August 7, 2024 Dear Friends, I don’t know if any of you watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Paris. I did not, but I did read about the controversy concerning a large table with a woman, wearing a silver crown, flanked by dancing drag queens, interrupted by a scantily clad blue man, emerging from a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. Many people saw this representation as reminiscent of Leonardo de Vinci’s Last Supper, and so great offense was taken. Was the Lord’s Supper being mocked? Many Christians thought so. When I looked at the scene, I did not even think of The Last Supper, so I failed to see what all the fuss was about. But I did ask one of my friends, who is a clergywoman, and she admitted that it did remind her of Da Vinci’s painting, but she did not take offense. To her it was simply artistic license. Many people took the side of the creators, who denied there was any intention to mock or insult. It was supposed to be, according to the creators of the event, a representation of the Greek God Dionysius, god of wine and revelry. (Bacchus was the name of the Roman god for the same.) The bacchanal was indeed a feast, essentially a celebration of hedonism. In France there is a connection to Dionysius because he is the father of Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine upon which the city of Paris sits. Someone else pointed out that Christians were way too quick to take offense. There is a famous painting from the 17th century by the Dutch artist, Jan van Bijlert, showing the Greek gods of Olympus gathered around a long table while in the center is the sun god, Apollo, with his signature halo of light around his head. In other words, Christians, it is not all about you! Indeed, it is not! My own feelings about the matter are that people take offense way too quickly, and we all would do well to take it down a notch or two. An apology, by the way, was delivered, insisting that no offense was intended and expressing regret for any hurt feelings. The Last Supper, the apology said, was not on our minds when we created the scene. In fact, the encouragement of tolerance was the idea. “Yeah, right,” came the response. It was simply not believed that creative and intelligent people would not have raised the specter of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Didn’t it occur to anyone that some Christians might take offense? Of course, they knew it was offensive, the Christians argued. The offense was their point. And then the Christians went on the attack. Pointing out that the Eucharist is the exact opposite of a bacchanalian feast, they said that while the Eucharist is about self-sacrifice, the bacchanal concerns self indulgence. And we live in a culture where the latter is celebrated, and the former is mocked. The bacchanal, someone wrote, is “an adventure in lust and gluttony,” while the eucharist is about self giving love. And then the complaint laid bare the simple truth that contempt for Christianity is hardly new. Early Christians were accused of atheism, because they denied the polytheism of ancient Rome. And in the third century in Rome there was a snide rebuke of Christians made in plaster showing Christians worshipping a crucified figure with the head of an ass. There is no denying that we live in a post-Christian culture, where the French say drag queens are “au courant.” Apparently, some Christians, at least, do not approve of drag queens. Yet how does their Christian offense strengthen the case for Christianity? Yes, the communion table is about self-sacrifice and the bacchanal is about self-indulgence, but what is gained by insisting that the creators of the scene intended to mock and insult Christianity, when they deny such an intention? Since intentions are notoriously difficult to prove, why enter into the argument? What does it achieve? I fear those who complained ended up looking too self satisfied in their offense, the opposite of what the eucharist communicates. Someone pointed out that the bacchanal is about fun, and fun is simply a part of life. Remember, Jesus was accused of being a drunkard who liked a good party way too much. Fun is not the whole of life, and if fun becomes the final goal, one is left with a diminished human existence. We can see the results all around us. Wealth and power are also pursued and consumed as if such things provide the deepest meaning of life. And again, that leads to a life of diminishment. What Christianity offers is full and abundant life. But we can know and celebrate that truth without taking offense at the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony, and then appearing too self-righteous in the defense of the faith. Yours in Christ, Sandra The Broken Human Condition
Preached by Sandra Olsen The First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT July 28, 2024 Ephesians 3: 14-21 2 Samuel 11: 1-15 I have a good friend, Seth, who is a rabbi. We first became acquainted when he was the rabbi in the Middletown synagogue, but he moved on, and we have maintained the relationship, which has grown into a substantial friendship. We discuss all kinds of issues, sometimes very difficult ones, most recently the war in Gaza and Israel, and we don’t not always like what the other has to say. But, as he said to me just a few weeks ago, he likes the fact that he can say sometimes very harsh things, but I don’t become angry and take it personally. For example, he told me that the problem with Christianity is that its story is predicated on the murder of a Jew, and the world, including Christians, seem to like dead Jews. A few months ago, we had a discussion about Martin Luther, and he asked me how it was that Christians continue to admire someone, so clearly anti-Jewish. Seth is right about Luther’s anti-Semitism. While in his early career, Luther said positive things about the Jews, because he believed they would convert to Christianity, when it was clear this was not going to happen, he spewed some of the most hateful anti-Jewish filth you can imagine. Much of what he wrote and said is hardly fit to print. He should be expunged as a Christian leader and thinker, Seth insisted, because he is so morally corrupt. What he said is terrible, I agreed, and that is readily acknowledged in Christian circles, but that does not undo his very real achievements. Character is rarely consistent, I argued, and the human condition is one of brokenness. We are sinners, and Protestants, at least the Reformed side of the tradition, defend the doctrine of total depravity, which means that every area of our lives is infected with sin. This does not mean human beings are incapable of good deeds; it simply means that no one can claim goodness except God. Jesus acknowledged that when he asked someone who addressed him as, “Good Teacher,” “Why do you call me good. Only God is good,” he insisted. Seth thinks the doctrine of human depravity lets people off the hook far too easily, as if they cannot help their brokenness. Luther’s anti-Jewishness, by the way, was not his sole big sin. He was responsible for the death of thousands of peasants, when he said they deserved death for their uprising. So, how much sin is too much before a leader is deposed? Well, that is a question that applies to King David. David, the youngest and the smallest of Jesse’s eight sons, was the one chosen by God to be king. And David hardly had an easy time. Initially, he had to deal with the wrath of King Saul, who set out of kill him out of jealousy. Suddenly, God rejected Saul, and not for the best reasons, one of them being that Saul did not kill all the occupants of a conquered city, including women and children. According to the story, God commanded that all should be murdered, and no objects of worth were to be taken. But Saul did not obey that command, and David eventually become king. He was a very successful warrior, expanding the land grab of the Jews. He ruled over a United Kingdom and its land area would never be greater. But now the years have passed, and in our story for today, David is most likely solidly middle aged. His soldiers have gone out to fight, but he remains at home. Perhaps he has seen enough battles; there is no longer the lust for conquest and the blood lust has disappeared. And so, there he is, on his balcony, when he spies the beautiful Bathsheba bathing, and he decides he wants her, and because he is king, he can have what he wants. The text tells us that he sent messengers to get her, a polite way of saying she was abducted. And then raped, because how could she possibly give meaningful consent. The brilliant Dutch painter, Rembrandt, imagines the scene in a different way. I remember the first time I saw the painting in a book. I was completely blown away by the psychological depth of the image. There sits Bathsheba reading a letter, commanding her to come to the king. She is all but naked and she wears this sad, pensive look on her face. What recourse does she have? She must go. If she had refused, what would have happened? Would David have accepted her refusal? We don’t know, but we suspect that kingly power does not approve of rejection. The Hebrew text says, “David took her,” but most English translations are a bit more gentle, “He lay with her.” She becomes pregnant and David connives to have her husband, Uriah, return to his home to sleep with his wife, but as a warrior of great honor and dignity, he will not dessert his men and do something he considers to be shameful while his men face danger. And so, David conspires to have Uriah killed in battle. It is a terrible deed, and David is surely guilty of a great sin. Perhaps none of us here is at all surprised, because we are all past the first blush of youth and are hardly naïve about the human condition and what powerful people are capable of. I remember, however, when I was 19, and there was this graduate student in political science whose parents were powerful in the PA Democratic Party. They had known President Kennedy and his family, and he told me that President Kennedy had been a terrible womanizer. I simply did not believe it; I could not believe it, and when his parents arrived for a visit once and we all had dinner together, his parents confirmed the story. I was heartbroken. At 19, in a world quite different from ours today, I was simply too young and naïve to understand that our heroes are also broken human beings. My father, who worked in the Headquarters of the First Army during the Second World War used to see the generals come in for meetings and there was General Eisenhower with his female driver, Kay. An affair was definitely in the works, and when it became known that he wanted to divorce Mamie and marry Kay, Eisenhower was told by General Marshall that his career would be finished. And so instead, Eisenhower finished the affair. My father told my mother the story, but she never would believe it, until decades later, when the truth emerged after Eisenhower was dead, but not before Mamie was. My mother was outraged that the Press could not wait until after she died. Such is the lust for smut. We want people, especially our heroes, to be morally consistent, but they rarely are. People are weak and strong in different areas of their lives. They can be deceitful in one area yet be upright in other areas. Obviously, if there are too many areas that are infected with self interest and sin, then the character structure all but collapses, and we are left with sociopathic behavior, someone incapable of feeling the sting of conscience. But that is not David, whom we will later see be confronted by the prophet Nathan. David’s story began when he was a shepherd, playing his lyre and composing songs. But then he killed with a slingshot and a stone the philistine Goliath and led an army against Israel’s enemies. “Saul has killed thousands, but David has killed ten thousand”, the crowd sang. And David became powerful and with power comes temptation---the oldest story in the world. Remember the mythic story of the fall, when Eve and Adam had the power to decide if they would eat the fruit they had been commanded not to eat. Temptation came and they ate, and the story continues from there. July 29, 2024
Dear Friends, I had the most wonderful surprise in church on Sunday, which has left me smiling for days. As church was beginning, Tim came up to me and said, “You are going to have a big surprise; look to your left in the back of the church, someone from your past is there.” I told him I do not normally bring my distance glasses into the church, just my reading ones, so I cannot tell who is there. At the end of the service, I walked to the back of the church and saw two people, a man and a woman. The woman hugged me and said, “Sandra, what a joy to see you after all these years. And I loved your sermon.” I scanned the face, unsure who it was, yet asked, “So, where are you living now?” As soon as she said, “Phoenix,” I knew immediately this was Gay Patterson, one of my two best friends from high school, someone I have not seen since 1968, though 6 years ago I found her on a high school website and one of my sons found her number, so I called. She was shocked to hear from me, since 1968 was the last time we had any contact. Gay, Bernadette and I were steadfast friends, very serious conversation partners. We talked all the time about big issues like truth and beauty. We discussed poetry and novels and plays. I went to Frontier Central High School in Hamburg, New York for only my junior and senior years, but almost immediately in the fall of my junior year, the three of us found each other and bonded. (Bernadette, by the way, died of cancer in her mid 30’s.). Gay remarked that no one understood why the three of us hung out together. Bernadette and Gay were really “different,” on the edge, very creative and artsy, and they were mocked, because they did not fit in. I did not fit in either, but as Gay said, “You were respected as the academic star and besides, you wore really nice clothes.” In the late 60’s, that was enough to get one some respect. Most people, I think, thought we were a bit weird, because we just were not interested in a lot of things high school kids pay mind to. We had no interest in school sports, and one time at a pep rally, which I hated, I was reprimanded for reading a book rather than yelling out those silly cheers. “This is a school, is it not?” I asked. “And don’t schools encourage reading? So, why are you reprimanding me, when I am doing what schools are supposed to encourage?” The teacher just shook her head and left me alone. Though Gay and I have had very little contact over the past year--- a few emails now and then--- we both acknowledged the profound influence the friendship among the three of us had. There are years in our growing that leave permanent marks on us, and for me, my last two years of high school and then four years of college at the University of Chicago marked me forever. Because Gay and Bernadette were so different, standing out in ways that could not be so easily ignored, which was why they were often mocked, I found myself drawn to them. They were unlike any friends I had ever had, and I greatly admired their passionate creativity, which mattered to them more than grades or college admissions. Bernadette had a gorgeous voice, and Gay was a poet, who not only wrote poetry, but read it and would bring to us these poems, which she insisted we discuss. I recall her bringing Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” What 17 year old wants to discuss death and immortality, but that is what we did. And in our honor’s senior English class, when we discussed Emily Dickinson, the three of us already had much to say. The teacher admitted he would not have chosen that poem for us, but since we brought it up, we would discuss it. Later, he asked us why we had not chosen, Hope Is a Thing With Feathers. Is that not more fitting for 17 year olds, he asked? You decide. Here are the two poems. Because I could not stop for Death-- He kindly stopped for me-- The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility-- We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess—in the Ring-- We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain-- We passed the Setting Sun-- Or rather—He passed us-- The Dews drew quivering and chill-- For only Gossamer, my Gown-- My Tippet—only Tulle-- We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground-- The Roof was scarcely visible-- The Cornice—in the Ground-- Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity-- "Hope" is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the Gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me. Gay, her husband Bill, and I all had lunch together at George’s, and it was absolutely a grace filled time. There were so many memories that came crashing over us, and we laughed and cried. These experiences belong to us as human beings, and one hardly needs to be religious to have them. But when you look through the lens of faith, life does take on a different hue when gratitude intrudes. I find myself immensely grateful for friendships that leave their marks long after the experiences have passed. Because, in a sense, impactful experiences are not over. They keep meeting us again and again as we try to make sense of the marks they have left on our lives. And faith, hope and love do the same thing. They meet us again and again, and we are always being changed by the encounter. Yours in Christ, Sandra JUST ORDINARY PEOPLE
Preached by Sandra Olsen at First Church of Christ in Unionville July 21. 2024 Mark 6: 30-44 I don’t know how many of you recall the 1980 movie, Ordinary People, staring Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as parents of two teenage boys, who stay out too long in their boat as a storm threatens, and when the boat is capsized and the two boys are hanging on to the boat and each other for dear life, one boy loses his grip and drowns. And the aftermath of that death--- the guilt, the accusations, the anger are what the film is all about. It is powerfully acted, and its beginning has a narrator say, “In this typical town in a comfortable home, three ordinary people are about to live an extraordinary story.” And that is how life often is---ordinary people living extraordinary stories. A few weeks ago, I had lunch with someone, and we were rehashing some of the extraordinary stories she had lived. And I told her,” You should write a book.” “No one would believe it,” was her response.” But again, that is life: ordinary people living extraordinary stories. And this is exactly what we have in today’s gospel. A few weeks ago, we saw Jesus return home and say extraordinary things, which unnerved the townspeople. To them, he was the kid next door, an ordinary person, so they were angry and resentful that he dared to do and say the things he did. Who did he think he was, anyway? Jesus then sent his disciples out into the world to do the work of healing and teaching. And believe me, there was nothing at all extraordinary about these men. They had nothing special that made them stand out, just ordinary workers, salt of the earth types, fishermen and a tax collector. As far as we know, they were not well educated, and they were not particularly knowledgeable about Jewish law, but to Jesus none of that was important. He sent them out into the world to do his work, and it appears that he had every confidence they could do it. Today’s lesson begins with their return, when they told Jesus all they had managed to do. And, of course, they were tired, and so Jesus told them to rest. But word had spread about Jesus and his disciples, and so they could not find the rest they needed. Jesus, as the good shepherd, saw the need all around him and responded to the crowd by teaching, as the text says, “many things.” Now the text tells us that Jesus and his disciples were far away from population centers, where food could be purchased. And so, the disciples suggested to Jesus that he send the crowd to the nearby towns to buy food. But what does Jesus say in response: “You give them something to eat.” They must have thought he was nuts. After all, they could not possibly afford to buy food to feed a large crowd. But Jesus was not nuts. He was expecting them to do something---not pass it off on someone else, which is what we often do or say, when someone asks us to do something really hard, beyond what we think our capacity is. “Why, I cannot possibly do that,” we protest. But Jesus was not nuts, and he was not kidding. Yet he did not leave them completely on their own. He showed them what was possible with five loaves of bread and two fish. Now I suppose one possible interpretation of the story is that it is highly symbolic, with the loaves and fish symbolizing the spiritual food with which Jesus fed the crowd. But the problem with that interpretation is that it places the emphasis on what Jesus did, but I think the story wants to emphasize what the disciples did or were called to do: “You give them something to eat,” is what Jesus said. And it is the disciples who pass out the food to the crowd. The gospel stories are not only about Jesus; they are also about his followers and others who happen to show up--- ordinary people, sometimes doing quite extraordinary things in the ordinary run of their lives. Some years ago, when I had a youth group at my church in Middletown, one of my 7th graders said she thought the miracle was that people took out the food they had and shared it with those who had nothing. “That is the power of Jesus,” she insisted. “He helped people want to be good.” And I liked her interpretation, because notice what she did---she placed the emphasis on the activity of the crowd. They shared what food they had. In other words, it is not just about what Jesus can do; it is about what others can also do in the activity of their normal, ordinary lives. You have heard me say many times that the gospel is a lens we put on to look at life, normal activities, like eating and feeding, or just doing the job we have to do, whether as a teacher, a nurse, a firefighter, a parent, a doctor, a home health aide, or a lawyer---just doing the ordinary stuff of your life and your job. And grace can infuse all those ordinary activities. A couple of weeks ago, I read this article in the Washington Post about the Oakland County, Michigan prosecutor, Karen McDonald, who got convictions against the parents of Ethan Crumbley, who killed four students in Oxford High School. Ethan had written in his journal that his parents had refused to help him, saying he was so distraught he thought he would shoot up his school. Teachers saw all kinds of worrying signs and were convinced he had a gun in his backpack, and so the parents were called in and Ethan was called down to the office. The school wanted the parents to take him home, but they refused, and they also refused to search his backpack in front of school officials, who legally could not search it, though they were fearful of what they would find inside. No one had ever gone after the parents of a school shooter before, and I am not making a judgment on whether or not that is good law. I certainly do not think a 15 year old boy should have been charged as an adult. Karen McDonald, the prosecutor, grew up in a small town of 4000 people in central Michigan. She seemed like a pretty ordinary person. She was not a good student; she was never known as the smart one. She did not attend a fancy, big name college or ivy league university. Her high school performance was so unimpressive that her parents made her sign a contract, saying she would repay them for college, if she did not do well. She graduated from Wayne State Law School in Michigan, not a big name law school. In so many ways she looked like an ordinary lawyer, but she became an extraordinary prosecutor, and she did something no one thought she could do---win convictions against Ethan’s parents. Other prosecutors told her not to try, and even her own team was unconvinced this would work. But she had this passion for justice and a deep feeling for the parents, whose children had died or were wounded in the attack. And she would not, could not, let it go. What she did was not a spiritual miracle in the sense that we normally think of spiritual. But the point of the gospel is to help us realize that the normal stuff of our lives, the daily grind of our routines and jobs are exactly the places where God meets us. They are the places of possibility, where we can change and grow. One of the assistant prosecutors in this case, who was instrumental in the prosecution of Ethan’s father, was sought after by private law firms, who offered him three and four times his state salary. But no, this was his job, and he would do it---more money be damned! There are extraordinary people, who do extraordinary things---Beethoven composing the 9th Symphony when deaf, Michealangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or carving the statue of David, Einstein and the theory of relativity. But most people are not like that. They are ordinary, and yet there are circumstances that call them to do extraordinary things. Jesus’ disciples were ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs, like fishing or collecting taxes. And yet they became avenues of God’s grace. And so can we all be such avenues---ordinary people doing ordinary things that really can become quite extraordinary. July 25, 2024
Dear Friends, Individual Christians, when facing a difficult decision, sometimes ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” I remember one of my seminary professors saying he thought the question was totally useless, since we often have no idea what Jesus would do. His world was so different from the one we inhabit. Nevertheless, people as well as churches, do ask the question, and sometimes they come up with an answer. Inglewood United Methodist Church’s answer is: House the Homeless. Like many mainline Protestant churches, Inglewood, which is part of Los Angeles, has been suffering from rapidly declining membership. Founded in 1905, it was mostly a white congregation. In the 60’s and 70’s a more diverse population began to move in with a different style of worship, and slowly over the decades, the church’s membership declined. At its peak, Inglewood’s membership boasted over 3000 people, and now it is less than 100. This all goes along with the decline of participation in organized religion. Yet that decline is not the entire story, because the church sits on an incredibly valuable piece of property---- as do many such religious organizations in urban areas. Affordable housing is a big issue all across the country, and nowhere is the situation more dire than in California. The church’s minister, the Rev. Victor Cyrus-Franklin, said the price of housing was impacting the neighborhood. “People cannot afford to live here,” he said. As he was speaking to a reporter, a man named Bill Dorsey, 78 years old, was a few yards away in a corridor that is being used by some homeless people, but also leads right into the church’s chapel. Piles of clothes, tarps, makeshift tents are scattered around, but the church tolerates it, because as someone said, “They have no place to go. Do we think we are too good to be surrounded by the homeless? Would Jesus throw them out?” Early next year the church will begin construction on 60 studio apartments that will replace three empty buildings directly behind its chapel, which until three years ago, were occupied by a school. This is not unique to Inglewood Methodist Church. IKAR, a Jewish congregation in Los Angeles is building a new synagogue, preschool and 60 affordable housing units in an area where the average cost of a home is $1.8 million. There have been zoning changes which have made such projects possible. In Whittier, CA, for example, another Methodist Church is planning on building a 98 unit apartment building. Because of zoning changes, at least 80 Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations are planning to build affordable housing. Now this does not mean that the congregations have the money to build the apartments. Many of them are struggling to meet the most minimal of their financial obligations but because they often sit on prime real estate, they have been able to turn that advantage into a mission to help people who cannot afford housing. For years Englewood struggled to pay its bills. Most of its money came from renting to a school, which paid $20,000 per month. That money amounted to ¾ of the church’s annual budget, so when the school decided to leave, the church thought it was facing its end. But a new project emerged. The church struck a deal with a developer, BMB Company, which agreed to build and operate 60 studio apartments, which will rent well below market value. The church did not sell the land but created a lease that would operate for 65 years. In exchange the church received a lump sum of money. The minister did not say how much the church received, but people who offer a guess think in terms of millions. How many millions is, as of now, still a guarded secret. At one time the members of Inglewood were managers of stores, banks, schools. They were teachers, doctors, nurses, owners of small businesses. “Our profile has changed,” the minister pointed out, “but we can still make an important impact on our community”. Yes, things change. Life moves in a different direction. What would Jesus do? Some churches answer, “Build affordable housing.” Yours in Christ, Sandra The Temptations and Perils of Power
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational In Unionville, CT July 14, 2024 Amos 7: 7-15 Mark 6: 14-29 The cross casts a very long shadow, and that is part of the message in today’s reading from Mark. Jesus had sent his disciples into the world to do healing and teaching, and then John is beheaded, which is a warning and reminder that the faithful might receive harsh treatment at the hands of the powerful. We know that Jesus got into a lot of trouble, because he confronted the powerful. He told them things they did not like to hear, not so different from the prophet Amos, who told King Jeroboam and his priest, Amaziah, that God’s judgment would come down very hard on them because they failed to follow God’s law. And John also found himself in trouble because he too confronted power, telling Herod and Herodias that they had sinned in the eyes of God. Herodias had been the wife of Herod’s half brother, and according to Jewish law, (except in the case were there were no children), a man should not marry his sister in law. John did not hold back; he openly named their guilt. We might expect Herod to respond with outrage, but that is not Herod’s initial reaction. He was both “perplexed and intrigued.” He enjoyed listening to John’s words. Herodias, on the other hand, was furious, and she wanted John dead, but Herod protected John until a birthday bash in which he made a public drunken promise to his stepdaughter, Salome, that she could have anything she wanted, and her mother told her to ask for John’s head. And because the promise was publicly made, Herod felt he had no choice but to comply. And so, John the Baptist was executed. Now Herod was powerful in the sense that he could order a lot of people around; he could get people to do his bidding. But like all powerful people, he had an image to protect and that may indeed be one of the most perilous aspects of power. Image can be very fragile, and acting to protect it can lead people to do all kinds of things that are against their better judgment. Herod did not want to be known as a man who broke promises, and so although he did not want John dead, he did not think he could prevent John’s death. His power was limited by his need to protect his image. Power is indeed a peril, but it is also a temptation. Powerful people do not readily renounce their power, and when they do, it is quite an astounding act. We should remember the first President of the United States, George Washington, who could have become king after the War for Independence was won. Many were clamoring for him to do so. But he said, “I did not fight George the Third of Great Britain to become George the First of these colonies.” After the war he gave up his army commission to return to life on his beloved farm. When duty later called, he became President, but only for two terms. He could have continued, but he renounced power, and King George of England said of Washington, “If he gives up such power, he will be the greatest of men.” Consider LBJ, a very powerful President: the civil rights and voting acts, creation of Medicare and Medicaid were extraordinary accomplishments. But then there was the debacle of Viet Nam, and LBJ suffered over his decisions. When the protesters shouted, “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”, he was deeply wounded. And we know that he refused to seek another term as President. After he had left office and had some time to reflect without the burden of political power, he admitted that as President he never felt he had the power to reconsider his policies in Viet Nam. And if you do not have the power to reconsider and to turn in another direction, what kind of power do you really have? You have lost one of the most essential marks of human control---the power to change one’s mind and one’s direction, which also embraces the power to admit mistakes. Most of us realize the tremendous power and burden that General Eisenhower carried in making his decisions about D-Day. The weather was not very cooperative, and yet there would be, he was told by his meteorologists, a short window of clearing on June 6, and so it was his decision alone when the Allied assault would begin. He wielded tremendous power, but he also carried tremendous anxiety, and when he stood out on the runway in the early morning hours of June 6, the men about to take off could sense his unease. And they tried to comfort him, “Don’t worry, General, we are going to take care of this for you.” Then he returned to his headquarters and wrote out two communiques: one, extolling the bravery of the people, who were moving toward victory and the other admitting it was a failure and taking full responsibility for it. He had power, and he knew at what cost it came. Jesus too had tremendous power. There is no doubt he was a man of charisma and startling spiritual strength. People did not always know what to make of him---neither his enemies nor his family. But there is an aspect of Jesus’ story that we so often ignore, that is, until Holy Week intrudes, and the whole drama plays out---the betrayal and the brutal death on the cross. As terrible and unjust as the death was, it was also necessary---but not because Jesus was the sacrificial offering that God demanded as payment for human sin. We so easily say, “Jesus died for our sins,” which to me means, he died on account of human sin. God did not require the death of Jesus in order to forgive. But human beings require the death to see what we are so often blind to---that power is both peril and temptation, and Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of God, because he was able to fully renounce power for the sake of love. He subjected himself to the forces of evil and in that willing subjection, God acted to overcome its terrible power. Evil did not and does not speak the final word. Isn’t it ironic that as much as we are impressed by power, as much as we might ascribe the word omnipotent to God, the story of our faith revolves around a savior, who not only taught and healed, but also suffered and died a humiliating death on a cross. There is no getting around this truth. At the end of his life, hanging on a cross, Jesus did not look powerful. The story we have this morning from Mark’s Gospel is a pointer to the fate that lies around the corner. As John met an untimely end, so will Jesus. Of course, we know that the story does not end with a death. Yes, there is a resurrection, but God’s power to raise would be nothing without Jesus’ willingness to renounce power with all its many perils and temptations. July 10, 2024
Dear Friends, In December 1815, the Senate and the House of Commons of North Carolina commissioned a full bodied statue of George Washington by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova. It was finally completed in 1820 and installed in the North Carolina State House on December 24, 1821. Sadly, the building and the statue were destroyed by a fire on June 21, 1831. Before the decision to give the commission to Canova was finalized, there had been discussion about how Washington should be presented, and Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that Washington should be dressed as an ancient Roman commander. “Our American boots and regimentals have a very puny effect,” he insisted. Apparently, Canova agreed, for it was his plan to show Washington seated, as many examples of ancient statuary customarily present ancient figures. A seated statue also made sense, since the ceiling of the rotunda was not high enough to accommodate a standing one. So, Washington was presented seated like the ancient hero, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. In his left hand he is holding a tablet, and in his right hand a quill, writing his farewell address to the nation. At his feet lie a baton and a sword. Most of us would have little or no idea who Cincinnatus was, but many of our Founding Fathers were steeped in ancient Roman history, and they knew the identity of Cincinnatus. The Founders looked to Rome as an example of a republic, evidencing republican civic virtues. Cincinnatus was a member of the patrician class, and he was known as someone who opposed the rights of the common citizens. He served as consul in 460 BC and as dictator in 458 BC and again in 439 BC, when his patrician class called on him to suppress the uprising of the plebians. So, why was Cincinnatus, clearly a member of the elite class, opposed to the rights of common citizens, so admired by our Founders? Because Cincinnatus was not in love with power, and he gave it up after his military victory, returning to his farm. This was not unlike George Washington, who after his victory in the Revolutionary War, returned to his beloved home, Mount Vernon, to take up the life of a gentleman farmer. Washington could have become a king, but as he said, “I did not fight King George the Third of England to become King George the First of the colonies.” Europeans were accustomed to kings and emperors holding onto power, and to relinquish it was almost unheard of. John Trumbull, the famous painter, wrote in 1784 about Washington’s resignation from the army, “Tis a conduct so novel, so inconceivable to People, who, far from giving up powers they possess, are willing to convulse the Empire to acquire more.” Indeed, the orderly transfer of power from one President to the next has been the hallmark of American history---until January 6, 2021. After George Washington had completed two presidential terms, the world stage waited and watched to see if he would willingly cede power to another President. The King of England is reported to have said, “If Washington gives his power up, he will be the greatest man alive.” Power can be dangerous to wield; people can so easily become enthralled by the attention and respect that is thrown their way. The President walks into a room, and people stand. His words are quoted, and his opinions sought. Power is seductive and therein lies its terrible danger. So, when someone like Cincinnatus and Washington willingly relinquished it, their stories are remembered. A deep impression is made. We would all do well at this time in our history to read or re-read Shakespeare’s great play, King Lear. Lear’s power blinded him to which of his daughters truly loved him. His youngest, Cordelia, told him she would love him as a daughter should, not more or less, while her two older sisters assured their father of their excessive love, all a lie, designed to wrestle from him power to rule the kingdom. Lear heartbreakingly rejects Cordelia, and the play reveals his blind foolishness that wreaks havoc on him and his kingdom. Cordelia ends up dead and Lear heartbroken. But he did arrive at knowledge as he realized what his blind foolishness had done. “I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” Yes, that is one lesson of power---its distorting effect that can blind one to the truth that is plainly before one’s eyes. No wonder the German writer and poet, Goethe said, “Every old man is a King Lear.” As Christians we can take the lessons of our faith and apply it to real life, for the cross does indeed cast a long shadow on all of life--- the personal, the social and the political. We are jolted out of our slumber to remember that the one we call “The Christ,” did not cling to power, but rather renounced it. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Philippians, Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, thought he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. Yours in Christ Sandra Coming Home
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational In Unionville, CT July 7, 2024 Mark 6: 1-13 When I moved to CT from Long Island in 1991, I had recently changed my ministerial standing from the Unitarian Universalist Association to the United Church of Christ. Leaving the UUA and returning to Christian roots felt like a coming home to me---though I was not raised UCC, but Presbyterian. Each year my former Unitarian church would invite me back to preach, and I would happily go. My colleague at First Church in Middletown never really understood why I would return each year, especially since I had a great many negative feelings toward the Unitarian Universalist denomination. But still, returning to Muttontown felt like going home. Why? Because for a number of years it was my religious home, the place that actually helped me grow and change by supporting me on my journey. I did a lot of thinking and reading while I was there. I also studied at a Roman Catholic seminary, earning a Doctor of Ministry degree, and I did clinical training in chaplaincy at Central Islip Psychiatric Center and Nassau County Medical Center and later served as a chaplain at Stony Brook Hospital. Those were not easy placements for me; I saw suffering on a scale I had never before personally encountered, and my theological perspective began to change as a result. I began to see God in a different way, and Jesus as the Christ took on a deeper meaning for me, the symbol of a suffering and redemptive God. I remember very well a conversation I had with a Unitarian ministerial colleagues about hope. I was telling him about the ravaged lives at the mental hospital---people who had spent 40 or 50 years hearing voices screaming in their ears. What about them? I asked. What can we hope for them? He stood there and shook his head. No, I thought to myself. I am too much of a Christian Universalist to NOT want to hope that there is something more for them. And so, though I increasingly felt out of place in what seemed to me a very secular UUA, I never felt that way about the Muttontown congregation. I was always at home there, because it symbolized for me the very best of the Unitarian Universalist tradition---a real and honest openness to the big questions and a willingness to follow where those questions lead. So, what about this word home? Home means so many different things. To many, home brings images of safety, security and comfort, the place where, as the poet Robert Frost said, “they have to take you in.” Think of the times in your life you longed to go home. Perhaps it was the first day of school, when everything and everyone felt so new and strange, or maybe the first time you went away to overnight camp, or what about a move to a new city, far away from the place you knew and loved as home. When I worked as a chaplain, I heard so many voices, longing to go home. It didn’t seem to matter if they were just not seriously ill or not: home was the place they wanted to be. Two weeks ago, I was visiting Naoma Morgenstein in her nursing home in West Hartford. And there was a woman sitting in the hallway, repeating over and over again, “I want to go home. When are they coming to take me home?” Many years ago, maybe about 20, I was in Bar Harbor, walking along the shore, when I met this old fisherman, who was sitting on one of the benches. We struck up a conversation, and he told me how he grew up in Bar Harbor and then went off to war in World War ll—at age 17. He was in the South Pacific, and it was a horrible experience, brutal beyond imagination. He told me he lost his best friend there, and he almost died of grief. The only thing that kept me going, he told me, was my memory of home. I had these images in my mind, the swing in my backyard, hanging from this big oak tree. I pictured the green shutters on my house, and the front porch, where my buddy and I used to make plans for the long summer days. And of course, this beautiful harbor, beckoning me home. All these memories of home kept me going. I don't know how people make it in life, if they don't have a home to remember and return to.” I used to wonder the same thing when I worked at a church in New Haven, where I dealt with a lot of homeless people. I remember very well this one man named Stanley, who in the wintertime would come in to ask me for dollars so he could stay at Dunkin Donuts, which required him to buy something every two hours in order to remain there. I would give him enough money to get him through the night and sometimes, when it was very cold, even the day. He would bring me his receipts, though I told him he did not need to. No, he insisted, he wanted to be true to his word. I asked him once about home---did he have any good memories of a home from his past. He said that he lost his parents in a car crash, when he was 7 and then his aunt and uncle very reluctantly took him andhis two sisters in. But when he was 17, they told him he had to leave. I “So,” he told me, “I was kicked out of the only home I knew after my parents died. That was very, very hard. And I never felt at home anyplace after that. I never understood why they kicked me out. I didn’t cause any trouble and I was a pretty good student. They just did not want me. And so after a while I didn’t even remember that place as a home.” So, here we have a story in Mark about home. By this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has been making quite a stir with his teaching and healing. In chapter two Mark reported that Jesus had gone home, where he healed a paralytic by forgiving his sins, which, of course, scandalized the priests and the scribes, for they insisted that only God could forgive sins! And then on the Sabbath he and his disciples walked through grain fields and picked grain to eat, much to the consternation of the religious leaders, because picking grain in their minds was tantamount to work, and no work was to be done on the Sabbath. He then entered the synagogue and healed a man with a withered hand. In the 5th chapter Jesus healed the Gerasene demoniac by sending the demons into a herd of swine, which then ran off the edge of a cliff and was drowned. So, Jesus was causing quite a stir. And now in chapter 6 we are told that he went home again. But did he find acceptance, comfort, safety and rest? No, because he was not the same person the townspeople remembered. He went to the synagogue and astounded people with his teaching. “Where did this man get all this,” they wanted to know? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses, and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” In other words, isn’t this the kid next door? And they took offense at him. He wasn’t the person they remembered. He wasn’t the person they expected him to be. He had grown and changed; he had a mission, and he could no longer be put into the same old familiar categories that had defined him all those years of his growing up. Thomas Wolfe wrote a famous novel: You Can't Go Home Again, whose truth points to why Jesus said, "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country." In Nazareth, Jesus was just the boy next door, the carpenter's kid, not a prophet, certainly not the enfleshment of God's Word. No wonder he could work no miracles in his hometown. There are times in life when we do go home---back to places, where memories are stored, helping us to remember from where we came. But when we return, we are not the same as when we left, and sometimes that difference can feel like a loss. Yet home---for better or worse---is always with us. And it was for Jesus as well. July 4, 2024
Dear Friends, I know people who cannot bear to be far away from water. My sister says she must live within driving distance of the ocean. Her partner has a townhouse seven miles from Cape May, New Jersey, so that fills the bill very nicely. Every day she loves to go walking on the bay side, so she gets her water “fix.” I have another friend, who owns a home on the Cape, within walking distance of the ocean. She spends May through September there and is completely rejuvenated by the time she returns to Middletown in the fall. One of my college roommates has a summer home in Michigan on Lake Elk, and though she does not care very much for swimming, simply looking at the lake brings her deep joy and pleasure. “I cannot be depressed,” she claims, “if I simply allow myself the time to gaze at the water. It brings me calm and peace.” The marine biologist, Wallace J. Nichols, wrote a book called, Blue Mind in which he reflected on the meditative state that water inspires. In fact, research confirms that being in or near the water relieves stress and boosts creativity. The sight of water actually has an impact on the brain. Well, life on our planet began in the soupy waters of creation, and our lives began in the watery womb of our mothers’ bodies. No wonder we feel a deep kinship with water. People often love pictures and paintings of water. The Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, painted these giant canvases of water lilies, and people remark that it is the lilies in the water that give them such enjoyment and calm. Lilies by themselves would not be nearly as pleasing. And when people were asked about their “happy places,” many described a place on a lake, a pond, a river or the ocean. These were “soul soothing” places. There is scientific research that confirms the restorative power of water. Just two minutes of looking at water outdoors actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system which leads to a lowering of blood pressure and the heart rate. Someone offered the conjecture that since survival depends on water, and our ancestors had to be attuned to the presence of water, we carry that affinity deep within our DNA. Living near water improves well being. People report being less anxious and depressed, and it might be that living near blue spaces is more advantageous than living near green spaces. A study of heart patients indicated that those who were recuperating from heart surgery were helped by viewing an open water scene in a picture or a painting. They had lower anxiety levels and needed less pain mediation than those who were showed other paintings or pictures of an abstract design or blank white sheet of paper or even forest and flower scenes. And another study suggested that people who viewed an aquarium before oral surgery were more relaxed than those who had been hypnotized. Today is July 4, and many people across the landscape of our nation will be celebrating it near bodies of water. I don’t know how many people will bother to reflect on the story of our nation and its very shaky beginnings, which are, quite frankly, being shaken once more. All of us would do well to be inspired by the beauty of our landscape and its many lovely bodies of water, reminding us that just as the land and water need to be cared for and defended, so too does the democratic common good. We can take nothing for granted---land, water or democracy. Yours in Christ, Sandra THE HIGH AND THE LOWLY
Preached by: Sandra Olsen at First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT June 30, 2024 Mark 5: 21-43 A week or so ago, I read this article---I think it was in the New York Times written by a journalist, who loved to interview the high and the mighty, you know, the movers and shakers of societies: business tycoons, in charge of billions; political leaders, making decisions about war and peace; people influential in the arts and movie industry, inventers on the cusp of major breakthroughs, like Artificial Intelligence. I did not note the name of the person, writing the article, but he did say he was part of the elite---parents were well known writers and journalists and he also attended the Dalton School in New York, an elite private school attended by the very wealthy as well as poor kids, who are given full scholarships. As I was reading, I thought to myself he was way too impressed by success and power, and I wondered how it was you could trust what these high and mighty individuals say, since they all have their image to protect. If you could speak to anyone, who would that be? I considered Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, who has been flying all over the world, trying to keep this fire or that one from becoming a world-wide conflagration. And then there are those who are dead, like Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day and Omar Bradley, General of the First Army during World War ll. Bradley interested me, because my father told me that on D-Day as the troops on the beach were being pummeled by machine gun fire, Bradley had a terrible time making the decision to bomb the Germans, because the Allied Troops on the beach would also be killed. His perspective would be fascinating, but then I thought: If I really want to know about D-Day, I would prefer to speak with the common soldiers on the ground, the ones who hit the beach and then fought like hell. Well, in today’s lesson from Mark we have a story about both the high and the lowly. The gospel begins with Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, who comes to Jesus and begs for his daughter to be healed. Although a powerful leader, notice that he does not presume that his high position means that Jesus must honor his request. He kneels, a sign of deep humility, not something a person of his position would normally do---especially to one, like Jesus, who is a peasant. But obviously, Jesus’ reputation as a healer precedes him. Jairus believes that Jesus can heal his sick daughter by laying his hands on her. So Jesus agrees to go to Jairus’ home. A daughter in ancient Israel had less status than a son, but in this story, status does not belong to the girl; it belongs to her father. He is the one making the request. Now there is an interruption, and this technique is unique to Mark, who sometimes begins one story and then interrupts it with another. In this case it is a woman, and unlike Jairus, she is unnamed. She is, in other words, so socially unimportant compared to Jairus that she is not even given the dignity of a name. Furthermore, she is sick; she is bleeding, and women were considered unclean while menstruating, sexually unavailable and forbidden to enter into the synagogue or temple. They were not supposed to prepare food for other people or touch other people’s food. If, like this woman, they continued to have an issue of blood, they were perpetually deemed unclean. So, she was essentially cut off from the life of the community, like a leper, a pariah, unable to partake of normal life’s activities. For 12 years she had been suffering, and she had spent all she had trying to be made well. Unlike Jairus, she did not directly approach Jesus to ask for healing. She touched his cloak with the hope and faith that touch would be enough. And the story tells us that Jesus felt the power go from him. His disciples thought he was nuts, since there were many people pushing against him. But Jesus knew what he knew, and the woman, who felt the healing in her body, trembling with fear, admitted that she touched him. She too went down on her knees before Jesus. Though grateful, she was also humble. And notice what Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well”. Though this woman remains unnamed, Jesus calls her daughter. He was not angry because she dared to touch him---something a conventional Jewish woman would never have dared to do. But she was desperate, and desperate people will sometimes act outside the boundaries of convention. Though he was on his way to a leader’s house, and so delayed, Jesus did not resent the woman for seeking and then taking what she so desperately needed. He did not condemn what some would see as her pushiness. Instead, he extolled her faith and called her daughter. And then Jesus continues to Jairus’ home, where his 12 year old daughter is believed to have already died. Notice the number 12 is applied to both situations; the woman had been bleeding for twelve years. The number 12 in ancient Israel symbolized wholeness and completion, like the 12 tribes of Israel. As they arrive near Jairus’ home, professional mourners are already crying, but Jesus tells the father, “Do not fear, but believe.” And he enters the girl’s room, takes her by the hand and tells her to rise up. And she does. Jesus orders the parents to keep the story quiet, and then he tells them to give the girl something to eat. Food---ordinary life is restored. So, we have these two stories put together, one about a man of status, who humbly asks Jesus for his daughter’s healing and another story about a low status woman, on the outside of normal life. The girl and the woman are both restored to normal life. We all understand that a good part of the horror of sickness is how it so easily and completely can destroy normal life. Sick people don’t eat normally; they are sometimes too weak to get out of bed, too tired to read and converse. To be restored to normal life is the gift, though much of the time we take our normalcy for granted, until we lose it. And in this case, both the high and the lowly want the same thing--- normal life. I remember when Jane Oliver, my husband’s sister in law was dying in a nursing home----She really wanted to die at home, but my brother in law could not manage it--- she said one day, “I just want to go home and sit next to my piano.” She was a church musician. Music had been her life, normal life. Some years ago, when I worked in a hospital, there was this gifted neurosurgeon, who was able to perform a delicate operation that was all but impossible for anyone else. It was microsurgery---that is, using a microscope on neurons, also involving in this case the optic nerve. And the quandary facing this doctor, who was beginning to suffer from palsy and soon would no longer be able to operate--- was who the last recipient of his surgical skill would be. Would he help save the sight of a ten year old boy, or that of a 55 year old scientist, whose work was groundbreaking? Now, I don’t know why someone else could not have done the surgery, if properly instructed, but the story I heard was this was the choice. And so, the case was discussed and argued about by the ethics committee in the hospital. It was the neurosurgeon’s decision; the ethics committee was only advisory. My boss, who taught ethics in the medical school and was also a Roman Catholic priest, attended the ethics meeting. And he told the chaplains that the case in the mind of many people seemed to come down to a question about who was more worthy of help: the high and mighty, the super successful scientist, or a child, whose life was more potential than accomplishment. In fact, one of the doctors on the committee, who was arguing for the scientist said to the neurosurgeon, “Well, you will feel pretty bad, if this boy turns out to be a criminal.” Someone else shot back, “He may turn out to be another Beethoven,” to which the doctor said, “You don’t need to see to compose.” Such are the arguments when elitism rears its head. Well, the neurosurgeon chose the child, the one with no status, no proven record of anything. What the child had on his side was potential, and that was enough for the doctor. In our gospel lesson Jesus did not choose between helping the high and the lowly. He helped both---though the one of low status, the nameless woman, living outside the boundaries of normal society, took bold initiative, touched the cloak and was healed. And for the boldness of her faith, she was called by Jesus, “Daughter.” June 26, 2024
Dear Friends, Most of you know that Willie Mays died last week, June 18, at age 93. There was something heroic about Willie Mays, and even I knew about him. When I was quite young and my father was a Yankee fan, I knew the names of the great ones: Mickey Mantle, Bobbie Richardson, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra. I also knew about Willie Mays. Though he played for the Giants and not the Yankees, my father greatly admired Willie Mays, especially Mays’ ability to steal bases. My father would be watching a game with Willie on a base, and then I would hear my father say, “There he goes. He is going to make it.” And Mays did. I think my father liked the idea of base stealing---doing something that required guts and judgment. So, as a kid, all I knew about Willie was that he was a base stealer. Neither did I realize Mays was probably the greatest all around baseball player in the history of the game nor did I know about the famous catch made in a World Series Game in the year 1954. Reading a description of the famous catch is awe-inspiring. Mays turned his back on the baseball and raced at top speed toward the stadium wall. Reaching out in front of his body, back still turned, running like the wind, he caught the ball. People say he had some internal and powerful instinctive inner guidance, a capacity for “optical acceleration cancellation,” meaning the ability to know exactly when a struck object will begin to decelerate. As Mays ran toward the ball, he knew what no one else did: He knew he would catch it. It was all part of his “situational intelligence”, the ability to anticipate what is going to happen when. Someone called it “a fleeing form of prophesy.” It stirs people, allowing them to be witnesses of something truly great. Most Americans who watched him play had no real appreciation for the brutal racism that made life so hard for Mays. In people’s minds it was Jackie Robinson, who paved the way for other black players, and for the record, Robinson was sometimes critical of Mays, who was fairly quiet about the racism that plagued the nation and black athletes. People liked to see the images of Mays playing stickball with kids in Harlem and elsewhere. These were comforting, homegrown images that allowed people to feel that life was normal back then without facing the hard truth that there was much that was out of whack. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher, wrote that the value of sports is that it reminds us that chasing the goals---whether hitting a ball or running for a touchdown, or spinning on the ice or doing a triple axle---creates new paths of agency and aspiration, and that is good for human beings. That is how we move on, how we achieve. But there is something else that we can see in those who are really at the top of their game. On the one hand, the achievement can look so simple, so calm and serene, as if failure is impossible, and yet the work to achieve it is hard driving. That double pursuit—inwardly serene and outwardly hard driving is, as someone said, “the epitome of grace in every human endeavor.” It is what makes achievement admirable and celebratory. I think it was Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, writer, and Noble Peace Prize winner, who said, “God made human beings, because God loves a good story.” And indeed, human lives evidence a great variety of stories. There are the great ones, as evidenced in the life of Willie Mays, but there are other stories that may never be known by the wider human community, but God sees and knows them. And we can imagine that some of them make God smile and laugh while others may break the divine heart. Yours in Christ, Sandra The Storms of Life
Preached by: Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT June 23, 2024 Mark 4: 35-41 This is the time of year the National Weather Service becomes very concerned about storms---hurricanes to be precise. We are approaching the hurricane season, and since storms are increasing in their ferocity, no wonder there is concerns Remember Hurricane Harvey in 2017 that devasted the Gulf Coast, with interstates in Houston, Texas becoming raging rapids. Puerto Rico lost a great deal of its infrastructure in that storm and then Irma arrived shortly after that, first turning its fury on the Caribbean and then on Florida. Recovery and repair are ongoing and so are the fearful memories. Human beings have been naming storms for quite some time. In the 19th century, for example, storms were named after saints of the Roman Catholic Church, like Santa Ana that struck Puerto Rico in 1925. The World Meteorological Organization began officially naming Atlantic storms in 1953, first using only female names until 1979, when male names were added. Naming storms may help reduce confusion, especially if they rapidly follow one another, but there is probably a psychological reason for doing so. Naming is a way of gaining some kind of control over a force, giving us a sense of power, when truthfully our power is very limited. The word, hurricane, for example, is derived from the Spanish word huracan, which was probably inspired by the Mayan storm god by the same name. Ancient people would often give names to the mysterious forces of nature, which they could neither control nor understand. But naming them somehow offered a degree of comfort, when direct control was impossible. We don’t know if the fisherman of Galilee named the storms that could whip out of the Valley of Doves on the western shore. I have been to that part of the world, and I will tell you that the Sea of Galilee can be very rough with storms seeming to come out of nowhere, so I can well imagine the disciples’ fear as they sat in the boat with Jesus in the stern. Jesus had been teaching and healing, and suddenly when evening came, he wanted to go to the other side of the lake. Most likely he was exhausted from all the crowds, for he fell asleep in the back of the boat. And that is when the storm suddenly came up, and the terrified disciples awoke him, accusing him of not caring if they perished. And he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace,” and everything became calm. Now the use of the word rebuke is interesting, because this is the same word Jesus used when he healed people possessed by demons. He rebuked the demons, commanding them to leave the person. And the demons obeyed, as did the wind. To the sea, he did not utter a rebuke, but he commanded “Peace! Be still! “ And calm and peace ensued. Now the Israelites were not a seafaring people, and in their scriptures the sea takes on a menacing quality, symbolizing chaos and even evil. In the creation story from Genesis, we see God creating order out of the chaos, bringing light to shatter the darkness and separating the waters from the land. This is a metaphor for God gaining control over chaos and the natural evil that can result when chaos rules----as we witness when hurricanes batter our shores and cities. Now the story that Mark tells is not simply about a storm on the Sea of Galilee. It is about the storms of life, which all human beings face. The storms differ, depending upon circumstances, including historical ones, but make no mistake---storms cannot be avoided. Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, written around the year 70, was composed at the end of the Jewish-Roman War between 66 and 70. Rome defeated the Jews, destroyed the Temple and crucified the rebels. There were crosses all along the highways in parts of Galilee. The message Rome sent was hardly subtle. But Mark has a different story to tell. Yes, there will be many storms in life, and there are many different ways to face them. Mark shows us a Jesus who who does not carry a sword or lead an army. He is not going to fight as Roman soldiers do, yet he exerts a kind of authority and power that brings peace and calm. And the disciples are startled by this outcome, and they want to know: Who is this man that even the wind and water obey him? Remember that the wind and water symbolize the chaos and the awesome power of life’s many storms that can batter and harm us. And so, is it any wonder that we are afraid---just as the disciples were afraid. After Jesus calmed the storm, he asked them, “Why are you afraid. Have you still no faith?” It was an unnecessary question, because, of course, Jesus knew why they were afraid. He surely knew that fear hovers over human beings and sometimes grabs them by the heart and soul, sending them into spasms of terror. He spent so much time telling people not to be afraid, not to be anxious precisely because that is how human beings often are---anxious and afraid. And yes, faith can help calm the fear and the anxiety, but let’s face it, there are times when the faith is there right along with all the fear. If Jesus did not know this at the beginning of his ministry, he certainly knew it by its end. Why else did he scream out from the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But at least he addressed, “My God.” A few months ago, I went to Yale New Haven Hospital to visit someone, but when I arrived she was out of the room for tests. So, I ended up speaking to her roommate, a woman in her 70’s in the hospital for some heart concerns. She told me how she had lost a granddaughter in a car accident almost a year ago. “I always considered myself a faithful Catholic,” she said, “and I must admit that I was shocked how little my faith helped me get through it all. I remember thinking to myself how disappointing God was. But the more I pondered, the more I realized I did not know what I should expect from this God of mine. I mean I did not expect God to have magically intervened to save Sarah from the drunk driver who hit her head on. I didn’t expect God to save me from the pain of losing her. Pain is the price we pay for love. Yet still I felt disappointed in God, but even with all my disappointment, I kept slogging along; I kept going to church and I kept praying, even though I had no idea what good it was doing. And I wasn’t shy about telling God directly in my prayers, “You are such a disappointment to me. I would have expected more from you, but I don’t know what that more is or should be.” But you know something: I did get through it all---the loss of my granddaughter and my deep disappointment with God. But I learned something I did not know before. I learned that faith can take an awful lot into itself---anger, fear, doubt, disappointment. It can take it all in, because believe me, I had it all, but yet faith survived. Faith can withstand the onslaughts and so can God.” When Jesus was in the boat with his disciples, I suspect that he did not yet realize how severe the onslaughts would or could become. He seemed harsh with his disciples and their fear and what he saw as their lack of faith, but then he had not yet faced the final fear of his life---the fear of God’s abandonment. And once he faced that, he too knew that faith can survive even its worst fear. June 18, 2024
Dear Friends, I found myself very moved by the recent memorials of the Normandy Landing. I listened, rapt by many of the speeches, including that of President Biden, King Charles of Great Britain and his son, William, who read war letters from men who landed on Normandy on June 6, 1944. Princess Ann, Charles’ sister, also spoke movingly of the landing and the obligation of memory. President Macron of France paid homage to the 20,000 civilians, who died in the bombings that knocked out German fortifications. And then there was the sight of the old men, most in wheelchairs, gathering to remember the past and to pay respect and honor to comrades who never returned home. Only the most stoned hearted would not be moved. My own father landed on Utah Beach, but it was a month later in July. He wrote to my mother, telling her that the locals were in swimming. There was some evidence of the battle that took place there, but the war had moved beyond the beaches, and the fight to free Europe from the grip of Nazi power was in full force. My father was not in battle; he was in the First Army, commanded by General Omar Bradley, and my father’s job was to work on the supply line. He worked in Headquarters, so he used to see the different generals, who would come in for meetings. He liked Bradley, who was known as the soldier’s soldier, very much, and he had admiration for Eisenhower, but he could not stand General Patton, who loved war and would push people beyond their limits. Some of those men broke, never to be healed. A week after the June 6th memorials, I came across an article on page 2 in the New York Times, written by Catherine Porter, called A Veteran Who Wouldn’t Return to Normandy. She was covering France for the Times, and she began by saying how emotional she felt about all the Normandy commemorative events. She could not stop thinking about Jim Bennett, her husband’s grandfather, who landed on Juno Beach on June 6, 1944. Jim was a veteran of the Canadian artillery, in charge of 100 men, who operated tanks whose tread marks can still be seen today on the sidewalks of Courseulles-sur-Mer. From Normandy Jim went to the city of Caen and was so bogged down in the awful fighting there that he said you could actually see molten lead drip from buildings because of all the incessant bombing. Jim would never speak of the war. The one story he told was about victory in Europe day, when he took a horse from a barn and road it along the beach to remind himself that life was more than war and death. He never returned to Normandy. “My life there was sheer hell,” he said. “I have no desire to return.” But Catherine wondered if returning might have helped him. Normandy left him with deep wounds, and he just let them be. No use stirring up what could not be undone or fixed. But there was so much gratitude expressed by people who had no direct memory of the war. She came across a 47 year old teacher from a nearby primary school who had brought her class to the events. She had grown up near Juno Beach, and over the years she saw men, some very old, trying to find the exact spot where they landed so many decades before and sometimes witnessed the death of a friend. “They carry so much pain and grief,” she said. “And so, there is a duty to remember.” And then she cried. In fact, Catherine said that every French person she met on the beaches cried. Some of them remembered stories from their own families, but others cried out of sheer gratitude. What would Jim have done with all this emotion? Catherine did not know, but she recognized that Jim kept a lot locked up inside. Perhaps that was the best way he could deal with it. On June 6 Catherine went to the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer where 9388 soldiers lay. One veteran told her he saw his former comrades waving at him. Again, she thought of Jim and whether or not all this display would have helped him. Would it have been a balm for his hurt heart and spirit, or would it have opened old wounds? She could not answer her own question. I can understand someone like Jim, because my own father was like him. He rarely talked about the war, except to tell funny stories, and the few serious ones he told made him deeply sad and withdrawn. Like Jim, my father would never return to Europe, and he never saw combat. He never had to see the bodies strewn across the battle fields. “But, my mother told me, “your father worked in Headquarters, and all the news came across his desk. He saw the numbers of the fatalities, and he had to report them to his commanding officer. He often felt sick when he made his report.” And so, like Jim, he would never return. My mother always wanted to see London and Paris, and so after my father died, when Aaron spent his junior year abroad in London and Caitlin later in Paris, she came with my husband and me to visit them. We all went to Normandy, and my mother cried, thinking of all those who died there. She remembered a 17 year old neighbor, who insisted on joining the Army a few months before the war ended in May, 1944. He died a few days before the war’s end. He was an only child, and his death broke his parents’ hearts. “They were never the same,” my mother said. War is a terrible thing. We all know this as we see images of the devastation in Gaza and Ukraine. This is not what God intends for the people and the creation, but this is what we human beings decide to do. One of the great rabbis of the 20th century, Herman Joshua Heschel, once said, “Faith only begins when we feel sorry for God.” When we consider the ravages of war, we can imagine how God “feels,” and then we can feel sorrow for the divine, who suffers from us, with us and for us. Yours in Christ, Sandra Sprouting Seeds
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church in Unionville, CT June 16, 2024 I Samuel 15:35-16: Mark 4:26-35 When I was in college there was this gentleman, who was the head librarian in the rare books collection. I use the word gentleman very deliberately, because he always dressed impeccably, beautifully tailored suits with a bow tie and freshly polished shoes. He was very well spoken with an aristocratic accident, and though none of the students really knew him, his presence did stand out as someone who was most likely eccentric. I worked in the library for 10 hours a week, and one day one of the head librarians shed some light on this gentleman’s history. His grandfather had been a librarian at the famous library in Louvain, Belgium, when during World War l, Germany, to the horror of other nations, attacked the library and burned it. Manuscripts, one of a kind, were irretrievably lost, and when the head of the library made the announcement, he broke down in tears and could not continue. His grandson was born in 1929, 11 years after the Great War ended, but he grew up hearing from his grandfather that the loss of books and manuscripts---the loss of knowledge---is just as devastating to the world as the loss of human life. That was a lesson his grandson never forgot. The seed was planted, and he not only earned a PhD in classics, but he also went on to work in a number of great university libraries, in rare books, protecting what he understood to be precious knowledge. His grandfather had planted a seed, and indeed, it sprouted, giving full and abundant life. Now the people of Jesus’ day were familiar with seeds. They lived in an agricultural society, where most people grew their own food. Of course, some made their living from fishing or from herding sheep and goats. Others were carpenters and bartered the work of their hands for food. But they all understood seeds and the important part farmers had to play in planting and watering and caring for the seeds. God may indeed be the one who would bring the seed to full harvest, but God does not work, unaided. Yes, the “earth produces of itself,” the text says, but we are reminded that there is a deep mystery in the ground that humans do not fully understand or control. And then the text makes an interesting turn to the mustard seed. Although the mustard seed is small, it is not the smallest of seeds. Not that this detail really matters, but what is important to understand is that the mustard shrub was often considered a nuisance, like a large weed that threatens to overtake a garden and so needs to be pulled up and disposed of. True, the mustard seeds were used medicinally, but in general the shrubs they produced were considered intruders in most gardens. But Jesus is here talking not about any garden, but about God’s kingdom and what it might look like. While the first part of the parable, reminds us that the growth of God’s kingdom is not completely under human control, with the introduction of the mustard seed, something else is suggested. Does the mustard seed symbolize the tiny developing Christian community that was growing in the midst of the Roman Empire and will one day overtake the power of Rome? Or, will it be pulled up and disposed of as Rome was accustomed to doing to those who threatened its power? Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, was written around the year 70, the same year the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. With that destruction many thought that Judaism was dead. Even many Jews thought so, and perhaps the writer of Mark’s gospel did as well, thinking that the new Christian community would replace Jewish life. But no, something new developed. While the Temple priesthood and the sacrificial system built around the Temple disappeared, it was replaced by the Pharisees, who kept Judaism alive by focusing attention on the study of Jewish scriptures and law. New seeds were planted and both Christianity and Judaism grew up alongside each other. It was not what anyone expected. But then the realm of God is wider and deeper than any of us can imagine. We don’t see as God does. And that is essentially the lesson from our story from Samuel, when the shepherd boy, David, is chosen by God to be the future king. He was not the biggest or the strongest. But then Saul had been strong and good looking, and he did not turn out so well. And so, God reminded Samuel as Samuel was considering Jesse’s sons: “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 outward 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, low status job of caring for the sheep---this was the one God had chosen. David would be the seed that would help Israel to blossom and grow. I began by telling you about a man, who became a librarian of rare books, because of a seed that was planted by his grandfather, who witnessed the partial destruction of one of the world’s great libraries in Louvain, Belgium. When the Germans invaded neutral Belgium in August, 1914, they would eventually attack Louvain, executing over 200 of its citizens, burning 230,000 books, 950 manuscripts and 800 rare books printed with metal type used between 1455 and 1501. Remember what his grandfather had told him: “Saving knowledge is as precious as saving a human life.” In 1986 this librarian would leave his beloved job as a rare books librarian to become a teacher in a high school on the south side of Chicago, a tough job in a tough neighborhood. “I have preserved the life of many books,” he is reported to have said. “I have preserved knowledge, a sacred duty, I believe. And now, I will try to do the same with young lives that are at risk.” No one thought he would succeed; no one thought he would stay. But he did. He came to his job as a high school teacher, decked out in his three piece suit and newly polished shoes. But he came with something else as well: the seed had been planted that saving lives, as he saved knowledge, was a sacred duty. And the students, who initially laughed at his appearance, came to feel his commitment and his care for them, and against all odds, he taught and when he finally retired, his students, both present and past, gave him a standing ovation. Now this is not God’s kingdom, but surely such work has a place in it. And so does our work, our little seeds, sprouting here and there, all to the glory of God. June 14, 2024
Dear Friends, I recently came across a very engaging article in the journal, America, which is a Jesuit publication. The Jesuits (of the Roman Catholic Church) can always be relied upon to present some serious thinking about a variety of topics and issues. The question put forth was: Do you have to believe in God to go to Church? The writer, by the way, was not a Jesuit priest, but a laywoman named Emma Camp. The author said she used to think belief in God was a necessity, but she has changed her mind. She shared a bit of her own spiritual and religious journey. Like many young people she stopped attending church by the time she was in high school. She had a rather eclectic background, from her grandparents’ Southern Baptist roots, to a progressive Protestant church her parents attended, Mass now and then with her mother, who did not quite leave behind her Roman Catholic background. Emma notes that when people stopped attending church, they also began spending more and more time alone. Losing church was not just about losing God, it was also about losing community. Emma admitted that she always appreciated the ethical teaching she received from Christianity, but she just could not buy the God thing. She wanted to believe, but she could not make herself believe that there was a God, who loved humankind and worked to save the world from the ravages of human arrogance and sin. While in college, as a English major, she found her way into some of the great writings of the Christian tradition, including St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Julian of Norwich. She read and she pondered. There was a major shift in her life when she wrote what turned out to be a controversial opinion piece in the New York Times about student self-censorship in the classroom. In an instant she became a celebrity with both praise and a great deal of cruel condemnation that turned her into a self-obsessed maniac. She tried to put it all aside, but couldn’t. And then she began to pray. She asked for help because she needed it. There was no magic solution; God did not suddenly intervene, but when she graduated from college and moved to Washington, D.C., she began to attend an Anglo-Catholic parish. It wasn’t that her issues with believing in God were solved; it was simply that she did not care so much that they weren’t. What she found was real community. After the Mass she found himself talking to elderly people as well as people with toddlers---not the people he would have normally found at the local bar or the concerts she liked to attend. She wrote, “A religious community forces you to become the kind of person who shows up.” She also wrote, “For me the moral element is one of the biggest reasons I joined a church instead of a soccer club. I want to feel accountable to something other than my own conscience, and the hour and a half of weekly contemplation provided in church is difficult to replicate anywhere else.” She has been a steady church attendee for over two years now, but she readily admits that she has not developed a rock solid faith. “I only believe in God 30% of the time--- on a good day,” she admits. But she keeps coming back. And she says that as counterintuitive as it might seem, she suggests that agnostics and atheists give church a try. Even if you do not find God, she says, you just might find a community that can help you live a life beyond yourself and your own self-concerns. My own opinion is that she is on to something. I wonder how many people in the secular world might consider her advice. Yours in Christ, Sandra OUT OF HIS/YOUR MIND
Preached by Sandra Olsen First Church, Unionville, CT June 6, 2021 Mark 3: 20-35 When I was growing up, I remember my father complaining about people, whom he designated as nuts or crazy. When I was very little, 4 or 5, I figured out that these were simply people my father did not like, but as I became a bit older, I realized he also applied it to people he did like, including my mother’s family, and so I came to the realization that sometimes he called people nuts or crazy when he did not like their opinions on a variety of topics, especially their political opinions. Well, when I was about 10, my mother went to visit a relative in a state mental hospital, and when she came home, she was very upset. “Poor Matilda,” she said, “is out of her mind.” “I told you not to go,” my father said. “She’s nuts.” And then my mother, who hardly ever raised her voice, blasted my father, “Don’t you dare call her nuts. That is what you call a lot of people, but Matilda is not nuts. She is ill, out of her mind, and I will not hear you insult her by designating her as nuts!” I have never forgotten that exchange not only because of my mother’s unaccustomed expression of anger, but also it was really the first time, I had a hint of how serious mental illness is and how terrible it is when people dismiss them as nuts. Apparently, my mother had wanted my father to accompany her to Gowanda, but he refused, probably because he did not want to be around people whom he considered “nuts.” Mental illness is serious, which I personally witnessed when I worked in a state mental hospital on Long Island in the mid 1980’s. De-institutionalization of the mentally ill was in full swing by then. Many had already been released into their communities, where they were supposed to receive community support and supervision, but the funds were never made adequately available, and we are yet living with the consequences. When I worked at Central Islip it was filled with people, who could not be released, because they were simply too elderly and too institutionalized to learn how to live in the outside world. I had never seen such wrecked human lives. They lived before there was much in the way of psychotropic medication, and so their lives were filled with voices screaming in their ears until in some cases they were lobotomized, which as awful as it sounds, was a relief for them. So, all these memories race through my mind, when I read this passage from Mark. It was not only Jesus’ enemies who thought he was out of his mind, but also his family---his mother, brothers and sisters believed he was not right in his head. Neither Matthew nor Luke, who use so much of Mark’s material, include this particular example of Jesus’ family complaining about him, perhaps because such behavior doesn’t make his family look too good. Mark, on the other hand, does not hold back and is very tough on the people closest to Jesus, including his family and disciples. We are only in the third chapter of Mark and already Jesus has made enemies. Actions like healing the sick or picking grain on the Sabbath were deemed an undermining of the Law, and the Law was what gave Jewish life its form and substance. He also dared to pronounce God’s forgiveness of sins, something the scribes and priests said only God could do. As for his family, they expected him to live within certain boundaries of Jewish life. As far as we know, he was unmarried and content to stay that way---though there are people, who conjecture that at one time he was married with a family, and something unexpected and tragic must have happened, which pushed him in a radical direction. But that is speculation. We make nice about Jesus by pointing to him as a great moral leader, but the simple truth is that many of his stories are an insult to our morality. He told a story about a man, who found a treasure in a field, reburied it, and then sold everything he possessed in order to buy the field from the owner, who had no idea there was a treasure there. And what about the parable Jesus told where all the workers were paid the same amount of money---whether they worked for an hour or a whole day. These are not the rules we live by now, and they were not the rules people lived by then, which helps to explain why people said, “he is out of his mind.” If you choose to follow a radical course in life, you do run the risk of people considering you to be “out of your mind.” Many years ago, before I was in seminary, I took a class at Harvard Divinity School with the famous Harvey Cox, who told a story about some neighbors, who actually had their 23 year old son kidnapped to be de-programmed. It’s not like he was a Moonie, or anything like that. No, he was part of an Episcopal Church, and he wanted to quit medical school to become a missionary in Africa. He was released after he agreed he would not quit but would become a medical missionary. Who in this case was really out of his mind---the son or the parents? Some of you may recall a few years ago, when at Christmas time we did a pageant about Saint Francis and his making of a live creche. Francis came from great wealth, but he was in a war that left him severely traumatized and depressed. He finally emerged from his depression as a follower of Christ and spent his life begging for a living and establishing convents and monasteries. He spoke with birds and other creatures, so many people, including his wealthy family thought him out of his mind. Yet the church finally declared him a saint. And then there is one of my heroines, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement. She fervently believed that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to Christ. And she lived that way in a poor worker’s house in New York. If you were her daughter, it was hardly an easy life, and we can imagine the resentment. Anything nice she was given was often stolen or destroyed. Many people, including the Harvard psychiatrist, Robert Coles, thought she was a saint, but I doubt her daughter did. How would you have liked to be part of Jesus’ family? He obviously did not put his family first. In fact, he said his real family had nothing to do with bloodline. It is about doing God’s will. Such a statement would not sit well with most families. Out of his mind: that is what people said he was. He was out of his mind with a burning love for God and God’s realm of justice and mercy. 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, and even out of your mind. June 7, 2024
Dear Friends, We have just come through the Pentecost season and in the liturgical calendar, we are now in “Ordinary Time,” which extends to the first Sunday of Advent. But before we completely put Pentecost behind us, I want to tell you about a story I recently came across about the historically significant year 1492. We learned it as the year Columbus sailed into the “New World” and the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. But it is also the year a man by the name of Antonio de Nebrija entered the court of Queen Isabella of Spain and handed her what he claimed was the key to her dreams of establishing a great Spanish Empire. “I have a weapon here,” he said, handing her a sheaf of papers, which was the first grammar book of the Spanish language. “This is stronger than guns or gunpowder.” Queen Isabella told Antonio de Nebrija, “I know the Spanish language quite well. I have no need of this book.” “But your Highness,” he replied, “language is the greatest tool of empire.” And that is essentially the story of Pentecost: the power of language, people understanding the truth being spoken in his or her own tongue. When we consider that there are now 21 Spanish speaking countries in the world today, 500 years after Queen Isabella, and then, also consider that Germany in the 30’s and 40’s had laws about language as did South Africa from the 40’s to the 90’s, not to mention laws in our own country and Canada directed against the languages of the indigenous people, we can certainly understand what Antonio de Nebrija meant. The power of language was brought home to me very recently on my trip to Ireland. I will confess my ignorance here: I had no idea that the Irish language is actually a living language. I thought it was dead and that everyone in Ireland spoke English. Well, just about everyone in Ireland does speak English, but the signs in the airport, on the road, in shops and transportation centers also post in Irish. And people do speak Irish, though admittedly until very recently it was mainly older people who did so. But now there is a resurgence of interest in Irish and there are even some schools whose instruction is in Irish, at least until high school. Why the change? It became apparent to people that the Irish language was in danger of dying out---just as many indigenous people here have been insisting on the same reality. Language exerts power, and when a dominant culture decides to impose its language on those of lesser power, the results can look like and feel like oppression. There is no denying that it is important to be able to speak the dominant language in a society, since without that ability access to the engines of cultural and economic power are compromised. But it is also important to understand that when people are denied their right to use their own language, as Jews in Germany were denied the right to speak Yiddish and the Irish were told to speak only English as were the Native Americans in our own country, the experience of that denial leaves a wound of festering resentment. The message is heard: “Your language is inferior, and you are too.” To counter this, small language centers are popping up for the purpose of teaching the Irish language. And adults, who have no intention of speaking it all the time, are yet bothering to learn it. It is a way of celebrating their identity and history. History is not always pleasant to contemplate and learn. As Americans we have our own issue with our painful past of slavery and racism. And in Ireland I heard a great deal about “The Troubles,” when Northern Ireland became a hotbed of violence as loyalists to Britain and those who wanted a free Ireland openly fought each other in the streets. And then there was Potato Famine of 1845 to 1849, when the blight on the potato harvest led to the starvation of over one million people and another million immigrated to our shores---including the ancestors of two of our recent Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Why did the English government fail to send relief? Some would accuse the English of genocide. When Queen Victoria wanted to visit Ireland during the blight, her advisors told her it was not safe. “But surely,” she insisted, “seeing their Queen will uplift them in their time of woe.” No, not if you are starving. What was needed was food, not the sight of a Queen in all the finery of her royalty. But sometimes we only see and hear what we want to see and hear---then as now. Pentecost reminds us that language is power and how we remember and tell the stories are a manifestation of that power. As we leave the season of Pentecost behind and move into Ordinary Time, let us remember that the story of the gospel, which is also the story of our lives with everything included--- the ugly, the beautiful and the mundane, continues. And how we hear, remember and tell it matters; it matters profoundly. Yours in Christ, Sandra May 15, 2024
Dear Friends, This is commencement season, and many speeches will be given to graduating high school and college classes. Last year my oldest grandchild, Siena, graduated from high school, and her high school principal gave the speech about how their lives will be impacted by artificial intelligence and other technological breakthroughs that their parents (and grandparents) can barely imagine. What he said was true and worth hearing, but I did not find it inspiring. I cannot recall any of the speeches at my children’s graduations, except for Caitlin, who graduated from Wooster College in Ohio. That speech was about friendship and how deep and enduring friendships shape and change lives. It was not only worth hearing, but also uplifting and inspiring. In June The Sunday New York Times always prints snippets from college and university speeches, and I look forward to reading them. Most of them are very good, and they display a whole range of emotions and subjects. Though many speeches display humor, there is usually a deep seriousness to them that sometimes says things that are not so easy to hear. Graduates are told that yes, life is full of possibilities as an unknown future beckons, but so too does life hand out disappointment, defeat and failure, and how those are faced and handled will most likely have more to say about life’s satisfaction quotient than the successes and victories that are piled up. What many speeches try to get at is the importance of character---how character grows and develops over time and what goes into making a good and strong character. All of you know who Mr. Rogers was, a Presbyterian minister, whose ministry consisted of hosting a children’s program that talked about feelings and all kinds of other subjects. Some people think he was a saint, and maybe he was, but I am no expert on sainthood. But I do believe he was a great man, a kind and compassionate man, one of deep and abiding character. In 2002, he gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire from which he graduated in 1950. His speech was not only for the new graduates, but also for anyone, who was and is willing to take the time and reflect. This is the end of his speech, and it is beautiful. Mr. Rogers said: “I’m very much interested in choices, and what it is, and who it is, that enable us human beings to make the choices we make all through our lives. What choices lead to ethnic cleansing? What choices lead to healing? What choices lead to the destruction of the environment, the erosion of the Sabbath, suicide bombings, or teenagers shooting teachers. What choices encourage heroism in the midst of chaos? I have a lot of framed things in my office, which people have given to me through the years. And on my walls are Greek, and Hebrew, and Russian, and Chinese. And beside my chair, is a French sentence from Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince. It reads, “L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.” What is essential is invisible to the eye. Well, what is essential about you? And who are those who have helped you become the person you are? Anyone who has ever graduated from a college, anyone who has ever been able to sustain a good work, has had at least one person, and often many, who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others. I’d like to give you all an invisible gift. A gift of a silent minute to think about those who have helped you become who you are today. Some of them may be here right now. Some may be far away. Some, like my astronomy professor, may even be in Heaven. But wherever they are, if they’ve loved you, and encouraged you, and wanted what was best in life for you, they’re right inside yourself. And I feel that you deserve quiet time, on this special occasion, to devote some thought to them. So, let’s just take a minute, in honor of those that have cared about us all along the way. One silent minute. Whomever you’ve been thinking about, imagine how grateful they must be, that during your silent times, you remember how important they are to you. It’s not the honors and the prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted. That we never have to fear the truth. That the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices, is very good stuff.” So, I encourage you to do what Mr. Rogers had those graduates do. Think about those people who have made a difference in your life, people who have nourished your soul. And then ask yourself: What is the bedrock of my life, and how does it help me make good choices that serve life and love. Yours in Christ, Sandra On Mothers: Reflections and Letters
Preached by: Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT May 12, 2024 Mark 7: 24-30 It would be hard NOT to admire this mother in Mark’s gospel. She is all in for her afflicted daughter, who probably suffered from something like epilepsy or schizophrenia. We can well imagine that this mother suffered ridicule or even cruelty from people, who interpreted demon possession as a curse from God, visited upon people, who were deemed guilty of some religious or moral infraction. But this mother did not care about any of that. She was totally focused on her daughter, and she did things that were completely beyond the conventions of her day. First of all, she was a gentile, living in the region of Tyre, northwest of Galilee, a region despised by the Jews. Now why Jesus would go there is a mystery, but since the text tells us he wanted to escape notice, perhaps he thought that in gentile territory, he would be ignored. But not so; this gentile mother intrudes into the house. She was not invited but enters on her own, which would have been considered more than rudeness. It was a complete breakdown of the normal rules of social interaction. But then notice what she did: Not thinking of herself as someone among the high and the mighty, she knelt down, a profound act of humility, and begged Jesus to heal her daughter. What follows is shocking, because we see Jesus behave as most first century Jews would have behaved. He told her his ministry is not for people like her, but only for the people of Israel and that throwing food to the dogs is not what he should do. Yes, he called her a dog, a common term Jews used when referring to gentiles, that is, people who were not Jewish. But she cared nothing about the insult, and simply turned it around, telling Jesus that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s plate. And notice what Jesus said: for saying this, the demon has left your child. Her cleverness and persistence were rewarded, and we can wonder what would have happened to the child of a mother, who was far less assertive and persistent. There is no other example in the New Testament, where someone is shown outmaneuvering and outsmarting Jesus. He changed his mind because of something this woman did and said. And we can admire her for that. We have no other information about her mothering skills, so we cannot claim her to be a perfect mother. And isn’t this how mothering is? Who really believes there are perfect mothers, but we should know that even imperfect ones do make an impact. A few years ago, one of my colleagues lost her mother, unexpectedly, and she found herself shocked by how grief stricken she was. Her mother was 86 and the daughter was 63, so she wondered why she was not better prepared for her loss. She attended this grief group for people, who had lost their mothers, and though it was open to both men and women, the group was made up of only women. The age range was wide from the 20’s until the latter 70’s. One of the activities these women did was read a book of letters written by well known writers to their mothers. And then, because so much regret had been expressed by many of the women, so much that had been left unsaid, they were challenged to write their own letters to their deceased mothers. So, I am going to read a mixture of letters, some from the book, including letters from sons and others from the daughters, who gathered to grieve. The first letter is written by Wilfred Owen, one of the English poets of the First World War. He only wrote five poems in his young lifetime, but that was enough to make his name immortal among the poets. Dec. 31, 1917 Wilfred Owen: My own dear Mother, I am thinking about you as I write this, for you are the one who can truly hear my words. I thought about last year, when I was lying awake in a windy tent in the middle of an awful encampment, I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp, an incomprehensible look I had never seen before. It was not despair or terror, for it was a blindfold look and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them. I have not told you what I am thinking tonight, but I know, you know, as only my mother can. Your Wilfred Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet, who graduated from Vassar College and then shortly afterwards in January, 1921, sailed for Paris. This letter was written on June 15, 1921 Dearly Beloved, It is nearly six months, since I saw you, a long time. Mother, do you know, almost all people love their mothers, but I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved her mother as much as I love you. I don’t believe there ever was anybody who did, quite so much, and quite in so many wonderful ways. I was telling somebody yesterday that the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I cannot remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested I should put it aside for something else. Some parents of children that are different have so much to reproach themselves with. But not you, Great Spirit. If I didn’t keep calling you mother in this letter, people reading it would think I was writing to my sweetheart. And they would be right. Your most obedient humble servant and devoted daughter, Vincent Ernest Hemingway, whom many consider one of the greatest American writers, awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1954, had a very difficult relationship with his mother, who was an artist, a painter. She disapproved of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, calling its success a dreadful honor and one of the filthiest of the year. Dear Mother, I did not answer you when you wrote about The Sun as I could not help being angry and it is very foolish to write angry letters, and more than foolish to do so to one’s mother. It is quite natural for you not to like the book, and I regret your reading any book that causes you pain or disgust. On the other hand, I am in no way ashamed of the book, except in as I may have failed in accurately portraying the people I wrote of. I am sure the book is unpleasant. But it is not all unpleasant and I am sure is no more unpleasant than the real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember that in such a book all the worst of the people’s lives is displayed while at home in Oak Park the loveliness is on display while the ugliness is hidden behind closed doors. Besides, Mother, you as an artist, know that a writer should not be forced to defend his choice of a subject but should be criticized on how he has treated his subject. The people I wrote of were entirely burned out, hollow and smashed, and that is the way I have attempted to show them. You may never like anything I write, and then suddenly you might like something very much. But you must believe that I am sincere in what I write. Dad has been very loyal and while you, Mother, have not been loyal at all, I absolutely understand that it is because you believed you owed it to yourself to correct me in a path which seemed to you disastrous. I am sure that in the course of my life, you will find much cause to feel that I have disgraced you, if you believe everything you hear. On the other hand, with a little shot of loyalty as anesthetic, you may be able to get through all the disreputability and find in the end I have not disgraced you at all. Anyhow, best love to you both. Ernie. From a 25 year old woman, whose mother was suddenly killed in a car crash: Dear Mother, Overwhelming anger is what I now feel, but not at you, though I suspect you think I only had anger for you. But that is so untrue. You were always so hard on me, always picking on me, and yes, that did make me angry, though even as a child, I did understand you wanted me to be the best I could be. But you did not know how to say that or show that except through your overbearing criticism. But really, that is not why I am angry. I am angry at Fate or whatever we want to call it when bad things happen that should not. If you had left the house a few minutes later, you would not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, when that jerk hit you head on. But what makes me really angry is that fate has grabbed our future, stolen it from me and you. There will be no mother daughter relationship now. We will have no chance to remake or redo anything. We will have no chance to grow and change in our understanding of each other. No chance to grow wise. I will always be your angry 25 year old daughter. But that is not how I will remain. And you will never know that, my dear mother. Never, ever. In Love, Renee. From a 63 year old woman, whose 86 year old mother suddenly died of a stroke: Dear Mother, I am too old to be this stupid, too old to be this wacked out. I try to imagine what you would say to me now. You would not approve, I am sure. You always held up strength and you despised stupidity above all. And you called emotions that were too raw, stupid. You always distrusted emotions that were too raw. Stop wallowing in them, you would command. And until I was a teenager, I thought I had to obey your commands. And now, Mother, at age 63, I am trying to hear your words to me. And that is what is stupid. I am too old for such nonsense, but really, Mother, it does not feel like nonsense to me. Your daughter So, what is the connection between these letters and the story in Mark’s gospel? They all are the stuff of life, the guts of life and that is how and where Jesus met people, and that is how and where Jesus meets us---in the pulse of life. May 8, 2024
Dear Friends, Tuesday, May 7th was the 200 year anniversary of the first performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, performed in Vienna on May 7, 1824. Beethoven had been deaf for a number of years, but he insisted on sitting on the stage to assist with the conducting of the music. At the Symphony’s end, he did not realize the music had ended, and so he continued to beat the music’s time. Someone gently went up to him and turned him around, so he could see the standing ovation he was receiving. The crowd was overwhelmed with emotion as they realized the man who had composed this marvelous piece of music was deaf! Some consider the 9th Symphony to be the greatest symphony ever written. It was the first time a symphony used a chorus, which sang Schiller’s Ode to Joy, written in the summer of 1785 by Friedrich Schiller. Symphony Hall, channel 78 on Sirius XM, a classical music station, is what I listen to in the car, and it often asks its listeners to vote on their favorite music---sometimes concertos or symphonies, or solo piano pieces. And when the vote is for symphonies, Beethoven’s 9th comes up Number 1---time and time again. A few years ago, Beethoven and Mozart were removed as the choices since these composers always dominate the top 78 list. This year the contest is on once again with symphonies, and the winners will be played over Memorial Day week-end. I am betting on another win for Beethoven’s 9th. The 9th evolved over a period of 30 years. When Beethoven was 22, he had planned to compose music for Schiller’s Ode to Joy, because he was so moved by the power of the poem’s vision of a united humanity. But he did not do anything with the idea, though he wrote about his desire in his notebooks. Then in 1817 the London Philharmonic commissioned him to write two symphonies with the intent that he would come to London to conduct them. But he never made it to London. Still the 9th was completed in 1823, and it expresses a profound belief in the universal brotherhood/sisterhood of humanity. Though Beethoven was no political activist, he cared deeply about the principles of freedom and human rights. There is a line in the chorus that sings, “All men become brothers.” (Excuse the sexism.) It is a stirring call for freedom and dignity, though we are painfully reminded how many people, including Jews, persons of color, women and many other minorities have been denied basic human rights. The chorus in the 9th states a hope, not yet a reality. The irony should not be lost on us that at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 Beethoven’s 9th was played as the Nazi’s were engineering their plan for domination that would result in the slaughter of 6 million Jews and the death of 75 million people world wide, 40 million of them civilians. In 1989 once again in Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down, the 9th was played, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who changed The Ode to Joy to the Ode to Freedom. There are many anniversaries this week celebrating this great piece of music, and as the world agonizes over what is happening in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and elsewhere, we all can be inspired by the genius of Beethoven, who suffered deafness and yet composed one of the greatest works of music the world has ever heard. I once heard a musician say, “If there is anything better than beautiful music, God has kept it for Godself.” Yours in Christ, Sandra Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy Joy! A spark of fire from heaven, Daughter from Elysium, Drunk with fire we dare to enter, Holy One, inside your shrine. Your magic power binds together, What we by custom wrench apart, All men will emerge as brothers, Where you rest your gentle wings. If you've mastered that great challenge: Giving friendship to a friend, If you've earned a steadfast woman, Celebrate your joy with us! Join if in the whole wide world there's Just one soul to call your own! He who's failed must steal away, shedding tears as he departs. All creation drinks with pleasure, Drinks at Mother Nature's breast; All the just, and all the evil, Follow down her rosy path. Kisses she bestowed, and grape wine, Friendship true, proved e'en in death; Every worm knows nature's pleasure, Every cherub meets his God. Gladly, like the planets flying True to heaven's mighty plan, Brothers, run your course now, Happy as a knight in victory. Be embracéd, all you millions, Share this kiss with all the world! Way above the stars, brothers, There must live a loving father. Do you kneel down low, you millions? Do you see your maker, world? Search for Him above the stars, Above the stars he must be living. The Gift of Friendship: I Have Called You Friends
Preached by: Sandra Olsen The First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT May 5, 2024 John 15: 9-17 Though I have not done any weddings since I arrived here in July, 2017, I used to do about 4 a year, especially when I was working at First Church in New Haven, which boasts one of the most beautiful churches in CT as well as the hand built Fisk organ, whose sounds are beyond beautiful. When I would speak to couples about their impending marriage, I would always ask them questions about their relationship---where they met, what drew them to each other and what they found to be particularly noteworthy about their relationship. And many, if not most couples, would comment that they were friends. I remember this one couple, young, around 27 or 28, and the woman said, she expected her husband to be her best friend, which meant unflinching loyalty, “even when I am wrong”, she said. Now her last comment really struck me hard because the history of the idea of friendship, especially as understood in the Greek world, would exclude that last point. Being a good friend does suggest support and empathy, but when your friend is wrong---or at least, when you believe he or she is wrong, what is your obligation then? Christianity says very little about friendship. In the Jewish scriptures we have a portrayal of a deep and abiding friendship between David, who will become king and King Saul’s son, Jonathan, but in the New Testament very few words are uttered about friendship, an exception being the words that Jesus uses when speaking to his disciples. He no longer calls them servants, but now he calls them friends, because he claims that he has shared with them everything God has told him. They are his friends not because he likes them or enjoys their company, but because they share with him a passion for God and God’s kingdom. They are co-creators with Jesus, making God’s truth and love known in a world desperately in need of good news. Their shared vision and mutual love of God are what makes them friends. Greek thinkers were far more systematic than Jesus, and the philosopher, Aristotle, who lived 350 years before Jesus, pondered the meaning of friendship. And our understanding of friendship owes much to his insights. He said there are different kinds of friendship: a friendship of utility, when people become friends, because they are mutually helpful and beneficial, like a support group, when people come together for a particular shared purpose, like grief or giving up smoking or alcohol. And then there is the friendship of enjoyment, when people become friends, because of a mutual interest in tennis or hiking or poetry. The highest form of friendship, Aristotle claimed, is the friendship based on character, when people are drawn to each other because there is a mutual love of the good, and they understand that this mutual love of the good can and will help them grow into better human beings. This is not so unlike what we see in John’s gospel, when Jesus calls his disciples his friends, because they are engaged in a mutual enterprise of kingdom building---that is, making known and apparent the love and mercy of God. Aristotle did not believe that persons of unequal ability or status could truly be friends in this latter sense. Character friendship, he believed, was between equals, so, living in the sexist world he did, he discounted character friendships between men and women as well as between people of vastly different educational and cultural experiences. He would not have imagined that people coming from two very different worlds would be able to forge a friendship based on the mutual love of the good. If they do not understand the good in the same way, how can they truly love and serve it? If people lack a common understanding of certain words and experiences, how can they forge a path ahead? Character friendships are in the business of growing character---that is, traits that are mutually recognized and celebrated as good. Agreement is assumed. One of my sons, Aaron, did a PhD in infectious disease at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, where there were a number of Jewish persons, including orthodox Jews. He knew of an orthodox woman, Susanna, who was in the medical school, studying to become a doctor. She initially refused to examine male bodies, since once she was licensed as a physician, she told her professors, she would only be doctoring females. That is what orthodox doctors do, she insisted. Men treat men and women treat women. What you do after graduation, they told her, is your business, but you will not receive a medical degree from this institution unless you work on both males and females. She was furious, but she could do nothing except conform. She expected, however, that her best friend, also orthodox and a student in the PhD program with my son, would give her the sympathy she thought she so rightly deserved. But that is not what she received. “Grow up,” her friend told Susanna. “This is the real world, and to become a doctor means that your knowledge and experience rest on certain standards, and what you think in this case, no matter how painful to you, is irrelevant. It was the end of their friendship, my son told me, a friendship that had been forged since they were 7 years old. Sarah, who worked in Aaron’s lab, was heart sick. She could not believe she was rejected for speaking what she understood to be the truth. She believed she was being and doing what a true friend should be and do--- speaking not what her friend wanted to hear, but what she needed to hear. On the day of the medical school graduation, which was held at Lincoln Center, Sarah was there, and when Susanna saw her, she wanted to know WHY. Why she was there and why she had said what she did. Because I am your friend, Sarah said, and I have been your friend for a long time, and I don’t throw friendships away. It was the beginning of a reconciliation. Jesus surely spoke tough words to those who gathered to hear him teach. He told people they were to love their enemies and forgive as many times as one is wronged. He also told them cleanliness is not about what goes into the mouth but rather what comes out of the mouth. He told people that to be a good neighbor is to be like the Samaritan, when the Jews and the Samaritans thought of themselves as enemies. Surely there were people in the crowd who took offense at what he said. But the hardest truth to speak was not to the anonymous crowds, but the words he said to his disciples, because, as we all know, intimacy does not like discomfort and challenge. And yet that is when friendship is truly tested---that is when we learn now deeply abiding it really is--when you can have the courage to speak to your friend not what she wants to hear, but what she needs to hear, and when your friend has the courage to hear and ponder the uncomfortable truth you are speaking. April 23, 2024
Dear Friends, Do you remember those long, lazy days of summer, when you were a youngster, sometimes complaining to your mother, “There’s nothing to do?” My mother’s response to our boredom was, “Only boring people are bored.” Most of the time we could find something to do, but there were boring days. Very recently I came across something both amusing and interesting. According to a computer program named True Knowledge, which contains over 300 million facts, the most boring day in the 20th century was April 11, 1954. Nothing of great consequence apparently happened---at least according to True Knowledge. There were some sports events and Belgium held an election and apparently some people in India planned a coup that day, but it did not take place until 2 days later. And no one famous was born or died that day! When April 11 was listed as a boring day, some scientists pointed out that there have been a great many boring days, scientifically speaking. The years from 1.8 billion to 800 million years ago are known as “The Boring Billion,” since nothing much happened on earth. Evolution, atmospheric chemistry and geologic formation did not achieve much during this time. Someone noted it was as if the button PAUSE were pushed for a billion years. But then around 530 million years ago, things really began to pick up. Most of the major animal groups began to appear and earth went through something called the Cambrian Explosion. In the fossil record we see mineralized skeletal remains, something completely unknown before this time. Scientists, who study evolution, find this Cambrian Explosion challenging to explain. Evolution is usually a long and slow process with change coming at a very slow pace. One explanation is the appearance of oxygen, which allows for more complex creatures. But why did oxygen appear when it did? Could it be explained by the diminishing of glaciers, which suffered major melting about 600 years before the Cambrian Explosion. With less glaciation, the sun could penetrate the earth and perhaps this led to the appearance of oxygen, which in turn allowed more complex animals, some of them predators. And once you have predators, you will have animals evolving to outsmart the predators. And so, the story goes. We wonder what God was doing during “The Boring Billion.” Maybe the divine mind was thinking and imagining a future far more complex and varied than the one that looks so to us boring. Maybe even God was bored and decided that action was needed! Who knows? Of course, it is dangerous and even silly to imagine God in human terms, but this is what we do, since getting out of our human perspective is almost impossible. At any rate, something pretty amazing happened, and the creation changed in a very big way, eventually issuing in human beings. Ellie Wiesel, the Jewish writer and survivor of the Holocaust, once said, “God made human beings, because God loves a good story.” Looing at our world, we can wonder if God has received more stories (both good and bad) than God has bargained for! Yours in Christ, Sandra LOVE ONE ANOTHER, BECAUSE LOVE IS OF GOD
Preached by: Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ, Congregational, Unionville, CT April 28, 2024 1 John 4: 7-21 Acts 8: 26-40 The lesson proclaimed from the First Letter of John is pretty clear. God is love, and we, made in the image and likeness of God, are called to love God as well as others. And if we fail to do that, we do not really love God. As you heard in the introduction, this was Letter was written in the midst of great dissension in the Johannine community, because people were fighting over the identity of Jesus Christ. Some thought he was a spirit and not fully human, while others could embrace his humanity, but had no idea about the divinity. And still others argued that his death had no redemptive value at all. And so, they argued and fought, and some left and formed another church community. Of course, we might point out that it is easier to love God at a distance than those who live among us and do all kinds of things that anger and trouble us. Dostoevsky, the great Russian author of Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov once said: “The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity . . .yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days. . . . I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.” I suspect most of us can understand fully what Dostoevsky means. Most of us can come up with a list of people we find annoying and even contemptible. We know we are called to love them and pray for them, our personal and our political enemies. But how many of us here would have been comfortable praying for Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or a more current example, Putin? And what about people who do despicable things, like Susan Smith, who in 1994 put her two young boys, age 3 and 14 months, in a car and rolled it into the water, where they drowned. She was divorced and complained that men did not want to date her because they had no interest in taking children on. When I prayed for her in church one Sunday, I got a strong backlash from some mothers, who could not understand how I could pray for such a vile woman. But isn’t this what God would have us do, I asked? My question wasn’t answered. One woman said in anger, “You can pray for her on your own, but to ask the church to do so, is beyond what you should expect from us. But isn’t the essential question, what does God expect from us? Let’s be honest: we are not comfortable praying for vile people. And comfort is the operative word. We want our religion to be comfortable; we want it to make us feel good, but the truth is that religion and faith are not always designed to give us comfort. Sometimes we are called to consider, do, and say things that are way beyond our comfort zones. And this concerns more than our prayers. It also concerns other topics about which there is great controversy in our society and our churches---just as there was great controversy over who Jesus truly was and is. And Jesus certainly upset people when he ignored rules of table fellowship and welcomed sinners. So, while we know, as did the Johannine community, that the ethic of love is supposed to guide us, how do we actually apply that in our lives, when we realize that it is not always clear exactly what the love ethic is calling us to do. What and how do you love the other when you find his or her position contemptible or even dangerous? I lived in Jacksonville, Florida, during some of the most harrowing days of the Civil Rights campaign, and I can tell you that there were many Christians in the Presbyterian Church we attended, who were staunchly convinced that God intended the races to be separated. No integration in schools or in public facilities. When I was in the 7th grade, my Sunday School teacher said, “The government has no right to tell us whom we must serve in our restaurants and hotels.” How did that opinion truly instantiate God’s command that we love one another? Is segregation what love looked like? To many people in that era, that is exactly how love appeared. And the same thing applies to other issues that have roiled our society as well as the church. What about capital punishment? Every mainline Protestant denomination as well as Roman Catholicism are opposed. Official statements have been made to that effect, and the ethic of love for all persons, even the deranged and cruel is promulgated as the will of God. And then there is abortion. How bitterly those lines are drawn and how strongly people of faith feel, standing on opposite sides. Both sides use the ethic of love as their defense, one claiming they are defending innocent life, the other defending the agency of women and their control over their own lives. Love, St. Augustine said, and do what you will. Do, in other words, what your will dictates in the name and spirit of love. But this ethic of love does not always give us an exact rule to follow. We are left uncomfortable, and that is how it must be. In our reading today from Acts Philip is facing a very uncomfortable situation. He had been to Jerusalem, converting some Jews to Christ, and then he went to Samaria, a place Jews usually avoided, because they considered Samaritans impure for their intermarriage with the Assyrians after the collapse of the northern kingdom to Assyria in 722 BC. The story goes that an angel told Philip to go south on the wilderness road. Now the word wilderness in the bible is a code word for threat, but it can also be a place where God does a new thing. But how can you know which it will be? You only can act, and perhaps later, you might figure it out. So, Philip went and met an Ethiopian eunuch, a non-Jew, whom he baptized. Eunuchs, by the way, in Old Testament Law, were not admitted to the religious community. They were treated very much like barren women, because sterility was understood to be a curse from God. And yet the story tells us that the Holy Spirit had ordered Philip to go over to the chariot and speak with the eunuch. So, Philip was confident that he was doing what God would have him do, although by doing so, he was rejecting some of the conventions he had learned and honored. The story is told as if there is no doubt or question in his mind about what he was doing. Some people have great confidence that they are indeed doing the will of God. But most of us do not have absolute assurance; we can only try to apply the ethic of love and hope that our actions are indeed the loving thing to do. Real life is filled with ambiguity and assurances of rightness are not easily forthcoming. We do not normally hear the unfiltered word of God, since all of us can only hear from our own perspective and experience. And yet we are reminded that there are times we are pushed beyond our usual understanding. Something new breaks in and breaks through, as it did for Philip. It is never easy to move outside our comfort zones. We prefer being comfortable. But comfort is neither the goal nor the point. God has a way of surprising us, just as we have a way of resisting God. Yet God is quite accustomed to human resistance and has a very long history of working around it. |
“The Lord is My Shepherd”
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 21, 2024
John 10: 11-18
Psalm 23
Some years ago, when I was working as a chaplain at University Hospital on Long Island, one of the nurses on the neurosurgery unit told me she needed to speak with me in private. “Of course, you know Dr. Davidson,” she began. “Well, he is acting strangely.” “How can you tell?” I asked. “He is always strange”. Though a brilliant neurosurgeon, he was eccentric, to say the least. Whenever he spoke to a patient about upcoming brain surgery, he could never stand to look him or her in the eye or the face, so he would turn away, which greatly unnerved his patients. I also knew his father had been a seminary professor and father and son had spent the last 25 years arguing about faith and religion. Now, the nurse told me, he insists on repeating the 23rd Psalm right before his surgeries. “I find it very, very strange,” she said, “and a bit upsetting. I don’t know what to make of it. I mean he never did this before.”
