again, he was begging for her hatred. But Miss Louise, she didn’t hate him. She kept saying she loved him, because he was one of God’s beloved. And the more she said that, the harder he beat her. But she wouldn’t give him what he wanted. She wouldn’t give him the hate. He could have killed her, and I thought he was going to, but finally, he threw his club down and ran away. And poor Miss Louise was lying there on the ground, bleeding and sobbing over and over again, Lord, I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody, really Lord, I don’t.
I was only 12 then, so I didn’t understand what I saw. But that policeman, so intent on hurting Miss Louise, because, I think, he could not stand the goodness he saw in her, well, he turned around. The bad that was in him, it changed. And when Miss Louise died, he was there at her funeral to carry her coffin. And he spoke, telling us all that he had been wicked, but Miss Louise, he said, had planted the seeds that helped to change him. And then our tour guide finished his story by saying, I think God was the one who planted those seeds, and Miss Louise watered them.” And that is what we are all supposed to do---water the good seeds that God plants.
January 27, 2021
Dear Friends,
I recently finished a fascinating book, The Liberation of Paris by Jean Edward Smith. It was the story of how this beautiful “City of Light,” as Paris is often called, was liberated from the Germans as the War in Europe neared its end. But not only was Paris liberated, it was also saved from destruction---by the efforts of three men, Eisenhower, an American, de Gaulle, a Frenchman, and von Choltitz, a German.
Hitler was positively gleeful, when his troops marched into Paris in the early morning hours of June 14, 1940. There was no fighting, and no shots were fired. The French General Weygand had declared Paris “an open city” and refused to defend it. On June 10th the French government fled, and the army soon followed. And so, the Germans marched in, and that morning, after reviewing his troops, the German General ate breakfast at the Ritz. For a few years, at least, life seemed fairly normal. The French populace did their best to adjust to the new reality, convinced that soon England would be defeated, and Germany would be the undisputed victor. But when the United States entered the War and eventually began to turn the tide against the Germans, the French became hopeful again---and it was only when hope was reborn that the Resistance in Paris took shape and form.
By the summer of 1944 the situation looked grim for the Germans. In July there had been another attempt to assassinate Hitler with many German generals involved, and so there was reshuffling of commands as people were interrogated and later tried for treason. General Dietrich von Choltitz was chosen by Hitler to command Paris. Known for his loyalty to Hitler, he had never questioned a command, no matter how harsh. Hitler insisted that the Germans should defend Paris from the advancing Allies at all costs, and he believed that von Choltitz was the man to do it. Von Choltitz was called to a personal meeting with Hitler in Germany in August, 1944, and though he was still confident that Germany could win the War, as soon as he came into Hitler’s presence, he knew the War was lost. Hitler, he said, had become a sick, diminished human being, ranting and raving and displaying a completely hateful mind. Furthermore, he was unmoored from reality, madly ignorant of the Allied advance through Normandy, and when the General left later that evening, he felt a deep heaviness and discouragement. If the war was already lost, how could he as a commander of soldiers, sacrifice their lives for no purpose? He also knew that Hitler in his hateful madness, once he realized that Paris would be lost, would insist on its complete destruction. And von Chostitz did not want to consent to such barbarism.
It wasn’t that von Choltitz was exceptionally tender hearted. He was a soldier, who had led the German paratroop attack on Rotterdam in May, 1940, and in July,1942 he led a successful attack on a Russian fortress, using 4800 soldiers in the assault that left only 349 of his soldiers alive. But because he captured the fort, he was promoted to General. In 1943 he helped with the German retreat from Russia, carrying out all orders given to him. And all this brought him to Paris.
Some people might say about von Choltitz what they would say about Rommel: they fought a bad war well, meaning that they tried very hard to respect the rules of war without descending into total barbarity---- though they were fighting for a barbarous regime. They fought hard and fairly---if we can ever dare apply the word fair to war. But von Choltitz would not do the absurd, and when Hitler ordered the City of Paris, reduced to ashes, with all major bridges and buildings blown to bits of shards, he would do everything to stall that order--- though he could not and would not directly refuse. His wife and three children were in Germany, and he knew what Hitler could do to them. He had done it to other families, and he would not hesitate to do it again, if his mad rage took hold of him.
There were other Germans, also realizing the War was lost, had no interest in destroying Paris. Place can take on profound meanings for people, and one did not and does not need to be French to love and honor Paris. There were many Germans who loved Paris, and von Choltitz was among them. Its extraordinary beauty--- its buildings, bridges and art treasures were worth saving.
A detonation expert was sent to Paris to wire key places for destruction. Von Choltitz had to act receptive, enthusiastically embracing the plan even as he was hoping (and perhaps even praying) that the Americans and French troops would soon arrive. This was not the original American intent. Marching into Paris, they believed, would have distracted them from their goal of totally defeating Germany as soon as possible. But Eisenhower believed going into Paris was the best thing to do. He wanted Charles de Gaulle as the undisputed leader of a new French government and having him lead his army into the city, followed by Americans, would help cement that outcome. Eisenhower had to do a great deal of clever manipulation to pull this off, and though such action saved Paris, some people believed the diversion into the city added at least another six months to the European War. Once the Americans entered, they had to take care of 4.5 million citizens, who lacked adequate food and electricity.
If the Americans had not come, it is doubtful von Choltitz would have been able to stave off the destruction. He surrendered the city in August, 1944, and though he was never tried for war crimes, he was held captive until 1947, when he was permitted to return to Germany. He became a friend to General Pierre Koenig, who was the military governor of the French zone in Germany, and when von Choltitiz died in 1966, the French provided the honor guard at his funeral, and the top French generals also attended. He was considered by many to be a hero.
And yet this hero had fought as an enemy of France and its allies. He fought for the German nation, which in following Hitler had embraced an evil that still causes the world to shudder. How was it possible that the nation of Bach, Beethoven, Kant and Goethe could fall for such lies and evil? It is undoubtedly true that not all who followed Hitler were evil, but they all are guilty. Yet as Christians we can hope and pray that God’s mercy speaks the final word and repairs the brokenness of the world.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I recently finished a fascinating book, The Liberation of Paris by Jean Edward Smith. It was the story of how this beautiful “City of Light,” as Paris is often called, was liberated from the Germans as the War in Europe neared its end. But not only was Paris liberated, it was also saved from destruction---by the efforts of three men, Eisenhower, an American, de Gaulle, a Frenchman, and von Choltitz, a German.
Hitler was positively gleeful, when his troops marched into Paris in the early morning hours of June 14, 1940. There was no fighting, and no shots were fired. The French General Weygand had declared Paris “an open city” and refused to defend it. On June 10th the French government fled, and the army soon followed. And so, the Germans marched in, and that morning, after reviewing his troops, the German General ate breakfast at the Ritz. For a few years, at least, life seemed fairly normal. The French populace did their best to adjust to the new reality, convinced that soon England would be defeated, and Germany would be the undisputed victor. But when the United States entered the War and eventually began to turn the tide against the Germans, the French became hopeful again---and it was only when hope was reborn that the Resistance in Paris took shape and form.
By the summer of 1944 the situation looked grim for the Germans. In July there had been another attempt to assassinate Hitler with many German generals involved, and so there was reshuffling of commands as people were interrogated and later tried for treason. General Dietrich von Choltitz was chosen by Hitler to command Paris. Known for his loyalty to Hitler, he had never questioned a command, no matter how harsh. Hitler insisted that the Germans should defend Paris from the advancing Allies at all costs, and he believed that von Choltitz was the man to do it. Von Choltitz was called to a personal meeting with Hitler in Germany in August, 1944, and though he was still confident that Germany could win the War, as soon as he came into Hitler’s presence, he knew the War was lost. Hitler, he said, had become a sick, diminished human being, ranting and raving and displaying a completely hateful mind. Furthermore, he was unmoored from reality, madly ignorant of the Allied advance through Normandy, and when the General left later that evening, he felt a deep heaviness and discouragement. If the war was already lost, how could he as a commander of soldiers, sacrifice their lives for no purpose? He also knew that Hitler in his hateful madness, once he realized that Paris would be lost, would insist on its complete destruction. And von Chostitz did not want to consent to such barbarism.
It wasn’t that von Choltitz was exceptionally tender hearted. He was a soldier, who had led the German paratroop attack on Rotterdam in May, 1940, and in July,1942 he led a successful attack on a Russian fortress, using 4800 soldiers in the assault that left only 349 of his soldiers alive. But because he captured the fort, he was promoted to General. In 1943 he helped with the German retreat from Russia, carrying out all orders given to him. And all this brought him to Paris.
Some people might say about von Choltitz what they would say about Rommel: they fought a bad war well, meaning that they tried very hard to respect the rules of war without descending into total barbarity---- though they were fighting for a barbarous regime. They fought hard and fairly---if we can ever dare apply the word fair to war. But von Choltitz would not do the absurd, and when Hitler ordered the City of Paris, reduced to ashes, with all major bridges and buildings blown to bits of shards, he would do everything to stall that order--- though he could not and would not directly refuse. His wife and three children were in Germany, and he knew what Hitler could do to them. He had done it to other families, and he would not hesitate to do it again, if his mad rage took hold of him.
There were other Germans, also realizing the War was lost, had no interest in destroying Paris. Place can take on profound meanings for people, and one did not and does not need to be French to love and honor Paris. There were many Germans who loved Paris, and von Choltitz was among them. Its extraordinary beauty--- its buildings, bridges and art treasures were worth saving.
A detonation expert was sent to Paris to wire key places for destruction. Von Choltitz had to act receptive, enthusiastically embracing the plan even as he was hoping (and perhaps even praying) that the Americans and French troops would soon arrive. This was not the original American intent. Marching into Paris, they believed, would have distracted them from their goal of totally defeating Germany as soon as possible. But Eisenhower believed going into Paris was the best thing to do. He wanted Charles de Gaulle as the undisputed leader of a new French government and having him lead his army into the city, followed by Americans, would help cement that outcome. Eisenhower had to do a great deal of clever manipulation to pull this off, and though such action saved Paris, some people believed the diversion into the city added at least another six months to the European War. Once the Americans entered, they had to take care of 4.5 million citizens, who lacked adequate food and electricity.
If the Americans had not come, it is doubtful von Choltitz would have been able to stave off the destruction. He surrendered the city in August, 1944, and though he was never tried for war crimes, he was held captive until 1947, when he was permitted to return to Germany. He became a friend to General Pierre Koenig, who was the military governor of the French zone in Germany, and when von Choltitiz died in 1966, the French provided the honor guard at his funeral, and the top French generals also attended. He was considered by many to be a hero.
And yet this hero had fought as an enemy of France and its allies. He fought for the German nation, which in following Hitler had embraced an evil that still causes the world to shudder. How was it possible that the nation of Bach, Beethoven, Kant and Goethe could fall for such lies and evil? It is undoubtedly true that not all who followed Hitler were evil, but they all are guilty. Yet as Christians we can hope and pray that God’s mercy speaks the final word and repairs the brokenness of the world.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
MANAGING MEMORIES by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 1/24/2021
Mark 1: 4-11
Recently I came across an old article about John McCain and his 2000 visit, or revisit to North Vietnam, where he had been held prisoner and tortured. Upon returning from his trip, he was quoted, “I put the Vietnam War behind me a long time ago. I harbor no anger or rancor. I am a better man for my experience, and I am grateful for having the opportunity of serving.” Certainly, an admirable attitude! But what really caught my attention was the comment added by the writer: “Sometimes,” he wrote, “we do have the opportunity in life of managing our memories
Managing memories. What a creative way to put it, for isn’t this what life often asks us to do: manage our memories? We all have experiences and what we remember as well as how we remember can be critical for how our lives unfold and move. Managing memories: How we do that can sometimes determine if we move forward, backward, or just remain static and stagnant. We know that some people manage their memories, even traumatic ones, better than others and how they do that is an engaging question. A friend of mine told me about some research she had read on trauma, concerning people who had lived through and survived terrible traumas---rape, fires, plane crashes. These people were so traumatized by their memories that their functioning was severely compromised. None of these survivors had a history of mental illness, but having survived a terrible trauma, they were now traumatized people--- until a doctor discovered that a particular drug, administered a number of times while they were actively recalling the details of the trauma, actually relieved the trauma. They did not forget what had happened, but the memory had lost its fearful power over them, because their brain chemistry had been altered. And as you might imagine playing with brain chemistry is controversial, but the doctor insisted that sometimes this is exactly what is needed to manage traumatic memories.
In a sense we can think of the Gospel writers as managers of memory, the memory of Jesus Christ. And of course, memories of Christ were and are different. We have four different Gospels and all of them have their unique perspective on Christ---who he was and is and what he was called to accomplish and how he did it. Matthew and Luke, for example, have birth stories to show us that there was something very special about Jesus at his conception and birth. John’s Gospel pushes Jesus’ identity back to the beginning, before history, before time itself. John makes Jesus Christ the Word, the Logos, the ordering principle of everything that is. “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
But Mark has none of this. He manages the memories of Jesus by beginning with Jesus coming to a wild man named John, who lived out in the wilderness, ate locusts and wild honey and wore a camel haired shirt, while baptizing people in an emotionally charged ritual of repentance. That’s when it happened: the Holy Spirit descended, laying claim to Jesus as God’s own. The baptism for Mark is when Jesus became God’s Son. And then immediately after the baptism and temptation, Mark shows Jesus initiating his ministry in Galilee by calling disciples, whom, the text says, immediately followed him.
Mark likes this word immediately, and he uses it more than 30 times throughout his entire gospel. Notice that Mark paints a picture of disciples, who immediately recognized that in Jesus there was something so compelling, so driving that they gave up their lives as fisherman and followed. Whether their response was really so immediate, we do not know, but we do know that Mark tells it this way to make the point that in Jesus something so decisive was present, that only an immediate response will do. And so, he tells us the disciples followed immediately---perhaps to give us a hint that we should do the same.
You have heard me say many times that Mark is the oldest of the four gospels, written sometime around the year 70, at least two or three decades before Matthew, Luke and John. In the year 70 the Jewish Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Talk about trauma. The destruction of the Temple meant that Judaism, at least Temple Judaism, founded on the rituals of sacrifice and expiation, was over, done, gone, finished. And so, the Temple priesthood disappeared. Judaism was then recreated by the Pharisees, who made Judaism a religion of the synagogue, a kind of “house church,” where people met to pray and reflect on and study scripture. But when Mark wrote his gospel the destruction of the Temple was so still raw and fresh, so traumatic that it pushed him in a new direction, and so we have the immediacy of Mark’s gospel. Decades later, when Matthew, Luke and John were written, when the meaning of the Temple’s destruction had been pondered for a while, the managing of memories would be a bit different. The story would be told differently.
Managing memories is something we human beings do all the time as we live our lives and build up memories of our past experiences. Take, for example, something as ordinary as weddings. They can be dreadfully stressful. I have seen more than my share of fights at wedding rehearsals with parents and their adult child yelling at each other. But even after all the stress, most people will remember their wedding day as one of the great moments of their lives---until the marriage ends in divorce. When I ask people, who are remarrying for a second or even third time, what their earlier wedding days were like, I often hear something like, “Oh, it was a terrible day. Nothing went right. I was sick to my stomach; my sister was late to the church. My mother and I had a terrible fight. But the truth is the meaning of the event---a marriage that went sour---- helps to determine the memory of the event.
Some years ago, before CT abolished the death penalty, I went to hear a woman, Tony Bosco, talk about her personal opposition to the death penalty. Her son and son and daughter in law were shot to death, as they lay asleep in their bed. As you can imagine, the pain was almost unbearable for Tony, and part of her management of the pain and the horrible memory of how her loved ones were brutally murdered involved her ardent opposition to the death penalty. She had always been opposed, and though her anger and rage about the deaths were deep and visceral, she managed her painful memories by passionately working to abolish the death penalty. She had seen many people do the opposite---desperately clinging to the promise of death for the perpetrator as a way of lessening the memory or making it go away. But, she said, the painful memory will never go away. All you can do is manage it. And knowing what it was like to lose family members to murder,” she said, “I could never support the execution of another human being and thus cause his or her family and friends to suffer. This is how I manage both my pain and my memory.
And so, when we read the Gospels and note that sometimes they manage their memories of Jesus Christ differently, we should be neither surprised nor defensive. We can’t make the differences go away by either denying them or pretending they are trivial in meaning. On the contrary, we can be grateful that we are part of a religious tradition that does not insist on defending the stories as literal accounts. We do not know exactly what the historical facts are, but the truth of the gospels cannot be reduced to historical facts anyway. The truth is expressed in the way lives are lived in response to the story of Jesus Christ---how it is that people as believers manage their memories of him.
If we saw a visual recording of what John McCain suffered and endured at the hands of his captors, (and knew nothing else about him) would we see anything beyond human cruelty and pain and human endurance? Would we dare to imagine that out of that terrible crucible of human suffering he would emerge a better man? The events that really matter---in the gospels as well as in our lives--- are never simply the moment in time that the event or events occurred. The meaning emerges, growing and changing over time. That is why we can continue to read, study and ponder the gospels. That is why clergy can continue to preach on the same texts again and again without preaching the same sermon. We remember the stories, but we manage our memories of them differently as their meaning for us emerges, growing and changing over time. And the same is true for the events in our own lives. We can revisit them again and again, not because we are necessarily stuck in the past, but precisely because we are invited to move ahead into a new and different future, and how we manage or memories over time tells us something significant about how we will manage the new beginning, promised in Jesus Christ.
Mark 1: 4-11
Recently I came across an old article about John McCain and his 2000 visit, or revisit to North Vietnam, where he had been held prisoner and tortured. Upon returning from his trip, he was quoted, “I put the Vietnam War behind me a long time ago. I harbor no anger or rancor. I am a better man for my experience, and I am grateful for having the opportunity of serving.” Certainly, an admirable attitude! But what really caught my attention was the comment added by the writer: “Sometimes,” he wrote, “we do have the opportunity in life of managing our memories
Managing memories. What a creative way to put it, for isn’t this what life often asks us to do: manage our memories? We all have experiences and what we remember as well as how we remember can be critical for how our lives unfold and move. Managing memories: How we do that can sometimes determine if we move forward, backward, or just remain static and stagnant. We know that some people manage their memories, even traumatic ones, better than others and how they do that is an engaging question. A friend of mine told me about some research she had read on trauma, concerning people who had lived through and survived terrible traumas---rape, fires, plane crashes. These people were so traumatized by their memories that their functioning was severely compromised. None of these survivors had a history of mental illness, but having survived a terrible trauma, they were now traumatized people--- until a doctor discovered that a particular drug, administered a number of times while they were actively recalling the details of the trauma, actually relieved the trauma. They did not forget what had happened, but the memory had lost its fearful power over them, because their brain chemistry had been altered. And as you might imagine playing with brain chemistry is controversial, but the doctor insisted that sometimes this is exactly what is needed to manage traumatic memories.
In a sense we can think of the Gospel writers as managers of memory, the memory of Jesus Christ. And of course, memories of Christ were and are different. We have four different Gospels and all of them have their unique perspective on Christ---who he was and is and what he was called to accomplish and how he did it. Matthew and Luke, for example, have birth stories to show us that there was something very special about Jesus at his conception and birth. John’s Gospel pushes Jesus’ identity back to the beginning, before history, before time itself. John makes Jesus Christ the Word, the Logos, the ordering principle of everything that is. “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
But Mark has none of this. He manages the memories of Jesus by beginning with Jesus coming to a wild man named John, who lived out in the wilderness, ate locusts and wild honey and wore a camel haired shirt, while baptizing people in an emotionally charged ritual of repentance. That’s when it happened: the Holy Spirit descended, laying claim to Jesus as God’s own. The baptism for Mark is when Jesus became God’s Son. And then immediately after the baptism and temptation, Mark shows Jesus initiating his ministry in Galilee by calling disciples, whom, the text says, immediately followed him.
Mark likes this word immediately, and he uses it more than 30 times throughout his entire gospel. Notice that Mark paints a picture of disciples, who immediately recognized that in Jesus there was something so compelling, so driving that they gave up their lives as fisherman and followed. Whether their response was really so immediate, we do not know, but we do know that Mark tells it this way to make the point that in Jesus something so decisive was present, that only an immediate response will do. And so, he tells us the disciples followed immediately---perhaps to give us a hint that we should do the same.
You have heard me say many times that Mark is the oldest of the four gospels, written sometime around the year 70, at least two or three decades before Matthew, Luke and John. In the year 70 the Jewish Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Talk about trauma. The destruction of the Temple meant that Judaism, at least Temple Judaism, founded on the rituals of sacrifice and expiation, was over, done, gone, finished. And so, the Temple priesthood disappeared. Judaism was then recreated by the Pharisees, who made Judaism a religion of the synagogue, a kind of “house church,” where people met to pray and reflect on and study scripture. But when Mark wrote his gospel the destruction of the Temple was so still raw and fresh, so traumatic that it pushed him in a new direction, and so we have the immediacy of Mark’s gospel. Decades later, when Matthew, Luke and John were written, when the meaning of the Temple’s destruction had been pondered for a while, the managing of memories would be a bit different. The story would be told differently.
Managing memories is something we human beings do all the time as we live our lives and build up memories of our past experiences. Take, for example, something as ordinary as weddings. They can be dreadfully stressful. I have seen more than my share of fights at wedding rehearsals with parents and their adult child yelling at each other. But even after all the stress, most people will remember their wedding day as one of the great moments of their lives---until the marriage ends in divorce. When I ask people, who are remarrying for a second or even third time, what their earlier wedding days were like, I often hear something like, “Oh, it was a terrible day. Nothing went right. I was sick to my stomach; my sister was late to the church. My mother and I had a terrible fight. But the truth is the meaning of the event---a marriage that went sour---- helps to determine the memory of the event.
Some years ago, before CT abolished the death penalty, I went to hear a woman, Tony Bosco, talk about her personal opposition to the death penalty. Her son and son and daughter in law were shot to death, as they lay asleep in their bed. As you can imagine, the pain was almost unbearable for Tony, and part of her management of the pain and the horrible memory of how her loved ones were brutally murdered involved her ardent opposition to the death penalty. She had always been opposed, and though her anger and rage about the deaths were deep and visceral, she managed her painful memories by passionately working to abolish the death penalty. She had seen many people do the opposite---desperately clinging to the promise of death for the perpetrator as a way of lessening the memory or making it go away. But, she said, the painful memory will never go away. All you can do is manage it. And knowing what it was like to lose family members to murder,” she said, “I could never support the execution of another human being and thus cause his or her family and friends to suffer. This is how I manage both my pain and my memory.
And so, when we read the Gospels and note that sometimes they manage their memories of Jesus Christ differently, we should be neither surprised nor defensive. We can’t make the differences go away by either denying them or pretending they are trivial in meaning. On the contrary, we can be grateful that we are part of a religious tradition that does not insist on defending the stories as literal accounts. We do not know exactly what the historical facts are, but the truth of the gospels cannot be reduced to historical facts anyway. The truth is expressed in the way lives are lived in response to the story of Jesus Christ---how it is that people as believers manage their memories of him.
If we saw a visual recording of what John McCain suffered and endured at the hands of his captors, (and knew nothing else about him) would we see anything beyond human cruelty and pain and human endurance? Would we dare to imagine that out of that terrible crucible of human suffering he would emerge a better man? The events that really matter---in the gospels as well as in our lives--- are never simply the moment in time that the event or events occurred. The meaning emerges, growing and changing over time. That is why we can continue to read, study and ponder the gospels. That is why clergy can continue to preach on the same texts again and again without preaching the same sermon. We remember the stories, but we manage our memories of them differently as their meaning for us emerges, growing and changing over time. And the same is true for the events in our own lives. We can revisit them again and again, not because we are necessarily stuck in the past, but precisely because we are invited to move ahead into a new and different future, and how we manage or memories over time tells us something significant about how we will manage the new beginning, promised in Jesus Christ.
January 20, 2021
Dear Friends,
Cindy Nye wrote something in an email this week that should be emblazoned on all our hearts and minds: “Just because we cannot see the path ahead does not mean there isn’t one.” It is true that often, when we cannot see the path head, we find ourselves despairing that there is no way ahead, and then we begin to fear that we will be stuck forever.
I can imagine this is how Lai Chi-wai felt after suffering paralysis from his waist down in a car accident in 2012. Lai had been ranked eighth in the world as a rock climber, having won four times the Asian Rock Climbing Championship. And then came the awful accident, which appeared to end his rock climbing forever. But Lai was determined to keep climbing, and in 2016 he climbed Lion Rock, a very steep mountain ridge in Hong Kong. And he did it in his wheelchair!
He then decided to ascend a skyscraper in the city by having ropes attached to the side of the building, which he would use to pull himself up, again in his wheelchair. His ascent began Saturday morning, January 16. The day started with sun and gentle breezes, but by mid-afternoon, the wind had picked up, resulting in tangled ropes and a swinging wheelchair, threatening to smash into the building. Though he says he had never before feared for his life while climbing, this time was different. He really began to wonder if he would die. He continued to climb, foot by foot, using every bit of strength in his arms to pull himself upward---until he had reached 800 feet, when the wind continued to whip him around and his fingers were covered with blisters. At this point he had to call it quits, 250 feet from his goal.
Lai is not a quitter, but he felt that he had to recognize reality. On Monday morning he was back at the skyscraper, not to begin another climb, but to assess why he had failed. He said he kept going over and over again the scene in his head, trying to determine if he could have done something differently. His arms were still sore and his fingers so raw with blisters that he could move his wheelchair only with the tips of his fingers. The online accolades were profuse with tremendous admiration for what he had accomplished---800 feet up on the side of a building in a wheelchair. Who would have thought it possible? And who would have ever attempted such a feat--- certainly not a paralyzed body in a wheelchair, attempting to make a path, where there was none. The praises continue to flow for Lai, not only because of the tremendous will, strength and courage his feat required, but also because his efforts raised over $735,000 for research on robotics for persons with spinal cord injuries. Though Lai does not exactly feel like a failure, nonetheless, he is coping with the feeling of a dream unaccomplished, or perhaps a dream deferred. He might try again, maybe on this building or even another one. He certainly is someone who discovers paths where others see none.
Sometimes in life we find ourselves in situations, where we feel completely boxed in, with no alternatives ahead. At such times, depression can descend on us like the dark clouds threatening stormy weather, which no wishing can make disappear. We withdraw into our own shut-in world, convinced there is no way ahead. I don’t know what or how new possibilities open up. But sometimes, suddenly, there they are, beckoning us forward. Perhaps, when we are tempted to give up, God just refuses to give up on us and opens a way where once there was none we could see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Dear Friends,
Cindy Nye wrote something in an email this week that should be emblazoned on all our hearts and minds: “Just because we cannot see the path ahead does not mean there isn’t one.” It is true that often, when we cannot see the path head, we find ourselves despairing that there is no way ahead, and then we begin to fear that we will be stuck forever.
I can imagine this is how Lai Chi-wai felt after suffering paralysis from his waist down in a car accident in 2012. Lai had been ranked eighth in the world as a rock climber, having won four times the Asian Rock Climbing Championship. And then came the awful accident, which appeared to end his rock climbing forever. But Lai was determined to keep climbing, and in 2016 he climbed Lion Rock, a very steep mountain ridge in Hong Kong. And he did it in his wheelchair!
He then decided to ascend a skyscraper in the city by having ropes attached to the side of the building, which he would use to pull himself up, again in his wheelchair. His ascent began Saturday morning, January 16. The day started with sun and gentle breezes, but by mid-afternoon, the wind had picked up, resulting in tangled ropes and a swinging wheelchair, threatening to smash into the building. Though he says he had never before feared for his life while climbing, this time was different. He really began to wonder if he would die. He continued to climb, foot by foot, using every bit of strength in his arms to pull himself upward---until he had reached 800 feet, when the wind continued to whip him around and his fingers were covered with blisters. At this point he had to call it quits, 250 feet from his goal.
Lai is not a quitter, but he felt that he had to recognize reality. On Monday morning he was back at the skyscraper, not to begin another climb, but to assess why he had failed. He said he kept going over and over again the scene in his head, trying to determine if he could have done something differently. His arms were still sore and his fingers so raw with blisters that he could move his wheelchair only with the tips of his fingers. The online accolades were profuse with tremendous admiration for what he had accomplished---800 feet up on the side of a building in a wheelchair. Who would have thought it possible? And who would have ever attempted such a feat--- certainly not a paralyzed body in a wheelchair, attempting to make a path, where there was none. The praises continue to flow for Lai, not only because of the tremendous will, strength and courage his feat required, but also because his efforts raised over $735,000 for research on robotics for persons with spinal cord injuries. Though Lai does not exactly feel like a failure, nonetheless, he is coping with the feeling of a dream unaccomplished, or perhaps a dream deferred. He might try again, maybe on this building or even another one. He certainly is someone who discovers paths where others see none.
Sometimes in life we find ourselves in situations, where we feel completely boxed in, with no alternatives ahead. At such times, depression can descend on us like the dark clouds threatening stormy weather, which no wishing can make disappear. We withdraw into our own shut-in world, convinced there is no way ahead. I don’t know what or how new possibilities open up. But sometimes, suddenly, there they are, beckoning us forward. Perhaps, when we are tempted to give up, God just refuses to give up on us and opens a way where once there was none we could see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Difficult Conversations by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 01/17/2021
I Samuel 3: 1-18
There are difficult conversations. We all have had them, or perhaps worked even harder to avoid them, but there are times when the difficulty cannot be ignored. Out of curiosity I asked some people to name their most difficult conversation---without betraying any confidences, of course. Most people could readily recall what was so painfully difficult---and for anyone worried about the divisive nature of political disagreement, no one, I repeat no one, named a political conversation or argument. It wasn’t that they had not engaged in such conversations, but they were hardly the most difficult ones.
One woman told me it was when she had to tell her mother that her husband and she were divorcing after 13 years of marriage and three kids. As hard as it was telling the children, facing my mother was far worse. Here I was 40 years old, and I was terrified of what she would say. She did not disappoint me, telling I was a failure as a mother, even though I pointed out that it takes two for a marriage to fail. Someone else confided that his most difficult conversation was with his wife, when he told her he was going to give up his law practice to go back to school and get certified to teach high school English. Another woman said it was having to tell her 17 year old son, a senior in high school, who was suffering from leukemia, that there was nothing more to be medically done, and he probably had only few months to live. His response, “But, Mom, I want to go to college in the fall.”
Well, today’s lesson from the Book of Samuel is also about difficult conversations. Samuel was young, how old exactly, we do not know, but we do know that he had been faithfully assisting the priest, Eli. Eli had been a fairly decent priest, but as the text tells us, his eyes had grown dim, meaning that he failed to see what was going on around him. Eli’s two sons, also priests, were evil; they blasphemed God and used the priesthood to enrich themselves. Now to be fair, Eli hade reprimanded them, but it did no good, and Eli, who had become old and inept, was unwilling to have more difficult conversations with his sons, and unwilling to take action. And we all can understand his response, because most of us one time or another have let things slide, because we did not want to have those difficult conversations.
And then God intervened. Young Samuel heard his named called, three times, and three times he went to Eli, telling him, “Here I am.” You see, Samuel could not yet distinguish the difference between Eli’s voice and God’s, but Eli, so much older and more experienced, figured out exactly what was going on, and he told Samuel how to respond, how to enter into conversation with God the next time God called. And so, when Samuel heard his name again, this time he answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And God not only told Samuel that a new thing would soon begin by God’s own action, but also God said that the House of Eli would be punished, that expiation for sin could never be achieved by sacrifice or offerings---a devastating judgment at this time in Israel’s history.
Poor Samuel, he had just heard devastating news, and he had no desire to tell Eli what he had heard. That was not a conversation he had any interest in initiating but notice that Eli insisted he be told everything. Samuel complied, and Eli, who deserves credit for not blaming Samuel for telling him what he did NOT want to hear, believed the words spoken by Samuel were from God. “It is the Lord,” he said. “Let him do what seems good to him.” Eli, in other words, accepted God’s judgment, in this case, a very hard thing to do.
Conversations with people can be incredibly difficult and challenging, but what about conversations with God? How do they happen? In conversation, there is a give and take, but in today’s lesson, Samuel listened, and God spoke. Samuel did not ask God questions, and God offered no further explanation. And this is how the Bible often portrays conversations with God. Consider Job and how he tried to ask God a lot of tough questions about his suffering, and finally, when God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, he basically told him to shut up. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? In other words, you are a mere puny mortal. How dare you question me? And Job repented, because he realized that his human understanding was so limited. And think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging, fervently praying for the cup of suffering to pass from him. There was no conversation, just the awful silence of God, which Jesus understood to mean that the terrible cup of suffering would not pass.
And yet we do pray. WE try to talk to God. In prayer we ask for help and blessings, for understanding, for strength, courage, wisdom and faith, and we certainly ask God questions, and we try hard to listen for a response. Expecting God to engage with us is what faithful Christians do. We want conversation, a dialogue, not a monologue, where we do all the talking and God does all the listening, or the opposite, where God does all the talking and we do all the listening We want and need a real give and take.
Some years ago, while working as a chaplain on the neurosurgery unit in a big teaching hospital, I had a 30 year old patient, a mother of two young children, afflicted with a deadly brain tumor, a glioblastoma. She had fought as hard as anyone, going through surgeries and radiation, but she was now at the end of her tether. “I have prayed so hard, she told me, “and so many others have also prayed for me, but now I think it’s time to stop and let the end come. I’ve asked God about this, whether or not it is o.k. for me to give it all up, but I don’t have any clear answer. I don’t want to confuse my thoughts with God’s, but I am done. I can’t do it anymore. And if God wants more fight out of me than God had better make it clear.” And then she asked me to do something I did not want to do at all. “Will you be with me when I tell my husband?”
It was the last place I wanted to be, the last thing I wanted to do, but how could I say, “No.” And her conversation with her husband was difficult and even ugly. “You’re a coward,” he accused. “You are a G-D coward; I never would have thought of you as a quitter.” And then he stormed out of the room.
I stayed for a while with Patricia as she sobbed her heart out, and then after a while, I found her husband in the day room, standing there, just staring out the window at the cold, barren January afternoon. Jeffery, I asked, do you know how to tell time? He looked at me for a few minutes without saying a word. And then he finally answered, “Yes, I do. It’s time, isn’t it? And then he returned to his wife’s hospital room and resumed what was a very difficult conversation.
Difficult conversations: we try to avoid them, but sometimes we just have to have them. We have them with each other, and we have them with God, even when we think God’s words are not as clear as they should be. We may look with some envy on Samuel, who, after being tutored by Eli, heard God’s words so clearly. But we have a right to wonder if it was really all so clear then, or was it in hindsight, in the looking back—especially for the writers of this story, who wrote centuries after the occurrence --- was it only then that the clarity arose? Difficult conversations. We have them with others and we have them with God, and though at the time such a conversation may not have given us what we wanted or even needed, yet we never know how God and we together will be able to use those difficult conversations to move forward toward a new beginning, a beginning to which we were blind at the time we engaged in that very difficult conversation.
I Samuel 3: 1-18
There are difficult conversations. We all have had them, or perhaps worked even harder to avoid them, but there are times when the difficulty cannot be ignored. Out of curiosity I asked some people to name their most difficult conversation---without betraying any confidences, of course. Most people could readily recall what was so painfully difficult---and for anyone worried about the divisive nature of political disagreement, no one, I repeat no one, named a political conversation or argument. It wasn’t that they had not engaged in such conversations, but they were hardly the most difficult ones.
One woman told me it was when she had to tell her mother that her husband and she were divorcing after 13 years of marriage and three kids. As hard as it was telling the children, facing my mother was far worse. Here I was 40 years old, and I was terrified of what she would say. She did not disappoint me, telling I was a failure as a mother, even though I pointed out that it takes two for a marriage to fail. Someone else confided that his most difficult conversation was with his wife, when he told her he was going to give up his law practice to go back to school and get certified to teach high school English. Another woman said it was having to tell her 17 year old son, a senior in high school, who was suffering from leukemia, that there was nothing more to be medically done, and he probably had only few months to live. His response, “But, Mom, I want to go to college in the fall.”
Well, today’s lesson from the Book of Samuel is also about difficult conversations. Samuel was young, how old exactly, we do not know, but we do know that he had been faithfully assisting the priest, Eli. Eli had been a fairly decent priest, but as the text tells us, his eyes had grown dim, meaning that he failed to see what was going on around him. Eli’s two sons, also priests, were evil; they blasphemed God and used the priesthood to enrich themselves. Now to be fair, Eli hade reprimanded them, but it did no good, and Eli, who had become old and inept, was unwilling to have more difficult conversations with his sons, and unwilling to take action. And we all can understand his response, because most of us one time or another have let things slide, because we did not want to have those difficult conversations.
And then God intervened. Young Samuel heard his named called, three times, and three times he went to Eli, telling him, “Here I am.” You see, Samuel could not yet distinguish the difference between Eli’s voice and God’s, but Eli, so much older and more experienced, figured out exactly what was going on, and he told Samuel how to respond, how to enter into conversation with God the next time God called. And so, when Samuel heard his name again, this time he answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And God not only told Samuel that a new thing would soon begin by God’s own action, but also God said that the House of Eli would be punished, that expiation for sin could never be achieved by sacrifice or offerings---a devastating judgment at this time in Israel’s history.
Poor Samuel, he had just heard devastating news, and he had no desire to tell Eli what he had heard. That was not a conversation he had any interest in initiating but notice that Eli insisted he be told everything. Samuel complied, and Eli, who deserves credit for not blaming Samuel for telling him what he did NOT want to hear, believed the words spoken by Samuel were from God. “It is the Lord,” he said. “Let him do what seems good to him.” Eli, in other words, accepted God’s judgment, in this case, a very hard thing to do.
Conversations with people can be incredibly difficult and challenging, but what about conversations with God? How do they happen? In conversation, there is a give and take, but in today’s lesson, Samuel listened, and God spoke. Samuel did not ask God questions, and God offered no further explanation. And this is how the Bible often portrays conversations with God. Consider Job and how he tried to ask God a lot of tough questions about his suffering, and finally, when God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, he basically told him to shut up. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? In other words, you are a mere puny mortal. How dare you question me? And Job repented, because he realized that his human understanding was so limited. And think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging, fervently praying for the cup of suffering to pass from him. There was no conversation, just the awful silence of God, which Jesus understood to mean that the terrible cup of suffering would not pass.
And yet we do pray. WE try to talk to God. In prayer we ask for help and blessings, for understanding, for strength, courage, wisdom and faith, and we certainly ask God questions, and we try hard to listen for a response. Expecting God to engage with us is what faithful Christians do. We want conversation, a dialogue, not a monologue, where we do all the talking and God does all the listening, or the opposite, where God does all the talking and we do all the listening We want and need a real give and take.
Some years ago, while working as a chaplain on the neurosurgery unit in a big teaching hospital, I had a 30 year old patient, a mother of two young children, afflicted with a deadly brain tumor, a glioblastoma. She had fought as hard as anyone, going through surgeries and radiation, but she was now at the end of her tether. “I have prayed so hard, she told me, “and so many others have also prayed for me, but now I think it’s time to stop and let the end come. I’ve asked God about this, whether or not it is o.k. for me to give it all up, but I don’t have any clear answer. I don’t want to confuse my thoughts with God’s, but I am done. I can’t do it anymore. And if God wants more fight out of me than God had better make it clear.” And then she asked me to do something I did not want to do at all. “Will you be with me when I tell my husband?”
It was the last place I wanted to be, the last thing I wanted to do, but how could I say, “No.” And her conversation with her husband was difficult and even ugly. “You’re a coward,” he accused. “You are a G-D coward; I never would have thought of you as a quitter.” And then he stormed out of the room.
I stayed for a while with Patricia as she sobbed her heart out, and then after a while, I found her husband in the day room, standing there, just staring out the window at the cold, barren January afternoon. Jeffery, I asked, do you know how to tell time? He looked at me for a few minutes without saying a word. And then he finally answered, “Yes, I do. It’s time, isn’t it? And then he returned to his wife’s hospital room and resumed what was a very difficult conversation.