I understood why she was unnerved. Dr. Davidson was a soft core atheist, which is why he was forever arguing with his father. I couldn’t imagine why he was on this new habit of repeating the 23rd psalm before his surgeries, but I knew better than to ask him. He hated to be questioned about anything personal. Well, I don’t know what is going on, I said, but I wouldn’t say a word. And no one did---though some of his other colleagues thought it strange as well. On the other hand, the 23rd Psalm is the most familiar of all psalms, and even the biblically illiterate and the unbelievers often request it at a funeral or memorial service for parents or grandparents. And even nominal Christians are familiar with the image of Jesus as the good shepherd, who leaves the 99 to search for the one lost lamb. In today’s reading from John, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep. And he is depicted as the good shepherd in some of the earliest Christian art.
There are no known images of Jesus before the third century, most likely because of the Jewish prohibition against graven images of God. But as Christianity became dominated by gentiles, images of Jesus began to appear. At first Jesus was pictured as a beardless youth, like the Roman god Hermes with a ram or lamb around his neck. Jesus was also imaged as Orpheus, playing his lute among the wild animals, and at other times he looks like Apollo, the god of light and sun, truth and prophecy. Though we are accustomed to a bearded Jesus, no beard appeared on Jesus’ face until the early fifth century.
Jesus as the good shepherd is a very comforting image, and as western art developed, we see paintings showing him walking among the flocks, or sitting down and calmly watching his sheep, or searching for the one lost lamb, and after finding it, gently cradling the animal, or carrying it on his shoulder. What we never see in these images, however, is Jesus as he is portrayed in today’s lesson--- defending his flock from attack and laying down his life for his sheep. In Psalm 23, the line: your rod and staff comfort me is a direct reference to the fact that shepherds used these instruments to not only lead and discipline the sheep but also, if need be, defend the flock from animals, who might attack and carry them away to eat! The image is comforting because of the real danger that lurked all around. And the shepherd was the one whose job it was to protect and defend.
So, Jesus and God are both imaged as shepherds, and yet ironically, shepherds were of low status, considered unclean by Jewish rabbis. By the time the Jews were slaves in Egypt and then left under the leadership of Moses around 1290 BCE, already the Egyptians looked down on shepherds, and Jews most likely began to embrace that negative image. Of course, it took centuries for the Jews to develop their religion and their rules of ritual purity and behavior, and David, who became the mighty king, unifying the northern and southern kingdom around the year 1000 BCE, was himself a shepherd, and though he did not compose all the psalms, he did write some of them. And perhaps he wrote the 23rd psalm, where God is named as the shepherd: The Lord is my shepherd. Yet by the time Jesus lived, 1000 years after David, shepherding had become a very low calling. Oral Jewish law (which was sometimes written down) said that if a shepherd fell into a pit, it was not required to help save his life!
The rabbis said shepherds could only tend their flocks out on the rocky terrains well beyond the towns, and so their lives were hard. Dirty and unkempt and usually uneducated, they were considered unclean, and were barred from certain religious rituals unless they went through rites of purification. And yet with all this negativity surrounding the image of shepherds, God and Jesus are imaged as shepherds. It is as if lowliness and vulnerability are the way and the place that God and goodness can be known and expressed.
And this is where Dr. Davidson’s new habit of saying the 23rd Psalm comes in. He never explained it to anyone on the staff. But one of his patients, a 21 year old named Kenny, a senior at MIT, with a brain tumor that was threatening to kill him, told one of the nurses that every night he repeated the 23rd Psalm before going to sleep. You know, he said to the nurse, I know the Lord is my shepherd, but I kind of think of Dr. Davidson as my shepherd too. I hope God doesn’t mind; I hope God understands why I trust Dr. Davidson so much. At first when he spoke with me, he wouldn’t even look at me, but now, ever since I told him he was my good shepherd, he no longer turns his head away. And I am so grateful for that change. And you know what he did the other night? He repeated with me the 23rd psalm. I was shocked he knew it. But then he told me his dad is a professor of theology. I have known that psalm by heart since I was 6 years old, he said.
Dr. Davidson, Kenny asked, would you mind repeating it with me right before they put me out for my surgery? Dr. Davidson said he would, and he did, and Kenny not only survived the surgery and the tumor, but he also went on to medical school and eventually became a neurosurgeon like the doctor he so admired. Dr. Davidson apparently later told Kenny that he had spent 25 years fighting and arguing with his father. “And yet, Kenny, in the months I have known you, you got me to do something my father would never have thought possible.” “Did you tell him?” Kenny asked. “Not on your life, the doctor responded. There are some things in life that are best left unspoken. I don’t know if the Lord is really my shepherd, but I think the two of us have been like shepherds to each other. And for that we can both be grateful.
While we can easily understand how Kenny came to trust Dr. Davidson as his shepherd---after all the surgeon saved his life--- how was it that in spite of himself, in spite of all his resistance against his father and God, the doctor would be led by the vulnerability of his 21 year old patient to repeat the 23rd Psalm before his surgeries? Sometimes the big things and the big changes are beyond our explanation. And that may indeed be a blessing.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 21, 2024
John 10: 11-18
Psalm 23
Some years ago, when I was working as a chaplain at University Hospital on Long Island, one of the nurses on the neurosurgery unit told me she needed to speak with me in private. “Of course, you know Dr. Davidson,” she began. “Well, he is acting strangely.” “How can you tell?” I asked. “He is always strange”. Though a brilliant neurosurgeon, he was eccentric, to say the least. Whenever he spoke to a patient about upcoming brain surgery, he could never stand to look him or her in the eye or the face, so he would turn away, which greatly unnerved his patients. I also knew his father had been a seminary professor and father and son had spent the last 25 years arguing about faith and religion. Now, the nurse told me, he insists on repeating the 23rd Psalm right before his surgeries. “I find it very, very strange,” she said, “and a bit upsetting. I don’t know what to make of it. I mean he never did this before.”
I understood why she was unnerved. Dr. Davidson was a soft core atheist, which is why he was forever arguing with his father. I couldn’t imagine why he was on this new habit of repeating the 23rd psalm before his surgeries, but I knew better than to ask him. He hated to be questioned about anything personal. Well, I don’t know what is going on, I said, but I wouldn’t say a word. And no one did---though some of his other colleagues thought it strange as well. On the other hand, the 23rd Psalm is the most familiar of all psalms, and even the biblically illiterate and the unbelievers often request it at a funeral or memorial service for parents or grandparents. And even nominal Christians are familiar with the image of Jesus as the good shepherd, who leaves the 99 to search for the one lost lamb. In today’s reading from John, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep. And he is depicted as the good shepherd in some of the earliest Christian art.
There are no known images of Jesus before the third century, most likely because of the Jewish prohibition against graven images of God. But as Christianity became dominated by gentiles, images of Jesus began to appear. At first Jesus was pictured as a beardless youth, like the Roman god Hermes with a ram or lamb around his neck. Jesus was also imaged as Orpheus, playing his lute among the wild animals, and at other times he looks like Apollo, the god of light and sun, truth and prophecy. Though we are accustomed to a bearded Jesus, no beard appeared on Jesus’ face until the early fifth century.
Jesus as the good shepherd is a very comforting image, and as western art developed, we see paintings showing him walking among the flocks, or sitting down and calmly watching his sheep, or searching for the one lost lamb, and after finding it, gently cradling the animal, or carrying it on his shoulder. What we never see in these images, however, is Jesus as he is portrayed in today’s lesson--- defending his flock from attack and laying down his life for his sheep. In Psalm 23, the line: your rod and staff comfort me is a direct reference to the fact that shepherds used these instruments to not only lead and discipline the sheep but also, if need be, defend the flock from animals, who might attack and carry them away to eat! The image is comforting because of the real danger that lurked all around. And the shepherd was the one whose job it was to protect and defend.
So, Jesus and God are both imaged as shepherds, and yet ironically, shepherds were of low status, considered unclean by Jewish rabbis. By the time the Jews were slaves in Egypt and then left under the leadership of Moses around 1290 BCE, already the Egyptians looked down on shepherds, and Jews most likely began to embrace that negative image. Of course, it took centuries for the Jews to develop their religion and their rules of ritual purity and behavior, and David, who became the mighty king, unifying the northern and southern kingdom around the year 1000 BCE, was himself a shepherd, and though he did not compose all the psalms, he did write some of them. And perhaps he wrote the 23rd psalm, where God is named as the shepherd: The Lord is my shepherd. Yet by the time Jesus lived, 1000 years after David, shepherding had become a very low calling. Oral Jewish law (which was sometimes written down) said that if a shepherd fell into a pit, it was not required to help save his life!
The rabbis said shepherds could only tend their flocks out on the rocky terrains well beyond the towns, and so their lives were hard. Dirty and unkempt and usually uneducated, they were considered unclean, and were barred from certain religious rituals unless they went through rites of purification. And yet with all this negativity surrounding the image of shepherds, God and Jesus are imaged as shepherds. It is as if lowliness and vulnerability are the way and the place that God and goodness can be known and expressed.
And this is where Dr. Davidson’s new habit of saying the 23rd Psalm comes in. He never explained it to anyone on the staff. But one of his patients, a 21 year old named Kenny, a senior at MIT, with a brain tumor that was threatening to kill him, told one of the nurses that every night he repeated the 23rd Psalm before going to sleep. You know, he said to the nurse, I know the Lord is my shepherd, but I kind of think of Dr. Davidson as my shepherd too. I hope God doesn’t mind; I hope God understands why I trust Dr. Davidson so much. At first when he spoke with me, he wouldn’t even look at me, but now, ever since I told him he was my good shepherd, he no longer turns his head away. And I am so grateful for that change. And you know what he did the other night? He repeated with me the 23rd psalm. I was shocked he knew it. But then he told me his dad is a professor of theology. I have known that psalm by heart since I was 6 years old, he said.
Dr. Davidson, Kenny asked, would you mind repeating it with me right before they put me out for my surgery? Dr. Davidson said he would, and he did, and Kenny not only survived the surgery and the tumor, but he also went on to medical school and eventually became a neurosurgeon like the doctor he so admired. Dr. Davidson apparently later told Kenny that he had spent 25 years fighting and arguing with his father. “And yet, Kenny, in the months I have known you, you got me to do something my father would never have thought possible.” “Did you tell him?” Kenny asked. “Not on your life, the doctor responded. There are some things in life that are best left unspoken. I don’t know if the Lord is really my shepherd, but I think the two of us have been like shepherds to each other. And for that we can both be grateful.
While we can easily understand how Kenny came to trust Dr. Davidson as his shepherd---after all the surgeon saved his life--- how was it that in spite of himself, in spite of all his resistance against his father and God, the doctor would be led by the vulnerability of his 21 year old patient to repeat the 23rd Psalm before his surgeries? Sometimes the big things and the big changes are beyond our explanation. And that may indeed be a blessing.
April 17, 2024
Dear Friends,
Occasionally, we read something about a person leaving money, sometimes a fortune, or even a favorite object to a beloved animal. I always find such antics a bit silly, but I know how deep and abiding the love for an animal can be. But have you ever heard of someone bequeathing something to a tree? Well, this is exactly what Colonel William H. Jackson did. Jackson was a college professor, who lived in Athens, Georgia, and when he made out his will, he gave to his favorite childhood tree, a white oak, and the eight feet of land surrounding it, the land and the tree. So, the tree became the owner of itself as well as the land. This became known in the year 1890 when the local newspaper printed the Professor’s unusual bequest. (Jackson lived between 1786 and 1875.)
The city of Athens has respected Professor Jackson’s wishes, and with the help of gardening groups, both the tree and its land have been lovingly cared for. But it is not clear if the tree has any legal ground protecting it. No one in recent memory has ever seen the deed giving the tree ownership of itself. Besides, Georgia law prohibits non-humans from owning any property, but no one has ever brought to Court a lawsuit contesting the right of the tree to own itself and the land it sits on. The tree has had a beloved history in the town, and people love to tell the story of the eccentric Professor and his beloved tree. In 1942 there was a dramatic windstorm, which toppled the tree, and people insisted on collecting its acorns and then sprouting them so saplings could be replanted in the same place.
You would think that Athens, Georgia is the only place with a tree that owns itself. But no, in Alabama in a town named Eufaula with a population of 12, 600 people, another independent oak owns itself. In 1935 the local garden club voted to protect a 65 foot wide oak, called Walker Oak. It stood in the middle of the town and was a favorite spot for children to play. The mayor of the town, E.H. Graves, recorded what he called “a deed of sentiment,” stating that the tree “was a creation and a gift of God, standing in our midst--- to itself ---to have to hold itself.” The tree was protected by an iron fence around it, but in 1961 a windstorm brought the tree to the ground. Just like in Athens, Georgia, the tree was replaced with an offspring, and the task of guarding and protecting it, continues to this day.
So, what do we make of this? Why so much attention paid to a tree? Well, trees are powerful symbols of life. The Tree of Life turns up again and again in all kinds of artistic representation. Jesus, for example, was said to be crucified on the tree of life, shorn of its buds, branches and leaves. What was once the fullness of life became in the hands of cruel human beings an instrument of death and torture. Trees also provide shade and protection from the hot sun. Remember the story of Jonah, who resisted God’s call to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh? Jonah ended up sitting beneath a bush and when it shriveled because of the harsh sun, he was both angry and sad. He felt more compassion for that bush than he did for the people of Nineveh. And that how it sometimes is. People can feel love and compassion for nature, which suffers on account of human arrogance and greed, and assign to it an innocence that human beings simply do not have. Is it any wonder then that we have so many poems and paeons written to celebrate the glories of nature and the beauty of trees?
The Oak – by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;
Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.
All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Occasionally, we read something about a person leaving money, sometimes a fortune, or even a favorite object to a beloved animal. I always find such antics a bit silly, but I know how deep and abiding the love for an animal can be. But have you ever heard of someone bequeathing something to a tree? Well, this is exactly what Colonel William H. Jackson did. Jackson was a college professor, who lived in Athens, Georgia, and when he made out his will, he gave to his favorite childhood tree, a white oak, and the eight feet of land surrounding it, the land and the tree. So, the tree became the owner of itself as well as the land. This became known in the year 1890 when the local newspaper printed the Professor’s unusual bequest. (Jackson lived between 1786 and 1875.)
The city of Athens has respected Professor Jackson’s wishes, and with the help of gardening groups, both the tree and its land have been lovingly cared for. But it is not clear if the tree has any legal ground protecting it. No one in recent memory has ever seen the deed giving the tree ownership of itself. Besides, Georgia law prohibits non-humans from owning any property, but no one has ever brought to Court a lawsuit contesting the right of the tree to own itself and the land it sits on. The tree has had a beloved history in the town, and people love to tell the story of the eccentric Professor and his beloved tree. In 1942 there was a dramatic windstorm, which toppled the tree, and people insisted on collecting its acorns and then sprouting them so saplings could be replanted in the same place.
You would think that Athens, Georgia is the only place with a tree that owns itself. But no, in Alabama in a town named Eufaula with a population of 12, 600 people, another independent oak owns itself. In 1935 the local garden club voted to protect a 65 foot wide oak, called Walker Oak. It stood in the middle of the town and was a favorite spot for children to play. The mayor of the town, E.H. Graves, recorded what he called “a deed of sentiment,” stating that the tree “was a creation and a gift of God, standing in our midst--- to itself ---to have to hold itself.” The tree was protected by an iron fence around it, but in 1961 a windstorm brought the tree to the ground. Just like in Athens, Georgia, the tree was replaced with an offspring, and the task of guarding and protecting it, continues to this day.
So, what do we make of this? Why so much attention paid to a tree? Well, trees are powerful symbols of life. The Tree of Life turns up again and again in all kinds of artistic representation. Jesus, for example, was said to be crucified on the tree of life, shorn of its buds, branches and leaves. What was once the fullness of life became in the hands of cruel human beings an instrument of death and torture. Trees also provide shade and protection from the hot sun. Remember the story of Jonah, who resisted God’s call to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh? Jonah ended up sitting beneath a bush and when it shriveled because of the harsh sun, he was both angry and sad. He felt more compassion for that bush than he did for the people of Nineveh. And that how it sometimes is. People can feel love and compassion for nature, which suffers on account of human arrogance and greed, and assign to it an innocence that human beings simply do not have. Is it any wonder then that we have so many poems and paeons written to celebrate the glories of nature and the beauty of trees?
The Oak – by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;
Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.
All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Peace Be with You
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church in Unionville, CT
April 14, 2024
Luke 24: 36B-48
When the risen Christ came among his disciples, making his first full appearance among them, both John’s reading from last Sunday as well as Luke’s from today, give us the same opening words: Peace be with you. Now let’s just think about those words. They are really quite extraordinary, considering the situation the disciples were in. In both gospels they were terrified, afraid of the Jewish religious authorities as well as the Romans, and in Luke, when Jesus comes among them, they are terrified at what they think is a ghost. So, what kind of peace can they really have? Certainly not the ceasing of conflict between different groups, vying for power and dominance. The Romans were not about to lay down their swords and renounce their dominance, and the growing tension between Jews and Christians was not about to disappear. Each religious identity, Jew and Christian, was growing a new self-understanding, and although I think the Jews would have been content to live along with Christianity, I am afraid that history shows that Christianity grew virulent antisemitism. Jesus’ resurrection did not bring peace between these two groups.
Christianity speaks of the peace that passes all human understanding, the peace that only God can give, which the world can neither give nor take away. We may not be able to explain exactly what that peace is; words often fail us, but our imaginations can show us a place where we are completely calm and unafraid, when we are fully confident that we are not alone and no matter what happens in the world or happens to us, we know that all is held in God’s infinite love and care. And that is peace, the peace that Christ would give. Now this is not a feeling or an experience that occurs in the normal run of life. Maybe we have never had it. In all honesty, I don’t think I have ever felt that complete assurance of peace. But I have heard stories of other people having such experiences, and many of them are related to extreme situations, often where death is lurking or has been lurking around---as it had been for Jesus and his disciples.
A few years ago, when I was visiting someone in a nursing home, I met a World War ll veteran, who told me how it was landing on one of the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. “We were pinned to the ground,” he said, “with machine gun fire aimed at us from the cliffs above. We were too terrified to move, and then this young captain, yelled out, “There are only two types of men on this beach: the dead and the soon to be dead; come on men, get up and climb those cliffs. And he stood up and motioned for us to come. I had just turned 19 the day before. Maybe I was just too young and too dumb not to believe his words, and so I got up and began to move. And the strange thing was that as I moved toward those cliffs, all fear left me. I felt this calm, a peace, I would call it, and I knew that even if I should die right then and there, it would be all right. To this day I cannot remember how the ropes and makeshift ladders were hung on those cliffs, but we climbed, or at least some of us did. I think there must have been some airplanes strafing the Germans and their guns, but I don’t remember that at all. I remember throwing some grenades to take them out. It all sounds so horrible when I tell it now, but at the time I was completely overwhelmed by peace. I don’t know how that could be because I figure that God could not have been too happy with all the bloodletting and murdering that was going on that day. But God did take care of me; of that I am sure, and he gave me a peace that I have never felt before or since. And maybe I don’t need to, because I remember it so well, the peace that passes all understanding.”
And then there was this woman, who told me about her abuse by an uncle, who impregnated her when she was barely 15. I didn’t tell anyone, she said, and when I became pregnant everyone, including my parents, thought I was some kind of slut. I mean this was 1960, and pregnancy out of wedlock was a big SIN. But no one asked me a lot of questions; I think they were afraid to ask. They just sent me away, and I gave the baby up. Years later, when I was 42 years old, my daughter found me, and we met, and we talked. And all the shame I bore for so many years simply rolled away. She accepted me and she said she understood why I gave her up. So, you forgive me? I asked. No, reason to forgive, she said. You don’t need to be forgiven. And when she said that, such a weight was lifted from my heart and soul. She never asked me about her father. She said she only wanted to meet her mother. Why, only me, I don’t know. I didn’t ask; maybe I didn’t want to know the reason. But that got me to thinking, and you know what I did. I went to my uncle, whose secret I always kept, and I told him, “I forgive you for all the shame I have had to bear all these years.” And then he cried, and so did I. That’s when it happened---the peace that came over me, like a great wave. It just poured over my whole being, and it just kept on pouring over me again and again and again. And that peace has never left me. I don’t mean that I always feel it, but I always remember it.
Notice that after Jesus gave his peace to the disciples and ate some fish, he told them what they must do: they must proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations. So, here it is: this intimate connection between peace and forgiveness. It works between human beings, when one who has been grievously wronged offers forgiveness to another, and it is accepted as the gift it is. And that can and often does lead to a peace that passes all understanding.
I believe I told you in another sermon about a woman I met, whose daughter had been brutally murdered. The poor mother was tortured for years by the image of her daughter’s brutal death, , and it was only when she went to the prison, where the murderer was, saw him face to face and forgave him that she was finally relieved of what she called “the assault against her soul.” But the story did not end there, because she had to contend with other people, even in her own family, her son, who could not forgive her for forgiving the man who murdered his sister. She told our group---we were all anti-death penalty people---that although her son’s anger was very painful, she could not regret what she had done. In fact, she believed that the forgiveness she gave was not so much her achievement as it was something that God had done in her and through her. How could I have done that on my own, she asked our group? I am no saint, and this man who had murdered my beautiful 19 year old daughter, who had her whole life ahead of her with the dream and hope of becoming a doctor dream ---how many other people had he prevented from being helped by her? For nearly 20 years I was in a state of rage and agony, and then when I forgave, it was gone and in its place was the peace that I believe only God can give.
Peace be with you. That is what Jesus came to say to his disciples. He said it in a situation which was anything but peaceful. And he continues to speak those words in our world today, where there are troubled families and troubled nations and wars that kill and maim innocent people. Peace be with you, he says, though surely he knows it is not peace we feel or experience in such situations. But he says it anyway in the hope that we will hear the words anew that something might indeed take root in the depths of our being and that one day we might know the peace that God in Jesus Christ gives, the peace that passes all human understanding.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church in Unionville, CT
April 14, 2024
Luke 24: 36B-48
When the risen Christ came among his disciples, making his first full appearance among them, both John’s reading from last Sunday as well as Luke’s from today, give us the same opening words: Peace be with you. Now let’s just think about those words. They are really quite extraordinary, considering the situation the disciples were in. In both gospels they were terrified, afraid of the Jewish religious authorities as well as the Romans, and in Luke, when Jesus comes among them, they are terrified at what they think is a ghost. So, what kind of peace can they really have? Certainly not the ceasing of conflict between different groups, vying for power and dominance. The Romans were not about to lay down their swords and renounce their dominance, and the growing tension between Jews and Christians was not about to disappear. Each religious identity, Jew and Christian, was growing a new self-understanding, and although I think the Jews would have been content to live along with Christianity, I am afraid that history shows that Christianity grew virulent antisemitism. Jesus’ resurrection did not bring peace between these two groups.
Christianity speaks of the peace that passes all human understanding, the peace that only God can give, which the world can neither give nor take away. We may not be able to explain exactly what that peace is; words often fail us, but our imaginations can show us a place where we are completely calm and unafraid, when we are fully confident that we are not alone and no matter what happens in the world or happens to us, we know that all is held in God’s infinite love and care. And that is peace, the peace that Christ would give. Now this is not a feeling or an experience that occurs in the normal run of life. Maybe we have never had it. In all honesty, I don’t think I have ever felt that complete assurance of peace. But I have heard stories of other people having such experiences, and many of them are related to extreme situations, often where death is lurking or has been lurking around---as it had been for Jesus and his disciples.
A few years ago, when I was visiting someone in a nursing home, I met a World War ll veteran, who told me how it was landing on one of the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. “We were pinned to the ground,” he said, “with machine gun fire aimed at us from the cliffs above. We were too terrified to move, and then this young captain, yelled out, “There are only two types of men on this beach: the dead and the soon to be dead; come on men, get up and climb those cliffs. And he stood up and motioned for us to come. I had just turned 19 the day before. Maybe I was just too young and too dumb not to believe his words, and so I got up and began to move. And the strange thing was that as I moved toward those cliffs, all fear left me. I felt this calm, a peace, I would call it, and I knew that even if I should die right then and there, it would be all right. To this day I cannot remember how the ropes and makeshift ladders were hung on those cliffs, but we climbed, or at least some of us did. I think there must have been some airplanes strafing the Germans and their guns, but I don’t remember that at all. I remember throwing some grenades to take them out. It all sounds so horrible when I tell it now, but at the time I was completely overwhelmed by peace. I don’t know how that could be because I figure that God could not have been too happy with all the bloodletting and murdering that was going on that day. But God did take care of me; of that I am sure, and he gave me a peace that I have never felt before or since. And maybe I don’t need to, because I remember it so well, the peace that passes all understanding.”
And then there was this woman, who told me about her abuse by an uncle, who impregnated her when she was barely 15. I didn’t tell anyone, she said, and when I became pregnant everyone, including my parents, thought I was some kind of slut. I mean this was 1960, and pregnancy out of wedlock was a big SIN. But no one asked me a lot of questions; I think they were afraid to ask. They just sent me away, and I gave the baby up. Years later, when I was 42 years old, my daughter found me, and we met, and we talked. And all the shame I bore for so many years simply rolled away. She accepted me and she said she understood why I gave her up. So, you forgive me? I asked. No, reason to forgive, she said. You don’t need to be forgiven. And when she said that, such a weight was lifted from my heart and soul. She never asked me about her father. She said she only wanted to meet her mother. Why, only me, I don’t know. I didn’t ask; maybe I didn’t want to know the reason. But that got me to thinking, and you know what I did. I went to my uncle, whose secret I always kept, and I told him, “I forgive you for all the shame I have had to bear all these years.” And then he cried, and so did I. That’s when it happened---the peace that came over me, like a great wave. It just poured over my whole being, and it just kept on pouring over me again and again and again. And that peace has never left me. I don’t mean that I always feel it, but I always remember it.
Notice that after Jesus gave his peace to the disciples and ate some fish, he told them what they must do: they must proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations. So, here it is: this intimate connection between peace and forgiveness. It works between human beings, when one who has been grievously wronged offers forgiveness to another, and it is accepted as the gift it is. And that can and often does lead to a peace that passes all understanding.
I believe I told you in another sermon about a woman I met, whose daughter had been brutally murdered. The poor mother was tortured for years by the image of her daughter’s brutal death, , and it was only when she went to the prison, where the murderer was, saw him face to face and forgave him that she was finally relieved of what she called “the assault against her soul.” But the story did not end there, because she had to contend with other people, even in her own family, her son, who could not forgive her for forgiving the man who murdered his sister. She told our group---we were all anti-death penalty people---that although her son’s anger was very painful, she could not regret what she had done. In fact, she believed that the forgiveness she gave was not so much her achievement as it was something that God had done in her and through her. How could I have done that on my own, she asked our group? I am no saint, and this man who had murdered my beautiful 19 year old daughter, who had her whole life ahead of her with the dream and hope of becoming a doctor dream ---how many other people had he prevented from being helped by her? For nearly 20 years I was in a state of rage and agony, and then when I forgave, it was gone and in its place was the peace that I believe only God can give.
Peace be with you. That is what Jesus came to say to his disciples. He said it in a situation which was anything but peaceful. And he continues to speak those words in our world today, where there are troubled families and troubled nations and wars that kill and maim innocent people. Peace be with you, he says, though surely he knows it is not peace we feel or experience in such situations. But he says it anyway in the hope that we will hear the words anew that something might indeed take root in the depths of our being and that one day we might know the peace that God in Jesus Christ gives, the peace that passes all human understanding.
When the Risen Christ Shows Up
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 7, 2024
John 20: 19-31
Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest, who for decades has worked in Los Angeles, trying to help kids stay away from both drugs and gangs. He founded an organization for that very purpose, and somehow Dr. Phil found about Father Boyle. Well, Dr. Phil, the television personality and psychologist, who tries to help people find their paths, thought it would be good to have Father Boyle on along with some boys, whose paths were anything but desirable. Father Boyle had his doubts, and when he met with Dr. Phil and his team, he thought he did a pretty good job of tamping down some of their wilder ideas. But on the day of the live show, when Father Boyle came onto the stage, he was horrified to see two large props in the middle of the set. One was a gorgeous mahogany coffin and the other an exact replica of a prison cell. The boys, flown in from different parts of the country, were brought out onto the stage, and Dr. Phil practically yelled in their faces: “Don’t you kids see and understand what your choices are leading to---death or prison.” He did this with a number of different groups of kids, until finally Father Boyle could take it no longer: “Phil”, he said. “These kids know the end results better than you or I. The truth is they don’t care. It is not information that will change them. What changes people, said Father Doyle, is experiences.
It is disheartening to face the hard truth that information or knowledge does not change most people and their behavior. And the word we should attend to is most because there are people, who do pay close attention to information and knowledge and use that to make decisions. Education is founded on this very principle, but as any teacher can tell you there are some people who are much better at using information than others. If we think back to the AIDS epidemic, which hit the gay and the IV drug users very hard, it is a fact that the gay community used the information to protect themselves extremely well, while the IV drug users did not. My husband teaches microbiology to undergraduates at Wesleyan University, and he has a whole unit on sexually transmitted disease with very explicit slides of diseased organs. Many of these kids, he tells me, look very uncomfortable during the lectures. Do you think their behavior is changed by what you teach them? I asked him. Well, he said, I will tell you what the textbook says in black and white: “Sexual desire is so powerful it is very hard to make an impact on behavior with only information.”
Now let’s consider our text this morning, which begins with the terrified disciples all huddled together in a locked room. Why are they afraid? Because their beloved leader had been cruelly tortured and murdered, and they are afraid Jesus’ enemies are about to come for them. And so, they are shivering with fear. Note well: they already have some information. Right before today’s lesson, you heard in the introduction to the reading how Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene, who then ran to get Peter and the beloved disciple to tell them that Jesus’ body had been taken. They two disciples ran to the tomb and saw the linen wrappings lying there. And then they went home. But Mary remained, crying at the tomb, and that is when Jesus showed up. She then went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” So, they had the information that Jesus was alive, but maybe they did not trust Mary’s words or perhaps they just did not know what to make of it. And then Jesus showed up. “Peace be with you,” he said after which he breathed on them the Holy Spirit, which in John’s gospel is the Pentecost moment.
Consider: the disciples were not looking for Jesus, though they had been told he was alive. But Jesus came to them as he had also come to Mary Magdalene. Jesus’ appearances had nothing to do with anything they were doing or trying to accomplish. It was Jesus who found them! And the same is true for Thomas. Thomas, the famous doubter, was not about to believe that Jesus was alive simply because the other disciples told him so. Sure, they gave him the information, but that was not enough. He had to see for himself, see the marks of the nails and feel the wound in the side. Remember, Jesus also had shown his disciples the nail marks and the wound in his side. His wounds, in fact, were the marks of his identity, helping his disciples to believe this is really he!
So, Jesus is the one who showed up, and his showing up is why the disciples believed. So many people today are on some kind of religious or spiritual search, and they think that if they search, they will find. I have felt in my adult life that I too have been on a search. I threw away my Christianity in my early 20’s and began to find it again while in seminary, which was also part of my search. And the intellectual foundations of the faith became extremely important to me. I wanted to understand, and I took the knowledge I learned very seriously. But still, I did not make the final leap to Christian faith until I had the experience of working in a state mental hospital, where the most dejected and rejected human beings had been living for decades. Working on locked wards with people who could barely speak because sometimes the voices they heard shouted down other peoples’ voices was in my experience sheer hell. I used to wander the halls, while repeating a line from the prophet Isaiah, O, truly you are a God who hides yourself.
One afternoon, away from the hospital wards, I had a conversation with a Unitarian Universalist colleague, who did not believe that there was a God working in history and human life. And when I described to him some of my patients, I asked him, what he hoped for them, and he simply shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps we can learn from them more about mental illness, so we can help others, but their lives are ruined, beyond repair. And you believe there is nothing more? I asked. Nothing, he said, shrugging his shoulders once again. And, the next day, when I was in the hospital, I realized that I did not believe what my colleague had said to me the previous day. I had hope that there was something MORE for these people. Jesus showed up, and the God who was always hiding on me, no longer appeared so hidden. I don’t know if I dare call it a resurrection experience, but I can attest that I saw in that hospital more wounds than I care to remember. And yet those wounds helped me to recognize Jesus Christ when he showed up, just as the disciples, including Thomas, also recognized Jesus when they saw the nail prints in his hands and felt the wound in his side.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
April 7, 2024
John 20: 19-31
Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest, who for decades has worked in Los Angeles, trying to help kids stay away from both drugs and gangs. He founded an organization for that very purpose, and somehow Dr. Phil found about Father Boyle. Well, Dr. Phil, the television personality and psychologist, who tries to help people find their paths, thought it would be good to have Father Boyle on along with some boys, whose paths were anything but desirable. Father Boyle had his doubts, and when he met with Dr. Phil and his team, he thought he did a pretty good job of tamping down some of their wilder ideas. But on the day of the live show, when Father Boyle came onto the stage, he was horrified to see two large props in the middle of the set. One was a gorgeous mahogany coffin and the other an exact replica of a prison cell. The boys, flown in from different parts of the country, were brought out onto the stage, and Dr. Phil practically yelled in their faces: “Don’t you kids see and understand what your choices are leading to---death or prison.” He did this with a number of different groups of kids, until finally Father Boyle could take it no longer: “Phil”, he said. “These kids know the end results better than you or I. The truth is they don’t care. It is not information that will change them. What changes people, said Father Doyle, is experiences.
It is disheartening to face the hard truth that information or knowledge does not change most people and their behavior. And the word we should attend to is most because there are people, who do pay close attention to information and knowledge and use that to make decisions. Education is founded on this very principle, but as any teacher can tell you there are some people who are much better at using information than others. If we think back to the AIDS epidemic, which hit the gay and the IV drug users very hard, it is a fact that the gay community used the information to protect themselves extremely well, while the IV drug users did not. My husband teaches microbiology to undergraduates at Wesleyan University, and he has a whole unit on sexually transmitted disease with very explicit slides of diseased organs. Many of these kids, he tells me, look very uncomfortable during the lectures. Do you think their behavior is changed by what you teach them? I asked him. Well, he said, I will tell you what the textbook says in black and white: “Sexual desire is so powerful it is very hard to make an impact on behavior with only information.”
Now let’s consider our text this morning, which begins with the terrified disciples all huddled together in a locked room. Why are they afraid? Because their beloved leader had been cruelly tortured and murdered, and they are afraid Jesus’ enemies are about to come for them. And so, they are shivering with fear. Note well: they already have some information. Right before today’s lesson, you heard in the introduction to the reading how Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene, who then ran to get Peter and the beloved disciple to tell them that Jesus’ body had been taken. They two disciples ran to the tomb and saw the linen wrappings lying there. And then they went home. But Mary remained, crying at the tomb, and that is when Jesus showed up. She then went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” So, they had the information that Jesus was alive, but maybe they did not trust Mary’s words or perhaps they just did not know what to make of it. And then Jesus showed up. “Peace be with you,” he said after which he breathed on them the Holy Spirit, which in John’s gospel is the Pentecost moment.
Consider: the disciples were not looking for Jesus, though they had been told he was alive. But Jesus came to them as he had also come to Mary Magdalene. Jesus’ appearances had nothing to do with anything they were doing or trying to accomplish. It was Jesus who found them! And the same is true for Thomas. Thomas, the famous doubter, was not about to believe that Jesus was alive simply because the other disciples told him so. Sure, they gave him the information, but that was not enough. He had to see for himself, see the marks of the nails and feel the wound in the side. Remember, Jesus also had shown his disciples the nail marks and the wound in his side. His wounds, in fact, were the marks of his identity, helping his disciples to believe this is really he!
So, Jesus is the one who showed up, and his showing up is why the disciples believed. So many people today are on some kind of religious or spiritual search, and they think that if they search, they will find. I have felt in my adult life that I too have been on a search. I threw away my Christianity in my early 20’s and began to find it again while in seminary, which was also part of my search. And the intellectual foundations of the faith became extremely important to me. I wanted to understand, and I took the knowledge I learned very seriously. But still, I did not make the final leap to Christian faith until I had the experience of working in a state mental hospital, where the most dejected and rejected human beings had been living for decades. Working on locked wards with people who could barely speak because sometimes the voices they heard shouted down other peoples’ voices was in my experience sheer hell. I used to wander the halls, while repeating a line from the prophet Isaiah, O, truly you are a God who hides yourself.
One afternoon, away from the hospital wards, I had a conversation with a Unitarian Universalist colleague, who did not believe that there was a God working in history and human life. And when I described to him some of my patients, I asked him, what he hoped for them, and he simply shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps we can learn from them more about mental illness, so we can help others, but their lives are ruined, beyond repair. And you believe there is nothing more? I asked. Nothing, he said, shrugging his shoulders once again. And, the next day, when I was in the hospital, I realized that I did not believe what my colleague had said to me the previous day. I had hope that there was something MORE for these people. Jesus showed up, and the God who was always hiding on me, no longer appeared so hidden. I don’t know if I dare call it a resurrection experience, but I can attest that I saw in that hospital more wounds than I care to remember. And yet those wounds helped me to recognize Jesus Christ when he showed up, just as the disciples, including Thomas, also recognized Jesus when they saw the nail prints in his hands and felt the wound in his side.
April 4, 2024
Dear Friends,
We are officially now in the season of Eastertide, which lasts until Pentecost, which this year is May 19. Eastertide concentrates on the good news of the resurrection, and in our part of the world, Eastertide comes during the spring season. The appearance of flowers and the buds beginning to form on the trees are not the same thing as resurrection, but the earth coming to life again after the cold dormancy of winter does suggest a symbolism that works for us. I suspect Easter would feel different, if its celebration occurs during the long winter months, as it does in the southern hemisphere. Since nature is God’s work, we do look for hints in the natural order which reveal to us the hand and work of God.
And so, I found myself fascinated by an essay, written in the year 1957 by the paleontologist, Loren Eisley, called “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in a posthumous collection, titled The Star Thrower. Eisley was sitting under a tree, as he rested and dozed after a trek through a woodland of pines. Suddenly, he was awakened from his slumber by the sound of birds, who were making together a plaintive sound of sorrow and protest. When he looked at a branch above him, there sat a huge raven with a squirming baby bird in his beak. Into the glade a variety of small birds had flown, all joining the tiny parents in their song of grief. Of course, no one dared to attack the raven, but they were all together in their common protest against the fate of this tiny newborn bird. Eisley wrote:
The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the bush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were singers of life, and not of death.
Some people might accuse Eisley of being sentimental, of investing too much of the human story into that of the birds. But Eisley knew what he heard, and he heard a song of grieving protest turn into one of joy. And if that is not the message of Easter and this entire season, I don’ know what else is. The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ opening line in one of his poems is, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Indeed, it is, and this too is the message of the season.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
We are officially now in the season of Eastertide, which lasts until Pentecost, which this year is May 19. Eastertide concentrates on the good news of the resurrection, and in our part of the world, Eastertide comes during the spring season. The appearance of flowers and the buds beginning to form on the trees are not the same thing as resurrection, but the earth coming to life again after the cold dormancy of winter does suggest a symbolism that works for us. I suspect Easter would feel different, if its celebration occurs during the long winter months, as it does in the southern hemisphere. Since nature is God’s work, we do look for hints in the natural order which reveal to us the hand and work of God.
And so, I found myself fascinated by an essay, written in the year 1957 by the paleontologist, Loren Eisley, called “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in a posthumous collection, titled The Star Thrower. Eisley was sitting under a tree, as he rested and dozed after a trek through a woodland of pines. Suddenly, he was awakened from his slumber by the sound of birds, who were making together a plaintive sound of sorrow and protest. When he looked at a branch above him, there sat a huge raven with a squirming baby bird in his beak. Into the glade a variety of small birds had flown, all joining the tiny parents in their song of grief. Of course, no one dared to attack the raven, but they were all together in their common protest against the fate of this tiny newborn bird. Eisley wrote:
The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the bush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were singers of life, and not of death.
Some people might accuse Eisley of being sentimental, of investing too much of the human story into that of the birds. But Eisley knew what he heard, and he heard a song of grieving protest turn into one of joy. And if that is not the message of Easter and this entire season, I don’ know what else is. The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ opening line in one of his poems is, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Indeed, it is, and this too is the message of the season.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Pay Attention to Beginnings and Endings
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024
Mark 16: 1-8
My 11th grade English teacher was a stickler about beginnings as well as endings. She would have us carefully attend to how a novel or a short story began as well as how it ended. I remember her having us spend nearly a whole class period on the opening line of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the worst of times; it was the best of times.” And then there is the dramatic last line, when Sydney Carton , facing execution during the French Revolution after taking the place of the husband of the woman he loves, delivers this: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Well, if my English teacher had anything to say about it, she would give a poor grade to both the beginning and ending of Mark’s gospel. Its beginning is boring. We have no birth story-----no scandalous pregnancy, no angels, no wise men, no fleeing to Egypt because Herod, is out to murder the baby. No, it simply begins with these simple words: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But Mark is subtle. Though he is telling us only the beginning, he is also suggesting that the story of Jesus Christ is still being written---including in our own lives today.
And then there is the ending, which many people do not like because the risen Jesus makes no appearance at all. Even many clergy don’t like to preach Mark’s ending on Easter Sunday, because it seems so incomplete, even disappointing. All we have are some words from a young man dressed in white, who tells the two Marys, who have gone to the grave with spices, that Jesus has been raised and has gone ahead of them to Galilee. They are not in the least bit happy about the news. Terror and amazement seized them, the text tells us, and “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And that is where Mark ended his gospel.
Well, you know how people are. If they don’t like something, they try to change it or improve it, which is exactly what happened a few centuries down the road. Suddenly, there were these new editions with a different ending tacked on. So, perhaps a monk or a scribe, frustrated with what they thought was an inadequate ending, added some scenes, where Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene and then to the other disciples, telling them to go out into the world to proclaim the good news. So, what we see in our bibles as verses 9 to 19 are a later edition. The reason we know this is that the older versions do not have it.
When we bother to think deeply about the original ending, we can appreciate Mark’s subtlety. First of all, there is something sadly pathetic about going to the tomb with spices to anoint the dead body. Of course, this is what women did. Anointing dead bodies was women’s work, but it was a losing battle against decay and decomposition. And yet, they did it anyway, because at least it was something they could do, and in situations where we feel powerless against forces over which we have no control, doing something feels better than doing nothing. And let’s face it, death is one of those forces that overwhelms us.
As you know, my husband’s sister in law, Jane Oliver, is dying, and we have been driving to MA on Saturdays to visit her and to give my brother in law, Kris, support. She isn’t eating and has not eaten in weeks, but here I am, insisting on bringing ice cream, because well, that is something she used to eat a month ago. So, I take the little cooler from the basement, putting the blue ice in to keep her favorite Haagen Dazs from melting, because, well, it is something I can do, although I know she will not eat it. I guess it is my equivalent of the women and their spices. It is all so futile, but on some level, it feels necessary and even important.
And then Mark shows us the women’s fear. And why wouldn’t they be afraid? Seeing a man, dressed in white, telling them something unbelievable about a dead body being alive and going ahead of them to Galilee is enough to make anyone afraid. If there is one thing they knew, it was death. Death was an intimate companion, not shoved away in some nursing home or hospital. They knew that dead was dead, especially after three days. So, who wouldn’t be unnerved, if not downright terrified, when told that the dead is alive. And who is this guy in white, anyway? Perhaps he stole the body. Why should he be believed? No wonder they were afraid. They neither knew nor understood what was really going on. And that is a situation ripe for fear.
Jesus spent so much of his ministry telling people not to be afraid or anxious. And the reason he did so is because this is exactly what we human beings are: fearful and anxious. The world can be a very scary place, and we human beings invent all kinds of schemes, including insurance, expensive home security systems, guns, and nuclear weapons to overcome or at least control our fear.
I have said before in other sermons that Mark is a master of irony, which runs throughout his gospel. It is ironic that the people who went around with Jesus and should have known who he is, are clueless. And it is doubly ironic that the ones who first recognize Jesus as the Holy One of God are the demons. “WE know who you are,” they said. “Have you come to destroy us?” And then at the end of Mark’s gospel, it is an employee of Caesar’s army, a Roman Centurion, who after watching Jesus die, says, “Truly this man was God’s son.” Why do they get it, when Jesus’ followers do not? The people who knew and loved Jesus are left clueless and afraid, and the ones who recognized him cannot really be trusted to be witnesses. So, who are the witnesses?
The clue to that question may well be in the opening words of Mark’s gospel: “This is the beginning of the good news.” But the beginning is also embraced in Mark’s ending, which includes all of us, people, who are probably more like the disciples than we care to admit. I mean much of the time we don’t get it either. When it comes to resurrection, who among us really understands? None of the gospels offer a description of the resurrection. They only show us some results: a clueless and frightened band of disciples, who could not remain awake while Jesus prayed that the cup might pass from him, and then abandoned Jesus when he was arrested, nonetheless came together along with others to declare that God had done something new in Jesus Christ. “He is risen,” they proclaimed, and the world is made new.
But for all the world’s newness, it is still not a perfect world, so perhaps we are still at the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. God’s time is not our time. But we are part of the story; we are witnesses. We would do well to recall what the man in white said to the women, who were also witnesses. He told them to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee. Ahead of them, and I daresay, ahead of us. Sometimes it can feel that Jesus is so far ahead of us that we cannot possibly catch up. But that may only mean that we should keep moving ahead in the hope that we are moving in the right direction. And if we have it wrong, well, we still can hope that God in Jesus Christ will show us another way. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not finished. It continues in us.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024
Mark 16: 1-8
My 11th grade English teacher was a stickler about beginnings as well as endings. She would have us carefully attend to how a novel or a short story began as well as how it ended. I remember her having us spend nearly a whole class period on the opening line of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the worst of times; it was the best of times.” And then there is the dramatic last line, when Sydney Carton , facing execution during the French Revolution after taking the place of the husband of the woman he loves, delivers this: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Well, if my English teacher had anything to say about it, she would give a poor grade to both the beginning and ending of Mark’s gospel. Its beginning is boring. We have no birth story-----no scandalous pregnancy, no angels, no wise men, no fleeing to Egypt because Herod, is out to murder the baby. No, it simply begins with these simple words: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But Mark is subtle. Though he is telling us only the beginning, he is also suggesting that the story of Jesus Christ is still being written---including in our own lives today.
And then there is the ending, which many people do not like because the risen Jesus makes no appearance at all. Even many clergy don’t like to preach Mark’s ending on Easter Sunday, because it seems so incomplete, even disappointing. All we have are some words from a young man dressed in white, who tells the two Marys, who have gone to the grave with spices, that Jesus has been raised and has gone ahead of them to Galilee. They are not in the least bit happy about the news. Terror and amazement seized them, the text tells us, and “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And that is where Mark ended his gospel.
Well, you know how people are. If they don’t like something, they try to change it or improve it, which is exactly what happened a few centuries down the road. Suddenly, there were these new editions with a different ending tacked on. So, perhaps a monk or a scribe, frustrated with what they thought was an inadequate ending, added some scenes, where Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene and then to the other disciples, telling them to go out into the world to proclaim the good news. So, what we see in our bibles as verses 9 to 19 are a later edition. The reason we know this is that the older versions do not have it.
When we bother to think deeply about the original ending, we can appreciate Mark’s subtlety. First of all, there is something sadly pathetic about going to the tomb with spices to anoint the dead body. Of course, this is what women did. Anointing dead bodies was women’s work, but it was a losing battle against decay and decomposition. And yet, they did it anyway, because at least it was something they could do, and in situations where we feel powerless against forces over which we have no control, doing something feels better than doing nothing. And let’s face it, death is one of those forces that overwhelms us.
As you know, my husband’s sister in law, Jane Oliver, is dying, and we have been driving to MA on Saturdays to visit her and to give my brother in law, Kris, support. She isn’t eating and has not eaten in weeks, but here I am, insisting on bringing ice cream, because well, that is something she used to eat a month ago. So, I take the little cooler from the basement, putting the blue ice in to keep her favorite Haagen Dazs from melting, because, well, it is something I can do, although I know she will not eat it. I guess it is my equivalent of the women and their spices. It is all so futile, but on some level, it feels necessary and even important.
And then Mark shows us the women’s fear. And why wouldn’t they be afraid? Seeing a man, dressed in white, telling them something unbelievable about a dead body being alive and going ahead of them to Galilee is enough to make anyone afraid. If there is one thing they knew, it was death. Death was an intimate companion, not shoved away in some nursing home or hospital. They knew that dead was dead, especially after three days. So, who wouldn’t be unnerved, if not downright terrified, when told that the dead is alive. And who is this guy in white, anyway? Perhaps he stole the body. Why should he be believed? No wonder they were afraid. They neither knew nor understood what was really going on. And that is a situation ripe for fear.
Jesus spent so much of his ministry telling people not to be afraid or anxious. And the reason he did so is because this is exactly what we human beings are: fearful and anxious. The world can be a very scary place, and we human beings invent all kinds of schemes, including insurance, expensive home security systems, guns, and nuclear weapons to overcome or at least control our fear.
I have said before in other sermons that Mark is a master of irony, which runs throughout his gospel. It is ironic that the people who went around with Jesus and should have known who he is, are clueless. And it is doubly ironic that the ones who first recognize Jesus as the Holy One of God are the demons. “WE know who you are,” they said. “Have you come to destroy us?” And then at the end of Mark’s gospel, it is an employee of Caesar’s army, a Roman Centurion, who after watching Jesus die, says, “Truly this man was God’s son.” Why do they get it, when Jesus’ followers do not? The people who knew and loved Jesus are left clueless and afraid, and the ones who recognized him cannot really be trusted to be witnesses. So, who are the witnesses?
The clue to that question may well be in the opening words of Mark’s gospel: “This is the beginning of the good news.” But the beginning is also embraced in Mark’s ending, which includes all of us, people, who are probably more like the disciples than we care to admit. I mean much of the time we don’t get it either. When it comes to resurrection, who among us really understands? None of the gospels offer a description of the resurrection. They only show us some results: a clueless and frightened band of disciples, who could not remain awake while Jesus prayed that the cup might pass from him, and then abandoned Jesus when he was arrested, nonetheless came together along with others to declare that God had done something new in Jesus Christ. “He is risen,” they proclaimed, and the world is made new.
But for all the world’s newness, it is still not a perfect world, so perhaps we are still at the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. God’s time is not our time. But we are part of the story; we are witnesses. We would do well to recall what the man in white said to the women, who were also witnesses. He told them to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee. Ahead of them, and I daresay, ahead of us. Sometimes it can feel that Jesus is so far ahead of us that we cannot possibly catch up. But that may only mean that we should keep moving ahead in the hope that we are moving in the right direction. And if we have it wrong, well, we still can hope that God in Jesus Christ will show us another way. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not finished. It continues in us.
Learning How to Be Afraid
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024
Luke 22: 39-46
When I was a teacher in the 70’s, there was this movement across the country which condemned the reading of fairy tales to children, because of their cruelty and violence. Consider the tale, Hansel and Gretel, whose father abandons them in a forest and then a witch tries to eat them, until clever Gretel pushes her into the oven, where she is finally cooked to death. No wonder that the psychologist, Bruno Bettleheim, wrote a book, called The Uses of Enchantment in which he claimed that fairy tales are effective because they probe the depths of the unconscious and give form and voice to struggles that human beings face. Besides, he said, in fairy tales, the good are victorious and the evil ones are punished, and for children this is a healthy outcome. The moral lines are clearly drawn between good and evil, and it is only as we mature, Bettleheim claimed, that we can learn to handle ambiguity. But first we need strong moral lessons, he said, which the fairy tales provide.
One of Grimm's less well known fairy tales is about a young man, who did not know what fear was. He had never been afraid, and he was convinced that this was a lesson he needed to learn, and so a reward was offered to the one who could make him feel fear. But nothing seemed to work---not monsters or darkness or loud noises. Well, one night, asleep in his bed, his young wife poured over him a bucket of cold water filled with slimy fish. Then, he was grasped by a terrible dread and horror, and for the first time he knew fear.
Soren Kierkegaard, the first modern existentialist Christian philosopher/theologian, began his famous work, The Concept of Dread, by reflecting on this fairy tale. Kierkegaard wrote: “Fear is an adventure, which everyone must face----the adventure of learning how to be afraid, so as not to be lost. The person who has learned how to fear in the right way has learned the most important thing of all."
Learning how to be afraid in the right way, the most important lesson of all? What an extraordinary thing to suggest. Doesn’t fear come naturally enough? Infants apparently have two inborn fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. As the baby grows, she learns to be afraid of separation from parents or the primary caretaker. Some would argue, in fact, that all human fear and anxiety are essentially the fear of separation---separation from those whom we love, separation from our home and our familiar things, which bring us comfort and security, and separation from life itself through death.
People may differ in levels of fear; some people are far more fearful than others, but we all are afraid of something. People fear terrorist attacks or economic collapse or school shootings. Many fear illness and old age. And then there is the war and violence in the Middle East and Ukraine. How will it end? Some of us are terribly fearful about the impending Presidential election. So, with so many things to be fearful about, who needs to learn to be afraid? Besides, did not Jesus spend his ministry telling people not to be afraid and anxious?
But just as Jesus had to learn to face temptation, so too did he have to learn to face fear. There are indeed things worth being afraid of, and for Jesus it was the silence and absence of God. In Gethsemane and on Golgotha Jesus was a man in utter terror. Sweating droplets of blood, according to Luke, praying and pleading for release from this agony of God's absence, Christ did not walk a heroic path of glory. Kierkergaard was right on the mark when he wrote, Christ was in "dread even unto death." The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, was never more profound than when he wrote: "Not only in the eyes of the world and his disciples, nay, even in his own eyes did Christ see himself as lost, as forsaken by God, felt in his conscience that he was cursed by God, suffered the torment of the damned.” Christ, said Luther, was not only assailed by fear and suffering in his human nature, afraid, that is, of the pain and suffering of crucifixion, but more importantly, he was afflicted in his very essence, in his relationship to his God---his divine Sonship---the very marrow of his being. According to Mark and Matthew, he cried out in forsakenness on the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
It was a terrible cry, because his was a terrible fear, and we cannot soften its terror by denying it. Luke leaves this cry out; he has Jesus utter the more pious words, “into your hands I commend my spirit,” which removes from Jesus’ lips the terrible sting of God’s abandonment. Yet God was silent and absent, and "Jesus died with a sense of the most profound rejection by the God whose Son he knew himself to be, and whose messianic kingdom had been his whole passion." Many believe that this cry of abandonment from the cross was historical because the tradition never would have preserved words calling into question the confidence and faith of Jesus without some historical grounding.
All throughout Christian history there have been those who claim that the suffering of Christ was all appearance---something on the historical surface only.
But the theological claim is far deeper than surface appearance. God is expressed in the history of a particular human life, so the suffering of Christ reveals not only the human suffering but also the divine suffering. Christ suffered abandonment by God, and God suffered/grieved the loss of the son. Everything else we think we know about God---particularly what Martin Luther called the God of glory: God in the sunrise colors, God in the magnificence of ocean waves, pounding against a rocky shore; God revealed in acts of kindness and generosity---all of this may be important and true, but it pales in significance before the truth revealed in Christ. When Christ was at his lowest, suffering the curses of the damned, because God was far away, God was also at God's lowest, suffering the absence of the beloved Son.
So, what does this mean for us? God is not some timeless entity, beyond history and human experience, but God is revealed within the constraints of a broken and ambivalent human history. What is most divine about God is not raw force and power, but the suffering love that remains love even when it is assailed, assaulted and tormented. Through all this agonized journey, from the betrayal in Gethsemane to the forsaken cry from the cross, there was never a time when Jesus did not yearn for and love his God, and never a time when God did not yearn for and love the Son. In spite of everything, love always remained love: that is its strength; that is the only victory God in Christ can give. And it is the power of this love that gives new life. In the story of Christ’s abandonment and death, we use the language of poetry to say that God widened the distance between god-self and Christ to make room for the whole world, and because the world has moved into that space, none of us must now fear what Christ already endured.
Tonight the drama is quickened. Jesus will be forsaken, and God's heart will break. We can only tolerate this bitter truth because we look toward the hope of Easter. Today we tremble in fear with Christ, but on Sunday we shall exalt in victory.
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024
Luke 22: 39-46
When I was a teacher in the 70’s, there was this movement across the country which condemned the reading of fairy tales to children, because of their cruelty and violence. Consider the tale, Hansel and Gretel, whose father abandons them in a forest and then a witch tries to eat them, until clever Gretel pushes her into the oven, where she is finally cooked to death. No wonder that the psychologist, Bruno Bettleheim, wrote a book, called The Uses of Enchantment in which he claimed that fairy tales are effective because they probe the depths of the unconscious and give form and voice to struggles that human beings face. Besides, he said, in fairy tales, the good are victorious and the evil ones are punished, and for children this is a healthy outcome. The moral lines are clearly drawn between good and evil, and it is only as we mature, Bettleheim claimed, that we can learn to handle ambiguity. But first we need strong moral lessons, he said, which the fairy tales provide.
One of Grimm's less well known fairy tales is about a young man, who did not know what fear was. He had never been afraid, and he was convinced that this was a lesson he needed to learn, and so a reward was offered to the one who could make him feel fear. But nothing seemed to work---not monsters or darkness or loud noises. Well, one night, asleep in his bed, his young wife poured over him a bucket of cold water filled with slimy fish. Then, he was grasped by a terrible dread and horror, and for the first time he knew fear.
Soren Kierkegaard, the first modern existentialist Christian philosopher/theologian, began his famous work, The Concept of Dread, by reflecting on this fairy tale. Kierkegaard wrote: “Fear is an adventure, which everyone must face----the adventure of learning how to be afraid, so as not to be lost. The person who has learned how to fear in the right way has learned the most important thing of all."
Learning how to be afraid in the right way, the most important lesson of all? What an extraordinary thing to suggest. Doesn’t fear come naturally enough? Infants apparently have two inborn fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. As the baby grows, she learns to be afraid of separation from parents or the primary caretaker. Some would argue, in fact, that all human fear and anxiety are essentially the fear of separation---separation from those whom we love, separation from our home and our familiar things, which bring us comfort and security, and separation from life itself through death.
People may differ in levels of fear; some people are far more fearful than others, but we all are afraid of something. People fear terrorist attacks or economic collapse or school shootings. Many fear illness and old age. And then there is the war and violence in the Middle East and Ukraine. How will it end? Some of us are terribly fearful about the impending Presidential election. So, with so many things to be fearful about, who needs to learn to be afraid? Besides, did not Jesus spend his ministry telling people not to be afraid and anxious?
But just as Jesus had to learn to face temptation, so too did he have to learn to face fear. There are indeed things worth being afraid of, and for Jesus it was the silence and absence of God. In Gethsemane and on Golgotha Jesus was a man in utter terror. Sweating droplets of blood, according to Luke, praying and pleading for release from this agony of God's absence, Christ did not walk a heroic path of glory. Kierkergaard was right on the mark when he wrote, Christ was in "dread even unto death." The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, was never more profound than when he wrote: "Not only in the eyes of the world and his disciples, nay, even in his own eyes did Christ see himself as lost, as forsaken by God, felt in his conscience that he was cursed by God, suffered the torment of the damned.” Christ, said Luther, was not only assailed by fear and suffering in his human nature, afraid, that is, of the pain and suffering of crucifixion, but more importantly, he was afflicted in his very essence, in his relationship to his God---his divine Sonship---the very marrow of his being. According to Mark and Matthew, he cried out in forsakenness on the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
It was a terrible cry, because his was a terrible fear, and we cannot soften its terror by denying it. Luke leaves this cry out; he has Jesus utter the more pious words, “into your hands I commend my spirit,” which removes from Jesus’ lips the terrible sting of God’s abandonment. Yet God was silent and absent, and "Jesus died with a sense of the most profound rejection by the God whose Son he knew himself to be, and whose messianic kingdom had been his whole passion." Many believe that this cry of abandonment from the cross was historical because the tradition never would have preserved words calling into question the confidence and faith of Jesus without some historical grounding.
All throughout Christian history there have been those who claim that the suffering of Christ was all appearance---something on the historical surface only.