Difficult conversations: we try to avoid them, but sometimes we just have to have them. We have them with each other, and we have them with God, even when we think God’s words are not as clear as they should be. We may look with some envy on Samuel, who, after being tutored by Eli, heard God’s words so clearly. But we have a right to wonder if it was really all so clear then, or was it in hindsight, in the looking back—especially for the writers of this story, who wrote centuries after the occurrence --- was it only then that the clarity arose? Difficult conversations. We have them with others and we have them with God, and though at the time such a conversation may not have given us what we wanted or even needed, yet we never know how God and we together will be able to use those difficult conversations to move forward toward a new beginning, a beginning to which we were blind at the time we engaged in that very difficult conversation.
January 14, 2021
Since this past November a small group from our church has been singing a hymn or two for church members, who find themselves “shut in” due to Covid 19. It is a simple act, done once a month after church, yet the simplicity of the thing brings great joy and even tears, not only to the ones to whom we sing but also to the people doing the singing. There is something uplifting and even healing not only in the caring act of showing up at someone’s home to sing but also in the sound of voice and music.
Last Sunday, while driving home from church after a singing adventure, I found myself suddenly thinking about Myra, a patient I once knew, a resident of a state mental hospital, where I worked as a chaplain for two years between 1984 to 1986. Myra had been hospitalized for over 45 years with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the early years of her hospitalization effective drugs were not readily available, and so Myra was often physically restrained. Yet there was one treatment a doctor accidentally discovered that was very successful in calming her down: listening to Bach’s partitas. And so rather than bring the restraints the doctor brought in a cassette player and the music of J.S. Bach. It worked, and Myra calmed right down. She would sit quietly on her bed with her eyes closed and a faint smile on her face and she would simply listen and be. By the time I worked there, Myra was on effective medication, but she still loved Bach, and the cassette recorder had been replaced by a CD player. Whenever I was on the floor, Myra would gently take me by the hand and lead me into the room, where she would play the music. Neither of us spoke, because the music said and did everything. Music does something to and for the human spirit, and in some cases; it is a healing balm for an embattled spirit.
Just recently my daughter, Caitlin, came across something on the internet about “choirs of the homeless.” These are not choirs going around singing FOR the homeless; these are choirs, whose members are the homeless. Volunteers often help with directing and procuring places for practice and performance, and these choirs are beginning to spring up all over the place in Europe as well as the United States. There is one in San Diego, CA, Voices of the City. A resident of the neighborhood could not help but notice the number of homeless people living on the streets, and from there she began a choir, which has changed the lives of many of the choir members as well as her own. Some of the members spoke about how worthless they had felt. A number of them had been homeless for over 10 years, sometimes much longer. People, they said, were often unkind and cruel with no understanding of how hard it is to get one’s life together after being out on the streets for a while. Reasons for homelessness vary---everything from illness, physical and/or mental, addiction, a prison record, job loss, a lack of family or friends, who can offer a place to live. The list is endless, and the stories of broken lives are heartbreaking, but the story of the choir is sheer uplift and delight. The Voices of the City has appeared on America’s Got Talent, and money raised by singing in various venues has been used to help people find a home. Yet, as one member of the choir said, “The choir means more to me than the home I have found.”
I recall last fall reading in the Sunday Courant a story about an orchestra for people dealing with mental illness. Ronald was destined for a fabulous conducting career. A graduate of the Julliard School in New York, Ronald had made his debut at Lincoln Center at the age of 20, and three years later he became the first American to win the prestigious Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition, the Olympic prize of conducting. The prize led to more golden opportunities, but then it all began to fall apart when his mental illness took over his life. He said he realized, when he looked back upon his life, that for a very long time something had been wrong. Even as a child he would have periods of great happiness followed by periods of dark sadness, but it was not until he was 30 that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was made. He said everyone abandoned him---no more work, no more opportunities.
Ronald was given another chance when he was hired for an orchestra in Burlington, Vermont by a director whose own career had been sidelined by panic attacks. But he simply could not adhere to the rigorous schedule, even with medication, and he barely lasted a year in the job. It was after this that he decided to establish his own orchestra for people struggling with mental illness, and now there are three branches: Burlington, Vermont, Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine.
In 2013 Ronald and his wife were invited to a national meeting of the Kennedy Forum, founded by Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, to talk about their work in order to promote understanding of mental illness and the importance of meaningful work. A music therapist, who plays instruments with the mentally ill, described how music involves a different part of the brain and allows persons to relate to the world in a different way. “It’s outside the cognitive realm,” he said, “and engages and enlarges the intuitive part of the brain, which is not damaged and hurting.” And so, music soothes, inspires and uplifts us, whether we are well or sick, happy or sad. As William Congreve wrote centuries ago:
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.
I’ve read that things inanimate have moved,
And, as with living souls have been informed,
By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Since this past November a small group from our church has been singing a hymn or two for church members, who find themselves “shut in” due to Covid 19. It is a simple act, done once a month after church, yet the simplicity of the thing brings great joy and even tears, not only to the ones to whom we sing but also to the people doing the singing. There is something uplifting and even healing not only in the caring act of showing up at someone’s home to sing but also in the sound of voice and music.
Last Sunday, while driving home from church after a singing adventure, I found myself suddenly thinking about Myra, a patient I once knew, a resident of a state mental hospital, where I worked as a chaplain for two years between 1984 to 1986. Myra had been hospitalized for over 45 years with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the early years of her hospitalization effective drugs were not readily available, and so Myra was often physically restrained. Yet there was one treatment a doctor accidentally discovered that was very successful in calming her down: listening to Bach’s partitas. And so rather than bring the restraints the doctor brought in a cassette player and the music of J.S. Bach. It worked, and Myra calmed right down. She would sit quietly on her bed with her eyes closed and a faint smile on her face and she would simply listen and be. By the time I worked there, Myra was on effective medication, but she still loved Bach, and the cassette recorder had been replaced by a CD player. Whenever I was on the floor, Myra would gently take me by the hand and lead me into the room, where she would play the music. Neither of us spoke, because the music said and did everything. Music does something to and for the human spirit, and in some cases; it is a healing balm for an embattled spirit.
Just recently my daughter, Caitlin, came across something on the internet about “choirs of the homeless.” These are not choirs going around singing FOR the homeless; these are choirs, whose members are the homeless. Volunteers often help with directing and procuring places for practice and performance, and these choirs are beginning to spring up all over the place in Europe as well as the United States. There is one in San Diego, CA, Voices of the City. A resident of the neighborhood could not help but notice the number of homeless people living on the streets, and from there she began a choir, which has changed the lives of many of the choir members as well as her own. Some of the members spoke about how worthless they had felt. A number of them had been homeless for over 10 years, sometimes much longer. People, they said, were often unkind and cruel with no understanding of how hard it is to get one’s life together after being out on the streets for a while. Reasons for homelessness vary---everything from illness, physical and/or mental, addiction, a prison record, job loss, a lack of family or friends, who can offer a place to live. The list is endless, and the stories of broken lives are heartbreaking, but the story of the choir is sheer uplift and delight. The Voices of the City has appeared on America’s Got Talent, and money raised by singing in various venues has been used to help people find a home. Yet, as one member of the choir said, “The choir means more to me than the home I have found.”
I recall last fall reading in the Sunday Courant a story about an orchestra for people dealing with mental illness. Ronald was destined for a fabulous conducting career. A graduate of the Julliard School in New York, Ronald had made his debut at Lincoln Center at the age of 20, and three years later he became the first American to win the prestigious Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition, the Olympic prize of conducting. The prize led to more golden opportunities, but then it all began to fall apart when his mental illness took over his life. He said he realized, when he looked back upon his life, that for a very long time something had been wrong. Even as a child he would have periods of great happiness followed by periods of dark sadness, but it was not until he was 30 that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was made. He said everyone abandoned him---no more work, no more opportunities.
Ronald was given another chance when he was hired for an orchestra in Burlington, Vermont by a director whose own career had been sidelined by panic attacks. But he simply could not adhere to the rigorous schedule, even with medication, and he barely lasted a year in the job. It was after this that he decided to establish his own orchestra for people struggling with mental illness, and now there are three branches: Burlington, Vermont, Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine.
In 2013 Ronald and his wife were invited to a national meeting of the Kennedy Forum, founded by Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, to talk about their work in order to promote understanding of mental illness and the importance of meaningful work. A music therapist, who plays instruments with the mentally ill, described how music involves a different part of the brain and allows persons to relate to the world in a different way. “It’s outside the cognitive realm,” he said, “and engages and enlarges the intuitive part of the brain, which is not damaged and hurting.” And so, music soothes, inspires and uplifts us, whether we are well or sick, happy or sad. As William Congreve wrote centuries ago:
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.
I’ve read that things inanimate have moved,
And, as with living souls have been informed,
By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
God On Our Side by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 1/10/2021
Genesis 1: 1-5
Mark 1: 4-11
Back in 2006, when I took a trip to Israel, I remember very well the drive leading from the sea to the city of Jerusalem. The road was steep, winding through rugged terrain, bereft of vegetation, and I recall thinking to myself, “This hardly looks like the promised land.” It was slow going, made even slower by the military trucks that lumbered ahead of us, so the only thing to do was to take in the scenery, dotted as it was with the wreckage of tanks and armored cars, marks of past skirmishes, left, we were told, as memorials to those who had fallen. The name Jerusalem means “foundation of peace,” an ironic meaning, given the history of the city. As I sat in my seat, looking out the window, one of my colleagues remarked that this was the path upon which Jesus would have walked to Jerusalem. It would have taken him a while to travel the 30 miles or so, and as far as we know, he did not go there very often. But we do know that wherever Jesus wanted to go, he walked, like in today’s lesson from Mark’s first chapter.
In our reading from Mark, we meet Jesus traveling on another road, not to Jerusalem, but from Nazareth to the wilderness where John the Baptist was baptizing people in the River Jordan. Though Jesus did a lot of walking, he didn’t often move outside his home locale of Galilee. He was sort of a country boy, really, from an unimpressive town named Nazareth in the region of Galilee. Most of his ministry took place on the roads and byways of Galilee---that is where people met him--- but whenever he did move outside his neighborhood something significant always happened--- like in today’s reading, when he went into the wilderness to be baptized by John. Now this word wilderness is very significant for the biblical imagination, because it signifies a land, where the unusual happened, a place where God just might show up unannounced and unexpected. And this wilderness is where Jesus was baptized, in the muddy Jordan River.
Notice what the text says: As he was coming out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending. We do not have to take the description literally as long as we understand that Mark means to communicate that what is happening is no easy and natural process. There is violence in the Spirit’s descent---the heavens were ripped apart and opened wide. This is a way of saying that spiritual growth and change are not always easy or comfortable as John would later learn, when he found himself in Herod’s prison and then beheaded, because of a stupid, drunken promise Herod had made to his stepdaughter, Salome.
So here we are a few weeks after Christmas, and we suddenly find ourselves out in the wilderness, where John the Baptist is doing his thing. John’s baptism was for the repentance of sin, and since the Christian tradition interprets Jesus as sinless, we might well wonder why Jesus submitted to baptism. But submission, not sin, is indeed the point. Jesus did not baptize himself; he could not baptize himself. There are some things we cannot do for ourselves, a point we, who live in a culture, which glorifies self-creation and self-sufficiency, should ponder.
In fact, the church exists because we are not self-sufficient. On our own we often cannot do such a great job of growing ourselves spiritually. If spiritual growth is nothing more than tapping into the deep wisdom that already lies within, I fear we will not make much progress, because we human beings have this tendency to tell ourselves what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear. Sometimes it is not our own inner voice we need, but rather something outside ourselves, a Word that challenges our normal way of understanding and looking at things. As precious as our own inner voice and wisdom are, they are not always enough. This is the point about Jesus submitting to baptism, an act done to him by someone else. Even Jesus was not spiritually self-sufficient.
While on my trip to Israel, one of my co-travelers and I got into a discussion about baptism. We had just arrived at the Jordan River, and I was shocked really how muddy and unattractive it was. And yet, there were all these people, from all over the world, clamoring to be baptized. They obviously were taking it very seriously. And I commented to one of my fellow travelers how people who really have very little interest in the church, do not attend church and really have no definite plans to go, nonetheless want their children baptized. I don’t know what they are after, I said, and I don’t think they know either.
My co-traveler responded by telling me story about a time she was a minister out in Montana, in this lovely little Presbyterian Church, near the mountains. “It was a beautiful place,” she said, “and I often thought the beauty was a disincentive for people to attend church, since they could feast on the beauty of the scenery and be filled with this spiritual sense of well-being. And for many people that was enough.
Well, one evening, around 9:00, I heard this frantic knock on the door, and there was this young woman, carrying her eight month old baby, whom she wanted baptized right then and there. But why? I asked her. Why the emergency? She explained to me that she was leaving her abusive husband, and she did not want to travel without her baby having God’s mark. “It’s not magic,” I told her. “If you are afraid of some harm coming to you and your baby, a baptism won’t protect you. Perhaps you need an order of protection from the court.” No, she insisted. My daughter needs to be baptized. Will you do it, please? And so, I did. I did not feel I could refuse or should refuse, and as soon as the baptism was over, the young woman and her baby left. I was very uncomfortable and worried. I heard nothing more until three years later, when I suddenly received a letter from the mother. She told me she was divorced, resettled with a good job, and her little girl was now approaching four years of age. “I am so grateful for what you did that night. It gave me more courage than you will ever know. I felt that God really was on our side, and I do believe that God was, and God is.
And maybe that really is the point for not only this mother and her child, but also for us and even for Jesus: God on our side. I don’t mean God on our side exclusively, as if God on our side means that God is not on someone else’s side. But I think for this young woman and her baby it meant that she felt she was not alone---that God cared about her life, wanting it to flourish and be full and well. And baptism is the sign of that care and love. Baptism does not create it; the care and love of God are always there, but the sacrament makes explicit what we are often blind to, what we in our daily lives often ignore or just cannot see. Sometimes it is such challenging situations that push us to search for and accept grace, which is what a sacrament is: the receiving of God’s love and care, which is always there for us.
And I imagine that there was something challenging for Jesus, something pushing and pulling him beyond the confines of his hometown. It is no accident that Mark places Jesus’ baptism in the wilderness, which symbolizes the place, beyond the ordinary and the comfortable.
Before Jesus could be baptized and see the spirit descend on him, he had to travel a distance from his home in the region of Galilee into the wilderness, where he submitted to baptism. And then the Spirit would drive him farther into the wilderness, where he would be tempted for 40 days and nights by Satan. Only then would he return to Galilee to do the work of his ministry, now confident that God was indeed on his side.
Genesis 1: 1-5
Mark 1: 4-11
Back in 2006, when I took a trip to Israel, I remember very well the drive leading from the sea to the city of Jerusalem. The road was steep, winding through rugged terrain, bereft of vegetation, and I recall thinking to myself, “This hardly looks like the promised land.” It was slow going, made even slower by the military trucks that lumbered ahead of us, so the only thing to do was to take in the scenery, dotted as it was with the wreckage of tanks and armored cars, marks of past skirmishes, left, we were told, as memorials to those who had fallen. The name Jerusalem means “foundation of peace,” an ironic meaning, given the history of the city. As I sat in my seat, looking out the window, one of my colleagues remarked that this was the path upon which Jesus would have walked to Jerusalem. It would have taken him a while to travel the 30 miles or so, and as far as we know, he did not go there very often. But we do know that wherever Jesus wanted to go, he walked, like in today’s lesson from Mark’s first chapter.
In our reading from Mark, we meet Jesus traveling on another road, not to Jerusalem, but from Nazareth to the wilderness where John the Baptist was baptizing people in the River Jordan. Though Jesus did a lot of walking, he didn’t often move outside his home locale of Galilee. He was sort of a country boy, really, from an unimpressive town named Nazareth in the region of Galilee. Most of his ministry took place on the roads and byways of Galilee---that is where people met him--- but whenever he did move outside his neighborhood something significant always happened--- like in today’s reading, when he went into the wilderness to be baptized by John. Now this word wilderness is very significant for the biblical imagination, because it signifies a land, where the unusual happened, a place where God just might show up unannounced and unexpected. And this wilderness is where Jesus was baptized, in the muddy Jordan River.
Notice what the text says: As he was coming out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending. We do not have to take the description literally as long as we understand that Mark means to communicate that what is happening is no easy and natural process. There is violence in the Spirit’s descent---the heavens were ripped apart and opened wide. This is a way of saying that spiritual growth and change are not always easy or comfortable as John would later learn, when he found himself in Herod’s prison and then beheaded, because of a stupid, drunken promise Herod had made to his stepdaughter, Salome.
So here we are a few weeks after Christmas, and we suddenly find ourselves out in the wilderness, where John the Baptist is doing his thing. John’s baptism was for the repentance of sin, and since the Christian tradition interprets Jesus as sinless, we might well wonder why Jesus submitted to baptism. But submission, not sin, is indeed the point. Jesus did not baptize himself; he could not baptize himself. There are some things we cannot do for ourselves, a point we, who live in a culture, which glorifies self-creation and self-sufficiency, should ponder.
In fact, the church exists because we are not self-sufficient. On our own we often cannot do such a great job of growing ourselves spiritually. If spiritual growth is nothing more than tapping into the deep wisdom that already lies within, I fear we will not make much progress, because we human beings have this tendency to tell ourselves what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear. Sometimes it is not our own inner voice we need, but rather something outside ourselves, a Word that challenges our normal way of understanding and looking at things. As precious as our own inner voice and wisdom are, they are not always enough. This is the point about Jesus submitting to baptism, an act done to him by someone else. Even Jesus was not spiritually self-sufficient.
While on my trip to Israel, one of my co-travelers and I got into a discussion about baptism. We had just arrived at the Jordan River, and I was shocked really how muddy and unattractive it was. And yet, there were all these people, from all over the world, clamoring to be baptized. They obviously were taking it very seriously. And I commented to one of my fellow travelers how people who really have very little interest in the church, do not attend church and really have no definite plans to go, nonetheless want their children baptized. I don’t know what they are after, I said, and I don’t think they know either.
My co-traveler responded by telling me story about a time she was a minister out in Montana, in this lovely little Presbyterian Church, near the mountains. “It was a beautiful place,” she said, “and I often thought the beauty was a disincentive for people to attend church, since they could feast on the beauty of the scenery and be filled with this spiritual sense of well-being. And for many people that was enough.
Well, one evening, around 9:00, I heard this frantic knock on the door, and there was this young woman, carrying her eight month old baby, whom she wanted baptized right then and there. But why? I asked her. Why the emergency? She explained to me that she was leaving her abusive husband, and she did not want to travel without her baby having God’s mark. “It’s not magic,” I told her. “If you are afraid of some harm coming to you and your baby, a baptism won’t protect you. Perhaps you need an order of protection from the court.” No, she insisted. My daughter needs to be baptized. Will you do it, please? And so, I did. I did not feel I could refuse or should refuse, and as soon as the baptism was over, the young woman and her baby left. I was very uncomfortable and worried. I heard nothing more until three years later, when I suddenly received a letter from the mother. She told me she was divorced, resettled with a good job, and her little girl was now approaching four years of age. “I am so grateful for what you did that night. It gave me more courage than you will ever know. I felt that God really was on our side, and I do believe that God was, and God is.
And maybe that really is the point for not only this mother and her child, but also for us and even for Jesus: God on our side. I don’t mean God on our side exclusively, as if God on our side means that God is not on someone else’s side. But I think for this young woman and her baby it meant that she felt she was not alone---that God cared about her life, wanting it to flourish and be full and well. And baptism is the sign of that care and love. Baptism does not create it; the care and love of God are always there, but the sacrament makes explicit what we are often blind to, what we in our daily lives often ignore or just cannot see. Sometimes it is such challenging situations that push us to search for and accept grace, which is what a sacrament is: the receiving of God’s love and care, which is always there for us.
And I imagine that there was something challenging for Jesus, something pushing and pulling him beyond the confines of his hometown. It is no accident that Mark places Jesus’ baptism in the wilderness, which symbolizes the place, beyond the ordinary and the comfortable.
Before Jesus could be baptized and see the spirit descend on him, he had to travel a distance from his home in the region of Galilee into the wilderness, where he submitted to baptism. And then the Spirit would drive him farther into the wilderness, where he would be tempted for 40 days and nights by Satan. Only then would he return to Galilee to do the work of his ministry, now confident that God was indeed on his side.
January 7, 2021
This is the time of year when people make New Year’s resolutions. Often these resolutions are concerned with issues of health: lose weight, eat less sugar, exercise more, drink less alcohol, etc. You get the picture, and perhaps many of you have made such resolutions in the past, if not now. I was told at the local Y, where I exercise, that its membership always has a strong bump up in January, though this year might be different because of the virus. By March, however, the enthusiasm has been worn down, and soon after that, the resolutions to exercise and be healthier are pretty much gone. However, if you can stick to your resolutions for at least four or five months, you actually have a pretty good chance of sticking to it for the remainder of the year. So, that’s good news.
I recently read that the problem with resolutions is that they often come down to an unfavorable benefit to pain ratio. In other words, after some months, people begin to feel that all their efforts (pain) are just not worth the benefits. Perhaps the weight does not come off so quickly, or you discover that the chocolate you resolved to renounce, really does give you tremendous pleasure, and so it is not worth the pain of giving it up. Thus, in the midst of this awful pandemic, some people are suggesting that we would be better served by embracing a different category of resolutions, concerning character development and relationship building---for example, a resolution to be more forgiving or more grateful.
The Templeton World Charity Foundation, for example, publishes forgiveness workbooks particularly for persons living in areas, suffering from high levels of injustice and violence. They call the process REACH, and it can be used by anyone. (R) Recall the hurt. (E) Empathize with the offender; (A) Altruistic gift of forgiveness; (C) Commit; and (H) Hold on to that feeling and resolution of forgiveness.
Another suggestion for a resolution revolves around gratitude. We have just come off a season of cultivating gratitude for our church family and friends as we were also asked to consider gratitude in our daily life. In 2003 a major study was undertaken to study the benefits of cultivating gratitude, and its results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. One group was randomly assigned to keep a weekly list of things or people for whom they were grateful, while the other group was told to keep a list of weekly hassles or even just neutral events. After 10 weeks it was found that the grateful group simply felt better---more relaxed, less anxious, physically stronger. People in the grateful group also reported that they found themselves exercising more and feeling more hopeful about the coming weeks.
There are many variations of this with people initially making a list of five items for which they are grateful and then each week adding one or two additions. Some people decided that they would take a daily walk at a particular time to consider what they could add to the list. They found this much more productive than just sitting down and trying to come up with some items to add to the list. Others find that prayer, asking God for help in recognizing ways to be more grateful and forgiving, actually does lead to greater insight. As Jesus taught, “Ask and it shall be given. Knock and the door will be opened. Search and you will find.”
One could do the same thing regarding forgiveness—making lists and taking walks, which for many people seem to help them clarify their thinking. I have read somewhere that writers, who periodically suffer from writer’s block, often find that a form of exercise, particularly walking, helps them work through the blockage.
We all find ourselves blocked now and then, and perhaps in this very difficult time, a raging pandemic as well as a controversial election, the feelings may even be more pronounced. Anger, hurt and disappointment sometimes work their way into our hearts and spirits so that we find ourselves overwhelmed by negative emotions. Such feelings and experiences are part of the human condition, and we cannot just wish them away or deny them. But if we can put them into perspective or put them in dialogue with efforts to be grateful and forgiving, we just might find that we feel calmer and more at peace. We also might find that our spiritual life takes on a deeper dimension, where we feel God’s presence in our efforts to embrace a more grateful and forgiving attitude.
We have just come through the Advent/Christmas season, where we celebrated the gifts of hope, peace, joy and love. It just might be that cultivating gratitude and forgiveness makes those four gifts more apparent and real.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
This is the time of year when people make New Year’s resolutions. Often these resolutions are concerned with issues of health: lose weight, eat less sugar, exercise more, drink less alcohol, etc. You get the picture, and perhaps many of you have made such resolutions in the past, if not now. I was told at the local Y, where I exercise, that its membership always has a strong bump up in January, though this year might be different because of the virus. By March, however, the enthusiasm has been worn down, and soon after that, the resolutions to exercise and be healthier are pretty much gone. However, if you can stick to your resolutions for at least four or five months, you actually have a pretty good chance of sticking to it for the remainder of the year. So, that’s good news.
I recently read that the problem with resolutions is that they often come down to an unfavorable benefit to pain ratio. In other words, after some months, people begin to feel that all their efforts (pain) are just not worth the benefits. Perhaps the weight does not come off so quickly, or you discover that the chocolate you resolved to renounce, really does give you tremendous pleasure, and so it is not worth the pain of giving it up. Thus, in the midst of this awful pandemic, some people are suggesting that we would be better served by embracing a different category of resolutions, concerning character development and relationship building---for example, a resolution to be more forgiving or more grateful.
The Templeton World Charity Foundation, for example, publishes forgiveness workbooks particularly for persons living in areas, suffering from high levels of injustice and violence. They call the process REACH, and it can be used by anyone. (R) Recall the hurt. (E) Empathize with the offender; (A) Altruistic gift of forgiveness; (C) Commit; and (H) Hold on to that feeling and resolution of forgiveness.
Another suggestion for a resolution revolves around gratitude. We have just come off a season of cultivating gratitude for our church family and friends as we were also asked to consider gratitude in our daily life. In 2003 a major study was undertaken to study the benefits of cultivating gratitude, and its results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. One group was randomly assigned to keep a weekly list of things or people for whom they were grateful, while the other group was told to keep a list of weekly hassles or even just neutral events. After 10 weeks it was found that the grateful group simply felt better---more relaxed, less anxious, physically stronger. People in the grateful group also reported that they found themselves exercising more and feeling more hopeful about the coming weeks.
There are many variations of this with people initially making a list of five items for which they are grateful and then each week adding one or two additions. Some people decided that they would take a daily walk at a particular time to consider what they could add to the list. They found this much more productive than just sitting down and trying to come up with some items to add to the list. Others find that prayer, asking God for help in recognizing ways to be more grateful and forgiving, actually does lead to greater insight. As Jesus taught, “Ask and it shall be given. Knock and the door will be opened. Search and you will find.”
One could do the same thing regarding forgiveness—making lists and taking walks, which for many people seem to help them clarify their thinking. I have read somewhere that writers, who periodically suffer from writer’s block, often find that a form of exercise, particularly walking, helps them work through the blockage.
We all find ourselves blocked now and then, and perhaps in this very difficult time, a raging pandemic as well as a controversial election, the feelings may even be more pronounced. Anger, hurt and disappointment sometimes work their way into our hearts and spirits so that we find ourselves overwhelmed by negative emotions. Such feelings and experiences are part of the human condition, and we cannot just wish them away or deny them. But if we can put them into perspective or put them in dialogue with efforts to be grateful and forgiving, we just might find that we feel calmer and more at peace. We also might find that our spiritual life takes on a deeper dimension, where we feel God’s presence in our efforts to embrace a more grateful and forgiving attitude.
We have just come through the Advent/Christmas season, where we celebrated the gifts of hope, peace, joy and love. It just might be that cultivating gratitude and forgiveness makes those four gifts more apparent and real.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE PERSISTENT WORD by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 1/03/2021
John 1: 1-18
It was a week after Christmas, and Jeremy was sitting in the living room as he stared out the window. He had been sitting there all morning. In fact, he had been sitting around since Christmas morning after returning from a visit to the nursing home, where his father had just died on Christmas Eve. “Do you want to talk about it?” his wife, Karen asked. Talk about what? he asked. Your father’s death, she answered, her voice rising in annoyance. “But I am not thinking about my father, he insisted. I am thinking about Wesley and the 15 year old girl I picked up on the dark road about an hour outside of town.”
You see, Jeremy’s sister had called him on Christmas Eve to tell him he should make the three hour drive to the nursing home to see his father before he died. Jeremy didn’t want to go. His father had been suffering from dementia for a few years now, and Jeremy doubted his father would even recognize him. ”He knows we are familiar people,” his sister insisted. “even if he can’t recall our names or our relationship to him. Besides, you need to come for your sake, not his.”
Jeremy knew his sister was right, and Karen, his wife, agreed. And so, he went. He wasn’t consumed with grief about his father’s impending death. It was relief he felt that it would finally be over. Besides, his father would hate being this way, if he had enough awareness to realize it, which he didn’t. Jeremy was about an hour away from the nursing home. It was already pitch black on the road, no lights at all, except for some lights from the few houses he passed. Suddenly, there she was in the middle of the road, waving her hands frantically in a gesture of need. He almost hit her, swerving to avoid an accident. He was shaken enough to pull the car over, and she came running up to his car. I need to get to town she said. Can you take me? Well, you can’t walk. It is at least an hour’s drive. So yes, get in. This is no time to be out in the middle of the road. I almost hit you, he said, accusingly. She defended herself by insisting there are not many cars driving by. “I had to stand in the middle of the road to get your attention.” Well, you succeeded in that, Jeremy admitted.
His passenger was a young girl, maybe 14 or 15. She sat in the car quietly sniffling, pulling out tissues and wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. Seems like you got something big on your mind, Jeremy said. I don’t want to talk about it, she answered. Just get me to town. But within five minutes she was sobbing and told Jeremy that she was pregnant, and her father had kicked her out of the house. I’ve got my plans, she said, and enough money to carry them out, so I hope I will be o.k. Jeremy did not know what to say, so he answered, “I hope so too.” My father called me terrible names, she said. He was so angry. I don’t even know if he will let me back, even after I have taken care of things. Jeremy sympathized, “I know how tough fathers can be. My own father was tough too. Can I tell you a story? It is a true one, and it happened on Christmas Eve. Since there was no objection, Jeremy went ahead with his story.
It was 1967, a very tough year for our family. In November of that year, we got word that Wesley, my older brother, had died in a prison in North Viet Nam. He was a pilot, and two years before his plane went down. For about 9 months we kept up hope, but finally, in order to get on with life, my parents decided that he must be dead. And then we got this terrible news. Yes, Wesley was dead, but he died in a North Viet Nam stink hole. He had been there for two years. My father was never the same. Wesley, twelve years older than I, was his favorite.
He adored and admired him, and the thought of Wesley being in a prison for two years, suffering that way, perhaps even being tortured, my father just could not stand it.
He had always been a religious man. He prayed and as a family we went to church every week, but after this news, my father would have nothing to do with church or with God. He just said, “There is no God. I don’t believe and I can’t believe.”
He didn’t like it that my mother continued to go to church and take my sister and me with her, but he did not try to prevent it. Well, that Christmas Eve in 1967, I was 12 and singing a solo in church. “Please, Paul,” my mother begged. “Come to church with us and hear Jeremy sing.” But my father flatly refused. “Well, why don’t you sit here and listen to Jeremy’s solo,” my mother suggested. Very reluctantly, he sat down, and I started to sing about the Good News of Jesus birth and the star of peace and hope and good will, shining for all. And suddenly, my father flew into a rage. He grabbed me and started shaking me so hard I thought my head would suddenly be disconnected from my body. I was terrified. My father had never laid a hand on me. “Paul,” my mother yelled, Leave him alone.” My father let go of me, but he went up to my mother and started shaking her. He had never even raised his voice to her. It’s all lies, Elizabeth, he yelled. Lies, lies and more lies!
How can you allow these kids to be exposed to such rot? There is no peace or good will or hope or anything. It is a cruel, hateful world, and people die because of the hate. My father was shaking with rage, but I had never seen my mother stronger. “Yes, Paul,” she said. “There is hate and cruelty and death, but the Word is stronger. The Word is louder.”
And then I just bolted out the door. I ran and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t stop until I was deep in the dark woods, lost, without a coat or a light. I thought I was going to die. I don’t know how long I wandered. I had no sense of time. But suddenly I saw a light, and so I just ran toward it. And I ran smack into my father, who was looking for me. We didn’t say a word to each other as we walked home. It was too late for any of us to make the Christmas Eve service, so we just stayed home and ate a quiet dinner. No one said a word about what had happened. In fact, no one EVER mentioned the incident. My mother died a few years ago, and I wanted to say something about it to her, but I never did. Even my sister wouldn’t talk. Right after my mother died, I tried bringing it up, but she just silenced me.
Jeremy pulled up to the nursing home, which was about a half mile from the town center. I won’t be long he said. And then I will drive you where you need to go. And if you want to go home, I will drive you there as well.
When Jeremy walked into his father’s room, his sister, Kate, was there. “You’re too late,” she said. “Dad died about fifteen minutes ago. But he whispered something before he died. “Tell your mother the Word is stronger and louder.” Jeremy and Kate looked at each other knowingly, but neither of them said a word. When Jeremy returned to his car, the young girl, whose name he did not even know, was gone. And so, he drove home.
He did not tell his wife anything about what had happened until a week later. In fact, even she did not know about that Christmas Eve in 1967, and she like everyone else both inside and outside the family thought Wesley had died in a plane crash in 1965. The family would never share the painful truth with anyone.
You know something, Karen, Jeremy said. I have been thinking this past week about Wesley and that young girl and my mother’s insistence that the Word is stronger and louder than all the hate and cruelty. I don’t think strong and loud are the words I would use. I mean the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, yet the World knew him not. And because it did not know and does not know, we still have all this cruelty and hate, which the Word does not and perhaps cannot shout down. But here’s the thing: the Word is persistent. It persists in showing up again and again and again. And all the cruelty and hatred and despair cannot prevent its persistence. And maybe that is the best news there is. It just does not give up—ever. It persists in working in the world, hoping that the world will hear it. And maybe someday it will.
John 1: 1-18
It was a week after Christmas, and Jeremy was sitting in the living room as he stared out the window. He had been sitting there all morning. In fact, he had been sitting around since Christmas morning after returning from a visit to the nursing home, where his father had just died on Christmas Eve. “Do you want to talk about it?” his wife, Karen asked. Talk about what? he asked. Your father’s death, she answered, her voice rising in annoyance. “But I am not thinking about my father, he insisted. I am thinking about Wesley and the 15 year old girl I picked up on the dark road about an hour outside of town.”
You see, Jeremy’s sister had called him on Christmas Eve to tell him he should make the three hour drive to the nursing home to see his father before he died. Jeremy didn’t want to go. His father had been suffering from dementia for a few years now, and Jeremy doubted his father would even recognize him. ”He knows we are familiar people,” his sister insisted. “even if he can’t recall our names or our relationship to him. Besides, you need to come for your sake, not his.”
Jeremy knew his sister was right, and Karen, his wife, agreed. And so, he went. He wasn’t consumed with grief about his father’s impending death. It was relief he felt that it would finally be over. Besides, his father would hate being this way, if he had enough awareness to realize it, which he didn’t. Jeremy was about an hour away from the nursing home. It was already pitch black on the road, no lights at all, except for some lights from the few houses he passed. Suddenly, there she was in the middle of the road, waving her hands frantically in a gesture of need. He almost hit her, swerving to avoid an accident. He was shaken enough to pull the car over, and she came running up to his car. I need to get to town she said. Can you take me? Well, you can’t walk. It is at least an hour’s drive. So yes, get in. This is no time to be out in the middle of the road. I almost hit you, he said, accusingly. She defended herself by insisting there are not many cars driving by. “I had to stand in the middle of the road to get your attention.” Well, you succeeded in that, Jeremy admitted.
His passenger was a young girl, maybe 14 or 15. She sat in the car quietly sniffling, pulling out tissues and wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. Seems like you got something big on your mind, Jeremy said. I don’t want to talk about it, she answered. Just get me to town. But within five minutes she was sobbing and told Jeremy that she was pregnant, and her father had kicked her out of the house. I’ve got my plans, she said, and enough money to carry them out, so I hope I will be o.k. Jeremy did not know what to say, so he answered, “I hope so too.” My father called me terrible names, she said. He was so angry. I don’t even know if he will let me back, even after I have taken care of things. Jeremy sympathized, “I know how tough fathers can be. My own father was tough too. Can I tell you a story? It is a true one, and it happened on Christmas Eve. Since there was no objection, Jeremy went ahead with his story.
It was 1967, a very tough year for our family. In November of that year, we got word that Wesley, my older brother, had died in a prison in North Viet Nam. He was a pilot, and two years before his plane went down. For about 9 months we kept up hope, but finally, in order to get on with life, my parents decided that he must be dead. And then we got this terrible news. Yes, Wesley was dead, but he died in a North Viet Nam stink hole. He had been there for two years. My father was never the same. Wesley, twelve years older than I, was his favorite.
He adored and admired him, and the thought of Wesley being in a prison for two years, suffering that way, perhaps even being tortured, my father just could not stand it.
He had always been a religious man. He prayed and as a family we went to church every week, but after this news, my father would have nothing to do with church or with God. He just said, “There is no God. I don’t believe and I can’t believe.”
He didn’t like it that my mother continued to go to church and take my sister and me with her, but he did not try to prevent it. Well, that Christmas Eve in 1967, I was 12 and singing a solo in church. “Please, Paul,” my mother begged. “Come to church with us and hear Jeremy sing.” But my father flatly refused. “Well, why don’t you sit here and listen to Jeremy’s solo,” my mother suggested. Very reluctantly, he sat down, and I started to sing about the Good News of Jesus birth and the star of peace and hope and good will, shining for all. And suddenly, my father flew into a rage. He grabbed me and started shaking me so hard I thought my head would suddenly be disconnected from my body. I was terrified. My father had never laid a hand on me. “Paul,” my mother yelled, Leave him alone.” My father let go of me, but he went up to my mother and started shaking her. He had never even raised his voice to her. It’s all lies, Elizabeth, he yelled. Lies, lies and more lies!
How can you allow these kids to be exposed to such rot? There is no peace or good will or hope or anything. It is a cruel, hateful world, and people die because of the hate. My father was shaking with rage, but I had never seen my mother stronger. “Yes, Paul,” she said. “There is hate and cruelty and death, but the Word is stronger. The Word is louder.”
And then I just bolted out the door. I ran and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t stop until I was deep in the dark woods, lost, without a coat or a light. I thought I was going to die. I don’t know how long I wandered. I had no sense of time. But suddenly I saw a light, and so I just ran toward it. And I ran smack into my father, who was looking for me. We didn’t say a word to each other as we walked home. It was too late for any of us to make the Christmas Eve service, so we just stayed home and ate a quiet dinner. No one said a word about what had happened. In fact, no one EVER mentioned the incident. My mother died a few years ago, and I wanted to say something about it to her, but I never did. Even my sister wouldn’t talk. Right after my mother died, I tried bringing it up, but she just silenced me.
Jeremy pulled up to the nursing home, which was about a half mile from the town center. I won’t be long he said. And then I will drive you where you need to go. And if you want to go home, I will drive you there as well.
When Jeremy walked into his father’s room, his sister, Kate, was there. “You’re too late,” she said. “Dad died about fifteen minutes ago. But he whispered something before he died. “Tell your mother the Word is stronger and louder.” Jeremy and Kate looked at each other knowingly, but neither of them said a word. When Jeremy returned to his car, the young girl, whose name he did not even know, was gone. And so, he drove home.
He did not tell his wife anything about what had happened until a week later. In fact, even she did not know about that Christmas Eve in 1967, and she like everyone else both inside and outside the family thought Wesley had died in a plane crash in 1965. The family would never share the painful truth with anyone.
You know something, Karen, Jeremy said. I have been thinking this past week about Wesley and that young girl and my mother’s insistence that the Word is stronger and louder than all the hate and cruelty. I don’t think strong and loud are the words I would use. I mean the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, yet the World knew him not. And because it did not know and does not know, we still have all this cruelty and hate, which the Word does not and perhaps cannot shout down. But here’s the thing: the Word is persistent. It persists in showing up again and again and again. And all the cruelty and hatred and despair cannot prevent its persistence. And maybe that is the best news there is. It just does not give up—ever. It persists in working in the world, hoping that the world will hear it. And maybe someday it will.
NUNC DIMITTIS: NOW DISMISS by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 12/27/2020
Luke 2: 22-40
I know nothing about jazz, but I read somewhere that John Coltrane was one of the great jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, and in one of his concerts, after playing “A Love Supreme,” he put down his saxophone and simply said, Nunc Dimittis. He felt he could never play the piece more perfectly, and if his whole life had been for this one moment, it would have been enough. Nunc Dimittis: it is Latin for Now dismiss. These two words are from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Song of Simeon we heard this morning in Luke’s gospel. The NRSV reads: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation,” Simeon was ready to go, ready to die, because he finally had seen what he had been waiting for.
It’s not an uncommon story. Sometimes people will not die until that special something comes to pass. Perhaps it’s a birth, or a marriage or even a graduation. My husband had a student some years ago, the first one in her entire extended family, to attend college, and her great grandfather told her that he would not die until he knew she had graduated. And indeed, on the day of the graduation, a call came into the hospital that the ceremony was over. The 96 year old man appeared to be unconscious, but when his daughter bent down and whispered in his ear that Maggie had her diploma from Wesleyan and would be headed to Colombia Medical School in the fall, he gave a faint smile and a few minutes later breathed his last: Nunc Dimittis.
Luke’s gospel is the only one to mention these two old people, Simeon and Anna. A birth always points toward the future, but in this case, it did not forget the past. Anna and Simeon symbolize the Jewish tradition, which had been waiting and hoping for the Messiah, a Messiah, who in the words of Luke is not only for Israel but also for the whole world, a light of revelation to the Gentiles. Besides the shepherds, Anna and Simeon are the only ones in Luke’s gospel, who personally meet the Holy family. And notice where they meet Jesus and his parents: in the Temple.
Now the place of meeting is very important here, because Luke wanted to make the point that the parents conformed to the Jewish law. The Old Testament Book of Leviticus lays out all kinds of rules about cleanliness and purification, including rules about eating, food preparation and childbirth. Contact with blood was problematic for the Jews, and so because of the bleeding after childbirth, women were considered unclean, and were required to go through rituals of purification. The length of days a woman had to avoid contact with holy objects differed depending upon whether she gave birth to a son or a daughter, but after the required time had elapsed, the parents would then go to the temple to offer a lamb as a burnt offering and a pigeon or dove as a sin offering, which would remove impurity brought on by an unwitting violation. Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph did not offer a lamb, but rather two turtledoves or two pigeons. The point he is making is that they were too poor to offer a lamb, yet, though poor, they met the requirements of Jewish law by offering what they could.
Why does Luke bother to give us these details? First of all, Luke is the gospel writer most sympathetic to the poor, and he wanted his readers to understand that Jesus’ family was poor. Secondly, we should recall that Luke’s gospel was written sometime around the year 90---so quite a few decades after Jesus’ earthly life. And by this time there were all kinds of conflicts going on, all kinds of accusations concerning Jesus and his scandalous origins. Since some had come to see Jesus as a dangerous rule breaker, who refused to conform to the requirements of Jewish law with its emphasis on ritual purity and cleanliness, Luke tried hard to counteract that charge by showing that Jesus came from a faithful Jewish family and was deeply grounded in Jewish law and tradition. If he did overturn certain laws, as he did when he healed people on the Sabbath, Luke wanted to show that it was for a good reason. Laws were made for people; people were not made for laws.
Another issue concerned the whole idea of a messiah or a savior. What kind of messiah/savior is Jesus? That was a very profound question. Now Luke was not Jewish, and he wrote for a gentile audience, which meant that his readers or listeners would not have had the same understanding or expectation that a Jewish audience would have. While the Jews would expect that a Messiah would politically restore Israel with a warrior king like David, gentiles would not have their heads turned by such an expectation. After the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 and the gospel moved beyond the Jews, the idea of Messiah and savior began to change. For the gentiles the political restoration of Israel was not at the top of the list of saving acts, and yet the gentile Luke bothered to put in his gospel the story of two old Jewish people, Anna and Simeon, both faithful Jews, both waiting for a savior, both expecting some kind of consolation or restoration of Israel. From Luke’s perspective a new day was dawning; a new beginning was at hand, which very well might bring a different kind of salvation, and yet the past was not forgotten or overlooked. Anna and Simeon are in the story, because Luke wanted to show some kind of continuation with the past even as the past would morph into a future, surely different from the past.
This relationship between past and future is always a challenge. The dreams and hopes of the past generation or generations do not necessarily belong to those who come after. It happened with our Puritan forebears, when the founding generation, so full of passionate commitment, had to watch future generations make a different kind of covenant. To the founding generation the children and grandchildren appeared weak in faith. The inflamed passion of those who would build a city on a hill or a new heaven on earth seemed to smolder and die---or did it just change, adjusting to a different kind of world, asking a different set of questions, making a different kind of life.
Part of the blessing of the story is that both Anna and Simeon will be dismissed before they see how their dream, their understanding of salvation will change. The future would not look like the past. What they were waiting for would not come to pass in the form they expected. Would either of them have expected a crucified savior? Not very likely, even if Luke does have Simeon speak of a sword piercing Mary’s heart.
The past is always with us, but how much it determines the future is not always obvious. A few years back, when I visited the Baltic Capitals, we went to a museum of the resistance---resistance to the Soviets, when they took over Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. There was this Latvian guide, who remembered his people fighting against the superior forces of the Soviet army. Pointing to his brother’s name, chiseled on one of the commemorative stones, he told us his 20 year old brother had been executed in this very spot, which had been a prison, now turned into a museum. I was very young, he said, only 10, but I do remember, and now I walk around the city, filled with youngsters, who take our independence from Russia for granted. They are not haunted as I am by fear, and it suddenly occurred to me one day that perhaps they are waiting for me and my generation to die and take our painful memories with us.
Memory, we are told, is a sacred obligation. We remember, because the past is with us in so many ways, and yet there are times we have to let go of the past in order to move on. In this story of Simeon and Anna, the past did have a role to play. Simeon saw the child, held him in his arms and gave God thanks and praise that he has seen the salvation God had prepared. And Anna too praised God and spoke to all who were looking for the redemption of Israel. They would not see the redemption, but they could go, be dismissed, because they had seen enough. And sometimes settling for enough is the best we can do.
Luke 2: 22-40
I know nothing about jazz, but I read somewhere that John Coltrane was one of the great jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, and in one of his concerts, after playing “A Love Supreme,” he put down his saxophone and simply said, Nunc Dimittis. He felt he could never play the piece more perfectly, and if his whole life had been for this one moment, it would have been enough. Nunc Dimittis: it is Latin for Now dismiss. These two words are from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Song of Simeon we heard this morning in Luke’s gospel. The NRSV reads: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation,” Simeon was ready to go, ready to die, because he finally had seen what he had been waiting for.
It’s not an uncommon story. Sometimes people will not die until that special something comes to pass. Perhaps it’s a birth, or a marriage or even a graduation. My husband had a student some years ago, the first one in her entire extended family, to attend college, and her great grandfather told her that he would not die until he knew she had graduated. And indeed, on the day of the graduation, a call came into the hospital that the ceremony was over. The 96 year old man appeared to be unconscious, but when his daughter bent down and whispered in his ear that Maggie had her diploma from Wesleyan and would be headed to Colombia Medical School in the fall, he gave a faint smile and a few minutes later breathed his last: Nunc Dimittis.
Luke’s gospel is the only one to mention these two old people, Simeon and Anna. A birth always points toward the future, but in this case, it did not forget the past. Anna and Simeon symbolize the Jewish tradition, which had been waiting and hoping for the Messiah, a Messiah, who in the words of Luke is not only for Israel but also for the whole world, a light of revelation to the Gentiles. Besides the shepherds, Anna and Simeon are the only ones in Luke’s gospel, who personally meet the Holy family. And notice where they meet Jesus and his parents: in the Temple.
Now the place of meeting is very important here, because Luke wanted to make the point that the parents conformed to the Jewish law. The Old Testament Book of Leviticus lays out all kinds of rules about cleanliness and purification, including rules about eating, food preparation and childbirth. Contact with blood was problematic for the Jews, and so because of the bleeding after childbirth, women were considered unclean, and were required to go through rituals of purification. The length of days a woman had to avoid contact with holy objects differed depending upon whether she gave birth to a son or a daughter, but after the required time had elapsed, the parents would then go to the temple to offer a lamb as a burnt offering and a pigeon or dove as a sin offering, which would remove impurity brought on by an unwitting violation. Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph did not offer a lamb, but rather two turtledoves or two pigeons. The point he is making is that they were too poor to offer a lamb, yet, though poor, they met the requirements of Jewish law by offering what they could.
Why does Luke bother to give us these details? First of all, Luke is the gospel writer most sympathetic to the poor, and he wanted his readers to understand that Jesus’ family was poor. Secondly, we should recall that Luke’s gospel was written sometime around the year 90---so quite a few decades after Jesus’ earthly life. And by this time there were all kinds of conflicts going on, all kinds of accusations concerning Jesus and his scandalous origins. Since some had come to see Jesus as a dangerous rule breaker, who refused to conform to the requirements of Jewish law with its emphasis on ritual purity and cleanliness, Luke tried hard to counteract that charge by showing that Jesus came from a faithful Jewish family and was deeply grounded in Jewish law and tradition. If he did overturn certain laws, as he did when he healed people on the Sabbath, Luke wanted to show that it was for a good reason. Laws were made for people; people were not made for laws.
Another issue concerned the whole idea of a messiah or a savior. What kind of messiah/savior is Jesus? That was a very profound question. Now Luke was not Jewish, and he wrote for a gentile audience, which meant that his readers or listeners would not have had the same understanding or expectation that a Jewish audience would have. While the Jews would expect that a Messiah would politically restore Israel with a warrior king like David, gentiles would not have their heads turned by such an expectation. After the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 and the gospel moved beyond the Jews, the idea of Messiah and savior began to change. For the gentiles the political restoration of Israel was not at the top of the list of saving acts, and yet the gentile Luke bothered to put in his gospel the story of two old Jewish people, Anna and Simeon, both faithful Jews, both waiting for a savior, both expecting some kind of consolation or restoration of Israel. From Luke’s perspective a new day was dawning; a new beginning was at hand, which very well might bring a different kind of salvation, and yet the past was not forgotten or overlooked. Anna and Simeon are in the story, because Luke wanted to show some kind of continuation with the past even as the past would morph into a future, surely different from the past.
This relationship between past and future is always a challenge. The dreams and hopes of the past generation or generations do not necessarily belong to those who come after. It happened with our Puritan forebears, when the founding generation, so full of passionate commitment, had to watch future generations make a different kind of covenant. To the founding generation the children and grandchildren appeared weak in faith. The inflamed passion of those who would build a city on a hill or a new heaven on earth seemed to smolder and die---or did it just change, adjusting to a different kind of world, asking a different set of questions, making a different kind of life.
Part of the blessing of the story is that both Anna and Simeon will be dismissed before they see how their dream, their understanding of salvation will change. The future would not look like the past. What they were waiting for would not come to pass in the form they expected. Would either of them have expected a crucified savior? Not very likely, even if Luke does have Simeon speak of a sword piercing Mary’s heart.
The past is always with us, but how much it determines the future is not always obvious. A few years back, when I visited the Baltic Capitals, we went to a museum of the resistance---resistance to the Soviets, when they took over Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. There was this Latvian guide, who remembered his people fighting against the superior forces of the Soviet army. Pointing to his brother’s name, chiseled on one of the commemorative stones, he told us his 20 year old brother had been executed in this very spot, which had been a prison, now turned into a museum. I was very young, he said, only 10, but I do remember, and now I walk around the city, filled with youngsters, who take our independence from Russia for granted. They are not haunted as I am by fear, and it suddenly occurred to me one day that perhaps they are waiting for me and my generation to die and take our painful memories with us.
Memory, we are told, is a sacred obligation. We remember, because the past is with us in so many ways, and yet there are times we have to let go of the past in order to move on. In this story of Simeon and Anna, the past did have a role to play. Simeon saw the child, held him in his arms and gave God thanks and praise that he has seen the salvation God had prepared. And Anna too praised God and spoke to all who were looking for the redemption of Israel. They would not see the redemption, but they could go, be dismissed, because they had seen enough. And sometimes settling for enough is the best we can do.
THE GREAT STILLNESS by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 12/24/2020
Some of you might recall the Italian film, La Dolce Vita, or The Good Life, which came out in 1960. The opening scene is really quite impressive. A helicopter, flying slowly and fairly close to the ground, has attached to it a life size statue of a man. Arms flung open wide, it gives the viewer the impression that it is flying on its own power, especially when the camera cuts out the helicopter. The statue's chiseled beard and robe are evident, though the face is not, and although you begin to suspect its identity, you do not know for certain, until the helicopter flies over a field of men, who shout in Italian: "Hey, it's Jesus!" Excitedly waving their hats, the men run after the helicopter as it continues its flight over the outskirts of Rome. Passing over a building with a swimming pool around which scantily clad bathing beauties are lounging, the men in the copter attempt to come down even closer to get a better view. Shouting above the roar of the engine, they explain to the women that their destination is the Vatican, and they promise to return after the statue is delivered. So, off the copter flies, and soon the dome of St. Peter's Basilica makes its appearance. Then the camera focuses completely on the statue, and as the focus is intensified, the entire screen is filled with nothing but the face of Jesus.
Well, something interesting happened in one particular theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, when this film was shown, now over 60 years ago. At first the theater was dominated by hilarious uproar over the incongruity of the scene: a sacred statue dangling from a helicopter, piloted by lusty young men, who are ogling scantily clad young women. But as the screen filled with the bearded face of Jesus, the mood completely changed. Not a sound could be heard; the laughter suddenly ceased. Those Ivy League college students, infatuated by the promise of the good life, were silenced by a face on a movie screen. For one brief moment, there was not sound, as if the face were showing them something they desperately needed to see. That statue, which at first had seemed so utterly ridiculous, dangling at the end of a helicopter, imposed not only silence, but also stillness.
And maybe that is what Christmas is all about: the deep stillness, which even ridicule or cynicism cannot break. It is stillness in which "something comes to life, something is born that is so strange and new and precious that not even a cynic dare laugh." The statue at the end of helicopter, the face in the sky, the infant born in the night among beasts, the human groan and pant that brings new life into the world, the smell of animals, the confused father, the weary mother, the startled and frightened shepherds, the glorious array of angels, singing and praising God. It makes a magnificent story, but it's more than a story, it has actually has transformed lives. In this story the world meets truth, and even if the world is embarrassed by the truth it would deny, somehow things will never be the same again.
Oh, the world in so many ways still looks the same. It's still hungry for a God it cannot find, because it looks in the wrong places. Intent on power and success, encouraged by approval and popularity, the world focuses on tangible benefits, which bring immediate results and satisfaction. But when the immediacy wears off, when all the power, wealth, beauty and success do not bring the expected results, and satisfaction goes no deeper than flesh, what is left? A face in the sky? A baby in the manger? A silence in the throat? A stillness in the soul? What is left is something so extraordinary that we dare not laugh, though we might weep. Weep, because a baby born in a stable to an impoverished, unwed mother becomes the hope of the world. Weep because there is no limit to the depths of humiliation to which God might go to be with humanity. It makes for a great story, perhaps the greatest, and like all great stories, it is shot through with both glory and terror.
Amidst all the joy and the singing of the angelic host, in the deep stillness of Christmas morning, shattered only by the cry of a newborn baby, we learn somehow new about God. We learn that there is no place God will not go to win us over---even to a stable in Bethlehem and later to a hill named Calvary. And if God will go anyplace, we will never be safe from God's power to recapture and recreate our lives. And that is glorious, yes, but it is also terrifying, because we cannot trust the human tendency to search for God where the high and mighty rule. God's throne does not appear golden, surrounded by the seraphim and cherubim, but is the crude wood of a manger in which a peasant baby lies. Christmas can shock us with the realization that appearance is deceiving.
And Christmas also reminds us that God is never safe from us. God made Godself vulnerable in a newborn baby. God comes to us in such a way that we can always turn God down, the way we can turn down so many other things in life, which might demand our money, our time, our loyalty, our attention. We don't have to comfort the God who comes to us in the mournful or feed the God who comes to us in the hungry or visit the God who calls to us from prison, and when we fully realize the implication of our power and God's vulnerability---we are afraid. No wonder the angels reassured: "Be not be afraid." But beyond the fear is the joy, and beyond the joy is the stillness, that deep, deep stillness, where everything goes to depths never before known. Everything may seem the same, and yet everything is different. And we don't have to explain it, understand it, or even believe it; we just have to be in that stillness---that is all. Just be.
About five years ago, when I was working in Center Church in New Haven, a few weeks before Christmas, I happened to be in the sanctuary, late one afternoon, waiting for someone to show up, who was interested in seeing the church for a wedding. Suddenly, I looked up, and there in the back of the church was Joe. I knew Joe; he lived with his sister, since his mother had died, and he struggled with schizophrenia. I would see him, always neat and clean and quite well dressed as he walked around the Green, often picking up the scattered trash he would find there. For years he had worked in the stockrooms at J.C. Penney, but he had some difficulty with a change in medication, and his doctors were trying to stabilize him on something new. "I just want to sit in the church for a while, if that's o.k. with you,” he said to me. “Sure,” I answered, “I’m just waiting for someone to show up.” And so, I waited and waited for about 45 minutes. Luckily, I had brought a book with me. Every time I looked up, there sat Joe, head bowed and hands folded. Finally, after an hour, I went over to Joe and sat down. “I guess my appointment did not make it”, I said.
“You can’t always count on people, can you?” Joe said to me. And then he began to talk. “I love churches,” he said, any kind of church. “When I was a boy I always went to church; I wanted to be an altar boy. I remember this one year around Christmas time; I was 11, and the priest took a group of aspiring altar boys into the church. Sitting us down in the front pews, he told us to be very, very quiet. "Shh," he commanded,” listen for the song of the angels. Listen very hard, and if you hear their singing, tell me, and you can be an altar boy.” “We sat there for a very long time,” Joe said. “And yes, some of the boys heard the angels singing. I listened very hard, but I couldn't hear anything. I went back time and time again, but still nothing. Some years later, when I was 17, I started to hear voices in my ears and in my head, and they shouted down any angel songs I might have heard. Now I don't hear those voices anymore; the medication works most of the time. But I still can't hear the angels sing. I guess I never will.” “Oh, Joe, don't lose hope,” I admonished. “It isn't hope I've lost”, he said, “It’s the desire to hear the angels sing.”
Not knowing what to say to Joe, I said nothing. The two of us just sat there in the silence and stillness and the vanishing light of the church for another 20 minutes or so. When Joe got up to leave, he took my hand, and said, "Thank you." “For what?” I asked. “For the stillness,” he said. “If you had as much noise in your head as I have had in mine, you would be grateful for the stillness too. It's more beautiful than the song of the angels.”
And maybe, when all is said and done, that is what Christmas is: stillness. Before the angels’ songs filled the air, there was this quiet stillness as the shepherds tended their flocks. And when the angels left the shepherds, there it was again---this quiet stillness. When the shepherds arrived at the manger, and found Mary, Joseph and the baby, the scene was enveloped in quiet stillness. John’s great gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word.” But before the word was the stillness, and it is that stillness, the stillness of God, which quiets our noise and the noise of the world. Shh! Listen to the stillness; it is even more beautiful than the song of the angels.
Some of you might recall the Italian film, La Dolce Vita, or The Good Life, which came out in 1960. The opening scene is really quite impressive. A helicopter, flying slowly and fairly close to the ground, has attached to it a life size statue of a man. Arms flung open wide, it gives the viewer the impression that it is flying on its own power, especially when the camera cuts out the helicopter. The statue's chiseled beard and robe are evident, though the face is not, and although you begin to suspect its identity, you do not know for certain, until the helicopter flies over a field of men, who shout in Italian: "Hey, it's Jesus!" Excitedly waving their hats, the men run after the helicopter as it continues its flight over the outskirts of Rome. Passing over a building with a swimming pool around which scantily clad bathing beauties are lounging, the men in the copter attempt to come down even closer to get a better view. Shouting above the roar of the engine, they explain to the women that their destination is the Vatican, and they promise to return after the statue is delivered. So, off the copter flies, and soon the dome of St. Peter's Basilica makes its appearance. Then the camera focuses completely on the statue, and as the focus is intensified, the entire screen is filled with nothing but the face of Jesus.
Well, something interesting happened in one particular theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, when this film was shown, now over 60 years ago. At first the theater was dominated by hilarious uproar over the incongruity of the scene: a sacred statue dangling from a helicopter, piloted by lusty young men, who are ogling scantily clad young women. But as the screen filled with the bearded face of Jesus, the mood completely changed. Not a sound could be heard; the laughter suddenly ceased. Those Ivy League college students, infatuated by the promise of the good life, were silenced by a face on a movie screen. For one brief moment, there was not sound, as if the face were showing them something they desperately needed to see. That statue, which at first had seemed so utterly ridiculous, dangling at the end of a helicopter, imposed not only silence, but also stillness.
And maybe that is what Christmas is all about: the deep stillness, which even ridicule or cynicism cannot break. It is stillness in which "something comes to life, something is born that is so strange and new and precious that not even a cynic dare laugh." The statue at the end of helicopter, the face in the sky, the infant born in the night among beasts, the human groan and pant that brings new life into the world, the smell of animals, the confused father, the weary mother, the startled and frightened shepherds, the glorious array of angels, singing and praising God. It makes a magnificent story, but it's more than a story, it has actually has transformed lives. In this story the world meets truth, and even if the world is embarrassed by the truth it would deny, somehow things will never be the same again.
Oh, the world in so many ways still looks the same. It's still hungry for a God it cannot find, because it looks in the wrong places. Intent on power and success, encouraged by approval and popularity, the world focuses on tangible benefits, which bring immediate results and satisfaction. But when the immediacy wears off, when all the power, wealth, beauty and success do not bring the expected results, and satisfaction goes no deeper than flesh, what is left? A face in the sky? A baby in the manger? A silence in the throat? A stillness in the soul? What is left is something so extraordinary that we dare not laugh, though we might weep. Weep, because a baby born in a stable to an impoverished, unwed mother becomes the hope of the world. Weep because there is no limit to the depths of humiliation to which God might go to be with humanity. It makes for a great story, perhaps the greatest, and like all great stories, it is shot through with both glory and terror.
Amidst all the joy and the singing of the angelic host, in the deep stillness of Christmas morning, shattered only by the cry of a newborn baby, we learn somehow new about God. We learn that there is no place God will not go to win us over---even to a stable in Bethlehem and later to a hill named Calvary. And if God will go anyplace, we will never be safe from God's power to recapture and recreate our lives. And that is glorious, yes, but it is also terrifying, because we cannot trust the human tendency to search for God where the high and mighty rule. God's throne does not appear golden, surrounded by the seraphim and cherubim, but is the crude wood of a manger in which a peasant baby lies. Christmas can shock us with the realization that appearance is deceiving.
And Christmas also reminds us that God is never safe from us. God made Godself vulnerable in a newborn baby. God comes to us in such a way that we can always turn God down, the way we can turn down so many other things in life, which might demand our money, our time, our loyalty, our attention. We don't have to comfort the God who comes to us in the mournful or feed the God who comes to us in the hungry or visit the God who calls to us from prison, and when we fully realize the implication of our power and God's vulnerability---we are afraid. No wonder the angels reassured: "Be not be afraid." But beyond the fear is the joy, and beyond the joy is the stillness, that deep, deep stillness, where everything goes to depths never before known. Everything may seem the same, and yet everything is different. And we don't have to explain it, understand it, or even believe it; we just have to be in that stillness---that is all. Just be.
About five years ago, when I was working in Center Church in New Haven, a few weeks before Christmas, I happened to be in the sanctuary, late one afternoon, waiting for someone to show up, who was interested in seeing the church for a wedding. Suddenly, I looked up, and there in the back of the church was Joe. I knew Joe; he lived with his sister, since his mother had died, and he struggled with schizophrenia. I would see him, always neat and clean and quite well dressed as he walked around the Green, often picking up the scattered trash he would find there. For years he had worked in the stockrooms at J.C. Penney, but he had some difficulty with a change in medication, and his doctors were trying to stabilize him on something new. "I just want to sit in the church for a while, if that's o.k. with you,” he said to me. “Sure,” I answered, “I’m just waiting for someone to show up.” And so, I waited and waited for about 45 minutes. Luckily, I had brought a book with me. Every time I looked up, there sat Joe, head bowed and hands folded. Finally, after an hour, I went over to Joe and sat down. “I guess my appointment did not make it”, I said.
“You can’t always count on people, can you?” Joe said to me. And then he began to talk. “I love churches,” he said, any kind of church. “When I was a boy I always went to church; I wanted to be an altar boy. I remember this one year around Christmas time; I was 11, and the priest took a group of aspiring altar boys into the church. Sitting us down in the front pews, he told us to be very, very quiet. "Shh," he commanded,” listen for the song of the angels. Listen very hard, and if you hear their singing, tell me, and you can be an altar boy.” “We sat there for a very long time,” Joe said. “And yes, some of the boys heard the angels singing. I listened very hard, but I couldn't hear anything. I went back time and time again, but still nothing. Some years later, when I was 17, I started to hear voices in my ears and in my head, and they shouted down any angel songs I might have heard. Now I don't hear those voices anymore; the medication works most of the time. But I still can't hear the angels sing. I guess I never will.” “Oh, Joe, don't lose hope,” I admonished. “It isn't hope I've lost”, he said, “It’s the desire to hear the angels sing.”
Not knowing what to say to Joe, I said nothing. The two of us just sat there in the silence and stillness and the vanishing light of the church for another 20 minutes or so. When Joe got up to leave, he took my hand, and said, "Thank you." “For what?” I asked. “For the stillness,” he said. “If you had as much noise in your head as I have had in mine, you would be grateful for the stillness too. It's more beautiful than the song of the angels.”
And maybe, when all is said and done, that is what Christmas is: stillness. Before the angels’ songs filled the air, there was this quiet stillness as the shepherds tended their flocks. And when the angels left the shepherds, there it was again---this quiet stillness. When the shepherds arrived at the manger, and found Mary, Joseph and the baby, the scene was enveloped in quiet stillness. John’s great gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word.” But before the word was the stillness, and it is that stillness, the stillness of God, which quiets our noise and the noise of the world. Shh! Listen to the stillness; it is even more beautiful than the song of the angels.
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 12/20/2020
What would this season be without the familiar carols we all love so much? We just sang a number of them during our little play. Carols usually have stories behind them, and so this morning I want to tell you about Hark the Herald Angels Sing. It is not a dramatic story, but it is a story.
Many of you know the name Charles Wesley, the famous hymn writer, who wrote such beloved hymns as Love, Divine All Loves Excelling and Jesus Christ is Risen Today. Charles was John Wesley’s brother, who is credited with founding the Methodist Church, and John said about his brother’s hymns that they were the finest theological teaching tools he knew. And indeed, hymns do teach. He attended the famous Westminster School and also studied at Christ College in Oxford. And then in 1735, aching for adventure, he left England and went to what is now the state of Georgia to work as the secretary to General James Ogelthorpe. But the adventure did not last very long, and a year later he returned to England, where he was assigned to an Anglican in a town called Islington.
Charles was not a quiet, small town preacher, and he was always in trouble. He advocated for the poor and visited prisons, insisting that all Christians are obligated to do the same. And most radically he believed that people had to work through their faith for themselves. No one, he said, could command faith from another, just as no one can believe for another. And as far as church music was concerned, he wanted it to be infused with energy and enthusiasm while also instructing people in the faith. One day, while preparing for Christmas, he wrote down this line, Hark! how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of Kings. Welkin is a word which literally means “the vault of heaven makes a long noise,” meaning that when heaven makes its pronouncement the full power of the new king is revealed. Well, Charles had already written a melody, and so a new song was born. And it gained wide acceptance, especially in the growing Methodist movement.
The trouble began when a college friend, George Whitefield, published the song without asking Charles. Whitefield was a radical Calvinist, and he had many theological disagreements with Charles Wesley about such matters as predestination and total depravity of the human being. People say that while Charles Wesley was a reformer, Whitefield was a revolutionary, and in time he was banned from preaching in all Anglican churches, and so he began preaching in outdoor gatherings. His form of worship, revivalism, would eventually be transplanted to our own soil, where it centered on the notion of faith being a deep, inner experience, not simply a warming of the heart, as the Methodists would say, but the heart’s inflaming, leading to a direct connection of the believer with Christ.
When Whitefield published Charles’ song, he changed the first line to Hark! the Herald angels sing, and this change infuriated Charles, who insisted that the angels did not sing at Christ’s birth. Charles was very literally minded, when it came to the Bible, and he pointed to Luke 2:13, which refers to a great company of the heavenly host appearing with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors.” While many of us think of the heavenly host as angels, Charles insisted this was most definitely NOT the case. And throughout his entire life he refused to sing it Whitefield’s way, though most everyone else embraced Whitefield’s version, and the word welkin all but dropped from the English language.
Now enters a man by the name of William Cummings, who at the tender age of 16, had sung in Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah, directed by Mendelssohn himself. Cummings was thrilled to see the genius at work and was devastated when later that year in 1847, at the young age of 38, Mendelssohn died. Cummings was moved not only by Mendelssohn’s creative genius, but also by Mendelssohn’s ability to embrace perspectives beyond his own. Though a Jew, Mendelssohn was moved even as a child by the Christian story, and though most of his work is secular in nature, he did compose something in 1840 about Johann Gutenberg, the famous printer, whose invention helped bring on the Protestant Reformation by making Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German widely available.
So, when years later, Cummings came upon the carol, he decided to make some changes, taking the Gutenberg music Mendelssohn had composed, and wedding it to Charles Wesley words, except he used Whitefield’s words about the angels singing. Many scholars think that neither Mendelssohn nor Wesley would have approved of this combination of lyric and melody, and yet consider the irony: Both Wesley and Whitefield were agents for Christ; they preached and evangelized countless numbers of people and their words in this case were paired with music, written by a Jewish Mendelssohn about an invention that changed the world and fanned the flames of the Protestant Reformation. Carols and hymns are not always the work of one solitary inspired person. Sometimes they evolve, changed by different people with different temperaments, experiences and beliefs, all adding to the power of the words and the music. As much as we love the Christmas story, especially from Luke, we cannot imagine it without the carols and the music we have come to love so much.
What would this season be without the familiar carols we all love so much? We just sang a number of them during our little play. Carols usually have stories behind them, and so this morning I want to tell you about Hark the Herald Angels Sing. It is not a dramatic story, but it is a story.
Many of you know the name Charles Wesley, the famous hymn writer, who wrote such beloved hymns as Love, Divine All Loves Excelling and Jesus Christ is Risen Today. Charles was John Wesley’s brother, who is credited with founding the Methodist Church, and John said about his brother’s hymns that they were the finest theological teaching tools he knew. And indeed, hymns do teach. He attended the famous Westminster School and also studied at Christ College in Oxford. And then in 1735, aching for adventure, he left England and went to what is now the state of Georgia to work as the secretary to General James Ogelthorpe. But the adventure did not last very long, and a year later he returned to England, where he was assigned to an Anglican in a town called Islington.
Charles was not a quiet, small town preacher, and he was always in trouble. He advocated for the poor and visited prisons, insisting that all Christians are obligated to do the same. And most radically he believed that people had to work through their faith for themselves. No one, he said, could command faith from another, just as no one can believe for another. And as far as church music was concerned, he wanted it to be infused with energy and enthusiasm while also instructing people in the faith. One day, while preparing for Christmas, he wrote down this line, Hark! how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of Kings. Welkin is a word which literally means “the vault of heaven makes a long noise,” meaning that when heaven makes its pronouncement the full power of the new king is revealed. Well, Charles had already written a melody, and so a new song was born. And it gained wide acceptance, especially in the growing Methodist movement.
The trouble began when a college friend, George Whitefield, published the song without asking Charles. Whitefield was a radical Calvinist, and he had many theological disagreements with Charles Wesley about such matters as predestination and total depravity of the human being. People say that while Charles Wesley was a reformer, Whitefield was a revolutionary, and in time he was banned from preaching in all Anglican churches, and so he began preaching in outdoor gatherings. His form of worship, revivalism, would eventually be transplanted to our own soil, where it centered on the notion of faith being a deep, inner experience, not simply a warming of the heart, as the Methodists would say, but the heart’s inflaming, leading to a direct connection of the believer with Christ.
When Whitefield published Charles’ song, he changed the first line to Hark! the Herald angels sing, and this change infuriated Charles, who insisted that the angels did not sing at Christ’s birth. Charles was very literally minded, when it came to the Bible, and he pointed to Luke 2:13, which refers to a great company of the heavenly host appearing with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors.” While many of us think of the heavenly host as angels, Charles insisted this was most definitely NOT the case. And throughout his entire life he refused to sing it Whitefield’s way, though most everyone else embraced Whitefield’s version, and the word welkin all but dropped from the English language.
Now enters a man by the name of William Cummings, who at the tender age of 16, had sung in Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah, directed by Mendelssohn himself. Cummings was thrilled to see the genius at work and was devastated when later that year in 1847, at the young age of 38, Mendelssohn died. Cummings was moved not only by Mendelssohn’s creative genius, but also by Mendelssohn’s ability to embrace perspectives beyond his own. Though a Jew, Mendelssohn was moved even as a child by the Christian story, and though most of his work is secular in nature, he did compose something in 1840 about Johann Gutenberg, the famous printer, whose invention helped bring on the Protestant Reformation by making Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German widely available.
So, when years later, Cummings came upon the carol, he decided to make some changes, taking the Gutenberg music Mendelssohn had composed, and wedding it to Charles Wesley words, except he used Whitefield’s words about the angels singing. Many scholars think that neither Mendelssohn nor Wesley would have approved of this combination of lyric and melody, and yet consider the irony: Both Wesley and Whitefield were agents for Christ; they preached and evangelized countless numbers of people and their words in this case were paired with music, written by a Jewish Mendelssohn about an invention that changed the world and fanned the flames of the Protestant Reformation. Carols and hymns are not always the work of one solitary inspired person. Sometimes they evolve, changed by different people with different temperaments, experiences and beliefs, all adding to the power of the words and the music. As much as we love the Christmas story, especially from Luke, we cannot imagine it without the carols and the music we have come to love so much.
December 16, 2020
Dear Friends,
Scrooge has been met by the Spirits of Christmas Past and Present, and then The Spirit of Christmas Future brought him to a graveyard and pointed to one grave in particular. Scrooge trembled, and asked, “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be?” The Spirit answered, “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” Scrooge was forced to look at the stone and see his name chiseled there: Ebenezer Scrooge!
Suddenly Scrooge scrambled out of bed. “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future,” Scrooge repeated out loud. The Spirit of all Three shall strive within me. O Jacob Marley! Heaven and Christmastime be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees. Scrooge’s face was wet with tears, for he had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirits. But now, he suddenly felt light, happy and merry, giddy even. And then out loud he said, “A Merry Christmas to everybody. A Happy New Year to all the world.” Running to the window, he opened it and shouted out to a boy he saw, “What day is it today? The boy, looking shocked at the question, answered, “Why it’s Christmas, Sir. It’s Christmas!” “So, I have not missed it,” Scrooge said to himself. “The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Yes, they can”.
Most of us know the outline of the final chapters of the story. Scrooge was changed. He went out and purchased the biggest turkey he could find and had it send to Bob Cratchit’s house. And then, walking down the street, he came across a man, who just the day before had entered his counting house to ask for a loan. Scrooge had flatly turned him down, and now in a fit of generosity, he gave the man more money than he had asked for. “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?” And yes, Scrooge was completely serious. It is not unlike the story of the tax collector, Zacchaeus, who, upon meeting Jesus, is transformed from a greedy man to a generous one. Such radical change may not be common, but it does happen, and in this famous Christmas story it happened to Scrooge.
Scrooge then went to church and walked about the streets, watching people rushing to and fro, while he patted children on the heads and questioned beggars. “He had never dreamed that any walk---that anything---could give him so much happiness.” After this he walked over to his nephew’s house, the same nephew whose request for a donation to help the poor, he had refused the previous day. He was heartily welcomed for dinner, and everything was a delight. And later when Bob Cratchit showed up for work, Scrooge told him, “I am not going to stand for this sort of thing any longer.” Bob was terrified! And therefore, he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back, I am going to raise your salary!” And then Scrooge added, “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year!”
And so, the story of Scrooge’s journey came to an end. Many people laughed at the change in Scrooge, which no one could explain. But then who can really explain radical change? It happens, or it does not happen, but when it comes, it always catches us a bit off guard. Persons, who have been imprisoned for years, are released, and though the statistics tell us their chances of recidivism are great, nonetheless, some do make it. They turn around, move in a different direction, and they do not return to a life of crime. There are alcoholics and over-eaters, struggling against their addictions for years, and then something changes.
Sometimes someone says, “I just got tired of it all,” or” I aged out of my bad behavior,” or ‘I wanted to wake up in the morning without feeling ashamed,” as someone recently said to me. Why do people change or why don’t people change? They really are the same question, perhaps asked from different perspectives. But perspectives can make all the difference in the world. Where we stand or sit, how we see or do not see can mean the difference between change and stagnation. No one forced Scrooge to change, though he was forced to go on a journey he had no interest in undertaking, and through that journey, he saw and learned things, which helped him to turn his life around. As the words proclaim in the famous song, Amazing Grace, “I was blind, but now I see.”
In this season of Advent and Christmas, may we also be blessed to see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Scrooge has been met by the Spirits of Christmas Past and Present, and then The Spirit of Christmas Future brought him to a graveyard and pointed to one grave in particular. Scrooge trembled, and asked, “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be?” The Spirit answered, “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” Scrooge was forced to look at the stone and see his name chiseled there: Ebenezer Scrooge!
Suddenly Scrooge scrambled out of bed. “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future,” Scrooge repeated out loud. The Spirit of all Three shall strive within me. O Jacob Marley! Heaven and Christmastime be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees. Scrooge’s face was wet with tears, for he had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirits. But now, he suddenly felt light, happy and merry, giddy even. And then out loud he said, “A Merry Christmas to everybody. A Happy New Year to all the world.” Running to the window, he opened it and shouted out to a boy he saw, “What day is it today? The boy, looking shocked at the question, answered, “Why it’s Christmas, Sir. It’s Christmas!” “So, I have not missed it,” Scrooge said to himself. “The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Yes, they can”.
Most of us know the outline of the final chapters of the story. Scrooge was changed. He went out and purchased the biggest turkey he could find and had it send to Bob Cratchit’s house. And then, walking down the street, he came across a man, who just the day before had entered his counting house to ask for a loan. Scrooge had flatly turned him down, and now in a fit of generosity, he gave the man more money than he had asked for. “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?” And yes, Scrooge was completely serious. It is not unlike the story of the tax collector, Zacchaeus, who, upon meeting Jesus, is transformed from a greedy man to a generous one. Such radical change may not be common, but it does happen, and in this famous Christmas story it happened to Scrooge.
Scrooge then went to church and walked about the streets, watching people rushing to and fro, while he patted children on the heads and questioned beggars. “He had never dreamed that any walk---that anything---could give him so much happiness.” After this he walked over to his nephew’s house, the same nephew whose request for a donation to help the poor, he had refused the previous day. He was heartily welcomed for dinner, and everything was a delight. And later when Bob Cratchit showed up for work, Scrooge told him, “I am not going to stand for this sort of thing any longer.” Bob was terrified! And therefore, he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back, I am going to raise your salary!” And then Scrooge added, “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year!”
And so, the story of Scrooge’s journey came to an end. Many people laughed at the change in Scrooge, which no one could explain. But then who can really explain radical change? It happens, or it does not happen, but when it comes, it always catches us a bit off guard. Persons, who have been imprisoned for years, are released, and though the statistics tell us their chances of recidivism are great, nonetheless, some do make it. They turn around, move in a different direction, and they do not return to a life of crime. There are alcoholics and over-eaters, struggling against their addictions for years, and then something changes.
Sometimes someone says, “I just got tired of it all,” or” I aged out of my bad behavior,” or ‘I wanted to wake up in the morning without feeling ashamed,” as someone recently said to me. Why do people change or why don’t people change? They really are the same question, perhaps asked from different perspectives. But perspectives can make all the difference in the world. Where we stand or sit, how we see or do not see can mean the difference between change and stagnation. No one forced Scrooge to change, though he was forced to go on a journey he had no interest in undertaking, and through that journey, he saw and learned things, which helped him to turn his life around. As the words proclaim in the famous song, Amazing Grace, “I was blind, but now I see.”