But the theological claim is far deeper than surface appearance. God is expressed in the history of a particular human life, so the suffering of Christ reveals not only the human suffering but also the divine suffering. Christ suffered abandonment by God, and God suffered/grieved the loss of the son. Everything else we think we know about God---particularly what Martin Luther called the God of glory: God in the sunrise colors, God in the magnificence of ocean waves, pounding against a rocky shore; God revealed in acts of kindness and generosity---all of this may be important and true, but it pales in significance before the truth revealed in Christ. When Christ was at his lowest, suffering the curses of the damned, because God was far away, God was also at God's lowest, suffering the absence of the beloved Son.
So, what does this mean for us? God is not some timeless entity, beyond history and human experience, but God is revealed within the constraints of a broken and ambivalent human history. What is most divine about God is not raw force and power, but the suffering love that remains love even when it is assailed, assaulted and tormented. Through all this agonized journey, from the betrayal in Gethsemane to the forsaken cry from the cross, there was never a time when Jesus did not yearn for and love his God, and never a time when God did not yearn for and love the Son. In spite of everything, love always remained love: that is its strength; that is the only victory God in Christ can give. And it is the power of this love that gives new life. In the story of Christ’s abandonment and death, we use the language of poetry to say that God widened the distance between god-self and Christ to make room for the whole world, and because the world has moved into that space, none of us must now fear what Christ already endured.
Tonight the drama is quickened. Jesus will be forsaken, and God's heart will break. We can only tolerate this bitter truth because we look toward the hope of Easter. Today we tremble in fear with Christ, but on Sunday we shall exalt in victory.
March 20, 2024
Dear Friends,
The universe is believed to be 26.7 billion years old. Not too long ago, the estimate was
13.7 billion years, but in the past year advanced technology has led scientists to revise their estimate to double what they previously thought. “All science,” my husband claims, “is theory. We don’t get better than theory, because we always must be ready and willing to readjust what we think as new information and knowledge emerge.”
The James Webb Telescope is showing us images of a vast and amazing universe that were unimaginable just a few years ago, and indeed, when we take the time to look at the images, we can feel very small and insignificant. People probably always experienced some insignificance when gazing at a star studded sky or watching the sun set or the moon rise. No wonder the Psalmist pondered, “What is the human being that God is mindful of him or her?” We are hardly the swiftest or the strongest creature on the planet, but we do have this incredible cerebral cortex, which allows us to question and to wonder, to search and to ponder and to build something as wonderful as the James Webb Telescope.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it took at least 600 million years for the earth’s crust to cool down and take shape. After another 300 million years sped by, the first signs of microbial life began to make its appearance. 3.2 billion years elapsed and then there was this amazing Cambrian explosion, which was an evolutionary burst of life. There were some mass extinctions and then 465 million years later, mammals finally made their extraordinary appearance. But homo sapiens were not yet in the picture. The first homo sapiens appeared on earth around 300,000 years ago. So, we have only been part of the earth’s story for .0067% of the earth’s existence.
During those 300,000 years human beings have been anything but passive. Consider how busy we have been. The story goes that we were given “dominion” over all living things, and though we can debate if a better word would be responsibility rather than dominion, it can hardly be denied that our care for the earth is less than impressive. The Creator has had to contend with the hard truth that these human beings, who some might argue are the crown of creation, have created a great deal of trouble and mayhem. Perhaps that is not completely our fault, since we came into the world in a very vulnerable and incomplete state. We had a great deal of learning and inventing to do just to survive! Consider the harnessing of fire and how we roamed around as nomads until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the first civilizations began to form. We had to learn to plant and to harvest, and then our species really took off. In a mere 6000 years we have moved from a state of hunter-gatherers to explorers of space! Of course, in those 6000 years we have also caused a great deal of trouble. We have fought terrible wars and have killed not only other humans but also have compromised the health of this beautiful planet and killed off a great many other species. Sometimes we did not understand what we were doing; we did not see or understand the consequences of our actions. We had to learn (and we are still trying to learn this lesson) that people who do not look like us or believe like us are still human beings, beloved by God. Unfortunately, we still resist learning that lesson.
The great 20th century rabbi, Joshua Herman Heschel, once noted: “Faith only begins when you feel sorry for God.” And indeed, we can feel sorry for God, when we consider the disappointment God must deal with when it comes to God’s wayward people. Perhaps God takes comfort in the fact that we human beings are still babes. Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astrophysicist, who many decades ago, did a PBS special, called Cosmos, placed the universe’s history on a 365 day calendar with January 1 being the day of the Big Bang and our current placement in time beginning at 12:01 AM the following year. At 10:30 PM, on December 31 humans appear, and all of recorded history is compressed into just a few seconds. It’s really not much time to learn all we need to learn and understand. So, we are still on the way, still trying to figure out what makes for full and abundant life for all God’s creatures. God is patiently waiting for us to learn the lessons we need to learn. And though God’s patience might sometimes wear down, God still is waiting for us to catch up.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The universe is believed to be 26.7 billion years old. Not too long ago, the estimate was
13.7 billion years, but in the past year advanced technology has led scientists to revise their estimate to double what they previously thought. “All science,” my husband claims, “is theory. We don’t get better than theory, because we always must be ready and willing to readjust what we think as new information and knowledge emerge.”
The James Webb Telescope is showing us images of a vast and amazing universe that were unimaginable just a few years ago, and indeed, when we take the time to look at the images, we can feel very small and insignificant. People probably always experienced some insignificance when gazing at a star studded sky or watching the sun set or the moon rise. No wonder the Psalmist pondered, “What is the human being that God is mindful of him or her?” We are hardly the swiftest or the strongest creature on the planet, but we do have this incredible cerebral cortex, which allows us to question and to wonder, to search and to ponder and to build something as wonderful as the James Webb Telescope.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it took at least 600 million years for the earth’s crust to cool down and take shape. After another 300 million years sped by, the first signs of microbial life began to make its appearance. 3.2 billion years elapsed and then there was this amazing Cambrian explosion, which was an evolutionary burst of life. There were some mass extinctions and then 465 million years later, mammals finally made their extraordinary appearance. But homo sapiens were not yet in the picture. The first homo sapiens appeared on earth around 300,000 years ago. So, we have only been part of the earth’s story for .0067% of the earth’s existence.
During those 300,000 years human beings have been anything but passive. Consider how busy we have been. The story goes that we were given “dominion” over all living things, and though we can debate if a better word would be responsibility rather than dominion, it can hardly be denied that our care for the earth is less than impressive. The Creator has had to contend with the hard truth that these human beings, who some might argue are the crown of creation, have created a great deal of trouble and mayhem. Perhaps that is not completely our fault, since we came into the world in a very vulnerable and incomplete state. We had a great deal of learning and inventing to do just to survive! Consider the harnessing of fire and how we roamed around as nomads until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the first civilizations began to form. We had to learn to plant and to harvest, and then our species really took off. In a mere 6000 years we have moved from a state of hunter-gatherers to explorers of space! Of course, in those 6000 years we have also caused a great deal of trouble. We have fought terrible wars and have killed not only other humans but also have compromised the health of this beautiful planet and killed off a great many other species. Sometimes we did not understand what we were doing; we did not see or understand the consequences of our actions. We had to learn (and we are still trying to learn this lesson) that people who do not look like us or believe like us are still human beings, beloved by God. Unfortunately, we still resist learning that lesson.
The great 20th century rabbi, Joshua Herman Heschel, once noted: “Faith only begins when you feel sorry for God.” And indeed, we can feel sorry for God, when we consider the disappointment God must deal with when it comes to God’s wayward people. Perhaps God takes comfort in the fact that we human beings are still babes. Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astrophysicist, who many decades ago, did a PBS special, called Cosmos, placed the universe’s history on a 365 day calendar with January 1 being the day of the Big Bang and our current placement in time beginning at 12:01 AM the following year. At 10:30 PM, on December 31 humans appear, and all of recorded history is compressed into just a few seconds. It’s really not much time to learn all we need to learn and understand. So, we are still on the way, still trying to figure out what makes for full and abundant life for all God’s creatures. God is patiently waiting for us to learn the lessons we need to learn. And though God’s patience might sometimes wear down, God still is waiting for us to catch up.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Making and Keeping Promises
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 17, 2024
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
John 12: 20-33
I will always remember Caroline, a super smart 15 year old girl, admitted to Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island, where I worked as a chaplain. Caroline had slashed her wrists, and although the cuts were not life threatening, still it was worrisome behavior, and so she was hospitalized. Her parents were in the midst of a very ugly divorce. She was the oldest of three children and felt responsible for the well being of her two younger siblings, who were 8 and 12. Both the psychiatrist and the social worker thought her behavior was directly aimed at the parents, who were behaving badly toward each other. The slashing was the full expression of her anger: “Hey, what do you two think you’re doing, throwing temper tantrums at each other rather than caring about us?”
When I entered Caroline’s room, I told her I was the chaplain.
“What does a chaplain do?” she wanted to know.
“Oh,” I said, “I listen to a lot of stories, and sometimes I even tell some.”
“What kind of stories do you tell?” she asked.
“Well, that depends on the situation. What kind do you like?”
“I like the kind that end happily ever after,” she said.
“Oh, you like fairy tales. What’s your favorite?” I wanted to know.
“Well, I always liked Sleeping Beauty,” she said. “When I was very little and saw the movie, I got really scared when Maleficent was fighting the Prince, but in the end everything came out just right. That was the best part---when everything came out all right.”
“I like that story too,” I admitted. “I especially like the three fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather, who gave to the Princess Aurora three gifts: beauty, the gift of a beautiful voice and then to counteract the wicked spell of Maleficent, she gave the Princess the gift of falling into a deep sleep for 100 years, rather than dying from pricking her finger on the spinning wheel. But you know something, I continued, if I had been giving out the gifts, I think I would have given some different ones. “Really? Like what?”
“Well,” I said, I think I would have given her courage. You know life can be hard, and courage is needed. And then hope, because hope keeps us going through all the tough times.”
“But Aurora was a Princess,” Caroline said. “She didn’t need hope or courage, because she just slept through all the problems until the Prince woke her with a kiss. He was the one who fought the battle for her.”
“Yes, I know, but that’s what makes it a fairy tale, because in real life we can’t sleep through our problems. In real life others can help us with our battles, but they cannot completely fight them for us.”
Caroline was silent for what seemed like a very long time. Finally she looked up at me and said, “My parents broke their promises to us kids. Parents are supposed to love their children, take care of them, no matter what. But my Dad is more interested in his new girlfriend and my Mom cares more about punishing my Dad than she does about caring for my brother, sister and me. I wish I could sleep for a 100 years, like Princess Aurora, and when I wake up everything would be fine.”
“Well, I can understand your wish,” I said, but you are old enough to realize that wishes don’t alwaycome true.” “I know that,” she said, “just like I know that people break their promises.”
Promises: they do get broken, though that does not prevent us from making them and expecting others to keep them. There are the explicit promises we make, when we promise our children that we will take them to the beach on a particular day, but more often than not the promises we make are implicit, meaning that they are not directly laid out, but they are implied in the relationship. Marriage and parenthood bring with them all kinds of implied promises. None of us here who are parents had to sign a statement saying we will love and care for our children, but the understanding is that we will. Friendship works the same way. There are a lot of implicit promises in friendship, though we know how easy it is to get into trouble when one friend has certain expectations about the relationship that another does not have.
And then there are the promises implicit in government, citizenship, and business. As citizens we implicitly make a promise to be law abiding, to pay our taxes and vote. There is an implied social contract, and we expect our government to protect us from foreign invasion and when natural disasters strike, to offer aid and comfort. As citizens we do have a right to expect the government to provide a reasonable safety net, especially for people who cannot care for themselves. We also expect Wall Street and our banking system to make responsible decisions so that savings and investments for retirement are not swallowed up by the greed of others. There is no document with such explicit promises signed, but such promises are implicit in the very nature of the political, economic, and social institutions, which direct the workings of our society.
Promises: We human beings could not live without them, and indeed, promises are at the heart of religion. In the Old Testament we have something called Covenant, an agreement made between God and the Israelites in which God promised to care for the people and the people would honor the law. “You shall be my people and I shall be your God.” But, of course, a great deal of the story line in the Jewish scriptures has to do with the breaking of the covenant. The Israelites did not keep the law, breaking their promise to God, and sometimes the Jews accuse God of failing to keep God’s promises to them.
Covenant is what is going on in our reading today from the book of Jeremiah. Now Jeremiah was not popular. He had been telling the people that they were about to be punished, because they failed to keep God’s law. They had broken every commandment, and even went “whoring” after other gods, baking cakes for the Queen of Heaven, for example, a female deity, who was part of the natural cycle of the land and the seasons. In this morning’s reading Nebuchadnezzar is at Jerusalem’s gates, and it appears as if God’s covenant with Israel is at an end. Broken promises lie scattered on the ground. And what does this curmudgeonly Jeremiah say? Rather than condemnation, he now offers hope. “The days are surely coming” when God will write on our hearts indelibly a desire to be faithful to God. God will change our crooked hearts into hearts that will desire what God desires for us. The promises may look broken, but God is doing something new.
“The hour has come.” This is the announcement Jesus made, when some Greeks came looking for him. The presence of the Greeks is no incidental inclusion, for the Greeks were known as seekers of wisdom, and here they come, searching for Jesus. And when Phillip and Andrew found Jesus and told him the Greeks were searching for him, Jesus answered, “The hour has come,” which in John’s gospel means the fulfillment of his mission is at hand. Jesus is about to be lifted up on the cross, so that all may be drawn to the love of God. Here is the promise: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. Jesus says nothing here about what we have to do to earn this; he doesn’t say we all have to believe the same things or do a certain kind of job and be successful in a certain kind of way. He simply says what he will do---draw all people to myself---that is, draw all people into the love and mercy of God.
Promises: People live by them, and Jesus did too. He lived, died, and rose that this promise of God’s love for the world may be known. This is the ultimate promise, and we look for hints of it in the concreteness of our lives---as Caroline did. Here parents were shocked into an improved mode of behavior by the message she sent them. And then during Caroline’s hospital stay, she connected to a seven year old boy, Tyler, who was suffering from leukemia. His mom was a single parent with a full time job and two other young children, and his dad lived on the west coast, so Tyler was alone in the hospital a great deal of the time. Caroline took to visiting Tyler---even after she was discharged. One day, it must have been at least a month after Caroline had left the hospital, I was on the ward and there sat Caroline next to Tyler’s empty bed. Tyler was having surgery that day.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, and Caroline answered, “Tyler was really afraid about his surgery, and so I promised that I would be here when he woke up. I am going to keep that promise, even if it is midnight when he comes back.” And there she sat all afternoon, well into the night. I left work at 6 P.M., while Caroline was still sitting by Tyler’s bedside. The nurse told me that her mother came in at 7 to take her home, but she refused to go. At 10 her father showed up, and she would not go with him either. “Well, her father said, “I guess if you won’t leave, I will just have to wait with you.” And there the two of them sat until after midnight, when finally Tyler was brought back to his room, tubes connected here and there, all over his body. He opened his eyes, Caroline leaned down and said, “I told you I would be here.” “I knew you would,” he said.
Promises: We make them all the time, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. We make them and yes, we break them, but there is grace, and sometimes it does break into our lives, reminding us that God is not the only one who CAN keep promises. We can too.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 17, 2024
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
John 12: 20-33
I will always remember Caroline, a super smart 15 year old girl, admitted to Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island, where I worked as a chaplain. Caroline had slashed her wrists, and although the cuts were not life threatening, still it was worrisome behavior, and so she was hospitalized. Her parents were in the midst of a very ugly divorce. She was the oldest of three children and felt responsible for the well being of her two younger siblings, who were 8 and 12. Both the psychiatrist and the social worker thought her behavior was directly aimed at the parents, who were behaving badly toward each other. The slashing was the full expression of her anger: “Hey, what do you two think you’re doing, throwing temper tantrums at each other rather than caring about us?”
When I entered Caroline’s room, I told her I was the chaplain.
“What does a chaplain do?” she wanted to know.
“Oh,” I said, “I listen to a lot of stories, and sometimes I even tell some.”
“What kind of stories do you tell?” she asked.
“Well, that depends on the situation. What kind do you like?”
“I like the kind that end happily ever after,” she said.
“Oh, you like fairy tales. What’s your favorite?” I wanted to know.
“Well, I always liked Sleeping Beauty,” she said. “When I was very little and saw the movie, I got really scared when Maleficent was fighting the Prince, but in the end everything came out just right. That was the best part---when everything came out all right.”
“I like that story too,” I admitted. “I especially like the three fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather, who gave to the Princess Aurora three gifts: beauty, the gift of a beautiful voice and then to counteract the wicked spell of Maleficent, she gave the Princess the gift of falling into a deep sleep for 100 years, rather than dying from pricking her finger on the spinning wheel. But you know something, I continued, if I had been giving out the gifts, I think I would have given some different ones. “Really? Like what?”
“Well,” I said, I think I would have given her courage. You know life can be hard, and courage is needed. And then hope, because hope keeps us going through all the tough times.”
“But Aurora was a Princess,” Caroline said. “She didn’t need hope or courage, because she just slept through all the problems until the Prince woke her with a kiss. He was the one who fought the battle for her.”
“Yes, I know, but that’s what makes it a fairy tale, because in real life we can’t sleep through our problems. In real life others can help us with our battles, but they cannot completely fight them for us.”
Caroline was silent for what seemed like a very long time. Finally she looked up at me and said, “My parents broke their promises to us kids. Parents are supposed to love their children, take care of them, no matter what. But my Dad is more interested in his new girlfriend and my Mom cares more about punishing my Dad than she does about caring for my brother, sister and me. I wish I could sleep for a 100 years, like Princess Aurora, and when I wake up everything would be fine.”
“Well, I can understand your wish,” I said, but you are old enough to realize that wishes don’t alwaycome true.” “I know that,” she said, “just like I know that people break their promises.”
Promises: they do get broken, though that does not prevent us from making them and expecting others to keep them. There are the explicit promises we make, when we promise our children that we will take them to the beach on a particular day, but more often than not the promises we make are implicit, meaning that they are not directly laid out, but they are implied in the relationship. Marriage and parenthood bring with them all kinds of implied promises. None of us here who are parents had to sign a statement saying we will love and care for our children, but the understanding is that we will. Friendship works the same way. There are a lot of implicit promises in friendship, though we know how easy it is to get into trouble when one friend has certain expectations about the relationship that another does not have.
And then there are the promises implicit in government, citizenship, and business. As citizens we implicitly make a promise to be law abiding, to pay our taxes and vote. There is an implied social contract, and we expect our government to protect us from foreign invasion and when natural disasters strike, to offer aid and comfort. As citizens we do have a right to expect the government to provide a reasonable safety net, especially for people who cannot care for themselves. We also expect Wall Street and our banking system to make responsible decisions so that savings and investments for retirement are not swallowed up by the greed of others. There is no document with such explicit promises signed, but such promises are implicit in the very nature of the political, economic, and social institutions, which direct the workings of our society.
Promises: We human beings could not live without them, and indeed, promises are at the heart of religion. In the Old Testament we have something called Covenant, an agreement made between God and the Israelites in which God promised to care for the people and the people would honor the law. “You shall be my people and I shall be your God.” But, of course, a great deal of the story line in the Jewish scriptures has to do with the breaking of the covenant. The Israelites did not keep the law, breaking their promise to God, and sometimes the Jews accuse God of failing to keep God’s promises to them.
Covenant is what is going on in our reading today from the book of Jeremiah. Now Jeremiah was not popular. He had been telling the people that they were about to be punished, because they failed to keep God’s law. They had broken every commandment, and even went “whoring” after other gods, baking cakes for the Queen of Heaven, for example, a female deity, who was part of the natural cycle of the land and the seasons. In this morning’s reading Nebuchadnezzar is at Jerusalem’s gates, and it appears as if God’s covenant with Israel is at an end. Broken promises lie scattered on the ground. And what does this curmudgeonly Jeremiah say? Rather than condemnation, he now offers hope. “The days are surely coming” when God will write on our hearts indelibly a desire to be faithful to God. God will change our crooked hearts into hearts that will desire what God desires for us. The promises may look broken, but God is doing something new.
“The hour has come.” This is the announcement Jesus made, when some Greeks came looking for him. The presence of the Greeks is no incidental inclusion, for the Greeks were known as seekers of wisdom, and here they come, searching for Jesus. And when Phillip and Andrew found Jesus and told him the Greeks were searching for him, Jesus answered, “The hour has come,” which in John’s gospel means the fulfillment of his mission is at hand. Jesus is about to be lifted up on the cross, so that all may be drawn to the love of God. Here is the promise: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. Jesus says nothing here about what we have to do to earn this; he doesn’t say we all have to believe the same things or do a certain kind of job and be successful in a certain kind of way. He simply says what he will do---draw all people to myself---that is, draw all people into the love and mercy of God.
Promises: People live by them, and Jesus did too. He lived, died, and rose that this promise of God’s love for the world may be known. This is the ultimate promise, and we look for hints of it in the concreteness of our lives---as Caroline did. Here parents were shocked into an improved mode of behavior by the message she sent them. And then during Caroline’s hospital stay, she connected to a seven year old boy, Tyler, who was suffering from leukemia. His mom was a single parent with a full time job and two other young children, and his dad lived on the west coast, so Tyler was alone in the hospital a great deal of the time. Caroline took to visiting Tyler---even after she was discharged. One day, it must have been at least a month after Caroline had left the hospital, I was on the ward and there sat Caroline next to Tyler’s empty bed. Tyler was having surgery that day.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, and Caroline answered, “Tyler was really afraid about his surgery, and so I promised that I would be here when he woke up. I am going to keep that promise, even if it is midnight when he comes back.” And there she sat all afternoon, well into the night. I left work at 6 P.M., while Caroline was still sitting by Tyler’s bedside. The nurse told me that her mother came in at 7 to take her home, but she refused to go. At 10 her father showed up, and she would not go with him either. “Well, her father said, “I guess if you won’t leave, I will just have to wait with you.” And there the two of them sat until after midnight, when finally Tyler was brought back to his room, tubes connected here and there, all over his body. He opened his eyes, Caroline leaned down and said, “I told you I would be here.” “I knew you would,” he said.
Promises: We make them all the time, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. We make them and yes, we break them, but there is grace, and sometimes it does break into our lives, reminding us that God is not the only one who CAN keep promises. We can too.
March 12, 2024
Dear Friends,
When the world does not go our way, that is, when we find ourselves stymied by some unfortunate occurrence, like the flu that prevents us from going on that week end trip to New York we had planned on for a few months, what do we often do? We complain, a very human response to frustration and disappointment. But very recently I came across the poetry of William Stafford, who lived between 1914 and 1993. Stafford was a peace activist and a poet, though he came late to the craft of poetry. His first major collection of poems was published when he was 48, and within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United States. That is a very fast track to stardom!
What is so fascinating about Stafford’s poetry is his perspective that we human beings are really owed nothing at all. That we exist is a miracle, since the chances of our existence are infinitesimally small. And yet we do exist on a planet that gives us not only the air and water we need to live but also much, much more. We are surrounded by nature’s beauty, and we also have human achievement, which has graced us with the beauty of a Beethoven Symphony and Rembrandt paintings. And we have laughter and tears and friends and enemies too. We have more than we deserve or even should expect, so Stafford’s advice is quite simple: Stifle your complaining!
I know nothing about Stafford’s formal religion, or even if he had a religion. But God does enter into his picture of the world. There is no denying that he was a keen observer of the human condition, and he realized how the next moment, or the next day is not guaranteed to us. So, he counseled gratitude. And the readiness to accept what comes along and learn from it. In a poem he named, YES, he wrote:
It could happen any time, tornado,
Earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
And look out---no guarantees
In this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
Like right now, like noon,
Like evening.
And then on the morning before he died, in the very last year of his 70’s, he wrote a poem that had these lines:
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
Will happen. I’m still here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.
So much of the time we do not think it is easy---even though Jesus tried to tell us that his yoke was easy, and his burden was light. But we have a hard time believing that, because, let’s face it, his yoke and burden hardly look easy and light to us. Oh, we struggle to get along and go along as we look out at a world that often appears from our very human perspective to be out of joint, so it is easy to think that Jesus too struggled. After all, he was one of us--- though also different from us. He was, after all, much more aware of living in God’s immense and wide embracing grace. So, even when facing the cross, even when he prayed for the cup to pass from him, in the end, he did pray, “Not my will, but your will.” Though I do not believe that God willed for Jesus to die, God did not prevent human beings from doing their worst. And God had to work with and through what human beings did and now are doing. I always imagined that it was a struggle for both God and Jesus. But perhaps in the end, it was like putting your “hand out in the sun again.” Perhaps “it was all easy.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When the world does not go our way, that is, when we find ourselves stymied by some unfortunate occurrence, like the flu that prevents us from going on that week end trip to New York we had planned on for a few months, what do we often do? We complain, a very human response to frustration and disappointment. But very recently I came across the poetry of William Stafford, who lived between 1914 and 1993. Stafford was a peace activist and a poet, though he came late to the craft of poetry. His first major collection of poems was published when he was 48, and within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United States. That is a very fast track to stardom!
What is so fascinating about Stafford’s poetry is his perspective that we human beings are really owed nothing at all. That we exist is a miracle, since the chances of our existence are infinitesimally small. And yet we do exist on a planet that gives us not only the air and water we need to live but also much, much more. We are surrounded by nature’s beauty, and we also have human achievement, which has graced us with the beauty of a Beethoven Symphony and Rembrandt paintings. And we have laughter and tears and friends and enemies too. We have more than we deserve or even should expect, so Stafford’s advice is quite simple: Stifle your complaining!
I know nothing about Stafford’s formal religion, or even if he had a religion. But God does enter into his picture of the world. There is no denying that he was a keen observer of the human condition, and he realized how the next moment, or the next day is not guaranteed to us. So, he counseled gratitude. And the readiness to accept what comes along and learn from it. In a poem he named, YES, he wrote:
It could happen any time, tornado,
Earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
And look out---no guarantees
In this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
Like right now, like noon,
Like evening.
And then on the morning before he died, in the very last year of his 70’s, he wrote a poem that had these lines:
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
Will happen. I’m still here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.
So much of the time we do not think it is easy---even though Jesus tried to tell us that his yoke was easy, and his burden was light. But we have a hard time believing that, because, let’s face it, his yoke and burden hardly look easy and light to us. Oh, we struggle to get along and go along as we look out at a world that often appears from our very human perspective to be out of joint, so it is easy to think that Jesus too struggled. After all, he was one of us--- though also different from us. He was, after all, much more aware of living in God’s immense and wide embracing grace. So, even when facing the cross, even when he prayed for the cup to pass from him, in the end, he did pray, “Not my will, but your will.” Though I do not believe that God willed for Jesus to die, God did not prevent human beings from doing their worst. And God had to work with and through what human beings did and now are doing. I always imagined that it was a struggle for both God and Jesus. But perhaps in the end, it was like putting your “hand out in the sun again.” Perhaps “it was all easy.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
On The Mercy Seat
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 10, 2024
Exodus 25: 17-22
Ephesians 2: 1-10
In May,1883 a young man, Matthew Joshua Clark, graduating from Harvard Divinity School and aspiring to the ordained ministry in the Congregational Church, was being examined by his Ecclesiastical Council, a process still used today. The Council now is made up of both ordained and lay persons, but in Clark’s day it might have included only the ordained. The candidate (then as now) submits a theological statement of faith upon which he or she is examined. Matthew Clark was facing deep hostility from his Council when he said that Christians owe mercy to all people. Now 1883 was 18 years after the end of the Civil War, and the nation was still in shock from all the bloodshed. When the war began, everyone thought it would be quickly over, but it lasted four agonizing years, killing at least 620,000 soldiers, and leaving another half million wounded.
The county was also suffering from a religious crisis because many people, both from the North and the South, wondered what God had been doing in the midst of that terrible carnage. People from both sides, including clergy, had been confident that God was on their side. But the South had lost, so where was God for them? And the North, though victorious, had to contend with a vast number of dead and wounded. If God had been on its side, why so much death and suffering? Lincoln had said in his Second Inaugural Address, that the War was God’s wrath visited upon the nation for the sin of slavery, and indeed, to some people at least, it made sense.
So, the nation was hungering for some religious good news, and it was during this time that the Universalist Denomination, which taught that God loves all people and will finally save all people, was growing. Now this belief was not original to the Universalists; it had been around since the beginning of Christianity with some very sophisticated theological minds throughout Christian history defending the claim. But until quite recently, it was always a minority position. In the years following the Civil War, the Universalists boldly preached God is love, and love will seek out the lost until they are found. God in Christ is the great healer, the one who will do for humanity what humanity cannot do for itself---that is, save itself. War had been a cruel teacher, and people recognized that sin lurked deeply within and could not be extirpated through human efforts alone. And so, many people began to embrace universalism, including some clergy who chose to remain within the Congregational Churches.
On that May afternoon Matthew Joshua Clark was facing clergy, who were committed to ferreting out the dreaded doctrine of universal salvation. Clark understood what the great Protestant theologian, John Calvin, had taught: God elects some people to salvation, while the vast majority of humankind is elected to damnation, and this election, Calvin taught, has nothing to do with what people do or how they live. It is simply a decision that God makes. The examination began with someone reminding Matthew Clark that Tertullian, one of the early Latin fathers of the Church, had said that the blessed in heaven experience even greater blessedness when they viewed the damned in hell, writhing in tormented agony. The candidate was asked what he thought of this image. Clark answered forthrightly, “A Christian can never feel happiness or blessedness at the suffering of another”. “So,” the question practically shot forth from the mouth of an examiner, “you think the damned are worthy of compassion? Is the quality of mercy appropriately directed toward the damned?”
Now Clark was no fool. He had been classically educated, and so he knew that Greek and Roman philosophy, including stoic philosophy, denied compassion and mercy to evil people. But he also knew that the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, advised it was neither right nor prudent to go against conscience, and so he answered as his conscience dictated: “Christians ethically owe mercy to all people.” Well, you can imagine the outrage. One minister said, “God does not call us to waste our tears on the reprobates. You have no defense, no defender.” The candidate calmly replied, "Christ will defend me, because Christ sits on the seat of mercy.”
Now the seat of mercy appears in the book of Exodus as you heard this morning. It is on the top of the Ark of the Covenant, where God’s law is kept, and the mercy seat is framed by two cherubim (angels), who spread out their wings above the seat. The seat is vacant, though in the Jewish calendar on the Day of Atonement, God is said to appear in a cloud above the mercy seat. But when Matthew Clark put Christ on the mercy seat, he was claiming that no one is so lost that he or she cannot be found by the mercy of Jesus Christ.
As the examination moved toward its end, Matthew, who had recently traveled to Europe, visiting the great museums of the world, told his examiners something they would never have expected to hear at an ordination examination. He described to them a few different paintings he had seen of Angelica and the Hermit. Now this story is not biblical; it comes from a Renaissance “soap opera” with the heroine, the young and beautiful Angelica, having many adventures. She meets a hermit, whom she supposes to be a good man, but in reality, he is caught in a life choice he cannot bear. Though he has taken a vow of celibacy, he rebels at its cruel austerity, and he longs for the release of passion and love. And so, he casts a spell upon Angelica. There she lies, sprawled out, naked on her bed, while the hermit creeps up on her, lifting up the sheet, making ready to rape her.
While nearly all the artists, who have treated this story have painted the hermit as contemptible, a reprobate, grasped by sin's power, Clark told his examiners that the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, had alone painted the hermit’s face full of pathos. The hermit cannot have what so many others have as the natural course of their lives, and in the absence of sexual consummation, he suffers. The story, by the way, tells us that the hermit failed in his deed as he also failed in his vow, not because he successfully resisted temptation, but because he was impotent. Well, you can well imagine the shock of his examiners. But Matthew’s point was this:what looks like damnable sin and reprobation to us may look to God as pathos, deserving of mercy. What, asked Matthew Clark, does sin look like when seen through the eyes of mercy? Clark reminded his examiners that in the book of Exodus God hovers in a cloud above the seat of mercy, while the cherubim’s magnificent golden wings overshadow the seat. But what if Christ sits squarely on the seat of mercy, not above it or below it, but on it? In that position Christ sees what no one else sees.
Matthew Clark failed his ordination examination, and would later go to the Universalists, who understood exactly what he was trying to say. God is rich in mercy, and humans best imitate God when mercy seasons justice, even at times, overcoming justice’s demands.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 10, 2024
Exodus 25: 17-22
Ephesians 2: 1-10
In May,1883 a young man, Matthew Joshua Clark, graduating from Harvard Divinity School and aspiring to the ordained ministry in the Congregational Church, was being examined by his Ecclesiastical Council, a process still used today. The Council now is made up of both ordained and lay persons, but in Clark’s day it might have included only the ordained. The candidate (then as now) submits a theological statement of faith upon which he or she is examined. Matthew Clark was facing deep hostility from his Council when he said that Christians owe mercy to all people. Now 1883 was 18 years after the end of the Civil War, and the nation was still in shock from all the bloodshed. When the war began, everyone thought it would be quickly over, but it lasted four agonizing years, killing at least 620,000 soldiers, and leaving another half million wounded.
The county was also suffering from a religious crisis because many people, both from the North and the South, wondered what God had been doing in the midst of that terrible carnage. People from both sides, including clergy, had been confident that God was on their side. But the South had lost, so where was God for them? And the North, though victorious, had to contend with a vast number of dead and wounded. If God had been on its side, why so much death and suffering? Lincoln had said in his Second Inaugural Address, that the War was God’s wrath visited upon the nation for the sin of slavery, and indeed, to some people at least, it made sense.
So, the nation was hungering for some religious good news, and it was during this time that the Universalist Denomination, which taught that God loves all people and will finally save all people, was growing. Now this belief was not original to the Universalists; it had been around since the beginning of Christianity with some very sophisticated theological minds throughout Christian history defending the claim. But until quite recently, it was always a minority position. In the years following the Civil War, the Universalists boldly preached God is love, and love will seek out the lost until they are found. God in Christ is the great healer, the one who will do for humanity what humanity cannot do for itself---that is, save itself. War had been a cruel teacher, and people recognized that sin lurked deeply within and could not be extirpated through human efforts alone. And so, many people began to embrace universalism, including some clergy who chose to remain within the Congregational Churches.
On that May afternoon Matthew Joshua Clark was facing clergy, who were committed to ferreting out the dreaded doctrine of universal salvation. Clark understood what the great Protestant theologian, John Calvin, had taught: God elects some people to salvation, while the vast majority of humankind is elected to damnation, and this election, Calvin taught, has nothing to do with what people do or how they live. It is simply a decision that God makes. The examination began with someone reminding Matthew Clark that Tertullian, one of the early Latin fathers of the Church, had said that the blessed in heaven experience even greater blessedness when they viewed the damned in hell, writhing in tormented agony. The candidate was asked what he thought of this image. Clark answered forthrightly, “A Christian can never feel happiness or blessedness at the suffering of another”. “So,” the question practically shot forth from the mouth of an examiner, “you think the damned are worthy of compassion? Is the quality of mercy appropriately directed toward the damned?”
Now Clark was no fool. He had been classically educated, and so he knew that Greek and Roman philosophy, including stoic philosophy, denied compassion and mercy to evil people. But he also knew that the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, advised it was neither right nor prudent to go against conscience, and so he answered as his conscience dictated: “Christians ethically owe mercy to all people.” Well, you can imagine the outrage. One minister said, “God does not call us to waste our tears on the reprobates. You have no defense, no defender.” The candidate calmly replied, "Christ will defend me, because Christ sits on the seat of mercy.”
Now the seat of mercy appears in the book of Exodus as you heard this morning. It is on the top of the Ark of the Covenant, where God’s law is kept, and the mercy seat is framed by two cherubim (angels), who spread out their wings above the seat. The seat is vacant, though in the Jewish calendar on the Day of Atonement, God is said to appear in a cloud above the mercy seat. But when Matthew Clark put Christ on the mercy seat, he was claiming that no one is so lost that he or she cannot be found by the mercy of Jesus Christ.
As the examination moved toward its end, Matthew, who had recently traveled to Europe, visiting the great museums of the world, told his examiners something they would never have expected to hear at an ordination examination. He described to them a few different paintings he had seen of Angelica and the Hermit. Now this story is not biblical; it comes from a Renaissance “soap opera” with the heroine, the young and beautiful Angelica, having many adventures. She meets a hermit, whom she supposes to be a good man, but in reality, he is caught in a life choice he cannot bear. Though he has taken a vow of celibacy, he rebels at its cruel austerity, and he longs for the release of passion and love. And so, he casts a spell upon Angelica. There she lies, sprawled out, naked on her bed, while the hermit creeps up on her, lifting up the sheet, making ready to rape her.
While nearly all the artists, who have treated this story have painted the hermit as contemptible, a reprobate, grasped by sin's power, Clark told his examiners that the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, had alone painted the hermit’s face full of pathos. The hermit cannot have what so many others have as the natural course of their lives, and in the absence of sexual consummation, he suffers. The story, by the way, tells us that the hermit failed in his deed as he also failed in his vow, not because he successfully resisted temptation, but because he was impotent. Well, you can well imagine the shock of his examiners. But Matthew’s point was this:what looks like damnable sin and reprobation to us may look to God as pathos, deserving of mercy. What, asked Matthew Clark, does sin look like when seen through the eyes of mercy? Clark reminded his examiners that in the book of Exodus God hovers in a cloud above the seat of mercy, while the cherubim’s magnificent golden wings overshadow the seat. But what if Christ sits squarely on the seat of mercy, not above it or below it, but on it? In that position Christ sees what no one else sees.
Matthew Clark failed his ordination examination, and would later go to the Universalists, who understood exactly what he was trying to say. God is rich in mercy, and humans best imitate God when mercy seasons justice, even at times, overcoming justice’s demands.
March 5, 2024
Dear Friends,
Mikhail Reva is a famous Ukrainian artist and sculptor, who two years ago, right before the Russian invasion, was working on a fountain in the city center of Dnipro. Already many of his sculptures had been placed around the country to the admiration and delight of many people. But after the invasion began, Reva became known as a protest artist. “I joined the resistance through my art,” he said. Besides screaming out his outrage in pen and ink drawings as well as paintings showing the horrors of war, Mikhail Reva began to collect the artifacts of war--- chunks of shrapnel, shell casings, missile fragments. Welding these objects together, he has made giant metal sculptures, such as a 12 foot Russian bear titled, Moloch, The Beast of War. Moloch was a Canaanite god, whose lust for blood could only be satisfied by human sacrifice. This is how Reva sees Putin, a man, who cannot be satisfied except through conquest and war. “Art is a tool that freezes time,” Reva said. And so, he creates to commemorate the tragedy of this war.
Reva lives in Odessa, where he grew up, and in 2022 his workshop was hit by a missile while he was visiting Bucha, the site of Russian war crimes and atrocities. The Odessa National Fine Arts Museum, where some of his sculptures were displayed, was also hit by a missile in November, 2022. Fortunately, his work survived the attack. He had not considered using the debris of war for art until his neighbors collected the debris from his house and placed it in a huge pile. And that is when the idea came to him to use the debris for art. Art tries to express the inexpressible, and this is what Reva desires to achieve. He wants to give voice and shape to what cannot be put into words. “War is pain”, he said, “and art permits you to see and experience the pain with fresh eyes.” But it is always a challenge to express the pain without being overcome by it.
His works are disturbing because war is disturbing. He painted a sketch of the Russian occupiers with no faces and no features. He said he wanted to communicate not their individual humanity but the terrible fear they brought to Ukraine. He saw the fear in the face of his 88 year old mother, who told her son that she was feeling the same fear she knew as a child of 10 during the Second World War. He also painted a huge crater like the one he saw outside his home in Odessa and into the crater’s depth, he placed a man. “For me,” he said, “the death of one small human being, represents the multitude of deaths that Ukraine has suffered.”
Many of Reva’s works are on display in the U.S. Embassy’s Hotel de Talleyrand in Paris. This display is an American effort to re-engage with the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, from which the previous administration in Washington had distanced itself. But now the United States is back with the Agency, and the placement of the art in U.S. hands shows an American commitment to be in solidarity with not only the Ukrainians but also the entire enterprise of the United Nations, which was designed to keep the peace and prevent the ravages and cruelty of war.
There is one particularly haunting piece called The Memory of the Crucified, which is a cross composed of nails recovered from churches destroyed by Russian attacks. “Russia intended its attacks to kill and destroy,” Reva said, “but I wanted to make something beautiful”. And the beauty is not always immediately grasped in the physical presentation, because these works of war are not conventionally beautiful. But the beauty lies in the deep meaning the work tries to communicate. Beauty reaches beyond the surface. One must look deeply to see in art and also in faith. The Apostle Paul would agree. In his famous Letter to the Christian Church in Corinth, Paul wrote: “The Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.” May we know this to be true.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Mikhail Reva is a famous Ukrainian artist and sculptor, who two years ago, right before the Russian invasion, was working on a fountain in the city center of Dnipro. Already many of his sculptures had been placed around the country to the admiration and delight of many people. But after the invasion began, Reva became known as a protest artist. “I joined the resistance through my art,” he said. Besides screaming out his outrage in pen and ink drawings as well as paintings showing the horrors of war, Mikhail Reva began to collect the artifacts of war--- chunks of shrapnel, shell casings, missile fragments. Welding these objects together, he has made giant metal sculptures, such as a 12 foot Russian bear titled, Moloch, The Beast of War. Moloch was a Canaanite god, whose lust for blood could only be satisfied by human sacrifice. This is how Reva sees Putin, a man, who cannot be satisfied except through conquest and war. “Art is a tool that freezes time,” Reva said. And so, he creates to commemorate the tragedy of this war.
Reva lives in Odessa, where he grew up, and in 2022 his workshop was hit by a missile while he was visiting Bucha, the site of Russian war crimes and atrocities. The Odessa National Fine Arts Museum, where some of his sculptures were displayed, was also hit by a missile in November, 2022. Fortunately, his work survived the attack. He had not considered using the debris of war for art until his neighbors collected the debris from his house and placed it in a huge pile. And that is when the idea came to him to use the debris for art. Art tries to express the inexpressible, and this is what Reva desires to achieve. He wants to give voice and shape to what cannot be put into words. “War is pain”, he said, “and art permits you to see and experience the pain with fresh eyes.” But it is always a challenge to express the pain without being overcome by it.
His works are disturbing because war is disturbing. He painted a sketch of the Russian occupiers with no faces and no features. He said he wanted to communicate not their individual humanity but the terrible fear they brought to Ukraine. He saw the fear in the face of his 88 year old mother, who told her son that she was feeling the same fear she knew as a child of 10 during the Second World War. He also painted a huge crater like the one he saw outside his home in Odessa and into the crater’s depth, he placed a man. “For me,” he said, “the death of one small human being, represents the multitude of deaths that Ukraine has suffered.”
Many of Reva’s works are on display in the U.S. Embassy’s Hotel de Talleyrand in Paris. This display is an American effort to re-engage with the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, from which the previous administration in Washington had distanced itself. But now the United States is back with the Agency, and the placement of the art in U.S. hands shows an American commitment to be in solidarity with not only the Ukrainians but also the entire enterprise of the United Nations, which was designed to keep the peace and prevent the ravages and cruelty of war.
There is one particularly haunting piece called The Memory of the Crucified, which is a cross composed of nails recovered from churches destroyed by Russian attacks. “Russia intended its attacks to kill and destroy,” Reva said, “but I wanted to make something beautiful”. And the beauty is not always immediately grasped in the physical presentation, because these works of war are not conventionally beautiful. But the beauty lies in the deep meaning the work tries to communicate. Beauty reaches beyond the surface. One must look deeply to see in art and also in faith. The Apostle Paul would agree. In his famous Letter to the Christian Church in Corinth, Paul wrote: “The Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.” May we know this to be true.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Righteous or Sinful Anger
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
March 3, 2024
John 2: 13-22
Some years ago, I took a course at Wesleyan, where we read some of the great works of western literature, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s, The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The professor spent a whole session talking about the anger of the great Greek warrior, Achilles, who was enraged, when a woman he had captured as war booty was taken away from him and given to the Greek King, Agamemnon. Achilles’ rage was so great that he refused to fight, though time and time again, other Greek warriors, like Odysseus, begged him to once again enter the battle against the Trojans. But Achilles refused, and it was only when his friend, Patroclus, was killed, while wearing Achilles armor, that Achilles picked up his sword and his armor to once again fight, killing the great Trojan warrior, Hector.
Achilles then attached Hector’s body to his chariot and raced around, defiling the body, which angered the god, Apollo, and the goddess, Aphrodite, who each night repaired what had been so angrily defiled. Finally, Hector’s father, King Priam, went to Achilles at night to ask for his son’s body. Achilles’ rage receded enough that he let the King have his dead son. Now Achilles’ anger was not an instant in time, expressed without any thought at all. No, Achilles knew exactly what he was doing. It was revenge, and revenge is deliberate and focused anger. And this kind of deliberate and protracted anger can be much more spiritually dangerous than the instantaneous expression of rage. The anger of revenge courts hatred, and hatred is antithetical to love.
Something very similar happened in Shakespeare’s great play, King Lear. Lear became enraged when his daughter, Cordelia, told him that she loved him as a daughter should. She did not verbally express excessive love and devotion as her two manipulative and dishonest sisters did. And Lear was a fool; his rage against Cordelia blinded him to the truth that Cordelia loved him best. But he only realized this after Cordelia was dead and his kingdom weakened.
Anger can be very dangerous, which is why Christianity names it as one of the seven deadly sins, usually listed as number 3, after pride and envy. You will not find the seven deadly sins--- pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth--- listed in the bible. They were named and catalogued in the Middle Ages, fully expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century. Dante describes the punishment of the angry as being enveloped in suffocating smoke. Imagine that image, unable to breathe because you inhale nothing but smoke. And indeed, anger can be suffocating, especially when it is protracted and takes over life. A momentary rage can indeed lead to bad actions, sometimes terrible ones. But when the rage dissipates, as it often quickly does, the person can easily be shocked by what he or she did.
Some years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a city hospital, one of my assignments was the neo natal intensive unit, where there were a number of drug addicted infants. The hospital had a policy of disallowing any newborn infant to go home with the mother until an evaluation could be done. And what would too often happen is that the father of the baby would come storming into the unit and demand his baby and sometimes threaten violence. So, there were these emergency buzzers all over the floor, which you could press with your foot and security would come running. Well, I happened to be in the unit, when this father came charging in while the doctor was examining this infant girl, who was having convulsions because of all the drugs in her system. And the father insisted he was taking the baby. The doctor backed away, and I happened to be standing right next to the doctor. I suddenly felt this overwhelming rage, punctuated with self-righteousness, because I would not even take an aspirin when I was pregnant and here was this poor infant with convulsions. And with no thought at all, I pushed against the father with all my strength, and he went flying across the room before falling on the floor. He swore at me and tried to lunge, but security was already there. Everyone was shocked by my behavior, I, most of all. But that is how anger sometimes works. It can act without thought.
Consider the cleansing of the Temple as we have it in John’s Gospel. Matthew, Mark and Luke also show Jesus in a state of anger, expelling the moneychangers. But John places the incident at the beginning of his gospel, which makes it seem that Jesus’ break from Judaism came early, while Matthew, Mark and Luke put it at the end, making it the final nail in his coffin. In the latter case, the religious leaders view such behavior as an affront to Temple practices that they determine Jesus must go. You see, it was completely legitimate to sell various kinds of animals in the courtyard for the purpose of temple sacrifice. Jews would come from all over the empire, and they would have foreign money. But the Temple would only accept Jewish money, so it had to be exchanged. 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, you would have had a very different perspective on what Jesus did. To the Jewish religious leaders Jesus’ anger did not look at all righteous; it looked as if he were trying to create chaos and undermine the Temple. But in John’s gospel Jesus will replace the Temple, so his anger is shown as justified. Anger does look differently, depending upon who is doing the looking and from what perspective they are seeing.
Anger erupts in all our lives. There are many good reasons to be angry, but there are also many good reasons to be wary of anger. Anger can be righteous, but it needs to let go of illusions---especially the illusion that that we are the holy innocents, free from responsibility and guilt. Once that illusion is gone, we can have our anger. It can be righteous, but never self-righteous.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
March 3, 2024
John 2: 13-22
Some years ago, I took a course at Wesleyan, where we read some of the great works of western literature, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s, The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The professor spent a whole session talking about the anger of the great Greek warrior, Achilles, who was enraged, when a woman he had captured as war booty was taken away from him and given to the Greek King, Agamemnon. Achilles’ rage was so great that he refused to fight, though time and time again, other Greek warriors, like Odysseus, begged him to once again enter the battle against the Trojans. But Achilles refused, and it was only when his friend, Patroclus, was killed, while wearing Achilles armor, that Achilles picked up his sword and his armor to once again fight, killing the great Trojan warrior, Hector.
Achilles then attached Hector’s body to his chariot and raced around, defiling the body, which angered the god, Apollo, and the goddess, Aphrodite, who each night repaired what had been so angrily defiled. Finally, Hector’s father, King Priam, went to Achilles at night to ask for his son’s body. Achilles’ rage receded enough that he let the King have his dead son. Now Achilles’ anger was not an instant in time, expressed without any thought at all. No, Achilles knew exactly what he was doing. It was revenge, and revenge is deliberate and focused anger. And this kind of deliberate and protracted anger can be much more spiritually dangerous than the instantaneous expression of rage. The anger of revenge courts hatred, and hatred is antithetical to love.
Something very similar happened in Shakespeare’s great play, King Lear. Lear became enraged when his daughter, Cordelia, told him that she loved him as a daughter should. She did not verbally express excessive love and devotion as her two manipulative and dishonest sisters did. And Lear was a fool; his rage against Cordelia blinded him to the truth that Cordelia loved him best. But he only realized this after Cordelia was dead and his kingdom weakened.
Anger can be very dangerous, which is why Christianity names it as one of the seven deadly sins, usually listed as number 3, after pride and envy. You will not find the seven deadly sins--- pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth--- listed in the bible. They were named and catalogued in the Middle Ages, fully expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century. Dante describes the punishment of the angry as being enveloped in suffocating smoke. Imagine that image, unable to breathe because you inhale nothing but smoke. And indeed, anger can be suffocating, especially when it is protracted and takes over life. A momentary rage can indeed lead to bad actions, sometimes terrible ones. But when the rage dissipates, as it often quickly does, the person can easily be shocked by what he or she did.
Some years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a city hospital, one of my assignments was the neo natal intensive unit, where there were a number of drug addicted infants. The hospital had a policy of disallowing any newborn infant to go home with the mother until an evaluation could be done. And what would too often happen is that the father of the baby would come storming into the unit and demand his baby and sometimes threaten violence. So, there were these emergency buzzers all over the floor, which you could press with your foot and security would come running. Well, I happened to be in the unit, when this father came charging in while the doctor was examining this infant girl, who was having convulsions because of all the drugs in her system. And the father insisted he was taking the baby. The doctor backed away, and I happened to be standing right next to the doctor. I suddenly felt this overwhelming rage, punctuated with self-righteousness, because I would not even take an aspirin when I was pregnant and here was this poor infant with convulsions. And with no thought at all, I pushed against the father with all my strength, and he went flying across the room before falling on the floor. He swore at me and tried to lunge, but security was already there. Everyone was shocked by my behavior, I, most of all. But that is how anger sometimes works. It can act without thought.
Consider the cleansing of the Temple as we have it in John’s Gospel. Matthew, Mark and Luke also show Jesus in a state of anger, expelling the moneychangers. But John places the incident at the beginning of his gospel, which makes it seem that Jesus’ break from Judaism came early, while Matthew, Mark and Luke put it at the end, making it the final nail in his coffin. In the latter case, the religious leaders view such behavior as an affront to Temple practices that they determine Jesus must go. You see, it was completely legitimate to sell various kinds of animals in the courtyard for the purpose of temple sacrifice. Jews would come from all over the empire, and they would have foreign money. But the Temple would only accept Jewish money, so it had to be exchanged. 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, you would have had a very different perspective on what Jesus did. To the Jewish religious leaders Jesus’ anger did not look at all righteous; it looked as if he were trying to create chaos and undermine the Temple. But in John’s gospel Jesus will replace the Temple, so his anger is shown as justified. Anger does look differently, depending upon who is doing the looking and from what perspective they are seeing.
Anger erupts in all our lives. There are many good reasons to be angry, but there are also many good reasons to be wary of anger. Anger can be righteous, but it needs to let go of illusions---especially the illusion that that we are the holy innocents, free from responsibility and guilt. Once that illusion is gone, we can have our anger. It can be righteous, but never self-righteous.
February 29, 2024
Dear Friends,
It has been a while since you have been in high school but consider this assignment in an English class I recently read about. What would you do with it? How would you get your imagination running? I had a wonderfully brilliant English teacher in my senior year of high school, and I am forever indebted to him for his masterful encouragement of both our intellects and our imaginations. I think he would have loved this assignment.
The teacher began the class by saying: Brevity is the soul of wit. So, she said. I want you to write a paragraph or two, telling a story that fits these words:
For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
Together, they whispered, but only one jumped.
The baby’s blood type? Human mostly.
Born a twin, graduated an only child.
I still make coffee for two.
Strangers, Friends, Best Friends, Lovers, Strangers
The class was made up of juniors, and the teacher was amazed how sensitive some of the students were to the pain of loss and disappointment. In their stories of grief, she thought them wise beyond their years. Of course, she also noticed how humor worked to turn what seems to be a sad story into something funny, like the baby who hated anything on his feet. One student wrote about a nine month old, who curled his toes up, preventing his parents from putting the shoe on his foot. “Why are they doing this to me,” the baby mused? ”Don’t they know feet need to be free?” In the one about a twin graduating as an only child, one student made it a story about a twin who failed the fourth grade, and because he was always behind his brother, he felt like an only child. Another student crafted a tale about a twin who was brilliant and already in medical school by the time her other twin was graduating from high school. Though the one graduating from high school sometimes had feelings of being a failure, the one in medical school felt she was a freak. Each felt like an only child. And still making coffee for two? The teacher was fascinated by the fact that students wrote more about the pain of divorce than about the pain of death. “I guess,” she said, “this reflects the reality of their lives.”
When it came to jumping, some students made it a story about 9/11, concentrating on the terrible choice to be made: burned alive or smashed on the pavement below. Others made it about a daredevil act---jumping off a high cliff into the water below. Some reflected on the feeling of betrayal: We were supposed to do this together, but instead, I did the feat alone, and I felt abandoned and betrayed. And students were quite realistic about the arc of human relationships. This is how it goes, from strangers to finally strangers again. The students understood that relationships are hard work, and they accepted that failure is often the price of caring. Yet many of them expressed the conviction that we learn in the failing.
The one they enjoyed the most was the one about a mating between a human and something else. No one mentioned the possibility of a human-divine offspring, but they had much fun imagining aliens and humans producing something new. And many of them expressed the hope that the outcome would be a big improvement over “simply human.” “Perhaps we do need,” someone wrote, “an injection of DNA from a source outside our human genes. Maybe our tendency toward violence would be tempered. We can hope, can’t we?”
Imagination is essential to our human identity. Einstein said there are times it is more important than knowledge. Of course, the Bible is filled with imagination. We have stories that push the limits of reality in the hope that through them we might see some new possibility. Jesus certainly used his imagination to give his listeners stories that pushed them beyond their comfort zones, where they were asked to consider what a good neighbor truly is. How is it possible that the one who showed compassion was the hated Samaritan, the enemy of the Jews? He is the good neighbor? So, never underestimate the power of imagination. Without it, religion would not be a living tradition, but instead would be dead and boring. As for the statement, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” consider that Jesus often offered his own pithy sayings: “The one who would save her life will lose it. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. It is not what you put into your mouth that despoils your body, but what comes out of your mouth.” So, I think Jesus would have appreciated this English teacher and the assignment she gave to her English class.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
It has been a while since you have been in high school but consider this assignment in an English class I recently read about. What would you do with it? How would you get your imagination running? I had a wonderfully brilliant English teacher in my senior year of high school, and I am forever indebted to him for his masterful encouragement of both our intellects and our imaginations. I think he would have loved this assignment.
The teacher began the class by saying: Brevity is the soul of wit. So, she said. I want you to write a paragraph or two, telling a story that fits these words:
For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
Together, they whispered, but only one jumped.
The baby’s blood type? Human mostly.
Born a twin, graduated an only child.
I still make coffee for two.
Strangers, Friends, Best Friends, Lovers, Strangers
The class was made up of juniors, and the teacher was amazed how sensitive some of the students were to the pain of loss and disappointment. In their stories of grief, she thought them wise beyond their years. Of course, she also noticed how humor worked to turn what seems to be a sad story into something funny, like the baby who hated anything on his feet. One student wrote about a nine month old, who curled his toes up, preventing his parents from putting the shoe on his foot. “Why are they doing this to me,” the baby mused? ”Don’t they know feet need to be free?” In the one about a twin graduating as an only child, one student made it a story about a twin who failed the fourth grade, and because he was always behind his brother, he felt like an only child. Another student crafted a tale about a twin who was brilliant and already in medical school by the time her other twin was graduating from high school. Though the one graduating from high school sometimes had feelings of being a failure, the one in medical school felt she was a freak. Each felt like an only child. And still making coffee for two? The teacher was fascinated by the fact that students wrote more about the pain of divorce than about the pain of death. “I guess,” she said, “this reflects the reality of their lives.”
When it came to jumping, some students made it a story about 9/11, concentrating on the terrible choice to be made: burned alive or smashed on the pavement below. Others made it about a daredevil act---jumping off a high cliff into the water below. Some reflected on the feeling of betrayal: We were supposed to do this together, but instead, I did the feat alone, and I felt abandoned and betrayed. And students were quite realistic about the arc of human relationships. This is how it goes, from strangers to finally strangers again. The students understood that relationships are hard work, and they accepted that failure is often the price of caring. Yet many of them expressed the conviction that we learn in the failing.
The one they enjoyed the most was the one about a mating between a human and something else. No one mentioned the possibility of a human-divine offspring, but they had much fun imagining aliens and humans producing something new. And many of them expressed the hope that the outcome would be a big improvement over “simply human.” “Perhaps we do need,” someone wrote, “an injection of DNA from a source outside our human genes. Maybe our tendency toward violence would be tempered. We can hope, can’t we?”
Imagination is essential to our human identity. Einstein said there are times it is more important than knowledge. Of course, the Bible is filled with imagination. We have stories that push the limits of reality in the hope that through them we might see some new possibility. Jesus certainly used his imagination to give his listeners stories that pushed them beyond their comfort zones, where they were asked to consider what a good neighbor truly is. How is it possible that the one who showed compassion was the hated Samaritan, the enemy of the Jews? He is the good neighbor? So, never underestimate the power of imagination. Without it, religion would not be a living tradition, but instead would be dead and boring. As for the statement, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” consider that Jesus often offered his own pithy sayings: “The one who would save her life will lose it. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. It is not what you put into your mouth that despoils your body, but what comes out of your mouth.” So, I think Jesus would have appreciated this English teacher and the assignment she gave to her English class.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
TAKING UP THE CROSS
Preached by Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH IN UNIONVILLE, CT
FEBRUARY 25, 2024
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 good runner and was confident of his ability to outrun the policeman. But the policeman was young, not more than 25, and 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 to 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 answers, “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 United Kingdom he had united. Jesus simply did not look like any 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 the pale. Is it any wonder 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, this word rebuke tells us 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, illness, an in law or a child, 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.
Following Alexei Navalny’s death, there have been many writings this past week about moral courage. Navalny had that in excess, almost dying from poisoning, being allowed to be treated in Germany and then after recovering, returning to Russia, where he was immediately arrested. He knew there was a strong possibility that he could pay with his life for his opposition to Putin and his commitment to the idea of a democratic Russia. Indeed, he was a heroic man. And heroism can inspire. We need heroes. We need heroes to show us what is possible. Tom Fox and James Loney were also heroes, working with a Christian peacekeeping team in Iraq. Fox was American, and Loney was Canadian, from Toronto. Both men were kidnapped while working in Iraq.
Loney remembers Baghdad, sitting next to Fox, who was wearing purple track pants and a grey sweater. He wrote: 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.
You became a Quaker, and you said that if it became necessary, 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. You were an American, and so they saw you as the enemy. 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 tempting to look upon Tom Fox’s death as a waste, so unnecessary. Why was he even in Iraq in the midst of a war that was also a civil war? And we can also wonder about Navalny. Why did he return to Russia? Could he have not led an opposition movement from outside the country? What did his death really accomplish?
Sometimes in life there are these moments, watershed moments, when something breaks through our consciousness and we understand in a new and different way---the way that 15 year old heard the cop say, “Use your intelligence for good.” 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. Peter saw things through a human lens, as we all do. But the Gospel is another lens, which allows people to see in a different way. Even suffering looks different. Navalny too had his lens; it was not Christian, but through it he saw the possibilities of freedom, justice, and truth. Neither Fox nor Navalny saw suffering as a good to be actively sought. But they both understood that some lives are given and not just taken.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH IN UNIONVILLE, CT
FEBRUARY 25, 2024
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 good runner and was confident of his ability to outrun the policeman. But the policeman was young, not more than 25, and 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 to 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 answers, “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 United Kingdom he had united. Jesus simply did not look like any 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 the pale. Is it any wonder 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, this word rebuke tells us 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, illness, an in law or a child, 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.
Following Alexei Navalny’s death, there have been many writings this past week about moral courage. Navalny had that in excess, almost dying from poisoning, being allowed to be treated in Germany and then after recovering, returning to Russia, where he was immediately arrested. He knew there was a strong possibility that he could pay with his life for his opposition to Putin and his commitment to the idea of a democratic Russia. Indeed, he was a heroic man. And heroism can inspire. We need heroes. We need heroes to show us what is possible. Tom Fox and James Loney were also heroes, working with a Christian peacekeeping team in Iraq. Fox was American, and Loney was Canadian, from Toronto. Both men were kidnapped while working in Iraq.
Loney remembers Baghdad, sitting next to Fox, who was wearing purple track pants and a grey sweater. He wrote: 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.
You became a Quaker, and you said that if it became necessary, 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. You were an American, and so they saw you as the enemy. 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 tempting to look upon Tom Fox’s death as a waste, so unnecessary. Why was he even in Iraq in the midst of a war that was also a civil war? And we can also wonder about Navalny. Why did he return to Russia? Could he have not led an opposition movement from outside the country? What did his death really accomplish?
Sometimes in life there are these moments, watershed moments, when something breaks through our consciousness and we understand in a new and different way---the way that 15 year old heard the cop say, “Use your intelligence for good.” 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. Peter saw things through a human lens, as we all do. But the Gospel is another lens, which allows people to see in a different way. Even suffering looks different. Navalny too had his lens; it was not Christian, but through it he saw the possibilities of freedom, justice, and truth. Neither Fox nor Navalny saw suffering as a good to be actively sought. But they both understood that some lives are given and not just taken.
February 23, 2024
Dear Friends
One of my favorite novels of all time is T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, the story of King Arthur and his famous Round Table. I first read it at the age of 18 and I have reread it at least three times. It is pure delight. The story begins with Arthur, who as a child was called Wart, and when he eventually pulled the sword out of the stone, he became king and then founded the Round Table with Lancelot as his most famous knight. Eventually and tragically the Table collapsed because of the evil intentions of others, including King Arthur’s son, Mordred.
For me one of the most moving passages is when Wart, still a child and not the favored one in the Court, is feeling sad and bit sorry for himself. And his wonderful teacher, Merlyn, the magician, gives him this advice.
“The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags in it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
I think Merlyn is exactly right. And when the world gets me down, as it did this past week with the murder of Navalny and the difficulties Ukraine is facing, not to mention the suffering in Gaza and Israel, I try to learn something new. Learning empowers not only my mind but also my spirit, because it is such a wonderful reminder how absolutely marvelous the creation is. God has created such a tapestry of stunning beauty and startling anomalies that one cannot help but be impressed. Just the other day, for example, I learned that there are glaciers in tropical countries. It is not something any of us would expect, but in places like Kenya, Indonesia and Colombia, glaciers do exist. Of course, you won’t see a glacier on the beach, but if you take a hike up a mountain, you might see one. These massive ice formations were caused by the compression of snow over many centuries.
But what took centuries to form is now quickly disappearing. I learned that 50% of all mountain glaciers, both in the tropics and outside the tropics, will disappear by the 21st century’s end! Some glaciers are disappearing even faster than that. The Eternity Glaciers in Indonesia are projected to disappear by the end of 2026. The Andes in Colombia boasts a huge glacier and that too is slated for disappearance in the next few years. Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa both have birthed glaciers, but they are quickly melting. In 2009 the Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia completely disappeared along with half of Bolivia’s glaciers over the past 50 years.
The age of tropical glaciers is quickly coming to an end---all because of a warming climate.
Well, you might ask, how does such learning counter sadness, when what you learn is clearly upsetting? To me knowledge is a form of power, fighting the enemy of ignorance. And as you learn more about this marvelous world and creation, how can you possibly regret what you now know? After all, we can always hope that the knowledge can and will be put to good use. But without such knowledge, there is no hope of change or improvement. And such knowledge is in our hands to use---for good or for ill.
And certainly, there is much knowledge that does not need to upset us at all. For example, I am in awe of the James Webb Telescope and the images it shows us of galaxies far beyond our own. As the images become closer and closer to the time of the Big Bang, who knows what we will see and learn? What is there to fear in such knowledge? Perhaps some biblical literalists will be upset to learn that the Earth is not the only place God has seen fit to endow with life. Perhaps some will not like to learn that the redemption of humans is not the only kind of redemption God has in mind. We know so very little, and there is so much more to learn, so much more knowledge in which to delight. As Merlyn said, “Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” And I would even be so bold to suggest that Jesus would agree.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends
One of my favorite novels of all time is T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, the story of King Arthur and his famous Round Table. I first read it at the age of 18 and I have reread it at least three times. It is pure delight. The story begins with Arthur, who as a child was called Wart, and when he eventually pulled the sword out of the stone, he became king and then founded the Round Table with Lancelot as his most famous knight. Eventually and tragically the Table collapsed because of the evil intentions of others, including King Arthur’s son, Mordred.
For me one of the most moving passages is when Wart, still a child and not the favored one in the Court, is feeling sad and bit sorry for himself. And his wonderful teacher, Merlyn, the magician, gives him this advice.
“The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags in it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
I think Merlyn is exactly right. And when the world gets me down, as it did this past week with the murder of Navalny and the difficulties Ukraine is facing, not to mention the suffering in Gaza and Israel, I try to learn something new. Learning empowers not only my mind but also my spirit, because it is such a wonderful reminder how absolutely marvelous the creation is. God has created such a tapestry of stunning beauty and startling anomalies that one cannot help but be impressed. Just the other day, for example, I learned that there are glaciers in tropical countries. It is not something any of us would expect, but in places like Kenya, Indonesia and Colombia, glaciers do exist. Of course, you won’t see a glacier on the beach, but if you take a hike up a mountain, you might see one. These massive ice formations were caused by the compression of snow over many centuries.
But what took centuries to form is now quickly disappearing. I learned that 50% of all mountain glaciers, both in the tropics and outside the tropics, will disappear by the 21st century’s end! Some glaciers are disappearing even faster than that. The Eternity Glaciers in Indonesia are projected to disappear by the end of 2026. The Andes in Colombia boasts a huge glacier and that too is slated for disappearance in the next few years. Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa both have birthed glaciers, but they are quickly melting. In 2009 the Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia completely disappeared along with half of Bolivia’s glaciers over the past 50 years.
The age of tropical glaciers is quickly coming to an end---all because of a warming climate.
Well, you might ask, how does such learning counter sadness, when what you learn is clearly upsetting? To me knowledge is a form of power, fighting the enemy of ignorance. And as you learn more about this marvelous world and creation, how can you possibly regret what you now know? After all, we can always hope that the knowledge can and will be put to good use. But without such knowledge, there is no hope of change or improvement. And such knowledge is in our hands to use---for good or for ill.
And certainly, there is much knowledge that does not need to upset us at all. For example, I am in awe of the James Webb Telescope and the images it shows us of galaxies far beyond our own. As the images become closer and closer to the time of the Big Bang, who knows what we will see and learn? What is there to fear in such knowledge? Perhaps some biblical literalists will be upset to learn that the Earth is not the only place God has seen fit to endow with life. Perhaps some will not like to learn that the redemption of humans is not the only kind of redemption God has in mind. We know so very little, and there is so much more to learn, so much more knowledge in which to delight. As Merlyn said, “Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” And I would even be so bold to suggest that Jesus would agree.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
ON THE SIDE OF GOD
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
February 18, 2024
Mark 1: 9-15
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was riding the bus home from work in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa was a black woman, and in those days, if you were black, the procedure for riding the bus was to alight at the front, pay your fare, get off and re-enter through the back door. The white section was at the front of the bus, and if the white seats filled up, the black people, already sitting in the black section, had to move back, and if necessary, give up their seats. No black person could sit next to a white person, not even across the aisle.”
Well, on this December day, the driver of the bus, J.P. Blake, looked at some of his black riders in the 5th row, which was the first row of the black seating, and said, “Give me those seats.” That is the row in which Rosa Parks was sitting. Three of the blacks in that row got up and moved farther back in the bus. But Rosa did not move. She thought of her grandparents and her mother, very strong and faithful people, and she decided then and there she would not move. Most of you know the story. She was arrested, and on December 5 the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, lasting 381 days, when the Supreme Court ruled that public transportation could not be segregated. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. became a leading voice in the boycott, with many clergy persons, some white and many black, echoing their support.
Many know the Rosa Parks story, but few have an appreciation for the role faith played in Rosa’s decision not to move to the back of the bus. As a child Rosa said she had learned from the Bible to trust in God and not be afraid. And these were traits she saw in her grandparents and her mother. She remembers times when the KKK came near her home, and she also recalls how her grandfather never seemed to be afraid. At night sometimes he would sit with his shotgun and say that he did not know how long he would last, if they came breaking into the house, but he would get the first shot. He never went looking for trouble, Rosa said, but if it came, he would be ready.
From her grandmother and mother, she learned to trust in God. This did not mean that everything would be o.k. They all knew how hard life was for black people; she heard the stories of violence--- rape, beatings, castration, lynching, all kinds of humiliating cruelties visited on persons whose skin was not white. Rosa’s God was no magician, but she did believe that God was on the side of justice and freedom. She gained strength from her two favorite psalms, 23 and 27. When she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on that December evening, she repeated to herself the words of Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid. When evildoers assail me to devour my body, my adversaries and foes---they shall stumble and fall. She had no idea what would happen. Sitting in that jail cell, she felt alone and abandoned. “But I did not cry,” she said. Instead, I prayed and waited. And indeed, that night, Rosa Parks was released from the jail cell. But that was only the beginning of a movement that changed the history of the country.
Rosa never considered her faith to be solely a private concern. It had a public dimension. She was part of a church, part of a church movement that marched and sang for freedom and civil rights. The church, Rosa said, was the foundation of our community. It became our strength, our refuge, our haven. We would pray, sing, and meet in church. We would use scriptures, testimonials, and hymns to strengthen ourselves against all the hatred and violence that was going on around us. We identified, she said, with the story of the Exodus, when Moses led his people to freedom. God helped them and God would help us, because we knew that God was on the side of freedom. And so, she said, we should be on God’s side, supporting the fight for justice and freedom. To do less than this, Rosa believed, would be to give into the devil’s temptation, who wanted us to be less than we are. The devil is a master at using fear to keep us from doing what God calls us to do. So, Rosa resisted the temptation of fear.
In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered perhaps the most important decision of the 20th century. Separate is not equal, ending legal segregation in public schools. Almost immediately the NAACP along with some school districts in the South began to consider how integration was to proceed. In the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, it was finally determined to begin with Central High, an architectural beauty as well as an academically prestigious public school. Black students had to apply to be considered for attendance at Central High, and they went through a rigorous vetting process, because they would face some very ugly resistance. Nine students were chosen, and we should know their names, because they helped to move the needle closer to justice: Minnijean Brown, Terrance Roberts, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls.
On September 4, 1957, the first day of school, Elizabeth Eckford remembers gathering around the breakfast table with her parents, siblings, other family members, even neighbors. Holding hands they prayed. They knew that Elizabeth and the other students were facing a raging mob, and they prayed that God would protect them. But they knew something else. They knew that God does not control everything that happens. They knew the ugliness of racism, and they knew that sometimes God’s desires are thwarted, at least in the short term. But their faith told them these nine students were participating in God’s march for freedom and justice, and that finally God’s will would be done---though there would and could be sacrifices along the way, including the lives of these youngsters. There was nothing naïve about their faith. Now there are parents among us here, and consider for one moment, whether you would have had the faith and the courage to send your son or daughter into that raging inferno with the faith that God was marching for freedom and justice and your child and you would be marching right along with God.
Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas, called out his National Guard to prevent the students from entering Central High, and unfortunately Elizabeth Eckford did not receive the last minute instructions that all the students were to meet at a School Board Member’s home, so she went ahead, alone. When she arrived at the school, she saw the National Guard, and she thought they were there to help her. Wrong. They stood right in front of her, rifles poised across their chests, preventing her from entering the building. And then the yelling and the cursing and the threats began. She did not know if she would survive. But as calmly as she could, she walked to a bus stop, where she sat down next to a kindly white man, who whispered to her, “Don’t let them see you cry. Heroes don’t cry.” And she didn’t.
Dwight Eisenhower, President of the United States, was aghast when he saw the images on television. He called Governor Faubus to Washington, warning him, “Don’t break the law.” Eisenhower thought their conversation went well, until the next day, when Faubus said he was calling off the National Guard and would leave the students to the crowds. Eisenhower was incensed, and though he did not want to be drawn into the battle, he called out the 101 Airborne to make sure those nine students gained entrance to the school. Helicopters flew overhead and the 10,000 members of the Arkansas National Guard were nationalized, taking them out of the hands of the Governor. Not to be undone, Governor Faubus closed the schools, turning them over to private enterprises, which would run segregated schools. 1957 in Little Rock was known as the Lost Year.
So. many people don’t like the mixing of politics and religion, and yet if you examine the history of our nation, the two have been handmaidens from the very beginning. War, slavery, voting rights, civil rights, abortion, criminal justice, the death penalty, immigration---you name the issue, religion and faith have always had something to say. And faith’s voices have spoken on both sides of the issues. It can be a very serious temptation to think we know what God is thinking. And yet Rosa Parks acted because she believed God was acting through her, just as the Little Rock Nine and their supporters believed God was acting through them.
During the darkest days of the Civil War, a group of Congregational clergy from New England, came to the White House to visit President Lincoln. “Mr. President,” they said, “we want you to know we are praying for you. We are confident that God is on your side.” “Gentleman,” the President replied, “while I am deeply grateful for your prayers, I must admit I am a bit surprised by your overwhelming confidence in me. Is not the important question here, not, if God is on my side, but am I, are we, on the side of God?”
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
February 18, 2024
Mark 1: 9-15
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was riding the bus home from work in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa was a black woman, and in those days, if you were black, the procedure for riding the bus was to alight at the front, pay your fare, get off and re-enter through the back door. The white section was at the front of the bus, and if the white seats filled up, the black people, already sitting in the black section, had to move back, and if necessary, give up their seats. No black person could sit next to a white person, not even across the aisle.”
Well, on this December day, the driver of the bus, J.P. Blake, looked at some of his black riders in the 5th row, which was the first row of the black seating, and said, “Give me those seats.” That is the row in which Rosa Parks was sitting. Three of the blacks in that row got up and moved farther back in the bus. But Rosa did not move. She thought of her grandparents and her mother, very strong and faithful people, and she decided then and there she would not move. Most of you know the story. She was arrested, and on December 5 the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, lasting 381 days, when the Supreme Court ruled that public transportation could not be segregated. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. became a leading voice in the boycott, with many clergy persons, some white and many black, echoing their support.
Many know the Rosa Parks story, but few have an appreciation for the role faith played in Rosa’s decision not to move to the back of the bus. As a child Rosa said she had learned from the Bible to trust in God and not be afraid. And these were traits she saw in her grandparents and her mother. She remembers times when the KKK came near her home, and she also recalls how her grandfather never seemed to be afraid. At night sometimes he would sit with his shotgun and say that he did not know how long he would last, if they came breaking into the house, but he would get the first shot. He never went looking for trouble, Rosa said, but if it came, he would be ready.
From her grandmother and mother, she learned to trust in God. This did not mean that everything would be o.k. They all knew how hard life was for black people; she heard the stories of violence--- rape, beatings, castration, lynching, all kinds of humiliating cruelties visited on persons whose skin was not white. Rosa’s God was no magician, but she did believe that God was on the side of justice and freedom. She gained strength from her two favorite psalms, 23 and 27. When she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on that December evening, she repeated to herself the words of Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid. When evildoers assail me to devour my body, my adversaries and foes---they shall stumble and fall. She had no idea what would happen. Sitting in that jail cell, she felt alone and abandoned. “But I did not cry,” she said. Instead, I prayed and waited. And indeed, that night, Rosa Parks was released from the jail cell. But that was only the beginning of a movement that changed the history of the country.
Rosa never considered her faith to be solely a private concern. It had a public dimension. She was part of a church, part of a church movement that marched and sang for freedom and civil rights. The church, Rosa said, was the foundation of our community. It became our strength, our refuge, our haven. We would pray, sing, and meet in church. We would use scriptures, testimonials, and hymns to strengthen ourselves against all the hatred and violence that was going on around us. We identified, she said, with the story of the Exodus, when Moses led his people to freedom. God helped them and God would help us, because we knew that God was on the side of freedom. And so, she said, we should be on God’s side, supporting the fight for justice and freedom. To do less than this, Rosa believed, would be to give into the devil’s temptation, who wanted us to be less than we are. The devil is a master at using fear to keep us from doing what God calls us to do. So, Rosa resisted the temptation of fear.
In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered perhaps the most important decision of the 20th century. Separate is not equal, ending legal segregation in public schools. Almost immediately the NAACP along with some school districts in the South began to consider how integration was to proceed. In the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, it was finally determined to begin with Central High, an architectural beauty as well as an academically prestigious public school. Black students had to apply to be considered for attendance at Central High, and they went through a rigorous vetting process, because they would face some very ugly resistance. Nine students were chosen, and we should know their names, because they helped to move the needle closer to justice: Minnijean Brown, Terrance Roberts, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls.
On September 4, 1957, the first day of school, Elizabeth Eckford remembers gathering around the breakfast table with her parents, siblings, other family members, even neighbors. Holding hands they prayed. They knew that Elizabeth and the other students were facing a raging mob, and they prayed that God would protect them. But they knew something else. They knew that God does not control everything that happens. They knew the ugliness of racism, and they knew that sometimes God’s desires are thwarted, at least in the short term. But their faith told them these nine students were participating in God’s march for freedom and justice, and that finally God’s will would be done---though there would and could be sacrifices along the way, including the lives of these youngsters. There was nothing naïve about their faith. Now there are parents among us here, and consider for one moment, whether you would have had the faith and the courage to send your son or daughter into that raging inferno with the faith that God was marching for freedom and justice and your child and you would be marching right along with God.
Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas, called out his National Guard to prevent the students from entering Central High, and unfortunately Elizabeth Eckford did not receive the last minute instructions that all the students were to meet at a School Board Member’s home, so she went ahead, alone. When she arrived at the school, she saw the National Guard, and she thought they were there to help her. Wrong. They stood right in front of her, rifles poised across their chests, preventing her from entering the building. And then the yelling and the cursing and the threats began. She did not know if she would survive. But as calmly as she could, she walked to a bus stop, where she sat down next to a kindly white man, who whispered to her, “Don’t let them see you cry. Heroes don’t cry.” And she didn’t.