In this season of Advent and Christmas, may we also be blessed to see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE PROMISE GIVEN AND TAKEN by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 12/13/2020
Isaiah 61: 1-4; Luke 1: 46-55
Our daily death rate from Covid-19 has now surpassed the number of people we lost on 9/11, 2001---2977 on that day, and on Wednesday, 3100 plus people died from the virus. Because 9/11 suddenly became relevant, I read an interesting article about some audio recordings from the South Tower on that terrible day. The voices of the firefighters could clearly be heard, describing the conditions they were seeing as they climbed the tower steps, sometimes calling for certain tools and asking for more backup. Apparently, some of the fire fighters actually reached the sky lobby of the South Tower on the 78th floor. Scores of people were trapped there, a number severely injured. At 9:48 AM Fire Chief Orio J. Palmer arrived with men from Ladder Company 15. Just imagine what those trapped people felt when they suddenly saw the firefighters. “Behold, our redemption has come.” And then, two minutes later the South Tower collapsed. Voices were heard no more.
Believe it or not, Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopalian clergywoman and theologian, described this as an Advent story. Why, because “the promise and the deathblow arrive almost at the same time.” They slide, not past each other, but they move right next to each other, reminding us that until the final victory comes, we live in this dual natured world, where the promise and the pain are come together. In theological terms: judgment and mercy each have its say.
That is certainly the theme of Isaiah. The Israelites have been living this story of exile, which began in 587 BC, when the Babylonian Empire conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, and marched the elites, that is, the well-educated and well trained, off to Babylon, where they could use their skills to make new lives for themselves as well as for Babylon. The prophet Isaiah directly told the people that the reason Judah had fallen was because they had deserted the covenant. The people had failed to be faithful to God, the prophet insisted, and now, Judah, defeated and some of its citizens exiled, was experiencing God’s judgment. We can imagine the people resisted hearing such a message, and at least some probably thought God had nothing to do with their defeat. Babylon, after all, was a superior military power. But there are those who insist on seeing the hand of God in everything, and so, they attended to what Isaiah was saying. Though he spoke words of God’s judgment, he would also speak words of hope and comfort as we heard in today’s reading: “The Lord has anointed me,” Isaiah said, “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.” Such words must have felt like healing hope to the Jews, not unlike the hope those trapped persons on the 87th floor of the South Tower felt, when they first saw members of Ladder Company 15 arrive.
When the Babylonian Empire later fell to the Assyrians, Cyrus, the Assyrian General, allowed the Jews to return home. But when they arrived in Jerusalem, it was not the city they remembered. The Temple was destroyed, and because so much skilled labor and leadership had been exiled, in the 50 odd years of the Babylonian captivity, not much progress had been made. Jerusalem looked like a bombed out city. Yes, the liberation had come; they were home, but what they expected and hoped for. God had brought them back to this? Why, and for what purpose?
Consider now our reading from Luke: Mary’s famous Magnificat. As you heard in the introduction, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, had become pregnant in her older years, and Mary, after hearing from the angel, Gabriel, immediately went to her cousin, Elizabeth, and sang joyful words of liberation:
The proud and the mighty would be taken down from their thrones; the lowly would be lifted up; the hungry would be fed, and the rich sent away empty. Such a description is known as the great reversal. But, of course, it did not happen in Mary’s time, and it has not happened in our time. There are still too many hungry, too many homeless, too many desperate today in our own nation, who need immediate help to save them from eviction and hunger.
The great joy of Mary’s song would be followed by great difficulty. In Luke’s gospel, Mary had to take a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, because of a census that required Joseph to return to his hometown. And so, Jesus is born in lowly conditions, laid in a manger, because there was no room at any inn. Matthew’s gospel tells the story differently, but the agony is still there. While there is no birth in a stable, because Jesus is born at home in Bethlehem, where his parents live, they have to immediately flee since King Herod will tolerate no contenders for his throne and intends to kill the baby. And some babies are murdered; the estimate is about 20, not a huge number, but if it is your baby, what do numbers matter? You get the point. On the one hand, there is great news, great promise, but almost immediately, there is something hard and painful, pushing against the promise. God did not make it easy for the Jews, returning to Jerusalem after their exile; God did not make it easy for Mary or Jesus or John the Baptist, and it does not seem that God makes it easy for us. We receive the promise, but we receive it in a world that offers many challenges to that promise. This is the nature of life, and God works within that nature.
Some years ago, when I was working at a church in Middletown, there was this man, who suddenly showed up at worship at the very beginning of Advent. His father had been a World War II veteran, fighting in the Pacific theater, which we know was cruel and bloody beyond imagining. Dave was born a few years after the war’s conclusion, and he told me his father was never really right after the war. “I was only very young, four and five,” he said, “but I remember my father as sullen, withdrawn, and rarely speaking. My mother told me years later that he was not the same man she had married in 1941. But then how could he be? The war had done more than change him; it had damaged him.” Well, one day he just disappeared. No one knew where he was or even if he was, and eventually their lives went on. His mother worked hard to support them, and she eventually remarried a good man, who was to Dave a good father. But Dave always wondered about his biological father, what had happened to him.
Well, three months before the beginning of Advent, he suddenly entered Dave’s life. They met a few times and talked. His father told Dave that the war had done terrible things to him, and he just could not be a husband or father. And so, it was best that he left. He was a very smart man returned to college on the GI Bill and became a successful lawyer. That was his life on the outside, but he told his son that on the inside he was dead. “I’m still dead,” he told Dave, “but I want you to know what happened.” And then he was gone, just like that he disappeared all over again---until 10 days before Christmas, when Dave received notice of his father’s death and notice that his father had left everything to his son. Dave had suddenly received the unexpected gift of his father, and then he was gone. The promise was given and then suddenly taken.
At the time, so many years ago, I did not think about Advent as being a time of both promise and loss, judgment and mercy, hope and despair. But that is how the story unfolds as it moves toward a fuller story of promise and loss. The new creation is promised, but it comes by way of death. We get resurrection, but not without crucifixion. Yes, the promise comes to us in the world as it is, just as it came to the Jews, exiled in Babylon and then returned to Jerusalem, just as it came to Mary in her world and to John the Baptist in his world and to all the many followers of Jesus over the many centuries. The promise comes and meets people where they are, in the world as it is, even as the promise points to a new creation. It speaks to us in the darkness with the assurance that the light is coming, even as the darkest shadows surround us.
Isaiah 61: 1-4; Luke 1: 46-55
Our daily death rate from Covid-19 has now surpassed the number of people we lost on 9/11, 2001---2977 on that day, and on Wednesday, 3100 plus people died from the virus. Because 9/11 suddenly became relevant, I read an interesting article about some audio recordings from the South Tower on that terrible day. The voices of the firefighters could clearly be heard, describing the conditions they were seeing as they climbed the tower steps, sometimes calling for certain tools and asking for more backup. Apparently, some of the fire fighters actually reached the sky lobby of the South Tower on the 78th floor. Scores of people were trapped there, a number severely injured. At 9:48 AM Fire Chief Orio J. Palmer arrived with men from Ladder Company 15. Just imagine what those trapped people felt when they suddenly saw the firefighters. “Behold, our redemption has come.” And then, two minutes later the South Tower collapsed. Voices were heard no more.
Believe it or not, Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopalian clergywoman and theologian, described this as an Advent story. Why, because “the promise and the deathblow arrive almost at the same time.” They slide, not past each other, but they move right next to each other, reminding us that until the final victory comes, we live in this dual natured world, where the promise and the pain are come together. In theological terms: judgment and mercy each have its say.
That is certainly the theme of Isaiah. The Israelites have been living this story of exile, which began in 587 BC, when the Babylonian Empire conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, and marched the elites, that is, the well-educated and well trained, off to Babylon, where they could use their skills to make new lives for themselves as well as for Babylon. The prophet Isaiah directly told the people that the reason Judah had fallen was because they had deserted the covenant. The people had failed to be faithful to God, the prophet insisted, and now, Judah, defeated and some of its citizens exiled, was experiencing God’s judgment. We can imagine the people resisted hearing such a message, and at least some probably thought God had nothing to do with their defeat. Babylon, after all, was a superior military power. But there are those who insist on seeing the hand of God in everything, and so, they attended to what Isaiah was saying. Though he spoke words of God’s judgment, he would also speak words of hope and comfort as we heard in today’s reading: “The Lord has anointed me,” Isaiah said, “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.” Such words must have felt like healing hope to the Jews, not unlike the hope those trapped persons on the 87th floor of the South Tower felt, when they first saw members of Ladder Company 15 arrive.
When the Babylonian Empire later fell to the Assyrians, Cyrus, the Assyrian General, allowed the Jews to return home. But when they arrived in Jerusalem, it was not the city they remembered. The Temple was destroyed, and because so much skilled labor and leadership had been exiled, in the 50 odd years of the Babylonian captivity, not much progress had been made. Jerusalem looked like a bombed out city. Yes, the liberation had come; they were home, but what they expected and hoped for. God had brought them back to this? Why, and for what purpose?
Consider now our reading from Luke: Mary’s famous Magnificat. As you heard in the introduction, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, had become pregnant in her older years, and Mary, after hearing from the angel, Gabriel, immediately went to her cousin, Elizabeth, and sang joyful words of liberation:
The proud and the mighty would be taken down from their thrones; the lowly would be lifted up; the hungry would be fed, and the rich sent away empty. Such a description is known as the great reversal. But, of course, it did not happen in Mary’s time, and it has not happened in our time. There are still too many hungry, too many homeless, too many desperate today in our own nation, who need immediate help to save them from eviction and hunger.
The great joy of Mary’s song would be followed by great difficulty. In Luke’s gospel, Mary had to take a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, because of a census that required Joseph to return to his hometown. And so, Jesus is born in lowly conditions, laid in a manger, because there was no room at any inn. Matthew’s gospel tells the story differently, but the agony is still there. While there is no birth in a stable, because Jesus is born at home in Bethlehem, where his parents live, they have to immediately flee since King Herod will tolerate no contenders for his throne and intends to kill the baby. And some babies are murdered; the estimate is about 20, not a huge number, but if it is your baby, what do numbers matter? You get the point. On the one hand, there is great news, great promise, but almost immediately, there is something hard and painful, pushing against the promise. God did not make it easy for the Jews, returning to Jerusalem after their exile; God did not make it easy for Mary or Jesus or John the Baptist, and it does not seem that God makes it easy for us. We receive the promise, but we receive it in a world that offers many challenges to that promise. This is the nature of life, and God works within that nature.
Some years ago, when I was working at a church in Middletown, there was this man, who suddenly showed up at worship at the very beginning of Advent. His father had been a World War II veteran, fighting in the Pacific theater, which we know was cruel and bloody beyond imagining. Dave was born a few years after the war’s conclusion, and he told me his father was never really right after the war. “I was only very young, four and five,” he said, “but I remember my father as sullen, withdrawn, and rarely speaking. My mother told me years later that he was not the same man she had married in 1941. But then how could he be? The war had done more than change him; it had damaged him.” Well, one day he just disappeared. No one knew where he was or even if he was, and eventually their lives went on. His mother worked hard to support them, and she eventually remarried a good man, who was to Dave a good father. But Dave always wondered about his biological father, what had happened to him.
Well, three months before the beginning of Advent, he suddenly entered Dave’s life. They met a few times and talked. His father told Dave that the war had done terrible things to him, and he just could not be a husband or father. And so, it was best that he left. He was a very smart man returned to college on the GI Bill and became a successful lawyer. That was his life on the outside, but he told his son that on the inside he was dead. “I’m still dead,” he told Dave, “but I want you to know what happened.” And then he was gone, just like that he disappeared all over again---until 10 days before Christmas, when Dave received notice of his father’s death and notice that his father had left everything to his son. Dave had suddenly received the unexpected gift of his father, and then he was gone. The promise was given and then suddenly taken.
At the time, so many years ago, I did not think about Advent as being a time of both promise and loss, judgment and mercy, hope and despair. But that is how the story unfolds as it moves toward a fuller story of promise and loss. The new creation is promised, but it comes by way of death. We get resurrection, but not without crucifixion. Yes, the promise comes to us in the world as it is, just as it came to the Jews, exiled in Babylon and then returned to Jerusalem, just as it came to Mary in her world and to John the Baptist in his world and to all the many followers of Jesus over the many centuries. The promise comes and meets people where they are, in the world as it is, even as the promise points to a new creation. It speaks to us in the darkness with the assurance that the light is coming, even as the darkest shadows surround us.
December 8, 2020
Dear Friends,
Last week’s reflection left us with Scrooge facing the ghost of his old partner, Marley, who told him that he (Marley) had made a terrible mistake in not making humankind his business. Too often he had walked along the streets with his eyes downcast so as not to see anyone or anything that might distract him from his business of making money. He confessed to Scrooge that the Christmas season causes him the most suffering. “I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. You will be haunted, Ebenezer, by three spirits.” “I would rather not,” Scrooge replied. But Marley insisted, telling Scrooge that without these visits, he would have no hope of escaping the same fate.
We certainly understand why Scrooge would rather not submit to the three spirits. Who knows what they have in store for him? Scrooge had spent his whole life, intent on creating wealth for himself, and he had no intention of changing. He would be forced to see and hear things to which he was normally deaf and blind. Change is never easy. I remember many decades ago, when I was undergoing a unit of clinical pastoral education at Deaconess Hospital in Boston. One of my assignments was the heart unit, where we were met by the head doctor of the unit, who said that he had so many young, eager medical residents, committed to getting people to change their destructive habits that had led (in many cases) to heart disease. “Well,” the doctor said, “I will tell you aspiring clergy what I tell my young doctors, “Most people would rather die than change!” I have now lived long enough to understand exactly what that doctor meant. Change does not come easily, and yes, there are many, many people, who would rather die than change. So, is Scrooge among that cohort?
There is no denying, however, that sometimes people do change. That both Marley and Scrooge walked around with downcast eyes is Dicken’s way of reminding us that we often do not see what is right before us, because we cast our eyes and hearts in the wrong direction. There is a wonderful story in the Old Testament, where Abraham, caught in a cycle of self-pity, is taken outside by God and shown the countless number of stars overhead, stars of great promise. And remember the story of the two disciples, traveling on the road to Emmaus, after Christ’s death, when Jesus was walking along with them, but they neither knew nor recognized him. Sometimes circumstances push people hard, forcing them to acknowledge a wider and deeper truth than they previously would accept. It happened (sometimes) on the heart unit; it happened with Abraham and the two disciples, and it will happen with Scrooge as he is faced with three spirits, whose task it is to reveal and teach.
The first spirit Scrooge met was the Spirit of Christmas Past, and it called Scrooge to rise and walk with him. They quickly moved through the wall, and soon stood upon an open country road, surrounded by fields. “Good Heavens!” said Scrooge, “I was a boy here!” The Spirit told Scrooge that the school is not quite deserted. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” Scrooge recognized the child as himself, and he cried. “I wish,” Scrooge began to say, but stopped in mid-sentence.
“What’s the matter?” the Spirit demanded to know. “Nothing,” said Scrooge as he hesitated before continuing, “Only yesterday a boy was singing a Christmas carol at my door. I should like to have given him something.” The Spirit smiled, and the two of them together moved on.
How many times have we answered, Nothing, when we were asked what is wrong? Sometimes we say, “Nothing,” because we cannot even begin to explain the deep things inside us. Scrooge realized there was something wrong, but that word nothing stuck in his mouth, because he also realized that nothing is what he had given to others---nothing to his clerk, nothing to his nephew, nothing to the child at his front door.
“Another idol has displaced me,” Belle sadly and gently said to Scrooge, but facing another Christmas Past, Scrooge did not understand his beloved’s words. “I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you.” Scrooge had feared poverty above all, and he had thought that if he could surround himself with the security of wealth, he would be safe. But the problem was that his wealth had become an idol, blocking out everything else, even the love of Belle. And that is precisely the danger of idols---they can take over a life so completely that there is no time, no energy, no love for other people or other worthy pursuits. We can think of an idol as a kind of addiction, and how challenging and even fearful it is to allow ourselves to be healed!
The Spirit of Christmas Present brought Scrooge to the home and family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Bob had just arrived home from church with his son, Tiny Tim, who was lame. Tim had told his father that he hoped the people in church had noticed his lameness, because he wanted the worshipers to remember Jesus, how he had healed the lame and the blind. Scrooge heard his clerk wish God’s blessings upon all, and then the tiny voice of Tiny Tim cried out, “God bless us, everyone!” Scrooge was strangely moved with a feeling he had not felt in many years, and he asked the Spirit if Tim would live. The Spirit replied that he saw a vacant seat and an ownerless crutch, and if “these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.” So, what will Scrooge do with his newly found knowledge and understanding? Will he alter the future---not only for Tiny Tim and his family but also for himself?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Last week’s reflection left us with Scrooge facing the ghost of his old partner, Marley, who told him that he (Marley) had made a terrible mistake in not making humankind his business. Too often he had walked along the streets with his eyes downcast so as not to see anyone or anything that might distract him from his business of making money. He confessed to Scrooge that the Christmas season causes him the most suffering. “I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. You will be haunted, Ebenezer, by three spirits.” “I would rather not,” Scrooge replied. But Marley insisted, telling Scrooge that without these visits, he would have no hope of escaping the same fate.
We certainly understand why Scrooge would rather not submit to the three spirits. Who knows what they have in store for him? Scrooge had spent his whole life, intent on creating wealth for himself, and he had no intention of changing. He would be forced to see and hear things to which he was normally deaf and blind. Change is never easy. I remember many decades ago, when I was undergoing a unit of clinical pastoral education at Deaconess Hospital in Boston. One of my assignments was the heart unit, where we were met by the head doctor of the unit, who said that he had so many young, eager medical residents, committed to getting people to change their destructive habits that had led (in many cases) to heart disease. “Well,” the doctor said, “I will tell you aspiring clergy what I tell my young doctors, “Most people would rather die than change!” I have now lived long enough to understand exactly what that doctor meant. Change does not come easily, and yes, there are many, many people, who would rather die than change. So, is Scrooge among that cohort?
There is no denying, however, that sometimes people do change. That both Marley and Scrooge walked around with downcast eyes is Dicken’s way of reminding us that we often do not see what is right before us, because we cast our eyes and hearts in the wrong direction. There is a wonderful story in the Old Testament, where Abraham, caught in a cycle of self-pity, is taken outside by God and shown the countless number of stars overhead, stars of great promise. And remember the story of the two disciples, traveling on the road to Emmaus, after Christ’s death, when Jesus was walking along with them, but they neither knew nor recognized him. Sometimes circumstances push people hard, forcing them to acknowledge a wider and deeper truth than they previously would accept. It happened (sometimes) on the heart unit; it happened with Abraham and the two disciples, and it will happen with Scrooge as he is faced with three spirits, whose task it is to reveal and teach.
The first spirit Scrooge met was the Spirit of Christmas Past, and it called Scrooge to rise and walk with him. They quickly moved through the wall, and soon stood upon an open country road, surrounded by fields. “Good Heavens!” said Scrooge, “I was a boy here!” The Spirit told Scrooge that the school is not quite deserted. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” Scrooge recognized the child as himself, and he cried. “I wish,” Scrooge began to say, but stopped in mid-sentence.
“What’s the matter?” the Spirit demanded to know. “Nothing,” said Scrooge as he hesitated before continuing, “Only yesterday a boy was singing a Christmas carol at my door. I should like to have given him something.” The Spirit smiled, and the two of them together moved on.
How many times have we answered, Nothing, when we were asked what is wrong? Sometimes we say, “Nothing,” because we cannot even begin to explain the deep things inside us. Scrooge realized there was something wrong, but that word nothing stuck in his mouth, because he also realized that nothing is what he had given to others---nothing to his clerk, nothing to his nephew, nothing to the child at his front door.
“Another idol has displaced me,” Belle sadly and gently said to Scrooge, but facing another Christmas Past, Scrooge did not understand his beloved’s words. “I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you.” Scrooge had feared poverty above all, and he had thought that if he could surround himself with the security of wealth, he would be safe. But the problem was that his wealth had become an idol, blocking out everything else, even the love of Belle. And that is precisely the danger of idols---they can take over a life so completely that there is no time, no energy, no love for other people or other worthy pursuits. We can think of an idol as a kind of addiction, and how challenging and even fearful it is to allow ourselves to be healed!
The Spirit of Christmas Present brought Scrooge to the home and family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Bob had just arrived home from church with his son, Tiny Tim, who was lame. Tim had told his father that he hoped the people in church had noticed his lameness, because he wanted the worshipers to remember Jesus, how he had healed the lame and the blind. Scrooge heard his clerk wish God’s blessings upon all, and then the tiny voice of Tiny Tim cried out, “God bless us, everyone!” Scrooge was strangely moved with a feeling he had not felt in many years, and he asked the Spirit if Tim would live. The Spirit replied that he saw a vacant seat and an ownerless crutch, and if “these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.” So, what will Scrooge do with his newly found knowledge and understanding? Will he alter the future---not only for Tiny Tim and his family but also for himself?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
AT THE BEGINNING IS VULNERABILITY by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
DECEMBER 6, 2020
Mark 1: 1-8
Here it is on the second Sunday of Advent, and our reading from Mark begins with this line: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark’s gospel is the oldest gospel, written around the year 70, and its telling of the Jesus story was a beginning. And now, two millennia later, we still tell the story as we wait and hope for God’s victory to be made fully manifest---just as many others before us have also waited and hoped as they worked on God’s behalf. Our reading today tells of John the Baptizer, an eccentric character, if there ever was one. And there are other characters who add to the story, though not always biblical ones, like St. Nicholas, whose day is today, December 6.
Nicholas was born sometime around the year 280 in what is now Turkey, in the village of Patara on the Mediterranean coast. He was born to wealthy parents, who raised him as a Christian, but a plague swept through the country, and his parents died, while Nicholas was barely out of his teens. Nicholas remembered the Gospel story of the young man, who came to Jesus, asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life. “Sell all you have, give the money to the poor and follow me,” Jesus said. Nicholas pondered those words and decided to spend his inheritance helping those in need. Now there are many stories and legends about his good deeds: giving gold to a poor man with three daughters so they might have a dowry and marry; rescuing condemned prisoners from execution, guiding lost sailors on stormy seas to safe ports, and even restoring murdered children to life.
While fact and fiction do get mixed together, we know that Nicholas was imprisoned for his faith during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, who ruthlessly persecuted Christians. We also know he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man, and he spent his whole life doing good deeds. He died on Dec. 6, 343. Nicholas was buried in Myra, but in 1087, his grave was moved to the city of Bari, a seaport town on Italy’s heel.
The people of Bari still love St. Nicholas, and when on December 11, 2001, falling debris from the World Trade towers destroyed the small St. Nicholas Church next to the World Trade Center, the mayor of Bari (on behalf of the citizens) sent one half million dollars to help rebuild the church. So did the people of Greece send money, for St. Nicholas is the patron saint of Greece. St. Nicholas, by the way, is also the patron saint of Manhattan, declared so by the early Dutch settlers to New York, who loved and honored the saint.
There are many stories about St. Nicholas, and today I want to share one, supposedly true, written by Paul Keller, who was German, living in the early days of the 20th century. What Paul remembers about St. Nicholas Day, was how his wealthy friend and neighbor, Carl, received gifts, while he, Paul, received nothing. Paul could never understand this peculiar arrangement.
“Perhaps,” his aunt said, “our house is so very small, hidden behind all these large houses, that Saint Nicholas simply misses us. After all, Nicholas is an old man, and his eyesight is not so sharp.” So Paul decided to wait outside on the evening of Dec. 6, so he could show St. Nicholas where his house was. He waited well into the night, and finally he saw a very fine and expensive carriage, driven by a very old man with a long white beard. Surely this must be Saint Nicholas, but Paul was unable to utter one word, and so, once again, St. Nicholas passed him by. The next day Carl showed Paul a handsome hand carved wooden boat he had received from Nicholas. In fact, the boat was named Saint Nicholas with the words neatly painted in white on the right side.
“Want to come with me after school and go to the creek and sail my boat?” Carl eagerly asked. “No”, Paul said. “I don’t want to play with you.” You see Paul was angry and jealous---jealous that St. Nicholas gave beautiful gifts to Carl but had nothing for him. Carl looked sad at Paul’s rejection, and though Paul realized it was not Carl’s fault that St. Nicholas had forgotten him, he just could not help himself, and so every day for weeks, when Carl would ask Paul to play with him at the creek, Paul refused. So, Carl played at the creek alone.
Late one December afternoon, as the sun deserted the sky, Paul heard yells and screams. Looking out the window, he saw Carl being carried into his house. He had fallen into the creek and was nearly frozen to death! Paul was not only frightened, but he also felt guilty. If he had been with Carl, he would have been able to help, or at least he could have gone for help. It was my jealousy that did this, Paul thought to himself. Days went by, and Paul learned from the maid working in Carl’s house that Carl’s eyes were wide open, but he did not seem to see or hear anything. He just lay there. The doctor, the maid said, does not know if Carl will live. Later that evening Paul’s wise old aunt tucked him into bed and spoke with him about Carl. “Why are Carl’s eyes opened, yet he does not see or speak?” “I think, the old woman said, “that Carl’s soul is gone”.
Gone! Paul pondered the meaning of his aunt’s words: How could Carl’s soul be gone, and where did it go? Pondering long and hard, he finally concluded that Carl’s soul must be in the little wooden boat he was playing with at the creek. When Carl fell into the water, Paul reasoned, his soul must have flown out of his mouth right into the boat. That is where his soul is: in the boat, and so Paul resolved that in the morning---the next day was Christmas Eve--- he would go to find the boat with Carl’s soul in it.
And so, the next day Paul went to the creek. He spent hours and hours walking along the creek’s edge, looking in the water and along the shore, but there was no sign of the little boat. Paul finally decided the only one who could help him was St. Nicholas. “Please help me find the boat with Carl’s soul in it,” Paul prayed. And then, just as he was about to give up, there it was, frozen in ice along the creek’s edge, and inside the boat was something white, something Paul was absolutely sure was Carl’s soul. And so very carefully, as if carrying a sacred object, Paul brought the boat to Carl’s house. He dared not look into the boat, feeling it would be wrong to stare at Carl’s soul.
Going to the front door of Carl’s house, he pulled with all his might on the rope, attached to a bell. Soon Carl’s father answered the door. “I found Carl’s boat with his soul in it,” Paul proudly said. “Here it is”. Carl’s father gratefully received the gift, and told Paul that there was no change in Carl. “Well, he will be fine soon,” Paul insisted. “Now he has his soul.”
It was evening, and Paul was with his family as they decorated the tree and sang favorite carols. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and there stood Carl’s father. He was all excited. I just want you to know that suddenly Carl woke up. Just when Paul rang the doorbell so loudly, Carl opened his eyes and began to speak, very slowly and softly, but he is speaking. The doctor says he will recover. And Carl did recover. Not only that, but every December 6, Paul received gifts from St. Nicholas. He was forgotten no more.
As an adult, Paul came to believe he was never really forgotten by St. Nicholas. He wondered if he would have gone to search for Paul’s lost soul, if he had always been privileged to receive gifts on December 6. Not getting and having helped him see the world in a different way, and without his experience of vulnerability, he might not have been so sensitive to the vulnerability of Carl’s lost soul. Indeed, there is something about vulnerability that can aid human beings in being open to God’s working in the world. Consider Nicholas, made vulnerable by the death of his parents, Mary, vulnerable to the scandal of being an unwed mother, and God, showing up in the vulnerability of an infant. Mark’s gospel lacks a birth story, but it is still filled with vulnerability, all kinds of vulnerable people, like John, who ends up beheaded and Jesus, who ends up abandoned on a cross. So, there it is: vulnerability. The question is: how God uses it to tell God’s story.
DECEMBER 6, 2020
Mark 1: 1-8
Here it is on the second Sunday of Advent, and our reading from Mark begins with this line: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark’s gospel is the oldest gospel, written around the year 70, and its telling of the Jesus story was a beginning. And now, two millennia later, we still tell the story as we wait and hope for God’s victory to be made fully manifest---just as many others before us have also waited and hoped as they worked on God’s behalf. Our reading today tells of John the Baptizer, an eccentric character, if there ever was one. And there are other characters who add to the story, though not always biblical ones, like St. Nicholas, whose day is today, December 6.
Nicholas was born sometime around the year 280 in what is now Turkey, in the village of Patara on the Mediterranean coast. He was born to wealthy parents, who raised him as a Christian, but a plague swept through the country, and his parents died, while Nicholas was barely out of his teens. Nicholas remembered the Gospel story of the young man, who came to Jesus, asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life. “Sell all you have, give the money to the poor and follow me,” Jesus said. Nicholas pondered those words and decided to spend his inheritance helping those in need. Now there are many stories and legends about his good deeds: giving gold to a poor man with three daughters so they might have a dowry and marry; rescuing condemned prisoners from execution, guiding lost sailors on stormy seas to safe ports, and even restoring murdered children to life.
While fact and fiction do get mixed together, we know that Nicholas was imprisoned for his faith during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, who ruthlessly persecuted Christians. We also know he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man, and he spent his whole life doing good deeds. He died on Dec. 6, 343. Nicholas was buried in Myra, but in 1087, his grave was moved to the city of Bari, a seaport town on Italy’s heel.
The people of Bari still love St. Nicholas, and when on December 11, 2001, falling debris from the World Trade towers destroyed the small St. Nicholas Church next to the World Trade Center, the mayor of Bari (on behalf of the citizens) sent one half million dollars to help rebuild the church. So did the people of Greece send money, for St. Nicholas is the patron saint of Greece. St. Nicholas, by the way, is also the patron saint of Manhattan, declared so by the early Dutch settlers to New York, who loved and honored the saint.
There are many stories about St. Nicholas, and today I want to share one, supposedly true, written by Paul Keller, who was German, living in the early days of the 20th century. What Paul remembers about St. Nicholas Day, was how his wealthy friend and neighbor, Carl, received gifts, while he, Paul, received nothing. Paul could never understand this peculiar arrangement.
“Perhaps,” his aunt said, “our house is so very small, hidden behind all these large houses, that Saint Nicholas simply misses us. After all, Nicholas is an old man, and his eyesight is not so sharp.” So Paul decided to wait outside on the evening of Dec. 6, so he could show St. Nicholas where his house was. He waited well into the night, and finally he saw a very fine and expensive carriage, driven by a very old man with a long white beard. Surely this must be Saint Nicholas, but Paul was unable to utter one word, and so, once again, St. Nicholas passed him by. The next day Carl showed Paul a handsome hand carved wooden boat he had received from Nicholas. In fact, the boat was named Saint Nicholas with the words neatly painted in white on the right side.
“Want to come with me after school and go to the creek and sail my boat?” Carl eagerly asked. “No”, Paul said. “I don’t want to play with you.” You see Paul was angry and jealous---jealous that St. Nicholas gave beautiful gifts to Carl but had nothing for him. Carl looked sad at Paul’s rejection, and though Paul realized it was not Carl’s fault that St. Nicholas had forgotten him, he just could not help himself, and so every day for weeks, when Carl would ask Paul to play with him at the creek, Paul refused. So, Carl played at the creek alone.
Late one December afternoon, as the sun deserted the sky, Paul heard yells and screams. Looking out the window, he saw Carl being carried into his house. He had fallen into the creek and was nearly frozen to death! Paul was not only frightened, but he also felt guilty. If he had been with Carl, he would have been able to help, or at least he could have gone for help. It was my jealousy that did this, Paul thought to himself. Days went by, and Paul learned from the maid working in Carl’s house that Carl’s eyes were wide open, but he did not seem to see or hear anything. He just lay there. The doctor, the maid said, does not know if Carl will live. Later that evening Paul’s wise old aunt tucked him into bed and spoke with him about Carl. “Why are Carl’s eyes opened, yet he does not see or speak?” “I think, the old woman said, “that Carl’s soul is gone”.
Gone! Paul pondered the meaning of his aunt’s words: How could Carl’s soul be gone, and where did it go? Pondering long and hard, he finally concluded that Carl’s soul must be in the little wooden boat he was playing with at the creek. When Carl fell into the water, Paul reasoned, his soul must have flown out of his mouth right into the boat. That is where his soul is: in the boat, and so Paul resolved that in the morning---the next day was Christmas Eve--- he would go to find the boat with Carl’s soul in it.
And so, the next day Paul went to the creek. He spent hours and hours walking along the creek’s edge, looking in the water and along the shore, but there was no sign of the little boat. Paul finally decided the only one who could help him was St. Nicholas. “Please help me find the boat with Carl’s soul in it,” Paul prayed. And then, just as he was about to give up, there it was, frozen in ice along the creek’s edge, and inside the boat was something white, something Paul was absolutely sure was Carl’s soul. And so very carefully, as if carrying a sacred object, Paul brought the boat to Carl’s house. He dared not look into the boat, feeling it would be wrong to stare at Carl’s soul.
Going to the front door of Carl’s house, he pulled with all his might on the rope, attached to a bell. Soon Carl’s father answered the door. “I found Carl’s boat with his soul in it,” Paul proudly said. “Here it is”. Carl’s father gratefully received the gift, and told Paul that there was no change in Carl. “Well, he will be fine soon,” Paul insisted. “Now he has his soul.”
It was evening, and Paul was with his family as they decorated the tree and sang favorite carols. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and there stood Carl’s father. He was all excited. I just want you to know that suddenly Carl woke up. Just when Paul rang the doorbell so loudly, Carl opened his eyes and began to speak, very slowly and softly, but he is speaking. The doctor says he will recover. And Carl did recover. Not only that, but every December 6, Paul received gifts from St. Nicholas. He was forgotten no more.
As an adult, Paul came to believe he was never really forgotten by St. Nicholas. He wondered if he would have gone to search for Paul’s lost soul, if he had always been privileged to receive gifts on December 6. Not getting and having helped him see the world in a different way, and without his experience of vulnerability, he might not have been so sensitive to the vulnerability of Carl’s lost soul. Indeed, there is something about vulnerability that can aid human beings in being open to God’s working in the world. Consider Nicholas, made vulnerable by the death of his parents, Mary, vulnerable to the scandal of being an unwed mother, and God, showing up in the vulnerability of an infant. Mark’s gospel lacks a birth story, but it is still filled with vulnerability, all kinds of vulnerable people, like John, who ends up beheaded and Jesus, who ends up abandoned on a cross. So, there it is: vulnerability. The question is: how God uses it to tell God’s story.
December 3, 2020
Dear Friends,
In Monday’s New York Times there was a front page article about how theaters, radio, mail and screen are trying to save Charles Dicken’s, A Christmas Carol. It is a tradition, after all, and many people simply cannot imagine the season without the presentation of the famous story of Scrooge and his redemption. While the large cast extravaganzas are gone this year because of the pandemic, creative ways to stage the play are being tried: outdoor theater, drive in productions, street theater, live streaming and even the offer of a “do it yourself play,” sent through the mail. As one theater person put it, “It’s an obligation.” The show must go on in one form or another.
I know exactly the feeling. When I was growing up, my mother read the story to us every year. It is one of those stories which grows with you as you grow up and age. So, I thought that over the next few weeks in Advent, I would reflect on parts of the story to encourage some thinking about the meaning of the season. Advent is a dark time of the year, both symbolically and literally, and though we often prefer to rush the season by ignoring the darkness of Advent and rushing to the light of Christmas, we should not forget that the world Jesus came into was a world mired in cruelty and sin. The Holy Family had to flee for their lives to escape the wrath of Herod, who wanted no contender for his throne and so intended to kill the baby. When he discovered that he had been tricked by the wise men, he ordered the murder of all male babies under the age of two in and around Bethlehem.
A Christmas Carol also begins with death: the death of old Marley. That word old might signify old age, but since this is a Christmas story, we can assume that old is in contrast to the new that the birth of Jesus Christ brings to the old world. Marley had been Scrooge’s partner for seven years, and it was Scrooge who signed the death certificate. Note the number 7: it is an important biblical number, so pay attention to Marley! He will surely make his presence known. But at the beginning of the story, it is Scrooge we meet, a “tight-fisted, squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner.” He was “hard and sharp as flint, …self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” So, early on we get the point: Scrooge is not someone we would want to be around, and certainly not someone any of us would ever want to work for. That was Bob Cratchit’s misfortune—to work for Scrooge, a man so cheap, that in his office, he kept a very small fire, but larger than the one he permitted Bob Cratchit to have with only one burning coal, and if Bob dared to enter Scrooge’s office to procure more coals, the boss suggested he might have to let his clerk go. So, as you might guess, Bob declined to ask for more coals. He simply huddled in his office with a comforter wrapped around him in an effort to keep warm, which miserably failed.
You might recall a story about another fire, right after Jesus was arrested. Peter was warming himself by a fire, when someone suggested that he knew Jesus. Surely, he was one of them! But Peter forcefully denied it, not once, but three times, and when the cock crowed, Peter remembered that Jesus had predicted his denial, and he wept bitter tears. Later, in a story from John’s Gospel, Peter will meet the resurrected Jesus by a fire as Jesus prepared breakfast for his disciples. Though there is much coldness in the world, Jesus Christ can bring warmth.
The Christmas Carol begins with coldness, and it only became colder when Scrooge’s nephew came to visit and dared to proclaim that “Christmas is good.” It is, his nephew declared, a time “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” But this did not move Scrooge any more than it moved the goats in Matthew’s gospel to attend to “the least of these.” When Scrooge’s nephew asked for a donation for the poor, Scrooge adamantly refused. “Put me down for nothing!” was Scrooge’s curt reply. Scrooge thought that because he gave some money to support the poor houses in London that was all he had to do. When his nephew pointed out the wretched state of such houses and how many would rather die than go to the poor houses, Scrooge declared, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” So, the point was made very clearly: Scrooge did not love the good---though even he agreed (very reluctantly) to give his clerk, Bob Cratchit, Christmas Day off with pay.
Scrooge then returned home. We have the impression that he would prefer to be at work rather than at home, but home he went. His door had a huge knocker on it, and though Scrooge had not given Marley one more thought that day after signing the death certificate, it was a shock when Scrooge put his key in the door, looked up and saw not a knocker but Marley’s face! “Oh! Captive, Bound and Double-Ironed, cried the Phantom that was Marley. . . . . Not to know that no space of regret can made amends for one life’s opportunities misused. Yet such was I! Oh, such was I! When Scrooge tried to protest that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley’s ghost, objected: Business! Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
So here we have it laid out: Marley was not so different from Scrooge, having spent his life loving and pursuing the wrong goals, caring too much about the wrong things. Marley and Scrooge represent the exact opposite of what Christ calls us to do and to be. Christ was born into poverty and never acquired material wealth. The wealth he offered was concentrated in acts of kindness, mercy, generosity. Marley was shackled to a cruel fate because he had failed to learn the lesson he would now have Scrooge learn. So, will Scrooge learn? And what about us? What will we learn?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
In Monday’s New York Times there was a front page article about how theaters, radio, mail and screen are trying to save Charles Dicken’s, A Christmas Carol. It is a tradition, after all, and many people simply cannot imagine the season without the presentation of the famous story of Scrooge and his redemption. While the large cast extravaganzas are gone this year because of the pandemic, creative ways to stage the play are being tried: outdoor theater, drive in productions, street theater, live streaming and even the offer of a “do it yourself play,” sent through the mail. As one theater person put it, “It’s an obligation.” The show must go on in one form or another.
I know exactly the feeling. When I was growing up, my mother read the story to us every year. It is one of those stories which grows with you as you grow up and age. So, I thought that over the next few weeks in Advent, I would reflect on parts of the story to encourage some thinking about the meaning of the season. Advent is a dark time of the year, both symbolically and literally, and though we often prefer to rush the season by ignoring the darkness of Advent and rushing to the light of Christmas, we should not forget that the world Jesus came into was a world mired in cruelty and sin. The Holy Family had to flee for their lives to escape the wrath of Herod, who wanted no contender for his throne and so intended to kill the baby. When he discovered that he had been tricked by the wise men, he ordered the murder of all male babies under the age of two in and around Bethlehem.
A Christmas Carol also begins with death: the death of old Marley. That word old might signify old age, but since this is a Christmas story, we can assume that old is in contrast to the new that the birth of Jesus Christ brings to the old world. Marley had been Scrooge’s partner for seven years, and it was Scrooge who signed the death certificate. Note the number 7: it is an important biblical number, so pay attention to Marley! He will surely make his presence known. But at the beginning of the story, it is Scrooge we meet, a “tight-fisted, squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner.” He was “hard and sharp as flint, …self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” So, early on we get the point: Scrooge is not someone we would want to be around, and certainly not someone any of us would ever want to work for. That was Bob Cratchit’s misfortune—to work for Scrooge, a man so cheap, that in his office, he kept a very small fire, but larger than the one he permitted Bob Cratchit to have with only one burning coal, and if Bob dared to enter Scrooge’s office to procure more coals, the boss suggested he might have to let his clerk go. So, as you might guess, Bob declined to ask for more coals. He simply huddled in his office with a comforter wrapped around him in an effort to keep warm, which miserably failed.