Dwight Eisenhower, President of the United States, was aghast when he saw the images on television. He called Governor Faubus to Washington, warning him, “Don’t break the law.” Eisenhower thought their conversation went well, until the next day, when Faubus said he was calling off the National Guard and would leave the students to the crowds. Eisenhower was incensed, and though he did not want to be drawn into the battle, he called out the 101 Airborne to make sure those nine students gained entrance to the school. Helicopters flew overhead and the 10,000 members of the Arkansas National Guard were nationalized, taking them out of the hands of the Governor. Not to be undone, Governor Faubus closed the schools, turning them over to private enterprises, which would run segregated schools. 1957 in Little Rock was known as the Lost Year.
So. many people don’t like the mixing of politics and religion, and yet if you examine the history of our nation, the two have been handmaidens from the very beginning. War, slavery, voting rights, civil rights, abortion, criminal justice, the death penalty, immigration---you name the issue, religion and faith have always had something to say. And faith’s voices have spoken on both sides of the issues. It can be a very serious temptation to think we know what God is thinking. And yet Rosa Parks acted because she believed God was acting through her, just as the Little Rock Nine and their supporters believed God was acting through them.
During the darkest days of the Civil War, a group of Congregational clergy from New England, came to the White House to visit President Lincoln. “Mr. President,” they said, “we want you to know we are praying for you. We are confident that God is on your side.” “Gentleman,” the President replied, “while I am deeply grateful for your prayers, I must admit I am a bit surprised by your overwhelming confidence in me. Is not the important question here, not, if God is on my side, but am I, are we, on the side of God?”
All for the Glory of God
Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024
If you grew up in a non-liturgical tradition, such as the Baptists or even the Congregationalists before the ecumenical movement of the 1960’s, your church might have all but ignored Lent and Ash Wednesday. I grew up as a Presbyterian, and though we noted Lent, we never celebrated Ash Wednesday. That was something the Roman Catholics did along with the Lutherans and the Episcopalians, whom, my mother claimed, were like the Catholics.
By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, Lent was seen as a time of repentance, a time to look deeply within and acknowledge the limitations and sin of human life. People were encouraged to reflect on their sinfulness and ask for forgiveness. In time the idea became popular to give something up for Lent, as if the self-denial of chocolate or meat would bring one closer to God.
In the early church, however, Lent was not really a season of repentance, but rather one of preparation. Converts to the faith were baptized on Easter, and so the 40 days leading to Easter were to be a time of reflection and study, a time to imagine what new life in Christ would and could look like. And for the already baptized, it was a time to deepen faith, to reflect on how one’s life is being lived and how one’s life impacts others. And so, Lent does not need to concentrate on guilt or self denial punishment. We should always remember the gospel is ultimately good news. We are called to turn away from our self-obsession toward the wholeness God offers that our lives might point toward justice, peace, compassion, and forgiveness.
How strange, we might think, that this time of turning toward the wholeness God offers, show begin with ashes placed on the forehead with a command to remember our time on this earth is limited. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” So, Ash Wednesday asks us to consider time, the reality that time moves along, and we cannot recapture its passing. We live in different rhythms. We sow and we reap; we speak, and we are silent. Though we say we desire peace, we find ourselves in times of war. Our reading from Ecclesiastes is not about ideal time; it is about how we actually live on this earth, and though we might desire for things to be different, the times are what they are. And we are who we are.
And yet as we consider real time and how we do live it, we are reminded that there is another standard, another way that God would have us live. We heard it in Isaiah, when the people are being called out because they have not been just and righteous. They have not properly cared for the widow and the orphan; they have failed to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and they are being told in no uncertain terms---rather harshly I would say---that this is the standard God demands for them. Jesus meant something very similar, when he said in Matthew, “Don’t puff yourselves up; don’t show off your piety, because none of that impresses God.” And so, they (and we) are to try and try again, remembering always that we do not have an unlimited time on this earth in which to try. Our lives will one day end, and Ash Wednesday reminds us to remember that truth.
Human beings are great deniers of death. There was a brilliant book published in 1973, winner of the Pulitzer Prize called, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. And because this denial is a universal human tendency, the major religions try to pry people away from their denial toward a realistic acceptance of death. The Buddha, for example, recommended corpse meditation, and in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka, photos of corpses in various states of decomposition are posted for the monks to contemplate. The student monks are taught to say about their own bodies, “This body too, such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.”
Perhaps this sounds morbid, but it is grounded in real human psychology. The great essayist, Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, “Let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in our minds than death. This is what psychologists call desensitization. In 2017 a team of researchers at several American universities gathered volunteers together to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row. And they were asked to write their reflections and their feelings, perhaps even their last words. And these were compared to people who were actually facing death. And the words of the people merely imagining their end were three times as negative and fearful as those who were truly moving to the end of their lives.
One of the conclusions of the study was that because our society so easily avoids the subject of death, we fail to develop a wisdom about facing death. We know with our heads that we are mortal and everything that lives is mortal, but we live as if we do not deeply own that truth. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist of self-actualization believed that love is only possible for us human beings because we are mortal. Mortality gives our choices shape and significance. If we lived forever, what consequences would our choices have? How would our souls deepen? How would they be refreshed? Maslow pointed to the Greek and Roman myths, where the love affairs among the gods and goddesses were boring---until they fell in love with human beings. Then time entered the picture and love then had meaning, depth and consequences.
Johann Sebastian Bach, whom some would say was the greatest composer who ever lived, said, “The final aim and end of all music is the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” We cannot all be great composers or musicians, but as Christians we can try to offer our lives to the glory of God, which when pursued, can and does refresh our souls. The last manuscript of music Bach wrote, Contrapunctus 14 from the Art of the Fugue, stops in mid measure. His son, CPE Bach, added these words to the score. “At this point in the fugue, the composer died.” Bach’s life and music merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. Though few of us could expect such a dramatic end, our souls can be refreshed when we see our limited time on this earth as a gift from God to be used up on behalf of others, all for the glory of God.
Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024
If you grew up in a non-liturgical tradition, such as the Baptists or even the Congregationalists before the ecumenical movement of the 1960’s, your church might have all but ignored Lent and Ash Wednesday. I grew up as a Presbyterian, and though we noted Lent, we never celebrated Ash Wednesday. That was something the Roman Catholics did along with the Lutherans and the Episcopalians, whom, my mother claimed, were like the Catholics.
By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, Lent was seen as a time of repentance, a time to look deeply within and acknowledge the limitations and sin of human life. People were encouraged to reflect on their sinfulness and ask for forgiveness. In time the idea became popular to give something up for Lent, as if the self-denial of chocolate or meat would bring one closer to God.
In the early church, however, Lent was not really a season of repentance, but rather one of preparation. Converts to the faith were baptized on Easter, and so the 40 days leading to Easter were to be a time of reflection and study, a time to imagine what new life in Christ would and could look like. And for the already baptized, it was a time to deepen faith, to reflect on how one’s life is being lived and how one’s life impacts others. And so, Lent does not need to concentrate on guilt or self denial punishment. We should always remember the gospel is ultimately good news. We are called to turn away from our self-obsession toward the wholeness God offers that our lives might point toward justice, peace, compassion, and forgiveness.
How strange, we might think, that this time of turning toward the wholeness God offers, show begin with ashes placed on the forehead with a command to remember our time on this earth is limited. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” So, Ash Wednesday asks us to consider time, the reality that time moves along, and we cannot recapture its passing. We live in different rhythms. We sow and we reap; we speak, and we are silent. Though we say we desire peace, we find ourselves in times of war. Our reading from Ecclesiastes is not about ideal time; it is about how we actually live on this earth, and though we might desire for things to be different, the times are what they are. And we are who we are.
And yet as we consider real time and how we do live it, we are reminded that there is another standard, another way that God would have us live. We heard it in Isaiah, when the people are being called out because they have not been just and righteous. They have not properly cared for the widow and the orphan; they have failed to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and they are being told in no uncertain terms---rather harshly I would say---that this is the standard God demands for them. Jesus meant something very similar, when he said in Matthew, “Don’t puff yourselves up; don’t show off your piety, because none of that impresses God.” And so, they (and we) are to try and try again, remembering always that we do not have an unlimited time on this earth in which to try. Our lives will one day end, and Ash Wednesday reminds us to remember that truth.
Human beings are great deniers of death. There was a brilliant book published in 1973, winner of the Pulitzer Prize called, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. And because this denial is a universal human tendency, the major religions try to pry people away from their denial toward a realistic acceptance of death. The Buddha, for example, recommended corpse meditation, and in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka, photos of corpses in various states of decomposition are posted for the monks to contemplate. The student monks are taught to say about their own bodies, “This body too, such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.”
Perhaps this sounds morbid, but it is grounded in real human psychology. The great essayist, Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, “Let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in our minds than death. This is what psychologists call desensitization. In 2017 a team of researchers at several American universities gathered volunteers together to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row. And they were asked to write their reflections and their feelings, perhaps even their last words. And these were compared to people who were actually facing death. And the words of the people merely imagining their end were three times as negative and fearful as those who were truly moving to the end of their lives.
One of the conclusions of the study was that because our society so easily avoids the subject of death, we fail to develop a wisdom about facing death. We know with our heads that we are mortal and everything that lives is mortal, but we live as if we do not deeply own that truth. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist of self-actualization believed that love is only possible for us human beings because we are mortal. Mortality gives our choices shape and significance. If we lived forever, what consequences would our choices have? How would our souls deepen? How would they be refreshed? Maslow pointed to the Greek and Roman myths, where the love affairs among the gods and goddesses were boring---until they fell in love with human beings. Then time entered the picture and love then had meaning, depth and consequences.
Johann Sebastian Bach, whom some would say was the greatest composer who ever lived, said, “The final aim and end of all music is the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” We cannot all be great composers or musicians, but as Christians we can try to offer our lives to the glory of God, which when pursued, can and does refresh our souls. The last manuscript of music Bach wrote, Contrapunctus 14 from the Art of the Fugue, stops in mid measure. His son, CPE Bach, added these words to the score. “At this point in the fugue, the composer died.” Bach’s life and music merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. Though few of us could expect such a dramatic end, our souls can be refreshed when we see our limited time on this earth as a gift from God to be used up on behalf of others, all for the glory of God.
February 14, 2024
Dear Friends,
Monday was Lincoln’s birthday, which, like Washington’s birthday, used to be national holidays until President’s Day took over both. I had a 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, who idolized Lincoln, calling him “our greatest President.” She had good reasons for her choice, and she would tell us inspiring stories about Lincoln’s childhood and how he learned to read on his own. She talked about the brutality of the Civil War and how Lincoln often granted amnesty to Union soldiers facing execution for desertion. She also told us that people would argue over the War’s cause for a very long time, some insisting it was slavery, others saying it came down to states’ rights. Somehow it impressed me that she told our class that history was not something whose meaning was final and finished. “History is far more than mere facts,” she would say. Mrs. Guyette made us memorize the Gettysburg Address, which she called “the greatest speech ever given on American soil.” Maybe she was right, though now I think Lincoln’s Second Inaugural gives Gettysburg a good contest.
Lincoln preferred to date the founding of the country to the Declaration of Independence rather than to the Constitution, because the former was about freedom and equality, while the latter defended slavery and property. Jefferson had written that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, though the country had certainly not lived up to that self-evident truth. At least it was not self-evident to all Americans. The slaveholders had amassed great wealth, and they insisted the Founders’ world view was a distortion of the truth that not all persons are created equal. Of course, no one can deny that talent is not equally distributed, but the claim of equality meant something quite specific to those opposing slavery. It meant equality before the law and the freedom to pursue one’s dreams and desires as far as one’s talent would permit. And certainly no one was more valuable or worthy before God because of wealth or the color of one’s skin. This message was preached by a number of Protestant clergy, such as Charles Finney, Theodore Weld and Henry Ward Beecher, all of whom were ardent abolitionists. From the pulpit they preached that slavery was sin and Finney even refused to give the sacrament of Holy Communion to slave holders.
In 1858 Lincoln was a candidate for the Senate, and he argued that the limitation of equality to white men was the same argument that the kings of Europe had used against granting rights to persons of the common classes. They created a hierarchy of worth, with the king at the top and various nobles on a descending ladder. How do we decide on this ladder, Lincoln wanted to know? If A decides to enslave B, because of the color of his skin, what if someone, C. comes along whose skin is lighter than both A and B. Does he then have the right to enslave both of them? No, you say, because A is White and B is Black, so though C can enslave B, he cannot enslave A, because A is White. C may have lighter skin than A, but still A is white, so he is protected against enslavement. So, said Lincoln, something more subtle than color is meant. Is it intellect? But if you use intellect as the standard, as soon as someone comes along who is intellectually sharper, do they then have the right to enslave the intellectually duller one? This is not what the enslavers meant or wanted to defend. They made in their minds a clear distinction between White and Black and only one race, the White one, had the right to enslave. The Declaration of Independence was wrong, the enslavers said, and the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, put forth the argument that the nation was really founded “upon the great truth that men were not created equal and that there is a superior race.”
And so, the Civil War came, and one side won the War, though not truly the hearts and minds of the nation. The country would live through a long reckoning and the fight for racial equality has still not fully come. Lincoln did hold the racist view that the White race was superior to the Black race, but in his mind such superiority did not give anyone the right to enslave another human being. As much as he advocated for the freedom of the slaves, he was also a product of his time. We remember him and celebrate his life and legacy not because he was perfect, but because he moved the nation closer to its original founding ideals. Perfect leaders are not to be found anywhere.
My own father thought FDR was our greatest President, and yet his Administration rounded up West Coast Japanese and put them in internment camps. Their property was stolen from them, and in a very real sense, even after their release at the end of the war, they could never go home again. Is it any wonder that many of them left the United States for Japan? Japanese internment is a stain on our history, just as slavery is also a stain on our history. We can be ashamed of that history without being overcome by shame. We can hold up our ideals and be proud of those ideals, while recognizing that we have not always lived up to what we profess. Such is the human condition. We strive and we fail and then we strive again. The movement is not always upward; we do fall back, but if we believe that God is good and God is gracious, we also hope that our failures are forgiven as we strive for the full and abundant life God desires for all people.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Monday was Lincoln’s birthday, which, like Washington’s birthday, used to be national holidays until President’s Day took over both. I had a 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, who idolized Lincoln, calling him “our greatest President.” She had good reasons for her choice, and she would tell us inspiring stories about Lincoln’s childhood and how he learned to read on his own. She talked about the brutality of the Civil War and how Lincoln often granted amnesty to Union soldiers facing execution for desertion. She also told us that people would argue over the War’s cause for a very long time, some insisting it was slavery, others saying it came down to states’ rights. Somehow it impressed me that she told our class that history was not something whose meaning was final and finished. “History is far more than mere facts,” she would say. Mrs. Guyette made us memorize the Gettysburg Address, which she called “the greatest speech ever given on American soil.” Maybe she was right, though now I think Lincoln’s Second Inaugural gives Gettysburg a good contest.
Lincoln preferred to date the founding of the country to the Declaration of Independence rather than to the Constitution, because the former was about freedom and equality, while the latter defended slavery and property. Jefferson had written that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, though the country had certainly not lived up to that self-evident truth. At least it was not self-evident to all Americans. The slaveholders had amassed great wealth, and they insisted the Founders’ world view was a distortion of the truth that not all persons are created equal. Of course, no one can deny that talent is not equally distributed, but the claim of equality meant something quite specific to those opposing slavery. It meant equality before the law and the freedom to pursue one’s dreams and desires as far as one’s talent would permit. And certainly no one was more valuable or worthy before God because of wealth or the color of one’s skin. This message was preached by a number of Protestant clergy, such as Charles Finney, Theodore Weld and Henry Ward Beecher, all of whom were ardent abolitionists. From the pulpit they preached that slavery was sin and Finney even refused to give the sacrament of Holy Communion to slave holders.
In 1858 Lincoln was a candidate for the Senate, and he argued that the limitation of equality to white men was the same argument that the kings of Europe had used against granting rights to persons of the common classes. They created a hierarchy of worth, with the king at the top and various nobles on a descending ladder. How do we decide on this ladder, Lincoln wanted to know? If A decides to enslave B, because of the color of his skin, what if someone, C. comes along whose skin is lighter than both A and B. Does he then have the right to enslave both of them? No, you say, because A is White and B is Black, so though C can enslave B, he cannot enslave A, because A is White. C may have lighter skin than A, but still A is white, so he is protected against enslavement. So, said Lincoln, something more subtle than color is meant. Is it intellect? But if you use intellect as the standard, as soon as someone comes along who is intellectually sharper, do they then have the right to enslave the intellectually duller one? This is not what the enslavers meant or wanted to defend. They made in their minds a clear distinction between White and Black and only one race, the White one, had the right to enslave. The Declaration of Independence was wrong, the enslavers said, and the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, put forth the argument that the nation was really founded “upon the great truth that men were not created equal and that there is a superior race.”
And so, the Civil War came, and one side won the War, though not truly the hearts and minds of the nation. The country would live through a long reckoning and the fight for racial equality has still not fully come. Lincoln did hold the racist view that the White race was superior to the Black race, but in his mind such superiority did not give anyone the right to enslave another human being. As much as he advocated for the freedom of the slaves, he was also a product of his time. We remember him and celebrate his life and legacy not because he was perfect, but because he moved the nation closer to its original founding ideals. Perfect leaders are not to be found anywhere.
My own father thought FDR was our greatest President, and yet his Administration rounded up West Coast Japanese and put them in internment camps. Their property was stolen from them, and in a very real sense, even after their release at the end of the war, they could never go home again. Is it any wonder that many of them left the United States for Japan? Japanese internment is a stain on our history, just as slavery is also a stain on our history. We can be ashamed of that history without being overcome by shame. We can hold up our ideals and be proud of those ideals, while recognizing that we have not always lived up to what we profess. Such is the human condition. We strive and we fail and then we strive again. The movement is not always upward; we do fall back, but if we believe that God is good and God is gracious, we also hope that our failures are forgiven as we strive for the full and abundant life God desires for all people.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Work of Mending
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
February 11, 2024
Mark 9: 2-9
2 Kings 2: 1-12
Cheryl grew up in the Bronx, in a closely knit neighborhood with a variety of shops, local businesses, and small eating places. Cheryl remembers the Saturday trips to the tailor, when her mother would bring to this older man pants, skirts, dresses, even sweaters, anything that needed mending. Mr. Pressler, the tailor, was always impeccably dressed, in a suit and a tie. “He was kind and pleasant,” Cheryl remembers, “and we trusted him with our lives. “You see, for my immigrant parents dressing well and neatly was a matter of pride. We did not have much money, and when things became ripped or worn, we needed them mended rather than replaced. And Mr. Pressler was a master tailor. You could not tell where the repair had been made. And that was a point of great pride, not only for the tailor, but also for all of us who needed our clothes mended.
When Cheryl was 18, she went off to a prestigious New England college on scholarship, and for the first time in her life, she was surrounded by people who had money. And they never had their clothes repaired. It shocked her that the ripped jeans would be thrown out without a second thought. This simply was not the way her life in the Bronx had been. Well, now nearly four decades have passed since her college days, and she has noticed a new phenomenon. There are people, who do mend clothes, but they do it without hiding the repair. Instead, they show it off, sometimes using brightly colored threads and fabrics, which immediately draw the eyes to the repair. So, why the change?
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it, because let’s face it, the human condition is one where repair and mending often are required. Yes, life is beautiful, a gift for which to be grateful, but we all know that each of us faces challenges and failures, and our mistakes often cry out for correction. Consider our reading from the Book of Kings. We have this prophet, Elijah, who in Jewish history, is mightily important. We saw him at the transfiguration of Jesus when he showed up with Moses. Elijah is the one for whom our Jewish friends set a place at the table, when they celebrate the Passover feast. Elijah is the one they expect to show up when the consummation of history takes place, when God repairs the brokenness of the creation and makes all manner of things well. Elijah valiantly fought against the prophets of Baal, killing many of them, which made Queen Jezebel so furious that he had to run away to save his life, and he bitterly complained to God about how hard life had become for him.
Elijah has been training and educating Elisha, who was expected to pick up the prophetic mantle. And though Elisha has been a very willing pupil, he is not ready to let his teacher go. And so, though Elijah tries to get away, Elisha keeps saying, “I will not leave you.” Elisha thinks he can hold on to his teacher, but he cannot. The two must part. When they arrive at the River Jordan, Elijah strikes the water with his cloak and the water is parted, torn apart---just like the parting of the Red Sea, when Moses led the Israelites through the separated waters to escape the Egyptians. This kind of tearing or parting is good---allowing movement toward a new beginning. And Elisha too will have a new beginning, but not without pain and the sorrow of separation. But before the two are parted, Elijah asks his pupil, ‘Is there something I may do for you before I am taken from you?” “Yes,” said Elisha. “I want a double share of your spirit.” And then a chariot of fire and horses of fire separate Elisa from Elijah and off Elijah goes into the heavens in a whirlwind. And what does Elisha do? He tears his clothes, a sign of deep grief, mourning and loss. He is torn apart by the loss of his teacher, and he is not sure what kind of mending will come to him---if any mending will repair the loss of his beloved teacher.
Most of us here, well past the blush of youth, know what grief feels like. We know what it feels like, because we have all suffered loss---loss of grandparents and parents, other family members, friends, and even, God help us, children. And we count other losses too---loss of youth and vitality, loss of independence, loss of a marriage or a significant relationship. Sometimes we arrive at a certain point in our lives when we put aside certain hopes and expectations, when we finally admit to ourselves, no, we are not going to write that novel or publish that collection of poetry, or climb Mount Kilimanjaro, or see Antarctica or sail down the Amazon or build that dream retreat in the mountains or near the ocean. Time passes, and we let go and when we do, there is grief at the loss. But there is something else beside the grief. There is a kind of mending and repair, healing, and if we consider how some people are mending torn clothes today with brightly colored threats and fabrics not to hide the tear but to acknowledge it, we too can try to embrace the losses we count as our own, because they actually help to make us who we are.
When my daughter, Caitlin, was recently in Nepal, hiking in the Himalayas under the direction of a sherpa, at one of the tea houses where she stayed, she met this other sherpa, who told her his story. He had been trained by one of the best. They were teacher and pupil, very, very close, and the younger man admitted that he developed such a dependence on his teacher that he could not imagine hiking without him. I was trained to be a sherpa, to lead others up the great mountains, but I felt I could not do it without my teacher at my side. I tried a number of times, but fear led me to turn back. Fear had me in its awful clutches. And then my teacher, my beloved guide who had taught me everything I knew, died in an avalanche. Overcome by grief I certainly was, but in time the amazing result was that his death freed me from my fear and my dependence. Two months after he died, there I was leading a team up the mountain. Oh, I was still grieving, but my grief led me to a new place.”
The same would be true for Elisha. As grief stricken as he was at the loss of Elijah, he would become the prophet he was called to become. Oh, he hardly had an easy time of it, but then prophets never do. And the disciples, Peter, James and John, who accompanied Jesus up the mountain, where they saw him transfigured, holding court with Moses and Elijah, they too would later learn to deal with the grief of losing their beloved leader and teacher. He would return to them, but not in the same old way. They could not cling to him any more than Mary Magdalene could. When she saw the resurrected Christ, she tried to reach out to him, but he said to her, “Do not cling to me.” No, there would be no clinging. But there would be a new path, a new beginning, created out of the alchemy of suffering and loss. There are rips and tears and wounds in our lives. There are losses and there is grief, sometimes a grief so great we do not know how we can bear it. But the grief does not speak the final word. It is love which speaks, the love of God, assuring us that the loss or losses we thought we could not bear are indeed bearable, because we do not bear them alone. The work of mending goes on, even when we do not notice it.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
February 11, 2024
Mark 9: 2-9
2 Kings 2: 1-12
Cheryl grew up in the Bronx, in a closely knit neighborhood with a variety of shops, local businesses, and small eating places. Cheryl remembers the Saturday trips to the tailor, when her mother would bring to this older man pants, skirts, dresses, even sweaters, anything that needed mending. Mr. Pressler, the tailor, was always impeccably dressed, in a suit and a tie. “He was kind and pleasant,” Cheryl remembers, “and we trusted him with our lives. “You see, for my immigrant parents dressing well and neatly was a matter of pride. We did not have much money, and when things became ripped or worn, we needed them mended rather than replaced. And Mr. Pressler was a master tailor. You could not tell where the repair had been made. And that was a point of great pride, not only for the tailor, but also for all of us who needed our clothes mended.
When Cheryl was 18, she went off to a prestigious New England college on scholarship, and for the first time in her life, she was surrounded by people who had money. And they never had their clothes repaired. It shocked her that the ripped jeans would be thrown out without a second thought. This simply was not the way her life in the Bronx had been. Well, now nearly four decades have passed since her college days, and she has noticed a new phenomenon. There are people, who do mend clothes, but they do it without hiding the repair. Instead, they show it off, sometimes using brightly colored threads and fabrics, which immediately draw the eyes to the repair. So, why the change?
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it, because let’s face it, the human condition is one where repair and mending often are required. Yes, life is beautiful, a gift for which to be grateful, but we all know that each of us faces challenges and failures, and our mistakes often cry out for correction. Consider our reading from the Book of Kings. We have this prophet, Elijah, who in Jewish history, is mightily important. We saw him at the transfiguration of Jesus when he showed up with Moses. Elijah is the one for whom our Jewish friends set a place at the table, when they celebrate the Passover feast. Elijah is the one they expect to show up when the consummation of history takes place, when God repairs the brokenness of the creation and makes all manner of things well. Elijah valiantly fought against the prophets of Baal, killing many of them, which made Queen Jezebel so furious that he had to run away to save his life, and he bitterly complained to God about how hard life had become for him.
Elijah has been training and educating Elisha, who was expected to pick up the prophetic mantle. And though Elisha has been a very willing pupil, he is not ready to let his teacher go. And so, though Elijah tries to get away, Elisha keeps saying, “I will not leave you.” Elisha thinks he can hold on to his teacher, but he cannot. The two must part. When they arrive at the River Jordan, Elijah strikes the water with his cloak and the water is parted, torn apart---just like the parting of the Red Sea, when Moses led the Israelites through the separated waters to escape the Egyptians. This kind of tearing or parting is good---allowing movement toward a new beginning. And Elisha too will have a new beginning, but not without pain and the sorrow of separation. But before the two are parted, Elijah asks his pupil, ‘Is there something I may do for you before I am taken from you?” “Yes,” said Elisha. “I want a double share of your spirit.” And then a chariot of fire and horses of fire separate Elisa from Elijah and off Elijah goes into the heavens in a whirlwind. And what does Elisha do? He tears his clothes, a sign of deep grief, mourning and loss. He is torn apart by the loss of his teacher, and he is not sure what kind of mending will come to him---if any mending will repair the loss of his beloved teacher.
Most of us here, well past the blush of youth, know what grief feels like. We know what it feels like, because we have all suffered loss---loss of grandparents and parents, other family members, friends, and even, God help us, children. And we count other losses too---loss of youth and vitality, loss of independence, loss of a marriage or a significant relationship. Sometimes we arrive at a certain point in our lives when we put aside certain hopes and expectations, when we finally admit to ourselves, no, we are not going to write that novel or publish that collection of poetry, or climb Mount Kilimanjaro, or see Antarctica or sail down the Amazon or build that dream retreat in the mountains or near the ocean. Time passes, and we let go and when we do, there is grief at the loss. But there is something else beside the grief. There is a kind of mending and repair, healing, and if we consider how some people are mending torn clothes today with brightly colored threats and fabrics not to hide the tear but to acknowledge it, we too can try to embrace the losses we count as our own, because they actually help to make us who we are.
When my daughter, Caitlin, was recently in Nepal, hiking in the Himalayas under the direction of a sherpa, at one of the tea houses where she stayed, she met this other sherpa, who told her his story. He had been trained by one of the best. They were teacher and pupil, very, very close, and the younger man admitted that he developed such a dependence on his teacher that he could not imagine hiking without him. I was trained to be a sherpa, to lead others up the great mountains, but I felt I could not do it without my teacher at my side. I tried a number of times, but fear led me to turn back. Fear had me in its awful clutches. And then my teacher, my beloved guide who had taught me everything I knew, died in an avalanche. Overcome by grief I certainly was, but in time the amazing result was that his death freed me from my fear and my dependence. Two months after he died, there I was leading a team up the mountain. Oh, I was still grieving, but my grief led me to a new place.”
The same would be true for Elisha. As grief stricken as he was at the loss of Elijah, he would become the prophet he was called to become. Oh, he hardly had an easy time of it, but then prophets never do. And the disciples, Peter, James and John, who accompanied Jesus up the mountain, where they saw him transfigured, holding court with Moses and Elijah, they too would later learn to deal with the grief of losing their beloved leader and teacher. He would return to them, but not in the same old way. They could not cling to him any more than Mary Magdalene could. When she saw the resurrected Christ, she tried to reach out to him, but he said to her, “Do not cling to me.” No, there would be no clinging. But there would be a new path, a new beginning, created out of the alchemy of suffering and loss. There are rips and tears and wounds in our lives. There are losses and there is grief, sometimes a grief so great we do not know how we can bear it. But the grief does not speak the final word. It is love which speaks, the love of God, assuring us that the loss or losses we thought we could not bear are indeed bearable, because we do not bear them alone. The work of mending goes on, even when we do not notice it.
February 7, 2024
Dear Friends,
As the week draws toward its close, and we consider the days that are approaching, we should remember that on February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from his prison, where he had been incarcerated for 27 years. Mandela had been convicted of advocating violent resistance against the violent regime of apartheid, and for 27 years he lived in hope that there would be a day when apartheid would be overthrown. In 1985 Mandela had been offered by President Botha release from prison, if he would agree to renounce all violent resistance. He refused. Into his daughter’s hands, Mandela placed a speech and asked her to read it. One line says it all: “Let Botha renounce violence. Let him say that he will dismantle apartheid. “
On February 10, 1990 the new President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk came to the prison where Mandela was being held and told him he would be released the following day. When Mandela walked out of the prison, holding the hand of his wife, Winne, he raised his other hand in a fist of victory. Apartheid was dismantled and four years later Mandela was elected President of South Africa. His words then can be applied to us now: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”
February 12 is the birthday of two renown persons: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, when he was a young man, Darwin had a dream to become a pastor, but soon he developed another passion---science. When he was only 22 years old, he voyaged to the Galapagos Islands, where he took copious notes about all he observed there. The Islands were spaced far enough apart that Darwin concluded the various creatures inhabiting them had evolved into different species. His notes became the basis for this theory of natural selection, which he published as a book 20 years later. Though lesser minds than his would accuse him of atheism, Darwin did believe in a Creator God, and in his book on natural selection he wrote, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
Most of us are well aware that Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is also February 12, a day schools and government buildings were closed until President’s Day replaced the tradition of celebrating both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays.
Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and spent his childhood in terrible, abject poverty without almost any formal education. Yet in his 20’s he determined to study law in Illinois, which led him on the road to his political future. Early on he claimed his strong opposition to slavery, and quoting from Jesus, he repeated, “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” Furthermore, he said, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” And so ,war came, and it was Lincoln who shepherded the nation through the bloody trials that left dead 360,022 Union soldiers and 258,000 Confederate troops---the bloodiest war in American history. On April 14, 1865, five days after the war ended, Lincoln was shot while attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. At his death, Edward Stanton, the nation’s Secretary of War said, “Now he belongs to the Ages.” It is worth noting that while Stanton came to have great respect and affection for Lincoln, at first, he did not like Lincoln at all, calling him “a gorilla, an imbecile, and a disgrace.” Lincoln did not care about Stanton’s personal opinion of him, because Stanton was known to be a brilliant administrator, and that was reason enough for Lincoln to appoint him as Secretary of War. Lincoln was deeply magnanimous. On this point all scholars agree.
On February 13, 1633 Galileo arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy because he said that’s the earth was not the center of the universe. The. Church used the writings of Aristotle and Ptolemy and certain biblical writings to bolster their position that the sun and moon revolved around the earth. Galileo had been studying Copernicus and he wrote a book that laid out the two positions---his and the Church’s. When the Church’s position was quickly refuted in the book, Galileo was called to Rome and ordered to recant or face the stake. Galileo said in his defense that faith and scientific knowledge can be compatible and since mind is a gift of God, human beings should never be afraid to study the evidence and think. Galileo did recant to save his life, but history has vindicated him and eventually the Church lifted its condemnation of Galileo’s ideas.
This year February 14 is not only St. Valentine’s Day, but it is also Ash Wednesday, so come to church for a service in the chapel on Wednesday evening at 7 PM, when you will learn something of the history and meaning of Ash Wednesday. As far as St. Valentine’s Day goes, there were at least three different martyred Valentines, but some think the day is named after a priest who was martyred in 270 by the Roman Emperor, Claudius ll Gothicus. Valentine wrote a letter to his jailer’s daughter, signed, Your Valentine. It was said that the priest healed the girl of her blindness. Another story is that a priest named Valentine was martyred, because he continued to marry couples to prevent the married men from being sent to war. Apparently single men were sent to war over married ones. By the 1500’s formal messages of love began to appear in Europe and by the late 1700’s commercial cards began to appear. In the United States the first commercial cards were printed in the mid-1800’s. Today, worldwide it is estimated that one billion cards and notes of devotion are sent on Valentines Day and 60 million pounds of chocolate are sold and given.
February 15 is the birthday of Susan B. Anthony, a vigorous defender of women’s rights and a fighter for women’s suffrage. Along with her friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she traveled across the country giving speeches in defense of women’s rights. She helped to establish a newspaper in New York City, The Revolutionist, whose motto was: Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.”
On February 16, 600, Pope Gregory recommended that God Bless You is an appropriate verbal response to a sneeze. A plague was raging across Europe, and it was hoped that the blessing would protect people from sickness and death.
On February 17, 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1859 Henri Dunant was in northern Italy, where he witnessed a terrible battle in the war for Italian independence. 40,000 wounded and dead soldiers lay on the battlefield, virtually ignored. Dunant immediately began to organize locals to help, and this led him on a project to do something about helping victims of war. The project bankrupted him, but he continued to work on behalf of peace, and in 1901 he was the first person to be awarded the Noble Peace Prize.
As you can see, each date in the upcoming week has something about it to recommend it to our memories. We live in such a diverse and fascinating world, and the human actors in it are always up to something. No wonder someone said, “God made human beings because God loves good stories.” Well, God certainly has enough good stories to prevent the divine nature from ever being bored! And we too should never be bored. There is always something new to learn.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
As the week draws toward its close, and we consider the days that are approaching, we should remember that on February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from his prison, where he had been incarcerated for 27 years. Mandela had been convicted of advocating violent resistance against the violent regime of apartheid, and for 27 years he lived in hope that there would be a day when apartheid would be overthrown. In 1985 Mandela had been offered by President Botha release from prison, if he would agree to renounce all violent resistance. He refused. Into his daughter’s hands, Mandela placed a speech and asked her to read it. One line says it all: “Let Botha renounce violence. Let him say that he will dismantle apartheid. “
On February 10, 1990 the new President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk came to the prison where Mandela was being held and told him he would be released the following day. When Mandela walked out of the prison, holding the hand of his wife, Winne, he raised his other hand in a fist of victory. Apartheid was dismantled and four years later Mandela was elected President of South Africa. His words then can be applied to us now: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”
February 12 is the birthday of two renown persons: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, when he was a young man, Darwin had a dream to become a pastor, but soon he developed another passion---science. When he was only 22 years old, he voyaged to the Galapagos Islands, where he took copious notes about all he observed there. The Islands were spaced far enough apart that Darwin concluded the various creatures inhabiting them had evolved into different species. His notes became the basis for this theory of natural selection, which he published as a book 20 years later. Though lesser minds than his would accuse him of atheism, Darwin did believe in a Creator God, and in his book on natural selection he wrote, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
Most of us are well aware that Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is also February 12, a day schools and government buildings were closed until President’s Day replaced the tradition of celebrating both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays.
Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and spent his childhood in terrible, abject poverty without almost any formal education. Yet in his 20’s he determined to study law in Illinois, which led him on the road to his political future. Early on he claimed his strong opposition to slavery, and quoting from Jesus, he repeated, “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” Furthermore, he said, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” And so ,war came, and it was Lincoln who shepherded the nation through the bloody trials that left dead 360,022 Union soldiers and 258,000 Confederate troops---the bloodiest war in American history. On April 14, 1865, five days after the war ended, Lincoln was shot while attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. At his death, Edward Stanton, the nation’s Secretary of War said, “Now he belongs to the Ages.” It is worth noting that while Stanton came to have great respect and affection for Lincoln, at first, he did not like Lincoln at all, calling him “a gorilla, an imbecile, and a disgrace.” Lincoln did not care about Stanton’s personal opinion of him, because Stanton was known to be a brilliant administrator, and that was reason enough for Lincoln to appoint him as Secretary of War. Lincoln was deeply magnanimous. On this point all scholars agree.
On February 13, 1633 Galileo arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy because he said that’s the earth was not the center of the universe. The. Church used the writings of Aristotle and Ptolemy and certain biblical writings to bolster their position that the sun and moon revolved around the earth. Galileo had been studying Copernicus and he wrote a book that laid out the two positions---his and the Church’s. When the Church’s position was quickly refuted in the book, Galileo was called to Rome and ordered to recant or face the stake. Galileo said in his defense that faith and scientific knowledge can be compatible and since mind is a gift of God, human beings should never be afraid to study the evidence and think. Galileo did recant to save his life, but history has vindicated him and eventually the Church lifted its condemnation of Galileo’s ideas.
This year February 14 is not only St. Valentine’s Day, but it is also Ash Wednesday, so come to church for a service in the chapel on Wednesday evening at 7 PM, when you will learn something of the history and meaning of Ash Wednesday. As far as St. Valentine’s Day goes, there were at least three different martyred Valentines, but some think the day is named after a priest who was martyred in 270 by the Roman Emperor, Claudius ll Gothicus. Valentine wrote a letter to his jailer’s daughter, signed, Your Valentine. It was said that the priest healed the girl of her blindness. Another story is that a priest named Valentine was martyred, because he continued to marry couples to prevent the married men from being sent to war. Apparently single men were sent to war over married ones. By the 1500’s formal messages of love began to appear in Europe and by the late 1700’s commercial cards began to appear. In the United States the first commercial cards were printed in the mid-1800’s. Today, worldwide it is estimated that one billion cards and notes of devotion are sent on Valentines Day and 60 million pounds of chocolate are sold and given.
February 15 is the birthday of Susan B. Anthony, a vigorous defender of women’s rights and a fighter for women’s suffrage. Along with her friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she traveled across the country giving speeches in defense of women’s rights. She helped to establish a newspaper in New York City, The Revolutionist, whose motto was: Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.”
On February 16, 600, Pope Gregory recommended that God Bless You is an appropriate verbal response to a sneeze. A plague was raging across Europe, and it was hoped that the blessing would protect people from sickness and death.
On February 17, 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1859 Henri Dunant was in northern Italy, where he witnessed a terrible battle in the war for Italian independence. 40,000 wounded and dead soldiers lay on the battlefield, virtually ignored. Dunant immediately began to organize locals to help, and this led him on a project to do something about helping victims of war. The project bankrupted him, but he continued to work on behalf of peace, and in 1901 he was the first person to be awarded the Noble Peace Prize.
As you can see, each date in the upcoming week has something about it to recommend it to our memories. We live in such a diverse and fascinating world, and the human actors in it are always up to something. No wonder someone said, “God made human beings because God loves good stories.” Well, God certainly has enough good stories to prevent the divine nature from ever being bored! And we too should never be bored. There is always something new to learn.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
“Everyone Is Searching”
Preached by Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
February 8, 2009
Mark 1: 29-39
“Everyone is searching for you.” That’s what Simon Peter and his companions said to Jesus, when they finally found him. Jesus had gone off, to be alone with God, to pray, to mediate, to be at peace. His activity had been almost frenzied in its pace, moving from the synagogue, where he had cast out an unclean spirit, then to the home of Simon Peter, where he healed Peter’s mother in law, followed by multiple healings, and now to a deserted place. Everyone was searching for Jesus, because that is the human condition---looking for something we think we desperately need and want.
So yes, people wanted something from Jesus. They wanted to be healed, to be restored to their community, as the demon possessed man had been restored, to be healed, as Simon Peter’s mother in law had been healed. Jesus was in the business of serving others, and indeed the word served used for Simon’s mother in law, when the text says, “She got up and served them,” is the same word from which we derive our word, deacon, the same word used of the angels, who served or ministered to Jesus after he faced his temptations in the wilderness, the same word Mark used of Jesus, who came not to be served, but to serve. Service in Mask’s Gospel is no second class position. It is what Jesus does and what he expects his followers to do.
But in our text for today Jesus is not serving others. He is alone, almost hidden, and people are searching for him. This theme of Jesus being out of sight while others search for him runs across the pages of Mark’s gospel. So why is Jesus out of sight? Well, in this particular instance, he has a need to be alone, to recharge spiritually as he prays to God. And then there are other times Jesus withdraws or hides because certain people are out to do him harm. By the third chapter in Mark Jesus is already in big trouble with the authorities, some of whom are plotting to destroy him. And so, as Jesus travels around Galilee, Mark tells us that Jesus sometimes avoids public places, where he knows the high and mighty will be. He purposely becomes invisible to those who have the power to destroy him.
But Jesus is also invisible or hidden in another sense. He is invisible, because people do not really know or understand who he is or what he is about. They see him as some kind of miracle worker, someone with magical powers who can fix whatever ails them. And although Jesus is a healer, he is more than that. He is the Holy One of God, which as we saw in last week’s reading, no one recognized, except the demon. But Jesus’ identity is not fully known and fully visible until his crucifixion and death. That is when Jesus is recognized fully as God’s Son by a Roman centurion.
Now this theme of visibility/invisibly is also part of the church’s story. In the early centuries, when the church was threatened by the power of Rome, the church tried to be invisible, hiding in caves or private homes. Being invisible was a means of the church’s survival. Our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors certainly had their times of hiding. In England, the Congregationalists hid from the Crown and The Church of England, because they did not want to conform to church rules and doctrine. No wonder they eventually left and came to a new world, where they hoped their hiding was over. But it was not. In New Haven, there were three men, Dixwell, Whalley and Goffe, who were among the 59 judges who signed the death warrant against Charles l, beheaded in 1649. With the restoration of the monarchy, the Crown sent agents to the new world to track down the regicides. And the church in New Haven, where I served for 10 years, did a fairly good job of hiding the men. Of course, eventually, the Congregationalists became the established church, proudly building their Meeting Houses on the town green at the town’s center. Later, in classic New England style, church spires would jut toward the heavens, communicating that here was not only architectural perfection and beauty, but also spiritual and even worldly power and presence. People knew the New England Congregationalists were here---no hiding, no invisibility.
Well, our churches are not hiding today, but they are, metaphorically speaking, invisible. WE are all but ignored. All across the nation many mainline sanctuaries like ours are near empty, and who really cares what the church has to say? Many decades ago The New York Times would actually quote from sermons preached in some of the New York prestigious churches---like Madison Ave. Presbyterian Church or St. John the Divine. Presumably people cared what was being said in the pulpits, or why would the Times have bothered. But we now inhabit a very different world. And the Church has not yet figured out how it belongs in this new world, where we do not have to hide, but we are not really visible.
Consider again our lesson from Mark. Note how the news of the healings spread so quickly that Jesus had to get away. He was probably exhausted, wanting to be left alone. But he also knew the people did not understand who he really was. They wanted a miracles worker, not the holy one of God. And so, he hid, which is something people sometimes do when they are misunderstood and cannot easily make their truth known. And the people, desperate for something, just keep searching.
Some of you may know John Irving’s novel, Cider House Rules, or perhaps the remarkable movie by the same name. The story takes place in Maine, in the 1930’s. The director of the orphanage, Dr. Larch, is training Homer, a young, sweet man, to be his assistant. Homer is searching, the way many people search, and his search will lead him to leave the orphanage, at least for a while. Every night Homer reads to the orphans, who as you would expect, are a motley crew, some beautiful, some not, some smart, some not so bright, some sick, some mentally and physically impaired, yet all wanting desperately to be adopted and yes, loved. And every night as Homer finishes reading and turns off the lights, he says to those orphans, “Good night, you Princes of Maine. Good night, you Kings of New England.”
On some level, isn’t this why people believe in God, or even want to believe in God. They want to know that they matter, that someone or something loves them and accepts them. The movie begins with Homer reading to the orphans from Charles Dickens’ famous novel, David Copperfield, whose opening lines read: Whether I shall turn out to be hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Well, maybe most of us do want to be the hero of our own lives, but the Gospel assures us that being the hero of our own story is not the final goal. The story is not completely ours; it is God’s, and in God’s story as we Christians tell us, Jesus is the hero, who shows us that we are loved. No one will ever convince me that the world will ever outgrow the need for that message. Everyone is searching, and the Gospel reminds us that God is the one who searches until all are finally found.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
February 8, 2009
Mark 1: 29-39
“Everyone is searching for you.” That’s what Simon Peter and his companions said to Jesus, when they finally found him. Jesus had gone off, to be alone with God, to pray, to mediate, to be at peace. His activity had been almost frenzied in its pace, moving from the synagogue, where he had cast out an unclean spirit, then to the home of Simon Peter, where he healed Peter’s mother in law, followed by multiple healings, and now to a deserted place. Everyone was searching for Jesus, because that is the human condition---looking for something we think we desperately need and want.
So yes, people wanted something from Jesus. They wanted to be healed, to be restored to their community, as the demon possessed man had been restored, to be healed, as Simon Peter’s mother in law had been healed. Jesus was in the business of serving others, and indeed the word served used for Simon’s mother in law, when the text says, “She got up and served them,” is the same word from which we derive our word, deacon, the same word used of the angels, who served or ministered to Jesus after he faced his temptations in the wilderness, the same word Mark used of Jesus, who came not to be served, but to serve. Service in Mask’s Gospel is no second class position. It is what Jesus does and what he expects his followers to do.
But in our text for today Jesus is not serving others. He is alone, almost hidden, and people are searching for him. This theme of Jesus being out of sight while others search for him runs across the pages of Mark’s gospel. So why is Jesus out of sight? Well, in this particular instance, he has a need to be alone, to recharge spiritually as he prays to God. And then there are other times Jesus withdraws or hides because certain people are out to do him harm. By the third chapter in Mark Jesus is already in big trouble with the authorities, some of whom are plotting to destroy him. And so, as Jesus travels around Galilee, Mark tells us that Jesus sometimes avoids public places, where he knows the high and mighty will be. He purposely becomes invisible to those who have the power to destroy him.
But Jesus is also invisible or hidden in another sense. He is invisible, because people do not really know or understand who he is or what he is about. They see him as some kind of miracle worker, someone with magical powers who can fix whatever ails them. And although Jesus is a healer, he is more than that. He is the Holy One of God, which as we saw in last week’s reading, no one recognized, except the demon. But Jesus’ identity is not fully known and fully visible until his crucifixion and death. That is when Jesus is recognized fully as God’s Son by a Roman centurion.
Now this theme of visibility/invisibly is also part of the church’s story. In the early centuries, when the church was threatened by the power of Rome, the church tried to be invisible, hiding in caves or private homes. Being invisible was a means of the church’s survival. Our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors certainly had their times of hiding. In England, the Congregationalists hid from the Crown and The Church of England, because they did not want to conform to church rules and doctrine. No wonder they eventually left and came to a new world, where they hoped their hiding was over. But it was not. In New Haven, there were three men, Dixwell, Whalley and Goffe, who were among the 59 judges who signed the death warrant against Charles l, beheaded in 1649. With the restoration of the monarchy, the Crown sent agents to the new world to track down the regicides. And the church in New Haven, where I served for 10 years, did a fairly good job of hiding the men. Of course, eventually, the Congregationalists became the established church, proudly building their Meeting Houses on the town green at the town’s center. Later, in classic New England style, church spires would jut toward the heavens, communicating that here was not only architectural perfection and beauty, but also spiritual and even worldly power and presence. People knew the New England Congregationalists were here---no hiding, no invisibility.
Well, our churches are not hiding today, but they are, metaphorically speaking, invisible. WE are all but ignored. All across the nation many mainline sanctuaries like ours are near empty, and who really cares what the church has to say? Many decades ago The New York Times would actually quote from sermons preached in some of the New York prestigious churches---like Madison Ave. Presbyterian Church or St. John the Divine. Presumably people cared what was being said in the pulpits, or why would the Times have bothered. But we now inhabit a very different world. And the Church has not yet figured out how it belongs in this new world, where we do not have to hide, but we are not really visible.
Consider again our lesson from Mark. Note how the news of the healings spread so quickly that Jesus had to get away. He was probably exhausted, wanting to be left alone. But he also knew the people did not understand who he really was. They wanted a miracles worker, not the holy one of God. And so, he hid, which is something people sometimes do when they are misunderstood and cannot easily make their truth known. And the people, desperate for something, just keep searching.
Some of you may know John Irving’s novel, Cider House Rules, or perhaps the remarkable movie by the same name. The story takes place in Maine, in the 1930’s. The director of the orphanage, Dr. Larch, is training Homer, a young, sweet man, to be his assistant. Homer is searching, the way many people search, and his search will lead him to leave the orphanage, at least for a while. Every night Homer reads to the orphans, who as you would expect, are a motley crew, some beautiful, some not, some smart, some not so bright, some sick, some mentally and physically impaired, yet all wanting desperately to be adopted and yes, loved. And every night as Homer finishes reading and turns off the lights, he says to those orphans, “Good night, you Princes of Maine. Good night, you Kings of New England.”
On some level, isn’t this why people believe in God, or even want to believe in God. They want to know that they matter, that someone or something loves them and accepts them. The movie begins with Homer reading to the orphans from Charles Dickens’ famous novel, David Copperfield, whose opening lines read: Whether I shall turn out to be hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Well, maybe most of us do want to be the hero of our own lives, but the Gospel assures us that being the hero of our own story is not the final goal. The story is not completely ours; it is God’s, and in God’s story as we Christians tell us, Jesus is the hero, who shows us that we are loved. No one will ever convince me that the world will ever outgrow the need for that message. Everyone is searching, and the Gospel reminds us that God is the one who searches until all are finally found.
February 1, 2024
Dear Friends,
February is Black History Month, a time we are both challenged to remember and to embrace new knowledge about Black people---their history and culture. As I write this, it is February 1, the birthday of Langston Hughes, one of the great literary figures of the 20th century. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, but he spent most of his growing up years in Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived with his grandmother. Unfortunately, his grandmother was very poor, so he never had enough food to eat or clothes to wear.
His mother became a single parent, when her husband, James, left the family shortly after Langston was born. James had been educated as a lawyer, but he was not allowed to practice law because he was black, and so he settled in Mexico, where he worked as a lawyer and became a successful landowner. He never returned to the United States. In 1919 Langston lived for a short time with his father in Mexico, but the two never had a close relationship, and Langston soon left Mexico to return home. Langston’s mother, Carolina Mercer, was a writer, actress and activist, who encouraged Black women to become involved in politics. She did not always have an easy time making a living, which is why the young Langston went to live with his grandmother. Though life with his grandmother was hard, she did tell him stories about heroes, who worked to free slaves, like her first husband, who was killed in a raid with John Brown, who was later executed for his raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia.
In Lawrence Langston discovered the public library with which he immediately fell in love. It was the only integrated public building in the city, and Langston spent as much time as he could there. Langston said, “In the library books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books.” The young boy always yearned for a happy family and a happy home, and he learned that in books people could write about their longings and their unhappiness. “In the wonderful world of books,” he said, “if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas.”
And so, Langston Hughes wanted to be a writer and fill books with beautiful language. In 1926, when he was 24 years old, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. He also wrote what became a renown essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” written to defend African-American art and culture. He was called a poet and writer of the people since his work was accessible to a wide-ranging audience and showed great deference to the common man and woman. He wrote, “Then there are the low down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority---may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. Their joy runs---bang into ecstasy! Their religion soars to a shout. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization.”
Langston Hughes wrote 16 books of poetry, 20 plays, 10 collections of short stories as well as a host of essays, novels, and children’s books. He was a critic of culture and religion, and to him Christianity often failed, because, he said, “it was often “bought and sold to the highest bidder,” which for him meant that what was preached and practiced was not the real message of Jesus. For Hughes Jesus was a radical, who upset the conventional run of his society by reminding people that in God’s realm,” the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
Here are two poems to ponder and then consider: What would Jesus have to say not only about the poems but also about the people that actually lived them?
I, Too by Langston Hughes
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
Harlem 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?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
February is Black History Month, a time we are both challenged to remember and to embrace new knowledge about Black people---their history and culture. As I write this, it is February 1, the birthday of Langston Hughes, one of the great literary figures of the 20th century. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, but he spent most of his growing up years in Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived with his grandmother. Unfortunately, his grandmother was very poor, so he never had enough food to eat or clothes to wear.
His mother became a single parent, when her husband, James, left the family shortly after Langston was born. James had been educated as a lawyer, but he was not allowed to practice law because he was black, and so he settled in Mexico, where he worked as a lawyer and became a successful landowner. He never returned to the United States. In 1919 Langston lived for a short time with his father in Mexico, but the two never had a close relationship, and Langston soon left Mexico to return home. Langston’s mother, Carolina Mercer, was a writer, actress and activist, who encouraged Black women to become involved in politics. She did not always have an easy time making a living, which is why the young Langston went to live with his grandmother. Though life with his grandmother was hard, she did tell him stories about heroes, who worked to free slaves, like her first husband, who was killed in a raid with John Brown, who was later executed for his raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia.
In Lawrence Langston discovered the public library with which he immediately fell in love. It was the only integrated public building in the city, and Langston spent as much time as he could there. Langston said, “In the library books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books.” The young boy always yearned for a happy family and a happy home, and he learned that in books people could write about their longings and their unhappiness. “In the wonderful world of books,” he said, “if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas.”
And so, Langston Hughes wanted to be a writer and fill books with beautiful language. In 1926, when he was 24 years old, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. He also wrote what became a renown essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” written to defend African-American art and culture. He was called a poet and writer of the people since his work was accessible to a wide-ranging audience and showed great deference to the common man and woman. He wrote, “Then there are the low down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority---may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. Their joy runs---bang into ecstasy! Their religion soars to a shout. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization.”
Langston Hughes wrote 16 books of poetry, 20 plays, 10 collections of short stories as well as a host of essays, novels, and children’s books. He was a critic of culture and religion, and to him Christianity often failed, because, he said, “it was often “bought and sold to the highest bidder,” which for him meant that what was preached and practiced was not the real message of Jesus. For Hughes Jesus was a radical, who upset the conventional run of his society by reminding people that in God’s realm,” the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
Here are two poems to ponder and then consider: What would Jesus have to say not only about the poems but also about the people that actually lived them?
I, Too by Langston Hughes
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
Harlem 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?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE IRONIC GOSPEL
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 28, 2024
Mark 1: 21-28
Here we are today in the first chapter of Mark, where a great deal has already happened. Jesus has been baptized, when the Spirit told him, “You are my Son, the Beloved.” Then he was driven into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan. And after his victory against Satan and after John the Baptist’s arrest, Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, calling his first disciples, Andrew, James and James’ brother John. And now in today’s lesson, still in the first chapter, we see them immediately go to Capernaum, where Jesus began teaching. And the text says, “They were astounded at this teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”
Now consider this word, authority. We know what it is, and we also know we live in a society, where the notion of authority is under attack. Teachers and parents have much less of it than they used to, and so do doctors, lawyers, and members of the clergy, not to mention politicians. Scientists still seem to have much authority with the public, but even that has been downgraded, especially when their work concerns medicine, as we saw in the recent pandemic. But when scientists speak about other topics, like the universe, for example, the physicists, who work on the James Webb telescope and show us these stunning images of worlds beyond our own, they still have authority and get the public’s admiration and respect.
And so, the people of Capernaum believed that Jesus was worth paying attention to. His teachings were authoritative. Now the interesting thing about Mark is that although he characterizes Jesus’ work as teaching, Mark does not tell us too much about the content of the teaching. Jesus teaches by doing, and in this morning’s lesson the teaching begins with the healing of a man possessed by an unclean spirit. Today we would most likely call the man mentally ill; perhaps he was schizophrenic, hearing voices and seeing apparitions.
In calling the spirit unclean Mark is telling us something important. He is letting us know that this illness is the domain of the scribes and the priests. You see in Jesus’ day it was the temple priesthood who declared a person clean or unclean. Some illness, leprosy and in this case “demon possession,” were deemed unclean. And it was the priests, who decided whether you had a particular unclean disease. One of my seminary professors insisted there was an economic basis to disease---not simply because the poor were not as well cared for, but also because the rich (who could pay money to the Temple) would sometimes receive a favorable diagnosis while a poor person would not. The rich hardly ever ended up in lepers’ colonies, for example, even if they had leprosy, because the priests rarely declared them to have this unclean disease!
So, when Mark tells us this man has an unclean spirit, he is telling us that it is the Temple leaders who have authority over him---that is, the authority to name him clean or unclean, sick, or well. If a person’s health improved, he or she could apply to the priesthood to be declared “healed” or clean. So, make no mistake about it: Jesus is stepping on toes here; he is crossing lines of authority and taking authority he simply did not have, according to the rules of his society. Notice too the irony. It isn’t the people or the authorities, who recognize Jesus, but rather it is the unclean spirit. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” While the religious leaders don’t have a clue who this man is and while others, including Jesus’ own disciples are often at a loss to understand, it is the unclean spirit, who can see what Jesus is really all about---liberating and healing people from the forces that bind them to a diminished and unclean life.
And then the text tells us that Jesus silenced the unclean spirit and commanded it to come out of the man. In ancient Israel to call someone by name is more than mere recognition. It is to have some kind of power over him or her, so the rules of social interaction meant that a person of higher social standing would say the name of a person of lower status first. Notice, the unclean spirit called Jesus’ name first, so when Jesus told the spirit to be silent, he was refusing to give the Spirit any kind of power over him, and he was also trying to keep his identity a secret. Mark’s gospel has something scholars call the Messianic secret, that is, Jesus’ true identity is not to be revealed until the appropriate time, and in Mark’s Gospel it is at his death, when a Roman centurion recognizes him as God’s Son. The irony: the people who should have known, his followers as well as the religious leaders, did not know who Jesus was, but the unclean spirits and the so called enemy (the Roman centurion) knew. Mark’s Gospel is full of irony because that is the human condition----ironic!
William Willimon was for years the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. An ordained Methodist minister, he had and has great sympathy for the social gospel, and most people would characterize his politics as left leaning. Some years ago, at a preaching seminar, I heard him tell a story about his early years in the ministry. He was serving a small church, I think, a congregation of hard working, responsible people, who were by Wilimon’s standards, at least, pretty conservative. Early one Sunday morning, he was in his church office, putting the finishing touches on his sermon about the obligation of Christian service in the world, when he happened to overhear a conversation concerning legislation about welfare.
“I say give ‘em a job digging ditches, and if they don’t take it, let them starve. We’ve been generous to them. Now it is time for them to pick up the shovel and work!” There was a chorus of agreement. Willimon began to seethe. Here he was about to preach a sermon on Christian service, and he had to listen to some church members bash the poor! Why don’t they bash the rich? he thought to himself. That is what Jesus did! He got up from his desk and was about to charge out of his office, and tell them exactly what he thought, when he was suddenly met at the door by one of the men, Harry, who was probably the most politically conservative member of the congregation.
“ Hi Pastor, what are you up to?”
“Just putting the finishing touches on my sermon,” Willimon replied.
“Don’t we give you enough time during the week to do your work?” Harry asked.
Willimon glared, but Harry did not notice, because he was too busy pulling something out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, handing a $5000 check to the pastor. “This is for the church to buy breeder pigs for people in Haiti. I want you to see if we can raise $5000 more by Easter. The swine flu is killing off the pigs and the people there are dying of starvation.”
“How do you know so much about Haiti?” Willimon wanted to know.
“Oh, Edna and I go down there every year, when I get my vacation from the plant, where I work. I help with a lot of different projects. Great people with great need. Do you think we can raise another $5000?” Harry asked.
“We certainly can try,” Willimon said. “I was astonished”, confessed Willimon, “and a little ashamed of myself. It was not at all what I expected, and staring down at the check I held in my hands, I pondered the ironic human condition.” We think we know; we think we understand, and, we think we have other people figured out. But we don’t. Just when you think someone is blind, they show you they see. Just when you think you see, you discover you are blind. It’s ironic, but that is the human condition.
We should not be surprised. But we are, time and time again. The Gospel tells us these stories, shows us the human condition in all its irony not so we will know so much more about what life was like then. Oh, that’s interesting, and if we are curious people, we like to learn. But what the Gospel really tries to do is show us what we are like—the irony of our human condition.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 28, 2024
Mark 1: 21-28
Here we are today in the first chapter of Mark, where a great deal has already happened. Jesus has been baptized, when the Spirit told him, “You are my Son, the Beloved.” Then he was driven into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan. And after his victory against Satan and after John the Baptist’s arrest, Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, calling his first disciples, Andrew, James and James’ brother John. And now in today’s lesson, still in the first chapter, we see them immediately go to Capernaum, where Jesus began teaching. And the text says, “They were astounded at this teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”
Now consider this word, authority. We know what it is, and we also know we live in a society, where the notion of authority is under attack. Teachers and parents have much less of it than they used to, and so do doctors, lawyers, and members of the clergy, not to mention politicians. Scientists still seem to have much authority with the public, but even that has been downgraded, especially when their work concerns medicine, as we saw in the recent pandemic. But when scientists speak about other topics, like the universe, for example, the physicists, who work on the James Webb telescope and show us these stunning images of worlds beyond our own, they still have authority and get the public’s admiration and respect.
And so, the people of Capernaum believed that Jesus was worth paying attention to. His teachings were authoritative. Now the interesting thing about Mark is that although he characterizes Jesus’ work as teaching, Mark does not tell us too much about the content of the teaching. Jesus teaches by doing, and in this morning’s lesson the teaching begins with the healing of a man possessed by an unclean spirit. Today we would most likely call the man mentally ill; perhaps he was schizophrenic, hearing voices and seeing apparitions.
In calling the spirit unclean Mark is telling us something important. He is letting us know that this illness is the domain of the scribes and the priests. You see in Jesus’ day it was the temple priesthood who declared a person clean or unclean. Some illness, leprosy and in this case “demon possession,” were deemed unclean. And it was the priests, who decided whether you had a particular unclean disease. One of my seminary professors insisted there was an economic basis to disease---not simply because the poor were not as well cared for, but also because the rich (who could pay money to the Temple) would sometimes receive a favorable diagnosis while a poor person would not. The rich hardly ever ended up in lepers’ colonies, for example, even if they had leprosy, because the priests rarely declared them to have this unclean disease!
So, when Mark tells us this man has an unclean spirit, he is telling us that it is the Temple leaders who have authority over him---that is, the authority to name him clean or unclean, sick, or well. If a person’s health improved, he or she could apply to the priesthood to be declared “healed” or clean. So, make no mistake about it: Jesus is stepping on toes here; he is crossing lines of authority and taking authority he simply did not have, according to the rules of his society. Notice too the irony. It isn’t the people or the authorities, who recognize Jesus, but rather it is the unclean spirit. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” While the religious leaders don’t have a clue who this man is and while others, including Jesus’ own disciples are often at a loss to understand, it is the unclean spirit, who can see what Jesus is really all about---liberating and healing people from the forces that bind them to a diminished and unclean life.
And then the text tells us that Jesus silenced the unclean spirit and commanded it to come out of the man. In ancient Israel to call someone by name is more than mere recognition. It is to have some kind of power over him or her, so the rules of social interaction meant that a person of higher social standing would say the name of a person of lower status first. Notice, the unclean spirit called Jesus’ name first, so when Jesus told the spirit to be silent, he was refusing to give the Spirit any kind of power over him, and he was also trying to keep his identity a secret. Mark’s gospel has something scholars call the Messianic secret, that is, Jesus’ true identity is not to be revealed until the appropriate time, and in Mark’s Gospel it is at his death, when a Roman centurion recognizes him as God’s Son. The irony: the people who should have known, his followers as well as the religious leaders, did not know who Jesus was, but the unclean spirits and the so called enemy (the Roman centurion) knew. Mark’s Gospel is full of irony because that is the human condition----ironic!
William Willimon was for years the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. An ordained Methodist minister, he had and has great sympathy for the social gospel, and most people would characterize his politics as left leaning. Some years ago, at a preaching seminar, I heard him tell a story about his early years in the ministry. He was serving a small church, I think, a congregation of hard working, responsible people, who were by Wilimon’s standards, at least, pretty conservative. Early one Sunday morning, he was in his church office, putting the finishing touches on his sermon about the obligation of Christian service in the world, when he happened to overhear a conversation concerning legislation about welfare.
“I say give ‘em a job digging ditches, and if they don’t take it, let them starve. We’ve been generous to them. Now it is time for them to pick up the shovel and work!” There was a chorus of agreement. Willimon began to seethe. Here he was about to preach a sermon on Christian service, and he had to listen to some church members bash the poor! Why don’t they bash the rich? he thought to himself. That is what Jesus did! He got up from his desk and was about to charge out of his office, and tell them exactly what he thought, when he was suddenly met at the door by one of the men, Harry, who was probably the most politically conservative member of the congregation.
“ Hi Pastor, what are you up to?”
“Just putting the finishing touches on my sermon,” Willimon replied.
“Don’t we give you enough time during the week to do your work?” Harry asked.
Willimon glared, but Harry did not notice, because he was too busy pulling something out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, handing a $5000 check to the pastor. “This is for the church to buy breeder pigs for people in Haiti. I want you to see if we can raise $5000 more by Easter. The swine flu is killing off the pigs and the people there are dying of starvation.”
“How do you know so much about Haiti?” Willimon wanted to know.
“Oh, Edna and I go down there every year, when I get my vacation from the plant, where I work. I help with a lot of different projects. Great people with great need. Do you think we can raise another $5000?” Harry asked.
“We certainly can try,” Willimon said. “I was astonished”, confessed Willimon, “and a little ashamed of myself. It was not at all what I expected, and staring down at the check I held in my hands, I pondered the ironic human condition.” We think we know; we think we understand, and, we think we have other people figured out. But we don’t. Just when you think someone is blind, they show you they see. Just when you think you see, you discover you are blind. It’s ironic, but that is the human condition.
We should not be surprised. But we are, time and time again. The Gospel tells us these stories, shows us the human condition in all its irony not so we will know so much more about what life was like then. Oh, that’s interesting, and if we are curious people, we like to learn. But what the Gospel really tries to do is show us what we are like—the irony of our human condition.
January 21, 2024
Dear Friends,
Michelle Norris is a journalist and now an opinion writer for The Washington Post. For some years she was the host on NPR’s All Things Considered. Not too long ago she had a very creative idea. She initially filled out 200 postcards and put them all over the place---in libraries, in magazines in a doctor’s office, in the grocery store. And she asked people to condense their thoughts on race and identity into one sentence of six words. She wasn’t expecting much of a return, and at first the postcards’ return was very slow. But then things began to speed up, so she decided to do more and more postcards. She learned that contrary to the idea that people are sick of the subject of race, she discovered that many people care deeply about the subject and wish there were greater depth and honesty about it. Here are some of the responses:
My hometown was purposefully White.
My race makes me perpetually foreign.
God loves everybody. Why don’t we?
I’m tired of explaining myself.
American Indian: proud we’re still here.
Reason I ended a sweet relationship.
Too Black for a Black man’s love.
Just a label, not a truth.
Black students won’t listen to me.
Breathing their stolen breath, I ache.
Don’t tell me what I am.
Michelle eventually received over 500,000 postcards, and now there is a website you can go on to give your own response: The Race Card Project. We think we should be color blind because we are all made and loved by the same God. As someone wrote: God loves everyone. Why can’t we? I don’t fully understand why race is such a stumbling block, but it is. We human beings are not particularly wise when it comes to dealing with THE OTHER. The stories of difference and the trouble surrounding difference are scattered throughout the Bible.
The Jews and the Samaritans read the same Bible, but the Jews thought the sacred mountain was Mt. Sinai and the Samaritans believed it was Mt. Gerizim. The Samaritans intermarried with the Assyrians, who conquered the Northern Kingdom of Judah in 722 BC, but the Jews who resided there did not. And so, they hated the Samaritans for not protecting their true identity. Were there other reasons for the suspicion? Perhaps, but the so called purity of identity was a very strong reason for the distrust. So, when Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke, everyone understood the implications. The Jews and Samaritans were enemies, and yet the Jew rendered aid and showed compassion to the Samaritan. “Who was the good neighbor?” Jesus asked. “The one who showed mercy,” was the answer. And Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
We should be able to “go and do likewise,” but so often we can’t, and we don’t. Divisions are sharp and ugly, and we all can see and feel the tension between Jews and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians and in our own nation, the tensions that mount over race. We are not colorblind, and we really cannot be so, because race impacts and sometimes even determines the parameters of one’s life. “My race makes me perpetually foreign,” someone wrote. That is his or her experience, and we cannot deny it as much as we wish it were different. Hopefully, we will one day better understand it. In the meantime, we can try to be good neighbors. As Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.” And though it might be a struggle, we can try., even if our efforts are imperfect.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Michelle Norris is a journalist and now an opinion writer for The Washington Post. For some years she was the host on NPR’s All Things Considered. Not too long ago she had a very creative idea. She initially filled out 200 postcards and put them all over the place---in libraries, in magazines in a doctor’s office, in the grocery store. And she asked people to condense their thoughts on race and identity into one sentence of six words. She wasn’t expecting much of a return, and at first the postcards’ return was very slow. But then things began to speed up, so she decided to do more and more postcards. She learned that contrary to the idea that people are sick of the subject of race, she discovered that many people care deeply about the subject and wish there were greater depth and honesty about it. Here are some of the responses:
My hometown was purposefully White.
My race makes me perpetually foreign.
God loves everybody. Why don’t we?
I’m tired of explaining myself.
American Indian: proud we’re still here.
Reason I ended a sweet relationship.
Too Black for a Black man’s love.
Just a label, not a truth.
Black students won’t listen to me.
Breathing their stolen breath, I ache.
Don’t tell me what I am.
Michelle eventually received over 500,000 postcards, and now there is a website you can go on to give your own response: The Race Card Project. We think we should be color blind because we are all made and loved by the same God. As someone wrote: God loves everyone. Why can’t we? I don’t fully understand why race is such a stumbling block, but it is. We human beings are not particularly wise when it comes to dealing with THE OTHER. The stories of difference and the trouble surrounding difference are scattered throughout the Bible.
The Jews and the Samaritans read the same Bible, but the Jews thought the sacred mountain was Mt. Sinai and the Samaritans believed it was Mt. Gerizim. The Samaritans intermarried with the Assyrians, who conquered the Northern Kingdom of Judah in 722 BC, but the Jews who resided there did not. And so, they hated the Samaritans for not protecting their true identity. Were there other reasons for the suspicion? Perhaps, but the so called purity of identity was a very strong reason for the distrust. So, when Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke, everyone understood the implications. The Jews and Samaritans were enemies, and yet the Jew rendered aid and showed compassion to the Samaritan. “Who was the good neighbor?” Jesus asked. “The one who showed mercy,” was the answer. And Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
We should be able to “go and do likewise,” but so often we can’t, and we don’t. Divisions are sharp and ugly, and we all can see and feel the tension between Jews and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians and in our own nation, the tensions that mount over race. We are not colorblind, and we really cannot be so, because race impacts and sometimes even determines the parameters of one’s life. “My race makes me perpetually foreign,” someone wrote. That is his or her experience, and we cannot deny it as much as we wish it were different. Hopefully, we will one day better understand it. In the meantime, we can try to be good neighbors. As Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.” And though it might be a struggle, we can try., even if our efforts are imperfect.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Reluctant Prophets and Saviors
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 21, 2024
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
Mark 1: 14-20
Some years ago, when I was working at First Church in Middletown, one of the boys in my youth group, loudly objected to the story of Jonah. Jamie was in the 6th grade and his comment was: “You’ve got to be kidding. No one ends up in the belly of a whale and lives. If you want us to believe, you will have to do a lot better than giving us this to read!” I tried to explain that this story was not literally true. It’s very symbolic,” I said. “The important question is about meaning: What does it mean?” “Well, that is your job” Jamie said. “You tell us.”
We really are not so different from Jamie. How did such a fantastic story gain entrance into the sacred canon? A man runs away from God’s command to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, which was probably the largest city in the Middle East at the time, about 150,000 people. The Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, and they were known for their cruelty. It was said they scorched their enemies alive to use their skin as a decoration for the walls of their pyramids. So, the Jews hated them and would have been very sympathetic to Jonah’s refusal to preach repentance to such a detested enemy. They could understand why Jonah was such a reluctant prophet.
Now the Book of Jonah was probably written sometime during or immediately after the exile of the Jews in Babylon. In 587 BC, the southern kingdom, Judah, fell to the Babylonian Empire, and the skilled and educated Jews were marched off to Babylon, where they lived for about 50 years---until Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews who wanted to return to Jerusalem to do so. So, in the midst of all this messy change, the Book of Jonah was written. We can well imagine that it was a time of deep resentment against the Babylonians, who had conquered them, and the Jews, who stayed behind in Jerusalem but did almost nothing to repair what had been destroyed. But the writer of Jonah cleverly used the Assyrians rather than the Babylonians to proclaim the message of God’s mercy for all people, including the enemy.
So, that is the context for the Book of Jonah, and it uses hyperbole and exaggeration to communicate its meaning. Furthermore, the creators of the lectionary decided to pair Jonah with Mark’s story of Jesus calling his first disciples. Notice the immediacy of Mark’s gospel. The word immediately appears 33 time in Mark, showing the radical willingness of people to follow Jesus. Bu there is no such immediacy for Jonah. He wants nothing to do with God and his command to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. But here’s the point: there is no escaping God. While trying to escape, Jonah ended up in the belly of a fish, and then after three days was spewed out. And this is where our lesson for today begins. Again, God gave the command, and this time Jonah listened. And so did the people of Nineveh listen. They repented. It took Jonah three days to walk across the city and five Hebrew words to get the Ninevites to repent.
But poor Jonah. This reluctant prophet was very unhappy with the repentance of Nineveh. He wanted them severely punished. But the lesson here is that God’s mercy is not completely in human hands. After all. God used human agency. It was not God who spoke to the Ninevites; it was Jonah. Jonah had a direct role to play, and though he was not happy about it---though he was a most reluctant prophet, nonetheless, he finally did what he was told to do, and it worked. They repented.
A friend of mine recently attended a seminar on the ethics of helping. There were a number of different speakers who had rendered aid to various people---the OTHERS in our world. Some had protected migrants at the southern border. Another had been in Rwanda during the great genocide there, trying to save the lives of the minority Tutsis. Another was a Serbian, who hid Muslim men being sought and murdered by other Serbians.
And then there was Armin, a man who had lived and worked in Iran as an art historian. His mother was Iranian and his father German. And through Armin’s work he became acquainted with another art historian, Solomon, who was Jewish. They did not become friends, but they were colleagues. Now many Jews were expelled from Iran in the 1950’s and then again after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And after that Revolution, Solomon was arrested and imprisoned. He managed to escape by bribing the guards. And while in hiding, he contacted some of his colleagues, including Armin, for help. Solomon was trying to make his way to the United States, where he had some successful family members.
Armin told the seminar that he really did not want to help. He said that he knew that helping was the right thing to do, but he was afraid, afraid of a government that could be brutal. And then his sister told him how their German father had hidden some Jews during the Holocaust and helped them escape to England. “I could not believe it,” Armin said. “How was it that my sister knew this story and yet I, the son, did not?” “Mother told me,” his sister said, but she was unsure about you, because she said you harbored anti-Jewish feelings.” Armin protested against that accusation, so his sister asked him directly. “Well, then, are you going to help this man escape Iran, or are your anti-Jewish feelings going to rule your decision?” And so, Armin, looking deeply into himself did what he knew was the right thing to do. He did not want to do it, because he knew it would be the end of his life in Iran. Sooner or later the authorities would have discovered what I had done, he told the seminar, so I too left Iran and went first to Germany and later to the United States.
Armin saved a life, and there is a saying in the Jewish tradition, that if you save one life it is as if you have saved the whole world. Armin emphasized how complicated the ethical life is. “Did I do the right thing, because it was right? Not completely, he confessed. I was resentful that my sister knew something about our father I never knew, and my pride was hurt.” So yes, pride leads us to many different actions, sometimes good and sometimes bad. And some of the good in the world is done by reluctant prophets, reluctant saviors, who find themselves called to do something good they would prefer to avoid. And yet they do the right thing for reasons that are hardly pure. And such is the human condition, which embraces all of us.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 21, 2024
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
Mark 1: 14-20
Some years ago, when I was working at First Church in Middletown, one of the boys in my youth group, loudly objected to the story of Jonah. Jamie was in the 6th grade and his comment was: “You’ve got to be kidding. No one ends up in the belly of a whale and lives. If you want us to believe, you will have to do a lot better than giving us this to read!” I tried to explain that this story was not literally true. It’s very symbolic,” I said. “The important question is about meaning: What does it mean?” “Well, that is your job” Jamie said. “You tell us.”
We really are not so different from Jamie. How did such a fantastic story gain entrance into the sacred canon? A man runs away from God’s command to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, which was probably the largest city in the Middle East at the time, about 150,000 people. The Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, and they were known for their cruelty. It was said they scorched their enemies alive to use their skin as a decoration for the walls of their pyramids. So, the Jews hated them and would have been very sympathetic to Jonah’s refusal to preach repentance to such a detested enemy. They could understand why Jonah was such a reluctant prophet.
Now the Book of Jonah was probably written sometime during or immediately after the exile of the Jews in Babylon. In 587 BC, the southern kingdom, Judah, fell to the Babylonian Empire, and the skilled and educated Jews were marched off to Babylon, where they lived for about 50 years---until Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews who wanted to return to Jerusalem to do so. So, in the midst of all this messy change, the Book of Jonah was written. We can well imagine that it was a time of deep resentment against the Babylonians, who had conquered them, and the Jews, who stayed behind in Jerusalem but did almost nothing to repair what had been destroyed. But the writer of Jonah cleverly used the Assyrians rather than the Babylonians to proclaim the message of God’s mercy for all people, including the enemy.
So, that is the context for the Book of Jonah, and it uses hyperbole and exaggeration to communicate its meaning. Furthermore, the creators of the lectionary decided to pair Jonah with Mark’s story of Jesus calling his first disciples. Notice the immediacy of Mark’s gospel. The word immediately appears 33 time in Mark, showing the radical willingness of people to follow Jesus. Bu there is no such immediacy for Jonah. He wants nothing to do with God and his command to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. But here’s the point: there is no escaping God. While trying to escape, Jonah ended up in the belly of a fish, and then after three days was spewed out. And this is where our lesson for today begins. Again, God gave the command, and this time Jonah listened. And so did the people of Nineveh listen. They repented. It took Jonah three days to walk across the city and five Hebrew words to get the Ninevites to repent.
But poor Jonah. This reluctant prophet was very unhappy with the repentance of Nineveh. He wanted them severely punished. But the lesson here is that God’s mercy is not completely in human hands. After all. God used human agency. It was not God who spoke to the Ninevites; it was Jonah. Jonah had a direct role to play, and though he was not happy about it---though he was a most reluctant prophet, nonetheless, he finally did what he was told to do, and it worked. They repented.
A friend of mine recently attended a seminar on the ethics of helping. There were a number of different speakers who had rendered aid to various people---the OTHERS in our world. Some had protected migrants at the southern border. Another had been in Rwanda during the great genocide there, trying to save the lives of the minority Tutsis. Another was a Serbian, who hid Muslim men being sought and murdered by other Serbians.
And then there was Armin, a man who had lived and worked in Iran as an art historian. His mother was Iranian and his father German. And through Armin’s work he became acquainted with another art historian, Solomon, who was Jewish. They did not become friends, but they were colleagues. Now many Jews were expelled from Iran in the 1950’s and then again after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And after that Revolution, Solomon was arrested and imprisoned. He managed to escape by bribing the guards. And while in hiding, he contacted some of his colleagues, including Armin, for help. Solomon was trying to make his way to the United States, where he had some successful family members.