You might recall a story about another fire, right after Jesus was arrested. Peter was warming himself by a fire, when someone suggested that he knew Jesus. Surely, he was one of them! But Peter forcefully denied it, not once, but three times, and when the cock crowed, Peter remembered that Jesus had predicted his denial, and he wept bitter tears. Later, in a story from John’s Gospel, Peter will meet the resurrected Jesus by a fire as Jesus prepared breakfast for his disciples. Though there is much coldness in the world, Jesus Christ can bring warmth.
The Christmas Carol begins with coldness, and it only became colder when Scrooge’s nephew came to visit and dared to proclaim that “Christmas is good.” It is, his nephew declared, a time “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” But this did not move Scrooge any more than it moved the goats in Matthew’s gospel to attend to “the least of these.” When Scrooge’s nephew asked for a donation for the poor, Scrooge adamantly refused. “Put me down for nothing!” was Scrooge’s curt reply. Scrooge thought that because he gave some money to support the poor houses in London that was all he had to do. When his nephew pointed out the wretched state of such houses and how many would rather die than go to the poor houses, Scrooge declared, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” So, the point was made very clearly: Scrooge did not love the good---though even he agreed (very reluctantly) to give his clerk, Bob Cratchit, Christmas Day off with pay.
Scrooge then returned home. We have the impression that he would prefer to be at work rather than at home, but home he went. His door had a huge knocker on it, and though Scrooge had not given Marley one more thought that day after signing the death certificate, it was a shock when Scrooge put his key in the door, looked up and saw not a knocker but Marley’s face! “Oh! Captive, Bound and Double-Ironed, cried the Phantom that was Marley. . . . . Not to know that no space of regret can made amends for one life’s opportunities misused. Yet such was I! Oh, such was I! When Scrooge tried to protest that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley’s ghost, objected: Business! Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
So here we have it laid out: Marley was not so different from Scrooge, having spent his life loving and pursuing the wrong goals, caring too much about the wrong things. Marley and Scrooge represent the exact opposite of what Christ calls us to do and to be. Christ was born into poverty and never acquired material wealth. The wealth he offered was concentrated in acts of kindness, mercy, generosity. Marley was shackled to a cruel fate because he had failed to learn the lesson he would now have Scrooge learn. So, will Scrooge learn? And what about us? What will we learn?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE COMMAND IS: HOPE by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11/29/2020
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Mark 13: 24-37
I’m reading a book, How Ike Led, written by his granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower. It really is a story about moral leadership, about the principles Eisenhower used to make decisions----his decisions as Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II and later as head of NATO and his decisions as President of the United States, when he ordered troops into New Orleans to enforce desegregation. As I grew older and more aware of the political positions of my family, I was curious why my father, a socialist, turned New Deal Democrat, voted for someone, running as a Republican, so I asked him. And his answer: “I wanted someone at the head who hated war as much as Eisenhower did.” And because of that characteristic my father contended ordinary soldiers were willing to walk into hell for him. On D Day, for example, as the pilots climbed into the planes that would take them over Normandy, Eisenhower was there in the dark, on the runway, in agony, knowing that many of these young men would not return. They could tell he was worried, and so they tried to comfort him, “Don’t worry, General. We’re going to take care of this for you.” And they took off, my father said, with the deep hope that this would indeed be the final turning point of the war.
Hope: how precious it is. Paul in his famous Letter on Love in Corinthians wrote of love being the greatest, but there are times when hope can make love possible. When love disappoints, when it threatens to dissolve into a spasm of pain, hope can keep us clinging to the possibility that the tough times of love can be endured that love might prevail. Hope is so essential and vital that the medieval church named its opposite—despair---as one of the deadly sins. This is why for centuries suicide was treated by the Church as anathema, a mortal sin, rejecting hope, understood as a command from God.
Judaism too preaches hope. A famous rabbi, considering what he might be asked on Judgment Day, went through in his mind the usual questions about doing deeds of justice and mercy and loving God with the fullness of heart, mind and soul. But then he considered that God might ask him: Did you hope? Did you hope for the coming of the Messiah, even when, especially when, there was no sign the Messiah would come? Did you hope, when everyone else was giving up?
Well, here we are on the First Sunday of Advent, when we have lit the candle of hope, read scriptures from Isaiah and Mark, which look toward a new beginning even in the bleakness of defeat and suffering. Babylon had defeated the southern kingdom, Judah, and the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. The Jewish elites, those of education and skill, had been taken to Babylon in captivity. They were not jailed; they could live and work, but being so far from their homeland, all seemed lost. And yet in the midst of this devastation, a prayer was spoken: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Make your name known to your adversaries.” You did this in the past, the prophet prayed, when you liberated our ancestors from the bondage of Egypt.
And then Isaiah called his people to account for their sins, which, in his mind, were the reason for their defeat at the hands of Babylon. They were being punished for their sin. And yet, he prayed, in spite of sin; in spite of the people’s turning away, God remains their God. And therein lies their hope: God will do a new thing, even if in their present condition, the people could not see it.
And this new thing is what Jesus is referring to in this 13th chapter of Mark. This section comes right before Jesus’ struggle in Gethsemane and his arrest and execution. Jesus has just emerged from the Temple, which Herod the Great was remodeling, and the disciples for very good reason were impressed by the huge size of the stones---- 37.5 feet long, 18 feet wide and 12 feet thick. Now Mark was written around the year 70, the same year the Romans destroyed the Temple, and so many scholars believe that this is what Mark is referring to---the destruction of the Temple, which to those early Christians looked like a condemnation of the Jews and an end to history as they knew it. Many at this time were expecting Jesus to return, and so, we have this cataclysmic event described--- darkened sun and moon, stars falling form heaven, but even then, Mark has Jesus say, “No one knows the time, but keep awake and be aware.” The point here is not to give a literal description of what will actually happen, but rather to orient believers toward a new beginning, a future that is in God’s hands, not ours. God will do a new thing, and the future will not look like the past. This is not Christian optimism, but it is Christian hope. And there are times when hope is what keeps us going, even when faith seems weak.
When I worked at Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island in the mid 80’s, I saw terrible things---lives destroyed by mental illness in the years before there were any effective medications. The patients there were all elderly, many in their 70’s, 80’s and beyond, hospitalized for decades, lobotomized in a time there was nothing else to be done. I remember a patient who had literally chewed off her hand forty years before. There was no effective help for her then, except to remove a part of her brain, which left her devoid of emotion. To me the hospital seemed like a place without hope.
One of the patients was Jesse, who spent her waking hours bouncing this small, pink rubber ball. And if it were suddenly lost, there was hell to pay, so the staff had a ready supply of pink balls to prevent Jesse from getting upset. Day in and day out---for decades, the staff told me, Jesse bounced her ball. So, one day I decided variety might be good for Jesse, so I brought in a bag of differently colored and differently sized balls--- green, blue, yellow, red and purple. I must have had at least 10 of them. And when I removed them from the bag and showed them to Jesse, as I began bouncing them, she suddenly began to howl, as if in great physical pain. She ran to her bed, covered herself up with her blanket and sobbed. When the nurse came running, I explained what I had done, thinking that Jessie would be happy with the variety. How wrong I was! All she wanted was her pink ball, bouncing it over and over again for 60 years. I don’t think she ever realized that her pink ball was not the original one. “Maybe,” the nurse said to me, “Jesse thinks there are only pink balls in her universe, and you have upset the balance.” After that Jesse would have nothing to do with me.
Jesse made me think a great deal about hope, because I hope there is something more for Jesse beyond this life. I don’t know what that something is; I cannot describe it, but then even scripture is very careful about any description of life after this one. Jesus never attempted to describe it.
When he talks about the end, as he does in Mark 13, there is no description of what comes after all the turmoil. The creation is made new, but what that means we do not know. So, while I am skeptical about any definite descriptions of what the new creation will look like, I do cling to the hope that there is something good---something a lot more than a heaven filled with pink bouncing balls. Jesse (and many, many others) have been cheated out of a full and abundant life on this earth, and I hope she has something more now, a future where “all manner of things shall be made well,” as the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, intoned.
That is really why I am a Christian, because I hope. I hope that God will indeed do a new thing, a radically new thing, despite the old things we human beings not only do, but also witness, including the horror of war, concentration camps and terrible suffering from illness. No, God, this should not be, and we look toward a time beyond time, when it will not be. We are in Advent now, a time of year, when darkness settles over our little section of the globe. And in the darkness, we light a candle, and we dare to hope---hope that God is indeed doing a new thing, even when we do not and cannot see it.
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Mark 13: 24-37
I’m reading a book, How Ike Led, written by his granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower. It really is a story about moral leadership, about the principles Eisenhower used to make decisions----his decisions as Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II and later as head of NATO and his decisions as President of the United States, when he ordered troops into New Orleans to enforce desegregation. As I grew older and more aware of the political positions of my family, I was curious why my father, a socialist, turned New Deal Democrat, voted for someone, running as a Republican, so I asked him. And his answer: “I wanted someone at the head who hated war as much as Eisenhower did.” And because of that characteristic my father contended ordinary soldiers were willing to walk into hell for him. On D Day, for example, as the pilots climbed into the planes that would take them over Normandy, Eisenhower was there in the dark, on the runway, in agony, knowing that many of these young men would not return. They could tell he was worried, and so they tried to comfort him, “Don’t worry, General. We’re going to take care of this for you.” And they took off, my father said, with the deep hope that this would indeed be the final turning point of the war.
Hope: how precious it is. Paul in his famous Letter on Love in Corinthians wrote of love being the greatest, but there are times when hope can make love possible. When love disappoints, when it threatens to dissolve into a spasm of pain, hope can keep us clinging to the possibility that the tough times of love can be endured that love might prevail. Hope is so essential and vital that the medieval church named its opposite—despair---as one of the deadly sins. This is why for centuries suicide was treated by the Church as anathema, a mortal sin, rejecting hope, understood as a command from God.
Judaism too preaches hope. A famous rabbi, considering what he might be asked on Judgment Day, went through in his mind the usual questions about doing deeds of justice and mercy and loving God with the fullness of heart, mind and soul. But then he considered that God might ask him: Did you hope? Did you hope for the coming of the Messiah, even when, especially when, there was no sign the Messiah would come? Did you hope, when everyone else was giving up?
Well, here we are on the First Sunday of Advent, when we have lit the candle of hope, read scriptures from Isaiah and Mark, which look toward a new beginning even in the bleakness of defeat and suffering. Babylon had defeated the southern kingdom, Judah, and the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. The Jewish elites, those of education and skill, had been taken to Babylon in captivity. They were not jailed; they could live and work, but being so far from their homeland, all seemed lost. And yet in the midst of this devastation, a prayer was spoken: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Make your name known to your adversaries.” You did this in the past, the prophet prayed, when you liberated our ancestors from the bondage of Egypt.
And then Isaiah called his people to account for their sins, which, in his mind, were the reason for their defeat at the hands of Babylon. They were being punished for their sin. And yet, he prayed, in spite of sin; in spite of the people’s turning away, God remains their God. And therein lies their hope: God will do a new thing, even if in their present condition, the people could not see it.
And this new thing is what Jesus is referring to in this 13th chapter of Mark. This section comes right before Jesus’ struggle in Gethsemane and his arrest and execution. Jesus has just emerged from the Temple, which Herod the Great was remodeling, and the disciples for very good reason were impressed by the huge size of the stones---- 37.5 feet long, 18 feet wide and 12 feet thick. Now Mark was written around the year 70, the same year the Romans destroyed the Temple, and so many scholars believe that this is what Mark is referring to---the destruction of the Temple, which to those early Christians looked like a condemnation of the Jews and an end to history as they knew it. Many at this time were expecting Jesus to return, and so, we have this cataclysmic event described--- darkened sun and moon, stars falling form heaven, but even then, Mark has Jesus say, “No one knows the time, but keep awake and be aware.” The point here is not to give a literal description of what will actually happen, but rather to orient believers toward a new beginning, a future that is in God’s hands, not ours. God will do a new thing, and the future will not look like the past. This is not Christian optimism, but it is Christian hope. And there are times when hope is what keeps us going, even when faith seems weak.
When I worked at Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island in the mid 80’s, I saw terrible things---lives destroyed by mental illness in the years before there were any effective medications. The patients there were all elderly, many in their 70’s, 80’s and beyond, hospitalized for decades, lobotomized in a time there was nothing else to be done. I remember a patient who had literally chewed off her hand forty years before. There was no effective help for her then, except to remove a part of her brain, which left her devoid of emotion. To me the hospital seemed like a place without hope.
One of the patients was Jesse, who spent her waking hours bouncing this small, pink rubber ball. And if it were suddenly lost, there was hell to pay, so the staff had a ready supply of pink balls to prevent Jesse from getting upset. Day in and day out---for decades, the staff told me, Jesse bounced her ball. So, one day I decided variety might be good for Jesse, so I brought in a bag of differently colored and differently sized balls--- green, blue, yellow, red and purple. I must have had at least 10 of them. And when I removed them from the bag and showed them to Jesse, as I began bouncing them, she suddenly began to howl, as if in great physical pain. She ran to her bed, covered herself up with her blanket and sobbed. When the nurse came running, I explained what I had done, thinking that Jessie would be happy with the variety. How wrong I was! All she wanted was her pink ball, bouncing it over and over again for 60 years. I don’t think she ever realized that her pink ball was not the original one. “Maybe,” the nurse said to me, “Jesse thinks there are only pink balls in her universe, and you have upset the balance.” After that Jesse would have nothing to do with me.
Jesse made me think a great deal about hope, because I hope there is something more for Jesse beyond this life. I don’t know what that something is; I cannot describe it, but then even scripture is very careful about any description of life after this one. Jesus never attempted to describe it.
When he talks about the end, as he does in Mark 13, there is no description of what comes after all the turmoil. The creation is made new, but what that means we do not know. So, while I am skeptical about any definite descriptions of what the new creation will look like, I do cling to the hope that there is something good---something a lot more than a heaven filled with pink bouncing balls. Jesse (and many, many others) have been cheated out of a full and abundant life on this earth, and I hope she has something more now, a future where “all manner of things shall be made well,” as the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, intoned.
That is really why I am a Christian, because I hope. I hope that God will indeed do a new thing, a radically new thing, despite the old things we human beings not only do, but also witness, including the horror of war, concentration camps and terrible suffering from illness. No, God, this should not be, and we look toward a time beyond time, when it will not be. We are in Advent now, a time of year, when darkness settles over our little section of the globe. And in the darkness, we light a candle, and we dare to hope---hope that God is indeed doing a new thing, even when we do not and cannot see it.
November 24, 2020
Dear Friends,
In a few days we will celebrate Thanksgiving, and though this year will most likely be a bit different because of the virus, still we will not ignore the day.
Thanksgiving is THE American holiday, the time when all of us, no matter our religious persuasion (or lack), no matter the ethnicity, race or gender, can come together to give thanks. Whether people thank God or fate or simply acknowledge their gratitude to an unknown and unnamed mystery, the act of thanksgiving is both humanizing and civilizing. No wonder then that we teach young children to say “thank you” from the time they can talk and rightly feel that a failure to cultivate this habit of thankfulness is more than a social blunder. It is, we believe, a grave misunderstanding of what it means to be fully human. Our lives, after all, are interconnected, dependent upon the care and generosity of others, and when we give thanks, we acknowledge that we are not self-made creatures.
The Bible is filled with the command to remember and give thanks. Remember, it says, that we are not the author of creation. Remember from whom and where we have come. Remember what it is we aspire to become. Thanksgiving is also the time we remember stories, and who among us does not remember learning the story of the First Thanksgiving? I remember being in first grade and making a pilgrim hat out of tag board, which I proudly wore. We were told how the Indians (as we called them then) helped the Pilgrims to survive by teaching them about planting, harvesting and food preservation. We drew pictures of the first Thanksgiving, showing red and white faces gathered around a table. At age 6, I was blissfully unaware of how cruelly Native Americans were treated. The word racism was not yet a part of my vocabulary, and frankly it was not a part of many people’s vocabulary. I had to learn, and I had to be taught.
We now live in an era where we are bombarded by information. One of my sons told me that if you google the word Thanksgiving on your computer, you will read something about an alleged first Thanksgiving in Texas. In 1598, 23 years before the Pilgrims’ festival, the Spanish explorer, Juan de Onate. arrived on the banks of the Rio Grande. After leading hundreds of settlers across the Mexican desert in a grueling 350 mile journey, he came to a place, San Elizario, near what is today El Paso, and there celebrated a Thanksgiving feast. And then there is the Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia, where on December 4, 1619 a festival of thanksgiving was held celebrating the safe arrival of the ship, Margaret, which brought 38 English settlers to the Plantation. Though I do not know about the historical accuracy of either of these stories, it does seem that there is something in us that has a need to give thanks. And the thanks we give requires a public expression, meaning it is more than simply the private, interior feeling of thankfulness. All societies need their stories of thanksgiving as a means of encouraging less self-absorption and entitlement. And so, even in this year, perhaps especially in this year, filled as it has been with challenges and disappointments, we are called to remember and give thanks.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
In a few days we will celebrate Thanksgiving, and though this year will most likely be a bit different because of the virus, still we will not ignore the day.
Thanksgiving is THE American holiday, the time when all of us, no matter our religious persuasion (or lack), no matter the ethnicity, race or gender, can come together to give thanks. Whether people thank God or fate or simply acknowledge their gratitude to an unknown and unnamed mystery, the act of thanksgiving is both humanizing and civilizing. No wonder then that we teach young children to say “thank you” from the time they can talk and rightly feel that a failure to cultivate this habit of thankfulness is more than a social blunder. It is, we believe, a grave misunderstanding of what it means to be fully human. Our lives, after all, are interconnected, dependent upon the care and generosity of others, and when we give thanks, we acknowledge that we are not self-made creatures.
The Bible is filled with the command to remember and give thanks. Remember, it says, that we are not the author of creation. Remember from whom and where we have come. Remember what it is we aspire to become. Thanksgiving is also the time we remember stories, and who among us does not remember learning the story of the First Thanksgiving? I remember being in first grade and making a pilgrim hat out of tag board, which I proudly wore. We were told how the Indians (as we called them then) helped the Pilgrims to survive by teaching them about planting, harvesting and food preservation. We drew pictures of the first Thanksgiving, showing red and white faces gathered around a table. At age 6, I was blissfully unaware of how cruelly Native Americans were treated. The word racism was not yet a part of my vocabulary, and frankly it was not a part of many people’s vocabulary. I had to learn, and I had to be taught.
We now live in an era where we are bombarded by information. One of my sons told me that if you google the word Thanksgiving on your computer, you will read something about an alleged first Thanksgiving in Texas. In 1598, 23 years before the Pilgrims’ festival, the Spanish explorer, Juan de Onate. arrived on the banks of the Rio Grande. After leading hundreds of settlers across the Mexican desert in a grueling 350 mile journey, he came to a place, San Elizario, near what is today El Paso, and there celebrated a Thanksgiving feast. And then there is the Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia, where on December 4, 1619 a festival of thanksgiving was held celebrating the safe arrival of the ship, Margaret, which brought 38 English settlers to the Plantation. Though I do not know about the historical accuracy of either of these stories, it does seem that there is something in us that has a need to give thanks. And the thanks we give requires a public expression, meaning it is more than simply the private, interior feeling of thankfulness. All societies need their stories of thanksgiving as a means of encouraging less self-absorption and entitlement. And so, even in this year, perhaps especially in this year, filled as it has been with challenges and disappointments, we are called to remember and give thanks.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Least of These by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11/22/20
Matthew 25: 31-46
As you heard in the introduction to Matthew’s reading, today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year before Advent begins next week. When Pope Pius Xl issued an encyclical, naming the last Sunday before Advent, Christ the King Sunday, many across the globe thought he was out of his mind. After all, the whole idea of kingship had been in decline in the West for over two centuries. Kings were understood to be part of an authoritarian political system that was anti-democratic, so we can rightly wonder how helpful it is to use the kingly image for Christ. But the idea was to encourage people to consider just what kind of king Christ is and what kind of power as king he has and uses. A strange kind of king he is, one who ends up on a cross. In fact, the lectionary readings for Christ the King Sunday are often the story of Christ’s arrest and crucifixion to make the point that Christ is no conventional king. This year’s lectionary choice shows the king rendering a final judgment on the nations. And notice that the judgment comes not from belief---not from recognizing and acknowledging Christ as king--- but from ethics: how one treats the least of these.
Because this is Matthew’s gospel, we are accustomed to the tension between the Jews and the Christians. This is all part of the question: What did the text mean then, in the context of the late first century, when the Gospel of Matthew was written. So, back then, who were the sheep and who were the goats?
Now the first thing you should know about sheep is that they are dumb. Sheep are notorious for wandering away from the flock and climbing out onto a ledge from which they cannot escape. And if the shepherd cannot get to them, they will die. Goats, on the other hand, are not only more surefooted than sheep, but they are also smarter. Goats just don’t get themselves out on a ledge from which they cannot move.
But in biblical times sheep had great value not only for their wool, but also because they were the preferred sacrificial animal, the unblemished lamb, offered to God on the Temple altar---though by the time of Matthew’s gospel the Temple and the altar were gone.
In time Jesus would be understood as the sacrificial lamb---"the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” He is also called the Good Shepherd, and his followers and disciples are known as his sheep---often his dumb sheep, I might add. The goat, on the other hand, had the dubious distinction of becoming a scapegoat, the one upon whom the sins of the people were placed before being driven out into the wilderness, where it most likely met its end as the dinner for a mountain lion.
In today’s lesson we immediately notice that it is preferable to be a sheep, because they are the ones finally chosen to enter into God’s realm for having shown care and kindness to the least of these. The goats, on the other hand, are cast away, because they abjectly failed to show such care. Because this is Matthew’s gospel, and you have been hearing me hammer home the point almost ad nauseum that the tension between Jews and Christians was so great at this time, we can guess that the goats are the symbol for the Jews and the sheep for the Christians.
Notice that both the sheep and the goats are clueless, when it comes to recognizing Christ. The sheep do good deeds—clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, but they do not recognize Christ in the commission of these deeds. They do them, because it is the right thing to do, and then the king, a symbol for Christ, tells them that whatever they have done to the least of these they have done to him. The goats are condemned not because they failed to recognize Christ, but because they did not do these good deeds.
Now in this particular context it is very likely that the least of these were understood to be other Christians in need. Notice the words---whatever you do to the least of these, who are members of my family. So, this text in its original setting was not a call for a universal ethic of compassion toward anyone who is poor and in need. It rings of in-group care. One cares for those who are part of the in group. But that was then, and now is a different time and place, and so we can interpret the text differently. We can stretch its meaning, because we main line Protestants are not fundamentalists; we are not originalists, believing that you can only interpret the text as it was meant in the first century. We can and should always ask ourselves: What does the text mean now?
Who are the least of these, the ones so easy to ignore and reject? They can be the poor, the marginalized, because of mental illness and or addiction; perhaps child molesters, sociopaths, who do evil deeds with no remorse. These are among the despised, people whom we do not like and in some instances have a hard time respecting, because they can be pathologically cruel and dishonest. Such people are often on the bottom of the heap. And yet, attending to them may be the most salient means of identifying ourselves as Christians.
Some years ago, when Hurricane Sandy was about to hit the northeast, a reporter for the New Haven Register went around to the places in New Haven where homeless people inhabited, asking them how they were preparing for the hurricane. There were a number of tent cities, which the reporter visited, and he discovered in one tent a woman who had just died. Now I was working in New Haven at the time, serving the First Church on the New Haven Green. And though I did not know the woman who had died, I did know her boyfriend, Rick. He was a regular at the soup kitchen, where I volunteered on Thursdays. His sad story was alcohol, and so his life was a wreck and so was hers---let’s call her Ginny. Ginny had a drug problem for years, and when Rick came to talk with me about doing her memorial service at the church, the story he told was one of unremitting heartbreak. When I asked him if there was any joy in her life, he told me it was the morning, especially in the spring and summer as the sun came up. She would crawl out of the tent and look up at the sky. I think, he said, she loved that time, because it was a new day, and there was always something hopeful in a new day, even if the day would end with her being high once again.
And so, when I conducted this service for one of the least of these, I had no successful life to rely on, no wonderful stories to tell except about the hopefulness of the morning sun and sky. All I had to rely on was the Good News---the proclamation of the love and mercy of God. I went to one of the choir members, who had a voice like an angel; the choir was a paid one, and the quality of their voices, many of them trained at the Yale School of Music, was astounding.
Judy, I said, Martin Luther spoke of the Christ of glory and the Christ of the cross. We have the cross covered, but we sure could use some glory. And when Judy rose to sing Amazing Grace as her voice wafted throughout the sanctuary with a sound that mounted toward heaven, those gathered, most of them homeless, turned their heads to see from where the voice came. And the tears flowed, in some cases turning into sobs. At the end of the service, a few came forward and clasped my hand in gratitude. Rick actually went down on his knees and kissed my hand. “Some might think she did not deserve such beauty,” he said. “but she did. She was beautiful despite all the pain.” And so, she was. And Christ knows that and wants us to know it too, which is why, when we tend to the least of these, we are also tending to Christ. You see that is the kind of King Christ is---not one who rules in absolute power, but one nailed on a denuded cross piece of wood, the place of the despised and the rejected. And that is exactly where his love is poured out for the whole world, especially for the least of these, whom the world rejects as unworthy. Such is the power of this king—the one who goes to the places where no one wants to go or to be.
Matthew 25: 31-46
As you heard in the introduction to Matthew’s reading, today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year before Advent begins next week. When Pope Pius Xl issued an encyclical, naming the last Sunday before Advent, Christ the King Sunday, many across the globe thought he was out of his mind. After all, the whole idea of kingship had been in decline in the West for over two centuries. Kings were understood to be part of an authoritarian political system that was anti-democratic, so we can rightly wonder how helpful it is to use the kingly image for Christ. But the idea was to encourage people to consider just what kind of king Christ is and what kind of power as king he has and uses. A strange kind of king he is, one who ends up on a cross. In fact, the lectionary readings for Christ the King Sunday are often the story of Christ’s arrest and crucifixion to make the point that Christ is no conventional king. This year’s lectionary choice shows the king rendering a final judgment on the nations. And notice that the judgment comes not from belief---not from recognizing and acknowledging Christ as king--- but from ethics: how one treats the least of these.
Because this is Matthew’s gospel, we are accustomed to the tension between the Jews and the Christians. This is all part of the question: What did the text mean then, in the context of the late first century, when the Gospel of Matthew was written. So, back then, who were the sheep and who were the goats?
Now the first thing you should know about sheep is that they are dumb. Sheep are notorious for wandering away from the flock and climbing out onto a ledge from which they cannot escape. And if the shepherd cannot get to them, they will die. Goats, on the other hand, are not only more surefooted than sheep, but they are also smarter. Goats just don’t get themselves out on a ledge from which they cannot move.
But in biblical times sheep had great value not only for their wool, but also because they were the preferred sacrificial animal, the unblemished lamb, offered to God on the Temple altar---though by the time of Matthew’s gospel the Temple and the altar were gone.
In time Jesus would be understood as the sacrificial lamb---"the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” He is also called the Good Shepherd, and his followers and disciples are known as his sheep---often his dumb sheep, I might add. The goat, on the other hand, had the dubious distinction of becoming a scapegoat, the one upon whom the sins of the people were placed before being driven out into the wilderness, where it most likely met its end as the dinner for a mountain lion.
In today’s lesson we immediately notice that it is preferable to be a sheep, because they are the ones finally chosen to enter into God’s realm for having shown care and kindness to the least of these. The goats, on the other hand, are cast away, because they abjectly failed to show such care. Because this is Matthew’s gospel, and you have been hearing me hammer home the point almost ad nauseum that the tension between Jews and Christians was so great at this time, we can guess that the goats are the symbol for the Jews and the sheep for the Christians.
Notice that both the sheep and the goats are clueless, when it comes to recognizing Christ. The sheep do good deeds—clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, but they do not recognize Christ in the commission of these deeds. They do them, because it is the right thing to do, and then the king, a symbol for Christ, tells them that whatever they have done to the least of these they have done to him. The goats are condemned not because they failed to recognize Christ, but because they did not do these good deeds.
Now in this particular context it is very likely that the least of these were understood to be other Christians in need. Notice the words---whatever you do to the least of these, who are members of my family. So, this text in its original setting was not a call for a universal ethic of compassion toward anyone who is poor and in need. It rings of in-group care. One cares for those who are part of the in group. But that was then, and now is a different time and place, and so we can interpret the text differently. We can stretch its meaning, because we main line Protestants are not fundamentalists; we are not originalists, believing that you can only interpret the text as it was meant in the first century. We can and should always ask ourselves: What does the text mean now?
Who are the least of these, the ones so easy to ignore and reject? They can be the poor, the marginalized, because of mental illness and or addiction; perhaps child molesters, sociopaths, who do evil deeds with no remorse. These are among the despised, people whom we do not like and in some instances have a hard time respecting, because they can be pathologically cruel and dishonest. Such people are often on the bottom of the heap. And yet, attending to them may be the most salient means of identifying ourselves as Christians.
Some years ago, when Hurricane Sandy was about to hit the northeast, a reporter for the New Haven Register went around to the places in New Haven where homeless people inhabited, asking them how they were preparing for the hurricane. There were a number of tent cities, which the reporter visited, and he discovered in one tent a woman who had just died. Now I was working in New Haven at the time, serving the First Church on the New Haven Green. And though I did not know the woman who had died, I did know her boyfriend, Rick. He was a regular at the soup kitchen, where I volunteered on Thursdays. His sad story was alcohol, and so his life was a wreck and so was hers---let’s call her Ginny. Ginny had a drug problem for years, and when Rick came to talk with me about doing her memorial service at the church, the story he told was one of unremitting heartbreak. When I asked him if there was any joy in her life, he told me it was the morning, especially in the spring and summer as the sun came up. She would crawl out of the tent and look up at the sky. I think, he said, she loved that time, because it was a new day, and there was always something hopeful in a new day, even if the day would end with her being high once again.
And so, when I conducted this service for one of the least of these, I had no successful life to rely on, no wonderful stories to tell except about the hopefulness of the morning sun and sky. All I had to rely on was the Good News---the proclamation of the love and mercy of God. I went to one of the choir members, who had a voice like an angel; the choir was a paid one, and the quality of their voices, many of them trained at the Yale School of Music, was astounding.
Judy, I said, Martin Luther spoke of the Christ of glory and the Christ of the cross. We have the cross covered, but we sure could use some glory. And when Judy rose to sing Amazing Grace as her voice wafted throughout the sanctuary with a sound that mounted toward heaven, those gathered, most of them homeless, turned their heads to see from where the voice came. And the tears flowed, in some cases turning into sobs. At the end of the service, a few came forward and clasped my hand in gratitude. Rick actually went down on his knees and kissed my hand. “Some might think she did not deserve such beauty,” he said. “but she did. She was beautiful despite all the pain.” And so, she was. And Christ knows that and wants us to know it too, which is why, when we tend to the least of these, we are also tending to Christ. You see that is the kind of King Christ is---not one who rules in absolute power, but one nailed on a denuded cross piece of wood, the place of the despised and the rejected. And that is exactly where his love is poured out for the whole world, especially for the least of these, whom the world rejects as unworthy. Such is the power of this king—the one who goes to the places where no one wants to go or to be.
November 11, 2020
Dear Friends,
Gloria Scott lives in Woburn, MA, an outlying suburb of Boston. I taught there in a pre-school not long after I graduated from college. I remember Woburn as a middle class community with a lot of older homes, like the one Gloria inherited from her parents years ago. The pale blue house, along with the overgrown yard, was in need of a lot of TLC. One day in August a light fixture in her kitchen suddenly showered sparks, leaving Gloria’s entire first floor without electricity. And that’s when a neighbor suggested she call John Kinney, a neighbor, who also was an electrician. Mr. Kinney fixed the problem without giving Gloria a bill for his work. That could have finished John Kinney’s involvement, but for some reason it did not. He noticed a lot of things that needed attention: holes in the ceiling, a roof requiring new shingles, drywall that needed replacing in the kitchen and bathroom, insulation for the attic and a new cover for the septic system. When he left, he told Gloria, “I live only five minutes away, so if you need anything, give me a call.”
But John knew Gloria would never presume to call, and so he came back on his own. “I think,” he told her, “I can get a lot of your problems around this house taken care of without any cost to you.” And that is exactly what he did---with a whole host of other skilled colleagues and friends. He began with a small group of volunteers and then by posting a video online, he wrote: “Nice Old Lady Needs Help,” and help is exactly what came. He raised over $110,000 for the project with over 16,000 volunteers. What began as an effort to fix some ceiling holes and plumbing issues led to a make-over of the entire house. Gloria does not know exactly how it all happened, but then it is hard to explain blessings. When they come, they just seem to happen, and the only appropriate response is gratitude. And Gloria is certainly grateful.
John Kinney was a genius at coordinating all the workers. Some days there were as many as 20 volunteers who showed up to work, and he did his best to protect Gloria from all the hubbub. Gloria’s Gladiators is the name of the project, and because of its success, other chapters are making their appearances across the country. Many older adults need help with their homes, and sometimes it is not always about money. There are many people, who just don’t know how to go about finding the right people to do the work, and with older people especially, easy access to the internet is just not possible. Besides, it is awkward to ask for help, and the issue of trust is a major one. Who really would feel comfortable with 20 strangers, showing up at your house to do work? It worked in this case because of John Kinney. He not only established a trusting relationship with Gloria, but he was also an incredibly competent organizer.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Oh yes, it worked in this case, but there are plenty of stories about people making a relationship with an older person for the express purpose of taking advantage of them.” People have lost their homes and their savings to scoundrels. But John Kinney was no scoundrel, and the project was so successful that John is interested in helping others. “It is,” he insisted, “the neighborly thing to do.”
Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? (Luke 10: 25-37) It all started with a question from a smart lawyer, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” As was often the case with Jesus, he responded with another question, “What does the Law say?” The lawyer was no ignorant fool. He knew the requirements of the Law: loving God with the fullness of soul, strength and mind, and loving neighbor as yourself. “You got that right,” Jesus answered. “Do all this and you will live.” But the lawyer wasn’t finished, and so he asked the pivotal question, “And who is my neighbor?” It was then Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. At the end of his story, Jesus had another question for the lawyer, “Who was neighbor to the man?” And the lawyer rightly answered, “The one who showed mercy.”
John Kinney said, “A good neighbor is observant, and is going to recognize when somebody needs help and acts on it. It doesn’t take much. Just go in and take the initiative.” In this day and age, I doubt Jesus could have put it any better.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Gloria Scott lives in Woburn, MA, an outlying suburb of Boston. I taught there in a pre-school not long after I graduated from college. I remember Woburn as a middle class community with a lot of older homes, like the one Gloria inherited from her parents years ago. The pale blue house, along with the overgrown yard, was in need of a lot of TLC. One day in August a light fixture in her kitchen suddenly showered sparks, leaving Gloria’s entire first floor without electricity. And that’s when a neighbor suggested she call John Kinney, a neighbor, who also was an electrician. Mr. Kinney fixed the problem without giving Gloria a bill for his work. That could have finished John Kinney’s involvement, but for some reason it did not. He noticed a lot of things that needed attention: holes in the ceiling, a roof requiring new shingles, drywall that needed replacing in the kitchen and bathroom, insulation for the attic and a new cover for the septic system. When he left, he told Gloria, “I live only five minutes away, so if you need anything, give me a call.”
But John knew Gloria would never presume to call, and so he came back on his own. “I think,” he told her, “I can get a lot of your problems around this house taken care of without any cost to you.” And that is exactly what he did---with a whole host of other skilled colleagues and friends. He began with a small group of volunteers and then by posting a video online, he wrote: “Nice Old Lady Needs Help,” and help is exactly what came. He raised over $110,000 for the project with over 16,000 volunteers. What began as an effort to fix some ceiling holes and plumbing issues led to a make-over of the entire house. Gloria does not know exactly how it all happened, but then it is hard to explain blessings. When they come, they just seem to happen, and the only appropriate response is gratitude. And Gloria is certainly grateful.
John Kinney was a genius at coordinating all the workers. Some days there were as many as 20 volunteers who showed up to work, and he did his best to protect Gloria from all the hubbub. Gloria’s Gladiators is the name of the project, and because of its success, other chapters are making their appearances across the country. Many older adults need help with their homes, and sometimes it is not always about money. There are many people, who just don’t know how to go about finding the right people to do the work, and with older people especially, easy access to the internet is just not possible. Besides, it is awkward to ask for help, and the issue of trust is a major one. Who really would feel comfortable with 20 strangers, showing up at your house to do work? It worked in this case because of John Kinney. He not only established a trusting relationship with Gloria, but he was also an incredibly competent organizer.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Oh yes, it worked in this case, but there are plenty of stories about people making a relationship with an older person for the express purpose of taking advantage of them.” People have lost their homes and their savings to scoundrels. But John Kinney was no scoundrel, and the project was so successful that John is interested in helping others. “It is,” he insisted, “the neighborly thing to do.”
Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? (Luke 10: 25-37) It all started with a question from a smart lawyer, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” As was often the case with Jesus, he responded with another question, “What does the Law say?” The lawyer was no ignorant fool. He knew the requirements of the Law: loving God with the fullness of soul, strength and mind, and loving neighbor as yourself. “You got that right,” Jesus answered. “Do all this and you will live.” But the lawyer wasn’t finished, and so he asked the pivotal question, “And who is my neighbor?” It was then Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. At the end of his story, Jesus had another question for the lawyer, “Who was neighbor to the man?” And the lawyer rightly answered, “The one who showed mercy.”
John Kinney said, “A good neighbor is observant, and is going to recognize when somebody needs help and acts on it. It doesn’t take much. Just go in and take the initiative.” In this day and age, I doubt Jesus could have put it any better.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Playing It Safe by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11/15/2020
Matthew 25: 14-30
So, here we have another tough parable from Matthew, but at this point in the Gospel, we should be accustomed to such toughness. Matthew shows Jesus speaking some of harshest words found in the entire New Testament. Now it is also true that some of these words were most likely put into Jesus’ mouth by the writer of this Gospel, who wanted to make the very strong point that God’s realm or Kingdom has some pretty demanding requirements. We have heard passages about being locked out of the wedding feast, because someone lacked the proper garments, people barred entrance to the wedding party because they failed to bring an adequate amount of oil for their lamps, and last week we heard what some scholars call, Jesus’ “rant on a hill,” when he accuses the Jewish leadership of complete corruption and hypocrisy.
This week the toughness continues when we meet a slave, who is so fearful of his harsh master that he buries the treasure he was given, because he was afraid that if he lost it in a bad venture, his master’s rage would rain down on him. Better to conserve what he had. And we can understand that fear, can’t we?
Now there is much to unpack in this parable and the first thing to understand is this word talent, which initially meant a measure of weight, like the British pound, which eventually came to mean money. In this case one talent is the equivalent of about 16.5 years of workers’ wages. So, one talent was hardly an insignificant sum for the slave to receive. Although he was not given five or even two talents as were the other two, one talent was far more than he would ever have expected.
So, what was he supposed to do with the money? Remember, we are not speaking of a capitalistic economy; there was no stock market, no bonds, not even banks as we understand them. People could trade, and it was certainly possible to make money through trade. And then there was also the possibility of lending money, but Jews were forbidden at this time from charging any interest. And so, though it sounds completely crazy to us, to bury one’s treasure was something many people did, a means of protecting what they had. It was an acceptable practice of Jewish law, affirmed by the rabbis. In fact, if you buried a treasure that belonged to your master, and you were savvy enough to get witnesses, corroborating your act, you could not be sued for the treasure, if it were later stolen. This was Jewish law, and it was not uncommon for servants and slaves to be given responsibility for their master’s wealth, and yes, many servants did indeed bury their master’s money.
So, this slave was not doing anything outside the boundaries of Jewish life. It was a way of playing it safe. And who among us does not know about playing it safe---especially when it comes to money and investments. People have learned some pretty painful lessons from the ups and downs of the stock market and the housing bubble, when people borrowed money from the value of their homes, only to see the value descend into a deep, black hole. So, we can understand financial conservatism. This slave was not irresponsible. Neither was he wicked nor lazy. Finding a good place to bury a treasure and then digging deeply into the earth to hide it was not an easy thing to do.
So, if this parable were primarily about money, I doubt the slave would have been castigated. If he knew his master to be harsh, it makes sense to follow a conservative path and preserve what he had been given. It is true that the other two were apparently more willing to take risk. But let’s face it, not everyone has that kind of personality. Some people are by nature risk-averse, and not just about money. They are risk averse about jobs, relationships, even travel.
Whatever we want to say about this servant, he was obviously not a risk taker. But money is not the full story here, and the people who heard this parable would have understood that more than money was at stake here. Talents are a symbol, a symbol for something great, something important and valuable. Of course, people always think money is the most valuable thing, but this is Matthew’s Gospel, and he has a particular way of telling Jesus’ story. It is always important to note where a story is placed in the gospel. And in this case, Matthew put this story toward the end of Jesus’ life—a few days before he celebrates the Last Supper with his disciples. And in these last few days Matthew shows us a Jesus very busy teaching that the Kingdom of God is near. It’s moving closer, Jesus said, and so Matthew shows Jesus teaching what God is like and what God’s Kingdom looks like---like a place where one wandering lost sheep is found, a place where the meek inherit the earth and the mournful receive comfort, a place where the last are first and first last and the blind see and the deaf hear.
They people who were part of the Matthean community would have known that Jesus’ demands could be very tough. According to Matthew, Jesus had said to leave everything behind to follow him. Don’t even stop to bury your father. “Let the dead bury the dead” is how Matthew had Jesus say it, and that was scandalous, for the duty of a son toward is father was NOT something up for discussion. And then there was the time Jesus had told a rich young ruler to give away EVERYTHING he had to follow him, because apparently the wealth had become a stumbling block. And so, the rich man went away very sad, because he had great wealth. And then Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s realm.” We have also heard Matthew’s Jesus call the scribes, priests and Pharisees vipers and hypocrites, white washed tombs. He had also thrown the moneychangers out of the Temple courtyard, although they were only doing what they were supposed to do. Money had to be changed, since only Jewish money could be used inside the Temple.
So those who heard these stories knew how tough and demanding the realm of God was. And though the same gospel assured that the merciful would receive mercy and the meek would inherit the earth, they also were subjected to words that were quite frankly terrifying. The tender hearted and compassionate God who loved the least of these was also the one who would demand everything. That seemed far too demanding, and so this slave took the one treasure he had been given, the one talent, the possibility of a new and abundant life, and he buried it, buried it deep within his heart, deep within his memory, where it felt safe and consoling.
What Matthew is saying here is that this slave is an admirer of Jesus, but not his disciple. He understood the demands, but did not follow them, as the rich young man was not able to follow them. Since there was so much tension between the Christians and the Jews at this time, I suspect that this slave was a symbol for those who remained Jews. The servants who received two and five talents and grew their treasure are symbols for the new Christians, while this slave is a symbol for one who remained a Jew, and for this he is called lazy and wicked, thrown out into the darkness, where, the text says, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Well, those are Matthew’s words, written in his time and place. There were options at the time---to join the new Christian movement or remain a Jew, faithful to the law, which was also being reinterpreted in the synagogue movement, spearheaded by the Pharisees, who really turned out to be quite creative. This parable is told to make the one talent slave look wrong, as if he lacked the courage, imagination and faith to follow Jesus. But what about those many people who concluded that following the Jewish law was for them a more reasonable and even life giving way to go rather than Jesus’ call to follow the law of higher righteousness, where love of enemy and forgiveness of even the most terrible assaults are commands and not suggestions?
By this time in the Christian story, in the middle of the 80’s, it was obvious that following Jesus exacted a high price. Some lost their families, their friends and in time even their lives. Some were willing to pay that price, but not everyone, and certainly not this one talent slave. That is what the gospel meant then, but what does it mean now? What is important for us today is not to condemn the slave who buried his treasure, but rather to ask ourselves the question: What price are we really willing to pay to follow Jesus? Are we his admirers or his disciples?
Matthew 25: 14-30
So, here we have another tough parable from Matthew, but at this point in the Gospel, we should be accustomed to such toughness. Matthew shows Jesus speaking some of harshest words found in the entire New Testament. Now it is also true that some of these words were most likely put into Jesus’ mouth by the writer of this Gospel, who wanted to make the very strong point that God’s realm or Kingdom has some pretty demanding requirements. We have heard passages about being locked out of the wedding feast, because someone lacked the proper garments, people barred entrance to the wedding party because they failed to bring an adequate amount of oil for their lamps, and last week we heard what some scholars call, Jesus’ “rant on a hill,” when he accuses the Jewish leadership of complete corruption and hypocrisy.
This week the toughness continues when we meet a slave, who is so fearful of his harsh master that he buries the treasure he was given, because he was afraid that if he lost it in a bad venture, his master’s rage would rain down on him. Better to conserve what he had. And we can understand that fear, can’t we?
Now there is much to unpack in this parable and the first thing to understand is this word talent, which initially meant a measure of weight, like the British pound, which eventually came to mean money. In this case one talent is the equivalent of about 16.5 years of workers’ wages. So, one talent was hardly an insignificant sum for the slave to receive. Although he was not given five or even two talents as were the other two, one talent was far more than he would ever have expected.
So, what was he supposed to do with the money? Remember, we are not speaking of a capitalistic economy; there was no stock market, no bonds, not even banks as we understand them. People could trade, and it was certainly possible to make money through trade. And then there was also the possibility of lending money, but Jews were forbidden at this time from charging any interest. And so, though it sounds completely crazy to us, to bury one’s treasure was something many people did, a means of protecting what they had. It was an acceptable practice of Jewish law, affirmed by the rabbis. In fact, if you buried a treasure that belonged to your master, and you were savvy enough to get witnesses, corroborating your act, you could not be sued for the treasure, if it were later stolen. This was Jewish law, and it was not uncommon for servants and slaves to be given responsibility for their master’s wealth, and yes, many servants did indeed bury their master’s money.
So, this slave was not doing anything outside the boundaries of Jewish life. It was a way of playing it safe. And who among us does not know about playing it safe---especially when it comes to money and investments. People have learned some pretty painful lessons from the ups and downs of the stock market and the housing bubble, when people borrowed money from the value of their homes, only to see the value descend into a deep, black hole. So, we can understand financial conservatism. This slave was not irresponsible. Neither was he wicked nor lazy. Finding a good place to bury a treasure and then digging deeply into the earth to hide it was not an easy thing to do.
So, if this parable were primarily about money, I doubt the slave would have been castigated. If he knew his master to be harsh, it makes sense to follow a conservative path and preserve what he had been given. It is true that the other two were apparently more willing to take risk. But let’s face it, not everyone has that kind of personality. Some people are by nature risk-averse, and not just about money. They are risk averse about jobs, relationships, even travel.
Whatever we want to say about this servant, he was obviously not a risk taker. But money is not the full story here, and the people who heard this parable would have understood that more than money was at stake here. Talents are a symbol, a symbol for something great, something important and valuable. Of course, people always think money is the most valuable thing, but this is Matthew’s Gospel, and he has a particular way of telling Jesus’ story. It is always important to note where a story is placed in the gospel. And in this case, Matthew put this story toward the end of Jesus’ life—a few days before he celebrates the Last Supper with his disciples. And in these last few days Matthew shows us a Jesus very busy teaching that the Kingdom of God is near. It’s moving closer, Jesus said, and so Matthew shows Jesus teaching what God is like and what God’s Kingdom looks like---like a place where one wandering lost sheep is found, a place where the meek inherit the earth and the mournful receive comfort, a place where the last are first and first last and the blind see and the deaf hear.
They people who were part of the Matthean community would have known that Jesus’ demands could be very tough. According to Matthew, Jesus had said to leave everything behind to follow him. Don’t even stop to bury your father. “Let the dead bury the dead” is how Matthew had Jesus say it, and that was scandalous, for the duty of a son toward is father was NOT something up for discussion. And then there was the time Jesus had told a rich young ruler to give away EVERYTHING he had to follow him, because apparently the wealth had become a stumbling block. And so, the rich man went away very sad, because he had great wealth. And then Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s realm.” We have also heard Matthew’s Jesus call the scribes, priests and Pharisees vipers and hypocrites, white washed tombs. He had also thrown the moneychangers out of the Temple courtyard, although they were only doing what they were supposed to do. Money had to be changed, since only Jewish money could be used inside the Temple.
So those who heard these stories knew how tough and demanding the realm of God was. And though the same gospel assured that the merciful would receive mercy and the meek would inherit the earth, they also were subjected to words that were quite frankly terrifying. The tender hearted and compassionate God who loved the least of these was also the one who would demand everything. That seemed far too demanding, and so this slave took the one treasure he had been given, the one talent, the possibility of a new and abundant life, and he buried it, buried it deep within his heart, deep within his memory, where it felt safe and consoling.
What Matthew is saying here is that this slave is an admirer of Jesus, but not his disciple. He understood the demands, but did not follow them, as the rich young man was not able to follow them. Since there was so much tension between the Christians and the Jews at this time, I suspect that this slave was a symbol for those who remained Jews. The servants who received two and five talents and grew their treasure are symbols for the new Christians, while this slave is a symbol for one who remained a Jew, and for this he is called lazy and wicked, thrown out into the darkness, where, the text says, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Well, those are Matthew’s words, written in his time and place. There were options at the time---to join the new Christian movement or remain a Jew, faithful to the law, which was also being reinterpreted in the synagogue movement, spearheaded by the Pharisees, who really turned out to be quite creative. This parable is told to make the one talent slave look wrong, as if he lacked the courage, imagination and faith to follow Jesus. But what about those many people who concluded that following the Jewish law was for them a more reasonable and even life giving way to go rather than Jesus’ call to follow the law of higher righteousness, where love of enemy and forgiveness of even the most terrible assaults are commands and not suggestions?
By this time in the Christian story, in the middle of the 80’s, it was obvious that following Jesus exacted a high price. Some lost their families, their friends and in time even their lives. Some were willing to pay that price, but not everyone, and certainly not this one talent slave. That is what the gospel meant then, but what does it mean now? What is important for us today is not to condemn the slave who buried his treasure, but rather to ask ourselves the question: What price are we really willing to pay to follow Jesus? Are we his admirers or his disciples?
November 11, 2020
Dear Friends,
As I write this, it is November 11, Veteran’s Day, so how appropriate for me to tell a story about Jeffrey Rease, a man with a mission. It all began when Jeffrey saw a photography project of British World War II veterans. He was so inspired by what he saw that he decided to photograph American World War II vets, before they all died. There is an estimated 325,000 still alive, though every day we lose an estimated 296 of them. And so, Jeffrey, a graphic designer, turned photographer. He has been traveling all across the country to find veterans from the Second World War listen to their stories and photograph them---sometimes while they are holding the pictures of themselves when they joined the Armed Services over 70 years ago.
Carl Cooper was a Marine for 38 years and fought at the battle of Okinawa. Carl is 99 years old, and for Jeffrey’s photograph he put on his white gloves, his gold buttoned jacket that still had some metals, dangling on it. And then he posed for the picture. Carl Cooper was the first veteran Jeffrey photographed, and after listening to his story, Jeffrey knew he was hooked. He knew he could not turn back. And so, Portraits of Honor was born, a project that shows (so far) 110 photographs of veterans from age 93 to 104. Sadly, the coronavirus has thrown the project into chaos as nursing homes and other facilities have shut down and disallow visits. Jeffrey had a list of people he had been planning to see: Betty Green, 96, who served in the Waves, Tong Costanzo, 97, who was among the first group to land on Omaha Beach and Robert Puckett, 94, who fought at Iwo Jima. But they died before Jeffrey could meet them, hear their stories and take their pictures.
Jeffrey says he feels a deep sadness that he will never meet these people, whom he feels are among the most heroic of Americans, The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw called them. They were great because they did what duty demanded without arguing or questioning it. Their children (The Baby Boomers) were not so inclined to accept duty without asking a lot of questions. But then the war the Boomers faced (Viet Nam) was nothing like World War ll. Different times will ask different questions and elicit different responses.
The Greatest Generation were not ones to talk about their experiences or their feelings about those experiences, and the families of these men are often shocked how much Jeffrey hears from these old vets. Jeffrey notes that they have often spent a lifetime avoiding questions about the war, and after a while their spouses and their children stopped asking. But Jeffrey discovered that something began to happen to these veterans, when they crossed into their 90’s. “There’s a shift in their lives,” Jeffrey said. They have already lost so much---- friends, spouses, sometimes even children and grandchildren--- and then they discover their war memories suddenly returning in full vividness. And though they never wanted to talk before, now they need no coaching to do so.
After Jeffrey asks them what their role was and where they served, he often does not have to say another word. The stories just flow off their tongues---how a 14 year old forged his mother’s signature, so he could join up; what it was like to be trapped under a capsized boat and praying to God, even though he had never prayed before; walking into the concentration camp, Dachau, and seeing horrors that made the war experience look like child play.
The children and grandchildren of these men are often shocked how much Jeffrey hears, and they are grateful their parents and grandparents have a voice, which gives shape to experiences they had kept hidden from others for 70 years. While their short term memories may in sine cases be compromised, these memories from the past are clear, vivid and strong.
Jeffrey has traveled all over the country to connect with these men and women, sleeping in his jeep to save money for the trips. He meets people in churches and parks, where it is easier to socially distance, but these vets don’t seem very worried about the virus. They have lived their lives and have seen far more terrible things than Covid-19, so they have no fear about becoming ill and dying. Perhaps, if they are afraid of anything, it is the fear that people will not remember the sacrifice that was made by so many people.
Someone once said, “If you don’t have memories of times before you were born, you are an orphan.” Indeed, this is why story telling is so important and essential. This is why some of the most beloved passages in the Bible are in the form of stories. Stories help us to orient ourselves; they help us to understand who we are and where we are going and where we might want to go. We learn who we are through stories, including the stories of our families as well the stories of our national history and the stories of the Bible, all showing us a varied cast of characters, struggling to learn and grow and be faithful---not unlike any of us.
When a grandson heard the harrowing story of his grandfather’s landing on Omaha Beach, he said he felt he had a better sense of his own identity. He found himself wondering if he would have had the grit his grandfather had, when landing on the beach, pinned to the ground, pummeled with machine gun fire, and yet rising up and going for the cliffs, which he miraculously scaled. Thinking about his grandfather’s act gave him a sense of pride, not only in his grandfather but also in himself. “I’m part of him, and he is part of me. We share DNA, and that is both a comfort and an inspiration.” Indeed, it is, and the same is true for us. We are all part of the human story, sharing the stardust and the DNA of both saints and sinners. But even if we do not literally share the DNA, we do share the stories. We remember the stories, and we pass them on.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
As I write this, it is November 11, Veteran’s Day, so how appropriate for me to tell a story about Jeffrey Rease, a man with a mission. It all began when Jeffrey saw a photography project of British World War II veterans. He was so inspired by what he saw that he decided to photograph American World War II vets, before they all died. There is an estimated 325,000 still alive, though every day we lose an estimated 296 of them. And so, Jeffrey, a graphic designer, turned photographer. He has been traveling all across the country to find veterans from the Second World War listen to their stories and photograph them---sometimes while they are holding the pictures of themselves when they joined the Armed Services over 70 years ago.
Carl Cooper was a Marine for 38 years and fought at the battle of Okinawa. Carl is 99 years old, and for Jeffrey’s photograph he put on his white gloves, his gold buttoned jacket that still had some metals, dangling on it. And then he posed for the picture. Carl Cooper was the first veteran Jeffrey photographed, and after listening to his story, Jeffrey knew he was hooked. He knew he could not turn back. And so, Portraits of Honor was born, a project that shows (so far) 110 photographs of veterans from age 93 to 104. Sadly, the coronavirus has thrown the project into chaos as nursing homes and other facilities have shut down and disallow visits. Jeffrey had a list of people he had been planning to see: Betty Green, 96, who served in the Waves, Tong Costanzo, 97, who was among the first group to land on Omaha Beach and Robert Puckett, 94, who fought at Iwo Jima. But they died before Jeffrey could meet them, hear their stories and take their pictures.
Jeffrey says he feels a deep sadness that he will never meet these people, whom he feels are among the most heroic of Americans, The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw called them. They were great because they did what duty demanded without arguing or questioning it. Their children (The Baby Boomers) were not so inclined to accept duty without asking a lot of questions. But then the war the Boomers faced (Viet Nam) was nothing like World War ll. Different times will ask different questions and elicit different responses.
The Greatest Generation were not ones to talk about their experiences or their feelings about those experiences, and the families of these men are often shocked how much Jeffrey hears from these old vets. Jeffrey notes that they have often spent a lifetime avoiding questions about the war, and after a while their spouses and their children stopped asking. But Jeffrey discovered that something began to happen to these veterans, when they crossed into their 90’s. “There’s a shift in their lives,” Jeffrey said. They have already lost so much---- friends, spouses, sometimes even children and grandchildren--- and then they discover their war memories suddenly returning in full vividness. And though they never wanted to talk before, now they need no coaching to do so.
After Jeffrey asks them what their role was and where they served, he often does not have to say another word. The stories just flow off their tongues---how a 14 year old forged his mother’s signature, so he could join up; what it was like to be trapped under a capsized boat and praying to God, even though he had never prayed before; walking into the concentration camp, Dachau, and seeing horrors that made the war experience look like child play.
The children and grandchildren of these men are often shocked how much Jeffrey hears, and they are grateful their parents and grandparents have a voice, which gives shape to experiences they had kept hidden from others for 70 years. While their short term memories may in sine cases be compromised, these memories from the past are clear, vivid and strong.
Jeffrey has traveled all over the country to connect with these men and women, sleeping in his jeep to save money for the trips. He meets people in churches and parks, where it is easier to socially distance, but these vets don’t seem very worried about the virus. They have lived their lives and have seen far more terrible things than Covid-19, so they have no fear about becoming ill and dying. Perhaps, if they are afraid of anything, it is the fear that people will not remember the sacrifice that was made by so many people.
Someone once said, “If you don’t have memories of times before you were born, you are an orphan.” Indeed, this is why story telling is so important and essential. This is why some of the most beloved passages in the Bible are in the form of stories. Stories help us to orient ourselves; they help us to understand who we are and where we are going and where we might want to go. We learn who we are through stories, including the stories of our families as well the stories of our national history and the stories of the Bible, all showing us a varied cast of characters, struggling to learn and grow and be faithful---not unlike any of us.
When a grandson heard the harrowing story of his grandfather’s landing on Omaha Beach, he said he felt he had a better sense of his own identity. He found himself wondering if he would have had the grit his grandfather had, when landing on the beach, pinned to the ground, pummeled with machine gun fire, and yet rising up and going for the cliffs, which he miraculously scaled. Thinking about his grandfather’s act gave him a sense of pride, not only in his grandfather but also in himself. “I’m part of him, and he is part of me. We share DNA, and that is both a comfort and an inspiration.” Indeed, it is, and the same is true for us. We are all part of the human story, sharing the stardust and the DNA of both saints and sinners. But even if we do not literally share the DNA, we do share the stories. We remember the stories, and we pass them on.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
None Is Lost to God by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11/8/2020
Matthew 23: 1-15; 23-28
I Thessalonians 2: 9-13
Recently a small group of us met on Zoom to discuss Simon Wiesenthal’s powerful book, The Sunflower. Wiesenthal was a famous Nazi hunter, who as a young Jewish man spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, where he expected to die. One day, on a work detail, outside the camp, a nurse brought him to the bedside of a young, dying Nazi soldier, who confessed to Simon a horrible crime he had committed in Russia against Jewish men, women and children. Karl, raised as a Roman Catholic, knew he was dying, and he wanted forgiveness for his crime, but not from a priest of his church, but from Simon as a Jew. The young Nazi reached out his hand for Simon’s, and though Simon was repulsed, he did not pull his hand away. He listened to Karl’s story, and remained silent, finally exiting the room in complete silence. Karl died that evening. The first half of the book tells the story, and the second half contains a series of reflections, written by a diversity of people from different backgrounds and professions, poets, theologians, ethicists, historians, all struggling with the question, What should Simon have done, or more essentially what would I have done in the same circumstance?
The responses were all deeply engaging, but one in particular grabbed my attention, when a man wrote, “God does not love an evil person.” And so, I asked a rabbi friend of mine if this was indeed the case, and though he had some reservations, he essentially agreed. And, he added, you are not obligated to forgive evil. Perhaps, he said to me, this means that I as a Jew have an easier time than you as a Christian accepting that some people are beyond redemption---even redemption by God.
This seems to me to be particularly germane to our reading from Matthew today, where Matthew shows Jesus shutting down all conversation with his enemies, throwing them away as irredeemable, which tragically over the centuries has played into the hands of Christian anti-Semitic. Now these words may not have come from the mouth of the historical Jesus, but rather from Matthew, writing in the middle of the 80’s, when tensions between Christians and Jews were hot and heavy. The Jewish Temple had been destroyed in the year 70, which Christians, gentile as well as Jewish Christians, interpreted as God’s judgment against the Jews for their failure to embrace Jesus as the Messiah. But to the Jews, who remained Jews, Jesus did not look like a Messiah, because the world did not appear to be redeemed. And so, these faithful Jews established synagogues, where they worshiped God and studied and reflected on Torah, that is the Law, the first five Books of the Old Testament.
In our gospel reading Jesus is shown speaking to his disciples and the crowd about the complete moral and religious bankruptcy of the Jewish leadership. Passionately charging them with hypocrisy, Jesus says they attend to details, yet ignore the larger issues of justice and mercy. On the outside their lives look clean and proper, but on the inside the corruption eats away at them. To listen to these words, you could easily believe that Jesus thought them lost to God, irredeemable. And indeed, throughout the centuries they have been used as an excuse by Christians for anti-Semitic.
By contrast our reading from 1 Thessalonians shows Paul extolling good and responsible church leadership. We have “worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you; our behavior has been “blameless, pure and upright,” he claims. So, we have here this stark contrast with the Jewish leadership described as hypocrites in Matthew and the Christian leadership in Thessalonica celebrated as pure and upright. But in truth it is doubtful that the Jewish leadership was as totally corrupt as Matthew portrays, just as it is unlikely that the leadership of the Thessalonica church was as pure and upright as Paul portrays. Each writer, after all, has a story to tell and to sell. And if we follow the promptings of the Reformation, we should be suspicious with the claim that people are beyond redemption. How can we possibly know such a thing?
At the end of my first year in seminary, I spent the summer at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, doing clinical training, where I met Frances, a 97 year old, mentally sharp old school Universalist. Having grown up in Alabama, the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, Frances was active in her father’s churches until her sophomore year in college, when she spent the summer in Boston with a college friend. It was there she became acquainted with the Universalist Church whose defining was universal salvation---all are loved and saved by God. When Frances returned home right before her junior year was to begin and her father learned of his daughter’s renegade theology, he was furious, disowning her and refusing to pay for college. She was fortunate to have a great grandmother, who paid the bill---without saying a word to her grandson. Frances was shunned by her parents for over 35 years.
She became a psychologist, working in the prison system with some of the most hardened criminals you can imagine, murderers, rapists, you name it, she had seen it. It was, she said, a real test of my faith, my belief that no one is outside of God’s redeeming love and mercy. Many of these people, she told me, were really quite terrible; they had done wicked things, and some showed no remorse for their deeds. But believing that God loved them gave her the courage and the grit to do her work, even if much of the time it looked futile.
I remember this one day, she said, when I was part of a group, 7 prisoners, a social worker and me as well as two prison guards, to protect us, if anything happened. One prisoner, Al, had been incarcerated for over 40 years, from the time he was 19, a lifer with two murder convictions against him. And this one day, after the group had been meeting for some weeks, he suddenly shouted and me, “What are you doing here?” In all the years I had been doing this work, no prisoner had ever asked me that question. They didn’t care why I was there. They were just glad to get out of their cells for a while, I guess. So, I didn’t have time to think of any professional response, so I just said, “I am here, because I believe you are loved by God, and being here is one way I can witness to God’s love.” There was this deafening silence, and then raucous laughter from one of the inmates, until another one commanded, “Shut your mouth.” And then Al, the man who had asked the question, began to weep, and soon the others began to cry as well, even the prison guards had to wipe away tears.. I mean these were among the hardest and meanest people I had ever known, Frances said, and here they all were, weeping.
Well, God has a funny way of working, because the next week her father, who was 84, called her and asked if she would come home. So, Frances went, and her father asked for her forgiveness, which she readily gave. It was then she learned that her father had left the Southern Baptists decades before, all because he was haunted by Frances’ conviction that God loves all and finally redeems all. How do you know that to be true, he asked her? After all, some of Jesus’ words are very hard. So how do you know that no one is lost to God? And her answer, “It is not so much a question of knowledge as it is of hope.” I hope for what I do not fully know or understand.” And there are indeed times when hope is the best thing we have and the best thing we can do.
In Christ,
Sandra
Matthew 23: 1-15; 23-28
I Thessalonians 2: 9-13
Recently a small group of us met on Zoom to discuss Simon Wiesenthal’s powerful book, The Sunflower. Wiesenthal was a famous Nazi hunter, who as a young Jewish man spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, where he expected to die. One day, on a work detail, outside the camp, a nurse brought him to the bedside of a young, dying Nazi soldier, who confessed to Simon a horrible crime he had committed in Russia against Jewish men, women and children. Karl, raised as a Roman Catholic, knew he was dying, and he wanted forgiveness for his crime, but not from a priest of his church, but from Simon as a Jew. The young Nazi reached out his hand for Simon’s, and though Simon was repulsed, he did not pull his hand away. He listened to Karl’s story, and remained silent, finally exiting the room in complete silence. Karl died that evening. The first half of the book tells the story, and the second half contains a series of reflections, written by a diversity of people from different backgrounds and professions, poets, theologians, ethicists, historians, all struggling with the question, What should Simon have done, or more essentially what would I have done in the same circumstance?
The responses were all deeply engaging, but one in particular grabbed my attention, when a man wrote, “God does not love an evil person.” And so, I asked a rabbi friend of mine if this was indeed the case, and though he had some reservations, he essentially agreed. And, he added, you are not obligated to forgive evil. Perhaps, he said to me, this means that I as a Jew have an easier time than you as a Christian accepting that some people are beyond redemption---even redemption by God.
This seems to me to be particularly germane to our reading from Matthew today, where Matthew shows Jesus shutting down all conversation with his enemies, throwing them away as irredeemable, which tragically over the centuries has played into the hands of Christian anti-Semitic. Now these words may not have come from the mouth of the historical Jesus, but rather from Matthew, writing in the middle of the 80’s, when tensions between Christians and Jews were hot and heavy. The Jewish Temple had been destroyed in the year 70, which Christians, gentile as well as Jewish Christians, interpreted as God’s judgment against the Jews for their failure to embrace Jesus as the Messiah. But to the Jews, who remained Jews, Jesus did not look like a Messiah, because the world did not appear to be redeemed. And so, these faithful Jews established synagogues, where they worshiped God and studied and reflected on Torah, that is the Law, the first five Books of the Old Testament.
In our gospel reading Jesus is shown speaking to his disciples and the crowd about the complete moral and religious bankruptcy of the Jewish leadership. Passionately charging them with hypocrisy, Jesus says they attend to details, yet ignore the larger issues of justice and mercy. On the outside their lives look clean and proper, but on the inside the corruption eats away at them. To listen to these words, you could easily believe that Jesus thought them lost to God, irredeemable. And indeed, throughout the centuries they have been used as an excuse by Christians for anti-Semitic.
By contrast our reading from 1 Thessalonians shows Paul extolling good and responsible church leadership. We have “worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you; our behavior has been “blameless, pure and upright,” he claims. So, we have here this stark contrast with the Jewish leadership described as hypocrites in Matthew and the Christian leadership in Thessalonica celebrated as pure and upright. But in truth it is doubtful that the Jewish leadership was as totally corrupt as Matthew portrays, just as it is unlikely that the leadership of the Thessalonica church was as pure and upright as Paul portrays. Each writer, after all, has a story to tell and to sell. And if we follow the promptings of the Reformation, we should be suspicious with the claim that people are beyond redemption. How can we possibly know such a thing?
At the end of my first year in seminary, I spent the summer at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, doing clinical training, where I met Frances, a 97 year old, mentally sharp old school Universalist. Having grown up in Alabama, the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, Frances was active in her father’s churches until her sophomore year in college, when she spent the summer in Boston with a college friend. It was there she became acquainted with the Universalist Church whose defining was universal salvation---all are loved and saved by God. When Frances returned home right before her junior year was to begin and her father learned of his daughter’s renegade theology, he was furious, disowning her and refusing to pay for college. She was fortunate to have a great grandmother, who paid the bill---without saying a word to her grandson. Frances was shunned by her parents for over 35 years.
She became a psychologist, working in the prison system with some of the most hardened criminals you can imagine, murderers, rapists, you name it, she had seen it. It was, she said, a real test of my faith, my belief that no one is outside of God’s redeeming love and mercy. Many of these people, she told me, were really quite terrible; they had done wicked things, and some showed no remorse for their deeds. But believing that God loved them gave her the courage and the grit to do her work, even if much of the time it looked futile.
I remember this one day, she said, when I was part of a group, 7 prisoners, a social worker and me as well as two prison guards, to protect us, if anything happened. One prisoner, Al, had been incarcerated for over 40 years, from the time he was 19, a lifer with two murder convictions against him. And this one day, after the group had been meeting for some weeks, he suddenly shouted and me, “What are you doing here?” In all the years I had been doing this work, no prisoner had ever asked me that question. They didn’t care why I was there. They were just glad to get out of their cells for a while, I guess. So, I didn’t have time to think of any professional response, so I just said, “I am here, because I believe you are loved by God, and being here is one way I can witness to God’s love.” There was this deafening silence, and then raucous laughter from one of the inmates, until another one commanded, “Shut your mouth.” And then Al, the man who had asked the question, began to weep, and soon the others began to cry as well, even the prison guards had to wipe away tears.. I mean these were among the hardest and meanest people I had ever known, Frances said, and here they all were, weeping.
Well, God has a funny way of working, because the next week her father, who was 84, called her and asked if she would come home. So, Frances went, and her father asked for her forgiveness, which she readily gave. It was then she learned that her father had left the Southern Baptists decades before, all because he was haunted by Frances’ conviction that God loves all and finally redeems all. How do you know that to be true, he asked her? After all, some of Jesus’ words are very hard. So how do you know that no one is lost to God? And her answer, “It is not so much a question of knowledge as it is of hope.” I hope for what I do not fully know or understand.” And there are indeed times when hope is the best thing we have and the best thing we can do.
In Christ,
Sandra
THE UNAUTHORIZED VERSION by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11/1/2020
Joshua 24: 1-3; 14-25
Matthew 25: 1-13
1611 was quite a year: Galileo's telescope made its appearance, giving the world a view of the heavens no one had ever seen before---sunspots, dark, cavernous craters on the moon, things the Church thought should not be there. The universe was understood to be a hierarchy, and the higher up one moved, the closer one came to heaven, the more perfect and beautiful is was supposed to be. And yet gazing out into the vast expanse of space, Galileo saw things that defied the Church's understanding of reality. He saw what he saw, not what he was supposed to see, and the world shook at its foundations.
Something else happened in 1611, which was also earth shaking. On May 2 the King James Version of the bible was first published, and it became the standard Bible of the English speaking world for nearly 400 years. It is still the Bible the President of the United States puts his or her hands upon when taking the oath of office to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States.
The King James Bible was not the first English translation. John Wycliffe, a towering intellectual and church leader in the 1300's, called by Luther "the morning star of the Reformation,” translated the Bible into Middle English---the English of Chaucer. And William Tyndale, a brilliant linguist who knew seven languages, translated the first five books of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament into English, a labor of love, whose reward was the stake in 1536. And then there was the Geneva Bible of 1560, the favorite of the Puritans and Shakespeare and the one carried on the Mayflower by the Pilgrims.
Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday, when you heard from Martin Luther, and the King James Bible is also part of the Reformation story. But England's Reformation did not begin with Luther. It had more to do with a king who wanted a male heir, and so King Henry VIII severed his ties to Rome so he could divorce and remarry. In time his daughter Elizabeth l would come to the throne, and one of her achievements in her nearly 50 years of rule was a new translation of the Bible in 1563, known as the Bishop's Bible, which became the standard one for the Church of England---though scholars today all agree that the Geneva Bible of 1560 was a far superior translation.
In 1603 Elizabeth died, and King James of Scotland came to the English throne. At this time the tensions were high between the Church of England and a group of radicals known as Puritans, who wanted to purge the English Church of its "papist" tendencies. The Puritans remembered that when James had come to the Scottish throne, he had scorned high church Anglicism by calling it "an ill mumbled mass in English," and so the Puritans hoped they would have a friend in the king. But the King believed he ruled by divine right, and so he had no sympathy at all for the Puritans’ democratic political leanings. He told the Puritans, “Conform or else!”
James was no fool, and he realized that making complete enemies of the Puritans was not to his political advantage, and so he paid heed to one of their requests: a new translation of the Bible. No one really understands why the Puritans made the request, because they were really quite happy with the Geneva Bible, and even after the KJV became available, the Puritans still continued to use the Geneva Bible. The King's nod to the new translation was more like a sneer---“I’ll give you this and no more, ” and yet, despite sneering, the King approved the assembling of a team of 47 translators, divided into 6 committees meeting at three different locations: Westminster Abbey, representing the legal and clerical powers, the University of Oxford, representing high Anglicism and the University of Cambridge, home to the radicals and dissidents.
What is truly amazing is that these translators represented not only scholarly excellence, but also a wide range of religious perspectives from high church to low church with one quarter being Puritans. The translators were told to make a revised translation of the Bishop's Bible, and since all of them were formidable scholars, they consulted not only other English translations, but also Luther's German Bible, the Latin Vulgate, a Syriac and an Aramaic New Testament as well as Greek and Latin manuscripts. Within 50 years of its publication in 1611 the King James Version supplanted the Geneva Bible, and though both the Pilgrims and Puritans had carried the Geneva Bible to these shores, the first bibles printed in this land were the King James Version.
Harold Bloom, a now deceased humanities professor from Yale, claimed the King James Bible stands "at the sublime summit of literature in English, sharing that honor only with Shakespeare.” While it is not the most accurate translation of the Hebrew and Greek, because the translators then only had access to what is today considered inferior manuscripts, which is why most seminaries today insist on the New Revised Version for its greater accuracy. Yet there is no denying that its language is designed for the ear with a flowing, eloquent rhythm. But it was not the praises of scholars or clergy that made the King James Bible great. Rather, it was its reception by the people. The Church never commanded this as the authorized choice--although when Queen Elizabeth ll came to the throne in 1953, she commanded that every school child in Great Britain receive a copy of the King James Bible. Nonetheless, I repeat, it was not authority, which made this translation beloved; it was the choice of the people. They freely accepted it---perhaps not unlike the Israelites, who at Shechem freely accepted the covenant with God. No one forced them; it was their choice.
Surely there is wisdom here---in the recognition that compulsion is never the wise means for shaping and forming faith. You can authorize a version; you can even command that it will be the official one, but that does not mean that people will love it and receive it and make it their own.
In today's reading from Matthew we hear a story about readiness to welcome the bridegroom, which symbolizes Jesus Christ. There are wise bridesmaids, who had with them enough oil, while the foolish ones did not plan so well ahead. And when the wise ones were asked to share their oil, they would not, claiming that if they did, they too would run out. But I wonder, if the real reason for their refusal has more to do with what can be given and shared. What is, after all, this precious oil, that allows the wise maidens to be present when the bridegroom comes? Is it faith or perhaps hope---and if so, can you really give faith and hope to another? Oh, you can tell the stories of the faith; you can do acts of charity for the dejected and the poor, speak out against violence and hatred---all part of faithful witness. But you cannot compel faith or command love and hope.
The King James Bible began as a half-hearted request from a group of dejected Puritans, and King James consented with a sneer. Not a very auspicious beginning for something, which became the beloved Word of God in the English language for over 400 years. No one would have predicted it, but then when it comes to religion, we are never sure what will happen or what God is up to.
Joshua 24: 1-3; 14-25
Matthew 25: 1-13
1611 was quite a year: Galileo's telescope made its appearance, giving the world a view of the heavens no one had ever seen before---sunspots, dark, cavernous craters on the moon, things the Church thought should not be there. The universe was understood to be a hierarchy, and the higher up one moved, the closer one came to heaven, the more perfect and beautiful is was supposed to be. And yet gazing out into the vast expanse of space, Galileo saw things that defied the Church's understanding of reality. He saw what he saw, not what he was supposed to see, and the world shook at its foundations.
Something else happened in 1611, which was also earth shaking. On May 2 the King James Version of the bible was first published, and it became the standard Bible of the English speaking world for nearly 400 years. It is still the Bible the President of the United States puts his or her hands upon when taking the oath of office to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States.
The King James Bible was not the first English translation. John Wycliffe, a towering intellectual and church leader in the 1300's, called by Luther "the morning star of the Reformation,” translated the Bible into Middle English---the English of Chaucer. And William Tyndale, a brilliant linguist who knew seven languages, translated the first five books of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament into English, a labor of love, whose reward was the stake in 1536. And then there was the Geneva Bible of 1560, the favorite of the Puritans and Shakespeare and the one carried on the Mayflower by the Pilgrims.
Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday, when you heard from Martin Luther, and the King James Bible is also part of the Reformation story. But England's Reformation did not begin with Luther. It had more to do with a king who wanted a male heir, and so King Henry VIII severed his ties to Rome so he could divorce and remarry. In time his daughter Elizabeth l would come to the throne, and one of her achievements in her nearly 50 years of rule was a new translation of the Bible in 1563, known as the Bishop's Bible, which became the standard one for the Church of England---though scholars today all agree that the Geneva Bible of 1560 was a far superior translation.
In 1603 Elizabeth died, and King James of Scotland came to the English throne. At this time the tensions were high between the Church of England and a group of radicals known as Puritans, who wanted to purge the English Church of its "papist" tendencies. The Puritans remembered that when James had come to the Scottish throne, he had scorned high church Anglicism by calling it "an ill mumbled mass in English," and so the Puritans hoped they would have a friend in the king. But the King believed he ruled by divine right, and so he had no sympathy at all for the Puritans’ democratic political leanings. He told the Puritans, “Conform or else!”
James was no fool, and he realized that making complete enemies of the Puritans was not to his political advantage, and so he paid heed to one of their requests: a new translation of the Bible. No one really understands why the Puritans made the request, because they were really quite happy with the Geneva Bible, and even after the KJV became available, the Puritans still continued to use the Geneva Bible. The King's nod to the new translation was more like a sneer---“I’ll give you this and no more, ” and yet, despite sneering, the King approved the assembling of a team of 47 translators, divided into 6 committees meeting at three different locations: Westminster Abbey, representing the legal and clerical powers, the University of Oxford, representing high Anglicism and the University of Cambridge, home to the radicals and dissidents.
What is truly amazing is that these translators represented not only scholarly excellence, but also a wide range of religious perspectives from high church to low church with one quarter being Puritans. The translators were told to make a revised translation of the Bishop's Bible, and since all of them were formidable scholars, they consulted not only other English translations, but also Luther's German Bible, the Latin Vulgate, a Syriac and an Aramaic New Testament as well as Greek and Latin manuscripts. Within 50 years of its publication in 1611 the King James Version supplanted the Geneva Bible, and though both the Pilgrims and Puritans had carried the Geneva Bible to these shores, the first bibles printed in this land were the King James Version.
Harold Bloom, a now deceased humanities professor from Yale, claimed the King James Bible stands "at the sublime summit of literature in English, sharing that honor only with Shakespeare.” While it is not the most accurate translation of the Hebrew and Greek, because the translators then only had access to what is today considered inferior manuscripts, which is why most seminaries today insist on the New Revised Version for its greater accuracy. Yet there is no denying that its language is designed for the ear with a flowing, eloquent rhythm. But it was not the praises of scholars or clergy that made the King James Bible great. Rather, it was its reception by the people. The Church never commanded this as the authorized choice--although when Queen Elizabeth ll came to the throne in 1953, she commanded that every school child in Great Britain receive a copy of the King James Bible. Nonetheless, I repeat, it was not authority, which made this translation beloved; it was the choice of the people. They freely accepted it---perhaps not unlike the Israelites, who at Shechem freely accepted the covenant with God. No one forced them; it was their choice.