Armin told the seminar that he really did not want to help. He said that he knew that helping was the right thing to do, but he was afraid, afraid of a government that could be brutal. And then his sister told him how their German father had hidden some Jews during the Holocaust and helped them escape to England. “I could not believe it,” Armin said. “How was it that my sister knew this story and yet I, the son, did not?” “Mother told me,” his sister said, but she was unsure about you, because she said you harbored anti-Jewish feelings.” Armin protested against that accusation, so his sister asked him directly. “Well, then, are you going to help this man escape Iran, or are your anti-Jewish feelings going to rule your decision?” And so, Armin, looking deeply into himself did what he knew was the right thing to do. He did not want to do it, because he knew it would be the end of his life in Iran. Sooner or later the authorities would have discovered what I had done, he told the seminar, so I too left Iran and went first to Germany and later to the United States.
Armin saved a life, and there is a saying in the Jewish tradition, that if you save one life it is as if you have saved the whole world. Armin emphasized how complicated the ethical life is. “Did I do the right thing, because it was right? Not completely, he confessed. I was resentful that my sister knew something about our father I never knew, and my pride was hurt.” So yes, pride leads us to many different actions, sometimes good and sometimes bad. And some of the good in the world is done by reluctant prophets, reluctant saviors, who find themselves called to do something good they would prefer to avoid. And yet they do the right thing for reasons that are hardly pure. And such is the human condition, which embraces all of us.
January 18, 2024
Dear Friends,
I have just finished reading a wonderful gook, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King Jr. I mentioned this book before in a reflection letter after reading a very positive review. The author, who is a journalist, walked from Washington, DC, where he lives, to New York City. It was a 25 day journey through battlefields and cemeteries in Maryland, Quaker and Amish farms in Pennsylvania as well as the Continental Army’s winter quarters at Valley Forge, then onto New Jersey, where he climbed onto the tallest trash heap in the country, guided by people who ran the dump! And then he moved onto Staten Island and the jewel in the crown, New York City. He met all kinds of people and heard varied reflections on life. And some of his experiences leave a deep impression.
One of the early ones was soon after he began his walk. He was in Maryland, walking through a wealthy neighborhood. Not only were the houses big and expensive, but the cars in the driveway told the same story of wealth and privilege. This one morning he has forgotten to refill his water bottle, and when a young man, dressed in an expensive suit, emerged from the house, Neil asked him where he could get some water. The man spent some time explaining how to get to the nearest store, but it would involve backtracking, something Neil did not want to do. The man’s attitude was, “That’s up to you.” What surprised Neil was that the man did not even consider taking the water bottle into the house and filling it. No, he would prefer to give complicated instructions rather than render simple aid. Neil found himself wondering if rich, successful people, the kind who inhabit such a perfectly ordered neighborhood, are unaccustomed to helping---especially when the person who needs help, does not look as if he or she comes from among the rank of the privileged.
And then there was time, Neil was sitting in a tavern and eating some fish tacos, when he was suddenly overcome by deep emotion. Struck by the simplicity of his life at that particular moment, he felt a deep pang of joy shoot through him. He could offer no explanation for the joy, but what came to mind was a line from Henry David Thoreau “We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it.”
In Pennsylvania he came across some Mennonite kids playing softball, girls in long dresses, but whacking the ball as hard as had ever seen and in the outfield running to catch the ball with their mitts. Their school was called The Farmerville Mennonite School, and Neil was completely entranced. The kids were warm and friendly, delighted that King had stopped and was curious about their lives. When a teacher asked Neil if he would like to hear the kids sing a few hymns, Neil was delighted and so were the kids. They had been outside, playing softball, followed by lunch, and talking to the curious walker, who had made his way to their school. But the hymns they sang were not about NOW, not about the delight of being alive on a beautiful spring day, but the hymns concerned another life in a time beyond time. “Someday my heart will pulse no more. I’ll slip away to heaven’s shore./ This earthly life will fade away/ into a never ending day./ Someday I’ll find a better place./ Someday I’ll run the final race/ My weary feet will cease to roam./ Someday I’m coming home.
“They sang, wrote Neil, without the slightest whiff of obligation or duty or because Mr. Weaver, the teacher, said they should. They were doing it for joy, and to thank me for being there, for having wandered onto their playground and for talking pleasure in what they did.” And Neil could not help but shed some tears of joy.
One of Neil’s goals was the mighty Edgeboro Landfill, the largest landfill in the country, situated in New Jersey. When he requested permission to walk to the top of the landfill, he expected a 50-50 chance of getting what he wanted. But the Middlesex County Utilities Authority sent back an affirmative note from Robert Leslie, the Landfill engineer. And joined by Brian Murray, the site manager, the three of them walked up the mound. Many cultures build mounds to commemorate this or that person or event. There were Mound Builders of Middle America who built mounds to honor animals or to mark a season, or an event, like a solar of lunar eclipse. The mounds are all they left behind.
What will the distant future say about the mounds we leave behind, a trash heap of history that embraces everything, including chickens and cows that came to the dump when a truck crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike? When the trucks make their dumps, a Caterpillar compactor drives back and forth to pack the trash deposits down. Each layer of the dump is sealed in durable membranes to keep it from polluting the water table. The top of the landfill sprawls over an expanse equal to a hundred football fields. Taking care of trash is quite an enterprise and a responsibility. We throw things away all the time but think very little about the work involved in caring for all that junk. And care is indeed what happens. One must take care of the trash.
When Neil finally arrived in New York City, he made his way to where the World Trade Towers had once stood. There is a huge gap, where the two towers had once stood, which Neil calls “a hole in the sky.” The names of the dead are all over the place, and you simply cannot avoid them. There are names and stories Neil remembered reading about, like Patrick Sullivan, 32 years old, from Brooklyn, whose brother, Greg, a cop, frantically looked for Patrick that horrible day. Patrick was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, and the company lost 2/3 of its total workforce, 658 people on 9/11. Anyone who arrived at the North Tower to work at Cantor Fitzgerald died that day when American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the building two floors beneath them. The stories of tragedy are all around, but so too is there life. A pear tree grows near the huge gap. The original tree had been charred, but parts of it had been coaxed back to life in a Bronx nursery, and then planted at Ground Zero again. And it has come to full life, protected by a small rail fence.
Walking is a very human activity, walking from place to place, not sure what will be found there, but convinced that something good can be learned and experienced. One day, while standing at a river, fishing, Neil wondered if the supremely human activity is the capacity to “stop, drop everything, forget the fishing, let the line go slack, and just stand there in awe. Perhaps our ability to behold is what truly sets us apart.” The Bible says something quite similar when it praises our ability to be at awe. The Bible says “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” but my Old Testament professor, Harrell Beck, said that the word awe gets at the meaning of the emotion better than the word fear. And so, be in awe.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I have just finished reading a wonderful gook, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King Jr. I mentioned this book before in a reflection letter after reading a very positive review. The author, who is a journalist, walked from Washington, DC, where he lives, to New York City. It was a 25 day journey through battlefields and cemeteries in Maryland, Quaker and Amish farms in Pennsylvania as well as the Continental Army’s winter quarters at Valley Forge, then onto New Jersey, where he climbed onto the tallest trash heap in the country, guided by people who ran the dump! And then he moved onto Staten Island and the jewel in the crown, New York City. He met all kinds of people and heard varied reflections on life. And some of his experiences leave a deep impression.
One of the early ones was soon after he began his walk. He was in Maryland, walking through a wealthy neighborhood. Not only were the houses big and expensive, but the cars in the driveway told the same story of wealth and privilege. This one morning he has forgotten to refill his water bottle, and when a young man, dressed in an expensive suit, emerged from the house, Neil asked him where he could get some water. The man spent some time explaining how to get to the nearest store, but it would involve backtracking, something Neil did not want to do. The man’s attitude was, “That’s up to you.” What surprised Neil was that the man did not even consider taking the water bottle into the house and filling it. No, he would prefer to give complicated instructions rather than render simple aid. Neil found himself wondering if rich, successful people, the kind who inhabit such a perfectly ordered neighborhood, are unaccustomed to helping---especially when the person who needs help, does not look as if he or she comes from among the rank of the privileged.
And then there was time, Neil was sitting in a tavern and eating some fish tacos, when he was suddenly overcome by deep emotion. Struck by the simplicity of his life at that particular moment, he felt a deep pang of joy shoot through him. He could offer no explanation for the joy, but what came to mind was a line from Henry David Thoreau “We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it.”
In Pennsylvania he came across some Mennonite kids playing softball, girls in long dresses, but whacking the ball as hard as had ever seen and in the outfield running to catch the ball with their mitts. Their school was called The Farmerville Mennonite School, and Neil was completely entranced. The kids were warm and friendly, delighted that King had stopped and was curious about their lives. When a teacher asked Neil if he would like to hear the kids sing a few hymns, Neil was delighted and so were the kids. They had been outside, playing softball, followed by lunch, and talking to the curious walker, who had made his way to their school. But the hymns they sang were not about NOW, not about the delight of being alive on a beautiful spring day, but the hymns concerned another life in a time beyond time. “Someday my heart will pulse no more. I’ll slip away to heaven’s shore./ This earthly life will fade away/ into a never ending day./ Someday I’ll find a better place./ Someday I’ll run the final race/ My weary feet will cease to roam./ Someday I’m coming home.
“They sang, wrote Neil, without the slightest whiff of obligation or duty or because Mr. Weaver, the teacher, said they should. They were doing it for joy, and to thank me for being there, for having wandered onto their playground and for talking pleasure in what they did.” And Neil could not help but shed some tears of joy.
One of Neil’s goals was the mighty Edgeboro Landfill, the largest landfill in the country, situated in New Jersey. When he requested permission to walk to the top of the landfill, he expected a 50-50 chance of getting what he wanted. But the Middlesex County Utilities Authority sent back an affirmative note from Robert Leslie, the Landfill engineer. And joined by Brian Murray, the site manager, the three of them walked up the mound. Many cultures build mounds to commemorate this or that person or event. There were Mound Builders of Middle America who built mounds to honor animals or to mark a season, or an event, like a solar of lunar eclipse. The mounds are all they left behind.
What will the distant future say about the mounds we leave behind, a trash heap of history that embraces everything, including chickens and cows that came to the dump when a truck crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike? When the trucks make their dumps, a Caterpillar compactor drives back and forth to pack the trash deposits down. Each layer of the dump is sealed in durable membranes to keep it from polluting the water table. The top of the landfill sprawls over an expanse equal to a hundred football fields. Taking care of trash is quite an enterprise and a responsibility. We throw things away all the time but think very little about the work involved in caring for all that junk. And care is indeed what happens. One must take care of the trash.
When Neil finally arrived in New York City, he made his way to where the World Trade Towers had once stood. There is a huge gap, where the two towers had once stood, which Neil calls “a hole in the sky.” The names of the dead are all over the place, and you simply cannot avoid them. There are names and stories Neil remembered reading about, like Patrick Sullivan, 32 years old, from Brooklyn, whose brother, Greg, a cop, frantically looked for Patrick that horrible day. Patrick was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, and the company lost 2/3 of its total workforce, 658 people on 9/11. Anyone who arrived at the North Tower to work at Cantor Fitzgerald died that day when American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the building two floors beneath them. The stories of tragedy are all around, but so too is there life. A pear tree grows near the huge gap. The original tree had been charred, but parts of it had been coaxed back to life in a Bronx nursery, and then planted at Ground Zero again. And it has come to full life, protected by a small rail fence.
Walking is a very human activity, walking from place to place, not sure what will be found there, but convinced that something good can be learned and experienced. One day, while standing at a river, fishing, Neil wondered if the supremely human activity is the capacity to “stop, drop everything, forget the fishing, let the line go slack, and just stand there in awe. Perhaps our ability to behold is what truly sets us apart.” The Bible says something quite similar when it praises our ability to be at awe. The Bible says “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” but my Old Testament professor, Harrell Beck, said that the word awe gets at the meaning of the emotion better than the word fear. And so, be in awe.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
RULES FOR THE ROAD: FOLLOW, COME AND SEE
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 14, 2024
Psalm 139: 1-12
John 1: 43-51
All of us who drive undoubtedly recall reading and studying the book about the rules of the road. Before you get a driver’s license, you must pass not only a road test, but also a written test. All states have driving rules, and sometimes the rules differ within a state. For example, though New York State allows right turns on red, the city of New York does not, and woe to the one who does not know that rule. In Little Rock, Arkansas, “no person shall sound the horn on a vehicle any place where cold drinks or sandwiches are served after 9 P.M. In Oregon, you are allowed to make a left hand turn on a red light, if you are turning into a one way street and Tennessee has a rule, which says it is illegal to shoot at any animal from a car, unless the animal happens to be a whale!
So, it is important to know the rules, and the same thing can be said about being a Christian. The United Church of Christ is pretty light on rules. While other denominations and traditions may insist that you consent to certain beliefs, the UCC is not a confessing denomination. While Christ is the head of the church, we have the freedom to discern and decide what that means for our lives. We are a covenantal church, meaning that we are called to walk together with one another in faith. We are called to be Christians in community. Christianity is not a solo enterprise.
Consider now our reading from John. The first thing Jesus does is call followers to from a community. He does not give these followers a list of beliefs about himself and God to which they must consent. In the section right before today’s lesson, Andrew and Simon join up quickly with no questions asked at all. In fact, Jesus is the one who asks a question: What are you looking for? They answer by asking him where he is staying and he tells them, “Come and see.”
Our lesson for today begins with Jesus’ decision to go to Galilee. Now that might seem like a trivial point to you, but it is actually quite important, because Galilee was an ethnically diverse region, removed from the stricter religious rules of Jerusalem. It was also home to a great deal of anti-Roman sentiment, the site of much political turmoil, so Jesus’ journey there signals him as someone who is willing to move outside the conventional, mainstream circles. And in this diverse place Jesus found Philip to whom he gave the command, “Follow me.” Where I go, you go too. And, of course, no one had any idea where such following would take them. Neither Andrew, nor Peter, nor Philip were offered any guarantees or promises or projections about the future. Jesus simply issued a command, “Follow me.” And they did.
Philip immediately recognized Jesus as the one predicted by the Hebrew Scriptures, and so, exactly as Andrew had done, getting his brother, Simon, Philip went and got his brother, Nathaniel. But notice this difference. While Philip, Simon and Andrew immediately went and followed, Nathaniel is more circumspect. He is suspicious, and when he learns that Jesus is from Nazareth, in Nathaniel’s mind, a kind of backwater, boring place, he asks a question: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But though he does not get a satisfactory answer, he still goes. Philip had the sense to invite Nathaniel without pressuring him.
And so, Nathaniel came and was impressed, especially when Jesus recognized him as an Israelite without deceit, sitting under a fig tree. In the rabbinic tradition the fig tree is compared to the Torah and searching for figs is a metaphorical way of referring to the study of Torah. John only uses the word Israelite here; all other times he uses Jew or Jews. So, Nathaniel is here being contrasted with Jacob, the trickster, who cheated his brother, Esau, out of his birthright and their father’s blessing.
Jacob wrestled with a man, who wounded him in the thigh, when Jacob refused to let the man go unless he received a blessing. He not only received a blessing, but also a name change: Israel, which means one who strives with God. This too is what discipleship looks like: Strive with God; argue with God, if you must, but do so without guile or deceit. And if you do these things, you will see. As Jesus promised Nathaniel, “You will see greater things than this.” So, these three words: follow, come, and see are the essence of Christian discipleship. Something else to note, which is easy to ignore: Andrew and Philip are Greek names, while Simon and Nathaniel are Jewish ones, which suggests a cultural diversity in the followers of Jesus from the very beginning.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Whatever King’s limitations and failings, and there were many, no one can deny he helped to change the consciousness and the laws of our nation. King never wanted to lead the Civil Rights movement, and after he was drafted to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he tried to resign when death threats came his way, but his resignation was refused. Unlike Nathaniel, who was invited to become a disciple with no pressure, King felt tremendous pressure. He was pushed pulled and prodded to follow, come, and see Christ in so many different places----Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Washington, Chicago, Memphis. Late, one winter evening, King, overwhelmed by fear after receiving another death threat, sat in his kitchen and bowed his head, calling on the one who would make a way out of no way. In the darkness of that night, Jesus came calling, and King said he was never the same. Taking up his cross, King followed; he came, and he saw. And we remember his journey and so many other journeys of saints and disciples in the hope that our own journeys might be strengthened and uplifted by remembering theirs.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 14, 2024
Psalm 139: 1-12
John 1: 43-51
All of us who drive undoubtedly recall reading and studying the book about the rules of the road. Before you get a driver’s license, you must pass not only a road test, but also a written test. All states have driving rules, and sometimes the rules differ within a state. For example, though New York State allows right turns on red, the city of New York does not, and woe to the one who does not know that rule. In Little Rock, Arkansas, “no person shall sound the horn on a vehicle any place where cold drinks or sandwiches are served after 9 P.M. In Oregon, you are allowed to make a left hand turn on a red light, if you are turning into a one way street and Tennessee has a rule, which says it is illegal to shoot at any animal from a car, unless the animal happens to be a whale!
So, it is important to know the rules, and the same thing can be said about being a Christian. The United Church of Christ is pretty light on rules. While other denominations and traditions may insist that you consent to certain beliefs, the UCC is not a confessing denomination. While Christ is the head of the church, we have the freedom to discern and decide what that means for our lives. We are a covenantal church, meaning that we are called to walk together with one another in faith. We are called to be Christians in community. Christianity is not a solo enterprise.
Consider now our reading from John. The first thing Jesus does is call followers to from a community. He does not give these followers a list of beliefs about himself and God to which they must consent. In the section right before today’s lesson, Andrew and Simon join up quickly with no questions asked at all. In fact, Jesus is the one who asks a question: What are you looking for? They answer by asking him where he is staying and he tells them, “Come and see.”
Our lesson for today begins with Jesus’ decision to go to Galilee. Now that might seem like a trivial point to you, but it is actually quite important, because Galilee was an ethnically diverse region, removed from the stricter religious rules of Jerusalem. It was also home to a great deal of anti-Roman sentiment, the site of much political turmoil, so Jesus’ journey there signals him as someone who is willing to move outside the conventional, mainstream circles. And in this diverse place Jesus found Philip to whom he gave the command, “Follow me.” Where I go, you go too. And, of course, no one had any idea where such following would take them. Neither Andrew, nor Peter, nor Philip were offered any guarantees or promises or projections about the future. Jesus simply issued a command, “Follow me.” And they did.
Philip immediately recognized Jesus as the one predicted by the Hebrew Scriptures, and so, exactly as Andrew had done, getting his brother, Simon, Philip went and got his brother, Nathaniel. But notice this difference. While Philip, Simon and Andrew immediately went and followed, Nathaniel is more circumspect. He is suspicious, and when he learns that Jesus is from Nazareth, in Nathaniel’s mind, a kind of backwater, boring place, he asks a question: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But though he does not get a satisfactory answer, he still goes. Philip had the sense to invite Nathaniel without pressuring him.
And so, Nathaniel came and was impressed, especially when Jesus recognized him as an Israelite without deceit, sitting under a fig tree. In the rabbinic tradition the fig tree is compared to the Torah and searching for figs is a metaphorical way of referring to the study of Torah. John only uses the word Israelite here; all other times he uses Jew or Jews. So, Nathaniel is here being contrasted with Jacob, the trickster, who cheated his brother, Esau, out of his birthright and their father’s blessing.
Jacob wrestled with a man, who wounded him in the thigh, when Jacob refused to let the man go unless he received a blessing. He not only received a blessing, but also a name change: Israel, which means one who strives with God. This too is what discipleship looks like: Strive with God; argue with God, if you must, but do so without guile or deceit. And if you do these things, you will see. As Jesus promised Nathaniel, “You will see greater things than this.” So, these three words: follow, come, and see are the essence of Christian discipleship. Something else to note, which is easy to ignore: Andrew and Philip are Greek names, while Simon and Nathaniel are Jewish ones, which suggests a cultural diversity in the followers of Jesus from the very beginning.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Whatever King’s limitations and failings, and there were many, no one can deny he helped to change the consciousness and the laws of our nation. King never wanted to lead the Civil Rights movement, and after he was drafted to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he tried to resign when death threats came his way, but his resignation was refused. Unlike Nathaniel, who was invited to become a disciple with no pressure, King felt tremendous pressure. He was pushed pulled and prodded to follow, come, and see Christ in so many different places----Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Washington, Chicago, Memphis. Late, one winter evening, King, overwhelmed by fear after receiving another death threat, sat in his kitchen and bowed his head, calling on the one who would make a way out of no way. In the darkness of that night, Jesus came calling, and King said he was never the same. Taking up his cross, King followed; he came, and he saw. And we remember his journey and so many other journeys of saints and disciples in the hope that our own journeys might be strengthened and uplifted by remembering theirs.
January 10, 2023
Dear Friends,
Most of you know the story of the creation in the Book of Genesis. It is not a literal description of how the creation came to be, but its theological point is clear: All that God has made is good. On the 6th day, the story goes that God created humanity in God’s image, “male and female he created them” at the same time. (It is only in Genesis 2 that Eve is created out of Adam’s rib.). And then God blessed the humans and gave them dominion over all living things. Now people have argued over this word dominion, claiming that responsibility would be a preferable word, since dominion suggests a control and dominance that has certainly done harm to the earth and all its many species. But whatever we want to say about human control and responsibility concerning the earth and its creatures, it is true that we humans have often been less than respectful toward animals. We are at the top of the intelligence pyramid, we are fond of pointing out, and though that is most likely the case, it is certainly worth noting that animal intelligence is far more impressive than we humans have dared to acknowledge. Very recently I came across three stories that undermine our human arrogance.
We have all heard the words, “bird brain.” It is an insult to suggest that someone has the intelligence of a bird, and yet scientists are discovering that some birds are very intelligent. For example, ravens are smart, very smart. They can use tools, recognize and remember human faces and even plan for the future. Ravens show strong preference for people who treat them kindly, and they hold grudges against those who have been cruel to them. And these preferences have been known to last for years. In some cases, scientists have discovered that raven intelligence is comparable to that of chimpanzees, which have been considered the smartest of the animals. And ravens are not the only birds with smarts: crows, jays, and magpies also evidence problem solving intelligence. So, be careful about using the term, bird brain, as a put down.
And then there is the fascinating story of a bear named Wojtek, whose life began in Iran. A shepherd traded him, when the bear was a small orphaned cub, for some chocolate and a Swiss army knife. The Polish soldiers, who made the trade, received the little cub in a burlap bag, and they were delighted with the trade. All the soldiers in the unit loved him, and they even named him Private Wojtek, which means “joyful warrior.” The year was 1944 and Wojtek meant far more to the soldiers than entertainment. When the unit was assigned to Italy, at the Battle of Monte Cassino, Wojtek carried artillery shells and crates for ammunition across the battlefield, and when the battle was over, the unit changed its insignia to a bear holding an artillery shell. And they promoted Wojtek to corporeal. After the war Wojtek was taken to the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he lived from 1947 to 1963, when he died. In fact, next to the famous Edinburgh Castle stands a statute of Polish soldiers and a bear, both, designated as heroes of the Second World War!
And then there are horses. When I was growing up, one of my cousins, who lived in Pennsylvania, had some horses. Both she and her mother rode, and I remember Pamela telling me that though horses were great fun to ride, they were not very smart. She told me how horses would run back into their stall sin a burning barn. “How dumb is that!” Pamela insisted. But research is now indicating that horses are not only intelligent but also intuitive. Horses are great learners and recently scientists have discovered that they are very good at communicating with humans. One study showed that a horse could tell a person if it wanted a blanket by “nudging” a board that had icons of a blanket on it. And if a horse knew where an object was that a human being wanted but did not know its location, the horse would push the person toward the object. And horses can react to a person’s emotional state. There are many examples of horses responding to a person’s sadness by nuzzling with them or their happiness by neighing and gently stamping their feet.
What an incredibly amazing world we live in. The variety of vegetation and animals is astounding, and now we are beginning to appreciate that the animal kingdom’s intelligence is far greater than our minds and hearts ever imagined. Animals can be our companions, but they are far more than OUR companions. They have in them “the power of being,” something to be respected and honored. We should remember that God made all that is and named it good.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Most of you know the story of the creation in the Book of Genesis. It is not a literal description of how the creation came to be, but its theological point is clear: All that God has made is good. On the 6th day, the story goes that God created humanity in God’s image, “male and female he created them” at the same time. (It is only in Genesis 2 that Eve is created out of Adam’s rib.). And then God blessed the humans and gave them dominion over all living things. Now people have argued over this word dominion, claiming that responsibility would be a preferable word, since dominion suggests a control and dominance that has certainly done harm to the earth and all its many species. But whatever we want to say about human control and responsibility concerning the earth and its creatures, it is true that we humans have often been less than respectful toward animals. We are at the top of the intelligence pyramid, we are fond of pointing out, and though that is most likely the case, it is certainly worth noting that animal intelligence is far more impressive than we humans have dared to acknowledge. Very recently I came across three stories that undermine our human arrogance.
We have all heard the words, “bird brain.” It is an insult to suggest that someone has the intelligence of a bird, and yet scientists are discovering that some birds are very intelligent. For example, ravens are smart, very smart. They can use tools, recognize and remember human faces and even plan for the future. Ravens show strong preference for people who treat them kindly, and they hold grudges against those who have been cruel to them. And these preferences have been known to last for years. In some cases, scientists have discovered that raven intelligence is comparable to that of chimpanzees, which have been considered the smartest of the animals. And ravens are not the only birds with smarts: crows, jays, and magpies also evidence problem solving intelligence. So, be careful about using the term, bird brain, as a put down.
And then there is the fascinating story of a bear named Wojtek, whose life began in Iran. A shepherd traded him, when the bear was a small orphaned cub, for some chocolate and a Swiss army knife. The Polish soldiers, who made the trade, received the little cub in a burlap bag, and they were delighted with the trade. All the soldiers in the unit loved him, and they even named him Private Wojtek, which means “joyful warrior.” The year was 1944 and Wojtek meant far more to the soldiers than entertainment. When the unit was assigned to Italy, at the Battle of Monte Cassino, Wojtek carried artillery shells and crates for ammunition across the battlefield, and when the battle was over, the unit changed its insignia to a bear holding an artillery shell. And they promoted Wojtek to corporeal. After the war Wojtek was taken to the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he lived from 1947 to 1963, when he died. In fact, next to the famous Edinburgh Castle stands a statute of Polish soldiers and a bear, both, designated as heroes of the Second World War!
And then there are horses. When I was growing up, one of my cousins, who lived in Pennsylvania, had some horses. Both she and her mother rode, and I remember Pamela telling me that though horses were great fun to ride, they were not very smart. She told me how horses would run back into their stall sin a burning barn. “How dumb is that!” Pamela insisted. But research is now indicating that horses are not only intelligent but also intuitive. Horses are great learners and recently scientists have discovered that they are very good at communicating with humans. One study showed that a horse could tell a person if it wanted a blanket by “nudging” a board that had icons of a blanket on it. And if a horse knew where an object was that a human being wanted but did not know its location, the horse would push the person toward the object. And horses can react to a person’s emotional state. There are many examples of horses responding to a person’s sadness by nuzzling with them or their happiness by neighing and gently stamping their feet.
What an incredibly amazing world we live in. The variety of vegetation and animals is astounding, and now we are beginning to appreciate that the animal kingdom’s intelligence is far greater than our minds and hearts ever imagined. Animals can be our companions, but they are far more than OUR companions. They have in them “the power of being,” something to be respected and honored. We should remember that God made all that is and named it good.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Called to Manage our Memories
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
January 7, 2024
Mark 1: 4-11
I have a good friend, who spent a year in a state mental hospital. While he did have some serious mental health issues, what really kept him at CVH for so long was that he had no place to live. He needed subsidized housing, but the system was not working on his behalf, and so there he sat for a year until a lawyer pulled some strings and managed to get him out into a subsidized apartment. But he has been traumatized by his experience, suffering from post- traumatic stress syndrome. One of his friends said to me, “He cannot manage his memories of that horrible experience very well.
Manage memories. The only other time I heard the term “manage memories” was about John McCain, who said in an interview that he bore no anger or bitterness about his experiences in a North Viet Nam prison. “I had to leave that experience behind me, he said, and forgive my captors.” A commentator remarked, “Sometimes people do manage their memories well.”
All kinds of memories need to be managed: memories of childhood and school and siblings, marriage, divorce, even death. History is about managing memories. How we talk about the past matters. So, we should all be quite interested in recent comments made by a contender for the Presidency, when she was asked what caused the Civil War, and she did not initially mention the word slavery. How do we remember the past? How do we manage our memories of a past that is not always something to be proud of?
Managing memories is something we all are called to do. Some of you know that I was born less than a year after my parents lost a 2 year old boy to leukemia. Bobby’s pictures were all around the house, so I knew about death long before most children do. Even at age 2 and 3, I remember being sad that I would never know him, and sometimes I would even crawl under my bed and cry. No one knew I did so, and I finally told my mother about it, when she was 90. She was shocked by the depths of my feelings about someone whom I never knew. But his death impacted me, and I had to manage my memory of it---though I was not even born when he died.
Manage memories: We can think of the gospel writers as managers of memory, memories of Jesus Christ. But memories are always more than a mere collection of facts and stories. They are about meaning. What is the meaning of the story? We have four different gospels and the stories they tell are not the same. We have just come through the Christmas season, and we should note that the gospels do not tell the same story of Jesus’ birth. Luke is the only gospel that has the Holy Family travel to Bethlehem for a census, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room for them in an inn. Matthew says that Jesus was born at home in Bethlehem. There are no angels announcing the birth to shepherds as in Luke, but Matthew has wise men, who are gentiles and travel to Bethlehem to pay honor to the new born king. John’s gospel is completely different. There is no conventional birth scene at all. John begins at the beginning: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
And then there is Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, which begins its memory of Jesus with a baptism. So, understand that while Luke and Matthew present Jesus as special from the moment of his conception and birth, and John pushes Jesus’ identity as God’s chosen back to the beginning, Mark’s earliest memories of Jesus are his coming to a wild man named John, who was offering a baptism of repentance. And that is when the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is the moment Jesus became God’s Son, according to Mark.
Now these different memories of Jesus had to be managed, and we can well imagine that the early church had its struggles with these differences. Most people in the pews don’t much notice the differences, but you can be sure the leaders in the church did. Why, for example did Jesus need to be baptized? The church developed the doctrine of Jesus’ sinlessness, which means that Jesus was born without the stain of original sin and maintained a relationship with God unbroken or disrupted by sin. John offered a baptism of repentance, so why did Jesus submit to the baptism, if he had nothing for which to repent? And so, in time Jesus’ baptism was remembered as his solidarity with humankind. In other words, he is remembered as one of us. The meaning that is attached to the event actually helps to determine how the event is remembered. And that lesson applies to life---how we human beings manage our memories.
Some years ago, when Connecticut was going through the process of banning capital punishment, I went to a number of meetings and rallies about this. I heard a number of incredible stories, and one of them was from a woman, whose 19 year old daughter had been brutally murdered by a man, who was sentenced to life in prison. This horror had happened in upstate New York over 20 years before. The entire family were ardent opponents of the death penalty, so they were relieved the murderer was not executed. But the mother said she was tortured by what she imagined her daughter’s final moments. She could not get the images out of her mind. Nothing helped her---not therapy, not medication or meditation, not prayer, her own or the prayers of others. So, finally, in desperation, ten years after the murder, she determined she would go to the prison where the murderer was incarcerated and talk with him. She told the group that she and her husband did not even attend his trial, because they could not bear to look at the murderer. So, she went to the prison, and she said the first miracle was that he agreed to see her. And she went again and again and again until a relationship actually developed. “You come more than my own mother,” he told her. “She can never forgive me, he said, and I don’t expect you can forgive me either.” “Maybe in time I will,” was her response. And in time that is what she did. That is the second miracle, she told our group. And the third miracles is that the horrible images of her daughter’s murder finally left her. I can remember my daughter as she was and how her life ended as horrible as it was no longer tortures me.
Managing memories. The gospels do it. The Church does it, and so do we. The events that really matter---in the gospels as well as in our lives--- are never simply one moment frozen in time. Their meaning emerges, growing and changing over time.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
January 7, 2024
Mark 1: 4-11
I have a good friend, who spent a year in a state mental hospital. While he did have some serious mental health issues, what really kept him at CVH for so long was that he had no place to live. He needed subsidized housing, but the system was not working on his behalf, and so there he sat for a year until a lawyer pulled some strings and managed to get him out into a subsidized apartment. But he has been traumatized by his experience, suffering from post- traumatic stress syndrome. One of his friends said to me, “He cannot manage his memories of that horrible experience very well.
Manage memories. The only other time I heard the term “manage memories” was about John McCain, who said in an interview that he bore no anger or bitterness about his experiences in a North Viet Nam prison. “I had to leave that experience behind me, he said, and forgive my captors.” A commentator remarked, “Sometimes people do manage their memories well.”
All kinds of memories need to be managed: memories of childhood and school and siblings, marriage, divorce, even death. History is about managing memories. How we talk about the past matters. So, we should all be quite interested in recent comments made by a contender for the Presidency, when she was asked what caused the Civil War, and she did not initially mention the word slavery. How do we remember the past? How do we manage our memories of a past that is not always something to be proud of?
Managing memories is something we all are called to do. Some of you know that I was born less than a year after my parents lost a 2 year old boy to leukemia. Bobby’s pictures were all around the house, so I knew about death long before most children do. Even at age 2 and 3, I remember being sad that I would never know him, and sometimes I would even crawl under my bed and cry. No one knew I did so, and I finally told my mother about it, when she was 90. She was shocked by the depths of my feelings about someone whom I never knew. But his death impacted me, and I had to manage my memory of it---though I was not even born when he died.
Manage memories: We can think of the gospel writers as managers of memory, memories of Jesus Christ. But memories are always more than a mere collection of facts and stories. They are about meaning. What is the meaning of the story? We have four different gospels and the stories they tell are not the same. We have just come through the Christmas season, and we should note that the gospels do not tell the same story of Jesus’ birth. Luke is the only gospel that has the Holy Family travel to Bethlehem for a census, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room for them in an inn. Matthew says that Jesus was born at home in Bethlehem. There are no angels announcing the birth to shepherds as in Luke, but Matthew has wise men, who are gentiles and travel to Bethlehem to pay honor to the new born king. John’s gospel is completely different. There is no conventional birth scene at all. John begins at the beginning: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
And then there is Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, which begins its memory of Jesus with a baptism. So, understand that while Luke and Matthew present Jesus as special from the moment of his conception and birth, and John pushes Jesus’ identity as God’s chosen back to the beginning, Mark’s earliest memories of Jesus are his coming to a wild man named John, who was offering a baptism of repentance. And that is when the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is the moment Jesus became God’s Son, according to Mark.
Now these different memories of Jesus had to be managed, and we can well imagine that the early church had its struggles with these differences. Most people in the pews don’t much notice the differences, but you can be sure the leaders in the church did. Why, for example did Jesus need to be baptized? The church developed the doctrine of Jesus’ sinlessness, which means that Jesus was born without the stain of original sin and maintained a relationship with God unbroken or disrupted by sin. John offered a baptism of repentance, so why did Jesus submit to the baptism, if he had nothing for which to repent? And so, in time Jesus’ baptism was remembered as his solidarity with humankind. In other words, he is remembered as one of us. The meaning that is attached to the event actually helps to determine how the event is remembered. And that lesson applies to life---how we human beings manage our memories.
Some years ago, when Connecticut was going through the process of banning capital punishment, I went to a number of meetings and rallies about this. I heard a number of incredible stories, and one of them was from a woman, whose 19 year old daughter had been brutally murdered by a man, who was sentenced to life in prison. This horror had happened in upstate New York over 20 years before. The entire family were ardent opponents of the death penalty, so they were relieved the murderer was not executed. But the mother said she was tortured by what she imagined her daughter’s final moments. She could not get the images out of her mind. Nothing helped her---not therapy, not medication or meditation, not prayer, her own or the prayers of others. So, finally, in desperation, ten years after the murder, she determined she would go to the prison where the murderer was incarcerated and talk with him. She told the group that she and her husband did not even attend his trial, because they could not bear to look at the murderer. So, she went to the prison, and she said the first miracle was that he agreed to see her. And she went again and again and again until a relationship actually developed. “You come more than my own mother,” he told her. “She can never forgive me, he said, and I don’t expect you can forgive me either.” “Maybe in time I will,” was her response. And in time that is what she did. That is the second miracle, she told our group. And the third miracles is that the horrible images of her daughter’s murder finally left her. I can remember my daughter as she was and how her life ended as horrible as it was no longer tortures me.
Managing memories. The gospels do it. The Church does it, and so do we. The events that really matter---in the gospels as well as in our lives--- are never simply one moment frozen in time. Their meaning emerges, growing and changing over time.
January 4, 2024
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a noted author, speaker, philosopher, and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as well as the Harvard Business School. His specialty is the study of happiness, and he has written extensively on the subject. He has a regular column in The Atlantic, well worth reading. He is, at least in my view, a wise man, and part of his wisdom comes from his classical learning and study. The subject of happiness is one the ancient Greeks pondered, especially Aristotle, and indeed, when a liberal arts education was more HIGHLY valued than it is today, many undergraduates were assigned Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Recently I came across an article by Brooks, claiming that there are ten traits that build character and make for a happy life. Put aside the idea of happiness as all lightness and joy, devoid of struggle and suffering. For Aristotle a happy life is a deeply meaningful one, a life that knows how to accept both joy and sorrow. So, here are the 10 traits Aristotle claimed will lead to happiness.
1. Courage. Aristotle saw courage as the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a greater good. War, of course, immediately comes to mind. Just about all Americans, for example, can see that John McCain’s willingness to forgo release from a North Vietnamese prison, because there were others, who had been imprisoned longer than he, as a noble and courageous act. Courage is the capacity to act in the face of fear rather than to surrender to it. And research has shown that the exercise of courage leads to greater resiliency after the danger has passed, and resiliency is shown to issue to greater happiness.
2. Temperance: Aristotle means self-control, the ability to discipline one’s appetites and baser impulses. When one is initially learning self-control, the research indicates that levels of happiness decrease, as one gives up what one wants and enjoys. But as people develop greater levels of self control and discipline, happiness rises. Temperance is a virtue that calls us to avoid extremes and play toward the moderate middle. So, when it comes to food and drink, for example, the temperate person does not necessarily avoid all alcohol or sweets but is very careful not to overindulge.
3. Liberality: This has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with money. Avoid stinginess; be generous without being profligate, and the happiness index will rise.
4. Magnificence: This concerns how one carries out one’s projects and duties. They should be done “most nobly and splendidly,” Aristotle insists, to help the widest range of people. Buying a yacht may be magnificent, but giving to a cause that benefits a large number of people is even more magnificent.
5. Greatness of Soul: Aristotle greatly admired Socrates, whom he considered a greatly souled person. According to Aristotle greatness of soul means being indifferent to both good and bad fortune. Life offers us all kinds of transitory pleasures, and though most of us prefer the good fortune over the bad, it is important to recognize what is truly important and life giving. So, Aristotle’s advice is: Don’t pursue pleasure. Look for what gives life meaning that lasts over time.
6. Gentleness: Aristotle believed happiness depended upon one’s ability to control tempers and cultivate kindness. Indeed, researchers have confirmed that aggression, even aggressive thoughts, can lead to greater levels of stress and unhappiness. Be gentle and watch happiness grow.
7. Self-Honesty: It is important to be honest about who one is. Aristotle counseled against both boastfulness as well as self-deprecation. We should know who we are, which also helps us to focus on who we wish to become. A gentle humility can lead to greater happiness.
8. Equity: We hear a great deal about equity these days, which we tend to equate with fairness. And it is true, if we feel we are being unfairly treated, we are less happy. But Aristotle meant something else. The equitable person, Aristotle wrote, “is one who by choice and habit does not stand on his rights unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share, although he has the law on his side.” This is a tricky one, because such a virtue can be cultivated in certain groups of people (such as it has been in women), which can make them a permanent underclass. Aristotle referred to this as a “special form of justice.”
9. Forgiveness: This one should come as no shock to Christians, who have been schooled in the virtue of forgiveness by Jesus, who taught that we should be ready to forgive again and again and again. Research on the subject of forgiveness is rich, showing that the capacity to forgive and let go of anger and resentment lowers depression and anxiety and helps water the seeds of happiness.
10. Modesty: We tend to think of modesty in terms of humility, but Aristotle defined it as refraining from shameful, though tempting behaviors, even in complete privacy, when no one would ever know what you are doing. Modesty relates to temperance, except that modesty does not move toward moderation. It is a virtue because it avoids vice. Modesty for Aristotle is only a virtue if a good person would be ashamed if he were to do the (immodest) act. In other words, one has to believe that an act is morally bad in order to be virtuous when avoiding it. If, for example, you have no trouble with alcohol but are yourself a teetotaler, avoiding drink in this case is not the virtue of modesty. Research does indicate that when people avoid immorality and try to do moral acts, their happiness does increase.
I admire Aristotle’s program of happiness development. While I read the Nicomachean Ethics now over 50 years ago, I honestly don’t remember it. I cannot even say that at the time it made much of an impression. I suspect I was too young to understand why it is so critically important to our human development. But even at 19, I did notice that while Greek philosophy reflected a great deal on happiness (eudaimonia), Jesus never used the word happiness. Yet he did intimate that loving God with the fullness of heart, mind and spirit would grow full and abundant lives, which is what the Greeks meant by happiness. So perhaps Jesus and Aristotle would be close companions, traveling along the path of life, telling each other engaging stories and having stimulating conversations.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Arthur Brooks is a noted author, speaker, philosopher, and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as well as the Harvard Business School. His specialty is the study of happiness, and he has written extensively on the subject. He has a regular column in The Atlantic, well worth reading. He is, at least in my view, a wise man, and part of his wisdom comes from his classical learning and study. The subject of happiness is one the ancient Greeks pondered, especially Aristotle, and indeed, when a liberal arts education was more HIGHLY valued than it is today, many undergraduates were assigned Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Recently I came across an article by Brooks, claiming that there are ten traits that build character and make for a happy life. Put aside the idea of happiness as all lightness and joy, devoid of struggle and suffering. For Aristotle a happy life is a deeply meaningful one, a life that knows how to accept both joy and sorrow. So, here are the 10 traits Aristotle claimed will lead to happiness.
1. Courage. Aristotle saw courage as the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a greater good. War, of course, immediately comes to mind. Just about all Americans, for example, can see that John McCain’s willingness to forgo release from a North Vietnamese prison, because there were others, who had been imprisoned longer than he, as a noble and courageous act. Courage is the capacity to act in the face of fear rather than to surrender to it. And research has shown that the exercise of courage leads to greater resiliency after the danger has passed, and resiliency is shown to issue to greater happiness.
2. Temperance: Aristotle means self-control, the ability to discipline one’s appetites and baser impulses. When one is initially learning self-control, the research indicates that levels of happiness decrease, as one gives up what one wants and enjoys. But as people develop greater levels of self control and discipline, happiness rises. Temperance is a virtue that calls us to avoid extremes and play toward the moderate middle. So, when it comes to food and drink, for example, the temperate person does not necessarily avoid all alcohol or sweets but is very careful not to overindulge.
3. Liberality: This has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with money. Avoid stinginess; be generous without being profligate, and the happiness index will rise.
4. Magnificence: This concerns how one carries out one’s projects and duties. They should be done “most nobly and splendidly,” Aristotle insists, to help the widest range of people. Buying a yacht may be magnificent, but giving to a cause that benefits a large number of people is even more magnificent.
5. Greatness of Soul: Aristotle greatly admired Socrates, whom he considered a greatly souled person. According to Aristotle greatness of soul means being indifferent to both good and bad fortune. Life offers us all kinds of transitory pleasures, and though most of us prefer the good fortune over the bad, it is important to recognize what is truly important and life giving. So, Aristotle’s advice is: Don’t pursue pleasure. Look for what gives life meaning that lasts over time.
6. Gentleness: Aristotle believed happiness depended upon one’s ability to control tempers and cultivate kindness. Indeed, researchers have confirmed that aggression, even aggressive thoughts, can lead to greater levels of stress and unhappiness. Be gentle and watch happiness grow.
7. Self-Honesty: It is important to be honest about who one is. Aristotle counseled against both boastfulness as well as self-deprecation. We should know who we are, which also helps us to focus on who we wish to become. A gentle humility can lead to greater happiness.
8. Equity: We hear a great deal about equity these days, which we tend to equate with fairness. And it is true, if we feel we are being unfairly treated, we are less happy. But Aristotle meant something else. The equitable person, Aristotle wrote, “is one who by choice and habit does not stand on his rights unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share, although he has the law on his side.” This is a tricky one, because such a virtue can be cultivated in certain groups of people (such as it has been in women), which can make them a permanent underclass. Aristotle referred to this as a “special form of justice.”
9. Forgiveness: This one should come as no shock to Christians, who have been schooled in the virtue of forgiveness by Jesus, who taught that we should be ready to forgive again and again and again. Research on the subject of forgiveness is rich, showing that the capacity to forgive and let go of anger and resentment lowers depression and anxiety and helps water the seeds of happiness.
10. Modesty: We tend to think of modesty in terms of humility, but Aristotle defined it as refraining from shameful, though tempting behaviors, even in complete privacy, when no one would ever know what you are doing. Modesty relates to temperance, except that modesty does not move toward moderation. It is a virtue because it avoids vice. Modesty for Aristotle is only a virtue if a good person would be ashamed if he were to do the (immodest) act. In other words, one has to believe that an act is morally bad in order to be virtuous when avoiding it. If, for example, you have no trouble with alcohol but are yourself a teetotaler, avoiding drink in this case is not the virtue of modesty. Research does indicate that when people avoid immorality and try to do moral acts, their happiness does increase.
I admire Aristotle’s program of happiness development. While I read the Nicomachean Ethics now over 50 years ago, I honestly don’t remember it. I cannot even say that at the time it made much of an impression. I suspect I was too young to understand why it is so critically important to our human development. But even at 19, I did notice that while Greek philosophy reflected a great deal on happiness (eudaimonia), Jesus never used the word happiness. Yet he did intimate that loving God with the fullness of heart, mind and spirit would grow full and abundant lives, which is what the Greeks meant by happiness. So perhaps Jesus and Aristotle would be close companions, traveling along the path of life, telling each other engaging stories and having stimulating conversations.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
ANNA SPEAKS
A Monologue by The Rev. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
December 31, 2023
Luke 2: 22-40
If someone asked you who Anna was and what role she played in Luke’s Gospel, you would most likely not know or remember. Come on, be honest, how many of you really recall my story? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. I don’t expect you to remember. After all, I received but two lines in Luke’s gospel. Not that I am complaining. To be honest, I am thankful that I am even mentioned, let alone named. So many of the people in Jesus’ stories don’t have names, including the wise men. It’s tradition that later gave them the names of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. The Bible does not name them. It doesn’t even say there were three. It is the three gifts, which has led to the conclusion of three wise men. But I am wandering far off topic.
I am here to tell you my story, which is also the story of Jesus and his family, at least as Luke tells it. No other gospel mentions me. Not that Luke and I were acquainted. We did not know each other. By the Luke wrote his Gospel, sometime around the year 80 or 85, I was long gone. I was already an old woman of 84 years when Jesus was born. A good life I had, though of course, I had my disappointments. I never had any children, and my husband died after only seven years of marriage, leaving me a dependent widow. But I was fortunate about one thing: I was not pressured into marrying again, since my family had enough wealth to care for me. You see women had no wealth of their own. They were their fathers or brothers or uncles or husband’s responsibility, and so if a woman lost her husband, she had no recourse but to return to her family of origin, unless someone immediately married her. Poor families often could not take in a widowed daughter or sister or niece, and so finding a husband was an economic necessity. I thank God I did not have that worry. One husband was enough for me. I returned to live with my parents, and when they died, I stayed with my brother and his family, but in time, my life revolved around the Temple. I became known as a holy woman, because I spent so much time in prayer.
And do you know what I prayed for? It was the liberation of my people. You see, we Jews were living under Roman occupation, and though I cannot deny that Rome had its achievements: Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, brought some good things to the world, but we Jews were never going to be satisfied as long as we were a subject people. We were proud, fiercely independent, and we looked back longingly to the days of King David, when he ruled a United Kingdom. This was how things should be, we thought. And though Rome under Julius Caesar built roads, allowing travel and commerce, and erected aqueducts and sophisticated plumbing, which did allow a civilization to flourish, still it was not our civilization, and so we Jews longed for the great liberator. Most of us expected a king and a warrior, like David, but as I grew older, I began to have doubts. Perhaps the liberator would be like nothing we had ever known or expected.
I remember the day so well: cold, gray skies and a chilling drizzle that almost froze my bones. And then there was the old man, Simeon, known in Jerusalem as a devout and righteous man, seeking, it was said, the consolation of Israel. And on this particular day, he entered the Temple, claiming that the Holy Spirit had led him there. And it was then that he noticed the couple, who entered the Temple with their newborn son of 8 days to have him circumcised. I knew immediately they were poor, because they did not sacrifice a lamb, but instead offered two turtledoves or perhaps it was pigeons, as the Law allowed. The parents were faithful Jews--- of that you could be sure. They followed the Law, and not only the spirit, but also the letter! Later both Jews and gentiles would try to deny Jesus’ Jewish roots, but I know what I saw. It was then that something very unusual happened. Simeon approached the parents and took their son from them and began to praise God. “My eyes,” he prayed,” have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel.”
I was shocked! Why this prayer, mentioning the Gentiles? Let me tell you, the parents were shocked as well. They did not know what to do or say. They just stood there, gaping. Simeon blessed them both, and then he looked at the mother, and told her that a sword would pierce her heart. I thought it was a cruel thing to say, but when I looked at the infant, I knew with a certainty we human beings rarely ever have that this child was for the redemption of Israel. I cannot tell you exactly how it was that I knew.
Unlike the shepherds, there were no angels making an announcement. Unlike the wise men, there was no star guiding me. And unlike Simeon, the Holy Spirit did not lead me to this particular place at that particular time. I had spent a lifetime in prayer, and so when this moment arrived, I recognized it as the gift it was. I knew. It was as if my life had been moving toward this moment of recognition. There were other people in the Temple that day. They saw the same baby as Simeon and I did, but their eyes did not see what we saw. They did not know what we knew.
And that is how it often is with the spiritual life. Some see and others don’t. And it doesn’t happen in the same way for everyone. Sometimes it takes years of spiritual practice and discipline, and then you finally see. But there are others for whom the revelation comes in an instant, without much preparation at all--- like the shepherds out in the fields the night Jesus was born. Nothing had prepared them for the sight and sound of angels. And how about Mary, that young girl, what did she really know about being the mother of a savior? Nothing, really, but there it was, and I suspect she consented without fully understanding to what she was giving her consent.
God can be a bit tricky at times, which is why the Hindus are wise to have a name for God, which means “the trickster.” I have often thought that Mary got tricked into accepting a role she was not prepared for. Don’t you think Mary was like all other mothers, wanting happiness for their children, and saviors, well, their lives are not cut out for happiness. And so, Simeon warned her--- a sword shall pierce your heart. Poor thing, she looked frightened. And why shouldn’t she be? She did not know what was in store for her or for her son.
Of course, at the time none of us knew. We did not know the full implication of what we had witnessed. Neither Simeon nor I had any idea what kind of savior this baby would be, no idea what sort of redemption he would bring. There is this saying about God and the devil both being in the details. I guess that is so, which means that the burden falls on us to sort the details out. And that can take a long, long time. We are still working on those details, aren’t we, still trying to figure out what the story really means. Here you are, about 2000 years later, a few days after Christmas, and you still don’t know fully what it all means. You are still waiting for the redemption of the world. Someone once said that God gives us hints, and we must do a lot of guessing. And so, we do. But I think it is important to guess boldly, outside the box, as the saying goes. So, that is my final advice to you. Take the hints and then guess with boldness and with courage. And act boldly and courageously, leaving the rest to God.
A Monologue by The Rev. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
December 31, 2023
Luke 2: 22-40
If someone asked you who Anna was and what role she played in Luke’s Gospel, you would most likely not know or remember. Come on, be honest, how many of you really recall my story? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. I don’t expect you to remember. After all, I received but two lines in Luke’s gospel. Not that I am complaining. To be honest, I am thankful that I am even mentioned, let alone named. So many of the people in Jesus’ stories don’t have names, including the wise men. It’s tradition that later gave them the names of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. The Bible does not name them. It doesn’t even say there were three. It is the three gifts, which has led to the conclusion of three wise men. But I am wandering far off topic.
I am here to tell you my story, which is also the story of Jesus and his family, at least as Luke tells it. No other gospel mentions me. Not that Luke and I were acquainted. We did not know each other. By the Luke wrote his Gospel, sometime around the year 80 or 85, I was long gone. I was already an old woman of 84 years when Jesus was born. A good life I had, though of course, I had my disappointments. I never had any children, and my husband died after only seven years of marriage, leaving me a dependent widow. But I was fortunate about one thing: I was not pressured into marrying again, since my family had enough wealth to care for me. You see women had no wealth of their own. They were their fathers or brothers or uncles or husband’s responsibility, and so if a woman lost her husband, she had no recourse but to return to her family of origin, unless someone immediately married her. Poor families often could not take in a widowed daughter or sister or niece, and so finding a husband was an economic necessity. I thank God I did not have that worry. One husband was enough for me. I returned to live with my parents, and when they died, I stayed with my brother and his family, but in time, my life revolved around the Temple. I became known as a holy woman, because I spent so much time in prayer.
And do you know what I prayed for? It was the liberation of my people. You see, we Jews were living under Roman occupation, and though I cannot deny that Rome had its achievements: Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, brought some good things to the world, but we Jews were never going to be satisfied as long as we were a subject people. We were proud, fiercely independent, and we looked back longingly to the days of King David, when he ruled a United Kingdom. This was how things should be, we thought. And though Rome under Julius Caesar built roads, allowing travel and commerce, and erected aqueducts and sophisticated plumbing, which did allow a civilization to flourish, still it was not our civilization, and so we Jews longed for the great liberator. Most of us expected a king and a warrior, like David, but as I grew older, I began to have doubts. Perhaps the liberator would be like nothing we had ever known or expected.
I remember the day so well: cold, gray skies and a chilling drizzle that almost froze my bones. And then there was the old man, Simeon, known in Jerusalem as a devout and righteous man, seeking, it was said, the consolation of Israel. And on this particular day, he entered the Temple, claiming that the Holy Spirit had led him there. And it was then that he noticed the couple, who entered the Temple with their newborn son of 8 days to have him circumcised. I knew immediately they were poor, because they did not sacrifice a lamb, but instead offered two turtledoves or perhaps it was pigeons, as the Law allowed. The parents were faithful Jews--- of that you could be sure. They followed the Law, and not only the spirit, but also the letter! Later both Jews and gentiles would try to deny Jesus’ Jewish roots, but I know what I saw. It was then that something very unusual happened. Simeon approached the parents and took their son from them and began to praise God. “My eyes,” he prayed,” have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel.”
I was shocked! Why this prayer, mentioning the Gentiles? Let me tell you, the parents were shocked as well. They did not know what to do or say. They just stood there, gaping. Simeon blessed them both, and then he looked at the mother, and told her that a sword would pierce her heart. I thought it was a cruel thing to say, but when I looked at the infant, I knew with a certainty we human beings rarely ever have that this child was for the redemption of Israel. I cannot tell you exactly how it was that I knew.
Unlike the shepherds, there were no angels making an announcement. Unlike the wise men, there was no star guiding me. And unlike Simeon, the Holy Spirit did not lead me to this particular place at that particular time. I had spent a lifetime in prayer, and so when this moment arrived, I recognized it as the gift it was. I knew. It was as if my life had been moving toward this moment of recognition. There were other people in the Temple that day. They saw the same baby as Simeon and I did, but their eyes did not see what we saw. They did not know what we knew.
And that is how it often is with the spiritual life. Some see and others don’t. And it doesn’t happen in the same way for everyone. Sometimes it takes years of spiritual practice and discipline, and then you finally see. But there are others for whom the revelation comes in an instant, without much preparation at all--- like the shepherds out in the fields the night Jesus was born. Nothing had prepared them for the sight and sound of angels. And how about Mary, that young girl, what did she really know about being the mother of a savior? Nothing, really, but there it was, and I suspect she consented without fully understanding to what she was giving her consent.
God can be a bit tricky at times, which is why the Hindus are wise to have a name for God, which means “the trickster.” I have often thought that Mary got tricked into accepting a role she was not prepared for. Don’t you think Mary was like all other mothers, wanting happiness for their children, and saviors, well, their lives are not cut out for happiness. And so, Simeon warned her--- a sword shall pierce your heart. Poor thing, she looked frightened. And why shouldn’t she be? She did not know what was in store for her or for her son.
Of course, at the time none of us knew. We did not know the full implication of what we had witnessed. Neither Simeon nor I had any idea what kind of savior this baby would be, no idea what sort of redemption he would bring. There is this saying about God and the devil both being in the details. I guess that is so, which means that the burden falls on us to sort the details out. And that can take a long, long time. We are still working on those details, aren’t we, still trying to figure out what the story really means. Here you are, about 2000 years later, a few days after Christmas, and you still don’t know fully what it all means. You are still waiting for the redemption of the world. Someone once said that God gives us hints, and we must do a lot of guessing. And so, we do. But I think it is important to guess boldly, outside the box, as the saying goes. So, that is my final advice to you. Take the hints and then guess with boldness and with courage. And act boldly and courageously, leaving the rest to God.
December 28, 2023
Dear Friends,
A friend of mine recently told me that her New Year’s resolution is to improve her mental well-being. “I get too caught up in the cares of the world,” she told me. “I am always worried about something in the nation and the world, and it is really starting to have a negative impact on my mental health. I find myself sad or even depressed too much of the time. So, I am really going to work on this.”
I have a suggestion for her, because a few days later, I came across a fascinating article in the Washington Post. The question posed was: Want to improve your mental health? Pay attention to birds was the answer. I must confess, I am not a bird lover. I don’t like things flying over my head, but I do appreciate and love birdsong, so I was heartened to learn that simply hearing birds sing can have a very positive effect on one’s mental health.
According to research, birds provide a very strong connection to nature, and being out and about in the natural world is very good for one’s mental health. Research has verified this. Just taking a walk with the sky arching overhead and trees greeting one’s eyes can lift the spirits and help lessen depression. Research has now been done on the impact of birds on mental health. Since birds are everywhere, including in urban environments, they help people connect with nature, even in an unconscious way. People may not always be aware that they are hearing birds sing, but if they do focus their attention on birdsong, they find that their mood is elevated, and they feel better, lighter, more hopeful. The surprising outcome is that the benefits persist even after the bird encounter is over. Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College in London indicates that the elevated mood persists for hours after returning from an encounter with birds or birdsong.
A second study concludes that listening to short audio clips---only 6 minutes---can reduce anxiety and paranoia. It does not seem to matter if you listen to a number of different birds sing or just one or two birds. The result is the same: a more positive mental outlook. Being in nature seems to improve concentration and decrease the mental fatigue that comes from living in a stressful, overloaded environment. Though neuroscience has not yet come up with an explanation for how birdsong actually works on the human brain, it is noted that hearing birdsong decreases the activity in the pre-frontal cortex which is associated with rumination. Rumination apparently is connected with anxiety and depression, when people keep ruminating on the same thing over and over again without any resolution or change.
Natural stimuli---- such as birdsong and the (soft) sound of rain or wind----allows us to engage in what neuroscientists call “soft fascination”, which means that our attention is held but is also replenished. Stress is then reduced and so is blood pressure and levels of cortisol. (Cortisol is the stress hormone associated with increased levels of glucose in the body, which prepares the body for a fight or flight.)
So, one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is BE AWARE. When we are outside, it is so easy for us to forget that there are birds all around us, sometimes singing their hearts out. Another thing we can do is BE CURIOUS. Smartphone applications such as Merlin Bird ID and BirdNet can help identify the bird and its song. BirdCast gives maps of bird migrations in an area, helping us to be aware of just how much bird activity there is in a given area.
Researchers have actually discovered that people who pay close attention to birds can feel greater levels of joy than people who simply ignore the birds around them. The joy is the delight people experience in a world that even with all its problems and challenges is still a wonder to behold. Of course, one can delight in many different things---music, reading, walking, to name just a few.
God has gifted us with a spectacular world, and though we human beings have a deserved reputation for messing things up, still there is a beautiful world to behold and enjoy. Birds and birdsong are simply marvelous gifts that we can savor without the expenditure of money or great effort. All we need to do is go outside and look and listen. And when we do, we just might discover that our joy will grow.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
A friend of mine recently told me that her New Year’s resolution is to improve her mental well-being. “I get too caught up in the cares of the world,” she told me. “I am always worried about something in the nation and the world, and it is really starting to have a negative impact on my mental health. I find myself sad or even depressed too much of the time. So, I am really going to work on this.”
I have a suggestion for her, because a few days later, I came across a fascinating article in the Washington Post. The question posed was: Want to improve your mental health? Pay attention to birds was the answer. I must confess, I am not a bird lover. I don’t like things flying over my head, but I do appreciate and love birdsong, so I was heartened to learn that simply hearing birds sing can have a very positive effect on one’s mental health.
According to research, birds provide a very strong connection to nature, and being out and about in the natural world is very good for one’s mental health. Research has verified this. Just taking a walk with the sky arching overhead and trees greeting one’s eyes can lift the spirits and help lessen depression. Research has now been done on the impact of birds on mental health. Since birds are everywhere, including in urban environments, they help people connect with nature, even in an unconscious way. People may not always be aware that they are hearing birds sing, but if they do focus their attention on birdsong, they find that their mood is elevated, and they feel better, lighter, more hopeful. The surprising outcome is that the benefits persist even after the bird encounter is over. Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College in London indicates that the elevated mood persists for hours after returning from an encounter with birds or birdsong.
A second study concludes that listening to short audio clips---only 6 minutes---can reduce anxiety and paranoia. It does not seem to matter if you listen to a number of different birds sing or just one or two birds. The result is the same: a more positive mental outlook. Being in nature seems to improve concentration and decrease the mental fatigue that comes from living in a stressful, overloaded environment. Though neuroscience has not yet come up with an explanation for how birdsong actually works on the human brain, it is noted that hearing birdsong decreases the activity in the pre-frontal cortex which is associated with rumination. Rumination apparently is connected with anxiety and depression, when people keep ruminating on the same thing over and over again without any resolution or change.
Natural stimuli---- such as birdsong and the (soft) sound of rain or wind----allows us to engage in what neuroscientists call “soft fascination”, which means that our attention is held but is also replenished. Stress is then reduced and so is blood pressure and levels of cortisol. (Cortisol is the stress hormone associated with increased levels of glucose in the body, which prepares the body for a fight or flight.)
So, one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is BE AWARE. When we are outside, it is so easy for us to forget that there are birds all around us, sometimes singing their hearts out. Another thing we can do is BE CURIOUS. Smartphone applications such as Merlin Bird ID and BirdNet can help identify the bird and its song. BirdCast gives maps of bird migrations in an area, helping us to be aware of just how much bird activity there is in a given area.
Researchers have actually discovered that people who pay close attention to birds can feel greater levels of joy than people who simply ignore the birds around them. The joy is the delight people experience in a world that even with all its problems and challenges is still a wonder to behold. Of course, one can delight in many different things---music, reading, walking, to name just a few.
God has gifted us with a spectacular world, and though we human beings have a deserved reputation for messing things up, still there is a beautiful world to behold and enjoy. Birds and birdsong are simply marvelous gifts that we can savor without the expenditure of money or great effort. All we need to do is go outside and look and listen. And when we do, we just might discover that our joy will grow.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
CHRISTMAS, 1941: IN THE DARK STREET SHINETH
A CHRISTMAS EVE SERMON
BY: SANDRA OLSEN
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Luke 2: 1-20
Christmas is a time that invites people to remember. People remember Christmases past---sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Someone recently told me about her memory of Christmas Eve, 1969, when her family received notice that her 21 year old brother was missing in action in Viet Nam. Her family was among the fortunate, however, because five days later, they learned he was alive and recovering from wounds. Another woman told me about Christmas, 1946, when her newly divorced mother had no money. Yet on Christmas morning under the tree was a whole set of beautiful doll clothes, which years later she realized her mother had sewn. The memory of that Christmas, she told me, grows more precious with each passing year. “My mother worked full time as a secretary, and then she had my two brothers and me to care for in the evening, but as tired as she must have been, she sewed these clothes after we kids went to bed.”
Yes, there is something about Christmas that invites, maybe even forces memory, and our memories can even stretch to times before our birth. Someone once said that if you have no memory of time before you were born, you are an orphan. And so, we gather here this afternoon because we do not want to be orphans. We remember THE STORY, the gospel story of Jesus’ birth, which has the power to inform all our other stories, making us who we are, helping us to remember who we are. Yes, Christmas invites us to remember, even to times before we were born.
Recently I came across a story about Christmas Eve, 1941. It was a dark time. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed a few weeks before, and many must have wondered where God was in all the horror of war---just as I am sure many people today wonder what God is doing--- in Ukraine, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Sudan, to name just a few. How do you remember and celebrate the birth of the savior, when the world does not look saved? Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain and Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, must have pondered that question as Christmas, 1941 approached. They knew, as few others did, what they were facing, and Winston Churchill, against all advice, decided to cross the Atlantic to meet with the American President. It was quite a meeting.
On Christmas Eve from the White House balcony, the two leaders spoke to a gathered crowd of around 20,000 people. As reported in the Washington Post, “a crescent moon hung overhead as the sun dipped behind the Virginia hills, while southward loomed the Washington monument”. The site of the national Christmas tree had been moved at President Roosevelt’s request from the Ellipse to the south lawn of the White House. The President pushed a button. and the tree burst into light. “Our strongest weapon in this terrible war,” the President said, “is our conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of all, which Christmas signifies. Against enemies who would preach and practice hate, we set our faith in human love and in God’s love and care for us and for all people everywhere.”
When Mr. Roosevelt had finished speaking, Winston Churchill rose. “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” the Prime Minister acknowledged. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons science can devise, the nations advance upon one another. Here in the midst of war, raging over the lands and the seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes, here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous human heart. Therefore, we may cast aside this night the cares and dangers which beset us and make an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Here for one night only each home should be a brightly lighted island of happiness and peace.”
The next day was Christmas, and Churchill and Roosevelt went to church, accompanied by Eleanor Roosevelt and General Edwin Watson. They sang that morning the beloved carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” beloved, that is, by Americans, but unknown to Churchill, who wanted to know the story of its composition.
Well, on Christmas Eve in 1865 Philip Brooks, an American clergyman, on a visit to the Holy Land, road a horse to a hill top in Jerusalem, where he imagined shepherds had gathered to tend their sheep, when suddenly the sky was ablaze with light and their hearts and minds were filled with a message of hope: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Looking out at the peaceful scene and remembering the horror of the American Civil War, which had just ended, Brooks remembered the night Jesus was born. He remembered the words of the angels, and despite all the trouble and suffering of his time and Jesus’ time, he experienced peace.
After returning to his church in Philadelphia, Brooks put down on paper what he had felt that night, the words to “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Three years later he asked his organist, Lewis Redner, to put the poem to music that it might be sung at the Christmas service. Redner tried, but with no success. He went to bed on Christmas Eve, feeling he had utterly failed. His mind was a whirlwind of confusion, and then, in the middle of the night, he awoke, hearing an angel strain. Grabbing a sheet of paper, he wrote the treble of the tune, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and the carol was sung the next morning at the Christmas service.
“Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting light”: that is what Brooks wrote, and when Roosevelt and Churchill spoke on that Christmas Eve, now 82 years ago, that is what they too must have hoped for, that in spite of all the carnage human beings would make upon each other, the everlasting light would shine. Indeed, this everlasting light is what we hope for, a light that depends not so much on our meager and pathetic efforts, but rather a light that is the gift of a good and gracious God, who comes to us in the most unlikely of places, like a stable in Bethlehem or a cross in Jerusalem, or a homeless shelter in Hartford, or a car that is serving as someone’s home. “Yet in the dark streets shineth, the everlasting light.” That is the promise of Christmas. Receive the promise and pass it on.
A CHRISTMAS EVE SERMON
BY: SANDRA OLSEN
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Luke 2: 1-20
Christmas is a time that invites people to remember. People remember Christmases past---sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Someone recently told me about her memory of Christmas Eve, 1969, when her family received notice that her 21 year old brother was missing in action in Viet Nam. Her family was among the fortunate, however, because five days later, they learned he was alive and recovering from wounds. Another woman told me about Christmas, 1946, when her newly divorced mother had no money. Yet on Christmas morning under the tree was a whole set of beautiful doll clothes, which years later she realized her mother had sewn. The memory of that Christmas, she told me, grows more precious with each passing year. “My mother worked full time as a secretary, and then she had my two brothers and me to care for in the evening, but as tired as she must have been, she sewed these clothes after we kids went to bed.”
Yes, there is something about Christmas that invites, maybe even forces memory, and our memories can even stretch to times before our birth. Someone once said that if you have no memory of time before you were born, you are an orphan. And so, we gather here this afternoon because we do not want to be orphans. We remember THE STORY, the gospel story of Jesus’ birth, which has the power to inform all our other stories, making us who we are, helping us to remember who we are. Yes, Christmas invites us to remember, even to times before we were born.
Recently I came across a story about Christmas Eve, 1941. It was a dark time. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed a few weeks before, and many must have wondered where God was in all the horror of war---just as I am sure many people today wonder what God is doing--- in Ukraine, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Sudan, to name just a few. How do you remember and celebrate the birth of the savior, when the world does not look saved? Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain and Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, must have pondered that question as Christmas, 1941 approached. They knew, as few others did, what they were facing, and Winston Churchill, against all advice, decided to cross the Atlantic to meet with the American President. It was quite a meeting.
On Christmas Eve from the White House balcony, the two leaders spoke to a gathered crowd of around 20,000 people. As reported in the Washington Post, “a crescent moon hung overhead as the sun dipped behind the Virginia hills, while southward loomed the Washington monument”. The site of the national Christmas tree had been moved at President Roosevelt’s request from the Ellipse to the south lawn of the White House. The President pushed a button. and the tree burst into light. “Our strongest weapon in this terrible war,” the President said, “is our conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of all, which Christmas signifies. Against enemies who would preach and practice hate, we set our faith in human love and in God’s love and care for us and for all people everywhere.”
When Mr. Roosevelt had finished speaking, Winston Churchill rose. “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” the Prime Minister acknowledged. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons science can devise, the nations advance upon one another. Here in the midst of war, raging over the lands and the seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes, here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous human heart. Therefore, we may cast aside this night the cares and dangers which beset us and make an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Here for one night only each home should be a brightly lighted island of happiness and peace.”
The next day was Christmas, and Churchill and Roosevelt went to church, accompanied by Eleanor Roosevelt and General Edwin Watson. They sang that morning the beloved carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” beloved, that is, by Americans, but unknown to Churchill, who wanted to know the story of its composition.
Well, on Christmas Eve in 1865 Philip Brooks, an American clergyman, on a visit to the Holy Land, road a horse to a hill top in Jerusalem, where he imagined shepherds had gathered to tend their sheep, when suddenly the sky was ablaze with light and their hearts and minds were filled with a message of hope: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Looking out at the peaceful scene and remembering the horror of the American Civil War, which had just ended, Brooks remembered the night Jesus was born. He remembered the words of the angels, and despite all the trouble and suffering of his time and Jesus’ time, he experienced peace.
After returning to his church in Philadelphia, Brooks put down on paper what he had felt that night, the words to “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Three years later he asked his organist, Lewis Redner, to put the poem to music that it might be sung at the Christmas service. Redner tried, but with no success. He went to bed on Christmas Eve, feeling he had utterly failed. His mind was a whirlwind of confusion, and then, in the middle of the night, he awoke, hearing an angel strain. Grabbing a sheet of paper, he wrote the treble of the tune, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and the carol was sung the next morning at the Christmas service.
“Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting light”: that is what Brooks wrote, and when Roosevelt and Churchill spoke on that Christmas Eve, now 82 years ago, that is what they too must have hoped for, that in spite of all the carnage human beings would make upon each other, the everlasting light would shine. Indeed, this everlasting light is what we hope for, a light that depends not so much on our meager and pathetic efforts, but rather a light that is the gift of a good and gracious God, who comes to us in the most unlikely of places, like a stable in Bethlehem or a cross in Jerusalem, or a homeless shelter in Hartford, or a car that is serving as someone’s home. “Yet in the dark streets shineth, the everlasting light.” That is the promise of Christmas. Receive the promise and pass it on.
December 21, 2023
Dear Friends,
In just a few days Christmas will be here, and across the world Christians will gather in churches to celebrate the birth of Jesus. In fact, for the past month or so, Christmas trees, nativity scenes and lights have been displayed in many different settings and locales all around the world. But not in the city of Bethlehem. In November the city decided there would be no Christmas festivities this year. Religious services will be held, including the traditional Midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, which sits over a cave, where Jesus was said to be born. But all other sights and sounds of Christmas will be muted or absent---because of the War in Gaza.
Christians in the West Bank, where the city of Bethlehem is located, decided that the war made normal celebrations impossible. How can we celebrate, when our Palestinian brothers and sisters are suffering was the question on their minds. It is hardly a trivial question, and yet it is also true that Jesus came into a world that knew suffering and death. True, Pax Romana meant that the Roman Empire had managed to make peace through armed force. It had conquered much of the known western world and compelled obedience from its subjects. Rome did allow the expression of local culture and religion---as long as Caesar was acknowledged as Lord, something the Jews simply could not do. When the angels in Luke’s Gospel sing of “peace on earth,” their words mean far more than Pax Romana. Yes, they mean a ceasing of war and violence, but they also declare a peace that is beyond anything human beings can achieve on their own. This kind of peace, which passes human understanding, is a peace that only God can give. And so, the prayer this Christmas at the midnight Mass in Bethlehem will surely be for the peace that only God can give as well as for the peace that overcomes the warring madness human beings wage.
The cancelling of Christmas festivities is a financial disaster for the West Bank, which makes about 70% of its income over the Advent/Christmas season. Shops, restaurants, and stores are closed; 70 hotels have been shuttered, which means that 6000 employees are without work. For Christians it is painful to be without the normal sights and sounds of Christmas, but most Christians in Bethlehem seem to accept that this is the right decision. There are not a huge number of Christians in the West Bank, about 50,000 out of a population of 3.2 million. In Gaza there are only 1300 Christians in a population of 2.1 million, and Israel has about 182,000 Christians in its population of 9.7 million. 73.5 % of Israelis are Jews, while 21% are Arabs, whose religious identification, while mainly Muslim, spans other religions, including Christianity.
Christians in Bethlehem and the entire West Bank are pained by the war and the reality of death and suffering. In fact, all Christians are so pained, as they (and we) are also pained by the terrorism visited upon Israel on October 7, which left over 1200 Jews dead and another 200 plus kidnapped. If we can believe the numbers, over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed in this awful war, many of them women and children. Just this past week a mother and her daughter, seeking refuge in the only Catholic Church in Gaza, were gunned down by and Israeli sniper. Pope Francis condemned the shooting, calling it an act of terrorism. The violence is gut wrenching, and we do wonder how Israel will be left safer and more secure once this all ends.
Christmas is the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and though we might attempt to comfort ourselves by acknowledging that the peace Jesus brings is beyond the cessation of war and violence, yet surely the peace of Christ should also embrace a peace that overcomes war and violence. As the prophet Isaiah so beautifully said, And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4). To that let all of us say, “Amen.”
Yours in Christ
Sandra
Dear Friends,
In just a few days Christmas will be here, and across the world Christians will gather in churches to celebrate the birth of Jesus. In fact, for the past month or so, Christmas trees, nativity scenes and lights have been displayed in many different settings and locales all around the world. But not in the city of Bethlehem. In November the city decided there would be no Christmas festivities this year. Religious services will be held, including the traditional Midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, which sits over a cave, where Jesus was said to be born. But all other sights and sounds of Christmas will be muted or absent---because of the War in Gaza.
Christians in the West Bank, where the city of Bethlehem is located, decided that the war made normal celebrations impossible. How can we celebrate, when our Palestinian brothers and sisters are suffering was the question on their minds. It is hardly a trivial question, and yet it is also true that Jesus came into a world that knew suffering and death. True, Pax Romana meant that the Roman Empire had managed to make peace through armed force. It had conquered much of the known western world and compelled obedience from its subjects. Rome did allow the expression of local culture and religion---as long as Caesar was acknowledged as Lord, something the Jews simply could not do. When the angels in Luke’s Gospel sing of “peace on earth,” their words mean far more than Pax Romana. Yes, they mean a ceasing of war and violence, but they also declare a peace that is beyond anything human beings can achieve on their own. This kind of peace, which passes human understanding, is a peace that only God can give. And so, the prayer this Christmas at the midnight Mass in Bethlehem will surely be for the peace that only God can give as well as for the peace that overcomes the warring madness human beings wage.
The cancelling of Christmas festivities is a financial disaster for the West Bank, which makes about 70% of its income over the Advent/Christmas season. Shops, restaurants, and stores are closed; 70 hotels have been shuttered, which means that 6000 employees are without work. For Christians it is painful to be without the normal sights and sounds of Christmas, but most Christians in Bethlehem seem to accept that this is the right decision. There are not a huge number of Christians in the West Bank, about 50,000 out of a population of 3.2 million. In Gaza there are only 1300 Christians in a population of 2.1 million, and Israel has about 182,000 Christians in its population of 9.7 million. 73.5 % of Israelis are Jews, while 21% are Arabs, whose religious identification, while mainly Muslim, spans other religions, including Christianity.
Christians in Bethlehem and the entire West Bank are pained by the war and the reality of death and suffering. In fact, all Christians are so pained, as they (and we) are also pained by the terrorism visited upon Israel on October 7, which left over 1200 Jews dead and another 200 plus kidnapped. If we can believe the numbers, over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed in this awful war, many of them women and children. Just this past week a mother and her daughter, seeking refuge in the only Catholic Church in Gaza, were gunned down by and Israeli sniper. Pope Francis condemned the shooting, calling it an act of terrorism. The violence is gut wrenching, and we do wonder how Israel will be left safer and more secure once this all ends.
Christmas is the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and though we might attempt to comfort ourselves by acknowledging that the peace Jesus brings is beyond the cessation of war and violence, yet surely the peace of Christ should also embrace a peace that overcomes war and violence. As the prophet Isaiah so beautifully said, And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4). To that let all of us say, “Amen.”
Yours in Christ
Sandra
JOSEPH SPEAKS
First Church of Christ, Unionville
December 18, 2023
Silent Joseph: that is what I have been called over the millennia of Christianity. Do you know that I do not speak ONE WORD in the Bible? Oh, I’m there in the story, but as narration, not as speech. And so, today I speak. I tell my story.
First of all, let me say there was and is so much legend about me. Human beings rush in to fill in the gaps, and imagination always has its role to play. Even the gospels have their imagination, since they were all written decades after Jesus lived and walked the earth. And each gospel has its own unique perspective, its own story to tell.
In medieval times all kinds of stories about me emerged, and some of them have hung on in the modern imagination. For example, I am still often portrayed as an old man. And Mary in the medieval imagination was not portrayed as someone of humble birth. The faithful could not bear to think of her as a lowly maiden. And so, in The Golden Legend, which sometimes was even more popular than the Bible, the story goes that upon Mary’s birth, her parents dedicated her to the Temple. When she came of age, men were invited to compete for her hand in marriage---though Mary had insisted that she was dedicated to God as a perpetual virgin. Yet God told the men to bring their staffs, and the staff that flowered was to have Mary in marriage. According to the story, I did not want to go. It said I was old with children and grandchildren of my own, so why would I want an adolescent wife? Well, no other staff flowered except mine, and though I was portrayed as the hesitant husband, I took Mary as my wife. It makes for a good story, and if you have a good story, you have the people’s attention. If you look at great art, you often see me portrayed holding a staff with a flower at its end. As I said, it makes for a good story.