Surely there is wisdom here---in the recognition that compulsion is never the wise means for shaping and forming faith. You can authorize a version; you can even command that it will be the official one, but that does not mean that people will love it and receive it and make it their own.
In today's reading from Matthew we hear a story about readiness to welcome the bridegroom, which symbolizes Jesus Christ. There are wise bridesmaids, who had with them enough oil, while the foolish ones did not plan so well ahead. And when the wise ones were asked to share their oil, they would not, claiming that if they did, they too would run out. But I wonder, if the real reason for their refusal has more to do with what can be given and shared. What is, after all, this precious oil, that allows the wise maidens to be present when the bridegroom comes? Is it faith or perhaps hope---and if so, can you really give faith and hope to another? Oh, you can tell the stories of the faith; you can do acts of charity for the dejected and the poor, speak out against violence and hatred---all part of faithful witness. But you cannot compel faith or command love and hope.
The King James Bible began as a half-hearted request from a group of dejected Puritans, and King James consented with a sneer. Not a very auspicious beginning for something, which became the beloved Word of God in the English language for over 400 years. No one would have predicted it, but then when it comes to religion, we are never sure what will happen or what God is up to.
October 28, 2020
Dear Friends,
Jayden Rathbone was 13 years old, and his favorite holiday was Halloween. He loved to dress up and go around the neighborhood making people jump with fright and then laugh. In 2011 his mother, Crystal Conover, dropped her son off at her ex-husband’s house, so Jayden could go trick and treating with his father. But on this night Crystal received a dreaded call. Jayden was crossing a dark street with his father, when a car suddenly came around the corner and hit him. He was on life support until Thanksgiving of that year, when he finally died.
Crystal had four other children to care for, so she could not completely surrender to her grief and anger, but still the pain was searingly deep, too deep for life to return to normal. She wasn’t always sure she could get through it, and even after two years, she still had very bad days. So, one of her friends in 2013 suggested she do something to honor and remember Jayden in a very special way. Since Halloween was his favorite holiday, Crystal decided to go all out with decorations for her yard ---clowns, goblins, ghosts, witches, black cats, spiders and any other creepy creatures you might imagine. And she also purchased hundreds of glow sticks to pass out to kids to help them light their way. Every year, since 2013, she repeated the same ritual---decorating her yard and handing out glow sticks.
But this year is different as it has been for everyone. And Crystal just found herself exhausted with all the tension and worry about the election, the virus, jobs, school, everything just clamping down on her heart and mind like a vise that would never let go. And so, she decided there would be no Halloween decorations this year. She simply could not do it. Well, word got out, and her neighbors would have none of it! Without even asking her permission, they showed up and began pulling out all the decorations from the garage and basement while even purchasing some new ones, because that too was part of the tradition. Every year new decorations were added. And, of course, there were the glow sticks along with a big sign for the front lawn, Help Jayden Light the Way!
One afternoon a man by the name of Lewis Weaver was driving through Crystal’s neighborhood, when he suddenly saw the sign, which pulled his mind back to Halloween, 2011. He was the fireman, the first on the scene of Jayden’s accident, the last person to hear Jayden speak. He pulled his car in front of Crystal’s house, and went up to the door, and told her who he was and what he remembered of that terrible night. And Crystal threw her arms around him and cried, grateful that he had stopped and even more grateful that he had actually heard Jayden’s voice and had seen him alive. For Crystal it was a great comfort. Lewis bought a clown to add to the decorations in Crystal’s yard and also some glow sticks to hand out to the kids in his neighborhood.
Halloween might be smaller this year, because of the pandemic, but for Crystal, Lewis and the people in Crystal’s neighborhood, there is nothing small about this Halloween. It is, in so many ways, a very big year as care and compassion are generously spread around. When someone is hurting, as much as Crystal was hurting, it is so easy to walk on by and say nothing and do nothing, because who really knows what to say or do? Everything can seem pathetically inadequate, so doing nothing does not seem like such a bad choice. But that is not what these neighbors did. They too were hurting with everything that is going on in the country and the world, and yet they chose to move outside their own pain long enough to recognize that Chrystal’s hurt could not be ignored. They knew that Jayden is ever present in her heart and mind, and so they reached out to help. What they did was not a miracle cure; it does not and will not remove all the hurt and anger and grief, but Crystal’s load is lightened by realizing how much people do care. And she is uplifted by the realization that she is not the only one who remembers Jayden. So many of her neighbors remember that smiling faced 13 year old boy, who loved Halloween and would want as the sign reads on the front lawn: TO LIGHT THE WAY FOR OTHERS. And isn’t this what we all should want, because when we light the way for others, we discover that our own way is also lit? That is the way it works. We are not in this life alone, and we do not travel alone. We have each other, and we also have our God in Jesus Christ, who is with us in our loneliness and also whenever two or three together are gathered in his name.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Jayden Rathbone was 13 years old, and his favorite holiday was Halloween. He loved to dress up and go around the neighborhood making people jump with fright and then laugh. In 2011 his mother, Crystal Conover, dropped her son off at her ex-husband’s house, so Jayden could go trick and treating with his father. But on this night Crystal received a dreaded call. Jayden was crossing a dark street with his father, when a car suddenly came around the corner and hit him. He was on life support until Thanksgiving of that year, when he finally died.
Crystal had four other children to care for, so she could not completely surrender to her grief and anger, but still the pain was searingly deep, too deep for life to return to normal. She wasn’t always sure she could get through it, and even after two years, she still had very bad days. So, one of her friends in 2013 suggested she do something to honor and remember Jayden in a very special way. Since Halloween was his favorite holiday, Crystal decided to go all out with decorations for her yard ---clowns, goblins, ghosts, witches, black cats, spiders and any other creepy creatures you might imagine. And she also purchased hundreds of glow sticks to pass out to kids to help them light their way. Every year, since 2013, she repeated the same ritual---decorating her yard and handing out glow sticks.
But this year is different as it has been for everyone. And Crystal just found herself exhausted with all the tension and worry about the election, the virus, jobs, school, everything just clamping down on her heart and mind like a vise that would never let go. And so, she decided there would be no Halloween decorations this year. She simply could not do it. Well, word got out, and her neighbors would have none of it! Without even asking her permission, they showed up and began pulling out all the decorations from the garage and basement while even purchasing some new ones, because that too was part of the tradition. Every year new decorations were added. And, of course, there were the glow sticks along with a big sign for the front lawn, Help Jayden Light the Way!
One afternoon a man by the name of Lewis Weaver was driving through Crystal’s neighborhood, when he suddenly saw the sign, which pulled his mind back to Halloween, 2011. He was the fireman, the first on the scene of Jayden’s accident, the last person to hear Jayden speak. He pulled his car in front of Crystal’s house, and went up to the door, and told her who he was and what he remembered of that terrible night. And Crystal threw her arms around him and cried, grateful that he had stopped and even more grateful that he had actually heard Jayden’s voice and had seen him alive. For Crystal it was a great comfort. Lewis bought a clown to add to the decorations in Crystal’s yard and also some glow sticks to hand out to the kids in his neighborhood.
Halloween might be smaller this year, because of the pandemic, but for Crystal, Lewis and the people in Crystal’s neighborhood, there is nothing small about this Halloween. It is, in so many ways, a very big year as care and compassion are generously spread around. When someone is hurting, as much as Crystal was hurting, it is so easy to walk on by and say nothing and do nothing, because who really knows what to say or do? Everything can seem pathetically inadequate, so doing nothing does not seem like such a bad choice. But that is not what these neighbors did. They too were hurting with everything that is going on in the country and the world, and yet they chose to move outside their own pain long enough to recognize that Chrystal’s hurt could not be ignored. They knew that Jayden is ever present in her heart and mind, and so they reached out to help. What they did was not a miracle cure; it does not and will not remove all the hurt and anger and grief, but Crystal’s load is lightened by realizing how much people do care. And she is uplifted by the realization that she is not the only one who remembers Jayden. So many of her neighbors remember that smiling faced 13 year old boy, who loved Halloween and would want as the sign reads on the front lawn: TO LIGHT THE WAY FOR OTHERS. And isn’t this what we all should want, because when we light the way for others, we discover that our own way is also lit? That is the way it works. We are not in this life alone, and we do not travel alone. We have each other, and we also have our God in Jesus Christ, who is with us in our loneliness and also whenever two or three together are gathered in his name.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A VISIT FROM MARTIN LUTHER: PRAYING FOR THE CHURCH
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11.1.2020
2 Thessalonians 1: 1-4; 2:1-4
I know how hard church can be, especially in times of great change, when you are not sure what lies ahead. I know what it is like to feel that things are way beyond your control---that the times are reeling with new inventions and ideas that call into question everything that has gone before. Change: it has never been easy for any of us in any time. And change has never been easy for the church, because almost by definition the church clings to tradition. The Bible is tradition, taking us far back before any of our lives began, and to many people then as now the bible was and is a fixed mark, telling people the same truth year after year after year. So, why should there be change? Why, indeed? Even now after all these 500 plus years I do not fully understand it, but the hindsight of history has given me some sight now I lacked then.
There was, of course, the invention of the printing press. That changed everything---something like your computers today, which have also changed everything. Information suddenly became available, and though literacy was not widespread, it had been increasing. More and more people could read, not Latin, of course, but their native tongue. And so, when I translated the Bible into German, I helped to foment a revolution. You know when I was hiding in the Wartburg Castle, because Rome was looking to arrest me and burn me at the stake, I used to go out in the day, disguised as a peasant, just so I could hear the words ordinary people used. I wanted to make the Bible come alive with the language of the people, so they could really hear God’s Word in their own tongue.
John Wycliffe had done the same in the mid 1300’s, when he translated the bible into English. He too was a reformer as was Jan Hus, burned at the stake in 1415 for his so called heresies---like wanting to give the communion cup to the laity. He was tricked, guaranteed safe passage, but when he arrived to give answer for his views, it was not a debate but an inquisition that had already decided to burn him. After his death his followers symbolized themselves by the flaming chalice. These were people of great vision and great courage and above all, great faith---but their time was not yet fully ripe. All in God’s time, we would say, all in God’s time.
And so, it became ---God’s time, though I did not know it then. My father was a successful miner, and having risen from the peasantry, he was determined to see me rise even further to become a lawyer and bring great honor to the family. It was our time, he insisted. But in the summer of 1505 in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm, when I was sure I would die, I cried out, “St. Anne, help me, and I shall become a monk.” Well, she did help me; I was saved, and a promise is a promise, so despite my father’s severe objections, I left law school and entered the monastery in Erfurt.
Let me tell you have insufferably hard monastic life was, physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. I recall the bone chilling cold, emanating from the dank stone walls and the long days of fasting, when my stomach churned in pain. But far worse than the physical suffering were my spiritual tortures. I was convinced that God hated me and would condemn me to everlasting torment for my sins. No matter how hard I tried to discipline my wayward soul, there were always more sins to accuse my conscience. My spiritual advisor, Johann von Staupitz used to say to me, “Martin, God is not angry with you, but you are angry with God.” It was true. Sometimes I hated God, and even now I think it was not love for God but my hatred that drove me to understand that we become righteous not through our good intentions and works, but through the grace of God. God declares us righteous even though we are sinners. The irony of God, that he would use my hatred of him to foment a revolution that changed the world.
You see, the Reformation was not PRIMARILY about the church’s abuses---though there were many, to be sure, like all that nonsense about indulgences buying off time in purgatory. Pope Leo wanted a magnificent church built in Rome, what would become St. Peter’s, and for that he needed money and a lot of it. So, the selling of indulgences was a way to fill papal coffers. “As into the coffers a penny rings, so out of purgatory a soul springs.” Silly it was, trivial theology---except that it is not so trivial when people, who did not know any better, were spiritually harmed. Then there was the pathetic ignorance of too many clergy, some who could not even recite the Lord’s Prayer. And the greed of the papacy for not only wealth but also power. The Pope was claiming for himself a power he simply did not have. The Vicar of Christ he called himself, but no human being can claim that authority. And in the end with all the ink and blood spilt---this is what it came down to---a question of authority. By whose authority do you say or do these things? On what basis do you claim your authority?
An old question, it is. Jesus Christ was asked by the religious leaders of his day, “By whose authority do you cast out demons? By what authority do you throw the money-changers out of the Temple courtyard? When I was asked on what authority I claimed my understanding of scripture, I told them it was from the authority of my study, my education, my doctorate. My authority did not derive from my ordination, but from my study of scripture. It was study which convinced me that it is not our human works which save us, but faith, faith as the gift of God. And then do you know what that perfidious Eck said to me, that toady of a man, doing the bidding of the Pope. He charged, “This is the virus, Martin, the heresy we seek to root out---this desire to attach more weight to one’s own interpretation of scripture than to that of the popes and councils and doctors and universities. Are you, Martin, the only one who knows anything, so that the church until you has been in grave error?”
That question, I will confess, was the only one that made my soul tremble. For how did I really know? And yet I answered Eck, “Remember that God once spoke through the mouth of Balaam’s ass. So, I will tell you what I think. I am a Christian theologian, and I am bound to not only assert but to defend the truth with my blood and my death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university or pope. I will confidently confess what appears to me true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic, whether it has been approved or reproved by a council.”
Finally, I was called to the city of Worms, where once again I faced Eck, who was a man of considerable talent and intellect, though he was on the wrong side of history. He told me I had no right to call into question the most holy Catholic Church, instituted by Christ, proclaimed by the apostles, sealed by the blood of the martyrs, confirmed by the councils. Straight into my eyes he gazed, “Do you or do you not, Martin, repudiate your books and the errors they contain?” And I answered, looking first straight into his eyes and then gazing at all those in attendance, their necks protruding out, straining to hear what I was about to declare. “Since you ask for a reply,” I said, “I will give you one without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes or councils, for they have contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me, amen.”
So long ago that was, and how much the world has changed. The church, which in my day stood at the forefront of revolution, now is threatened with a kind of benign irrelevance. So easily ignored it is, empty pews and all. But the truth is, we cannot see around the corner of history. We do not know what God is up to. I didn’t know in my time, and you don’t know in yours. Maybe the Church---and I mean church with a capital C--- is going through some kind of strange growing pains that shrink it down before it can grow and blossom into something new. We just don’t know. We struggle to be faithful, and the measure of faith is not always success. The call, after all, is to be faithful first, and so we struggle.
And so too did St. Paul struggle. He too was not always sure how faith should look in his particular moment. But he was sure of God’s fidelity in Jesus Christ; he was sure the Church had a mission to preach the love of God for a world and humanity, mired in sin. And so, he prayed for the church, just as I too prayed, and just as you too must do the same.
It is so easy to lose heart, to be discouraged. But remember, we can never be sure what God is up to. Take heart, my friends, God is not yet finished with the Church. The Reformation continues.
by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 11.1.2020
2 Thessalonians 1: 1-4; 2:1-4
I know how hard church can be, especially in times of great change, when you are not sure what lies ahead. I know what it is like to feel that things are way beyond your control---that the times are reeling with new inventions and ideas that call into question everything that has gone before. Change: it has never been easy for any of us in any time. And change has never been easy for the church, because almost by definition the church clings to tradition. The Bible is tradition, taking us far back before any of our lives began, and to many people then as now the bible was and is a fixed mark, telling people the same truth year after year after year. So, why should there be change? Why, indeed? Even now after all these 500 plus years I do not fully understand it, but the hindsight of history has given me some sight now I lacked then.
There was, of course, the invention of the printing press. That changed everything---something like your computers today, which have also changed everything. Information suddenly became available, and though literacy was not widespread, it had been increasing. More and more people could read, not Latin, of course, but their native tongue. And so, when I translated the Bible into German, I helped to foment a revolution. You know when I was hiding in the Wartburg Castle, because Rome was looking to arrest me and burn me at the stake, I used to go out in the day, disguised as a peasant, just so I could hear the words ordinary people used. I wanted to make the Bible come alive with the language of the people, so they could really hear God’s Word in their own tongue.
John Wycliffe had done the same in the mid 1300’s, when he translated the bible into English. He too was a reformer as was Jan Hus, burned at the stake in 1415 for his so called heresies---like wanting to give the communion cup to the laity. He was tricked, guaranteed safe passage, but when he arrived to give answer for his views, it was not a debate but an inquisition that had already decided to burn him. After his death his followers symbolized themselves by the flaming chalice. These were people of great vision and great courage and above all, great faith---but their time was not yet fully ripe. All in God’s time, we would say, all in God’s time.
And so, it became ---God’s time, though I did not know it then. My father was a successful miner, and having risen from the peasantry, he was determined to see me rise even further to become a lawyer and bring great honor to the family. It was our time, he insisted. But in the summer of 1505 in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm, when I was sure I would die, I cried out, “St. Anne, help me, and I shall become a monk.” Well, she did help me; I was saved, and a promise is a promise, so despite my father’s severe objections, I left law school and entered the monastery in Erfurt.
Let me tell you have insufferably hard monastic life was, physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. I recall the bone chilling cold, emanating from the dank stone walls and the long days of fasting, when my stomach churned in pain. But far worse than the physical suffering were my spiritual tortures. I was convinced that God hated me and would condemn me to everlasting torment for my sins. No matter how hard I tried to discipline my wayward soul, there were always more sins to accuse my conscience. My spiritual advisor, Johann von Staupitz used to say to me, “Martin, God is not angry with you, but you are angry with God.” It was true. Sometimes I hated God, and even now I think it was not love for God but my hatred that drove me to understand that we become righteous not through our good intentions and works, but through the grace of God. God declares us righteous even though we are sinners. The irony of God, that he would use my hatred of him to foment a revolution that changed the world.
You see, the Reformation was not PRIMARILY about the church’s abuses---though there were many, to be sure, like all that nonsense about indulgences buying off time in purgatory. Pope Leo wanted a magnificent church built in Rome, what would become St. Peter’s, and for that he needed money and a lot of it. So, the selling of indulgences was a way to fill papal coffers. “As into the coffers a penny rings, so out of purgatory a soul springs.” Silly it was, trivial theology---except that it is not so trivial when people, who did not know any better, were spiritually harmed. Then there was the pathetic ignorance of too many clergy, some who could not even recite the Lord’s Prayer. And the greed of the papacy for not only wealth but also power. The Pope was claiming for himself a power he simply did not have. The Vicar of Christ he called himself, but no human being can claim that authority. And in the end with all the ink and blood spilt---this is what it came down to---a question of authority. By whose authority do you say or do these things? On what basis do you claim your authority?
An old question, it is. Jesus Christ was asked by the religious leaders of his day, “By whose authority do you cast out demons? By what authority do you throw the money-changers out of the Temple courtyard? When I was asked on what authority I claimed my understanding of scripture, I told them it was from the authority of my study, my education, my doctorate. My authority did not derive from my ordination, but from my study of scripture. It was study which convinced me that it is not our human works which save us, but faith, faith as the gift of God. And then do you know what that perfidious Eck said to me, that toady of a man, doing the bidding of the Pope. He charged, “This is the virus, Martin, the heresy we seek to root out---this desire to attach more weight to one’s own interpretation of scripture than to that of the popes and councils and doctors and universities. Are you, Martin, the only one who knows anything, so that the church until you has been in grave error?”
That question, I will confess, was the only one that made my soul tremble. For how did I really know? And yet I answered Eck, “Remember that God once spoke through the mouth of Balaam’s ass. So, I will tell you what I think. I am a Christian theologian, and I am bound to not only assert but to defend the truth with my blood and my death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university or pope. I will confidently confess what appears to me true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic, whether it has been approved or reproved by a council.”
Finally, I was called to the city of Worms, where once again I faced Eck, who was a man of considerable talent and intellect, though he was on the wrong side of history. He told me I had no right to call into question the most holy Catholic Church, instituted by Christ, proclaimed by the apostles, sealed by the blood of the martyrs, confirmed by the councils. Straight into my eyes he gazed, “Do you or do you not, Martin, repudiate your books and the errors they contain?” And I answered, looking first straight into his eyes and then gazing at all those in attendance, their necks protruding out, straining to hear what I was about to declare. “Since you ask for a reply,” I said, “I will give you one without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes or councils, for they have contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me, amen.”
So long ago that was, and how much the world has changed. The church, which in my day stood at the forefront of revolution, now is threatened with a kind of benign irrelevance. So easily ignored it is, empty pews and all. But the truth is, we cannot see around the corner of history. We do not know what God is up to. I didn’t know in my time, and you don’t know in yours. Maybe the Church---and I mean church with a capital C--- is going through some kind of strange growing pains that shrink it down before it can grow and blossom into something new. We just don’t know. We struggle to be faithful, and the measure of faith is not always success. The call, after all, is to be faithful first, and so we struggle.
And so too did St. Paul struggle. He too was not always sure how faith should look in his particular moment. But he was sure of God’s fidelity in Jesus Christ; he was sure the Church had a mission to preach the love of God for a world and humanity, mired in sin. And so, he prayed for the church, just as I too prayed, and just as you too must do the same.
It is so easy to lose heart, to be discouraged. But remember, we can never be sure what God is up to. Take heart, my friends, God is not yet finished with the Church. The Reformation continues.
October 21, 2020
Dear Friends,
Artemisia Gentileschi is not a household name. You might know her name, if you were an art history major in college, or perhaps someone who has taken a keen interest in women’s history---how women have made contributions even when everything was stacked against them. And believe me, everything was stacked against Artemisia, who was an Italian woman, painting in the Baroque era in the 1600’s. Even in her own time, she was celebrated by a male artist, Jerome David, who said she was “a miracle in painting, more easily envied than imitated.” Today, she is the subject of scholarship, plays, novels, films and even makes an appearance in a children’s book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
As a woman Artemisia was never allowed to go outside alone, and she certainly had no access to artistic training. But fortunately for her, her natural talent was recognized, coached, challenged and deepened by her father, Orazio, who was also an artist. He taught her well, and by the time his daughter was 18 years old, he bragged, “She is already capable of such works that many principal masters never arrive at.” Indeed, her talent was great, but she never would have become known without her father’s instruction and initial support---though Artemisia did leave her home and work on her own, quite a radical thing for a woman to do.
Women simply had no access to what was needed to succeed as an artist---no formal training, let alone access to the market of patrons. Simone de Beauvoir, whose brilliant and seminal work, The Second Sex, told the story of how women have been treated as less than fully human throughout the march of history, wrote, “One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius.” And the great challenge and problem for women have been that they have been stymied from becoming. Male artists, for example, would wander around the city or town to observe life at its fullest expression. They would have noted how different people move their bodies in different situations. They would have entered the places (mainly churches) where patrons had placed great works of art. They would have studied the facades of buildings and the interior, where frescoes adorned the walls and ceilings. But all this was denied to Artemisia, who was hardly ever allowed outside. She inhabited the top floor of her father’s’ home, where she only had his work and some engravings to study. No wonder she would later call her confinement “noxious.”
In the year 1610, when Artemisia was only 17 years old, she painted, “Susannah and the Elders.” This comes from a biblical story, where Susannah, married to Joachim, is bathing in the garden where two lecherous elders tell her they will accuse her of adultery if she does not submit to their desire. She is shown sitting on a stone wall, with a small flimsy covering, which leaves most of her body naked, while these two leering men hover over her, as she bends her head away from them and uses one arm to push them away. I am no art critic, but people who are say that the body proportions are somewhat uneven, hardly surprising, given the fact that Artemisia only had her own body to study in detail. There is a look of disgust on Susannah’s face, and some might well ponder whether this painting could have been painted by a male. Of course, males have indeed painted the story, but is there something that Artemisia catches that is unique to her as a female painter?
Artemisia did paint a number of biblical scenes. Many of you may not recall the story of Judith, a woman of determination and courage, who literally saved the Jewish people by murdering Holofernes, an Assyrian general intent on making the Jews his vassals. Judith and her maidservant are shown holding Holofernes down as Judith carves a wound in his neck from which blood spurts all over the place. It is a horrible scene to see, so realistically painted with tufts of the victim’s hair held between Judith’s knuckles. The great Italian painter, Caravaggio, also painted this scene, but his Judith leans to one side and hardly looks intent on accomplishing her horrific deed. There is no such hesitation in Artemisia’s two paintings of this story.
Most people know the famous story of Bathsheba and King David, who eyes from his balcony the lovely Bathsheba, bathing. And he wants her and sends a letter to her, demanding that she come to his chamber. There is a famous painting by Rembrandt of Bathsheba receiving the letter from David with a look of puzzling hesitation on her face. Artemisia does not paint that particular scene as far as I know, but she does paint Bathsheba, bathing with David off in the distance as he gazes at the body he so much desires. David, however, is painted small, almost inconsequential in appearance, while Bathsheba is the major character, fixing her hair, surrounded by other female attendants. We know how the story will go---how the small figure of David will actually suddenly assume great size and power as he orders Bathsheba to appear before him. And what alternative does she have, except to come to his chamber as he so orders?
The National Gallery of Art in London is hosting a show of 29 of Artemisia’s works until January 24, 2021. Just last week I went on YouTube to hear a short interview from one of the curators about the show. She said something that struck me. “When someone commissioned a work from Artemisia, the expectation was that he or she would get something very different from the usual,” meaning, I think, that she as a woman would present a different view of the world.
The theologian and bishop, St. Augustine, lived from 354 to 430, and he was regarded as being one of the great leaders and thinkers of the church. He said something about diversity, which should focus our attention even today. He said that diversity was the delight of God and that the variety and contrast of the creation not only brought delight to God but also delighted those whose minds and sensibilities were capable of noticing the vast differences in the creation. God did not make everything alike, and in difference and contrast there is something vitally important to behold, something to pay heed to. The patrons who paid Artemisia commissions for her work certainly believed and expected that in her painting there was something that could not be found elsewhere. “I will show your illustrious Lordship what a woman can do,” she is reported to have said to one of her patrons, and indeed she did!
Although I do not think you can see the exhibition online, if you google in Artemisia at the National Gallery in London, a few choices will come up, and one of them is an interview, Artemisia in 8 paintings, by one of the curators of the exhibition. It is certainly worth hearing and seeing. And in a time when so many of us are hunkered down at home, seeing something new and different is good for the mind, spirit and imagination! And remember, God delights in diversity and contrast!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Artemisia Gentileschi is not a household name. You might know her name, if you were an art history major in college, or perhaps someone who has taken a keen interest in women’s history---how women have made contributions even when everything was stacked against them. And believe me, everything was stacked against Artemisia, who was an Italian woman, painting in the Baroque era in the 1600’s. Even in her own time, she was celebrated by a male artist, Jerome David, who said she was “a miracle in painting, more easily envied than imitated.” Today, she is the subject of scholarship, plays, novels, films and even makes an appearance in a children’s book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
As a woman Artemisia was never allowed to go outside alone, and she certainly had no access to artistic training. But fortunately for her, her natural talent was recognized, coached, challenged and deepened by her father, Orazio, who was also an artist. He taught her well, and by the time his daughter was 18 years old, he bragged, “She is already capable of such works that many principal masters never arrive at.” Indeed, her talent was great, but she never would have become known without her father’s instruction and initial support---though Artemisia did leave her home and work on her own, quite a radical thing for a woman to do.
Women simply had no access to what was needed to succeed as an artist---no formal training, let alone access to the market of patrons. Simone de Beauvoir, whose brilliant and seminal work, The Second Sex, told the story of how women have been treated as less than fully human throughout the march of history, wrote, “One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius.” And the great challenge and problem for women have been that they have been stymied from becoming. Male artists, for example, would wander around the city or town to observe life at its fullest expression. They would have noted how different people move their bodies in different situations. They would have entered the places (mainly churches) where patrons had placed great works of art. They would have studied the facades of buildings and the interior, where frescoes adorned the walls and ceilings. But all this was denied to Artemisia, who was hardly ever allowed outside. She inhabited the top floor of her father’s’ home, where she only had his work and some engravings to study. No wonder she would later call her confinement “noxious.”
In the year 1610, when Artemisia was only 17 years old, she painted, “Susannah and the Elders.” This comes from a biblical story, where Susannah, married to Joachim, is bathing in the garden where two lecherous elders tell her they will accuse her of adultery if she does not submit to their desire. She is shown sitting on a stone wall, with a small flimsy covering, which leaves most of her body naked, while these two leering men hover over her, as she bends her head away from them and uses one arm to push them away. I am no art critic, but people who are say that the body proportions are somewhat uneven, hardly surprising, given the fact that Artemisia only had her own body to study in detail. There is a look of disgust on Susannah’s face, and some might well ponder whether this painting could have been painted by a male. Of course, males have indeed painted the story, but is there something that Artemisia catches that is unique to her as a female painter?
Artemisia did paint a number of biblical scenes. Many of you may not recall the story of Judith, a woman of determination and courage, who literally saved the Jewish people by murdering Holofernes, an Assyrian general intent on making the Jews his vassals. Judith and her maidservant are shown holding Holofernes down as Judith carves a wound in his neck from which blood spurts all over the place. It is a horrible scene to see, so realistically painted with tufts of the victim’s hair held between Judith’s knuckles. The great Italian painter, Caravaggio, also painted this scene, but his Judith leans to one side and hardly looks intent on accomplishing her horrific deed. There is no such hesitation in Artemisia’s two paintings of this story.
Most people know the famous story of Bathsheba and King David, who eyes from his balcony the lovely Bathsheba, bathing. And he wants her and sends a letter to her, demanding that she come to his chamber. There is a famous painting by Rembrandt of Bathsheba receiving the letter from David with a look of puzzling hesitation on her face. Artemisia does not paint that particular scene as far as I know, but she does paint Bathsheba, bathing with David off in the distance as he gazes at the body he so much desires. David, however, is painted small, almost inconsequential in appearance, while Bathsheba is the major character, fixing her hair, surrounded by other female attendants. We know how the story will go---how the small figure of David will actually suddenly assume great size and power as he orders Bathsheba to appear before him. And what alternative does she have, except to come to his chamber as he so orders?
The National Gallery of Art in London is hosting a show of 29 of Artemisia’s works until January 24, 2021. Just last week I went on YouTube to hear a short interview from one of the curators about the show. She said something that struck me. “When someone commissioned a work from Artemisia, the expectation was that he or she would get something very different from the usual,” meaning, I think, that she as a woman would present a different view of the world.
The theologian and bishop, St. Augustine, lived from 354 to 430, and he was regarded as being one of the great leaders and thinkers of the church. He said something about diversity, which should focus our attention even today. He said that diversity was the delight of God and that the variety and contrast of the creation not only brought delight to God but also delighted those whose minds and sensibilities were capable of noticing the vast differences in the creation. God did not make everything alike, and in difference and contrast there is something vitally important to behold, something to pay heed to. The patrons who paid Artemisia commissions for her work certainly believed and expected that in her painting there was something that could not be found elsewhere. “I will show your illustrious Lordship what a woman can do,” she is reported to have said to one of her patrons, and indeed she did!
Although I do not think you can see the exhibition online, if you google in Artemisia at the National Gallery in London, a few choices will come up, and one of them is an interview, Artemisia in 8 paintings, by one of the curators of the exhibition. It is certainly worth hearing and seeing. And in a time when so many of us are hunkered down at home, seeing something new and different is good for the mind, spirit and imagination! And remember, God delights in diversity and contrast!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A TOUGH STORY FOR A TOUGH TIME by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 10/18/2020
Isaiah 5: 1-7
Matthew 21: 33-46
The Gospel lectionary readings these past months have been from Matthew, and these past few weeks, the stories have been tough. Last week we heard about a man thrown out into the darkness, where there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth---all because he failed to wear the proper wedding garment, which was a symbol in last week’s parable for righteousness and fairness. Matthew’s time and place were not easy, and so he shows Jesus speaking tough words for tough times. And as the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, reminds us, “Sometimes you have to squeeze very hard to get the good news from a biblical text.”
Over these months you have heard me repeat many times that there was tremendous tension between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians with each group insisting that they knew the right way to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Remember, Matthew’s gospel was written sometime in the mid 80’s, a time when Jewish Christians were being expelled from the synagogues, because they were no longer deemed proper, Law abiding Jews. And these Jewish Christians brought with them into Christianity their insistence that the Jewish Law should be followed by all Christians, whether Jew or gentile. But beside the issue of the Jewish law and how it was used and interpreted, there were major social and economic problems, and one of them was absentee landlords.
Toward the end of the first century much of the farmland that had previously been owned by the people living and working on the land, had been taken over by larger and richer landowners, a kind of agribusiness, based in Jerusalem, which meant that those who had once owned the land were now reduced to a kind of sharecropping existence. So, they understandably resented these wealthy absentee landowners, and the economic injustice they believed it wrought. And Matthew was trying to see his way through all this economic and social tension.
Today’s parable is not a pretty story, filled as it is with murder and mayhem, but then parables are not designed to be pretty or comforting. Parables turn the conventional world upside down as expectations are overthrown and a new and different vision is offered. We can never be too sure where exactly a parable is leading, and so we often find our imaginations weaving in and out of the story, our sympathies and loyalties, shifting as the parable unwinds to its conclusion. Jesus even said that he sometimes told parables to confuse people, to hide the secrets of the Kingdom from those not really interested in seeing or hearing. Though parables often offended people, they also worked on and in people, inviting and sometimes even compelling the hearers to take another look, because reality is not always what it appears to be. In other words, if you think you have it, think again.
So, Jesus began this parable by talking about a landlord, who had carefully planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press and then built a watchtower. Remember, Jesus told this parable to the Jewish leadership, who were questioning him about his authority after he had thrown the money changers out of the Temple courtyard. Who gave you the authority, they wanted to know, but Jesus answered them in three parables, and the second parable is our lesson for today?
Now the religious leaders would have immediately recognized the parable’s roots in Isaiah. They knew that the landowner in Isaiah is God, so they probably thought the landowner in Jesus’ parable is also God. And they also most likely understood that the injustice many tenants felt toward an absent landowner was not so distant from the economic injustice that was also rampant in Isaiah’s time. God expected Israel to cultivate a land of justice, but instead, Isaiah’s poem claimed, it sowed economic exploitation of the poor. And so, God resolved to remove the vineyard’s hedge, breaking down its wall, and leaving it to destruction. And in Isaiah’s world---this is what finally happened; the southern kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians, and the Jewish leadership was carried off into captivity.
Now Jesus gave his parable a different twist by having the landowner lease the vineyard and then leave---not unlike what was happening in Palestine at the time Matthew was writing. On the one hand, the religious establishment, who tended to be economically privileged, might not have been so bothered by absentee landowners. But on the other hand, they lived in an occupied territory, ruled over by an absentee Caesar, so perhaps they began to wonder who this absent landowner really is. Is he God or not?
The next thing that happened is the landowner wanted to collect his produce, and so he sent his slaves to do the job. Ask yourself, at this point in the parable, with whom do you sympathize, with the landlord or the tenants? Sure, the landowner purchased the land and initially developed it, but then he left, leaving the work for his tenants to do. And work they did! They weeded and dug and mended the fence and kept watch. And then the landowner sent his agents, his slaves, to collect what his tenants had worked so hard to produce. So how do you think those tenants would have felt toward these agents, who after all, represented the landowner’s interests? You do not have to be a Marxist to have sympathy for the tenants. But then comes the shocker. The tenants viciously attacked the agents; they murdered one, beat another and stoned a third. So much for sympathy! The tenants have now become murderers. And the scene is repeated when another group of slaves is sent into the vineyard’s blood soaked field. So now where does your sympathy move---perhaps toward the slaves, who had no choice but to do the landowner’s bidding? And the same thing happened to the second group of slaves as happened to the first group.
Now, consider, if you were the landowner, at this point would you risk your son by sending him to a place, which has already witnessed deadly violence? Wouldn’t you have the sense to realize that the tenants are in revolt? They are bitter and enraged, and bitterness and rage are not likely to respect the heir, whose legitimacy the tenants do not recognize anyway. But this landlord is not like most landlords. He keeps trying and trying to get what is his, and so he continues to send his agents and then his son to collect his due. Now the landlord is a symbol for God and what God is looking for is obedience to a covenant that demands justice, righteousness and yes, even mercy---though as you can see from the response of the religious leaders, mercy is not what they expected the landlord to give. They were expecting vengeance. And it does feel like vengeance, when what you have is taken away and given to others. It does feel like a crushing stone has been dropped on your life.
Some years ago, when I worked at University Hospital on Long Island, I had a patient, who had spent 15 years in prison, because of drunk driving that killed a family, both parents and two of the three children. The one who survived was a teenage boy of 16. This man had been out of prison for 5 or 6 years, and he was doing very well in the financial markets. He was a savvy investor, and his family came from money, so, unlike so many people out of prison, he was able to start his life over. And what he was trying to do was give money to the one who had survived the accident, but time and time again, it was not accepted. “I will have none of your blood money” was what he was told. “ I won’t help you to feel better about what you did.”
“No,” the man insisted, “I can never feel better about what I did. The guilt is mine. But I will continue to make the offer over and over again in the hope that someday it will be accepted. And perhaps in accepting it, you will be free from your survival guilt.”
Now at the time I thought he should just leave the survivor alone, and when I asked him why he did not, he said it was because of what happened to him in prison. “God did not leave me alone; God persisted,” he said, “and because of God’s persistence I began to believe I could live again.”
This is the good news we have to squeeze out of this parable--- living fully. It is very tough sounding with the kingdom being taken away and given to others and people being crushed by the weight of the stone. And that is sometimes how life is and how life feels to us. But there is in this parable a story about a persistent God, who keeps showing up, trying to collect the harvests, which are really deeds of justice, righteousness and mercy. God keeps going back, no matter how many times God is turned down. And when the gift is given to others, it is with the hope that what has been lost will be found anew and rediscovered in a totally new way, as it was for the survivor of that terrible crash that killed his parents and two sisters. One day he did accept the money, when his 7 year old daughter was hit on a bicycle by a drunk driver, and needed extraordinary medical care and an experimental surgery that she might walk again, which she did, because God persists and shows us how to persist as well.
Isaiah 5: 1-7
Matthew 21: 33-46
The Gospel lectionary readings these past months have been from Matthew, and these past few weeks, the stories have been tough. Last week we heard about a man thrown out into the darkness, where there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth---all because he failed to wear the proper wedding garment, which was a symbol in last week’s parable for righteousness and fairness. Matthew’s time and place were not easy, and so he shows Jesus speaking tough words for tough times. And as the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, reminds us, “Sometimes you have to squeeze very hard to get the good news from a biblical text.”
Over these months you have heard me repeat many times that there was tremendous tension between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians with each group insisting that they knew the right way to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Remember, Matthew’s gospel was written sometime in the mid 80’s, a time when Jewish Christians were being expelled from the synagogues, because they were no longer deemed proper, Law abiding Jews. And these Jewish Christians brought with them into Christianity their insistence that the Jewish Law should be followed by all Christians, whether Jew or gentile. But beside the issue of the Jewish law and how it was used and interpreted, there were major social and economic problems, and one of them was absentee landlords.
Toward the end of the first century much of the farmland that had previously been owned by the people living and working on the land, had been taken over by larger and richer landowners, a kind of agribusiness, based in Jerusalem, which meant that those who had once owned the land were now reduced to a kind of sharecropping existence. So, they understandably resented these wealthy absentee landowners, and the economic injustice they believed it wrought. And Matthew was trying to see his way through all this economic and social tension.
Today’s parable is not a pretty story, filled as it is with murder and mayhem, but then parables are not designed to be pretty or comforting. Parables turn the conventional world upside down as expectations are overthrown and a new and different vision is offered. We can never be too sure where exactly a parable is leading, and so we often find our imaginations weaving in and out of the story, our sympathies and loyalties, shifting as the parable unwinds to its conclusion. Jesus even said that he sometimes told parables to confuse people, to hide the secrets of the Kingdom from those not really interested in seeing or hearing. Though parables often offended people, they also worked on and in people, inviting and sometimes even compelling the hearers to take another look, because reality is not always what it appears to be. In other words, if you think you have it, think again.
So, Jesus began this parable by talking about a landlord, who had carefully planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press and then built a watchtower. Remember, Jesus told this parable to the Jewish leadership, who were questioning him about his authority after he had thrown the money changers out of the Temple courtyard. Who gave you the authority, they wanted to know, but Jesus answered them in three parables, and the second parable is our lesson for today?
Now the religious leaders would have immediately recognized the parable’s roots in Isaiah. They knew that the landowner in Isaiah is God, so they probably thought the landowner in Jesus’ parable is also God. And they also most likely understood that the injustice many tenants felt toward an absent landowner was not so distant from the economic injustice that was also rampant in Isaiah’s time. God expected Israel to cultivate a land of justice, but instead, Isaiah’s poem claimed, it sowed economic exploitation of the poor. And so, God resolved to remove the vineyard’s hedge, breaking down its wall, and leaving it to destruction. And in Isaiah’s world---this is what finally happened; the southern kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians, and the Jewish leadership was carried off into captivity.
Now Jesus gave his parable a different twist by having the landowner lease the vineyard and then leave---not unlike what was happening in Palestine at the time Matthew was writing. On the one hand, the religious establishment, who tended to be economically privileged, might not have been so bothered by absentee landowners. But on the other hand, they lived in an occupied territory, ruled over by an absentee Caesar, so perhaps they began to wonder who this absent landowner really is. Is he God or not?
The next thing that happened is the landowner wanted to collect his produce, and so he sent his slaves to do the job. Ask yourself, at this point in the parable, with whom do you sympathize, with the landlord or the tenants? Sure, the landowner purchased the land and initially developed it, but then he left, leaving the work for his tenants to do. And work they did! They weeded and dug and mended the fence and kept watch. And then the landowner sent his agents, his slaves, to collect what his tenants had worked so hard to produce. So how do you think those tenants would have felt toward these agents, who after all, represented the landowner’s interests? You do not have to be a Marxist to have sympathy for the tenants. But then comes the shocker. The tenants viciously attacked the agents; they murdered one, beat another and stoned a third. So much for sympathy! The tenants have now become murderers. And the scene is repeated when another group of slaves is sent into the vineyard’s blood soaked field. So now where does your sympathy move---perhaps toward the slaves, who had no choice but to do the landowner’s bidding? And the same thing happened to the second group of slaves as happened to the first group.
Now, consider, if you were the landowner, at this point would you risk your son by sending him to a place, which has already witnessed deadly violence? Wouldn’t you have the sense to realize that the tenants are in revolt? They are bitter and enraged, and bitterness and rage are not likely to respect the heir, whose legitimacy the tenants do not recognize anyway. But this landlord is not like most landlords. He keeps trying and trying to get what is his, and so he continues to send his agents and then his son to collect his due. Now the landlord is a symbol for God and what God is looking for is obedience to a covenant that demands justice, righteousness and yes, even mercy---though as you can see from the response of the religious leaders, mercy is not what they expected the landlord to give. They were expecting vengeance. And it does feel like vengeance, when what you have is taken away and given to others. It does feel like a crushing stone has been dropped on your life.
Some years ago, when I worked at University Hospital on Long Island, I had a patient, who had spent 15 years in prison, because of drunk driving that killed a family, both parents and two of the three children. The one who survived was a teenage boy of 16. This man had been out of prison for 5 or 6 years, and he was doing very well in the financial markets. He was a savvy investor, and his family came from money, so, unlike so many people out of prison, he was able to start his life over. And what he was trying to do was give money to the one who had survived the accident, but time and time again, it was not accepted. “I will have none of your blood money” was what he was told. “ I won’t help you to feel better about what you did.”
“No,” the man insisted, “I can never feel better about what I did. The guilt is mine. But I will continue to make the offer over and over again in the hope that someday it will be accepted. And perhaps in accepting it, you will be free from your survival guilt.”
Now at the time I thought he should just leave the survivor alone, and when I asked him why he did not, he said it was because of what happened to him in prison. “God did not leave me alone; God persisted,” he said, “and because of God’s persistence I began to believe I could live again.”
This is the good news we have to squeeze out of this parable--- living fully. It is very tough sounding with the kingdom being taken away and given to others and people being crushed by the weight of the stone. And that is sometimes how life is and how life feels to us. But there is in this parable a story about a persistent God, who keeps showing up, trying to collect the harvests, which are really deeds of justice, righteousness and mercy. God keeps going back, no matter how many times God is turned down. And when the gift is given to others, it is with the hope that what has been lost will be found anew and rediscovered in a totally new way, as it was for the survivor of that terrible crash that killed his parents and two sisters. One day he did accept the money, when his 7 year old daughter was hit on a bicycle by a drunk driver, and needed extraordinary medical care and an experimental surgery that she might walk again, which she did, because God persists and shows us how to persist as well.
Reflection Letter: Empathy
October 14, 2020
Over the past years we have been hearing a great deal about this word “empathy:” who has it, who lacks it, whether or not it can be taught, and if it can be taught, how to do it. Education has tried to include emotional and sensitivity training in its curriculum for some years now in an effort to combat bullying and to help youngsters identify their own feelings and connect their feelings with what others also experience. If a child can recognize and own her hurt feeling, for example, when someone mocks her drawing, then the hope is that she can be helped to recognize that another child will be hurt if and when he or she is mocked. Yet a kindergarten teacher told me recently that when she reprimanded a girl for making fun of another girl’s hair, she reminded the child how she felt when someone laughed at her red shoes. The little girl responded, “But I didn’t make fun of her shoes; I made fun of her hair.”
Most of us would defend the idea that empathy is important. We want people to be able to imagine themselves in another person’s place. We want people to feel connected to others, recognizing that as human beings we share a great deal in common, even if our politics, religion and racial identities differ. Feelings of joy, grief, anger, love, hope, etc. are universal, and the recognition of this universality should, we think, make it easier for us to get along. Some will argue that the ability to participate in the feelings of others is actually rooted in our biology, part of our DNA.
In the 19th century German philosophers came up with this idea of “Einfuhlung,” or in-feeling, which first became translated into English in 1904 as a new word, empathy. What the philosophers meant by this is projecting your own feelings, sentiments or memories onto the thing or person you are contemplating or dealing with, whether it be a piece of art or a grief stricken human being. Social science eventually took this idea and used it to talk about emotional intelligence, pointing out that the ability to relate to and identify with others can actually be more essential than raw intellectual ability.
Some educators, very critical of the mania for testing, point out how important literature can be for the teaching and experiencing of empathy. My own father in law, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School for Education for 48 years, was apoplectic about standardized testing. I can recall him arguing how the reading of literature in schools had been sadly reduced to the ability to name the main idea or name the literary techniques an author used to make a character come alive. A colleague of his had examined standardized tests, including the High School Regents’ Examinations in New York State, and noted that while literary technical skills were called for, the experience of entering into the story and feeling with the main characters, understanding why they were behaving as they were, was something that was all but ignored. As far as the tests were concerned, it did not seem to matter whether or not the students had any understanding of what the main characters were living through and why. My father in law’s main interest was social science education, and he complained that the reason history was deemed the most hated high school subject was because it was too often taught without any passionate engagement in history’s struggles. Why don’t we ever ask kids to imagine what it was like to be a slave? What was the experience of slavery really like for those who were enslaved? And what about the slave owners? What did life have to look like to them in order for them to justify owning other people? If my father in law were alive today, he would surely argue that such questions can help students develop empathy.
I actually can recall some of my high school English teachers, who helped us to try to get inside the head of characters and see the world through their eyes. In the 9th grade I was living in Jacksonville, Florida, in the midst of the Civil Rights campaign, and my English teacher, Sandra Johnson, had us read, To Kill a Mockingbird. She wanted us to see that world in Macon, Georgia through the eyes of not only Scout and Jem, but also Tom Robinson, the man accused of raping Mayella Ewell. She even tried to have us see the world through the eyes of her embittered and hateful Bob Ewell, Mayella’s father, who actually tried to kill Jem. I remember her asking us over and over again, “What does the world look like to this or that character and how does that view lead them do what they do? What kind of choices do they really have?
No one back in my school days ever called this empathy training or emotional intelligence training, but I think that is what it was. My senior high school English teacher, Mr. Verreau, was brilliant, and he insisted that we read to understand life better, to develop a deeper and richer view of reality. And so, we read plays, short stories and novels whose main characters always had something to teach and pull out of us, even at the tender age of seventeen. He too was interested in helping us see the world through other people’s eyes and experiences. “That is how you grow and change,” he would say. “And I expect you to grow and change! I don’t want you to stay the same as you are today.”
Lately, there has been some criticism about the teaching of empathy with research showing that it is more often displayed toward those who look like us, think like us and act like us. Well, that should not surprise any of us, and quite frankly that is the challenge---to develop our empathy beyond the familiar boundaries we often live in so we can see and experience a wider slice of reality and truth and feel empathy toward those who may not look or act like us. It is true that we always bring our own experiences of life into the experiences of other human beings, which means that even when we feel empathy toward another, it is filtered through our own perspectives, which some people say makes empathy too self-centered.
Some of us have just finished reading and discussing The Sunflower, a book about an encounter between a young, dying SS soldier and a young, Jewish man, imprisoned in a concentration camp. After Simon, the Jewish man, is brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier, who asks forgiveness for terrible crimes he committed against Jews, Simon eventually asked himself the question, “Were we all really made of the same stuff? If so, why are some murderers and others victims?” Profound questions, indeed, and perhaps the experience of empathy might help us to ponder and answer.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
October 14, 2020
Over the past years we have been hearing a great deal about this word “empathy:” who has it, who lacks it, whether or not it can be taught, and if it can be taught, how to do it. Education has tried to include emotional and sensitivity training in its curriculum for some years now in an effort to combat bullying and to help youngsters identify their own feelings and connect their feelings with what others also experience. If a child can recognize and own her hurt feeling, for example, when someone mocks her drawing, then the hope is that she can be helped to recognize that another child will be hurt if and when he or she is mocked. Yet a kindergarten teacher told me recently that when she reprimanded a girl for making fun of another girl’s hair, she reminded the child how she felt when someone laughed at her red shoes. The little girl responded, “But I didn’t make fun of her shoes; I made fun of her hair.”
Most of us would defend the idea that empathy is important. We want people to be able to imagine themselves in another person’s place. We want people to feel connected to others, recognizing that as human beings we share a great deal in common, even if our politics, religion and racial identities differ. Feelings of joy, grief, anger, love, hope, etc. are universal, and the recognition of this universality should, we think, make it easier for us to get along. Some will argue that the ability to participate in the feelings of others is actually rooted in our biology, part of our DNA.
In the 19th century German philosophers came up with this idea of “Einfuhlung,” or in-feeling, which first became translated into English in 1904 as a new word, empathy. What the philosophers meant by this is projecting your own feelings, sentiments or memories onto the thing or person you are contemplating or dealing with, whether it be a piece of art or a grief stricken human being. Social science eventually took this idea and used it to talk about emotional intelligence, pointing out that the ability to relate to and identify with others can actually be more essential than raw intellectual ability.
Some educators, very critical of the mania for testing, point out how important literature can be for the teaching and experiencing of empathy. My own father in law, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School for Education for 48 years, was apoplectic about standardized testing. I can recall him arguing how the reading of literature in schools had been sadly reduced to the ability to name the main idea or name the literary techniques an author used to make a character come alive. A colleague of his had examined standardized tests, including the High School Regents’ Examinations in New York State, and noted that while literary technical skills were called for, the experience of entering into the story and feeling with the main characters, understanding why they were behaving as they were, was something that was all but ignored. As far as the tests were concerned, it did not seem to matter whether or not the students had any understanding of what the main characters were living through and why. My father in law’s main interest was social science education, and he complained that the reason history was deemed the most hated high school subject was because it was too often taught without any passionate engagement in history’s struggles. Why don’t we ever ask kids to imagine what it was like to be a slave? What was the experience of slavery really like for those who were enslaved? And what about the slave owners? What did life have to look like to them in order for them to justify owning other people? If my father in law were alive today, he would surely argue that such questions can help students develop empathy.
I actually can recall some of my high school English teachers, who helped us to try to get inside the head of characters and see the world through their eyes. In the 9th grade I was living in Jacksonville, Florida, in the midst of the Civil Rights campaign, and my English teacher, Sandra Johnson, had us read, To Kill a Mockingbird. She wanted us to see that world in Macon, Georgia through the eyes of not only Scout and Jem, but also Tom Robinson, the man accused of raping Mayella Ewell. She even tried to have us see the world through the eyes of her embittered and hateful Bob Ewell, Mayella’s father, who actually tried to kill Jem. I remember her asking us over and over again, “What does the world look like to this or that character and how does that view lead them do what they do? What kind of choices do they really have?
No one back in my school days ever called this empathy training or emotional intelligence training, but I think that is what it was. My senior high school English teacher, Mr. Verreau, was brilliant, and he insisted that we read to understand life better, to develop a deeper and richer view of reality. And so, we read plays, short stories and novels whose main characters always had something to teach and pull out of us, even at the tender age of seventeen. He too was interested in helping us see the world through other people’s eyes and experiences. “That is how you grow and change,” he would say. “And I expect you to grow and change! I don’t want you to stay the same as you are today.”
Lately, there has been some criticism about the teaching of empathy with research showing that it is more often displayed toward those who look like us, think like us and act like us. Well, that should not surprise any of us, and quite frankly that is the challenge---to develop our empathy beyond the familiar boundaries we often live in so we can see and experience a wider slice of reality and truth and feel empathy toward those who may not look or act like us. It is true that we always bring our own experiences of life into the experiences of other human beings, which means that even when we feel empathy toward another, it is filtered through our own perspectives, which some people say makes empathy too self-centered.
Some of us have just finished reading and discussing The Sunflower, a book about an encounter between a young, dying SS soldier and a young, Jewish man, imprisoned in a concentration camp. After Simon, the Jewish man, is brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier, who asks forgiveness for terrible crimes he committed against Jews, Simon eventually asked himself the question, “Were we all really made of the same stuff? If so, why are some murderers and others victims?” Profound questions, indeed, and perhaps the experience of empathy might help us to ponder and answer.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHERE ARE YOU? by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 10/11/2020
Exodus 32: 1-14
Matthew 22: 1-14
Where are you? It’s a question from God that runs throughout the entire Bible, sometimes implicitly stated, but at other times the question is quite explicit. In the book of Genesis, for example, when God was walking in the Garden of Eden, and Adam, having just eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, was hiding, God calls out, “Where are you?” God also wanted to know where Abel was, after Cain, out of jealousy, had murdered him. And then there was the time God called out for Abraham, when he told Abraham to journey to a place, where a sacrifice was to be made. Where are you, Abraham? And Abraham answered, “Here I am!” God has this habit of calling on his people, including his prophets, like Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah and wanting to know, “Where are you,” and sometimes, as in the case of Jeremiah and Elijah, they do their best to hide.
More often than not, however, this question of one’s whereabouts is not directly asked by God, but rather it is implied, as it is in today’s story from Exodus. Moses, who has been leading this unruly and whiny people through the wilderness, has gone up the mountain to receive the Commandments that would bind God and the people into a covenant: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people.” We are with you, God, is what God expected them to say, when he was implicitly asking them, “Where are you?”
But where were the people, really? No sooner had Moses been absent for a while when the people grew restive and demanded that Aaron make them a god whom they could see and worship. And so, the golden calf was built, and the story goes that God’s wrath fiercely burned against the people, and Moses had to talk God down, convincing God that if He destroyed the very people he had just liberated, his god image would be tarnished. In a sense we could say that Moses was bold enough to ask the same question of God, “Where are you, O God? Are you to be found in wrath or in mercy?”
Well, here we are, dealing once again with the parables in Matthew, and this parable, the third parable of judgment, asks God and the religious leadership, “Where are you?” Matthew shows Jesus telling this parable to the Jewish leadership, who has become really quite sick and tired of this Jesus character undermining their religious authority, grounded as it was in the Temple and the entire system of sacrifice. These leaders saw themselves as the righteous ones, the ones who lived by the Law, the ones who knew the Law because they fervently studied it. But in Matthew, Jesus is the new law; he is the one whom God has chosen, and so the choice for or against the Son is the decisive choice. The religious leaders, who at this point in the gospel, were conspiring against Jesus, were certainly not at the wedding feast to which they had been invited. Instead they had chosen to be in darkness, where there was, according to Matthew, much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The parable begins with the wedding feast as a symbol of salvation, and indeed, the feast is a very common symbol of redemption in the Bible. The king sent out an invitation for his son’s wedding, and notice that the invitation had two stages, something quite common in Jesus’ day. The first invitation went out well in advance, a kind of save the date notice, and then on the day of the event, a reminder was sent. While the first invitation was ignored, the second one elicited a violent response with some of the slaves being mistreated and killed. And this mistreatment is what really angered the king, who responded with his own form of violence, sending his troops to destroy the people as well as their city. Of course, on the surface this does not make God, who is symbolized by the king, look very good, because God here is behaving vengefully, when He does not get what he wants.
But the story is symbolic, not literal, and Jesus is using exaggeration to get the point across that the refusal of God’s grace and redemption is serious business. It has real consequences for one’s life, not necessarily because God punishes in a cruel and eternal way, but because the rejection of the redemptive party is itself a cruelty that makes life smaller and meaner. Sadly, the religiously sophisticated do not get it, because their comfort and their privilege blind them to what is really important. In fact, the religious leaders focus on details, which are not essential to the kingdom. Looking in the wrong direction, they also travel in the wrong direction, and so they arrive at a place, which is at a distance from God. They are lost, but sadly they do not know it.
So, the message here is, “Do not be careless with the gifts of the kingdom,” and in this case one gift that apparently matters is the wedding garment. Of course, this is not about the necessity of wearing fine clothes to a wedding. We might wonder how it is that people, some of them poor, and invited to the feast at the last minute, would have the means to procure the proper wedding garment. But wedding garments were provided for those who could not afford them. This was the custom, so we can conclude that if a guest was not wearing one, it was because he just did not bother to put it on. He was careless, inattentive to the requirements of the feast. And what are the requirements?
Well, this is the redemptive feast, and since Jesus stood in the prophetic line, like the prophets Micah and Isaiah, he too asked people to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God; to love God with the fullness of heart, mind and soul and to love neighbor as self. It isn’t that anyone can fulfill this perfectly, but when the invitation to the feast comes, we are asked to make an effort to enter, clothed in righteousness, because righteousness is the place we are called to be. The required wedding garment in the symbol for this righteousness.
I am a great admirer of Robert Coles, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who became famous for his multiple volume work, Children of Crisis. He also taught one of the most popular courses at Harvard College, which examined the lives of people who tried to stand for justice and righteousness, some very famous, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day, and others unknown. Coles told his class a story about the time he was a young medical school student and traveled to New York to meet Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker’s Movement.
For years Day helped to run these Catholic Worker houses, which tried to feed, clothe and house the most dejected of the poor. When Coles arrived at the house, he immediately noticed that Dorothy was involved in a conversation, if you could call it that, with a woman, who was clearly severely mentally troubled. The conversation did not make much sense, because the poor woman could barely articulate her thoughts, but there Dorothy was, giving this woman her time and full attention. And then finally, as the conversation wound its way to an end, Dorothy Day approached Coles and asked, “Were you waiting to speak to one of us?” And Coles said with that one question he suddenly understood that Dorothy Day inhabited a very special place. She was humble enough NOT to assume that Coles was there to speak to her. She did not assume that she was the important person. She stood in a place of profound humility.
There was something in Day’s question---Were you waiting to speak to one of us--- that Coles found Christ-like. She was in a place, where power, success and education, which so many people pursue with great desire and passion, were not the most important goals. For her they were not the keys to the kingdom, not the material out of which the proper wedding garment is woven.
So, where are you? Where are we as a church? Are we in a place like the scribes and elders, who have much knowledge, but not much wisdom, much pride, but not much humility? Are we in a place, where we can see what truly matters to a God whose invitation goes out to all, including the lowly, the poor, the rejected, not because by definition they are more worthy, but because the high and the mighty all too often ignore the invitation to the feast? The gospel reminds us that the act of ignoring is serious business, because sometimes what and whom we ignore are precisely what God is placing before us for deep consideration that we might change, turn around and move in a direction toward the one who comes that our lives might be full and abundant.
Exodus 32: 1-14
Matthew 22: 1-14
Where are you? It’s a question from God that runs throughout the entire Bible, sometimes implicitly stated, but at other times the question is quite explicit. In the book of Genesis, for example, when God was walking in the Garden of Eden, and Adam, having just eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, was hiding, God calls out, “Where are you?” God also wanted to know where Abel was, after Cain, out of jealousy, had murdered him. And then there was the time God called out for Abraham, when he told Abraham to journey to a place, where a sacrifice was to be made. Where are you, Abraham? And Abraham answered, “Here I am!” God has this habit of calling on his people, including his prophets, like Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah and wanting to know, “Where are you,” and sometimes, as in the case of Jeremiah and Elijah, they do their best to hide.
More often than not, however, this question of one’s whereabouts is not directly asked by God, but rather it is implied, as it is in today’s story from Exodus. Moses, who has been leading this unruly and whiny people through the wilderness, has gone up the mountain to receive the Commandments that would bind God and the people into a covenant: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people.” We are with you, God, is what God expected them to say, when he was implicitly asking them, “Where are you?”
But where were the people, really? No sooner had Moses been absent for a while when the people grew restive and demanded that Aaron make them a god whom they could see and worship. And so, the golden calf was built, and the story goes that God’s wrath fiercely burned against the people, and Moses had to talk God down, convincing God that if He destroyed the very people he had just liberated, his god image would be tarnished. In a sense we could say that Moses was bold enough to ask the same question of God, “Where are you, O God? Are you to be found in wrath or in mercy?”
Well, here we are, dealing once again with the parables in Matthew, and this parable, the third parable of judgment, asks God and the religious leadership, “Where are you?” Matthew shows Jesus telling this parable to the Jewish leadership, who has become really quite sick and tired of this Jesus character undermining their religious authority, grounded as it was in the Temple and the entire system of sacrifice. These leaders saw themselves as the righteous ones, the ones who lived by the Law, the ones who knew the Law because they fervently studied it. But in Matthew, Jesus is the new law; he is the one whom God has chosen, and so the choice for or against the Son is the decisive choice. The religious leaders, who at this point in the gospel, were conspiring against Jesus, were certainly not at the wedding feast to which they had been invited. Instead they had chosen to be in darkness, where there was, according to Matthew, much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The parable begins with the wedding feast as a symbol of salvation, and indeed, the feast is a very common symbol of redemption in the Bible. The king sent out an invitation for his son’s wedding, and notice that the invitation had two stages, something quite common in Jesus’ day. The first invitation went out well in advance, a kind of save the date notice, and then on the day of the event, a reminder was sent. While the first invitation was ignored, the second one elicited a violent response with some of the slaves being mistreated and killed. And this mistreatment is what really angered the king, who responded with his own form of violence, sending his troops to destroy the people as well as their city. Of course, on the surface this does not make God, who is symbolized by the king, look very good, because God here is behaving vengefully, when He does not get what he wants.
But the story is symbolic, not literal, and Jesus is using exaggeration to get the point across that the refusal of God’s grace and redemption is serious business. It has real consequences for one’s life, not necessarily because God punishes in a cruel and eternal way, but because the rejection of the redemptive party is itself a cruelty that makes life smaller and meaner. Sadly, the religiously sophisticated do not get it, because their comfort and their privilege blind them to what is really important. In fact, the religious leaders focus on details, which are not essential to the kingdom. Looking in the wrong direction, they also travel in the wrong direction, and so they arrive at a place, which is at a distance from God. They are lost, but sadly they do not know it.
So, the message here is, “Do not be careless with the gifts of the kingdom,” and in this case one gift that apparently matters is the wedding garment. Of course, this is not about the necessity of wearing fine clothes to a wedding. We might wonder how it is that people, some of them poor, and invited to the feast at the last minute, would have the means to procure the proper wedding garment. But wedding garments were provided for those who could not afford them. This was the custom, so we can conclude that if a guest was not wearing one, it was because he just did not bother to put it on. He was careless, inattentive to the requirements of the feast. And what are the requirements?
Well, this is the redemptive feast, and since Jesus stood in the prophetic line, like the prophets Micah and Isaiah, he too asked people to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God; to love God with the fullness of heart, mind and soul and to love neighbor as self. It isn’t that anyone can fulfill this perfectly, but when the invitation to the feast comes, we are asked to make an effort to enter, clothed in righteousness, because righteousness is the place we are called to be. The required wedding garment in the symbol for this righteousness.
I am a great admirer of Robert Coles, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who became famous for his multiple volume work, Children of Crisis. He also taught one of the most popular courses at Harvard College, which examined the lives of people who tried to stand for justice and righteousness, some very famous, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day, and others unknown. Coles told his class a story about the time he was a young medical school student and traveled to New York to meet Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker’s Movement.
For years Day helped to run these Catholic Worker houses, which tried to feed, clothe and house the most dejected of the poor. When Coles arrived at the house, he immediately noticed that Dorothy was involved in a conversation, if you could call it that, with a woman, who was clearly severely mentally troubled. The conversation did not make much sense, because the poor woman could barely articulate her thoughts, but there Dorothy was, giving this woman her time and full attention. And then finally, as the conversation wound its way to an end, Dorothy Day approached Coles and asked, “Were you waiting to speak to one of us?” And Coles said with that one question he suddenly understood that Dorothy Day inhabited a very special place. She was humble enough NOT to assume that Coles was there to speak to her. She did not assume that she was the important person. She stood in a place of profound humility.
There was something in Day’s question---Were you waiting to speak to one of us--- that Coles found Christ-like. She was in a place, where power, success and education, which so many people pursue with great desire and passion, were not the most important goals. For her they were not the keys to the kingdom, not the material out of which the proper wedding garment is woven.
So, where are you? Where are we as a church? Are we in a place like the scribes and elders, who have much knowledge, but not much wisdom, much pride, but not much humility? Are we in a place, where we can see what truly matters to a God whose invitation goes out to all, including the lowly, the poor, the rejected, not because by definition they are more worthy, but because the high and the mighty all too often ignore the invitation to the feast? The gospel reminds us that the act of ignoring is serious business, because sometimes what and whom we ignore are precisely what God is placing before us for deep consideration that we might change, turn around and move in a direction toward the one who comes that our lives might be full and abundant.
October 7, 2020
Dear Friends,
I came across an interesting article in the Arts section of the New York Times this past week. I never would l have read it, had I known the story involved a grisly murder, but because the byline read, Seeking Humanity in Nordic Noir, I thought the article had something to do with how the people of Scandinavia cope artistically with the long, cold, darkness---the blackness of the night that hovers over the land for many months. But this was NOT what the article was about. It concerned the work of the director, Tobias Lindholm, who has made a series, The Investigation, about the murder of Kim Wall, a 30 year old journalist, who was working on a story about a homemade submarine, built by a Danish inventor, Peter Madsen. Kim boarded the submarine with Madsen to do an interview, but she never returned. Her torso eventually washed up on shore, and Madsen admitted to the crime for which he is now serving life imprisonment. All this is simply horrible, and as I said, I would have avoided the article had I known the details, but then I would have missed the important point, which did turn out to be uplifting and hopeful. The Investigation is not so much about the crime as it is about all the people, who worked so hard to solve it. It is, in other words, about ordinary people doing their jobs in the best way they knew how.
Tobias Lindholm tells the story in six parts without portraying any brutal murder scene; in fact, the name of the murderer is never mentioned once. Instead, the six episodes concentrate on the detectives, the divers and the criminologists, who brought their best selves to the task of solving the crime. There were divers, who spent many months entering the cold, dark and rough waters of the Oresund, which separates Sweden and Denmark. They did it, because they wanted Kim’s parents to be able to bury their daughter’s body and “move on,” whatever “moving on” might mean.
And then there is Jens Moller, the Danish, good natured homicide detective, who led the investigation into Kim’s death. He has been a detective for over 40 years, and he happens to be very good as his job. When Tobias spoke with Jens, he said the sense of the story was so different from what he had read in the sensationalized press. Jens spoke of all the intense efforts made by so many people to solve the crime. It was all about people caring enough to do their jobs with commitment, skill and determination. Jens did not place himself at the center of the investigation, though he was a very skillful director, taking all the different pieces of information, and forming them into a whole puzzle that could finally bring the investigators to a confession, a trial and a conviction. No, Jens gave credit to the whole team, who worked together for the common good of solving a crime.
None of these people are heroes as we normally understand that term. They are not household names. They are just decent, hardworking men and women, who care about what they do. A horrible crime had been committed, but the horror is not the point of the series. It is all about decency and competence and caring. And that relates to Kim’s work as a journalist as well. “She was always looking for the story behind the story,” her father said. Her articles appeared in many publications, including the New York Times. She wrote about women fighting for justice in places, where justice is usually ignored and denied. Kim’s desire was to give voice to people who so often have no voice, because no one pays any heed to their stories---a little bit like the Bible, where stories are told about people, who also lack a public voice and hearing.
Consider the story Jesus tells about the widow, who gave all she had to the Temple treasury, or the woman with an issue of blood, who touched Jesus to be healed, or the Canaanite mother, whom Jesus intimates is a dog, when she begs Jesus to heal her afflicted daughter. None of these biblical characters are given names, but their stories show us what life is like for ordinary people, struggling with the challenges of life. And that is what Kim Wall wanted to do as well: She wanted to raise the awareness of people’s lives, which more often than not are ignored. And so, her parents have begun the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, which awards grants to young female journalists, who are also trying to give ignored people a voice.
There is a heart shaped memorial To Kim Wall on the beach that stands very near to her parents’ home. Walking by it, Tobias pets the Wall’s dog, and says, “Systems that work, human beings who believe in society---that’s the Nordic story too.” Let us hope and pray that this will become our story as well.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I came across an interesting article in the Arts section of the New York Times this past week. I never would l have read it, had I known the story involved a grisly murder, but because the byline read, Seeking Humanity in Nordic Noir, I thought the article had something to do with how the people of Scandinavia cope artistically with the long, cold, darkness---the blackness of the night that hovers over the land for many months. But this was NOT what the article was about. It concerned the work of the director, Tobias Lindholm, who has made a series, The Investigation, about the murder of Kim Wall, a 30 year old journalist, who was working on a story about a homemade submarine, built by a Danish inventor, Peter Madsen. Kim boarded the submarine with Madsen to do an interview, but she never returned. Her torso eventually washed up on shore, and Madsen admitted to the crime for which he is now serving life imprisonment. All this is simply horrible, and as I said, I would have avoided the article had I known the details, but then I would have missed the important point, which did turn out to be uplifting and hopeful. The Investigation is not so much about the crime as it is about all the people, who worked so hard to solve it. It is, in other words, about ordinary people doing their jobs in the best way they knew how.
Tobias Lindholm tells the story in six parts without portraying any brutal murder scene; in fact, the name of the murderer is never mentioned once. Instead, the six episodes concentrate on the detectives, the divers and the criminologists, who brought their best selves to the task of solving the crime. There were divers, who spent many months entering the cold, dark and rough waters of the Oresund, which separates Sweden and Denmark. They did it, because they wanted Kim’s parents to be able to bury their daughter’s body and “move on,” whatever “moving on” might mean.
And then there is Jens Moller, the Danish, good natured homicide detective, who led the investigation into Kim’s death. He has been a detective for over 40 years, and he happens to be very good as his job. When Tobias spoke with Jens, he said the sense of the story was so different from what he had read in the sensationalized press. Jens spoke of all the intense efforts made by so many people to solve the crime. It was all about people caring enough to do their jobs with commitment, skill and determination. Jens did not place himself at the center of the investigation, though he was a very skillful director, taking all the different pieces of information, and forming them into a whole puzzle that could finally bring the investigators to a confession, a trial and a conviction. No, Jens gave credit to the whole team, who worked together for the common good of solving a crime.
None of these people are heroes as we normally understand that term. They are not household names. They are just decent, hardworking men and women, who care about what they do. A horrible crime had been committed, but the horror is not the point of the series. It is all about decency and competence and caring. And that relates to Kim’s work as a journalist as well. “She was always looking for the story behind the story,” her father said. Her articles appeared in many publications, including the New York Times. She wrote about women fighting for justice in places, where justice is usually ignored and denied. Kim’s desire was to give voice to people who so often have no voice, because no one pays any heed to their stories---a little bit like the Bible, where stories are told about people, who also lack a public voice and hearing.
Consider the story Jesus tells about the widow, who gave all she had to the Temple treasury, or the woman with an issue of blood, who touched Jesus to be healed, or the Canaanite mother, whom Jesus intimates is a dog, when she begs Jesus to heal her afflicted daughter. None of these biblical characters are given names, but their stories show us what life is like for ordinary people, struggling with the challenges of life. And that is what Kim Wall wanted to do as well: She wanted to raise the awareness of people’s lives, which more often than not are ignored. And so, her parents have begun the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, which awards grants to young female journalists, who are also trying to give ignored people a voice.
There is a heart shaped memorial To Kim Wall on the beach that stands very near to her parents’ home. Walking by it, Tobias pets the Wall’s dog, and says, “Systems that work, human beings who believe in society---that’s the Nordic story too.” Let us hope and pray that this will become our story as well.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
REMEMBERING IMPORTANT STORIES AND QUESTIONS by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
10/4/2020
Exodus 17: 1-7
Matthew 21: 23-32
The French Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, once quipped that it would be far better to judge a person by her questions rather than her answers. Well, Matthew’s gospel has been full of questions right from its very beginning all the way to the end. John the Baptist and Pilate ask Jesus who he is. John asked Jesus if he were the one for whom they have been waiting, and Pilate wanted to know if he is the king of the Jews. And then there are the questions put to Jesus by the religious leaders about why he and his disciples break the law--- why they don’t properly wash their hands, or pick grain and heal on the Sabbath. They also ask Jesus about divorce and taxes and the afterlife---which husband a woman will have in heaven, if she has been married multiple times.
And the disciples also asked questions: Who is the greatest among us and what good deed is necessary to gain eternal life and how often must we forgive. Now all these questions (from the disciples as well as from the religious leaders) are very revealing, because with the exception of John the Baptist and ironically, Pilate, the questions are all self serving, designed to entrap Jesus or impress him, or get something from him. And the same is true for this morning’s question about Jesus’ authority, put to him by the chief priests and elders. But, they are not interested in a real answer; all they care about is entrapping him.
Notice the context of this question. Jesus is in the Temple, the same place he was, when a few weeks ago, we heard him asked what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God. He has already thrown the moneychangers out, so the leaders are furious and want to know by what authority he does these things. But all they want to do is gather more evidence to bring a charge of blasphemy against him.
And in true rabbinic fashion Jesus answered their question with another question: “Was John’s baptism from heaven or from human origin?” It was a brilliant response, because no matter how the question was answered, the leaders would be trapped. And so, they answered, “We don’t know.” And, Jesus in turn, refused to answer their query about his authority, and then told a parable about two sons---one who verbally refused to do what his father asked, but then later went into the vineyard to do the work, and the second son, who promised obedience, but never lifted a finger. When Jesus asked the question about which son did the father’s will, the leaders knew the right answer—the first son. And then Jesus blasted them by saying they were like the second son, pledging obedience, but failing to give it. And to top off the insult, he told them the prostitutes and tax collectors would gain admittance to God’s Kingdom before them. The religious leaders did not get from this encounter what they were looking for.
And that is often how it is in life. Just a few chapters before this one, Peter had said to Jesus, “You know we left everything for you; now what do we get? And what they finally got---a crucified and risen savior, is not exactly what they were expecting. Just as the Israelites, wandering in the wilderness did not get what they were expecting---40 long years of wandering.
The Israelites, the text from Exodus tells us, wandered by stages, and they too wanted to know: what do we get? They were dying of thirst, desperately wanting and needing water. And yet, those two words, by stages, tell us something very significant. They are on a journey and like all journeys, they will learn and discover as they go. And at this point in their journey, they are asking a very important question: Is God truly among us or not, because they are not sure, just as sometimes many people are not sure.
I was speaking to a rabbi friend of mine about the nature of questions in the Bible and how often in both the Old and New Testaments, they are not directly answered. And my rabbi friend said, “Yes, and we Jews have had to learn to live without direct answers.” And then he told me a Hasidic legend about a rabbi, who undertook the perilous mission to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, he thought, along with so much of humanity, was suffering terribly, and he felt that the Messiah needed to come, sooner rather than later. But for his arrogance, trying to intervene in history, he was banished by God with his faithful servant to a deserted island. The servant implored his Master to use his considerable powers to bring them back home. “Impossible,” the rabbi moaned, “I have no powers left.” “Then please,” the servant begged, “say a prayer, recite a litany, say the words you used to utter.” “I cannot,” the rabbi, replied, “I have forgotten everything.” And they both wept together.
Finally, the Rabbi turned to his servant and commanded, “Remind me of the words to one of the prayers.” “Ah, I cannot,” said the servant. &ld
10/4/2020
Exodus 17: 1-7
Matthew 21: 23-32
The French Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, once quipped that it would be far better to judge a person by her questions rather than her answers. Well, Matthew’s gospel has been full of questions right from its very beginning all the way to the end. John the Baptist and Pilate ask Jesus who he is. John asked Jesus if he were the one for whom they have been waiting, and Pilate wanted to know if he is the king of the Jews. And then there are the questions put to Jesus by the religious leaders about why he and his disciples break the law--- why they don’t properly wash their hands, or pick grain and heal on the Sabbath. They also ask Jesus about divorce and taxes and the afterlife---which husband a woman will have in heaven, if she has been married multiple times.
And the disciples also asked questions: Who is the greatest among us and what good deed is necessary to gain eternal life and how often must we forgive. Now all these questions (from the disciples as well as from the religious leaders) are very revealing, because with the exception of John the Baptist and ironically, Pilate, the questions are all self serving, designed to entrap Jesus or impress him, or get something from him. And the same is true for this morning’s question about Jesus’ authority, put to him by the chief priests and elders. But, they are not interested in a real answer; all they care about is entrapping him.
Notice the context of this question. Jesus is in the Temple, the same place he was, when a few weeks ago, we heard him asked what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God. He has already thrown the moneychangers out, so the leaders are furious and want to know by what authority he does these things. But all they want to do is gather more evidence to bring a charge of blasphemy against him.
And in true rabbinic fashion Jesus answered their question with another question: “Was John’s baptism from heaven or from human origin?” It was a brilliant response, because no matter how the question was answered, the leaders would be trapped. And so, they answered, “We don’t know.” And, Jesus in turn, refused to answer their query about his authority, and then told a parable about two sons---one who verbally refused to do what his father asked, but then later went into the vineyard to do the work, and the second son, who promised obedience, but never lifted a finger. When Jesus asked the question about which son did the father’s will, the leaders knew the right answer—the first son. And then Jesus blasted them by saying they were like the second son, pledging obedience, but failing to give it. And to top off the insult, he told them the prostitutes and tax collectors would gain admittance to God’s Kingdom before them. The religious leaders did not get from this encounter what they were looking for.
And that is often how it is in life. Just a few chapters before this one, Peter had said to Jesus, “You know we left everything for you; now what do we get? And what they finally got---a crucified and risen savior, is not exactly what they were expecting. Just as the Israelites, wandering in the wilderness did not get what they were expecting---40 long years of wandering.
The Israelites, the text from Exodus tells us, wandered by stages, and they too wanted to know: what do we get? They were dying of thirst, desperately wanting and needing water. And yet, those two words, by stages, tell us something very significant. They are on a journey and like all journeys, they will learn and discover as they go. And at this point in their journey, they are asking a very important question: Is God truly among us or not, because they are not sure, just as sometimes many people are not sure.
I was speaking to a rabbi friend of mine about the nature of questions in the Bible and how often in both the Old and New Testaments, they are not directly answered. And my rabbi friend said, “Yes, and we Jews have had to learn to live without direct answers.” And then he told me a Hasidic legend about a rabbi, who undertook the perilous mission to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, he thought, along with so much of humanity, was suffering terribly, and he felt that the Messiah needed to come, sooner rather than later. But for his arrogance, trying to intervene in history, he was banished by God with his faithful servant to a deserted island. The servant implored his Master to use his considerable powers to bring them back home. “Impossible,” the rabbi moaned, “I have no powers left.” “Then please,” the servant begged, “say a prayer, recite a litany, say the words you used to utter.” “I cannot,” the rabbi, replied, “I have forgotten everything.” And they both wept together.
Finally, the Rabbi turned to his servant and commanded, “Remind me of the words to one of the prayers.” “Ah, I cannot,” said the servant. &ld