But the Bible too tells a good story. And so, let’s stick with scripture. In Luke, which is probably your favorite Christmas story, my portrayal is, well, minimal. Luke tells the story of the census, which caused me to go from Nazareth, where we lived, to Bethlehem., where the Messiah was supposed to be born. Bethlehem is the city of David, and I am a descendant of the House of David. And so, Jesus’ Davidic line is traced through me---though of course the story is that I am not Jesus’ biological father. But Luke did not care about biology. He wanted to make the point that Jesus’ identity as a descendant of the House of David came through me. It is as simple (or as complicated) as that!
Now Matthew tells a very different story, and the first thing you notice is that there is no census, no need to get Mary and me to Bethlehem, because Bethlehem is where we were already living. So, both gospels cannot be right; we could not be living in two different places at the same time, so you may want me to tell you what is the right story. But I am not here to do that. The important point for you to understand is that there are different stories, because there are different points to be made, different perspectives.
Matthew is very strong on connecting the Jesus story to the Old Testament. Jesus is the new Moses, giving the new law. And Matthew connects me to the Old Testament figure of Joseph, you know the favorite son of Jacob, who gave Joseph that beautiful coat of many colors. And his jealous brothers sold him into slavery and told their father that a wild beast had killed him. Joseph was a brilliant interpreter of dreams and though he began as a slave, he became a high official in the Egyptian government, because he interpreted dreams for Pharoah and his family. And so, I, who share his name, deal in dreams. That is how Matthew tells the story.
When I discovered that Mary was pregnant, I determined to divorce her. You see, a promise to marry in ancient Israel was considered a legally binding contract, and so I needed to break that contract. But, if I had done it publicly, it would have brought not only great shame upon Mary, but also the possibility that she could have been stoned as an adulteress. So, I determined to divorce her quietly without public scandal or shame. And that is when the dream came to me and an angel of the Lord said: “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for her pregnancy is of the Holy Spirit.”
I’ve got to admit, that was hard to swallow, hard to believe. And can you blame me for wanting more assurance? I loved Mary and I wanted to know that my love for her was really at one with God’s love and God’s will. But the angel, Gabriel, told me I must believe and be silent. And you know something? Those words were not only for me. They are for all of us, at least some of the time. We can be so full of words that we miss the big things. We are so busy talking, so busy getting our own points across that we fail to be silent and hear the deep truth of God. And so, I was quiet, and I listened.
Listened as well to the other dreams that came: the dream that told me Herod was out for the life of the infant, and so we fled to Egypt. And then there was another dream that told me Herod was dead and so it was safe to return. But we did not return to Bethlehem. I was afraid for our safety, and so we went to Nazareth, where I made my living as “a worker with wood.” And Jesus worked with me. I taught him a great deal, and he was pretty good with wood, but I could tell his heart was not in it. And at times that could be annoying. I’ll admit to you that I did not understand him. I would see him looking off into the far distance, and he liked to spend a great deal of his time alone. When he was 12 and stayed behind at the Temple and Mary and I frantically looked for him, when we finally found him, he dismissed our worries by saying, “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” And let me tell you: he did not mean MY business. I KNEW whose business he meant, and it scared the life out of me. And as the years went by, he seemed to take that business even more seriously. And it continued to scare me. And that fear became a wedge between Jesus and me. After a while I could not feel close to him. He and I were at a distance from one another, a distance that could not be crossed. And sometimes that is just the way it is. Maybe there are times it is just the way it needs to be.
If there is anything I learned from my life it is this: Though we are all God’s people and loved by God, we are different. We don’t see, experience, or understand the world in the same way. And sometimes that difference separates us, no matter how hard we try to overcome it, no matter how hard we try to understand. I think there are times we just cannot understand. We stand in different places and cannot see what the other sees. Perhaps we simply need to be more accepting of that difference and the distance it creates.
I think Mary understood that better than I did. She knew how to listen and ponder things deeply in her heart. And I think her ponderings led her to a gentle acceptance. May that be so for all of us.
First Church of Christ, Unionville
December 18, 2023
Silent Joseph: that is what I have been called over the millennia of Christianity. Do you know that I do not speak ONE WORD in the Bible? Oh, I’m there in the story, but as narration, not as speech. And so, today I speak. I tell my story.
First of all, let me say there was and is so much legend about me. Human beings rush in to fill in the gaps, and imagination always has its role to play. Even the gospels have their imagination, since they were all written decades after Jesus lived and walked the earth. And each gospel has its own unique perspective, its own story to tell.
In medieval times all kinds of stories about me emerged, and some of them have hung on in the modern imagination. For example, I am still often portrayed as an old man. And Mary in the medieval imagination was not portrayed as someone of humble birth. The faithful could not bear to think of her as a lowly maiden. And so, in The Golden Legend, which sometimes was even more popular than the Bible, the story goes that upon Mary’s birth, her parents dedicated her to the Temple. When she came of age, men were invited to compete for her hand in marriage---though Mary had insisted that she was dedicated to God as a perpetual virgin. Yet God told the men to bring their staffs, and the staff that flowered was to have Mary in marriage. According to the story, I did not want to go. It said I was old with children and grandchildren of my own, so why would I want an adolescent wife? Well, no other staff flowered except mine, and though I was portrayed as the hesitant husband, I took Mary as my wife. It makes for a good story, and if you have a good story, you have the people’s attention. If you look at great art, you often see me portrayed holding a staff with a flower at its end. As I said, it makes for a good story.
But the Bible too tells a good story. And so, let’s stick with scripture. In Luke, which is probably your favorite Christmas story, my portrayal is, well, minimal. Luke tells the story of the census, which caused me to go from Nazareth, where we lived, to Bethlehem., where the Messiah was supposed to be born. Bethlehem is the city of David, and I am a descendant of the House of David. And so, Jesus’ Davidic line is traced through me---though of course the story is that I am not Jesus’ biological father. But Luke did not care about biology. He wanted to make the point that Jesus’ identity as a descendant of the House of David came through me. It is as simple (or as complicated) as that!
Now Matthew tells a very different story, and the first thing you notice is that there is no census, no need to get Mary and me to Bethlehem, because Bethlehem is where we were already living. So, both gospels cannot be right; we could not be living in two different places at the same time, so you may want me to tell you what is the right story. But I am not here to do that. The important point for you to understand is that there are different stories, because there are different points to be made, different perspectives.
Matthew is very strong on connecting the Jesus story to the Old Testament. Jesus is the new Moses, giving the new law. And Matthew connects me to the Old Testament figure of Joseph, you know the favorite son of Jacob, who gave Joseph that beautiful coat of many colors. And his jealous brothers sold him into slavery and told their father that a wild beast had killed him. Joseph was a brilliant interpreter of dreams and though he began as a slave, he became a high official in the Egyptian government, because he interpreted dreams for Pharoah and his family. And so, I, who share his name, deal in dreams. That is how Matthew tells the story.
When I discovered that Mary was pregnant, I determined to divorce her. You see, a promise to marry in ancient Israel was considered a legally binding contract, and so I needed to break that contract. But, if I had done it publicly, it would have brought not only great shame upon Mary, but also the possibility that she could have been stoned as an adulteress. So, I determined to divorce her quietly without public scandal or shame. And that is when the dream came to me and an angel of the Lord said: “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for her pregnancy is of the Holy Spirit.”
I’ve got to admit, that was hard to swallow, hard to believe. And can you blame me for wanting more assurance? I loved Mary and I wanted to know that my love for her was really at one with God’s love and God’s will. But the angel, Gabriel, told me I must believe and be silent. And you know something? Those words were not only for me. They are for all of us, at least some of the time. We can be so full of words that we miss the big things. We are so busy talking, so busy getting our own points across that we fail to be silent and hear the deep truth of God. And so, I was quiet, and I listened.
Listened as well to the other dreams that came: the dream that told me Herod was out for the life of the infant, and so we fled to Egypt. And then there was another dream that told me Herod was dead and so it was safe to return. But we did not return to Bethlehem. I was afraid for our safety, and so we went to Nazareth, where I made my living as “a worker with wood.” And Jesus worked with me. I taught him a great deal, and he was pretty good with wood, but I could tell his heart was not in it. And at times that could be annoying. I’ll admit to you that I did not understand him. I would see him looking off into the far distance, and he liked to spend a great deal of his time alone. When he was 12 and stayed behind at the Temple and Mary and I frantically looked for him, when we finally found him, he dismissed our worries by saying, “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” And let me tell you: he did not mean MY business. I KNEW whose business he meant, and it scared the life out of me. And as the years went by, he seemed to take that business even more seriously. And it continued to scare me. And that fear became a wedge between Jesus and me. After a while I could not feel close to him. He and I were at a distance from one another, a distance that could not be crossed. And sometimes that is just the way it is. Maybe there are times it is just the way it needs to be.
If there is anything I learned from my life it is this: Though we are all God’s people and loved by God, we are different. We don’t see, experience, or understand the world in the same way. And sometimes that difference separates us, no matter how hard we try to overcome it, no matter how hard we try to understand. I think there are times we just cannot understand. We stand in different places and cannot see what the other sees. Perhaps we simply need to be more accepting of that difference and the distance it creates.
I think Mary understood that better than I did. She knew how to listen and ponder things deeply in her heart. And I think her ponderings led her to a gentle acceptance. May that be so for all of us.
December 14, 2023
Dear Friends,
We Christians are in the midst of celebrating Advent as we move toward Christmas. Advent is really a dark time, quite literally so in the northern hemisphere as the days shorten until the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, after which the days begin to grow longer. But even without the seasonal darkness, Advent still suggests a dark time as Christians wait for the coming of the Christ to bring new life and light into the world. John’s gospel lacks a conventional birth story, but it does say that the Word was the light and life of all people. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Our Jewish friends are celebrating Hanukkah, which this year began on December 8 and will end on December 15. Hanukkah is also concerned with light and darkness. When Alexander the Great, born 356 BCE, conquered territory and created an empire, extending from Greece to Rome to India, he began a process known as Hellenization, which meant that Greek language and culture became the dominant force. Greek was the language of education and many Jews, for example, no longer knew or understood Hebrew. By the middle of the second century the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who reigned from 175 to 164 BCE, was forcing practices on the Jews, which they considered to be an assault on their religious identity and a desacralization of the Temple. While many Jews were willing to go along with the changes, there was a group, the Maccabees, who fought to save their tradition. They understood Greek culture and its practices to be a defilement of their Temple, and so a battle was fought centering around the Second Temple in Jerusalem. ( Remember, the first Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE). Mattathias and his son, Judas Maccabeus, along with other loyalists, fought a battle that lasted three years. Finally, the victory was won, and Judas ordered the cleansing of the Temple and its re-dedication.
The story of this military victory is not in the Jewish bible, but it is in the Book of Maccabees, part of the Apocrypha, included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testament but deleted in the Protestant and Jewish ones. While the Book of Maccabees tells a military story, the Talmud tells the story of the miracle of oil. When Judas Maccabeus entered the Temple., he found only a very small amount of oil, barely enough for one day of candle burning. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days, until consecrated oil could be found, and the Temple rededicated. Thus, the celebration of Hanukkah is mandated to last for eight days.
Apparently as time went on, many rabbis did not want to emphasize the militarism of the story, and so they chose to concentrate on the miracle of the oil. One rabbi suggested that the real miracle of Hanukkah concerns the continuing survival of the Jews throughout history---though time and time again there have been efforts to erase them from the face of the earth. Hanukkah is about celebrating the light, which overcomes the darkness. It is the victory of hope over despair. These are fully human experiences, open to people of many different faiths or no faith at all. All human beings know what it is to be tempted by hopelessness and despair. The ritual of candle lighting symbolically casts away the darkness.
Over the years I have heard some Jews complain that Hanukkah is only a minor religious holiday, but because it comes so close to the season of Advent and Christmas, its celebration is pushed as a Jewish response to Christmas. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it does seem to me that celebrating the victory of hope over despair is certainly a humanly vital act, one worthy of time and effort. Christians and Jews together can celebrate the coming of the light.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
We Christians are in the midst of celebrating Advent as we move toward Christmas. Advent is really a dark time, quite literally so in the northern hemisphere as the days shorten until the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, after which the days begin to grow longer. But even without the seasonal darkness, Advent still suggests a dark time as Christians wait for the coming of the Christ to bring new life and light into the world. John’s gospel lacks a conventional birth story, but it does say that the Word was the light and life of all people. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Our Jewish friends are celebrating Hanukkah, which this year began on December 8 and will end on December 15. Hanukkah is also concerned with light and darkness. When Alexander the Great, born 356 BCE, conquered territory and created an empire, extending from Greece to Rome to India, he began a process known as Hellenization, which meant that Greek language and culture became the dominant force. Greek was the language of education and many Jews, for example, no longer knew or understood Hebrew. By the middle of the second century the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who reigned from 175 to 164 BCE, was forcing practices on the Jews, which they considered to be an assault on their religious identity and a desacralization of the Temple. While many Jews were willing to go along with the changes, there was a group, the Maccabees, who fought to save their tradition. They understood Greek culture and its practices to be a defilement of their Temple, and so a battle was fought centering around the Second Temple in Jerusalem. ( Remember, the first Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE). Mattathias and his son, Judas Maccabeus, along with other loyalists, fought a battle that lasted three years. Finally, the victory was won, and Judas ordered the cleansing of the Temple and its re-dedication.
The story of this military victory is not in the Jewish bible, but it is in the Book of Maccabees, part of the Apocrypha, included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testament but deleted in the Protestant and Jewish ones. While the Book of Maccabees tells a military story, the Talmud tells the story of the miracle of oil. When Judas Maccabeus entered the Temple., he found only a very small amount of oil, barely enough for one day of candle burning. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days, until consecrated oil could be found, and the Temple rededicated. Thus, the celebration of Hanukkah is mandated to last for eight days.
Apparently as time went on, many rabbis did not want to emphasize the militarism of the story, and so they chose to concentrate on the miracle of the oil. One rabbi suggested that the real miracle of Hanukkah concerns the continuing survival of the Jews throughout history---though time and time again there have been efforts to erase them from the face of the earth. Hanukkah is about celebrating the light, which overcomes the darkness. It is the victory of hope over despair. These are fully human experiences, open to people of many different faiths or no faith at all. All human beings know what it is to be tempted by hopelessness and despair. The ritual of candle lighting symbolically casts away the darkness.
Over the years I have heard some Jews complain that Hanukkah is only a minor religious holiday, but because it comes so close to the season of Advent and Christmas, its celebration is pushed as a Jewish response to Christmas. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it does seem to me that celebrating the victory of hope over despair is certainly a humanly vital act, one worthy of time and effort. Christians and Jews together can celebrate the coming of the light.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Golden Legend: St. Nicholas, A Saint of Advent
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, UNIONVILLE, CT
DECEMBER 10, 2023
Mark 1: 1-8
It is the second Sunday of Advent, and our reading this morning from Mark gives us John the Baptist, who was, by all accounts, rather eccentric. (Matthew and Luke make him seem even more so.) John was baptizing people for the forgiveness of sins, and the text tells us that everyone from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside came out to be baptized. He was clothed with a camel haired shirt, ate honey and wild locusts, and we can imagine him almost shouting his message: “Someone greater than I is coming, and I am unworthy to stoop down and untie the throng of his sandal.” So, John was definitely different.
And then in verse 9, which is not part of the lectionary text for the day, it simply says, Jesus came from Nazareth to be baptized by John. And that line sounds so quiet, Jesus coming without a lot of noise or drama. It does feel peaceful, doesn’t it? And who does not want and need some peace? I don’t mean peace as simply the absence of war---though Lord knows, that would be a very welcome relief. But the peace that passes all understanding, which only God can give. Rarely do we know that kind of peace, though we long for it, and certainly imagine it. And on this Second Sunday of Advent, in a world filled with prejudice, war, dissension and confusion, we all know the feeling of wanting peace, even if the peace we get does not really pass human understanding. There are days we are willing to settle for far less than that kind of peace. Some days almost any kind of peace will do.
In the 13th century a member of the Dominican Order, Jacobus de Voragine, born in 1228 or 1229, wrote a book, The Golden Legend. For almost three centuries, it was a best seller, sometimes outselling the Bible. It is a collection of stories about saints, but it is really more than that. It is an attempt to tell the story of human time by putting it into a sacred perspective. Since in Jesus Christ God enters the human story, nothing human is beyond God’s grace. In the most ordinary of moments, God meets us and even in those times, which seem so empty of God’s presence and God’s grace, still, God is there. From Psalm 139: O where can I flee from your spirit? If I ascend to the heavens or descend to the depths, still you are there. There is no place I can go, where God is not.
Now the Middle Ages was a violent time. There was no police force, and crime against persons including theft, assault and even murder was not uncommon. And yet in the midst of that violent time, a man wrote a compelling story about human time, filled with all the problems that human beings have, and yet he gave to this story a God shaped vision. As filled with trouble and even violence as some of the stories of The Golden Legend are, still hope, peace, joy and love prevail.
The book is divided into chapters, which tell the story of Jesus Christ through the liturgical calendar. So, for example, the chapter called the time of renewal is the season of Advent, a time of waiting and hoping for light to come into the world and overcome the darkness. And for Advent Jacobus includes the stories of four saints: Andrew, Nicholas, Lucy, and Thomas. Now Andrew and Thomas were disciples of Jesus, so they have pride of place, St. Lucy wanted her family to give away all its wealth to the poor, and when she refused her suitor, insisting she will remain a virgin, he was so enraged that he would not have access to her wealth or body, he reported her to the authorities as a Christian and she was eventually executed. And then there is St. Nicholas.
We don’t know a great deal about St. Nicholas, but he was made Bishop of Myra (now Turkey) while still a young man. He was born wealthy and was incredibly generous, often saving people from dire fates, like the young women he saved from prostitution, when he gave them gold bars as dowries. He is also said to have saved sailors from catastrophic storms at sea and children from persons who would do them great harm.
This past Wednesday was St. Nicholas Day, when at the Y, I was speaking to an Episcopal priest, Daniel, who was raised Roman Catholic. Daniel grew up hearing all kinds of stories about saints., and he told me his favorite was St. Nicholas. “We hung up stockings on the night of Dec. 5,” he said, “and the next day they were filled with small goodies, candy, fruit, maybe a pair of socks, or mittens, modest gifts, not as big as Christmas.” And then Daniel told me this story.
Many years ago, a few days before St. Nicholas Day, it was a snowy day in Vermont when all the neighborhood kids were out sledding, and then so quickly it happened, Daniel’s brother, Mark, was hit by a car. He had a lot of internal injuries, including his spleen, which had to be removed. And his kidneys were mush, smashed, and so he would need a kidney, or else it would be dialysis. His family submitted themselves for testing, to see if anyone would be a proper match, and so did the neighbors, very close friends, who lived across the street. And one of those neighbors, Paul, the oldest brother of Daniel’s best friend, was an excellent match. Mark’s family could not believe it! How could a neighbor be a better match than blood relations? I asked my husband about this, who teaches such things, and he told me that yes, it is possible. (And then he proceeded to give me far more information than I wanted or needed.) No one in Mark’s family would dare to ask Paul, who had just turned 20, for such a sacrifice. But a few days after St. Nicholas’ Day, when the family finally got around to looking into the stockings that had been hanging there for a few days, in Mark’s stocking was a note from Paul: You’ve got a donor, the note said.
We could not believe the generosity, Daniel told me. My brother was still in the hospital, and it would be a while before he could have the new kidney, but eventually he had the operation, and it worked. Life went on well and healthfully for 20 years, and then Paul began to have serious kidney issues with his one remaining kidney. He needed a new kidney, and this time Daniel was the best match. He returned the blessing his brother Mark had received 20 years before, so that Paul, who helped to save Mark’s life, would have another chance at full and abundant life.
How ironic and grace filled is this story---that two different families, connected as friends, should become bound to each other as donors. Daniel told me that to this day he believes it had made a profound difference in all their lives that they had grown up hearing stories of the saints. “Some of the stories were silly, like a saint finding a pair of eyes and putting them into a blind person’s eye sockets. But there were other stories, like those of St. Nicholas, that did not have the flavor of fairy tales but were about real people with real needs. WE could believe them as patterns for human life. You know, he said, the Bible says that faith comes by hearing. It is true. We heard something that made a difference to the way we lived our lives.
And so on this Second Sunday of Advent, a few days after St Nicholas Day, which was December 6, peace is the theme. John the Baptist might have raged about the need to repent, and then along came Jesus, quietly and unobtrusively. And when he came, he brought with him the promise of a peace that passes human understanding. May we know that peace and hear the words and the stories that bring such peace into our lives.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, UNIONVILLE, CT
DECEMBER 10, 2023
Mark 1: 1-8
It is the second Sunday of Advent, and our reading this morning from Mark gives us John the Baptist, who was, by all accounts, rather eccentric. (Matthew and Luke make him seem even more so.) John was baptizing people for the forgiveness of sins, and the text tells us that everyone from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside came out to be baptized. He was clothed with a camel haired shirt, ate honey and wild locusts, and we can imagine him almost shouting his message: “Someone greater than I is coming, and I am unworthy to stoop down and untie the throng of his sandal.” So, John was definitely different.
And then in verse 9, which is not part of the lectionary text for the day, it simply says, Jesus came from Nazareth to be baptized by John. And that line sounds so quiet, Jesus coming without a lot of noise or drama. It does feel peaceful, doesn’t it? And who does not want and need some peace? I don’t mean peace as simply the absence of war---though Lord knows, that would be a very welcome relief. But the peace that passes all understanding, which only God can give. Rarely do we know that kind of peace, though we long for it, and certainly imagine it. And on this Second Sunday of Advent, in a world filled with prejudice, war, dissension and confusion, we all know the feeling of wanting peace, even if the peace we get does not really pass human understanding. There are days we are willing to settle for far less than that kind of peace. Some days almost any kind of peace will do.
In the 13th century a member of the Dominican Order, Jacobus de Voragine, born in 1228 or 1229, wrote a book, The Golden Legend. For almost three centuries, it was a best seller, sometimes outselling the Bible. It is a collection of stories about saints, but it is really more than that. It is an attempt to tell the story of human time by putting it into a sacred perspective. Since in Jesus Christ God enters the human story, nothing human is beyond God’s grace. In the most ordinary of moments, God meets us and even in those times, which seem so empty of God’s presence and God’s grace, still, God is there. From Psalm 139: O where can I flee from your spirit? If I ascend to the heavens or descend to the depths, still you are there. There is no place I can go, where God is not.
Now the Middle Ages was a violent time. There was no police force, and crime against persons including theft, assault and even murder was not uncommon. And yet in the midst of that violent time, a man wrote a compelling story about human time, filled with all the problems that human beings have, and yet he gave to this story a God shaped vision. As filled with trouble and even violence as some of the stories of The Golden Legend are, still hope, peace, joy and love prevail.
The book is divided into chapters, which tell the story of Jesus Christ through the liturgical calendar. So, for example, the chapter called the time of renewal is the season of Advent, a time of waiting and hoping for light to come into the world and overcome the darkness. And for Advent Jacobus includes the stories of four saints: Andrew, Nicholas, Lucy, and Thomas. Now Andrew and Thomas were disciples of Jesus, so they have pride of place, St. Lucy wanted her family to give away all its wealth to the poor, and when she refused her suitor, insisting she will remain a virgin, he was so enraged that he would not have access to her wealth or body, he reported her to the authorities as a Christian and she was eventually executed. And then there is St. Nicholas.
We don’t know a great deal about St. Nicholas, but he was made Bishop of Myra (now Turkey) while still a young man. He was born wealthy and was incredibly generous, often saving people from dire fates, like the young women he saved from prostitution, when he gave them gold bars as dowries. He is also said to have saved sailors from catastrophic storms at sea and children from persons who would do them great harm.
This past Wednesday was St. Nicholas Day, when at the Y, I was speaking to an Episcopal priest, Daniel, who was raised Roman Catholic. Daniel grew up hearing all kinds of stories about saints., and he told me his favorite was St. Nicholas. “We hung up stockings on the night of Dec. 5,” he said, “and the next day they were filled with small goodies, candy, fruit, maybe a pair of socks, or mittens, modest gifts, not as big as Christmas.” And then Daniel told me this story.
Many years ago, a few days before St. Nicholas Day, it was a snowy day in Vermont when all the neighborhood kids were out sledding, and then so quickly it happened, Daniel’s brother, Mark, was hit by a car. He had a lot of internal injuries, including his spleen, which had to be removed. And his kidneys were mush, smashed, and so he would need a kidney, or else it would be dialysis. His family submitted themselves for testing, to see if anyone would be a proper match, and so did the neighbors, very close friends, who lived across the street. And one of those neighbors, Paul, the oldest brother of Daniel’s best friend, was an excellent match. Mark’s family could not believe it! How could a neighbor be a better match than blood relations? I asked my husband about this, who teaches such things, and he told me that yes, it is possible. (And then he proceeded to give me far more information than I wanted or needed.) No one in Mark’s family would dare to ask Paul, who had just turned 20, for such a sacrifice. But a few days after St. Nicholas’ Day, when the family finally got around to looking into the stockings that had been hanging there for a few days, in Mark’s stocking was a note from Paul: You’ve got a donor, the note said.
We could not believe the generosity, Daniel told me. My brother was still in the hospital, and it would be a while before he could have the new kidney, but eventually he had the operation, and it worked. Life went on well and healthfully for 20 years, and then Paul began to have serious kidney issues with his one remaining kidney. He needed a new kidney, and this time Daniel was the best match. He returned the blessing his brother Mark had received 20 years before, so that Paul, who helped to save Mark’s life, would have another chance at full and abundant life.
How ironic and grace filled is this story---that two different families, connected as friends, should become bound to each other as donors. Daniel told me that to this day he believes it had made a profound difference in all their lives that they had grown up hearing stories of the saints. “Some of the stories were silly, like a saint finding a pair of eyes and putting them into a blind person’s eye sockets. But there were other stories, like those of St. Nicholas, that did not have the flavor of fairy tales but were about real people with real needs. WE could believe them as patterns for human life. You know, he said, the Bible says that faith comes by hearing. It is true. We heard something that made a difference to the way we lived our lives.
And so on this Second Sunday of Advent, a few days after St Nicholas Day, which was December 6, peace is the theme. John the Baptist might have raged about the need to repent, and then along came Jesus, quietly and unobtrusively. And when he came, he brought with him the promise of a peace that passes human understanding. May we know that peace and hear the words and the stories that bring such peace into our lives.
December 8, 2023
Dear Friends,
Geoffrey Holt was a quiet, shy guy. He liked it that way. He never wanted to call attention to himself. He told his sister once that if you are noticed, it only opens you to criticism, and so he liked to remain under the radar. People would often see him sitting on a bright orange mower by the side of the road. He not only moved his own lawn, but he also moved the lawn of other people. He lived in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, in a very modest mobile home, situated in Stearns Mobile Home Park, where he worked---- cutting grass, doing odd jobs around the place, fixing this and that.
Geoffrey Holt was born in Indianapolis and moved to Hinsdale in the 1960’s. At first, he worked as a social studies teacher as well as teaching driver education. Later, he worked in a grain mill and when he retired, he moved into his mobile home. That is when he became friendly with Edwin Smith, the man who owned the mobile home park, where Holt eventually lived. The relationship began very slowly, since Geoffrey Holt was very shy, but Edwin Smith stuck at it, and in time he discovered that Geoffrey felt passionate about some things. He collected die cast cars and model trains, and he could tell you the history of practically every car that was ever made. His home and shed were filled with model trains and cars, things he took great pride in.
Most people in Hinsdale never knew about Holt’s hobbies. They saw him as a quiet guy, who puttered around the mobile home park and then spent time outside, sitting by the roadside or near a brook that flowed past his home. People sometimes saw him driving his orange mower through the wooded grounds of the mobile home park. He had an old car, but never drove it. When he needed to buy something at the local Walmart, he would drive his mower to the store and buy what he needed. He dressed humbly and simply and hardly ever replaced his clothes with new ones.
But Holt had a big secret about which few people knew except for his sister and his friend, Edwin Smith. One day Holt told Smith, “I’ve made investments in my life, beginning early and they have done very, very well.” Smith did not know how much those investments were, but when Holt died last June at the age of 82, he left 3.8 million dollars to the town of Hinsdale. His sister told him she did not need his money, and so Holt decided to leave it to the town he loved and lived in and served for five decades.
The announcement was made to the town last September, and you can just imagine the shock. The quietest, most humble man was the town’s greatest benefactor! To most people Geoffrey Holt lived an odd life, but to Edwin Smith, it made sense. “Geoffrey Holt was a content man,” Smith said, “and you could see the contentment in Holt’s simple routine.” Yes, he was content and humble, and though very wealthy, he chose to leave his wealth to the town he called home for the past 60 years.
I know nothing about Holt’s religious views, if he had any, but somehow I think Jesus would approve of this guy, who lived simply and passed on his wealth to a place he called home.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Geoffrey Holt was a quiet, shy guy. He liked it that way. He never wanted to call attention to himself. He told his sister once that if you are noticed, it only opens you to criticism, and so he liked to remain under the radar. People would often see him sitting on a bright orange mower by the side of the road. He not only moved his own lawn, but he also moved the lawn of other people. He lived in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, in a very modest mobile home, situated in Stearns Mobile Home Park, where he worked---- cutting grass, doing odd jobs around the place, fixing this and that.
Geoffrey Holt was born in Indianapolis and moved to Hinsdale in the 1960’s. At first, he worked as a social studies teacher as well as teaching driver education. Later, he worked in a grain mill and when he retired, he moved into his mobile home. That is when he became friendly with Edwin Smith, the man who owned the mobile home park, where Holt eventually lived. The relationship began very slowly, since Geoffrey Holt was very shy, but Edwin Smith stuck at it, and in time he discovered that Geoffrey felt passionate about some things. He collected die cast cars and model trains, and he could tell you the history of practically every car that was ever made. His home and shed were filled with model trains and cars, things he took great pride in.
Most people in Hinsdale never knew about Holt’s hobbies. They saw him as a quiet guy, who puttered around the mobile home park and then spent time outside, sitting by the roadside or near a brook that flowed past his home. People sometimes saw him driving his orange mower through the wooded grounds of the mobile home park. He had an old car, but never drove it. When he needed to buy something at the local Walmart, he would drive his mower to the store and buy what he needed. He dressed humbly and simply and hardly ever replaced his clothes with new ones.
But Holt had a big secret about which few people knew except for his sister and his friend, Edwin Smith. One day Holt told Smith, “I’ve made investments in my life, beginning early and they have done very, very well.” Smith did not know how much those investments were, but when Holt died last June at the age of 82, he left 3.8 million dollars to the town of Hinsdale. His sister told him she did not need his money, and so Holt decided to leave it to the town he loved and lived in and served for five decades.
The announcement was made to the town last September, and you can just imagine the shock. The quietest, most humble man was the town’s greatest benefactor! To most people Geoffrey Holt lived an odd life, but to Edwin Smith, it made sense. “Geoffrey Holt was a content man,” Smith said, “and you could see the contentment in Holt’s simple routine.” Yes, he was content and humble, and though very wealthy, he chose to leave his wealth to the town he called home for the past 60 years.
I know nothing about Holt’s religious views, if he had any, but somehow I think Jesus would approve of this guy, who lived simply and passed on his wealth to a place he called home.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Hope Amid the Darkness
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
The First Sunday in Advent
December 3, 2023
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Mark 13: 24-37
My father was a World War ll veteran, and like many of his generation, he did not speak very much about his personal experiences, but he did like to talk about the generals he came across. He was not in combat; he worked on the supply line in the Headquarters of the First Army, commanded by General Omar Bradley. He admired Bradley as the soldier’s soldier, someone who cared deeply about the ordinary soldier. And he had great praise for General Eisenhower, a man, who hated war, unlike General Patton, whom my father detested, because Patton loved war. And then there was the English General Montgomery, whom everyone found impossible to deal with, except Eisenhower, who could actually coax cooperation out of Montgomery. But no one, my father said, could talk to defeated troops the way Montgomery did. They could have just suffered the most stinging, humiliating defeat, yet he could make them feel as if they had just won a tremendous victory. He was a leader, my father insisted, who gave his troops great hope, and there is nothing more valuable than hope when you are fighting a war. Hope, of course, is valuable in more than war. What would life be without hope?
Hope is so important religiously that the medieval theologians named its opposite, despair, as one of the deadly sins. Suicide, for example, in Christian theology has been treated very harshly until the modern era. A suicide could not have a Christian burial, because suicide was understood to be a rejection of God’s grace, a rejection of hope. Mercifully, we have moved beyond such a cruel assessment of human mental and physical pain. Today, when you see the seven deadly sins listed, you will not see the word despair. It was collapsed into the sin of acedia, or sloth, understood not simply as a physical laziness, but also a spiritual one, a refusal to look and see the new thing God can and will do. To hope means to look toward a future that will not be a repeat of the past.
Judaism also has a high assessment of hope. I read a story about a rabbi, who was considering what God might ask him in the Great Judgment. Did you pursue justice and love mercy? Did you care for the widow and the orphan? Did you love God with the fullness of heart, mind, and spirit? But then he considered another question: Did you hope? Did you hope for the Messiah when it appeared that the Messiah would never come? Did you hope when everyone around you was hopeless?
Well, here we are on the first Sunday of Advent. We have lit the candle of hope, and have read scriptures, which perhaps on the surface, do not look so hopeful. We have Isaiah, written at a time of great loss and even despair. The empire of the Babylonians had defeated the southern kingdom of Judah and had carried off to Babylon people of education and great skill. The Temple had been destroyed, and the Temple was a central symbol of Judaism, the site where sacrifice was made to God. In the Temple’s inner sanctuary, God was said to reside, and so what were the Jews to make of this destruction? Had God simply abandoned them? Had God left the Temple? Despair was undoubtedly more than a temptation. It was an existential reality. And yet in the midst of such great suffering, a prayer was spoken: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Make your name known to your adversaries.” And who were these adversaries? Surely the Babylonians, but not only that enemy. The prophet said that Judah had strayed from the Covenant and the path of faithfulness. Isaiah tried hard to help the people face and account for their sins, which he saw as the reason for their defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. And yet despite sin, Isaiah reminded them, God is our God. And because that is so, hope rises. God can and will do a new thing, even if the people are blind to it.
And this new thing is what Jesus is referring to in this 13th chapter of Mark. This text seems to most of us a rather strange text to be reading the first Sunday of Advent, because it does not sound very hopeful. Jesus is here describing a cataclysmic event: a darkened sun and moon, stars falling from heaven, surely events which would be terrifying to witness. But we are not biblical literalists. The language here is metaphorical and symbolic. The point is to be awake and aware, open to the new thing God is doing, even when, especially when we cannot directly see it.
Now the Gospel of Mark was written sometime around the year 70, the same year the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple. In this scene, Jesus has just emerged from the Temple, right before he will go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he will struggle to remain faithful. Herod the Great, the Jewish King, who was also a lackey to the Romans, had expended great effort and wealth in remodeling the Temple. No wonder the disciples were impressed by the great size of the stones---37.5 feet long, 18 feet wide and 12 feet thick. And they wanted to know when the great things Jesus had been talking about would come to pass. And that is when Jesus gave them this description, reminding them to live hopefully toward a future, which would come, though no one knew when.
Hope is the thing, isn’t it? Years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a state psychiatric center, where most of the patients had been residents for decades I used to wander those hallways, repeating words from Isaiah, “Oh truly, you are a God who hides yourself!” God certainly seemed to be hiding from Jesse, who spent her time bouncing a small, pink rubber ball around, for days and months on end, for years, the staff told me. The staff had the sense to have a supply of such balls, because if Jesse lost hers, she became very agitated. It drove me crazy that this is all Jesse would do. What kind of life is it that spends its days and years bouncing a ball? And then, one day another patient, Herbie, asked the staff if he too could have a ball just like Jesse’s. And the two of them began bouncing the balls together. “O this is just great, “I said to Father Tom, the Roman Catholic chaplain. “Now we have the two of them locked in their ball bouncing psychosis.” Father Tom looked at me with keen annoyance and said: “It’s relationship. They are making some kind of connection. Look at them. They look at each other and smile as they bounce. Jesse’s face never cracked a smile before. I think, he said, this is a God moment.”
It was true. Jesse and Herbie smiled as they bounced their balls together. And sometimes they would even laugh. One of the nurses, who had been there for decades, told me she had never heard Jesse laugh before. But it is not enough; it seems so pathetically little for human lives to be reduced to ball bouncing, I said to Father Tom. No, it isn’t enough, he agreed. But it is a beginning, Father Tom insisted, and when it finally ends, it will end in God’s grace. That is the hope, isn’t it? Indeed, it was and is. Sometimes hope is what we cling to, and sometimes it speaks the word we need to hear.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
The First Sunday in Advent
December 3, 2023
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Mark 13: 24-37
My father was a World War ll veteran, and like many of his generation, he did not speak very much about his personal experiences, but he did like to talk about the generals he came across. He was not in combat; he worked on the supply line in the Headquarters of the First Army, commanded by General Omar Bradley. He admired Bradley as the soldier’s soldier, someone who cared deeply about the ordinary soldier. And he had great praise for General Eisenhower, a man, who hated war, unlike General Patton, whom my father detested, because Patton loved war. And then there was the English General Montgomery, whom everyone found impossible to deal with, except Eisenhower, who could actually coax cooperation out of Montgomery. But no one, my father said, could talk to defeated troops the way Montgomery did. They could have just suffered the most stinging, humiliating defeat, yet he could make them feel as if they had just won a tremendous victory. He was a leader, my father insisted, who gave his troops great hope, and there is nothing more valuable than hope when you are fighting a war. Hope, of course, is valuable in more than war. What would life be without hope?
Hope is so important religiously that the medieval theologians named its opposite, despair, as one of the deadly sins. Suicide, for example, in Christian theology has been treated very harshly until the modern era. A suicide could not have a Christian burial, because suicide was understood to be a rejection of God’s grace, a rejection of hope. Mercifully, we have moved beyond such a cruel assessment of human mental and physical pain. Today, when you see the seven deadly sins listed, you will not see the word despair. It was collapsed into the sin of acedia, or sloth, understood not simply as a physical laziness, but also a spiritual one, a refusal to look and see the new thing God can and will do. To hope means to look toward a future that will not be a repeat of the past.
Judaism also has a high assessment of hope. I read a story about a rabbi, who was considering what God might ask him in the Great Judgment. Did you pursue justice and love mercy? Did you care for the widow and the orphan? Did you love God with the fullness of heart, mind, and spirit? But then he considered another question: Did you hope? Did you hope for the Messiah when it appeared that the Messiah would never come? Did you hope when everyone around you was hopeless?
Well, here we are on the first Sunday of Advent. We have lit the candle of hope, and have read scriptures, which perhaps on the surface, do not look so hopeful. We have Isaiah, written at a time of great loss and even despair. The empire of the Babylonians had defeated the southern kingdom of Judah and had carried off to Babylon people of education and great skill. The Temple had been destroyed, and the Temple was a central symbol of Judaism, the site where sacrifice was made to God. In the Temple’s inner sanctuary, God was said to reside, and so what were the Jews to make of this destruction? Had God simply abandoned them? Had God left the Temple? Despair was undoubtedly more than a temptation. It was an existential reality. And yet in the midst of such great suffering, a prayer was spoken: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Make your name known to your adversaries.” And who were these adversaries? Surely the Babylonians, but not only that enemy. The prophet said that Judah had strayed from the Covenant and the path of faithfulness. Isaiah tried hard to help the people face and account for their sins, which he saw as the reason for their defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. And yet despite sin, Isaiah reminded them, God is our God. And because that is so, hope rises. God can and will do a new thing, even if the people are blind to it.
And this new thing is what Jesus is referring to in this 13th chapter of Mark. This text seems to most of us a rather strange text to be reading the first Sunday of Advent, because it does not sound very hopeful. Jesus is here describing a cataclysmic event: a darkened sun and moon, stars falling from heaven, surely events which would be terrifying to witness. But we are not biblical literalists. The language here is metaphorical and symbolic. The point is to be awake and aware, open to the new thing God is doing, even when, especially when we cannot directly see it.
Now the Gospel of Mark was written sometime around the year 70, the same year the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple. In this scene, Jesus has just emerged from the Temple, right before he will go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he will struggle to remain faithful. Herod the Great, the Jewish King, who was also a lackey to the Romans, had expended great effort and wealth in remodeling the Temple. No wonder the disciples were impressed by the great size of the stones---37.5 feet long, 18 feet wide and 12 feet thick. And they wanted to know when the great things Jesus had been talking about would come to pass. And that is when Jesus gave them this description, reminding them to live hopefully toward a future, which would come, though no one knew when.
Hope is the thing, isn’t it? Years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a state psychiatric center, where most of the patients had been residents for decades I used to wander those hallways, repeating words from Isaiah, “Oh truly, you are a God who hides yourself!” God certainly seemed to be hiding from Jesse, who spent her time bouncing a small, pink rubber ball around, for days and months on end, for years, the staff told me. The staff had the sense to have a supply of such balls, because if Jesse lost hers, she became very agitated. It drove me crazy that this is all Jesse would do. What kind of life is it that spends its days and years bouncing a ball? And then, one day another patient, Herbie, asked the staff if he too could have a ball just like Jesse’s. And the two of them began bouncing the balls together. “O this is just great, “I said to Father Tom, the Roman Catholic chaplain. “Now we have the two of them locked in their ball bouncing psychosis.” Father Tom looked at me with keen annoyance and said: “It’s relationship. They are making some kind of connection. Look at them. They look at each other and smile as they bounce. Jesse’s face never cracked a smile before. I think, he said, this is a God moment.”
It was true. Jesse and Herbie smiled as they bounced their balls together. And sometimes they would even laugh. One of the nurses, who had been there for decades, told me she had never heard Jesse laugh before. But it is not enough; it seems so pathetically little for human lives to be reduced to ball bouncing, I said to Father Tom. No, it isn’t enough, he agreed. But it is a beginning, Father Tom insisted, and when it finally ends, it will end in God’s grace. That is the hope, isn’t it? Indeed, it was and is. Sometimes hope is what we cling to, and sometimes it speaks the word we need to hear.
When No One Gets It
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
November 26, 2023
Matthew 25: 31-46
When I was a senior in high school, I had this brilliant English teacher, who not only had us read great literature and write on it, but he was also in the habit of asking us tough questions about life---things to ponder. I remember when he asked us: If we had to choose between being stupid or mean, what would we choose? But we don’t like those choices, we protested. This is an advanced English class and none of us is stupid, and who wants to be thought of as mean? But Mr. Verreau insisted we had to choose one or the other and then write a one page essay, defending our choice. It was one of the hardest assignments he gave us, and I can still remember pondering what to choose and what to say in my essay. Finally, I decided it was preferable to be stupid rather than mean. I argued that stupidity is sometimes ignorance, which can be improved upon with time and knowledge. A mean person, I wrote, often does not want to outgrow the meanness, while a stupid person can desire to learn and to change.
Well, the interesting thing about our lesson from Matthew this morning is that everyone, that is, both the sheep and the goats look stupid. Neither gets it. They both end up asking the same question: Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you something to eat, or when were you in prison and we visited you? Neither knew that as they did it to the least of these, they did it to Christ. Both lacked knowledge and understanding, and yet one of them, the sheep, did the right thing and the goats did not. Why?
It is not because the sheep are more intelligent. In fact, sheep are rather stupid. For example, sheep will climb up onto a ledge from which they cannot get down. And they will bleat their lives away if there is no one to rescue them. They do need a shepherd. Goats, on the contrary, are not only more surefooted, but they are also more intelligent. They don’t make the mistake of going up on a ledge from which they cannot get down. So, is being a goat preferable to being a sheep?
Not according to the Bible. Being a smart goat was, biblically speaking, no advantage. There was this scapegoat thing, when the sins of the people were put upon the goat before it was driven out into the wilderness, where it probably became supper for a hungry beast. Sheep, on the other hand, were valuable not only for their wool, but also as sacrificial animals. There was something piously noble in being the unblemished lamb---well, at least from the Jewish point of view. And, of course, we remember that Jesus is called the good shepherd, and his followers are referred to as his sheep, and as we see time and time again, many of his followers, including his disciples do seem rather stupid.
You have heard me say many times that Matthew wrote in a tension filled era. There was great tension between Jews, who were becoming Christians, and Jews who were remaining Jews, following the Pharisees, who kept Judaism alive through the synagogue movement. The Temple had been destroyed in the year 70 by the Romans, and the Sadducees, the aristocratic priestly class, thought that such destruction meant the end of Jewish identity. Not so, the Pharisees insisted. It is not the Temple, which makes us Jews, they said, but rather fidelity to the law, and fidelity to God’s Word does not require the Temple. Now Matthew often gives the impression that the Temple’s destruction was God’s curse upon the Jews for not embracing Jesus as the Christ. Matthew unfortunately gives us a lot of woes and curses visited upon the Jews. And so, we might expect that in this final judgment scene we would hear another woeful curse upon the Pharisees and those Jews, who remained Jews.
But no, Matthew does not use formal religious identity to separate. Instead, he uses ethics---how it is one treats the least of these. Neither the sheep nor the goats recognized Christ’s presence in the least of these. Those on the right wanted to know when it was that they had clothed and fed Christ or visited him in prison, just as the ones on the left demanded to know when it was they had failed to offer Christ hospitality. Neither of them got it; neither realized that Jesus Christ is actually connected to deeds of compassion and mercy. One side simply did good things, because doing good is the right thing to do. They had no expectation of a reward, just as the others had no expectation of punishment. So, Matthew reminds us that faithfulness is not about being part of a particular religious group. It isn’t how sophisticated or smart we are. It is about how we respond to the hurt that is all around us, particularly the hurt we find in the least of these.
It is sobering to realize that no government in the world had more PhD’s than Nazi Germany. It was the most highly educated government in the history of the world, and yet, it was also the most evil, or at least among the most evil of governments. It is simply an observable fact that intelligence does not guarantee goodness.
Martin Niemoller was a German theologian and pastor, who initially voted for Adolph Hitler, because he believed a strong national leader was needed, and he also approved of Hitler’s espousal of Christianity’s role in a renewal of national morality. Later, as he saw the racial purity laws determine who could be considered a true Christian, meaning no Jew was allowed to convert, he became an ardent opponent of the Nazi regime and was imprisoned for seven years. He failed to see and understand what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another pastor and theologian, saw and understood from the very beginning---that Hitler was the enemy of Germany and the world and the enemy of the gospel, the enemy of goodness and truth. Both men were highly intelligent; both men were devout Christians, but one saw and understood something the other failed to know and understand until later. Niemoller admitted later that he harbored some antisemitism, which made him stupid about the Hazis.
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote about stupidity as if it could be reduced to ignorance. At 17 I did not understand the difference between ignorance and stupidity. How could I possibly know? But one of my heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote, Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Against stupidity, we are defenseless. Neither protests nor force accomplish anything against stupidity. Facts are irrefutable, but the stupid person pushes them aside as inconsequential, as incidental. This much is certain: stupidity’s essence is not an intellectual defect, but a human one. Upon examination, it becomes apparent, that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Bonhoeffer wrote this in 1938. He knew of what he spoke.
Our lesson from Matthew was written in a time of great conflict between Jews and Christians, an upsurge of power both politically and religiously. But note: Matthew does not say that Christians are sheep and Jews are goats. The test is what is done to the least of these. And that does not come down to intelligence or knowledge: It comes down to character, the depths of one’s humanity, which is always an enemy of stupidity.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
November 26, 2023
Matthew 25: 31-46
When I was a senior in high school, I had this brilliant English teacher, who not only had us read great literature and write on it, but he was also in the habit of asking us tough questions about life---things to ponder. I remember when he asked us: If we had to choose between being stupid or mean, what would we choose? But we don’t like those choices, we protested. This is an advanced English class and none of us is stupid, and who wants to be thought of as mean? But Mr. Verreau insisted we had to choose one or the other and then write a one page essay, defending our choice. It was one of the hardest assignments he gave us, and I can still remember pondering what to choose and what to say in my essay. Finally, I decided it was preferable to be stupid rather than mean. I argued that stupidity is sometimes ignorance, which can be improved upon with time and knowledge. A mean person, I wrote, often does not want to outgrow the meanness, while a stupid person can desire to learn and to change.
Well, the interesting thing about our lesson from Matthew this morning is that everyone, that is, both the sheep and the goats look stupid. Neither gets it. They both end up asking the same question: Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you something to eat, or when were you in prison and we visited you? Neither knew that as they did it to the least of these, they did it to Christ. Both lacked knowledge and understanding, and yet one of them, the sheep, did the right thing and the goats did not. Why?
It is not because the sheep are more intelligent. In fact, sheep are rather stupid. For example, sheep will climb up onto a ledge from which they cannot get down. And they will bleat their lives away if there is no one to rescue them. They do need a shepherd. Goats, on the contrary, are not only more surefooted, but they are also more intelligent. They don’t make the mistake of going up on a ledge from which they cannot get down. So, is being a goat preferable to being a sheep?
Not according to the Bible. Being a smart goat was, biblically speaking, no advantage. There was this scapegoat thing, when the sins of the people were put upon the goat before it was driven out into the wilderness, where it probably became supper for a hungry beast. Sheep, on the other hand, were valuable not only for their wool, but also as sacrificial animals. There was something piously noble in being the unblemished lamb---well, at least from the Jewish point of view. And, of course, we remember that Jesus is called the good shepherd, and his followers are referred to as his sheep, and as we see time and time again, many of his followers, including his disciples do seem rather stupid.
You have heard me say many times that Matthew wrote in a tension filled era. There was great tension between Jews, who were becoming Christians, and Jews who were remaining Jews, following the Pharisees, who kept Judaism alive through the synagogue movement. The Temple had been destroyed in the year 70 by the Romans, and the Sadducees, the aristocratic priestly class, thought that such destruction meant the end of Jewish identity. Not so, the Pharisees insisted. It is not the Temple, which makes us Jews, they said, but rather fidelity to the law, and fidelity to God’s Word does not require the Temple. Now Matthew often gives the impression that the Temple’s destruction was God’s curse upon the Jews for not embracing Jesus as the Christ. Matthew unfortunately gives us a lot of woes and curses visited upon the Jews. And so, we might expect that in this final judgment scene we would hear another woeful curse upon the Pharisees and those Jews, who remained Jews.
But no, Matthew does not use formal religious identity to separate. Instead, he uses ethics---how it is one treats the least of these. Neither the sheep nor the goats recognized Christ’s presence in the least of these. Those on the right wanted to know when it was that they had clothed and fed Christ or visited him in prison, just as the ones on the left demanded to know when it was they had failed to offer Christ hospitality. Neither of them got it; neither realized that Jesus Christ is actually connected to deeds of compassion and mercy. One side simply did good things, because doing good is the right thing to do. They had no expectation of a reward, just as the others had no expectation of punishment. So, Matthew reminds us that faithfulness is not about being part of a particular religious group. It isn’t how sophisticated or smart we are. It is about how we respond to the hurt that is all around us, particularly the hurt we find in the least of these.
It is sobering to realize that no government in the world had more PhD’s than Nazi Germany. It was the most highly educated government in the history of the world, and yet, it was also the most evil, or at least among the most evil of governments. It is simply an observable fact that intelligence does not guarantee goodness.
Martin Niemoller was a German theologian and pastor, who initially voted for Adolph Hitler, because he believed a strong national leader was needed, and he also approved of Hitler’s espousal of Christianity’s role in a renewal of national morality. Later, as he saw the racial purity laws determine who could be considered a true Christian, meaning no Jew was allowed to convert, he became an ardent opponent of the Nazi regime and was imprisoned for seven years. He failed to see and understand what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another pastor and theologian, saw and understood from the very beginning---that Hitler was the enemy of Germany and the world and the enemy of the gospel, the enemy of goodness and truth. Both men were highly intelligent; both men were devout Christians, but one saw and understood something the other failed to know and understand until later. Niemoller admitted later that he harbored some antisemitism, which made him stupid about the Hazis.
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote about stupidity as if it could be reduced to ignorance. At 17 I did not understand the difference between ignorance and stupidity. How could I possibly know? But one of my heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote, Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Against stupidity, we are defenseless. Neither protests nor force accomplish anything against stupidity. Facts are irrefutable, but the stupid person pushes them aside as inconsequential, as incidental. This much is certain: stupidity’s essence is not an intellectual defect, but a human one. Upon examination, it becomes apparent, that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Bonhoeffer wrote this in 1938. He knew of what he spoke.
Our lesson from Matthew was written in a time of great conflict between Jews and Christians, an upsurge of power both politically and religiously. But note: Matthew does not say that Christians are sheep and Jews are goats. The test is what is done to the least of these. And that does not come down to intelligence or knowledge: It comes down to character, the depths of one’s humanity, which is always an enemy of stupidity.
November 22, 2023
Dear Friends,
My reflection letter for this week is going to be short and sweet about a computer program called TRUE KNOWLEDGE, which has been fed about 300 million facts. Actually, when you consider all the facts in the word, 300 million is NOT that much. According to this program, April 11, 1954 was the most BORING day in history. No famous person was born or died on that day----though it is possible that the fame is still in the future. No great historical event occurred. Belgium had an election and there were some sport events, but as far as this program is concerned nothing of great note happened that day. So, if you were born on April 11, 1954, you can claim that you were born on the most boring day in history!
As soon as this “fact” was made known, some scientist said, “Well April 11 is only one day but the earth had one billion years of boredom.” From about 1.8 to 800 billion years ago, very little happened on the earth in terms of evolution, geological formation, or atmospheric chemistry. I guess we could say that things were going on under the surface, because about 530 years ago the Cambrian Explosion began. This is when scientists can see from the fossil record that most major animal groups began to appear, so obviously much was going on BEFORE THIS to make earth a hospitable place for life. In perhaps as few as 10 million years, marine animals evolved most of the basic body forms that we observe in modern groups. That is quite an amazing change---anything but boring.
Let’s face it, boredom is unpleasant. Remember the long summer days, when camp was not the common option it is today, so boredom for kids could be a real challenge, especially on rainy days. Who among us does not recall saying to one’s mother, “I’m bored?” I don’t know about your mother, but mine would commonly respond, “Only boring people are bored.”
As an adult I never suffer from boredom. I can always find something to do. In fact, I often feel I have too much to do. Besides, there is always something to learn, something to read, something to dig my mind and heart into. And I hope the same is true for all of you.
It is almost impossible for me to imagine Jesus being bored, even though he had none of the distractions and amusements that engage so much of our time. I imagine Jesus as a person of great heart and mind, who spent a lot of time alone, pondering the big questions and talking to God in prayer. In the Gospels, we often see him go off to pray alone. He was most likely an introvert, and I do wonder if introverts have a tendency to be less bored than extroverts, since the latter rely more on the external world for their stimulation. But whether you are an introvert or extrovert, I hope you do not suffer from too much boredom. And who knows what a later computer program will choose as the most boring day?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
My reflection letter for this week is going to be short and sweet about a computer program called TRUE KNOWLEDGE, which has been fed about 300 million facts. Actually, when you consider all the facts in the word, 300 million is NOT that much. According to this program, April 11, 1954 was the most BORING day in history. No famous person was born or died on that day----though it is possible that the fame is still in the future. No great historical event occurred. Belgium had an election and there were some sport events, but as far as this program is concerned nothing of great note happened that day. So, if you were born on April 11, 1954, you can claim that you were born on the most boring day in history!
As soon as this “fact” was made known, some scientist said, “Well April 11 is only one day but the earth had one billion years of boredom.” From about 1.8 to 800 billion years ago, very little happened on the earth in terms of evolution, geological formation, or atmospheric chemistry. I guess we could say that things were going on under the surface, because about 530 years ago the Cambrian Explosion began. This is when scientists can see from the fossil record that most major animal groups began to appear, so obviously much was going on BEFORE THIS to make earth a hospitable place for life. In perhaps as few as 10 million years, marine animals evolved most of the basic body forms that we observe in modern groups. That is quite an amazing change---anything but boring.
Let’s face it, boredom is unpleasant. Remember the long summer days, when camp was not the common option it is today, so boredom for kids could be a real challenge, especially on rainy days. Who among us does not recall saying to one’s mother, “I’m bored?” I don’t know about your mother, but mine would commonly respond, “Only boring people are bored.”
As an adult I never suffer from boredom. I can always find something to do. In fact, I often feel I have too much to do. Besides, there is always something to learn, something to read, something to dig my mind and heart into. And I hope the same is true for all of you.
It is almost impossible for me to imagine Jesus being bored, even though he had none of the distractions and amusements that engage so much of our time. I imagine Jesus as a person of great heart and mind, who spent a lot of time alone, pondering the big questions and talking to God in prayer. In the Gospels, we often see him go off to pray alone. He was most likely an introvert, and I do wonder if introverts have a tendency to be less bored than extroverts, since the latter rely more on the external world for their stimulation. But whether you are an introvert or extrovert, I hope you do not suffer from too much boredom. And who knows what a later computer program will choose as the most boring day?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
GRATITUDE THAT KEEPS GROWING
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
November 19, 2023
Psalm 100
Philippians 4: 4-9
It seems rather extraordinary that Paul while in prison should write a letter to the Christian community in the city of Philippi advising them not to worry about anything. I mean would you not think that being in a Roman prison would be cause for worry? And yet he tells the people to make their desires and needs known to God by prayer and supplication, always with thanksgiving. Be grateful. The theme for Paul was gratitude, even while he was imprisoned. We are on the cusp of Thanksgiving, and I have chosen not to read the lectionary choices for the day, but rather to lift up the theme of gratitude, which even in the darkness of prison, Paul was able to feel, to express and to celebrate.
This morning I am going to tell you two stories of gratitude. The first one I encountered some years ago, when I was working in New Haven. Periodically walking across the New Haven Green, where three churches stood, mine in the middle, I would sometimes come across this older man playing chess on one of the benches. Sometimes his partner would be another older person, but more often than not, he would be playing with a Yale student. And it was one of these students who told me the story.
Richard, the old man, was very talented at chess, and so were some of the students who came to play with him, but usually Richard would beat them. “He was not a quick player,” the student told me. “He was very deliberate and careful, thinking about every move he would make.” And he had this beautiful chess set with finely carved figures and a gorgeous board to play on. Where did you get this set, the student asked him one day. Oh, years ago, when I was about 20 or so, I was rummaging through the attic, looking for some of my high school stuff, when I came across this set. Bringing it downstairs, I asked my mother: What is this? Where did it come from? And then she told me the story. You see, Richard told the student, my father was teaching me how to play chess. I was only 8, and my father was a master, but he was willing to take the time to teach me. But then the war came, and my father went off to the South Pacific from where he never returned. I was 12 when he was killed, and I can still remember the telegram when it came.
Well, the years passed, and I did nothing about the game of chess until I came across the set in the attic. My mom had forgotten all about it---how my dad was carving all the chess pieces and making this gorgeous board. He was going to give it to me for my birthday, but the war intervened, and he did not finish it. He had a few more pieces to make and the board needed some work. Well, I took the set and found some pieces to complete it, and I took the board to a woodworker we knew, who finished it. And then I began to work on my chess game, and over the years, I continued to work, and even today, he told the student, I am working on it. And you, turning to the student, are helping me.
And then the student, whose name I have forgotten, told me something else, which is perhaps the most important part of the story. Richard told the young man that as the years went by, the gift became even more precious to him. My dad worked hard as an electrician during the day, and yet at night, after I had gone to bed, there he was, working on this gift for me. At 20, it was an incredible find, a piece of my father, but now, I am in my 80’s, and time has made the gift even more precious. My gratitude has grown, not only for this chess set, but for all the people who over the years have played with me, beginning with my father, all of them helping me to become a better player. And you are part of my gratitude, he told the Yale student. You are a fine player; you have the makings of a great one, and in my old age, you have taught me some moves. So, remember, my young friend: the most precious gifts we receive are the ones which help our gratitude to grow over time.
The second story is about my family. I have four kids, the oldest and youngest, girls and the two middle, boys. When Aaron, my second son and third child, was 14, he came to me and asked, “Mom, could we get a better piano? This piano will not do what I need it to do.” It was, after all, an inexpensive spinet, something to learn on, but Aaron had been playing for over 7 years and he was pretty good. Oh, Aaron, we have so little money right now. Alethea is at Smith and Ashley is at Cheshire Academy. We don’t have anything extra, but maybe we could go look and see what we can find second hand. And so, we went to the piano store, where Aaron fell in love with a Boston Baby Grand to the tune of $23,000. He sat down and played a Mozart piece, I think it was. Love was the only word to describe his feeling for that piano. And at 14, Aaron did realize the economics of the matter. There was a lovely upright, a very excellent second hand piano for $7,000, which I wasin favor of buying on time. He would accept it, but it was not his heart’s desire.
Two days later I was visiting one of my parishioners, Edith, who was 96 years old and at the end of her life. She was at home, not treating her breast cancer, except for comfort care. She was in very good spirits and actually doing quite well. Edith would always ask me about my children and I would go through the list of four. And when I came to Aaron, I told her about the piano.
You know, she said to me. I am an old woman, and my days are not long. But I will tell you when I look back on my life, I remember the gifts I have given and the joy those gifts brought to people. And some of those gifts grew gratitude that expanded over the years---like the garnet ring I gave to my granddaughter. At 22 she was not that impressed by the garnet; she loved emeralds, but because it was from me, she accepted the gift graciously. But now, over 20 years later, she wears that ring all the time. It has become more precious to her and more meaningful as the years have gone by.
Your son is too young to understand the sacrifice it would be for you and your husband to buy him that piano, but as the years go by, I promise you his gratitude for it will grow. And gratitude deepens life. Now, you are in the business of moving heaven, so you move it, and buy him that piano. And so, we did. We had to borrow against my husband’s retirement, and the monthly payments were very hard, but we never regretted it. Both Aaron and our younger daughter, Caitlin’s playing took off. Their teacher told me she had never seen students improve so quickly because of a new instrument.
Aaron insisted on staying home from school the day the piano was delivered. It was also the day that Edith died, and when Aaron sat down at the piano to play a Rachmaninoff piece, I said under my breath,” Edith, this one is for you.”
Thanksgiving is Thursday, and we will sit down to eat and hopefully remember to be grateful. But remember too there may be some gifts in your life that just keep growing your gratitude. And so, as Paul wrote: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” And remember to give thanks always.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
November 19, 2023
Psalm 100
Philippians 4: 4-9
It seems rather extraordinary that Paul while in prison should write a letter to the Christian community in the city of Philippi advising them not to worry about anything. I mean would you not think that being in a Roman prison would be cause for worry? And yet he tells the people to make their desires and needs known to God by prayer and supplication, always with thanksgiving. Be grateful. The theme for Paul was gratitude, even while he was imprisoned. We are on the cusp of Thanksgiving, and I have chosen not to read the lectionary choices for the day, but rather to lift up the theme of gratitude, which even in the darkness of prison, Paul was able to feel, to express and to celebrate.
This morning I am going to tell you two stories of gratitude. The first one I encountered some years ago, when I was working in New Haven. Periodically walking across the New Haven Green, where three churches stood, mine in the middle, I would sometimes come across this older man playing chess on one of the benches. Sometimes his partner would be another older person, but more often than not, he would be playing with a Yale student. And it was one of these students who told me the story.
Richard, the old man, was very talented at chess, and so were some of the students who came to play with him, but usually Richard would beat them. “He was not a quick player,” the student told me. “He was very deliberate and careful, thinking about every move he would make.” And he had this beautiful chess set with finely carved figures and a gorgeous board to play on. Where did you get this set, the student asked him one day. Oh, years ago, when I was about 20 or so, I was rummaging through the attic, looking for some of my high school stuff, when I came across this set. Bringing it downstairs, I asked my mother: What is this? Where did it come from? And then she told me the story. You see, Richard told the student, my father was teaching me how to play chess. I was only 8, and my father was a master, but he was willing to take the time to teach me. But then the war came, and my father went off to the South Pacific from where he never returned. I was 12 when he was killed, and I can still remember the telegram when it came.
Well, the years passed, and I did nothing about the game of chess until I came across the set in the attic. My mom had forgotten all about it---how my dad was carving all the chess pieces and making this gorgeous board. He was going to give it to me for my birthday, but the war intervened, and he did not finish it. He had a few more pieces to make and the board needed some work. Well, I took the set and found some pieces to complete it, and I took the board to a woodworker we knew, who finished it. And then I began to work on my chess game, and over the years, I continued to work, and even today, he told the student, I am working on it. And you, turning to the student, are helping me.
And then the student, whose name I have forgotten, told me something else, which is perhaps the most important part of the story. Richard told the young man that as the years went by, the gift became even more precious to him. My dad worked hard as an electrician during the day, and yet at night, after I had gone to bed, there he was, working on this gift for me. At 20, it was an incredible find, a piece of my father, but now, I am in my 80’s, and time has made the gift even more precious. My gratitude has grown, not only for this chess set, but for all the people who over the years have played with me, beginning with my father, all of them helping me to become a better player. And you are part of my gratitude, he told the Yale student. You are a fine player; you have the makings of a great one, and in my old age, you have taught me some moves. So, remember, my young friend: the most precious gifts we receive are the ones which help our gratitude to grow over time.
The second story is about my family. I have four kids, the oldest and youngest, girls and the two middle, boys. When Aaron, my second son and third child, was 14, he came to me and asked, “Mom, could we get a better piano? This piano will not do what I need it to do.” It was, after all, an inexpensive spinet, something to learn on, but Aaron had been playing for over 7 years and he was pretty good. Oh, Aaron, we have so little money right now. Alethea is at Smith and Ashley is at Cheshire Academy. We don’t have anything extra, but maybe we could go look and see what we can find second hand. And so, we went to the piano store, where Aaron fell in love with a Boston Baby Grand to the tune of $23,000. He sat down and played a Mozart piece, I think it was. Love was the only word to describe his feeling for that piano. And at 14, Aaron did realize the economics of the matter. There was a lovely upright, a very excellent second hand piano for $7,000, which I wasin favor of buying on time. He would accept it, but it was not his heart’s desire.
Two days later I was visiting one of my parishioners, Edith, who was 96 years old and at the end of her life. She was at home, not treating her breast cancer, except for comfort care. She was in very good spirits and actually doing quite well. Edith would always ask me about my children and I would go through the list of four. And when I came to Aaron, I told her about the piano.
You know, she said to me. I am an old woman, and my days are not long. But I will tell you when I look back on my life, I remember the gifts I have given and the joy those gifts brought to people. And some of those gifts grew gratitude that expanded over the years---like the garnet ring I gave to my granddaughter. At 22 she was not that impressed by the garnet; she loved emeralds, but because it was from me, she accepted the gift graciously. But now, over 20 years later, she wears that ring all the time. It has become more precious to her and more meaningful as the years have gone by.
Your son is too young to understand the sacrifice it would be for you and your husband to buy him that piano, but as the years go by, I promise you his gratitude for it will grow. And gratitude deepens life. Now, you are in the business of moving heaven, so you move it, and buy him that piano. And so, we did. We had to borrow against my husband’s retirement, and the monthly payments were very hard, but we never regretted it. Both Aaron and our younger daughter, Caitlin’s playing took off. Their teacher told me she had never seen students improve so quickly because of a new instrument.
Aaron insisted on staying home from school the day the piano was delivered. It was also the day that Edith died, and when Aaron sat down at the piano to play a Rachmaninoff piece, I said under my breath,” Edith, this one is for you.”
Thanksgiving is Thursday, and we will sit down to eat and hopefully remember to be grateful. But remember too there may be some gifts in your life that just keep growing your gratitude. And so, as Paul wrote: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” And remember to give thanks always.
November 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
Robyn Sue Fisher loved ice cream, and so she made it her work with the establishment of Smitten Ice Cream in the Mission District of San Francisco. Robyn graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, MA and then went to Stanford Business School, where she discovered she was a “maker.” She wanted to make something that would bring joy to people, and ice cream certainly has that potential. She patented the Brr Machine, which makes ice cream from scratch in 90 seconds. At first, she pulled and pushed her machine around San Francisco, and then she found a permanent home for her business. She loved her work, and she enjoyed seeing people delighted by how quickly her machine made delicious ice cream. And then sadness struck!
We all know about the recent antisemitism that has been encircling the globe. One day Robyn received a call from an employee who told her that her front windows were smashed and messages scrawled across the front of the building: Free Palestien (Palestine was misspelled) and Out the Mission. Robyn was heartbroken. She boarded up her shop and announced that she was closing it. First, she felt fear, then anger and then deep sorrow, which finally moved into empathy. “And from empathy,” she said,” I got to love.” “I’m not closing the shop,” she insisted. “As soon as the new windows arrive, I will reopen.”
Now Robyn is doing more than making ice cream. She is creating a new line of t-shirts and sweatshirts that say, “In the spirit of ice cream, I choose love.” All proceeds from sales will go to benefit The Courage Museum, set to open in 2025, and will sit in the Presidio, the Army base turned park near the Golden Gate Bridge. The Museum will focus on ending the public health crisis caused by violence and the hate that fuels it.
Someone asked Robyn what she would say to the person or persons who trashed her shop. “I would invite the person to have ice cream with me.” And who knows what might happen then? By the way, Robyn has two other ice cream stores, one in Las Vegas, and the other in San Jose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Robyn Sue Fisher loved ice cream, and so she made it her work with the establishment of Smitten Ice Cream in the Mission District of San Francisco. Robyn graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, MA and then went to Stanford Business School, where she discovered she was a “maker.” She wanted to make something that would bring joy to people, and ice cream certainly has that potential. She patented the Brr Machine, which makes ice cream from scratch in 90 seconds. At first, she pulled and pushed her machine around San Francisco, and then she found a permanent home for her business. She loved her work, and she enjoyed seeing people delighted by how quickly her machine made delicious ice cream. And then sadness struck!
We all know about the recent antisemitism that has been encircling the globe. One day Robyn received a call from an employee who told her that her front windows were smashed and messages scrawled across the front of the building: Free Palestien (Palestine was misspelled) and Out the Mission. Robyn was heartbroken. She boarded up her shop and announced that she was closing it. First, she felt fear, then anger and then deep sorrow, which finally moved into empathy. “And from empathy,” she said,” I got to love.” “I’m not closing the shop,” she insisted. “As soon as the new windows arrive, I will reopen.”
Now Robyn is doing more than making ice cream. She is creating a new line of t-shirts and sweatshirts that say, “In the spirit of ice cream, I choose love.” All proceeds from sales will go to benefit The Courage Museum, set to open in 2025, and will sit in the Presidio, the Army base turned park near the Golden Gate Bridge. The Museum will focus on ending the public health crisis caused by violence and the hate that fuels it.
Someone asked Robyn what she would say to the person or persons who trashed her shop. “I would invite the person to have ice cream with me.” And who knows what might happen then? By the way, Robyn has two other ice cream stores, one in Las Vegas, and the other in San Jose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
November 12, 2023
Matthew 22: 34-40
2 Samuel 18: 1-16; 24-33
So here we find Jesus in the 22nd chapter of Matthew being put ONCE MORE to the test. Which commandment, the lawyer asks, is the greatest? Perhaps to our ears this question sounds like a legitimate one, but as was said in the introduction, this question is part of an intentional effort to entrap Jesus. All the authorities were going after him—the priests and the scribes, who were part of the aristocratic class known as the Sadducees, as well as the Pharisees, who though not of the upper classes, were yet conversant on the law. The Pharisees, by the way, also had a skilled occupation, like a lawyer or a tentmaker. Undoubtedly, they were all suspicious of Jesus’ popularity and charismatic power, and so they were constantly testing him, trying to find out if he could be cornered and made to look foolish or dangerous. Now right before today’s lesson Jesus had been asked a question by the Sadducees. If a woman marries seven brothers in succession, because all her husbands had died, leaving her childless, in the resurrection whose wife shall she be? Jesus not only told them that in heaven there will be no marrying, but he also said that God is the God of the living, not of the dead. And so, the next sentence begins our text for today: When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question: Which commandment is the greatest.
Now you should understand that the Pharisees and Sadducees did not like each other. They were not only of different socio-economic classes, but they also had different religious ideas. The Sadducees believed neither in a resurrection of the dead nor in the oral interpretation of the law, while the Pharisees taught both these things. Jesus also taught those things, which is why some scholars believe that at one time Jesus had been a Pharisee. And so, when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they were probably pretty happy that their religious enemies had been put in their place.
And now they are going to see if they could outwit this very clever Jesus, so they decide to ask Jesus a question about which commandment is the greatest---the greatest of the 613 commandments that are part of the law. And here Jesus did not say anything new or radical. He simply repeated what is known as the Shema from Deuteronomy, which calls for complete devotion to God with heart, soul and might. In other words, one’s whole being is to be actively involved in loving God. Loving God is the starting point for everything else a human being is called to do. Then Jesus went on to refer to a second commandment that is like the first, and here he again quoted from the law, this time from Leviticus 19:18, which reads, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When these two commandments are put together, we understand that love for God and love for neighbor and self are interdependent. We love God by showing love to others as well as ourselves, and in loving others and ourselves in the right way, we show love for God. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
But the real challenge with the commandment is trying to figure out what exactly is the loving thing to do in particular situations. When we consider international relations, for example, how should the ethic of love rule when we are dealing with conflict like that between Israel and Hamas or Ukraine and Russia? What does it mean to love the enemy, when the enemy is Hamas against Israel or Putin’s Russian forces against Ukraine? What is the loving thing to do about immigration, when we clearly need more workers for jobs and yet lack the infrastructure, including judges, caseworkers, and affordable housing? Reinhold Niebuhr, whose words opened our worship service, was a minister in Detroit, very supportive of unions, as well as a social ethicist, who taught for years at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He said that in politics love cannot be the ruling ethic. The best we can hope and work for is justice. But even justice can be very hard to come by. What is the just thing to do in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine and on our southern border? The answers are hardly obvious.
If we forget politics and move into the personal, we all face ethical dilemmas in our families and our friendships. What is the loving thing to do when you have been betrayed by your spouse with your best friend? What is the loving thing to do if your son walks out on his wife and leaves three kids behind? People whom we deeply love sometimes do things, which are an affront to our ethics. My husband told me about a neighbor of his, who in 1969 went to Canada rather than serve in Viet Nam. The father, a decorated hero from World War II, who supported the war in Viet Nam, disowned his son, while the mother, who opposed the war, thought her son a hero. Each parent had a response to both the war and their son as well as to each other. What then was the loving thing for them to do?
And so, we arrive at this incredible story about David and his son, Absalom, which mixes politics with the personal. If you ever are discouraged about what seems like the dysfunction of your family, consider David’s. There was rape of a sister, Tamar by one of her brothers, Amnon, and when David found out he was very angry, but he said nothing, for the text tells us, he loved his first born son. We may well wonder, if David loved his daughter, Tamar. She became a desolate woman, and later, Absalom, another brother takes vengeance upon Tamar by killing Amnon. And David along with his servants and other sons wept for Amnon.
Absalom fled and for three years stayed away, and the text tells us how David mourned for his son’s absence; he yearned for him, because he loved Absalom, who was beautiful. From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish on him, at least no physical blemish. Absalom finally returned to Jerusalem, but for two years did not come into the king’s presence. Finally, he came before his father, prostrated himself and David kissed his son. But the healing did not last. Absalom rebelled against his father and in time a battle ensued, and you heard the story. Even in the midst of Absalom’s rebellion, David continued to love his son, and he asked that no harm come to Absalom, But another commander killed Absalom as the traitor he surely was. And David grieved, O Absalom, my son, Absalom. Would that I had died instead of you. O my son, Absalom, my son, my son.”
The story should grab your heart and squeeze it until it hurts. The tragedy is palpable, and part of the tragedy is the limits of human love to heal. David loved his son, but what power did that love have to heal? The whole situation was a mess, beginning with the rape of Tamar right down to the rebellion against David. Surely David could have/should have spoken out earlier, but no matter what he said or did, there is yet the inevitability of overwhelming pain.
And isn’t this the way life often is? It should not be and yet it is. We have commandments and are told that some ways to live are better ways than others. And yes, we know this. But we also know something else, especially if we have lived long enough. We hear of people trying to help another family member, who has a major illness or addiction or some other problem, and yet they cannot heal the malady. Human love does have its limits. It cannot repair everything, even if it sometimes it must bear everything.
At the end of today’s Gospel Jesus asks the Pharisees a question which they cannot answer, and from that day on, the text tells us that they dared not ask Jesus any more questions. Jesus had silenced the Sadducees and now he silenced the Pharisees. Nothing more could be asked by them. They were at the end of their questions, but not at the end of the story. They were clever, but cleverness does not solve everything any more than human love does. Yet faith tells us that God’s love has no limits----and that assurance is what we can cling to in the most difficult and challenging of times. We may not be able to see how or if God’s love solves everything, but there is hope that finally it will.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
November 12, 2023
Matthew 22: 34-40
2 Samuel 18: 1-16; 24-33
So here we find Jesus in the 22nd chapter of Matthew being put ONCE MORE to the test. Which commandment, the lawyer asks, is the greatest? Perhaps to our ears this question sounds like a legitimate one, but as was said in the introduction, this question is part of an intentional effort to entrap Jesus. All the authorities were going after him—the priests and the scribes, who were part of the aristocratic class known as the Sadducees, as well as the Pharisees, who though not of the upper classes, were yet conversant on the law. The Pharisees, by the way, also had a skilled occupation, like a lawyer or a tentmaker. Undoubtedly, they were all suspicious of Jesus’ popularity and charismatic power, and so they were constantly testing him, trying to find out if he could be cornered and made to look foolish or dangerous. Now right before today’s lesson Jesus had been asked a question by the Sadducees. If a woman marries seven brothers in succession, because all her husbands had died, leaving her childless, in the resurrection whose wife shall she be? Jesus not only told them that in heaven there will be no marrying, but he also said that God is the God of the living, not of the dead. And so, the next sentence begins our text for today: When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question: Which commandment is the greatest.
Now you should understand that the Pharisees and Sadducees did not like each other. They were not only of different socio-economic classes, but they also had different religious ideas. The Sadducees believed neither in a resurrection of the dead nor in the oral interpretation of the law, while the Pharisees taught both these things. Jesus also taught those things, which is why some scholars believe that at one time Jesus had been a Pharisee. And so, when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they were probably pretty happy that their religious enemies had been put in their place.
And now they are going to see if they could outwit this very clever Jesus, so they decide to ask Jesus a question about which commandment is the greatest---the greatest of the 613 commandments that are part of the law. And here Jesus did not say anything new or radical. He simply repeated what is known as the Shema from Deuteronomy, which calls for complete devotion to God with heart, soul and might. In other words, one’s whole being is to be actively involved in loving God. Loving God is the starting point for everything else a human being is called to do. Then Jesus went on to refer to a second commandment that is like the first, and here he again quoted from the law, this time from Leviticus 19:18, which reads, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When these two commandments are put together, we understand that love for God and love for neighbor and self are interdependent. We love God by showing love to others as well as ourselves, and in loving others and ourselves in the right way, we show love for God. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
But the real challenge with the commandment is trying to figure out what exactly is the loving thing to do in particular situations. When we consider international relations, for example, how should the ethic of love rule when we are dealing with conflict like that between Israel and Hamas or Ukraine and Russia? What does it mean to love the enemy, when the enemy is Hamas against Israel or Putin’s Russian forces against Ukraine? What is the loving thing to do about immigration, when we clearly need more workers for jobs and yet lack the infrastructure, including judges, caseworkers, and affordable housing? Reinhold Niebuhr, whose words opened our worship service, was a minister in Detroit, very supportive of unions, as well as a social ethicist, who taught for years at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He said that in politics love cannot be the ruling ethic. The best we can hope and work for is justice. But even justice can be very hard to come by. What is the just thing to do in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine and on our southern border? The answers are hardly obvious.
If we forget politics and move into the personal, we all face ethical dilemmas in our families and our friendships. What is the loving thing to do when you have been betrayed by your spouse with your best friend? What is the loving thing to do if your son walks out on his wife and leaves three kids behind? People whom we deeply love sometimes do things, which are an affront to our ethics. My husband told me about a neighbor of his, who in 1969 went to Canada rather than serve in Viet Nam. The father, a decorated hero from World War II, who supported the war in Viet Nam, disowned his son, while the mother, who opposed the war, thought her son a hero. Each parent had a response to both the war and their son as well as to each other. What then was the loving thing for them to do?
And so, we arrive at this incredible story about David and his son, Absalom, which mixes politics with the personal. If you ever are discouraged about what seems like the dysfunction of your family, consider David’s. There was rape of a sister, Tamar by one of her brothers, Amnon, and when David found out he was very angry, but he said nothing, for the text tells us, he loved his first born son. We may well wonder, if David loved his daughter, Tamar. She became a desolate woman, and later, Absalom, another brother takes vengeance upon Tamar by killing Amnon. And David along with his servants and other sons wept for Amnon.
Absalom fled and for three years stayed away, and the text tells us how David mourned for his son’s absence; he yearned for him, because he loved Absalom, who was beautiful. From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish on him, at least no physical blemish. Absalom finally returned to Jerusalem, but for two years did not come into the king’s presence. Finally, he came before his father, prostrated himself and David kissed his son. But the healing did not last. Absalom rebelled against his father and in time a battle ensued, and you heard the story. Even in the midst of Absalom’s rebellion, David continued to love his son, and he asked that no harm come to Absalom, But another commander killed Absalom as the traitor he surely was. And David grieved, O Absalom, my son, Absalom. Would that I had died instead of you. O my son, Absalom, my son, my son.”
The story should grab your heart and squeeze it until it hurts. The tragedy is palpable, and part of the tragedy is the limits of human love to heal. David loved his son, but what power did that love have to heal? The whole situation was a mess, beginning with the rape of Tamar right down to the rebellion against David. Surely David could have/should have spoken out earlier, but no matter what he said or did, there is yet the inevitability of overwhelming pain.
And isn’t this the way life often is? It should not be and yet it is. We have commandments and are told that some ways to live are better ways than others. And yes, we know this. But we also know something else, especially if we have lived long enough. We hear of people trying to help another family member, who has a major illness or addiction or some other problem, and yet they cannot heal the malady. Human love does have its limits. It cannot repair everything, even if it sometimes it must bear everything.
At the end of today’s Gospel Jesus asks the Pharisees a question which they cannot answer, and from that day on, the text tells us that they dared not ask Jesus any more questions. Jesus had silenced the Sadducees and now he silenced the Pharisees. Nothing more could be asked by them. They were at the end of their questions, but not at the end of the story. They were clever, but cleverness does not solve everything any more than human love does. Yet faith tells us that God’s love has no limits----and that assurance is what we can cling to in the most difficult and challenging of times. We may not be able to see how or if God’s love solves everything, but there is hope that finally it will.
November 8, 2023
Dear Friends,
The news can sometimes be hard to take, so The Washington Post has a section called “The Optimist,” which in the midst of tough times tells some uplifting stories, like the one about Grandma Peggy. It all began on Wednesdays, a day the high school began later, so Sam Crowe had breakfast at a local diner with a group of his friends. ‘You know,” he told his friends, “my grandma makes a great breakfast, even better than this one,” and so in October, 2021, a group of kids began to eat breakfast at Peggy Winchowski’s house every Wednesday. She loved cooking for them---pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, oatmeal, whatever the kids wanted. She always looked forward to Wednesdays. She said it was the best day of the week for her. And then sadness struck in July, 2022, when Sam was killed in a car accident.
On the day Sam died, kids came to her house to grieve with her and to make sure she was o.k. They came every single day of that first grief stricken week and after that they continued to show up to check up on her. When school began in September, Grandma Peggy, as they called her, told them they were welcome to continue to come to her house on Wednesdays for breakfast. And so, they did---except even more kids began to show up. Now every Wednesday about 30 high school students come to her house. Sometimes Sam’s parents show up, and they all eat breakfast together, but they do more than eat. They talk about Sam, sharing all kinds of memories and stories about him. They remember his humor, his kindness, his love of life, and when they talk about Sam this way, they say they can actually feel his presence among them. “He is right here with us,” one of his friends said. And indeed, Grandma Peggy agrees.
Grandma Peggy is 69 years old, and she has lived long enough to realize that life can be hard---that bad things happen to good people. “But,” she said, “these people are so young, and to lose a friend when you are 14, 15 or 16, that is so hard. They don’t understand why such things happen.”
Actually no one understands WHY such things happen. It is just that when you live long enough you learn that such things do happen. That is simply the way life sometimes is. And so, Grandma Peggy can give these kids something significant as they give something significant to her. They each are living though their grief, and as they live it, they learn. Wisdom comes through living.
I am reminded of one of my favorite novels, War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. There is this one character, Pierre, an aristocrat and intellectual, who is always trying to discover the meaning of life. He tries so many different paths, but it all comes to nothing---until Napoleon invades Russia and Pierre becomes a prisoner of war. And it is then that he meets another prisoner, Platon Karataev, a simple peasant, who tells Pierre, “Life is the minute by minute living of it.” And it is in those minutes that one finds meaning.
The young people who come to Grandma Peggy for breakfast are finding that the time they spend with Peggy and each other while eating and talking are making their way through life, deepening their understanding and their wisdom as they face head on their grief. And Peggy is doing the same. After all, young people show us life renewing itself, and Peggy is undoubtedly helped by the energy of young lives. Such mutuality in relationships is life giving. We can even call it grace.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The news can sometimes be hard to take, so The Washington Post has a section called “The Optimist,” which in the midst of tough times tells some uplifting stories, like the one about Grandma Peggy. It all began on Wednesdays, a day the high school began later, so Sam Crowe had breakfast at a local diner with a group of his friends. ‘You know,” he told his friends, “my grandma makes a great breakfast, even better than this one,” and so in October, 2021, a group of kids began to eat breakfast at Peggy Winchowski’s house every Wednesday. She loved cooking for them---pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, oatmeal, whatever the kids wanted. She always looked forward to Wednesdays. She said it was the best day of the week for her. And then sadness struck in July, 2022, when Sam was killed in a car accident.
On the day Sam died, kids came to her house to grieve with her and to make sure she was o.k. They came every single day of that first grief stricken week and after that they continued to show up to check up on her. When school began in September, Grandma Peggy, as they called her, told them they were welcome to continue to come to her house on Wednesdays for breakfast. And so, they did---except even more kids began to show up. Now every Wednesday about 30 high school students come to her house. Sometimes Sam’s parents show up, and they all eat breakfast together, but they do more than eat. They talk about Sam, sharing all kinds of memories and stories about him. They remember his humor, his kindness, his love of life, and when they talk about Sam this way, they say they can actually feel his presence among them. “He is right here with us,” one of his friends said. And indeed, Grandma Peggy agrees.
Grandma Peggy is 69 years old, and she has lived long enough to realize that life can be hard---that bad things happen to good people. “But,” she said, “these people are so young, and to lose a friend when you are 14, 15 or 16, that is so hard. They don’t understand why such things happen.”
Actually no one understands WHY such things happen. It is just that when you live long enough you learn that such things do happen. That is simply the way life sometimes is. And so, Grandma Peggy can give these kids something significant as they give something significant to her. They each are living though their grief, and as they live it, they learn. Wisdom comes through living.
I am reminded of one of my favorite novels, War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. There is this one character, Pierre, an aristocrat and intellectual, who is always trying to discover the meaning of life. He tries so many different paths, but it all comes to nothing---until Napoleon invades Russia and Pierre becomes a prisoner of war. And it is then that he meets another prisoner, Platon Karataev, a simple peasant, who tells Pierre, “Life is the minute by minute living of it.” And it is in those minutes that one finds meaning.
The young people who come to Grandma Peggy for breakfast are finding that the time they spend with Peggy and each other while eating and talking are making their way through life, deepening their understanding and their wisdom as they face head on their grief. And Peggy is doing the same. After all, young people show us life renewing itself, and Peggy is undoubtedly helped by the energy of young lives. Such mutuality in relationships is life giving. We can even call it grace.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
October 31, 2023
Dear Friends,
This past week someone said to me, “I am having a very hard time being hopeful right now.” We all know exactly what he means. “The world is too much with us as a line from a Wordsworth poem declares. Lately Ukraine has been “eclipsed” by the war between Israel and Gaza. It is unbearable to see the pictures coming from Gaza. We are horrified by what Hamas did to Israel and now we feel the horror of innocent civilians dying, many of them children. 8500 Palestinian deaths are too much, just as 1400 Israeli deaths were too much. We do not know how the mayhem will end, but we pray that it will soon end.
There was also the mass murder in Maine, when a 40 year old man named Robert Card, who was suffering from mental illness, killed 18 people and wounded another 13. His youngest victim was a 14 year old bowling star. He and his father were both killed. A six year old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death by the landlord, and in Texas a female pediatrician, who was Arab, was stabbed to death by a 24 year old neighbor. Jewish students at Cornell University have been told to stay away from Hillel House on campus, because of antisemitic threats made against Jewish students. “Slit their throats,” was the horrifying command. The FBI has been called in to help the University cope with the threats. Indeed, “the world is too much with us.”
Some people will simply turn off, refusing to engage with the news. For me that option does not work since ignorance does not truly buy peace of mind. At best, it is a false kind of peace—at least to me. Knowledge is power and understanding what is going on is a first step to understanding why it is going on. And then perhaps a way to change it will emerge. Furthermore, understanding is a tool that can nurture compassion.
We human beings are tribal creatures, and throughout our history, we have had much trouble dealing with difference and the Other. But we do learn, and we have learned, and though our learning is incomplete, when we see examples of it, we are uplifted. Who is not encouraged by the story of the Good Samaritan? Jews and Samaritans hated each other, and yet Jesus told a story that showed the hated enemy being a good neighbor to the beaten Jew, left by the roadside to die. It is more than a story because such behaviors are replicated all over the world in real time. Consider the righteous gentiles who hid Jews during the dark years of the Holocaust, and there are many examples of friendships between Palestinians and Jews. Hatred and violence do grab the headlines, but there are other stories as well. And we would do well to heed them.
Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday when we remembered how a group of Reformers actually changed the course of history. It was a difficult, chaotic time. The Church was broken apart, and people must have felt that the end was coming. And yet, room was made for another approach to spirituality and faith. There is indeed something inviolate about the individual conscience. No one can make you believe what you simply do not believe.
The story of the Reformation also reminds us that as much as we think we are at the center of the story God is a major actor in history’s unfolding. Luther was shaken to the depths of his being by the fear that he could be wrong, but he also took great comfort in his faith that told him, whether right or wrong, he was under God’s care. God is truth, Luther believed, and though he thought himself a witness to God’s truth, he also held firm to the conviction that God would finally take care of error. The arc of history is long, and though we cannot see the whole length, we can be sustained and uplifted by the faith that history’s arc is under God’s care, love, and mercy. This does not suggest that everything which happens, is part of God’s plan. Human beings are free agents, who often act outside of God’s Word and Law. Yet God always has a response to human activity and agency. God’s love will not be stymied, and though we often find ourselves discouraged and even depressed by a world that seems so out of control, we can take comfort in the advice that St. Augustine gave so long ago: “Work as if everything depends upon you but pray as if everything depends upon God”. I think Luther took that advice and it allowed him to weather his doubts and the storms he faced. May that same advice be of some help and comfort to us in these challenging days.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
This past week someone said to me, “I am having a very hard time being hopeful right now.” We all know exactly what he means. “The world is too much with us as a line from a Wordsworth poem declares. Lately Ukraine has been “eclipsed” by the war between Israel and Gaza. It is unbearable to see the pictures coming from Gaza. We are horrified by what Hamas did to Israel and now we feel the horror of innocent civilians dying, many of them children. 8500 Palestinian deaths are too much, just as 1400 Israeli deaths were too much. We do not know how the mayhem will end, but we pray that it will soon end.
There was also the mass murder in Maine, when a 40 year old man named Robert Card, who was suffering from mental illness, killed 18 people and wounded another 13. His youngest victim was a 14 year old bowling star. He and his father were both killed. A six year old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death by the landlord, and in Texas a female pediatrician, who was Arab, was stabbed to death by a 24 year old neighbor. Jewish students at Cornell University have been told to stay away from Hillel House on campus, because of antisemitic threats made against Jewish students. “Slit their throats,” was the horrifying command. The FBI has been called in to help the University cope with the threats. Indeed, “the world is too much with us.”
Some people will simply turn off, refusing to engage with the news. For me that option does not work since ignorance does not truly buy peace of mind. At best, it is a false kind of peace—at least to me. Knowledge is power and understanding what is going on is a first step to understanding why it is going on. And then perhaps a way to change it will emerge. Furthermore, understanding is a tool that can nurture compassion.
We human beings are tribal creatures, and throughout our history, we have had much trouble dealing with difference and the Other. But we do learn, and we have learned, and though our learning is incomplete, when we see examples of it, we are uplifted. Who is not encouraged by the story of the Good Samaritan? Jews and Samaritans hated each other, and yet Jesus told a story that showed the hated enemy being a good neighbor to the beaten Jew, left by the roadside to die. It is more than a story because such behaviors are replicated all over the world in real time. Consider the righteous gentiles who hid Jews during the dark years of the Holocaust, and there are many examples of friendships between Palestinians and Jews. Hatred and violence do grab the headlines, but there are other stories as well. And we would do well to heed them.
Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday when we remembered how a group of Reformers actually changed the course of history. It was a difficult, chaotic time. The Church was broken apart, and people must have felt that the end was coming. And yet, room was made for another approach to spirituality and faith. There is indeed something inviolate about the individual conscience. No one can make you believe what you simply do not believe.
The story of the Reformation also reminds us that as much as we think we are at the center of the story God is a major actor in history’s unfolding. Luther was shaken to the depths of his being by the fear that he could be wrong, but he also took great comfort in his faith that told him, whether right or wrong, he was under God’s care. God is truth, Luther believed, and though he thought himself a witness to God’s truth, he also held firm to the conviction that God would finally take care of error. The arc of history is long, and though we cannot see the whole length, we can be sustained and uplifted by the faith that history’s arc is under God’s care, love, and mercy. This does not suggest that everything which happens, is part of God’s plan. Human beings are free agents, who often act outside of God’s Word and Law. Yet God always has a response to human activity and agency. God’s love will not be stymied, and though we often find ourselves discouraged and even depressed by a world that seems so out of control, we can take comfort in the advice that St. Augustine gave so long ago: “Work as if everything depends upon you but pray as if everything depends upon God”. I think Luther took that advice and it allowed him to weather his doubts and the storms he faced. May that same advice be of some help and comfort to us in these challenging days.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A VISIT FROM MARTIN LUTHER: PRAYING FOR THE CHURCH
Reformation Sunday
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 29, 2023
I know how hard church can be. You live in a world of change as did I, and change has never been easy for us or for the church. Church (almost by definition) clings to tradition, and I suppose that is how it has to be. The Bible is tradition, taking us far back before any of our lives began, and to many people (in my day as well as in yours) the bible was a fixed mark, telling people the truth it had always told them. So why should there be change? Why, indeed? Even now after all these 500 years I do not really understand it---except that with the hindsight of history, I can see certain things like the invention of the printing press which changed everything.
Information suddenly became available to a wide range of people. 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 Wartburg Castle, 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 for his so called heresies---like wanting to give the communion cup to the laity. Hus was tricked, guaranteed safe passage, but when he arrived to give answer for his views, it was not a debate he was invited to, but an inquisition that had already decided to burn him. After his death his followers symbolized themselves by the flaming chalice. These were men of great vision and great courage and above all, great faith---but the time was not yet ripe for them. All in God’s time, we would say, all in God’s time.
And so, it became ---God’s time. Of course, the temptation is to see it as our time. We have this habit of putting ourselves at the center of the story like my father, a successful miner, who had risen from the peasantry and was determined to see me rise even further to become a lawyer. 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.
Monastic life was hard, physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. Tortured I was by the feeling that God hated me, condemned me for all 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 finally drove me to the understanding that it is not our good works which save us, but 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, for revolution it certainly was.
You see, it was not PRIMARILY about the 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, and for that he needed money, a lot of it. So, the selling of indulgences was a way to fill papal coffers. “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. 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 had to deal with it. The religious leaders of his day asked him, “By whose authority do you cast out demons? Is it by the power of Satan or the power of God? And he would not answer them, for he knew they were incapable of recognizing the truth. Well, I confess that I was not nearly so humble or so wise. 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. 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, ”Martin, this is a virus, a 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? Except for you is all the Church in error?”
A good question, it was, and I confess that it was the only question that made my soul tremble. For how did I really know? And yet I answered: “Remember that God once spoke through the mouth of Balaam’s ass. 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.”
Well, that got me to the city of Worms, where once again I faced Eck, who repeated that 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 if not with extinction than with benign irrelevance. Easily ignored you are, empty pews and all. But the truth is, we cannot see around the corner---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.
It is so easy to lose heart, to be discouraged. But remember the call is not to be successful but to be faithful, and faith tells us that God is up to something, even if we do not know what it is. Take heart, my friends, God is not yet finished with the Church. The Reformation continues
Reformation Sunday
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 29, 2023
I know how hard church can be. You live in a world of change as did I, and change has never been easy for us or for the church. Church (almost by definition) clings to tradition, and I suppose that is how it has to be. The Bible is tradition, taking us far back before any of our lives began, and to many people (in my day as well as in yours) the bible was a fixed mark, telling people the truth it had always told them. So why should there be change? Why, indeed? Even now after all these 500 years I do not really understand it---except that with the hindsight of history, I can see certain things like the invention of the printing press which changed everything.
Information suddenly became available to a wide range of people. 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 Wartburg Castle, 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 for his so called heresies---like wanting to give the communion cup to the laity. Hus was tricked, guaranteed safe passage, but when he arrived to give answer for his views, it was not a debate he was invited to, but an inquisition that had already decided to burn him. After his death his followers symbolized themselves by the flaming chalice. These were men of great vision and great courage and above all, great faith---but the time was not yet ripe for them. All in God’s time, we would say, all in God’s time.
And so, it became ---God’s time. Of course, the temptation is to see it as our time. We have this habit of putting ourselves at the center of the story like my father, a successful miner, who had risen from the peasantry and was determined to see me rise even further to become a lawyer. 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.
Monastic life was hard, physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. Tortured I was by the feeling that God hated me, condemned me for all 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 finally drove me to the understanding that it is not our good works which save us, but 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, for revolution it certainly was.
You see, it was not PRIMARILY about the 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, and for that he needed money, a lot of it. So, the selling of indulgences was a way to fill papal coffers. “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. 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 had to deal with it. The religious leaders of his day asked him, “By whose authority do you cast out demons? Is it by the power of Satan or the power of God? And he would not answer them, for he knew they were incapable of recognizing the truth. Well, I confess that I was not nearly so humble or so wise. 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. 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, ”Martin, this is a virus, a 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? Except for you is all the Church in error?”
A good question, it was, and I confess that it was the only question that made my soul tremble. For how did I really know? And yet I answered: “Remember that God once spoke through the mouth of Balaam’s ass. 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.”
Well, that got me to the city of Worms, where once again I faced Eck, who repeated that 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 if not with extinction than with benign irrelevance. Easily ignored you are, empty pews and all. But the truth is, we cannot see around the corner---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.
It is so easy to lose heart, to be discouraged. But remember the call is not to be successful but to be faithful, and faith tells us that God is up to something, even if we do not know what it is. Take heart, my friends, God is not yet finished with the Church. The Reformation continues
WHAT WE OWE TO GOD AND WHAT WE OWE TO CAESAR
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 22, 2023
Exodus 33: 12-23
Matthew 22: 15-22
Moses wanted a sign from God, and can we really blame him? If he were successfully going to lead his people out of Egypt, assuring them that this divinity was the real thing, not some fake or poor imitation , a sign would have been important. And God said, “O.K., but you can only see my backside; you cannot see my glory directly.
I wonder if some of the religious leadership who came to Jesus were interested in the same thing. I mean isn’t it possible that at least some of them were trying to ascertain if God’s glory was truly reflected in Jesus? They had heard him teach; they had witnessed his healings, and so surely their curiosity was aroused. Who is this guy? Now this is not how Matthew’s gospel portrays the Jewish religious leadership. Matthew doesn’t give them any credit at all, which is unfortunate, and probably has helped to fuel some of the anti-Jewish thinking and behavior that has infected Christianity throughout its long history. When Matthew wrote, it was tough going for Jews who were trying to follow Christ. The Temple had been destroyed and the synagogues, founded and run by the Pharisees, were springing up and giving new, vital life to the Jews. And Jewish Christians were being expelled from these synagogues. They were told they were no longer Jews. This is the context in which Matthew wrote, so by the time we arrive at chapter 22, Matthew gives us a Jewish leadership totally intent on killing Jesus.
So, this very important question about paying taxes doesn’t really get answered in a satisfactory way. Jesus’ answer is very clever and it puts the leadership in its place. But the answer does not encourage dialogue, because according to Matthew the religious leadership was not interested in getting at truth. They were only interested in setting a trap for Jesus. They were not fools. They knew what they were asking. If Jesus had said that the Jews (as an occupied people) should not pay taxes, the Herodians would have had evidence to charge him with sedition. But if he said, “Yes, taxes are owed,” the Pharisees would be furious, since they saw the tax policy as completely unjust, which in so many ways, it was.
Note where Jesus is: He is in the Temple, sacred space, and a coin with the age of Caesar’s head on it, is essentially a desecration of this sacred space. You see, temple taxes could only be paid in Jewish money, which is why there were money changers in the Temple courtyard. Jews came from all over the empire, and they had to change their money. So, Jesus asked to see a Roman coin, which not only had an image of the Roman emperor on it, but it also bore this inscription, Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest. To the Jews this violated the commandments---to worship no other God but God and to abstain from making graven images. Jesus, however, did not get involved in any discussion of these issues. He simply said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” A clever response if someone is trying to entrap you, but it doesn’t help anyone to figure out what exactly is owed to government and what is owed to God.
Most of us acknowledge that we have an obligation to pay taxes to the government. After all, we do receive benefits like security, roads and public education and mail. It does not matter if you drive a car or not, because you still receive benefits of food and other deliveries made to stores and warehouses where you shop. And whether or not you have children or grandchildren in the public schools is not the point, because we all have an obligation to care about the education of the young. So, we are obligated to pay, though how much is the question and the challenge.
Now there are Christians and very faithful ones, who see Christ as being so against the dominant culture that they refuse to vote, because they see all politics under the rule of money and violence. Some Christian pacifists will refrain from paying a portion of their federal income taxes that would go to support the military. Remember, in the early days of Christianity, no Christian was permitted to be a member of the army. Loyalty to Christ can mean taking a radical stand against the culture. So, while Jesus did not answer the question about what we owe to Caesar and what we owe to God, there is no doubt that this is no trivial question.
In the third century, when Rome was the dominant power and Christians were being persecuted. the emperor Valerian in the year 258 commanded his Imperial treasury to confiscate all money and possessions belonging to the Christian church. Responding to this threat, the pope put a young man named Lawrence in charge of the church’s riches, and he also gave him responsibility for the church’s outreach to the poor.
The Roman emperor demanded that Lawrence turn over all the riches of the church and gave him three days to comply. Lawrence quickly sold all the church’s valuables, which in those days was nothing like it would come to be later centuries) and gave the money to widows and to the sick. He then distributed all the church’s property to the poor.
On the third day, the emperor summoned Lawrence to his palace and asked for the wealth of the church. With great fanfare, Lawrence entered the palace, stopped, and then gestured back to the door. Streaming in behind him were crowds of poor, crippled, blind and suffering people. He proclaimed, “These are the true treasures of the church.” The Emperor did not know what to do or say.
What do we owe to God, and what do we owe to Caesar? When I was a first year student in seminary, one of my professors told a story he had heard from one of his professors, who at age 22 had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. Wandering around the French countryside in a group of three other young American soldiers, they suddenly came upon a young German soldier, so young in fact, he had no facial hair. Hitler was desperate at this point; boys of 14 and 15 were being drafted into the army. What to do with him? They weren’t looking to take any prisoners. They were in no position to hold any prisoners. Should they let him go, which is really what they wanted to do, but what if he sounded an alert and then what if they were captured or even killed? And so regretfully, they drew lots to determine who would shoot him in the back, because they did not want him to see what was coming, and this young man of 22 was the chosen executioner.
He did the deed, and then struggled with it until the day he died. He became a professor of theological ethics, and spent his life asking himself and his students, “What do we owe God and what do we owe Caesar?” Many days he thought he had done the wrong thing. The image of the crucified Christ means, he taught, that one’s own death is preferable to inflicting unjust death on another. The awful decision, he knew, was made out of fear and Christ said, “Love casts out fear.” But he also knew that war is not about love; it never is and never will be. A very imperfect justice is the most we can hope for while we live on this earth.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God? The answer is not straightforward and clear. We struggle to answer, and yes, Christians come out with different answers and take different sides. What do we owe God and what do we owe Caesar? The question haunts us, and indeed, it should haunt and trouble us. Sometimes that is how God speaks to us---in our troubled and haunted hearts and minds.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 22, 2023
Exodus 33: 12-23
Matthew 22: 15-22
Moses wanted a sign from God, and can we really blame him? If he were successfully going to lead his people out of Egypt, assuring them that this divinity was the real thing, not some fake or poor imitation , a sign would have been important. And God said, “O.K., but you can only see my backside; you cannot see my glory directly.
I wonder if some of the religious leadership who came to Jesus were interested in the same thing. I mean isn’t it possible that at least some of them were trying to ascertain if God’s glory was truly reflected in Jesus? They had heard him teach; they had witnessed his healings, and so surely their curiosity was aroused. Who is this guy? Now this is not how Matthew’s gospel portrays the Jewish religious leadership. Matthew doesn’t give them any credit at all, which is unfortunate, and probably has helped to fuel some of the anti-Jewish thinking and behavior that has infected Christianity throughout its long history. When Matthew wrote, it was tough going for Jews who were trying to follow Christ. The Temple had been destroyed and the synagogues, founded and run by the Pharisees, were springing up and giving new, vital life to the Jews. And Jewish Christians were being expelled from these synagogues. They were told they were no longer Jews. This is the context in which Matthew wrote, so by the time we arrive at chapter 22, Matthew gives us a Jewish leadership totally intent on killing Jesus.
So, this very important question about paying taxes doesn’t really get answered in a satisfactory way. Jesus’ answer is very clever and it puts the leadership in its place. But the answer does not encourage dialogue, because according to Matthew the religious leadership was not interested in getting at truth. They were only interested in setting a trap for Jesus. They were not fools. They knew what they were asking. If Jesus had said that the Jews (as an occupied people) should not pay taxes, the Herodians would have had evidence to charge him with sedition. But if he said, “Yes, taxes are owed,” the Pharisees would be furious, since they saw the tax policy as completely unjust, which in so many ways, it was.
Note where Jesus is: He is in the Temple, sacred space, and a coin with the age of Caesar’s head on it, is essentially a desecration of this sacred space. You see, temple taxes could only be paid in Jewish money, which is why there were money changers in the Temple courtyard. Jews came from all over the empire, and they had to change their money. So, Jesus asked to see a Roman coin, which not only had an image of the Roman emperor on it, but it also bore this inscription, Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest. To the Jews this violated the commandments---to worship no other God but God and to abstain from making graven images. Jesus, however, did not get involved in any discussion of these issues. He simply said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” A clever response if someone is trying to entrap you, but it doesn’t help anyone to figure out what exactly is owed to government and what is owed to God.
Most of us acknowledge that we have an obligation to pay taxes to the government. After all, we do receive benefits like security, roads and public education and mail. It does not matter if you drive a car or not, because you still receive benefits of food and other deliveries made to stores and warehouses where you shop. And whether or not you have children or grandchildren in the public schools is not the point, because we all have an obligation to care about the education of the young. So, we are obligated to pay, though how much is the question and the challenge.
Now there are Christians and very faithful ones, who see Christ as being so against the dominant culture that they refuse to vote, because they see all politics under the rule of money and violence. Some Christian pacifists will refrain from paying a portion of their federal income taxes that would go to support the military. Remember, in the early days of Christianity, no Christian was permitted to be a member of the army. Loyalty to Christ can mean taking a radical stand against the culture. So, while Jesus did not answer the question about what we owe to Caesar and what we owe to God, there is no doubt that this is no trivial question.
In the third century, when Rome was the dominant power and Christians were being persecuted. the emperor Valerian in the year 258 commanded his Imperial treasury to confiscate all money and possessions belonging to the Christian church. Responding to this threat, the pope put a young man named Lawrence in charge of the church’s riches, and he also gave him responsibility for the church’s outreach to the poor.
The Roman emperor demanded that Lawrence turn over all the riches of the church and gave him three days to comply. Lawrence quickly sold all the church’s valuables, which in those days was nothing like it would come to be later centuries) and gave the money to widows and to the sick. He then distributed all the church’s property to the poor.
On the third day, the emperor summoned Lawrence to his palace and asked for the wealth of the church. With great fanfare, Lawrence entered the palace, stopped, and then gestured back to the door. Streaming in behind him were crowds of poor, crippled, blind and suffering people. He proclaimed, “These are the true treasures of the church.” The Emperor did not know what to do or say.
What do we owe to God, and what do we owe to Caesar? When I was a first year student in seminary, one of my professors told a story he had heard from one of his professors, who at age 22 had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. Wandering around the French countryside in a group of three other young American soldiers, they suddenly came upon a young German soldier, so young in fact, he had no facial hair. Hitler was desperate at this point; boys of 14 and 15 were being drafted into the army. What to do with him? They weren’t looking to take any prisoners. They were in no position to hold any prisoners. Should they let him go, which is really what they wanted to do, but what if he sounded an alert and then what if they were captured or even killed? And so regretfully, they drew lots to determine who would shoot him in the back, because they did not want him to see what was coming, and this young man of 22 was the chosen executioner.
He did the deed, and then struggled with it until the day he died. He became a professor of theological ethics, and spent his life asking himself and his students, “What do we owe God and what do we owe Caesar?” Many days he thought he had done the wrong thing. The image of the crucified Christ means, he taught, that one’s own death is preferable to inflicting unjust death on another. The awful decision, he knew, was made out of fear and Christ said, “Love casts out fear.” But he also knew that war is not about love; it never is and never will be. A very imperfect justice is the most we can hope for while we live on this earth.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God? The answer is not straightforward and clear. We struggle to answer, and yes, Christians come out with different answers and take different sides. What do we owe God and what do we owe Caesar? The question haunts us, and indeed, it should haunt and trouble us. Sometimes that is how God speaks to us---in our troubled and haunted hearts and minds.
October 25, 2023
Dear Friends,
When I was a college freshman, my humanities class was assigned Leo Tolstoy’s great masterpiece, War and Peace. This was during the Viet Nam War, and the novel had great relevance for everyone---no matter what you thought about the war in Southeast Asia. I loved the novel when I was 18, and since then I have read it an additional two times, the last time about 15 years ago for a course I took at Wesleyan University in which a careful reading of the novel was the sole reading assignment.
The novel tells the story of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and the cast of characters, whose lives unfold both in war and in peace. There is this one scene, where the aristocratic Prince Andrei, who had been wounded fighting Napoleon’s army at Austerlitz, presents his view about war and in his mind the insanity of trying to legislate rules of war. “They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of true, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish. If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worthwhile gong to certain death.” In other words, Andrei believed that humanizing war was a way to make war acceptable---and perhaps more common. I clearly remember Professor Williams asking us to consider Andrei’s argument. Do you think, he asked our class, if humanizing war makes it easier to justify war?
It is a very profound question. The Viet Nam War was one that actually came into our living rooms in vivid color. We saw what war looked like, including the dead bodies of combatants as well as the bodies of people we were assured were Viet Cong, though many of them looked like children. And then there was that famous photo of a naked young girl, crying and running away from an attack of napalm. No one could succeed in making her into anyone but who she was: an innocent victim of war.
Last week I wrote about the international efforts to humanize war by making laws about how it can be fought. Proportionality is the central concept. One cannot wage war, even against military targets, if an unproportionable number of civilians will be harmed. This is what the updating of the Geneva Convention rules of 1977 laid out. The earlier rules had covered the treatment of prisoners and the sick and wounded and had tried to limit the use of civilians as human shields.
If one considers how earlier wars were fought the policy was really one of total war. Consider what the United States did on March 9, 1945, when a fleet of B-29’s headed for Tokyo carrying a load of napalm because the civilian population lived in wooden houses. The raid ignited a firestorm whose orange glow could be spotted for 150 miles. Major General Curtis LeMay, who was the architect of the raid, said that 150,000 civilians were “scorched, boiled and baked to death.” He also later acknowledged that if we lost the war, we would go on trial as war criminals. He knew of what he spoke.
Total war was hardly the invention of World War ll. In the ancient days of Rome and Carthage, the first two Punic Wars were fought outside the population centers. But in the third Punic War Rome laid siege to Carthage and slaughtered its inhabitants. The result was that there was no fourth war. Perhaps some of you recall the name of the Prussian military leader, Clausewitz, who was not only a fighter but also a theorist of war. He said the point of fighting was not simply to repel the enemy but to destroy the enemy. His war theory was one without limits.
Think back to your high school days when you learned about the American Civil War. General Sherman was the Union general who set fire to Atlanta, and for this he was considered a barbarian. Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, called the Union General, Grant, a butcher, because he was willing to fight total war. Both Sherman and Grant wanted to make the South howl, so they would NEVER again go to war against the Union. And yet at the war’s end, both generals were in favor of lenient terms for the surrender, which is why very few southern fighters were punished. In the history of civil wars, most losers were hanged or shot. Yet this was not the case in the American Civil War.
Most of us probably consider humanitarian laws about war as a good thing. Yet recently I came across a review of a book by a Yale professor of history and jurisprudence at Yale, Samuel Moyn. Moyn’s contention is that we have far less to celebrate that we might think. His fear is that the humanizing of war has led to wars of longer duration and frequency. There is no denying that fewer people die in the present era, but this is not simply due to the rules of war. It is also because of greater technological precision. The drone is designed to hit certain military targets, and although there is no denying the mistakes that have certainly killed innocent civilians, it is also true that we have nothing like the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg.
We are now witnesses to two terrible conflicts. We see what is happening in Ukraine, where Russia has targeted civilians and has not followed the rules of modern warfare. Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, which is against the 1977 Geneva Convention Rules. And look what is now happening in Gaza. One million people from northern Gaza were ordered to move south or be considered part of a terrorist Hamas network. But where are these people to go? Is this command at all proportional to the terrible loss of Israeli life and the detestable cruelty of Hamas’ invasion into Israel? How can a land invasion of Gaza be fought when Hamas is embedded into the civilian population? The modern rules of war would say it cannot be done and therefore should not be done. Perhaps Ukraine and Gaza cannot be called total wars, but there is no doubt that civilians are suffering in disproportionate ways. And that is a terrible crime against humanity.
The argument that making rules for war only makes war more acceptable and longer may be true. But who wants to return to firebombing cities and napalming civilians? War is terrible, indeed, and we should not fool ourselves into believing that we can make it civilized. But is it not possible to make it less horrible for the innocents, who did not make the decision to invade a country and murder its citizens or bomb a land into the stone age?
Christ may not look upon our efforts to humanize with any favor, but until we are able to love others as we do ourselves, which is what Christ commanded us to do; we are left with our meager efforts to humanize something (war), which in so many ways is beyond humanization. And yet we try, and I would add, we must try. Because we are at such a great distance from perfection, can we at least not attempt some measure of the good? And does not the good demand that we do everything in our power to protect the innocents? But when we look at what is going on in Gaza now, do we really believe that innocent civilians are being protected?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When I was a college freshman, my humanities class was assigned Leo Tolstoy’s great masterpiece, War and Peace. This was during the Viet Nam War, and the novel had great relevance for everyone---no matter what you thought about the war in Southeast Asia. I loved the novel when I was 18, and since then I have read it an additional two times, the last time about 15 years ago for a course I took at Wesleyan University in which a careful reading of the novel was the sole reading assignment.
The novel tells the story of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and the cast of characters, whose lives unfold both in war and in peace. There is this one scene, where the aristocratic Prince Andrei, who had been wounded fighting Napoleon’s army at Austerlitz, presents his view about war and in his mind the insanity of trying to legislate rules of war. “They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of true, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish. If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worthwhile gong to certain death.” In other words, Andrei believed that humanizing war was a way to make war acceptable---and perhaps more common. I clearly remember Professor Williams asking us to consider Andrei’s argument. Do you think, he asked our class, if humanizing war makes it easier to justify war?
It is a very profound question. The Viet Nam War was one that actually came into our living rooms in vivid color. We saw what war looked like, including the dead bodies of combatants as well as the bodies of people we were assured were Viet Cong, though many of them looked like children. And then there was that famous photo of a naked young girl, crying and running away from an attack of napalm. No one could succeed in making her into anyone but who she was: an innocent victim of war.
Last week I wrote about the international efforts to humanize war by making laws about how it can be fought. Proportionality is the central concept. One cannot wage war, even against military targets, if an unproportionable number of civilians will be harmed. This is what the updating of the Geneva Convention rules of 1977 laid out. The earlier rules had covered the treatment of prisoners and the sick and wounded and had tried to limit the use of civilians as human shields.
If one considers how earlier wars were fought the policy was really one of total war. Consider what the United States did on March 9, 1945, when a fleet of B-29’s headed for Tokyo carrying a load of napalm because the civilian population lived in wooden houses. The raid ignited a firestorm whose orange glow could be spotted for 150 miles. Major General Curtis LeMay, who was the architect of the raid, said that 150,000 civilians were “scorched, boiled and baked to death.” He also later acknowledged that if we lost the war, we would go on trial as war criminals. He knew of what he spoke.
Total war was hardly the invention of World War ll. In the ancient days of Rome and Carthage, the first two Punic Wars were fought outside the population centers. But in the third Punic War Rome laid siege to Carthage and slaughtered its inhabitants. The result was that there was no fourth war. Perhaps some of you recall the name of the Prussian military leader, Clausewitz, who was not only a fighter but also a theorist of war. He said the point of fighting was not simply to repel the enemy but to destroy the enemy. His war theory was one without limits.
Think back to your high school days when you learned about the American Civil War. General Sherman was the Union general who set fire to Atlanta, and for this he was considered a barbarian. Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, called the Union General, Grant, a butcher, because he was willing to fight total war. Both Sherman and Grant wanted to make the South howl, so they would NEVER again go to war against the Union. And yet at the war’s end, both generals were in favor of lenient terms for the surrender, which is why very few southern fighters were punished. In the history of civil wars, most losers were hanged or shot. Yet this was not the case in the American Civil War.
Most of us probably consider humanitarian laws about war as a good thing. Yet recently I came across a review of a book by a Yale professor of history and jurisprudence at Yale, Samuel Moyn. Moyn’s contention is that we have far less to celebrate that we might think. His fear is that the humanizing of war has led to wars of longer duration and frequency. There is no denying that fewer people die in the present era, but this is not simply due to the rules of war. It is also because of greater technological precision. The drone is designed to hit certain military targets, and although there is no denying the mistakes that have certainly killed innocent civilians, it is also true that we have nothing like the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg.
We are now witnesses to two terrible conflicts. We see what is happening in Ukraine, where Russia has targeted civilians and has not followed the rules of modern warfare. Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, which is against the 1977 Geneva Convention Rules. And look what is now happening in Gaza. One million people from northern Gaza were ordered to move south or be considered part of a terrorist Hamas network. But where are these people to go? Is this command at all proportional to the terrible loss of Israeli life and the detestable cruelty of Hamas’ invasion into Israel? How can a land invasion of Gaza be fought when Hamas is embedded into the civilian population? The modern rules of war would say it cannot be done and therefore should not be done. Perhaps Ukraine and Gaza cannot be called total wars, but there is no doubt that civilians are suffering in disproportionate ways. And that is a terrible crime against humanity.
The argument that making rules for war only makes war more acceptable and longer may be true. But who wants to return to firebombing cities and napalming civilians? War is terrible, indeed, and we should not fool ourselves into believing that we can make it civilized. But is it not possible to make it less horrible for the innocents, who did not make the decision to invade a country and murder its citizens or bomb a land into the stone age?
Christ may not look upon our efforts to humanize with any favor, but until we are able to love others as we do ourselves, which is what Christ commanded us to do; we are left with our meager efforts to humanize something (war), which in so many ways is beyond humanization. And yet we try, and I would add, we must try. Because we are at such a great distance from perfection, can we at least not attempt some measure of the good? And does not the good demand that we do everything in our power to protect the innocents? But when we look at what is going on in Gaza now, do we really believe that innocent civilians are being protected?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHERE ARE YOU?
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 15, 2023
Exodus 32: 1-14
Matthew 22: 1-14
There is this question from God that runs throughout the entire bible, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. God wants to know where the people are. The question begins well, at the beginning, when the primal parents, Adam and Eve, were in the Garden of Eden, where they had everything they needed. One command they were given: Do not eat from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, or you shall die. And what did they do? They ate because the temptation to be like God was too much for them to reject. And suddenly they saw. They understood what they had not known before. They saw their nakedness, and they were afraid, afraid of God. And so they hid. And the result of it all was expulsion from the Garden. Now we can ask ourselves if this disobedience was not essentially necessary, for what would human beings be without knowledge of Good and Evil? We would be little more than automatons with obedience based not on knowledge and choice, but on ignorance and compulsion. Without the freedom to choose, what are we, really? And so, the story goes that Adam and Eve made their choice, but it did not really lead to freedom, but rather to a new kind of slavery. Now, they were enslaved to sin.
Where are you? God asked the question time and time again. God wanted to know where Abel was, after Cain murdered him out of jealousy. God called out to Abraham, when he commanded him to go on a journey where a sacrifice was to be made---the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, though Abraham did not know it at the time. He answered God, Here I am. He was not trying to hide, though if he had, who would have blamed him? All throughout the biblical story, God has this habit of calling on his people, wanting to know where they are, and often, their response is one of hiding. Remember, Jonah, who refused to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, because he was afraid that God, being merciful, would not destroy these wicked, wayward people. The prophet, Jeremiah, tried to hide from God’s call, and when God found Jeremiah anyway, the prophet accused God in very explicit language of rape. He forced God-self on me, was his accusatory rant.
Sometimes, however, the question of the people’s whereabouts is not explicitly asked by God. Oh, the question is yet there, implicitly, hidden in the details. And this is how it is in today’s story from Exodus. Moses has been leading the people through the wilderness and things were not going smoothly. The people whined and complained. They wanted to return to Egypt, where they were well fed, the fleshpots of Egypt, they called them. This wandering in the desert was far more than they bargained for, and now their leader, Moses, had gone up to the mountain top to receive the Commandments, which would bind God and the people together in a covenant. But consider what happened. Moses had been gone far too long, and so the people, impatient and fearful, asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to fashion for them a new God, a God who could be depended upon to give the people what they wanted and needed. So, where were these people NOW? God had thought the people were with him. I shall be your God and you shall be my people---that is what God had said. And God thought, perhaps foolishly and naively, that the people would be with him. But no, that is not where the people were. They were somewhere else, caught in an idolatry of their own making. For that is what idolatry is: it is the making of an idol, a dream, a god in our own image. God was furious, and Moses had the challenging job of talking God out of God’s fury. It is ironic that Moses turned the question back onto God. Where are you, God? Where are you to be found---in fury or mercy?
There is pathos in this story because the people did not really know where they were. To them fashioning a golden calf out of their jewels was an act of faith. They wanted a God they could see and touch, and for them, this was worship. It did not seem to occur to them that the idol they had made was exactly what God would command them not to do. I suppose we could argue that God could cut the people some slack, because they did this before Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, which would forbid the making of any graven images. God’s mystery and majesty cannot be contained in the works of human hands. But perhaps they did not understand that---just as many people do not know where they truly are, do not understand what it is they are truly doing.
My youngest daughter, Caitlin, was furloughed for a month from her job with the native Americans in Maine because of a glitch in the hiring process, and so, because she is a fanatic about climbing mountains, she decided to go off to Nepal, where three years ago, she almost died due to pulmonary edema. She has hired a sherpa and is hiking in the Himalayas, in places not too many westerners have been. I think she is nuts and so do her siblings. My husband is far more tolerant than the rest of us.
My oldest daughter, Alethea, told Caitlin that she thought this obsession of hers was way off balance. And then she repeated a story she read about a woman, who has broken records in the Himalayas. Well, her team came across a sherpa, who had fallen from the mountain, and was hanging upside down. He was dying---unless someone helped. But though the team gave him some oxygen for a while, they did not rescue him, hoping that some other team would come along and render aid. When they eventually returned, the man was still hanging there, dead. Alethea told Caitlin this was sociopathic behavior---when the goal of setting records became more important than a human being’s actual life. A religious perspective would call it idolatry---when the goal becomes the god. “You don’t understand,” Caitlin insisted. “You don’t understand the call of the mountains.”
"You’re damn right, I don’t understand,”came the response. “And I don’t want to understand how somebody can care more about breaking a record than she does about an actual breathing, living human being. The climber later said, “No regrets and no guilt.” Well, she should have regrets and guilt, and if she does not, it is because she is in a place no human being should desire to be. Where are you? In the quagmire of your own self importance that you care very little for the fate of another human being that you will leave then hanging him upside down, to die? Where are you? Where are you hiding---hiding not only from God but also from the most basic ethical code that demands we care about the suffering of other human beings.
Where are you? Where are you hiding? So often people do not know. They think they are in one place, only to be in another. They are like the scribes and the pharisees, who in Matthew’s gospel consider themselves the high and the mighty, the worthy ones, who actually refuse the invitation while the lowly accept the invitation to the feast. The story reminds us that sometimes what seems trivial to us---the proper wedding attire, for example, is really code language for what is serious business, that is, something to reflect upon and deeply ponder. The implication here is that there is choice, the chance to turn around and move in a different direction, toward the one who desires for us and for all full and abundant life. The man hanging at the end of a rope was a real human being. He offered a choice and I daresay God’s heart was broken at the choice the hiking group made.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 15, 2023
Exodus 32: 1-14
Matthew 22: 1-14
There is this question from God that runs throughout the entire bible, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. God wants to know where the people are. The question begins well, at the beginning, when the primal parents, Adam and Eve, were in the Garden of Eden, where they had everything they needed. One command they were given: Do not eat from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, or you shall die. And what did they do? They ate because the temptation to be like God was too much for them to reject. And suddenly they saw. They understood what they had not known before. They saw their nakedness, and they were afraid, afraid of God. And so they hid. And the result of it all was expulsion from the Garden. Now we can ask ourselves if this disobedience was not essentially necessary, for what would human beings be without knowledge of Good and Evil? We would be little more than automatons with obedience based not on knowledge and choice, but on ignorance and compulsion. Without the freedom to choose, what are we, really? And so, the story goes that Adam and Eve made their choice, but it did not really lead to freedom, but rather to a new kind of slavery. Now, they were enslaved to sin.
Where are you? God asked the question time and time again. God wanted to know where Abel was, after Cain murdered him out of jealousy. God called out to Abraham, when he commanded him to go on a journey where a sacrifice was to be made---the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, though Abraham did not know it at the time. He answered God, Here I am. He was not trying to hide, though if he had, who would have blamed him? All throughout the biblical story, God has this habit of calling on his people, wanting to know where they are, and often, their response is one of hiding. Remember, Jonah, who refused to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, because he was afraid that God, being merciful, would not destroy these wicked, wayward people. The prophet, Jeremiah, tried to hide from God’s call, and when God found Jeremiah anyway, the prophet accused God in very explicit language of rape. He forced God-self on me, was his accusatory rant.
Sometimes, however, the question of the people’s whereabouts is not explicitly asked by God. Oh, the question is yet there, implicitly, hidden in the details. And this is how it is in today’s story from Exodus. Moses has been leading the people through the wilderness and things were not going smoothly. The people whined and complained. They wanted to return to Egypt, where they were well fed, the fleshpots of Egypt, they called them. This wandering in the desert was far more than they bargained for, and now their leader, Moses, had gone up to the mountain top to receive the Commandments, which would bind God and the people together in a covenant. But consider what happened. Moses had been gone far too long, and so the people, impatient and fearful, asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to fashion for them a new God, a God who could be depended upon to give the people what they wanted and needed. So, where were these people NOW? God had thought the people were with him. I shall be your God and you shall be my people---that is what God had said. And God thought, perhaps foolishly and naively, that the people would be with him. But no, that is not where the people were. They were somewhere else, caught in an idolatry of their own making. For that is what idolatry is: it is the making of an idol, a dream, a god in our own image. God was furious, and Moses had the challenging job of talking God out of God’s fury. It is ironic that Moses turned the question back onto God. Where are you, God? Where are you to be found---in fury or mercy?
There is pathos in this story because the people did not really know where they were. To them fashioning a golden calf out of their jewels was an act of faith. They wanted a God they could see and touch, and for them, this was worship. It did not seem to occur to them that the idol they had made was exactly what God would command them not to do. I suppose we could argue that God could cut the people some slack, because they did this before Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, which would forbid the making of any graven images. God’s mystery and majesty cannot be contained in the works of human hands. But perhaps they did not understand that---just as many people do not know where they truly are, do not understand what it is they are truly doing.
My youngest daughter, Caitlin, was furloughed for a month from her job with the native Americans in Maine because of a glitch in the hiring process, and so, because she is a fanatic about climbing mountains, she decided to go off to Nepal, where three years ago, she almost died due to pulmonary edema. She has hired a sherpa and is hiking in the Himalayas, in places not too many westerners have been. I think she is nuts and so do her siblings. My husband is far more tolerant than the rest of us.
My oldest daughter, Alethea, told Caitlin that she thought this obsession of hers was way off balance. And then she repeated a story she read about a woman, who has broken records in the Himalayas. Well, her team came across a sherpa, who had fallen from the mountain, and was hanging upside down. He was dying---unless someone helped. But though the team gave him some oxygen for a while, they did not rescue him, hoping that some other team would come along and render aid. When they eventually returned, the man was still hanging there, dead. Alethea told Caitlin this was sociopathic behavior---when the goal of setting records became more important than a human being’s actual life. A religious perspective would call it idolatry---when the goal becomes the god. “You don’t understand,” Caitlin insisted. “You don’t understand the call of the mountains.”
"You’re damn right, I don’t understand,”came the response. “And I don’t want to understand how somebody can care more about breaking a record than she does about an actual breathing, living human being. The climber later said, “No regrets and no guilt.” Well, she should have regrets and guilt, and if she does not, it is because she is in a place no human being should desire to be. Where are you? In the quagmire of your own self importance that you care very little for the fate of another human being that you will leave then hanging him upside down, to die? Where are you? Where are you hiding---hiding not only from God but also from the most basic ethical code that demands we care about the suffering of other human beings.
Where are you? Where are you hiding? So often people do not know. They think they are in one place, only to be in another. They are like the scribes and the pharisees, who in Matthew’s gospel consider themselves the high and the mighty, the worthy ones, who actually refuse the invitation while the lowly accept the invitation to the feast. The story reminds us that sometimes what seems trivial to us---the proper wedding attire, for example, is really code language for what is serious business, that is, something to reflect upon and deeply ponder. The implication here is that there is choice, the chance to turn around and move in a different direction, toward the one who desires for us and for all full and abundant life. The man hanging at the end of a rope was a real human being. He offered a choice and I daresay God’s heart was broken at the choice the hiking group made.
October 16, 2023
Dear Friends,
The Fog of War was a 2003 documentary, showing Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under JFK and Lyndon Johnson, reflecting on The Viet Nam War. Acknowledging that the war was a mistake, he spoke very movingly of “the fog of war,” which distorts perceptions about what is really going on. Once you enter into war, you fail to see other options, McNamara admitted. You can become blinded by the fog.
As we sit here, anxiously waiting to see what will happen in Israel and Gaza, it is all too easy to become confused by the fog of war. Emotions run deep, and when we attempt to think ethically about war, those very emotions can compromise our ability to be rational. Listening to the heart does not always lay out the best path to follow, especially in those situations like this one, where great injustice has been done to Israel even as we must acknowledge the pain and injustice that the Palestinian people have suffered and are still suffering.
Yet there are laws, which are supposed to govern the conduct of any war, and the first rule is to separate the WHY of the conflict from the HOW. In this particular case, the immediate conflict began when Hamas broke through Israel’s defense system and wantonly murdered soldiers and civilians, while taking around 150 persons for hostages. This behavior is against ALL international law, no matter what the behavior of Israel was and is toward the Palestinians. It must be acknowledged that Gaza is a place of great suffering. It is a prison from which Gazans cannot leave, Unemployment and poverty are rampant. Though Hamas is the government, it does not always govern in a way that helps the people. Rather than building more infrastructure, it will use money to build tunnels and purchase missiles and guns, while vowing to destroy Israel and kill Jews. But while Hamas’ failure of its people is evident and its attack on Israel is against all norms of international law, Israel must fight the war within certain boundaries. No matter how the war began, (the WHY of the war), Israel still has the responsibility to fight in a certain way, (the HOW of the war), even if its enemy does not abide by the same rules. Hamas issued a statement, claiming it always abides by the rules of law, and Israel said the same thing. Clearly, there are violations on both sides. The taking of hostages is strictly forbidden, and the cutting off of food, water and electricity is also forbidden. Israel has given an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza, but there are hospitals with critically ill patients and to move them would be a death sentence. And where are one million people to go? The southern portion of Gaza is already pushed beyond the limit. The United Nations has stated its objection to this evacuation order. It wants Israel to rescind it, but so far Israel has not.
We do know that Hamas has used civilians as human shields, hiding their fighters among the populace. So, what is Israel supposed to do? There are those who would argue that Israel is justified in bombing these places or using some other form of force, but international law is firm on this point. Infractions, even when severe, by one side do not give the other side the warrant to commit war crimes. My good friend, Seth, who is a rabbi, told me the other day that this will always place Israel at a disadvantage. Hamas will do whatever it needs to do to make Israel look bad. And yes, there is truth to this, yet the killing of innocent civilians is a crime that must be avoided.
International law acknowledges that sometimes military targets do involve the killing of innocent civilians. Sometimes, this cannot be avoided, but then the question of proportionality is raised. How many civilians will die when a military target is attacked? Usually, this cannot be answered with great confidence, but if there is overwhelming evidence that large masses of civilians will die, the action is not legal. By this standard, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are war crimes Those killed were overwhelmingly civilian: women, children, and old men. The argument that such an action will shorten the war is not a legally defensible one, since no one knows for sure what will shorten a conflict.
How and why did people try to legislate rules about war? While the tradition goes back many centuries, it is the modern world that has tried to make international rules about the conduct of war. In 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Act attempted to make war a rarity by declaring it illegal in most instances, and then in 1945 the UN Charter tried to ban war. In 1949 and 1977 the Geneva Convention made more rules about war with many countries signing on. The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2003 furthered the attempt to legislate rules about war. Our own country has not signed it, because it objects to its citizens being tried before another tribunal. And yet, we are perfectly comfortable with other nation’s people being so tried. This makes us look like hypocrites.
In the early centuries of Christianity’s life, Christians were forbidden to take part in any war. No person could be a member of the military. Christianity was a pacifist religion. But when Constantine conquered in the name of Christ in 312, pacifism went on the defensive. And then the great St. Augustine would later offer his defense of a just war. And though there are pacifist strains in Christianity today, such as the Quakers and the Amish, most Christians find themselves defending the idea of a just war.
War is a terrible thing, to be avoided in nearly all instances. But when it is not avoided, or cannot be avoided, it is well that we think long and hard about the conditions under which people fight. Yet we should not fool ourselves into believing that Christ approves of our just wars. Perhaps in a fallen world, this is the best we can do. Sadly, this is the kind of world we have made. And it is tragic that too many innocents suffer the consequences.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The Fog of War was a 2003 documentary, showing Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under JFK and Lyndon Johnson, reflecting on The Viet Nam War. Acknowledging that the war was a mistake, he spoke very movingly of “the fog of war,” which distorts perceptions about what is really going on. Once you enter into war, you fail to see other options, McNamara admitted. You can become blinded by the fog.
As we sit here, anxiously waiting to see what will happen in Israel and Gaza, it is all too easy to become confused by the fog of war. Emotions run deep, and when we attempt to think ethically about war, those very emotions can compromise our ability to be rational. Listening to the heart does not always lay out the best path to follow, especially in those situations like this one, where great injustice has been done to Israel even as we must acknowledge the pain and injustice that the Palestinian people have suffered and are still suffering.
Yet there are laws, which are supposed to govern the conduct of any war, and the first rule is to separate the WHY of the conflict from the HOW. In this particular case, the immediate conflict began when Hamas broke through Israel’s defense system and wantonly murdered soldiers and civilians, while taking around 150 persons for hostages. This behavior is against ALL international law, no matter what the behavior of Israel was and is toward the Palestinians. It must be acknowledged that Gaza is a place of great suffering. It is a prison from which Gazans cannot leave, Unemployment and poverty are rampant. Though Hamas is the government, it does not always govern in a way that helps the people. Rather than building more infrastructure, it will use money to build tunnels and purchase missiles and guns, while vowing to destroy Israel and kill Jews. But while Hamas’ failure of its people is evident and its attack on Israel is against all norms of international law, Israel must fight the war within certain boundaries. No matter how the war began, (the WHY of the war), Israel still has the responsibility to fight in a certain way, (the HOW of the war), even if its enemy does not abide by the same rules. Hamas issued a statement, claiming it always abides by the rules of law, and Israel said the same thing. Clearly, there are violations on both sides. The taking of hostages is strictly forbidden, and the cutting off of food, water and electricity is also forbidden. Israel has given an order to evacuate the northern part of Gaza, but there are hospitals with critically ill patients and to move them would be a death sentence. And where are one million people to go? The southern portion of Gaza is already pushed beyond the limit. The United Nations has stated its objection to this evacuation order. It wants Israel to rescind it, but so far Israel has not.
We do know that Hamas has used civilians as human shields, hiding their fighters among the populace. So, what is Israel supposed to do? There are those who would argue that Israel is justified in bombing these places or using some other form of force, but international law is firm on this point. Infractions, even when severe, by one side do not give the other side the warrant to commit war crimes. My good friend, Seth, who is a rabbi, told me the other day that this will always place Israel at a disadvantage. Hamas will do whatever it needs to do to make Israel look bad. And yes, there is truth to this, yet the killing of innocent civilians is a crime that must be avoided.
International law acknowledges that sometimes military targets do involve the killing of innocent civilians. Sometimes, this cannot be avoided, but then the question of proportionality is raised. How many civilians will die when a military target is attacked? Usually, this cannot be answered with great confidence, but if there is overwhelming evidence that large masses of civilians will die, the action is not legal. By this standard, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are war crimes Those killed were overwhelmingly civilian: women, children, and old men. The argument that such an action will shorten the war is not a legally defensible one, since no one knows for sure what will shorten a conflict.
How and why did people try to legislate rules about war? While the tradition goes back many centuries, it is the modern world that has tried to make international rules about the conduct of war. In 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Act attempted to make war a rarity by declaring it illegal in most instances, and then in 1945 the UN Charter tried to ban war. In 1949 and 1977 the Geneva Convention made more rules about war with many countries signing on. The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2003 furthered the attempt to legislate rules about war. Our own country has not signed it, because it objects to its citizens being tried before another tribunal. And yet, we are perfectly comfortable with other nation’s people being so tried. This makes us look like hypocrites.
In the early centuries of Christianity’s life, Christians were forbidden to take part in any war. No person could be a member of the military. Christianity was a pacifist religion. But when Constantine conquered in the name of Christ in 312, pacifism went on the defensive. And then the great St. Augustine would later offer his defense of a just war. And though there are pacifist strains in Christianity today, such as the Quakers and the Amish, most Christians find themselves defending the idea of a just war.
War is a terrible thing, to be avoided in nearly all instances. But when it is not avoided, or cannot be avoided, it is well that we think long and hard about the conditions under which people fight. Yet we should not fool ourselves into believing that Christ approves of our just wars. Perhaps in a fallen world, this is the best we can do. Sadly, this is the kind of world we have made. And it is tragic that too many innocents suffer the consequences.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Challenge of Stewardship
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville
October 8, 2023
Matthew 19: 16-26
Matthew 25: 14-30
I recently came across an article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which listed the 50 top philanthropists in 2022. While I am not going to list all fifty, I will give you the top five: Bill Gates, who gave 5.1 billion; Elon Musk, 1.99 billion; Michael Bloomberg comes in at 1.7 billion; Warren Buffett 758, 832 million; Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos gave 710,500 billion. (Jacklyn Bezos is Jeff Bezos mother, and Jeff Bezos, by the way gave 122,149,000 million, so he was further down the list.) That is a lot of money; the top 50 gave a total ofn16 billion to a variety of causes, including foundations, universities, and health concerns, such as cancer research. Many of these people have signed the Giving Pledge, which is a promise to give away a majority of their wealth. Now majority means over 50%, and some of these people have pledged to give away as much as 90%. The Giving Pledge was begun in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who quickly got another 38 billionaires to sign up. Now the number of people who have signed is 238 from 29 countries.
If we look at these people through the lens of Matthew 25, we can say that they truly invested their talents very well. Even if some came from family wealth, there is no doubt that they worked hard in their endeavors. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his technological dream, which finally issued in Microsoft, and when he retired from Microsoft, he began working hard, very hard on The Bill and Melinda Foundation, which has done so much good for health concerns across the globe. It does seem that everything these people touch turns to gold; more and more is piled on, and even when they give away billions, they still have billions to play with. But consider what someone recently said to me. “It isn’t so much the amount you give that marks you as generous; it is what you keep for yourself.” How much are you really sacrificing when you give away 90% of your billions, which yet leaves you a multi-millionaire. How generous are you then, really?
I know this woman, who became homeless, when her partner of 18 years, left her while she was battling cancer. She lived on the streets for over 10 years before finally getting into subsidized housing. She told me, “The most generous people I have ever seen are among the poorest.” When she first was homeless and went to a soup kitchen to eat, there was this other woman, who recognized that Marcy was a complete novice at homelessness. And so, she offered her a big bag of bottles and cans, so she could cash them in for money. And she also gave her one of her sleeping bags. The chill of autumn was beginning to make itself felt, and this experienced homeless woman, Linda, a severe alcoholic, who had been homeless for years, sacrificed her bag of cans, which on that day, at least, was all she had. Maybe if you do not have much of anything, you don’t find yourself in the position of being attached to anything, and letting go and giving away, seems easier. The more you have, the harder you cling to it.
That is probably why Jesus told the story of the rich young man, who wanted to know how to find eternal life. This young man was clearly a lover of the law; he intimately knew its details, and Jesus acknowledged that. But he did not want to follow Jesus by selling all he had, giving the money away to the poor, and then becoming a wandering disciple. And so, he went away sad, for he had many possessions. Notice that Jesus did not condemn him; he felt compassion, acknowledging that wealth is indeed a great impediment to faithfulness. But in the end, Jesus acknowledged that it is not human agency and the ability to do the right and generous thing that saves, but God. What we cannot do for ourselves, God does for us. And yet, while we live on this earth, we are called to do the right thing, or at least struggle to do what is right and good.
And so, what is the right thing---here and now in our little faith community, struggling to survive. Let’s be honest; we are all aware that we are perilously close to the edge, and it would not take much for this church to be pushed right over the edge into closing. All it would take is some key givers to no longer give. So, are we compelled to give by our fear of closing, or are we moved to give by our conviction that in our giving HERE somehow God is glorified. Now there are many things that are accomplished in this community of faith, and though we are small, we do reach out beyond ourselves through Covenant to Care as well as to other gifts, like the Christmas Fund for poor, retired clergy, or Neighbors in Need And One Great Hour of Sharing, which fund a variety of projects that feed the hungry, heal the sick and clothe the naked. Such things are important; they matter, but the primary call of the church is worship. That is the one thing that is unique to the church. There are many other institutions that reach out to help the poor and the needy, but what other institution exists for the purpose of worshipping God?
We come together each week to worship a God, who though beyond our understanding, is not beyond our loving. Loving God does not mean that we are always comfortable with the God we meet. Sometimes, we come here profoundly hurt and disappointed that what we desperately wanted and needed for ourselves as well as for others-- is not what we received. When Aura Poole told me a few weeks ago about the death of her grandson, I knew the pain of which she spoke. A second grandson lost to the despair of drugs. WE knew the same pain when Michael died. Our hearts broke for Michael and for his entire family, as well as for ourselves, for Michael was one of us. And what mattered then was not that we could repair the hurt, for we could not, but it mattered that we could come together as a community of faith and celebrate and give thanks for a life full of joy and laughter and love, even as that same life suffered a struggle he did not win. And we did all that in the loving embrace of God.
Does it matter that we can be here as a community of faith with all our differing opinions on a plurality of topics---social, political, and yes, even religious. We don’t all see the world in the same way, and even God and Jesus sometimes appear differently to us. At times some of us are not shy about blaming God, when things go so profoundly wrong. What good is this God, we might wonder. Others just bring their raging questions to the divine mystery and pray, “I don’t understand, but I am trying to trust. Help me, God, because I am hanging on by a thread.” And here is a place where we can hang on, even if only by a thread. And here is a place, we do not have to hang on alone. We can do it together. And blessings do abound, because sometimes we are hanging together joyfully. Sometimes we find ourselves trusting together and celebrating together. And this being together, as far as I am concerned, is what matters profoundly. It is why I love the church; why I give to the church, why I have spent the last 40 years of my life working in it.
The Church is far from a perfect institution. We all know its failures; all churches have their limitations and disappointments. The Church is, after all, filled with human beings, and human beings do not always live up to a high standard of faithfulness. But even in failure we are together. And being together, trusting together, celebrating together, grieving together, rejoicing together, praying, questioning, and loving together in the embrace of a good and gracious God whom we meet in Jesus Christ is what the Church does and is called to do. And that is the best reason I know to give. WE give that together we can be more than we can ever be alone. The journey of faith is not one to take alone. It is one to go on together.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville
October 8, 2023
Matthew 19: 16-26
Matthew 25: 14-30
I recently came across an article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which listed the 50 top philanthropists in 2022. While I am not going to list all fifty, I will give you the top five: Bill Gates, who gave 5.1 billion; Elon Musk, 1.99 billion; Michael Bloomberg comes in at 1.7 billion; Warren Buffett 758, 832 million; Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos gave 710,500 billion. (Jacklyn Bezos is Jeff Bezos mother, and Jeff Bezos, by the way gave 122,149,000 million, so he was further down the list.) That is a lot of money; the top 50 gave a total ofn16 billion to a variety of causes, including foundations, universities, and health concerns, such as cancer research. Many of these people have signed the Giving Pledge, which is a promise to give away a majority of their wealth. Now majority means over 50%, and some of these people have pledged to give away as much as 90%. The Giving Pledge was begun in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who quickly got another 38 billionaires to sign up. Now the number of people who have signed is 238 from 29 countries.
If we look at these people through the lens of Matthew 25, we can say that they truly invested their talents very well. Even if some came from family wealth, there is no doubt that they worked hard in their endeavors. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his technological dream, which finally issued in Microsoft, and when he retired from Microsoft, he began working hard, very hard on The Bill and Melinda Foundation, which has done so much good for health concerns across the globe. It does seem that everything these people touch turns to gold; more and more is piled on, and even when they give away billions, they still have billions to play with. But consider what someone recently said to me. “It isn’t so much the amount you give that marks you as generous; it is what you keep for yourself.” How much are you really sacrificing when you give away 90% of your billions, which yet leaves you a multi-millionaire. How generous are you then, really?
I know this woman, who became homeless, when her partner of 18 years, left her while she was battling cancer. She lived on the streets for over 10 years before finally getting into subsidized housing. She told me, “The most generous people I have ever seen are among the poorest.” When she first was homeless and went to a soup kitchen to eat, there was this other woman, who recognized that Marcy was a complete novice at homelessness. And so, she offered her a big bag of bottles and cans, so she could cash them in for money. And she also gave her one of her sleeping bags. The chill of autumn was beginning to make itself felt, and this experienced homeless woman, Linda, a severe alcoholic, who had been homeless for years, sacrificed her bag of cans, which on that day, at least, was all she had. Maybe if you do not have much of anything, you don’t find yourself in the position of being attached to anything, and letting go and giving away, seems easier. The more you have, the harder you cling to it.
That is probably why Jesus told the story of the rich young man, who wanted to know how to find eternal life. This young man was clearly a lover of the law; he intimately knew its details, and Jesus acknowledged that. But he did not want to follow Jesus by selling all he had, giving the money away to the poor, and then becoming a wandering disciple. And so, he went away sad, for he had many possessions. Notice that Jesus did not condemn him; he felt compassion, acknowledging that wealth is indeed a great impediment to faithfulness. But in the end, Jesus acknowledged that it is not human agency and the ability to do the right and generous thing that saves, but God. What we cannot do for ourselves, God does for us. And yet, while we live on this earth, we are called to do the right thing, or at least struggle to do what is right and good.
And so, what is the right thing---here and now in our little faith community, struggling to survive. Let’s be honest; we are all aware that we are perilously close to the edge, and it would not take much for this church to be pushed right over the edge into closing. All it would take is some key givers to no longer give. So, are we compelled to give by our fear of closing, or are we moved to give by our conviction that in our giving HERE somehow God is glorified. Now there are many things that are accomplished in this community of faith, and though we are small, we do reach out beyond ourselves through Covenant to Care as well as to other gifts, like the Christmas Fund for poor, retired clergy, or Neighbors in Need And One Great Hour of Sharing, which fund a variety of projects that feed the hungry, heal the sick and clothe the naked. Such things are important; they matter, but the primary call of the church is worship. That is the one thing that is unique to the church. There are many other institutions that reach out to help the poor and the needy, but what other institution exists for the purpose of worshipping God?
We come together each week to worship a God, who though beyond our understanding, is not beyond our loving. Loving God does not mean that we are always comfortable with the God we meet. Sometimes, we come here profoundly hurt and disappointed that what we desperately wanted and needed for ourselves as well as for others-- is not what we received. When Aura Poole told me a few weeks ago about the death of her grandson, I knew the pain of which she spoke. A second grandson lost to the despair of drugs. WE knew the same pain when Michael died. Our hearts broke for Michael and for his entire family, as well as for ourselves, for Michael was one of us. And what mattered then was not that we could repair the hurt, for we could not, but it mattered that we could come together as a community of faith and celebrate and give thanks for a life full of joy and laughter and love, even as that same life suffered a struggle he did not win. And we did all that in the loving embrace of God.
Does it matter that we can be here as a community of faith with all our differing opinions on a plurality of topics---social, political, and yes, even religious. We don’t all see the world in the same way, and even God and Jesus sometimes appear differently to us. At times some of us are not shy about blaming God, when things go so profoundly wrong. What good is this God, we might wonder. Others just bring their raging questions to the divine mystery and pray, “I don’t understand, but I am trying to trust. Help me, God, because I am hanging on by a thread.” And here is a place where we can hang on, even if only by a thread. And here is a place, we do not have to hang on alone. We can do it together. And blessings do abound, because sometimes we are hanging together joyfully. Sometimes we find ourselves trusting together and celebrating together. And this being together, as far as I am concerned, is what matters profoundly. It is why I love the church; why I give to the church, why I have spent the last 40 years of my life working in it.
The Church is far from a perfect institution. We all know its failures; all churches have their limitations and disappointments. The Church is, after all, filled with human beings, and human beings do not always live up to a high standard of faithfulness. But even in failure we are together. And being together, trusting together, celebrating together, grieving together, rejoicing together, praying, questioning, and loving together in the embrace of a good and gracious God whom we meet in Jesus Christ is what the Church does and is called to do. And that is the best reason I know to give. WE give that together we can be more than we can ever be alone. The journey of faith is not one to take alone. It is one to go on together.
October 5, 2023
Dear Friends,
On Monday Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were awarded the Noble Prize in Medicine for their work with mRNA (messenger RNA). Their discovery was and is a VERY BIG DEAL, since it undoubtedly saved in the United States alone over 3 million lives and over 18 million hospitalizations in addition to a $1 trillion savings. Moderna and Pfizer developed the vaccines, but that would have been impossible without the work Karko and Weissman did. And yet that work almost did not come to fruition.
Katalin Kariko completed her doctoral training in Hungary, but she left the country, because there was so little money available for research, and so she came to the United States whose reputation for state of the art scientific research is well deserved. But she spent years spinning her wheels and going what looked like nowhere. She had a position at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, but because she could not get a grant and could not get her papers published, she was demoted. Grants depend on publications, and publications are always peer reviewed, and if the reviewers judge the work to be unimportant or incomplete---sometimes they reviewers demand more work---the paper is rejected. And then when you go to apply for a grant, you have no viable publications to show, which almost always means the grant will also be rejected.
Because Katalin could not get grants or her papers published, she made her career at the U. of Pennsylvania by attaching herself to more senior faculty members, who permitted her to work in their labs as a research associate for a lot less money than a full pledged tenure track faculty member. Some of these people came and went, or sometimes their grant money dried up, so she was let go. But at a chance encounter at the xerox machine she met Drew Weissman, who was scientifically obsessed with developing a vaccine for the AIDS virus. He had failed so many times to make an effective vaccine, and he wondered if it might be possible for the two of them to work together on an Aids vaccine using mRNA. But the problem was that mRNA proved to be extremely delicate, so when it was introduced into cells, the cells viewed it as an invading pathogen and destroyed it. The human body has developed a system to detect invading RNA viruses and degrade them. RNA viruses are extremely common and include such things as viruses which cause the common cold, influenza and Covid, measles, mumps and even Aids. When they applied for grants, the reviewers were unimpressed, because vaccines were normally made against weakened pathogens and more recently on some of their purified proteins. No one had ever considered making a vaccine using messenger RNA. So, there was no support for their work, which was considered pure speculation and fantasy. Eventually they discovered that cells can protect their own mRNA with specific chemical modifications, so they made the same modifications before injecting the mRNA into other cells. It worked! The mRNA was taken up into the cells without being destroyed as an invading pathogen.
At first no one was that impressed or interested, but then Moderna in the U.S. and BioNTech in in Germany took interest. For years the companies studied the use of mRNA vaccines for flu and other illnesses, but nothing moved out of clinical trials----and then the coronavirus struck. A lot of things then came quickly together, and those who criticize the vaccines because they seemed to come out of nowhere too quickly, fail to appreciate the long road that paved the way. Indeed, the application of the science to the immediate challenge of the coronavirus was impressive, and this story will go down in history as one of the great victories of our time---no matter what the naysayers contend.
But it almost did not happen, and if Weissman and Kariko had very different personalities, it might not have happened. They were beyond stubborn in their pursuit of the use of mRNA, and many scientists have marveled at their persistence. Many, many other scientists would have given up a long time ago. Experimental science is incredibly hard and frustrating since most of the experiments one undertakes fail. And asking why the failure is laborious and at times boring. It requires patience and persistence and there are many people, gifted with keen intelligence and curiosity, who simply lack the kind of psychological make up that pushes them to keep going. We have no idea how many breakthroughs have been lost because people gave up.
And let’s be honest: giving up is sometimes necessary and even the right thing to do. Giving up is like letting go, and learning how to let go is no trivial pursuit. Sometimes a person spends his or her life pursuing something that never works out, and bitterness and resentment can easily set in. Why these two scientists kept pursuing their goal, when failure met them time and time again, is a story worth telling and pondering. Weissman, by the way, has still not cracked a vaccine for the HIV virus, and yet his failure is not absolute. He may yet do what he set out to accomplish. But if he does not, he already has achieved greatness.
None of us likes failure; we don’t even like the word, and we try very hard to turn our failures into an occasion for learning. Some people might consider Jesus a failure. After all, he died as a condemned criminal, crucified, which for the Jews was shameful. He could boast of no wealth, no education, beyond the most rudimentary literacy. He wrote no books and hardly traveled more than 50 miles from his place of birth. And yet what an impact his life has made! But the impact was not his to make alone. It depended on many factors and many different people. The Jesus’ story could have ended with his death, but it did not. Other persons, including the Apostle Paul, moved the story along, adding dimensions, which Jesus never would have considered. We think we draw the circle of our own life, but the circle grows wider and deeper with time. And time is something into which we cannot fully see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
On Monday Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were awarded the Noble Prize in Medicine for their work with mRNA (messenger RNA). Their discovery was and is a VERY BIG DEAL, since it undoubtedly saved in the United States alone over 3 million lives and over 18 million hospitalizations in addition to a $1 trillion savings. Moderna and Pfizer developed the vaccines, but that would have been impossible without the work Karko and Weissman did. And yet that work almost did not come to fruition.
Katalin Kariko completed her doctoral training in Hungary, but she left the country, because there was so little money available for research, and so she came to the United States whose reputation for state of the art scientific research is well deserved. But she spent years spinning her wheels and going what looked like nowhere. She had a position at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, but because she could not get a grant and could not get her papers published, she was demoted. Grants depend on publications, and publications are always peer reviewed, and if the reviewers judge the work to be unimportant or incomplete---sometimes they reviewers demand more work---the paper is rejected. And then when you go to apply for a grant, you have no viable publications to show, which almost always means the grant will also be rejected.
Because Katalin could not get grants or her papers published, she made her career at the U. of Pennsylvania by attaching herself to more senior faculty members, who permitted her to work in their labs as a research associate for a lot less money than a full pledged tenure track faculty member. Some of these people came and went, or sometimes their grant money dried up, so she was let go. But at a chance encounter at the xerox machine she met Drew Weissman, who was scientifically obsessed with developing a vaccine for the AIDS virus. He had failed so many times to make an effective vaccine, and he wondered if it might be possible for the two of them to work together on an Aids vaccine using mRNA. But the problem was that mRNA proved to be extremely delicate, so when it was introduced into cells, the cells viewed it as an invading pathogen and destroyed it. The human body has developed a system to detect invading RNA viruses and degrade them. RNA viruses are extremely common and include such things as viruses which cause the common cold, influenza and Covid, measles, mumps and even Aids. When they applied for grants, the reviewers were unimpressed, because vaccines were normally made against weakened pathogens and more recently on some of their purified proteins. No one had ever considered making a vaccine using messenger RNA. So, there was no support for their work, which was considered pure speculation and fantasy. Eventually they discovered that cells can protect their own mRNA with specific chemical modifications, so they made the same modifications before injecting the mRNA into other cells. It worked! The mRNA was taken up into the cells without being destroyed as an invading pathogen.
At first no one was that impressed or interested, but then Moderna in the U.S. and BioNTech in in Germany took interest. For years the companies studied the use of mRNA vaccines for flu and other illnesses, but nothing moved out of clinical trials----and then the coronavirus struck. A lot of things then came quickly together, and those who criticize the vaccines because they seemed to come out of nowhere too quickly, fail to appreciate the long road that paved the way. Indeed, the application of the science to the immediate challenge of the coronavirus was impressive, and this story will go down in history as one of the great victories of our time---no matter what the naysayers contend.
But it almost did not happen, and if Weissman and Kariko had very different personalities, it might not have happened. They were beyond stubborn in their pursuit of the use of mRNA, and many scientists have marveled at their persistence. Many, many other scientists would have given up a long time ago. Experimental science is incredibly hard and frustrating since most of the experiments one undertakes fail. And asking why the failure is laborious and at times boring. It requires patience and persistence and there are many people, gifted with keen intelligence and curiosity, who simply lack the kind of psychological make up that pushes them to keep going. We have no idea how many breakthroughs have been lost because people gave up.
And let’s be honest: giving up is sometimes necessary and even the right thing to do. Giving up is like letting go, and learning how to let go is no trivial pursuit. Sometimes a person spends his or her life pursuing something that never works out, and bitterness and resentment can easily set in. Why these two scientists kept pursuing their goal, when failure met them time and time again, is a story worth telling and pondering. Weissman, by the way, has still not cracked a vaccine for the HIV virus, and yet his failure is not absolute. He may yet do what he set out to accomplish. But if he does not, he already has achieved greatness.
None of us likes failure; we don’t even like the word, and we try very hard to turn our failures into an occasion for learning. Some people might consider Jesus a failure. After all, he died as a condemned criminal, crucified, which for the Jews was shameful. He could boast of no wealth, no education, beyond the most rudimentary literacy. He wrote no books and hardly traveled more than 50 miles from his place of birth. And yet what an impact his life has made! But the impact was not his to make alone. It depended on many factors and many different people. The Jesus’ story could have ended with his death, but it did not. Other persons, including the Apostle Paul, moved the story along, adding dimensions, which Jesus never would have considered. We think we draw the circle of our own life, but the circle grows wider and deeper with time. And time is something into which we cannot fully see.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
September 14, 2023
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about the James Webb Telescope, telling him about all the incredible images made available to the public. Peter did not know much about the James Webb, but he told me he was sure it would discover there is no life beyond this world. I was shocked by his confidence. “How can you possibly say such a thing?” I asked. “You simply cannot know that for certain. In fact, I said, “I think it is very possible there is life beyond this planet.”
As the conversation continued, it became obvious to me that his rejection of the idea of life beyond the planet earth is directly connected to his feelings about all the hoopla concerning UFO’s. He just finds those stories about flying saucers, abductions, and little green men from outer space to be ridiculous. Maybe they are. I have never paid much attention to such stories, until this past month when the September/October edition of Yankee Magazine had an article titled, Are We Alone? I read it and must admit that I found it very engaging. I did not conclude that people had indeed witnessed extraterrestrial life, though I am convinced that many of them were convinced that they had. But what we believe is possible helps determine what we see and understand, so I don’t think most of these people were lying.
In October, 2021at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, a Harvard professor and chair of the Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb, gave a talk about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere. He spoke of an “odd comet,” named Oumuamua, sighted in 2017 estimated to be between 100 and 400 meters long, 21 million miles away from earth and moving away at a speed of 85,000 miles per hour. It was unlike any comet or asteroid seen before and was not emitting any gas or dust, and so Loeb intimated that it is possible that it is artificial, meaning made by someone or something. That suggestion created a storm among the academic community, who insisted it must be natural. But why MUDT it be? How can we be sure that it was not made by some other form of intelligent life? Loeb said something we should all pay attention to and ponder: “It is our nature to fit evidence to what we know. Imagine a caveman finding a cellphone. The caveman, who is familiar with rocks, might think it a rock, a different kind of rock, to be sure, but a rock, nonetheless. But if he looked at it more, pressed a button here and there, he would see that it is not a rock, but something completely different. So, we need to press the button on objects like Oumuamua!.” In other words, we need to have open minds, a willingness to suspend judgment until we know more. If we think it is impossible for there to be intelligent life elsewhere, we will undoubtedly miss all kinds of hints that do not fit into our prescribed view.
I don’t know enough to make judgments about UFO’s and other objects people claim they have seen. But I am fascinated by the James Webb’s discovery of the exoplanet K2-18B, which is 120 light years away from earth. It is 8.6 times the mass of earth and orbits around a star, K2-18. What is amazing about this exoplanet is that it is rich in hydrogen and has methane and carbon dioxide, believed to be necessary for life. And then there is the special molecule called dimethyl sulfide, which as far as we now know is only produced by life. So, all this is very suggestive. This is not proof that life is there, but it certainly will lead to a lot of work being done and who knows what we will learn in the future?
Not only is the world big but the universe is also. And there are many universes! We should keep open hearts, minds, and spirits. Loeb has enough humility to admit what he does not know or understand. “It is important to have a sense of cosmic modesty,” he says. “About half of the sun-like stars in the universe have a planet the size of Earth, at roughly the same separation. That means that not only are we not in the center of the universe, as people thought thousands of years ago, but our backyard is not even unusual. We are not privileged in any way”. Or are we? WE can all wonder what God thinks about that!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about the James Webb Telescope, telling him about all the incredible images made available to the public. Peter did not know much about the James Webb, but he told me he was sure it would discover there is no life beyond this world. I was shocked by his confidence. “How can you possibly say such a thing?” I asked. “You simply cannot know that for certain. In fact, I said, “I think it is very possible there is life beyond this planet.”
As the conversation continued, it became obvious to me that his rejection of the idea of life beyond the planet earth is directly connected to his feelings about all the hoopla concerning UFO’s. He just finds those stories about flying saucers, abductions, and little green men from outer space to be ridiculous. Maybe they are. I have never paid much attention to such stories, until this past month when the September/October edition of Yankee Magazine had an article titled, Are We Alone? I read it and must admit that I found it very engaging. I did not conclude that people had indeed witnessed extraterrestrial life, though I am convinced that many of them were convinced that they had. But what we believe is possible helps determine what we see and understand, so I don’t think most of these people were lying.
In October, 2021at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, a Harvard professor and chair of the Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb, gave a talk about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere. He spoke of an “odd comet,” named Oumuamua, sighted in 2017 estimated to be between 100 and 400 meters long, 21 million miles away from earth and moving away at a speed of 85,000 miles per hour. It was unlike any comet or asteroid seen before and was not emitting any gas or dust, and so Loeb intimated that it is possible that it is artificial, meaning made by someone or something. That suggestion created a storm among the academic community, who insisted it must be natural. But why MUDT it be? How can we be sure that it was not made by some other form of intelligent life? Loeb said something we should all pay attention to and ponder: “It is our nature to fit evidence to what we know. Imagine a caveman finding a cellphone. The caveman, who is familiar with rocks, might think it a rock, a different kind of rock, to be sure, but a rock, nonetheless. But if he looked at it more, pressed a button here and there, he would see that it is not a rock, but something completely different. So, we need to press the button on objects like Oumuamua!.” In other words, we need to have open minds, a willingness to suspend judgment until we know more. If we think it is impossible for there to be intelligent life elsewhere, we will undoubtedly miss all kinds of hints that do not fit into our prescribed view.
I don’t know enough to make judgments about UFO’s and other objects people claim they have seen. But I am fascinated by the James Webb’s discovery of the exoplanet K2-18B, which is 120 light years away from earth. It is 8.6 times the mass of earth and orbits around a star, K2-18. What is amazing about this exoplanet is that it is rich in hydrogen and has methane and carbon dioxide, believed to be necessary for life. And then there is the special molecule called dimethyl sulfide, which as far as we now know is only produced by life. So, all this is very suggestive. This is not proof that life is there, but it certainly will lead to a lot of work being done and who knows what we will learn in the future?
Not only is the world big but the universe is also. And there are many universes! We should keep open hearts, minds, and spirits. Loeb has enough humility to admit what he does not know or understand. “It is important to have a sense of cosmic modesty,” he says. “About half of the sun-like stars in the universe have a planet the size of Earth, at roughly the same separation. That means that not only are we not in the center of the universe, as people thought thousands of years ago, but our backyard is not even unusual. We are not privileged in any way”. Or are we? WE can all wonder what God thinks about that!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
OWE NOTHING BUT LOVE?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
September 10, 2023
Matthew 18: 15-20
Romans 13: 8-14
Both of our readings this morning concern trouble with people in churches. Matthew wrote around the year 80 or 85 in the midst of great tension in the newly formed church where Jewish Christians and gentile Christians were trying to figure out how to get along with each other. Paul wrote his Letter to the Christian Church in Rome around 55 or so, and the Roman Church---30 years before Matthew’s gospel--- was also having its challenges. There were Christians insisting that the Jews, who rejected Jesus were now rejected by God, but Paul said (in other parts of the Letter) “No,” God’s covenant with the Jews stands, because God made a promise, and God does not remove the blessings God has already promised. And then there were arguments about rules and regulations---how strictly certain things should be enforced including the eating of certain kinds of food. And so, the arguments went on and on. And that is why these particular texts were written---to address actual troubles.
Paul would not have insisted that church people owe nothing to each other but love, if love were always the operating principle. In fact, the truth is that over 1/3 of Paul’s various Letters concern tensions and problems particular churches were facing. And so, it has always been. Consider the Church in our own country. We all realize how difficult the slavery issue was to many churches pre-Civil War, and most of us can remember the tension that civil rights caused in the church during the 60’s. I lived in the South for three years then, and I remember how it was when the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, in 1963, and when the minister dared to name it murder, 10 people walked out, insisting that politics had no place in the church at all. And consider the challenge of gay/lesbian and transgender issues not only in the church but also in school districts.
So, how are we supposed to cope with such tensions? Silence is one possible answer. Don’t talk about it, but that will work only so far. There are times the issues become too big to ignore, as with slavery and civil rights, not to mention Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, and that is when the trouble begins. Matthew’s gospel counsels conversation. Talk it out; if there is offensive behavior of any kind, name it and go to the person or persons and see if any understanding or wisdom can prevail. Talk and listen, and then, if no progress is made, expulsion. That is pretty tough, but the feeling was better to lose one member than to have the whole church community infected.
Now Paul does not speak of expelling anyone. He talks of love. As a faith community, he said, we owe each other love, and that is ALL we owe. More than this, we cannot do. But then we wonder: what does love look like in the midst of the tensions and problems that historically churches have faced? Imagine, for example, the church in Brooklyn, where the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher preached passionately against slavery, saying it was an abomination against God. He believed in the smithy of his soul that he was preaching God’s Word, a Word of justice and love. But if you were on the other side of the issue, you would not have heard his words as the gospel of love. He was stirring up trouble, and yet, he would say, sometimes God’s Word does and must stir up trouble. When justice rolls down like mighty waters, life is disturbed, and the church Beecher served became part of the Underground Railroad. Love can sometimes be a disturbing act, even an illegal one.
But it is also true that most of the tensions and challenges in church history have not always revolved around big social or political issues. More often than not, churches have argued over personal behaviors. If you go back and read some of the colonial church minutes, for example, you will discover that church meetings often revolved around misbehavior like gambling, swearing, drunkenness and even fornication. My former church in Middletown was founded in the 1670’s, and old church records showed people being denied communion because they were seen in a drunken stupor during the week. And some of the church records showed accusations against a married person for messing around with someone who was not his or her spouse. And then there were the young lovers, seen wrangling away in the woods. No wonder church meetings were well attended. The latest gossip was on the docket. Now, I am confident that there were those who were convinced that they were doing the loving act by calling out behaviors that could potentially weaken the family unit and the church. They did not see themselves as cruel or even nosey. “Mind your own business” was not part of the social ethic. Try calling out such behaviors today and see how far it will get you.
In one of my former churches my colleague spoke to someone who was having an affair, after his 14 year old daughter brought it up at the youth group meeting. She was very upset and convinced her mother did not know and was wondering whether she should tell her mom. When my colleague spoke to her father, he angerly insisted, “It is none of your business.” “But it is,” came the response. “Your daughter raised the issue in the youth group, and now a lot of people know.” In the past such things were raised in the hope that repentance would occur, and the end result would be reconciliation. That is the hope---but hope is not always actualized, especially in such a privatized culture as ours. And so, more often than not, we are silent. We don’t know what to say, and we rightly wonder: What in such a case is the loving thing to do?
I recently came across an entry from an 1892 record of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, GA, when a well respected woman of the church came to the Session to request mercy on behalf of her daughter, who had borne a child out of wedlock. The mother implored the Church Session not to multiply her daughter’s shame by making a public spectacle of the young woman when they removed her from church membership, but instead she pleaded that they use quiet discretion. Now this was 1892 and a child out of wedlock was a major no-no. But the Session refused, that is, refused to remove the girl’s name from membership. Instead, the Session voted to send two elders to stand by the girl’s side, offering her support and advice in this difficult time as well as spiritual nurture and baptism for the baby. Notice that the church went to her; it did not wait for her to come to the church. There was not a hint of the modern day, “It’s none of our business,” no faint embrace of “You do your thing and I’ll do mine.”
We live in our little individual cocoons, where we do not expect others to disturb or question us. If someone in the church has a problem, whether it’s alcohol, infidelity, or abusive behavior, we usually hope the problem will just go away, or perhaps the minister can take care of it. It is as if we are too embarrassed to show that we care---care enough to approach or even confront somebody with his or her troublesome behavior? If the person does not come to us, we just leave them alone to stew in his hurt and trouble.
Care is the operative word here, and care is very close to love. When we care, we are not shut up in our little private worlds, but we move out beyond so that we notice when people are hurting. And we respond, or at least try to, even if our response is awkward or embarrassing. When I was in college, for a short time I attended this Unitarian Church, where this young man was clearly deeply depressed and troubled about his impending induction into the Army and perhaps to Viet Nam. Student deferments had ended, and his life was about to be radically disrupted by the United States Army. But before the Army could take him, he took his life, and his parents, who lived in California, and did not know the depths of his despair, wondered what more could/should have been done. The minister confessed to the church in a Sunday morning sermon, “Jeremy was left too much alone, and for that we are all ashamed. We did not go to him. We were waiting for him to come to us.” Paul’s insistence that we owe nothing but love surely does not mean that we always know what the loving action is. But at the least love does not mean that we should always defend privacy above everything else.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
September 10, 2023
Matthew 18: 15-20
Romans 13: 8-14
Both of our readings this morning concern trouble with people in churches. Matthew wrote around the year 80 or 85 in the midst of great tension in the newly formed church where Jewish Christians and gentile Christians were trying to figure out how to get along with each other. Paul wrote his Letter to the Christian Church in Rome around 55 or so, and the Roman Church---30 years before Matthew’s gospel--- was also having its challenges. There were Christians insisting that the Jews, who rejected Jesus were now rejected by God, but Paul said (in other parts of the Letter) “No,” God’s covenant with the Jews stands, because God made a promise, and God does not remove the blessings God has already promised. And then there were arguments about rules and regulations---how strictly certain things should be enforced including the eating of certain kinds of food. And so, the arguments went on and on. And that is why these particular texts were written---to address actual troubles.
Paul would not have insisted that church people owe nothing to each other but love, if love were always the operating principle. In fact, the truth is that over 1/3 of Paul’s various Letters concern tensions and problems particular churches were facing. And so, it has always been. Consider the Church in our own country. We all realize how difficult the slavery issue was to many churches pre-Civil War, and most of us can remember the tension that civil rights caused in the church during the 60’s. I lived in the South for three years then, and I remember how it was when the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, in 1963, and when the minister dared to name it murder, 10 people walked out, insisting that politics had no place in the church at all. And consider the challenge of gay/lesbian and transgender issues not only in the church but also in school districts.
So, how are we supposed to cope with such tensions? Silence is one possible answer. Don’t talk about it, but that will work only so far. There are times the issues become too big to ignore, as with slavery and civil rights, not to mention Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, and that is when the trouble begins. Matthew’s gospel counsels conversation. Talk it out; if there is offensive behavior of any kind, name it and go to the person or persons and see if any understanding or wisdom can prevail. Talk and listen, and then, if no progress is made, expulsion. That is pretty tough, but the feeling was better to lose one member than to have the whole church community infected.
Now Paul does not speak of expelling anyone. He talks of love. As a faith community, he said, we owe each other love, and that is ALL we owe. More than this, we cannot do. But then we wonder: what does love look like in the midst of the tensions and problems that historically churches have faced? Imagine, for example, the church in Brooklyn, where the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher preached passionately against slavery, saying it was an abomination against God. He believed in the smithy of his soul that he was preaching God’s Word, a Word of justice and love. But if you were on the other side of the issue, you would not have heard his words as the gospel of love. He was stirring up trouble, and yet, he would say, sometimes God’s Word does and must stir up trouble. When justice rolls down like mighty waters, life is disturbed, and the church Beecher served became part of the Underground Railroad. Love can sometimes be a disturbing act, even an illegal one.
But it is also true that most of the tensions and challenges in church history have not always revolved around big social or political issues. More often than not, churches have argued over personal behaviors. If you go back and read some of the colonial church minutes, for example, you will discover that church meetings often revolved around misbehavior like gambling, swearing, drunkenness and even fornication. My former church in Middletown was founded in the 1670’s, and old church records showed people being denied communion because they were seen in a drunken stupor during the week. And some of the church records showed accusations against a married person for messing around with someone who was not his or her spouse. And then there were the young lovers, seen wrangling away in the woods. No wonder church meetings were well attended. The latest gossip was on the docket. Now, I am confident that there were those who were convinced that they were doing the loving act by calling out behaviors that could potentially weaken the family unit and the church. They did not see themselves as cruel or even nosey. “Mind your own business” was not part of the social ethic. Try calling out such behaviors today and see how far it will get you.
In one of my former churches my colleague spoke to someone who was having an affair, after his 14 year old daughter brought it up at the youth group meeting. She was very upset and convinced her mother did not know and was wondering whether she should tell her mom. When my colleague spoke to her father, he angerly insisted, “It is none of your business.” “But it is,” came the response. “Your daughter raised the issue in the youth group, and now a lot of people know.” In the past such things were raised in the hope that repentance would occur, and the end result would be reconciliation. That is the hope---but hope is not always actualized, especially in such a privatized culture as ours. And so, more often than not, we are silent. We don’t know what to say, and we rightly wonder: What in such a case is the loving thing to do?
I recently came across an entry from an 1892 record of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, GA, when a well respected woman of the church came to the Session to request mercy on behalf of her daughter, who had borne a child out of wedlock. The mother implored the Church Session not to multiply her daughter’s shame by making a public spectacle of the young woman when they removed her from church membership, but instead she pleaded that they use quiet discretion. Now this was 1892 and a child out of wedlock was a major no-no. But the Session refused, that is, refused to remove the girl’s name from membership. Instead, the Session voted to send two elders to stand by the girl’s side, offering her support and advice in this difficult time as well as spiritual nurture and baptism for the baby. Notice that the church went to her; it did not wait for her to come to the church. There was not a hint of the modern day, “It’s none of our business,” no faint embrace of “You do your thing and I’ll do mine.”
We live in our little individual cocoons, where we do not expect others to disturb or question us. If someone in the church has a problem, whether it’s alcohol, infidelity, or abusive behavior, we usually hope the problem will just go away, or perhaps the minister can take care of it. It is as if we are too embarrassed to show that we care---care enough to approach or even confront somebody with his or her troublesome behavior? If the person does not come to us, we just leave them alone to stew in his hurt and trouble.
Care is the operative word here, and care is very close to love. When we care, we are not shut up in our little private worlds, but we move out beyond so that we notice when people are hurting. And we respond, or at least try to, even if our response is awkward or embarrassing. When I was in college, for a short time I attended this Unitarian Church, where this young man was clearly deeply depressed and troubled about his impending induction into the Army and perhaps to Viet Nam. Student deferments had ended, and his life was about to be radically disrupted by the United States Army. But before the Army could take him, he took his life, and his parents, who lived in California, and did not know the depths of his despair, wondered what more could/should have been done. The minister confessed to the church in a Sunday morning sermon, “Jeremy was left too much alone, and for that we are all ashamed. We did not go to him. We were waiting for him to come to us.” Paul’s insistence that we owe nothing but love surely does not mean that we always know what the loving action is. But at the least love does not mean that we should always defend privacy above everything else.
September 6, 2023
Dear Friends,
Recently Pope Francis made a visit to Portugal, where he met with a group of Jesuits, often considered the intellectual elite of the Church. He gave a talk, and then he took some time to answer questions. One Jesuit, who had recently spent time in the United States, told the Pope he was shocked by the anti-Pope comments he heard from many American bishops. He did not understand their extreme dislike of the Pope and their accusation that his policies were destroying the Church. What did he (Pope Francis) make of this?
I was very surprised by the vehemence of the Pope’s response. He neither minced words, nor tried to put a positive spin on what has been some very nasty opposition to him. Instead, he came right out and called these people ideologues. By clinging to a past that is gone, he said, his opponents mistakenly believe this is the essence of faith. But faith, he insisted, is always dynamic. It changes with time as we understand more and more about the world. At one time the Church believed the earth was the center of the universe, and would have burned Galileo at the stake, if he had not recanted. The Church cannot live with its head in the sand but must move out into the world to understand the current situation and embrace new knowledge Of course, the Pope did not mean to suggest that the Church should on all fronts surrender to the present moment. Francis has been very critical of the extreme secularization of the West, which often treats the Church as if it were a complete irrelevancy. (The Roman Catholic Church, like the mainline Protestants, has suffered a loss of attendance and membership.)
The Pope is not shy about speaking of sin. While he understands abortion as a terrible sin, he does recognize that there is a critical need for expanded services to pregnant women, babies, children, and families. Childcare and food subsidies are needed as well as expanded health care, parental leave, and generous vacation time. He is also very critical of the income inequality gap and has firmly stated his support for policies that would help to close it. He lamented that too often his opponents concentrate on the sins below the waist while ignoring other social sins like war, poverty, and homelessness. Francis has also advocated for immigrants, who leave repressive nations behind in a search for an improved life of economic vitality and freedom.
He spoke about how the Church’s understanding of sin has broadened over time. Now, the Roman Catholic Church forcefully states that the possession of nuclear weapons is sin as is capital punishment. But there was a time when the Church actually practiced capital punishment, putting to death people, considered heretics. At one time in the church’s history, it did not believe in the freedom of conscience regarding religious choice. “Error has no rights,” was the operative belief until the coming of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s. So, throughout its long history, the Church has changed, the Pope pointed out, and the change is not finished.
Pope Francis has been more open to divorced and separated Catholics and even to those Catholics, who have remarried. Since the Roman Church views marriage as a sacrament, a rite which the couple, not the priest actualizes (or cathects is the technical word), the big problem for the church is not so much divorce as it is remarriage. The Church does recognize that some marriages should end for the health of the persons and the family. But the sacramental nature of the marriage stands unless it can be shown why and how the couple or one person of the couple could not truly enter into the sacrament. The Pope has tried to show greater understanding toward couples, whose marriages cannot be annulled, but nonetheless want to start a new life and new marriage. Understanding the complexity of the human condition is part of what makes Pope Francis such a pastoral Pope. He has also shown great sensitivity to the whole gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgender issues that are roiling not only the Church but also the wider society. Again, he calls for learning, understanding and compassion.
Francis has also come under criticism for his tolerance toward persons, who do not embrace all Catholic doctrine, and yet are invited to the Communion Table. This would include such notables as Nancy Pelosi as well as Joe Biden, both devout Catholics, but also are solidly pro-choice. Pelosi’s bishop has said he would deny her Holy Communion, while Biden’s bishop has said no such thing. Francis has very graciously said he would deny no one communion, which, he claims, is for all sinners. We do not come to the Table because we are pure and sinless; we come because we are all fallen creatures in need of God’s love and mercy. In other words, we don’t earn the sacrament of Holy Communion. It is a gift.
There is so much about Pope Francis that resonates with many mainline Protestants. We believe that as understanding grows and develops, church doctrine also changes, and faith grows and expands in new ways. We should all be grateful that Pope Francis is speaking truth to power and recognizes that no one or no institution is ever truly complete---including the Church!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Recently Pope Francis made a visit to Portugal, where he met with a group of Jesuits, often considered the intellectual elite of the Church. He gave a talk, and then he took some time to answer questions. One Jesuit, who had recently spent time in the United States, told the Pope he was shocked by the anti-Pope comments he heard from many American bishops. He did not understand their extreme dislike of the Pope and their accusation that his policies were destroying the Church. What did he (Pope Francis) make of this?
I was very surprised by the vehemence of the Pope’s response. He neither minced words, nor tried to put a positive spin on what has been some very nasty opposition to him. Instead, he came right out and called these people ideologues. By clinging to a past that is gone, he said, his opponents mistakenly believe this is the essence of faith. But faith, he insisted, is always dynamic. It changes with time as we understand more and more about the world. At one time the Church believed the earth was the center of the universe, and would have burned Galileo at the stake, if he had not recanted. The Church cannot live with its head in the sand but must move out into the world to understand the current situation and embrace new knowledge Of course, the Pope did not mean to suggest that the Church should on all fronts surrender to the present moment. Francis has been very critical of the extreme secularization of the West, which often treats the Church as if it were a complete irrelevancy. (The Roman Catholic Church, like the mainline Protestants, has suffered a loss of attendance and membership.)
The Pope is not shy about speaking of sin. While he understands abortion as a terrible sin, he does recognize that there is a critical need for expanded services to pregnant women, babies, children, and families. Childcare and food subsidies are needed as well as expanded health care, parental leave, and generous vacation time. He is also very critical of the income inequality gap and has firmly stated his support for policies that would help to close it. He lamented that too often his opponents concentrate on the sins below the waist while ignoring other social sins like war, poverty, and homelessness. Francis has also advocated for immigrants, who leave repressive nations behind in a search for an improved life of economic vitality and freedom.
He spoke about how the Church’s understanding of sin has broadened over time. Now, the Roman Catholic Church forcefully states that the possession of nuclear weapons is sin as is capital punishment. But there was a time when the Church actually practiced capital punishment, putting to death people, considered heretics. At one time in the church’s history, it did not believe in the freedom of conscience regarding religious choice. “Error has no rights,” was the operative belief until the coming of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s. So, throughout its long history, the Church has changed, the Pope pointed out, and the change is not finished.
Pope Francis has been more open to divorced and separated Catholics and even to those Catholics, who have remarried. Since the Roman Church views marriage as a sacrament, a rite which the couple, not the priest actualizes (or cathects is the technical word), the big problem for the church is not so much divorce as it is remarriage. The Church does recognize that some marriages should end for the health of the persons and the family. But the sacramental nature of the marriage stands unless it can be shown why and how the couple or one person of the couple could not truly enter into the sacrament. The Pope has tried to show greater understanding toward couples, whose marriages cannot be annulled, but nonetheless want to start a new life and new marriage. Understanding the complexity of the human condition is part of what makes Pope Francis such a pastoral Pope. He has also shown great sensitivity to the whole gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgender issues that are roiling not only the Church but also the wider society. Again, he calls for learning, understanding and compassion.
Francis has also come under criticism for his tolerance toward persons, who do not embrace all Catholic doctrine, and yet are invited to the Communion Table. This would include such notables as Nancy Pelosi as well as Joe Biden, both devout Catholics, but also are solidly pro-choice. Pelosi’s bishop has said he would deny her Holy Communion, while Biden’s bishop has said no such thing. Francis has very graciously said he would deny no one communion, which, he claims, is for all sinners. We do not come to the Table because we are pure and sinless; we come because we are all fallen creatures in need of God’s love and mercy. In other words, we don’t earn the sacrament of Holy Communion. It is a gift.
There is so much about Pope Francis that resonates with many mainline Protestants. We believe that as understanding grows and develops, church doctrine also changes, and faith grows and expands in new ways. We should all be grateful that Pope Francis is speaking truth to power and recognizes that no one or no institution is ever truly complete---including the Church!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
August 30, 2023
Dear Friends,
Monday, September 4, is Labor Day, when we are called to remember and celebrate the dignity of labor. Monday is also the first day of classes at Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches. It has always galled me that this very left leaning university dares to start its classes on a day when LABOR is the major theme. After all, Labor Day was a long time in coming, and it involved people who were fighting to have their rights recognized, including fair wages and a reasonable length workday. When the Pullman Strike in Chicago began on May 11, 1894, the issues involved decreasing wages and rents that did not go down, though the country was in the midst of a deep depression. Workers commonly worked a 16 hour day, and there was no such thing as paid vacation or sick time. We have come a distance since that time, but over the past decades, we have been hearing a great deal about the increasing wealth divide, as the richest 1% increased its wealth, while the poorest 50 % has sunk deeper into poverty. But this is beginning to change. In fact, some economists say that the year 2015 was the fulcrum that signaled a major shift with the people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder beginning to see real changes.
Indeed, this past summer has been called “the summer of labor.” Not only have (some) workers seen a significant rise in wages--- as much as 30%---but also the demand and need for respect has been finally acknowledged by management. Workers do not want to be treated as if they are nothing but bodies to be used to accomplish the goals that management sets. Since there is a shortage of labor, management is compelled to pay attention, since it cannot be confident that there will be other willing workers to take the place of those who leave. Even people who are hardly low wage earners, like airplane pilots, have managed to win big raises and better working conditions, since there are not enough pilots to fly the planes.
Unions have had a pretty good year. Take UPS, where a strike this summer was a real possibility. But it was avoided when The International Brotherhood of Teamsters came to a tentative agreement with UPS. Money is always an issue, of course, but the threatened strike was about more than money. There were “issues of dignity,” when drivers were complaining about the lack of air conditioning in the trucks, they drove which could reach into the triple digits. An impressive aspect of the new contract is that it was weighted toward those who made the least, especially part time drivers. The starting pay for part time drivers was raised by 30% and thousands of part time drivers were moved into full time positions.
We have all heard the lament, “The rich are getting richer while the poor fall behind.” But this is beginning to change in some dramatic ways. Some of the change has come because certain states have upped their minimum wage. Since 2014 thirty states have raised their minimum wage. But then the pandemic struck, and there was a real worker shortage, especially in the lower paying jobs. Wages began to accelerate for those at the bottom---and not only in states which raised minimum wage. There was a real change in perspective as people began to recognize that these workers---people who stocked store shelves, checked people out at grocery stores, drove buses, delivered the mail and collected the garbage---were essential. Without their work, the society would cease to function.
After the Second World War the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, especially in France and Belgium, recognized that the working class had become alienated from the Church. And so, some of its priests left their clerical dress behind and went to work in factories. And what happened then is a story of great drama. Many of these priests became heavily politicized, joining the socialist and even the Communist Party as they demonstrated for improved housing and wages and even called for anti-racism legislation. This made the Roman hierarchy very nervous and in 1954 Pope Pius Xll ordered an end to the Priest-Worker Movement. However, in 1965 Paul VI approved it in modified form, recognizing that fair wages and working conditions as well as justice, peace and respect for all people, no matter their skin color or ethnicity, were values that Jesus would approve. After all, no matter what we want to say about Jesus, he was NOT a member of the ruling class. He was poor, and he advocated for those who were poor. When he said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do to me,” he was pushing his hearers to consider how those on the very bottom were being treated. And he was saying very explicitly that he was among those on the bottom, suffering with them and for them.
Politics and religion are not always friendly to each other, but there is no denying that Jesus’ teaching has political implications. And though the implications are hardly obvious or easy to discern, that does not relieve us from the task of trying to figure out how we are called to act in the world with all its messy politics and economics. Following Jesus does not mean that he tells us how to vote or what political party to support, but it does mean he asks us to care. How we evidence our care and concern for the world is our decision and our responsibility.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Monday, September 4, is Labor Day, when we are called to remember and celebrate the dignity of labor. Monday is also the first day of classes at Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches. It has always galled me that this very left leaning university dares to start its classes on a day when LABOR is the major theme. After all, Labor Day was a long time in coming, and it involved people who were fighting to have their rights recognized, including fair wages and a reasonable length workday. When the Pullman Strike in Chicago began on May 11, 1894, the issues involved decreasing wages and rents that did not go down, though the country was in the midst of a deep depression. Workers commonly worked a 16 hour day, and there was no such thing as paid vacation or sick time. We have come a distance since that time, but over the past decades, we have been hearing a great deal about the increasing wealth divide, as the richest 1% increased its wealth, while the poorest 50 % has sunk deeper into poverty. But this is beginning to change. In fact, some economists say that the year 2015 was the fulcrum that signaled a major shift with the people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder beginning to see real changes.
Indeed, this past summer has been called “the summer of labor.” Not only have (some) workers seen a significant rise in wages--- as much as 30%---but also the demand and need for respect has been finally acknowledged by management. Workers do not want to be treated as if they are nothing but bodies to be used to accomplish the goals that management sets. Since there is a shortage of labor, management is compelled to pay attention, since it cannot be confident that there will be other willing workers to take the place of those who leave. Even people who are hardly low wage earners, like airplane pilots, have managed to win big raises and better working conditions, since there are not enough pilots to fly the planes.
Unions have had a pretty good year. Take UPS, where a strike this summer was a real possibility. But it was avoided when The International Brotherhood of Teamsters came to a tentative agreement with UPS. Money is always an issue, of course, but the threatened strike was about more than money. There were “issues of dignity,” when drivers were complaining about the lack of air conditioning in the trucks, they drove which could reach into the triple digits. An impressive aspect of the new contract is that it was weighted toward those who made the least, especially part time drivers. The starting pay for part time drivers was raised by 30% and thousands of part time drivers were moved into full time positions.
We have all heard the lament, “The rich are getting richer while the poor fall behind.” But this is beginning to change in some dramatic ways. Some of the change has come because certain states have upped their minimum wage. Since 2014 thirty states have raised their minimum wage. But then the pandemic struck, and there was a real worker shortage, especially in the lower paying jobs. Wages began to accelerate for those at the bottom---and not only in states which raised minimum wage. There was a real change in perspective as people began to recognize that these workers---people who stocked store shelves, checked people out at grocery stores, drove buses, delivered the mail and collected the garbage---were essential. Without their work, the society would cease to function.
After the Second World War the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, especially in France and Belgium, recognized that the working class had become alienated from the Church. And so, some of its priests left their clerical dress behind and went to work in factories. And what happened then is a story of great drama. Many of these priests became heavily politicized, joining the socialist and even the Communist Party as they demonstrated for improved housing and wages and even called for anti-racism legislation. This made the Roman hierarchy very nervous and in 1954 Pope Pius Xll ordered an end to the Priest-Worker Movement. However, in 1965 Paul VI approved it in modified form, recognizing that fair wages and working conditions as well as justice, peace and respect for all people, no matter their skin color or ethnicity, were values that Jesus would approve. After all, no matter what we want to say about Jesus, he was NOT a member of the ruling class. He was poor, and he advocated for those who were poor. When he said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do to me,” he was pushing his hearers to consider how those on the very bottom were being treated. And he was saying very explicitly that he was among those on the bottom, suffering with them and for them.
Politics and religion are not always friendly to each other, but there is no denying that Jesus’ teaching has political implications. And though the implications are hardly obvious or easy to discern, that does not relieve us from the task of trying to figure out how we are called to act in the world with all its messy politics and economics. Following Jesus does not mean that he tells us how to vote or what political party to support, but it does mean he asks us to care. How we evidence our care and concern for the world is our decision and our responsibility.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
What Mothers Do
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
August 20, 2023
Matthew 15: 21-28
Mothers do play a very substantial role in the Bible. In fact, motherhood is often the only role they are permitted to play---with some exceptions, of course. If the word barren were applied to you, because it was always deemed the fault of the woman if no child were conceived, well, your lot in life was pathetic---until God opened your womb, as the biblical text usually put it. Recall Sarah, Abraham’s wife, whose shame was overcome, when as an old woman, she finally conceived and bore Isaac. And then there was Hannah, who was beside herself with grief, because she had no child until she conceived Samuel, who became a prophet to the king. And what about Elizabeth, who in her old age, gave birth to John the Baptist? Of course, not all mothers in the bible were barren. There was Rebekah, a scheming mother, if ever there was one. She favored her younger son, Jacob, over the older one, Esau. The truth was Jacob 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 Jacob into giving the paternal blessing to his younger son when it should have gone to Esau. And we all know about Mary, whose claim to fame was her motherhood of Jesus. As a youngster, growing up Presbyterian, Mary was not spoken of much, and to me she was just a boring mother, who never did anything all that interesting, except bear a child out of wedlock.
So here in our reading from Matthew, we have another mother, who is anything but boring. Jesus had been in Jewish territory, where he was healing and teaching, and the text tells us,”he left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon, which was gentile territory.” So, the decision to move into gentile territory was made by Jesus. And for what purpose? We should always remember that the gospel stories are not simply about Jesus and his place and time, but also about the community out of which the gospel emerged, and Matthew was writing to both gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, so he wanted to show his mixed community that Jesus was willing to embrace both Jews and gentiles, and they must do the same.
So, the story goes that this Canaanite woman approached Jesus, shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She wanted healing for her daughter, who was tormented by a demon. Demons were blamed for all kinds of illnesses, so we don’t know specifically the daughter’s ailment. Now it is important to understand that women were not supposed to accost men in public. So, Jesus ignored her. It was only after his disciples told him to send her away that he told her he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Notice then that she knelt, a sign of great respect and deference, saying, Lord, help me. And then he called her daughter and her a dog. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But notice that she did not make herself the center of the story by becoming insulted. It was not about her; it was all about the healing her daughter needed. So, even after the put-down she called him, Lord. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And then Jesus acknowledged that her faith was great. and her daughter was healed. The same story, by the way, is told in Mark’s gospel, but there, Jesus did not commend her faith, but rather on her cleverness. “For saying that,” he said, “you may go. The demon has left your daughter.” So, this woman, this mother, did what she had to do in order to take care of her daughter. She did what so many other mothers do when they face a major crisis and the normal rules---like not speaking to men in public--- are thrown away.
Last winter a man called me, and wanted me to say some words over his mother’s grave. She had died many years before and was buried by a rabbi in the Jewish section of the cemetery. “My father is Jewish,” he said, and I was raised Jewish, but when my mother died, my father was still alive, and he hid the fact that my mother was not Jewish. She was a German Lutheran, raised in Germany as my father was and me until I was 9. My father had left Germany to find work in England soon after Hitler came to power, and his intention was to get us out, but as Hitler’s grasp tightened over Germany, we never made it. People knew my mother was married to a Jew, so she came under heavy suspicion. And the war, well, it was horrible. I don’t have too many memories of it, because I was so young, but I do remember being very hungry and seeing people beaten, sometimes to death. My mother and I went to a big Lutheran Church in Berlin, where I do remember the Nazi flag flying. I asked my mother about it once, and she told me, “Hush, don’t speak of it.” So, I never did.
My mother was a very beautiful woman, and there were Nazi officers, who threatened to take me away, because they knew my father was Jewish. And so, to prevent that, she prostituted herself with a number of them, I would later learn. As an adult, she told me the whole ugly story. “I would have done anything to save you,” she said. Finally, some years after the war, we were reunited with my father in England and eventually we came to New York. I don’t know when my mother told my father the truth, but he did know it, though we never spoke of it. When she died, I mentioned it to him, and he was shocked that I knew. And I told him I was shocked that he knew. “Your mother,” he said, “was a guardian of the truth.”
But, my father was not. He insisted my mother be buried as a Jew, though she was Christian, faithfully attending a Lutheran Church on 5th Ave. every Sunday. And though I had been baptized as a Christian in Germany, when we were reunited with my father after the war, my father insisted I be raised Jewish. My father has been dead for some years now, and I have finally gotten up the nerve to ask someone to speak some Christian words spoken over my mother’s grave, especially the words Jesus said, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.” And then I told him the story of the brave and unconventional Canaanite woman, who saved the life of her daughter. “I did not know that story, “he said, “but I am sure my mother did. And so, please read that too at her gravesite.
And so one cold February afternoon, he and I stood at her grave and I said some words of Christian burial along with Jesus’ words about the truth and the story of one gutsy, determined Canaanite woman, who showed us what she was willing to do for the sake of her child. And though I am not one to romanticize motherhood, I do think there is something in that role which uniquely shows us what God in Jesus Christ is like, when suffering is taken on for the sake of others. What’s a mother to do? Sometimes she does what she has to do---even when it is outside the boundaries of convention.
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
August 20, 2023
Matthew 15: 21-28
Mothers do play a very substantial role in the Bible. In fact, motherhood is often the only role they are permitted to play---with some exceptions, of course. If the word barren were applied to you, because it was always deemed the fault of the woman if no child were conceived, well, your lot in life was pathetic---until God opened your womb, as the biblical text usually put it. Recall Sarah, Abraham’s wife, whose shame was overcome, when as an old woman, she finally conceived and bore Isaac. And then there was Hannah, who was beside herself with grief, because she had no child until she conceived Samuel, who became a prophet to the king. And what about Elizabeth, who in her old age, gave birth to John the Baptist? Of course, not all mothers in the bible were barren. There was Rebekah, a scheming mother, if ever there was one. She favored her younger son, Jacob, over the older one, Esau. The truth was Jacob 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 Jacob into giving the paternal blessing to his younger son when it should have gone to Esau. And we all know about Mary, whose claim to fame was her motherhood of Jesus. As a youngster, growing up Presbyterian, Mary was not spoken of much, and to me she was just a boring mother, who never did anything all that interesting, except bear a child out of wedlock.
So here in our reading from Matthew, we have another mother, who is anything but boring. Jesus had been in Jewish territory, where he was healing and teaching, and the text tells us,”he left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon, which was gentile territory.” So, the decision to move into gentile territory was made by Jesus. And for what purpose? We should always remember that the gospel stories are not simply about Jesus and his place and time, but also about the community out of which the gospel emerged, and Matthew was writing to both gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, so he wanted to show his mixed community that Jesus was willing to embrace both Jews and gentiles, and they must do the same.
So, the story goes that this Canaanite woman approached Jesus, shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She wanted healing for her daughter, who was tormented by a demon. Demons were blamed for all kinds of illnesses, so we don’t know specifically the daughter’s ailment. Now it is important to understand that women were not supposed to accost men in public. So, Jesus ignored her. It was only after his disciples told him to send her away that he told her he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Notice then that she knelt, a sign of great respect and deference, saying, Lord, help me. And then he called her daughter and her a dog. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But notice that she did not make herself the center of the story by becoming insulted. It was not about her; it was all about the healing her daughter needed. So, even after the put-down she called him, Lord. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And then Jesus acknowledged that her faith was great. and her daughter was healed. The same story, by the way, is told in Mark’s gospel, but there, Jesus did not commend her faith, but rather on her cleverness. “For saying that,” he said, “you may go. The demon has left your daughter.” So, this woman, this mother, did what she had to do in order to take care of her daughter. She did what so many other mothers do when they face a major crisis and the normal rules---like not speaking to men in public--- are thrown away.
Last winter a man called me, and wanted me to say some words over his mother’s grave. She had died many years before and was buried by a rabbi in the Jewish section of the cemetery. “My father is Jewish,” he said, and I was raised Jewish, but when my mother died, my father was still alive, and he hid the fact that my mother was not Jewish. She was a German Lutheran, raised in Germany as my father was and me until I was 9. My father had left Germany to find work in England soon after Hitler came to power, and his intention was to get us out, but as Hitler’s grasp tightened over Germany, we never made it. People knew my mother was married to a Jew, so she came under heavy suspicion. And the war, well, it was horrible. I don’t have too many memories of it, because I was so young, but I do remember being very hungry and seeing people beaten, sometimes to death. My mother and I went to a big Lutheran Church in Berlin, where I do remember the Nazi flag flying. I asked my mother about it once, and she told me, “Hush, don’t speak of it.” So, I never did.
My mother was a very beautiful woman, and there were Nazi officers, who threatened to take me away, because they knew my father was Jewish. And so, to prevent that, she prostituted herself with a number of them, I would later learn. As an adult, she told me the whole ugly story. “I would have done anything to save you,” she said. Finally, some years after the war, we were reunited with my father in England and eventually we came to New York. I don’t know when my mother told my father the truth, but he did know it, though we never spoke of it. When she died, I mentioned it to him, and he was shocked that I knew. And I told him I was shocked that he knew. “Your mother,” he said, “was a guardian of the truth.”
But, my father was not. He insisted my mother be buried as a Jew, though she was Christian, faithfully attending a Lutheran Church on 5th Ave. every Sunday. And though I had been baptized as a Christian in Germany, when we were reunited with my father after the war, my father insisted I be raised Jewish. My father has been dead for some years now, and I have finally gotten up the nerve to ask someone to speak some Christian words spoken over my mother’s grave, especially the words Jesus said, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.” And then I told him the story of the brave and unconventional Canaanite woman, who saved the life of her daughter. “I did not know that story, “he said, “but I am sure my mother did. And so, please read that too at her gravesite.
And so one cold February afternoon, he and I stood at her grave and I said some words of Christian burial along with Jesus’ words about the truth and the story of one gutsy, determined Canaanite woman, who showed us what she was willing to do for the sake of her child. And though I am not one to romanticize motherhood, I do think there is something in that role which uniquely shows us what God in Jesus Christ is like, when suffering is taken on for the sake of others. What’s a mother to do? Sometimes she does what she has to do---even when it is outside the boundaries of convention.
August 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
Survival is impressive. When we read or hear about people surviving incredibly difficult challenges, most of us take notice. We are moved by stories of people who recently survived the fire on Maui, some returning to their homes as the blaze raged about them, to retrieve beloved pets. I read about one young man, who helped an old woman, who could barely hobble along. But he talked her through the ordeal, telling her, “You can make it. You can do it. You have not come this far in life to give up now.” And, of course, who among us, has not been inspired by the citizens of Ukraine, as they stand up to Russian aggression? Yes, the will to survive is indeed impressive.
But recently I read about another kind of survival: trees. With the release of the movie, Oppenheimer, there is a great deal of interest generated about the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, it was with fascination that I read about 170 trees in the Hiroshima blast zone, many of them still alive today. There are a number of different species, such as the Ginkgo and the Willow as well as others, but the Ginkgo is particularly hardy. It is a species native to China, and it boasts fan shaped leaves that in the fall become a stunning gold. The Ginkgo is one of the oldest and the most vibrant trees on our planet. Scientists tell us they survived the asteroid that most likely killed the dinosaurs, and they also survived the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, because their roots grow deeply into the earth’s soil, which afforded them protection from the immense heat of the blast, which was over 13,770 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Japanese have a term for persons, who survived the atomic blast, hibakusha, and the trees also have a name: hisbakujumoku. It has been 77 years since the bombing, and some of the trees have finally died, but there are others, still very much alive. The Green Legacy Hiroshima grows seedlings from the seeds of these surviving trees, and sends them all over the world, often to places that have survived terrible disaster, such as a fire. I would not be at all surprised is seedlings will be sent to Maui. But seedlings are also sent to nuclear nations as a reminder that PEACE is the goal, so nothing like Hiroshima or Nagasaki ever happens again.
One woman, Hideko Tamura Snider, was ten years old, when the bomb hit. Her mother’s, best friend and many of her relatives were killed in the blast. In 2003 she moved to Oregon and in 2017 she joined the Green Legacy. She goes around the state visiting the various peace trees that have been planted and she has planted 51 seeds herself. “I talk to the trees,” she said, “touching their leaves and giving them water. I feel their strength, and I let them know how glad I am that they are on this earth. Like them, I too have survived.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Survival is impressive. When we read or hear about people surviving incredibly difficult challenges, most of us take notice. We are moved by stories of people who recently survived the fire on Maui, some returning to their homes as the blaze raged about them, to retrieve beloved pets. I read about one young man, who helped an old woman, who could barely hobble along. But he talked her through the ordeal, telling her, “You can make it. You can do it. You have not come this far in life to give up now.” And, of course, who among us, has not been inspired by the citizens of Ukraine, as they stand up to Russian aggression? Yes, the will to survive is indeed impressive.
But recently I read about another kind of survival: trees. With the release of the movie, Oppenheimer, there is a great deal of interest generated about the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, it was with fascination that I read about 170 trees in the Hiroshima blast zone, many of them still alive today. There are a number of different species, such as the Ginkgo and the Willow as well as others, but the Ginkgo is particularly hardy. It is a species native to China, and it boasts fan shaped leaves that in the fall become a stunning gold. The Ginkgo is one of the oldest and the most vibrant trees on our planet. Scientists tell us they survived the asteroid that most likely killed the dinosaurs, and they also survived the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, because their roots grow deeply into the earth’s soil, which afforded them protection from the immense heat of the blast, which was over 13,770 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Japanese have a term for persons, who survived the atomic blast, hibakusha, and the trees also have a name: hisbakujumoku. It has been 77 years since the bombing, and some of the trees have finally died, but there are others, still very much alive. The Green Legacy Hiroshima grows seedlings from the seeds of these surviving trees, and sends them all over the world, often to places that have survived terrible disaster, such as a fire. I would not be at all surprised is seedlings will be sent to Maui. But seedlings are also sent to nuclear nations as a reminder that PEACE is the goal, so nothing like Hiroshima or Nagasaki ever happens again.
One woman, Hideko Tamura Snider, was ten years old, when the bomb hit. Her mother’s, best friend and many of her relatives were killed in the blast. In 2003 she moved to Oregon and in 2017 she joined the Green Legacy. She goes around the state visiting the various peace trees that have been planted and she has planted 51 seeds herself. “I talk to the trees,” she said, “touching their leaves and giving them water. I feel their strength, and I let them know how glad I am that they are on this earth. Like them, I too have survived.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
“What Time Is It?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville,
August 13, 2023
Genesis 37: 1-4; 12-28
Matthew 14: 22-33
I had a professor of New Testament, who told us it was important to pay attention to the time it is in the story. Is it early morning, before the break of day, when the night shadows still cross the sky? Or is it afternoon, when the heat and the glare of the sun are beginning to de-intensify. Is it in the pitch blackness of night, when the stars in the sky, unpolluted by the modern lights of the city, actually provide some light to the human beings who are out in the dark. “Pay attention to the time,” he would say, for the time of day or night actually might tell you something about what is going on. What can be seen in the light of day that is hidden by the night shadows? Or what do the night shadows tell us about human activity and decision?
When we consider the story of Joseph and his brothers, we are not told directly what time it is. Jacob sent Joseph out to find his brothers, totally insensitive to the jealously and resentment his favored treatment of Joseph caused. And that is the way it often is in families. Parents can be clueless. Now it would be reasonable to assume that Jacob sent Joseph out in the morning because he had a distance to walk, and by the time he found them, the sun was probably sinking lower in the sky, bringing cooler temperatures. Shepherds would often bring their flocks out to graze later in the day to avoid the blistering heat. And as the sun began to lower in the sky and the first hint of darkness began to appear, the brothers consider an evil plan---murdering Joseph, because he was their father’s favorite. The shadows of evening, which can hide the full truth, symbolize evil deeds and intentions in the making. But it was not completely dark. There was light in that Reuben had a plan to save Joseph. He would return to free his brother from the pit---except that Judah had the idea to sell him to the Ishmaelites. And so, Jacob would end up in Egypt, which is the beginning of the story of how the Jews came to be in Egypt, eventually becoming slaves and needing Moses to lead them out of their slavery.
In the text from Matthew, it reads early in the morning Jesus came walking on the water toward his disciples. The Greek, which is the original language of the gospels, says “the third watch,” which begins at 3 AM. So, Jesus was walking on water at an unsettling hour, a time we human beings are often assaulted by fears and worries that in the light of day do not seem so awful. At 3 AM depression weighs heavier on the heart and despair tempts the soul. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, “The Crack Up,” “In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
Indeed, it is. Some years ago, while working in New Haven, I met this guy, who had served in the Army during the Iraqi War. He told me he used to interrogate suspected terrorists in the middle of the night. “Even the ideology of the most fanatical people weakens at 3 o’clock in the morning,” he said. Someone else told me how his wife left him and their three young children to run away with her new love. I remember her getting out of bed at 3 AM. “What are you doing?” I asked her. Just getting some juice to drink, she said. Though he went back to sleep, she never came back to bed. Later she told him, “It is easier to do the unthinkable at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
And so is it any wonder that when Jesus came walking across the water toward the disciples at that early morning hour, they did not recognize him. They could not clearly see who was there, and so gripped by fear, they thought it was a ghost. But this story is not simply about the disciples and Jesus; it is also about the community out of which Matthew’s gospel came, and this community too was gripped by fear and anxiety. This gospel was written about 10 years after the Romans had destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, and so the Jews had to find a new way to be Jews, and for them it was the synagogue movement---small religious gatherings, where they would study and ponder Torah. But other Jews joined the Christian movement, and they were trying to figure out how Jewish Christians and gentile Christians could be together and worship together.
Now we should note what has already happened in this chapter. King Herod had John the Baptist killed, and after learning of John’s death, Jesus wanted to be alone to ponder and pray. But he could not get away from the crowds, and so he taught and healed them. When it became late and the crowds were hungry, Jesus told his disciples to give the people something to eat, which they did, after Jesus blessed and broke the five loaves of bread and two fish. So, while Jesus is the source of the blessing, it is his followers who do the actual work of feeding the crowd. It was after this feeding of the 5000 that Jesus made his disciples get into the boat. That was his idea, not theirs. He wanted to be alone to pray, so he was not in the boat with them. There they were in the middle of the night, struggling to get across to the other side, but the winds are so strong, they are not making much progress.
Now what is this boat? It’s not just a boat; it is a symbol for the church, this newly constituted community of faith that in Matthew’s day and time was also struggling against strong headwinds—serious tensions between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians and persecution from the Romans. But what Matthew is trying to get across is that the boat as the church was not making progress not only because of all the tension, but also because there was a failure to recognize who Jesus is and what he asks his disciples to do. Consider what happened as Jesus walked across the water and Peter saw him---though Peter is not completely sure it is Jesus. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Now we get caught up in this so called miracle of nature, walking on water, but the essential point here is the movement out of the boat, out of the church, into the water, something which symbolizes an uncomfortable and difficult place to be. Jesus was not calling Peter to a place of comfort, but rather to a mission of discomfort, a place of new challenge and new possibility.
And such places are always hard for a church. In one of my former churches, there were some pretty strong disagreements about certain non church groups that would gather in front of the church to hand out food and socks and mittens and gift cards to the homeless. Sometimes the church property was left untidy with trash on the ground. And so, some people insisted such groups be banned. And yet others saw their presence as a movement beyond the church, making it available to others, who would never come inside the church to worship.
We all realize the difficult challenges churches these days are facing. What time is it? We are not sure, are we? We do not know what the future holds. In both the lesson from Genesis and from Matthew, notice the level of discomfort. Joseph was sold and ended up in Egypt, which began a whole new story. And in Matthew gospel, notice where Jesus is. While he made his disciples get into the boat, he did not get in with them. He came to them on the water, reminding his disciples and us that the comfortable and the familiar are not always the places Jesus calls us to be and remain.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville,
August 13, 2023
Genesis 37: 1-4; 12-28
Matthew 14: 22-33
I had a professor of New Testament, who told us it was important to pay attention to the time it is in the story. Is it early morning, before the break of day, when the night shadows still cross the sky? Or is it afternoon, when the heat and the glare of the sun are beginning to de-intensify. Is it in the pitch blackness of night, when the stars in the sky, unpolluted by the modern lights of the city, actually provide some light to the human beings who are out in the dark. “Pay attention to the time,” he would say, for the time of day or night actually might tell you something about what is going on. What can be seen in the light of day that is hidden by the night shadows? Or what do the night shadows tell us about human activity and decision?
When we consider the story of Joseph and his brothers, we are not told directly what time it is. Jacob sent Joseph out to find his brothers, totally insensitive to the jealously and resentment his favored treatment of Joseph caused. And that is the way it often is in families. Parents can be clueless. Now it would be reasonable to assume that Jacob sent Joseph out in the morning because he had a distance to walk, and by the time he found them, the sun was probably sinking lower in the sky, bringing cooler temperatures. Shepherds would often bring their flocks out to graze later in the day to avoid the blistering heat. And as the sun began to lower in the sky and the first hint of darkness began to appear, the brothers consider an evil plan---murdering Joseph, because he was their father’s favorite. The shadows of evening, which can hide the full truth, symbolize evil deeds and intentions in the making. But it was not completely dark. There was light in that Reuben had a plan to save Joseph. He would return to free his brother from the pit---except that Judah had the idea to sell him to the Ishmaelites. And so, Jacob would end up in Egypt, which is the beginning of the story of how the Jews came to be in Egypt, eventually becoming slaves and needing Moses to lead them out of their slavery.
In the text from Matthew, it reads early in the morning Jesus came walking on the water toward his disciples. The Greek, which is the original language of the gospels, says “the third watch,” which begins at 3 AM. So, Jesus was walking on water at an unsettling hour, a time we human beings are often assaulted by fears and worries that in the light of day do not seem so awful. At 3 AM depression weighs heavier on the heart and despair tempts the soul. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, “The Crack Up,” “In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
Indeed, it is. Some years ago, while working in New Haven, I met this guy, who had served in the Army during the Iraqi War. He told me he used to interrogate suspected terrorists in the middle of the night. “Even the ideology of the most fanatical people weakens at 3 o’clock in the morning,” he said. Someone else told me how his wife left him and their three young children to run away with her new love. I remember her getting out of bed at 3 AM. “What are you doing?” I asked her. Just getting some juice to drink, she said. Though he went back to sleep, she never came back to bed. Later she told him, “It is easier to do the unthinkable at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
And so is it any wonder that when Jesus came walking across the water toward the disciples at that early morning hour, they did not recognize him. They could not clearly see who was there, and so gripped by fear, they thought it was a ghost. But this story is not simply about the disciples and Jesus; it is also about the community out of which Matthew’s gospel came, and this community too was gripped by fear and anxiety. This gospel was written about 10 years after the Romans had destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, and so the Jews had to find a new way to be Jews, and for them it was the synagogue movement---small religious gatherings, where they would study and ponder Torah. But other Jews joined the Christian movement, and they were trying to figure out how Jewish Christians and gentile Christians could be together and worship together.
Now we should note what has already happened in this chapter. King Herod had John the Baptist killed, and after learning of John’s death, Jesus wanted to be alone to ponder and pray. But he could not get away from the crowds, and so he taught and healed them. When it became late and the crowds were hungry, Jesus told his disciples to give the people something to eat, which they did, after Jesus blessed and broke the five loaves of bread and two fish. So, while Jesus is the source of the blessing, it is his followers who do the actual work of feeding the crowd. It was after this feeding of the 5000 that Jesus made his disciples get into the boat. That was his idea, not theirs. He wanted to be alone to pray, so he was not in the boat with them. There they were in the middle of the night, struggling to get across to the other side, but the winds are so strong, they are not making much progress.
Now what is this boat? It’s not just a boat; it is a symbol for the church, this newly constituted community of faith that in Matthew’s day and time was also struggling against strong headwinds—serious tensions between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians and persecution from the Romans. But what Matthew is trying to get across is that the boat as the church was not making progress not only because of all the tension, but also because there was a failure to recognize who Jesus is and what he asks his disciples to do. Consider what happened as Jesus walked across the water and Peter saw him---though Peter is not completely sure it is Jesus. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Now we get caught up in this so called miracle of nature, walking on water, but the essential point here is the movement out of the boat, out of the church, into the water, something which symbolizes an uncomfortable and difficult place to be. Jesus was not calling Peter to a place of comfort, but rather to a mission of discomfort, a place of new challenge and new possibility.
And such places are always hard for a church. In one of my former churches, there were some pretty strong disagreements about certain non church groups that would gather in front of the church to hand out food and socks and mittens and gift cards to the homeless. Sometimes the church property was left untidy with trash on the ground. And so, some people insisted such groups be banned. And yet others saw their presence as a movement beyond the church, making it available to others, who would never come inside the church to worship.
We all realize the difficult challenges churches these days are facing. What time is it? We are not sure, are we? We do not know what the future holds. In both the lesson from Genesis and from Matthew, notice the level of discomfort. Joseph was sold and ended up in Egypt, which began a whole new story. And in Matthew gospel, notice where Jesus is. While he made his disciples get into the boat, he did not get in with them. He came to them on the water, reminding his disciples and us that the comfortable and the familiar are not always the places Jesus calls us to be and remain.
August 3, 2023
Dear Friends,
Though Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, none of us has an easy time doing so. And when he also commands that we forgive over and over again, well, that too is almost more than we can bear to do. While all the major religions speak of love and forgiveness, Jesus may be unique in his insistence that loving and forgiving the enemy are commands. Can you imagine telling the Japanese right after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they must forgive the United States? Well, we would not have done any better if we were given the same directive after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And what about the Jews and the Germans? My brother in laws’ parents, who were Jewish, refused to set foot in Germany and Austria. They had no interest in forgiving their enemies for what had been done to the Jews during the Second World War.
Praying for enemies is very spiritually challenging, to say the least, and when the enemy is a nation, which is fighting a war against your own country and way of life, then the spiritual challenge rises to overwhelming. And yet this is precisely what the nation of Ukraine is now facing. Many Ukrainians are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose liturgy includes prayers for Patriarch Krill of Moscow, who has thrown his support behind Putin and the war against Ukraine. But as one member of an Orthodox Church, tied to Russia, said, “The Bible says if a person has lost his way and is a sinner, we can still pray for him or her.” The church member is a soldier fighting for Ukraine, but he still loves his church, and he still prays for the Patriarch Krill. Last April a number of Ukrainian priests were arrested because of these ties to the Russian Church, which left security forces wondering about their loyalty to Ukraine. But, as one of the arrested priests said, “I have never been on the side of aggression, and I never will be.”
There are “independent” Ukrainian Orthodox churches and about four years ago they were granted autocephaly by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, head of Eastern Orthodoxy. The move was rejected by Moscow, and since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia more churches and their priests have made moves to join the independent movement and cut ties with Russia. Not only is Moscow unhappy with such desires, but also members of the church complain that politics sometimes takes over the church. People are loyal to their church, but they also feel a deep loyalty to their nation, and they don’t want to have the latter questioned simply because their church is connected to the Moscow Patriarchate. They make distinctions and separations, and they don’t understand why others cannot do the same. But others don’t and can’t. Someone said, “I cannot trust a person who says they are pro-Ukrainian and still goes to the Moscow church. This person is hiding something in himself.”
Yet there are others who insist they have nothing to hide. One elderly church member said, “I am the person who loves everyone. But there are people here who hate everyone. But God is love, and God will decide who is right and who is wrong.” In the meantime, she continues to love her Russian affiliated church as she waits, hopes and prays for the war to end.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Though Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, none of us has an easy time doing so. And when he also commands that we forgive over and over again, well, that too is almost more than we can bear to do. While all the major religions speak of love and forgiveness, Jesus may be unique in his insistence that loving and forgiving the enemy are commands. Can you imagine telling the Japanese right after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they must forgive the United States? Well, we would not have done any better if we were given the same directive after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And what about the Jews and the Germans? My brother in laws’ parents, who were Jewish, refused to set foot in Germany and Austria. They had no interest in forgiving their enemies for what had been done to the Jews during the Second World War.
Praying for enemies is very spiritually challenging, to say the least, and when the enemy is a nation, which is fighting a war against your own country and way of life, then the spiritual challenge rises to overwhelming. And yet this is precisely what the nation of Ukraine is now facing. Many Ukrainians are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose liturgy includes prayers for Patriarch Krill of Moscow, who has thrown his support behind Putin and the war against Ukraine. But as one member of an Orthodox Church, tied to Russia, said, “The Bible says if a person has lost his way and is a sinner, we can still pray for him or her.” The church member is a soldier fighting for Ukraine, but he still loves his church, and he still prays for the Patriarch Krill. Last April a number of Ukrainian priests were arrested because of these ties to the Russian Church, which left security forces wondering about their loyalty to Ukraine. But, as one of the arrested priests said, “I have never been on the side of aggression, and I never will be.”
There are “independent” Ukrainian Orthodox churches and about four years ago they were granted autocephaly by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, head of Eastern Orthodoxy. The move was rejected by Moscow, and since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia more churches and their priests have made moves to join the independent movement and cut ties with Russia. Not only is Moscow unhappy with such desires, but also members of the church complain that politics sometimes takes over the church. People are loyal to their church, but they also feel a deep loyalty to their nation, and they don’t want to have the latter questioned simply because their church is connected to the Moscow Patriarchate. They make distinctions and separations, and they don’t understand why others cannot do the same. But others don’t and can’t. Someone said, “I cannot trust a person who says they are pro-Ukrainian and still goes to the Moscow church. This person is hiding something in himself.”
Yet there are others who insist they have nothing to hide. One elderly church member said, “I am the person who loves everyone. But there are people here who hate everyone. But God is love, and God will decide who is right and who is wrong.” In the meantime, she continues to love her Russian affiliated church as she waits, hopes and prays for the war to end.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Wounds that Mark Us
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
August 6, 2023
Genesis 32: 22-31
Matthew 5: 43-48
When Jacob walked away from his encounter with God, or perhaps it was God’s angel, he was wounded, hit in the thigh, so he limped away. The wound, I think, was intended to be permanent, a reminder that wrestling with God has a price, even if at the end, one achieves a kind of victory, as Jacob, whose new name became Israel, surely did. He received his blessing, but he limped away, a wounded man. Recall the resurrection story, when Jesus was with his disciples in a room and Thomas, who would not believe, unless he could see and touch the wound in Jesus’ side and the nail imprints on his hands and feet. And so, Jesus showed Thomas the wounds he still bore even after his resurrection. The story is existentially true, because that is how life often is. We live through the harrowing times; we come out on the other end of all the struggle, but we carry the wounds, and in some way those wounds mark us. They tell our story, what we have lived through and what we have survived. I recall some years ago, reading a book about FDR and how though he was wounded deeply by polio, it also made him who he became, one of our greatest Presidents.
Today is the 77th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then three days later on August 9, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. There is a great deal of interest in this history, because of the recent release of the movie, Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist and the faither of the atomic bomb, did have his wounds, “blood on my hands,” he said. That guilt marked him for the rest of his life, and it was not only because of what Japan suffered, but also because of what the atomic bomb unleashed---a world awash in bombs and an arms race that could destroy the world many times over.
Oppenheimer would have preferred the bomb be dropped on Germany, perhaps, because as a Jew, he had a score to settle with the Nazis. Germany had surrendered on May 8, 1945, and apparently Oppenheimer had some ambivalence about the bomb being used on Japan, though unlike some physicists, he was not categorically opposed. I doubt he knew that Japan was working through Russia to surrender. The Japanese, however, were a proud people, and their high command was fanatical. One of them said, “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” He said this AFTER the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The six member Supreme War Council had met, and was deadlocked 3 to 3 about a surrender; unanimity was required and so the war went on for a few more days. It was finally the Emperor, who decided to surrender, and when the Council learned of his intention, there was an attempted coup with soldiers racing through the palace in search for the recorded surrender speech, which was to be given the next day. But it was hidden with the Empress’s ladies and was never found by the soldiers.
The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, described as a kindly gentleman, from the very beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1942, functioned as a kind of chairman of the board. Known for his moral probity, he believed in a law of moral progress, most likely enforced by people who looked like him, white and male. He had agonized over the firebombing of Tokyo and the German city of Dresden as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki---all civilian targets. Is it any wonder that General Curtis Le May , whose Bomber Command had burned and scorched dozens of Japanese cities with firebombs, said “If we lose this war, we are going on trial as war criminals.” Stimson was the one who decided that Hiroshima and NOT the ancient capital of Kyoto would be the target of the atomic bomb, and on August 8, two days after the bombing, when Stimson showed President Truman the aerial photographs of the destruction, Stimson suffered a mild heart attack. In his diary he noted that besides Hiroshima three other cities were slated for bombing. But when Truman saw the destruction, he said after Nagasaki---no more atomic bombs will be dropped unless I say so.
We know that war is a terrible thing, and we also know it leaves scars and wounds that never fully heal. My father in law was a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, and he worked with a high school history teacher on a project about critical thinking on issues in American history. Len, the teacher, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Just so you know, it is the navigator who finally takes over the controls from the pilot as the plane nears the bomb site, and it is the navigator who releases the bomb. My father in law said Len carried a deep wound about the part he played in the dropping of the bomb. There was something off about the man, my father in law claimed. He was smart as a whip, but he had in him this deep anger mixed with deep sadness.
There was then and there still is now a great deal of controversy about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped. General Eisenhower, for example, was opposed, believing it to be morally indefensible to target civilians. The Japanese, he said, are near surrender. They are starving. But others believed there would be no quick surrender from fanatics, and southeast Asians, under brutal Japanese occupation, were dying at a rate of 250,000/day. Even without an American invasion of the Japanese island, some estimated millions of lives would be saved by the dropping of the bomb.
The calculus is impossible to predict. If we did not drop the bomb, we have no idea how many lives would have been lost or saved. But we know what he did, and we should face that truth without pretending that the decision was an obvious or an easy one to make. There are arguments on both sides. The brutal incineration of 200,000 civilians is difficult, some would say, impossible to justify. And there are those who claim that the primary reason the bomb was dropped was for the benefit of Russia---to show the Russians, who were fast becoming our new enemy, what kind of weapon we had.
We know what Jesus taught about loving our enemies, but though Jesus’ teachings do have profound political implications of which Jesus was certainly aware, he was not a political leader. He was not tasked with the burden of making decisions about how a nation should conduct itself in an armed conflict it did not begin. Jesus commands us to be perfect, but how can we be perfect in an imperfect world? That we ended World War ll in an imperfect way, by dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations---the only nation that has ever used such weapons--- certainly leaves us in a morally compromised position. And we should not be afraid to admit that. We might prefer to think of ourselves as the righteous ones, but we are better served by the recognition that history and the truths it teaches are often ambiguous and sometimes morally troubling. And if that recognition leaves us with wounds, so be it. Then we must bear them. This is the nature of the human condition, and in a time when so many people want only a sanitized version of history taught, we would do well to recognize that sanitized history also leaves us wounded. There is no escaping the wounds. They mark us. The question is: What kinds of wounds---the ones that come from facing the ambiguity of history or the ones that come from denial of the truth?
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
August 6, 2023
Genesis 32: 22-31
Matthew 5: 43-48
When Jacob walked away from his encounter with God, or perhaps it was God’s angel, he was wounded, hit in the thigh, so he limped away. The wound, I think, was intended to be permanent, a reminder that wrestling with God has a price, even if at the end, one achieves a kind of victory, as Jacob, whose new name became Israel, surely did. He received his blessing, but he limped away, a wounded man. Recall the resurrection story, when Jesus was with his disciples in a room and Thomas, who would not believe, unless he could see and touch the wound in Jesus’ side and the nail imprints on his hands and feet. And so, Jesus showed Thomas the wounds he still bore even after his resurrection. The story is existentially true, because that is how life often is. We live through the harrowing times; we come out on the other end of all the struggle, but we carry the wounds, and in some way those wounds mark us. They tell our story, what we have lived through and what we have survived. I recall some years ago, reading a book about FDR and how though he was wounded deeply by polio, it also made him who he became, one of our greatest Presidents.
Today is the 77th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then three days later on August 9, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. There is a great deal of interest in this history, because of the recent release of the movie, Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist and the faither of the atomic bomb, did have his wounds, “blood on my hands,” he said. That guilt marked him for the rest of his life, and it was not only because of what Japan suffered, but also because of what the atomic bomb unleashed---a world awash in bombs and an arms race that could destroy the world many times over.
Oppenheimer would have preferred the bomb be dropped on Germany, perhaps, because as a Jew, he had a score to settle with the Nazis. Germany had surrendered on May 8, 1945, and apparently Oppenheimer had some ambivalence about the bomb being used on Japan, though unlike some physicists, he was not categorically opposed. I doubt he knew that Japan was working through Russia to surrender. The Japanese, however, were a proud people, and their high command was fanatical. One of them said, “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” He said this AFTER the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The six member Supreme War Council had met, and was deadlocked 3 to 3 about a surrender; unanimity was required and so the war went on for a few more days. It was finally the Emperor, who decided to surrender, and when the Council learned of his intention, there was an attempted coup with soldiers racing through the palace in search for the recorded surrender speech, which was to be given the next day. But it was hidden with the Empress’s ladies and was never found by the soldiers.
The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, described as a kindly gentleman, from the very beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1942, functioned as a kind of chairman of the board. Known for his moral probity, he believed in a law of moral progress, most likely enforced by people who looked like him, white and male. He had agonized over the firebombing of Tokyo and the German city of Dresden as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki---all civilian targets. Is it any wonder that General Curtis Le May , whose Bomber Command had burned and scorched dozens of Japanese cities with firebombs, said “If we lose this war, we are going on trial as war criminals.” Stimson was the one who decided that Hiroshima and NOT the ancient capital of Kyoto would be the target of the atomic bomb, and on August 8, two days after the bombing, when Stimson showed President Truman the aerial photographs of the destruction, Stimson suffered a mild heart attack. In his diary he noted that besides Hiroshima three other cities were slated for bombing. But when Truman saw the destruction, he said after Nagasaki---no more atomic bombs will be dropped unless I say so.
We know that war is a terrible thing, and we also know it leaves scars and wounds that never fully heal. My father in law was a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, and he worked with a high school history teacher on a project about critical thinking on issues in American history. Len, the teacher, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Just so you know, it is the navigator who finally takes over the controls from the pilot as the plane nears the bomb site, and it is the navigator who releases the bomb. My father in law said Len carried a deep wound about the part he played in the dropping of the bomb. There was something off about the man, my father in law claimed. He was smart as a whip, but he had in him this deep anger mixed with deep sadness.
There was then and there still is now a great deal of controversy about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped. General Eisenhower, for example, was opposed, believing it to be morally indefensible to target civilians. The Japanese, he said, are near surrender. They are starving. But others believed there would be no quick surrender from fanatics, and southeast Asians, under brutal Japanese occupation, were dying at a rate of 250,000/day. Even without an American invasion of the Japanese island, some estimated millions of lives would be saved by the dropping of the bomb.
The calculus is impossible to predict. If we did not drop the bomb, we have no idea how many lives would have been lost or saved. But we know what he did, and we should face that truth without pretending that the decision was an obvious or an easy one to make. There are arguments on both sides. The brutal incineration of 200,000 civilians is difficult, some would say, impossible to justify. And there are those who claim that the primary reason the bomb was dropped was for the benefit of Russia---to show the Russians, who were fast becoming our new enemy, what kind of weapon we had.
We know what Jesus taught about loving our enemies, but though Jesus’ teachings do have profound political implications of which Jesus was certainly aware, he was not a political leader. He was not tasked with the burden of making decisions about how a nation should conduct itself in an armed conflict it did not begin. Jesus commands us to be perfect, but how can we be perfect in an imperfect world? That we ended World War ll in an imperfect way, by dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations---the only nation that has ever used such weapons--- certainly leaves us in a morally compromised position. And we should not be afraid to admit that. We might prefer to think of ourselves as the righteous ones, but we are better served by the recognition that history and the truths it teaches are often ambiguous and sometimes morally troubling. And if that recognition leaves us with wounds, so be it. Then we must bear them. This is the nature of the human condition, and in a time when so many people want only a sanitized version of history taught, we would do well to recognize that sanitized history also leaves us wounded. There is no escaping the wounds. They mark us. The question is: What kinds of wounds---the ones that come from facing the ambiguity of history or the ones that come from denial of the truth?
August 3, 202
Dear Friends,
Though Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, none of us has an easy time doing so. And when he also commands that we forgive over and over again, well, that too is almost more than we can bear to do. While all the major religions speak of love and forgiveness, Jesus may be unique in his insistence that loving and forgiving the enemy are commands. Can you imagine telling the Japanese right after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they must forgive the United States? Well, we would not have done any better if we were given the same directive after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And what about the Jews and the Germans? My brother in laws’ parents, who were Jewish, refused to set foot in Germany and Austria. They had no interest in forgiving their enemies for what had been done to the Jews during the Second World War.
Praying for enemies is very spiritually challenging, to say the least, and when the enemy is a nation, which is fighting a war against your own country and way of life, then the spiritual challenge rises to overwhelming. And yet this is precisely what the nation of Ukraine is now facing. Many Ukrainians are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose liturgy includes prayers for Patriarch Krill of Moscow, who has thrown his support behind Putin and the war against Ukraine. But as one member of an Orthodox Church, tied to Russia, said, “The Bible says if a person has lost his way and is a sinner, we can still pray for him or her.” The church member is a soldier fighting for Ukraine, but he still loves his church, and he still prays for the Patriarch Krill. Last April a number of Ukrainian priests were arrested because of these ties to the Russian Church, which left security forces wondering about their loyalty to Ukraine. But, as one of the arrested priests said, “I have never been on the side of aggression, and I never will be.”
There are “independent” Ukrainian Orthodox churches and about four years ago they were granted autocephaly by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, head of Eastern Orthodoxy. The move was rejected by Moscow, and since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia more churches and their priests have made moves to join the independent movement and cut ties with Russia. Not only is Moscow unhappy with such desires, but also members of the church complain that politics sometimes takes over the church. People are loyal to their church, but they also feel a deep loyalty to their nation, and they don’t want to have the latter questioned simply because their church is connected to the Moscow Patriarchate. They make distinctions and separations, and they don’t understand why others cannot do the same. But others don’t and can’t. Someone said, “I cannot trust a person who says they are pro-Ukrainian and still goes to the Moscow church. This person is hiding something in himself.”
Yet there are others who insist they have nothing to hide. One elderly church member said, “I am the person who loves everyone. But there are people here who hate everyone. But God is love, and God will decide who is right and who is wrong.” In the meantime, she continues to love her Russian affiliated church as she waits, hopes and prays for the war to end.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Though Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, none of us has an easy time doing so. And when he also commands that we forgive over and over again, well, that too is almost more than we can bear to do. While all the major religions speak of love and forgiveness, Jesus may be unique in his insistence that loving and forgiving the enemy are commands. Can you imagine telling the Japanese right after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they must forgive the United States? Well, we would not have done any better if we were given the same directive after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And what about the Jews and the Germans? My brother in laws’ parents, who were Jewish, refused to set foot in Germany and Austria. They had no interest in forgiving their enemies for what had been done to the Jews during the Second World War.
Praying for enemies is very spiritually challenging, to say the least, and when the enemy is a nation, which is fighting a war against your own country and way of life, then the spiritual challenge rises to overwhelming. And yet this is precisely what the nation of Ukraine is now facing. Many Ukrainians are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose liturgy includes prayers for Patriarch Krill of Moscow, who has thrown his support behind Putin and the war against Ukraine. But as one member of an Orthodox Church, tied to Russia, said, “The Bible says if a person has lost his way and is a sinner, we can still pray for him or her.” The church member is a soldier fighting for Ukraine, but he still loves his church, and he still prays for the Patriarch Krill. Last April a number of Ukrainian priests were arrested because of these ties to the Russian Church, which left security forces wondering about their loyalty to Ukraine. But, as one of the arrested priests said, “I have never been on the side of aggression, and I never will be.”
There are “independent” Ukrainian Orthodox churches and about four years ago they were granted autocephaly by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, head of Eastern Orthodoxy. The move was rejected by Moscow, and since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia more churches and their priests have made moves to join the independent movement and cut ties with Russia. Not only is Moscow unhappy with such desires, but also members of the church complain that politics sometimes takes over the church. People are loyal to their church, but they also feel a deep loyalty to their nation, and they don’t want to have the latter questioned simply because their church is connected to the Moscow Patriarchate. They make distinctions and separations, and they don’t understand why others cannot do the same. But others don’t and can’t. Someone said, “I cannot trust a person who says they are pro-Ukrainian and still goes to the Moscow church. This person is hiding something in himself.”
Yet there are others who insist they have nothing to hide. One elderly church member said, “I am the person who loves everyone. But there are people here who hate everyone. But God is love, and God will decide who is right and who is wrong.” In the meantime, she continues to love her Russian affiliated church as she waits, hopes and prays for the war to end.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 30, 2023
Matthew 13: 31-33; 44-52
Romans 8: 26-39
December 1, 2010 was a terrible weather day---rain pummeled the streets and wind pummeled the rain. The day before had been beautiful and so too the day after, but as luck would have it, December 1 was the evening my daughter and I had tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to see Puccini’s La Boheme, our favorite opera. I drove as I always do, but unfortunately, my Buick Rendezvous, which was an all wheel drive car, was in the shop, because its AWD was disabled, so I drove my mini-van, which was not nearly as good in bad weather---particularly wet, windy weather. It was miserable going on the Merritt Parkway, but as I moved closer to New York the rain let up, and so traffic was moving more quickly. I was probably traveling between 40 and 45 miles an hour, in the left hand lane, when, around a curve my rear wheels began to slide; the rear of the car then hit the left hand guard rail, which sent the car into a 360 degree spin. I spun around and across the road, from left to right, hitting the right side guard rail head on. The car, however, had thankfully lost speed in its spin, so the air bags did not even go off. We were fine, though my car was not. This was around 6:30 on a Wednesday evening; there were cars all around me, but I hit no one and no one hit me. As we sat there, waiting for help, while cars whizzed by us, my daughter said, “It’s a miracle we’re o.k.” Well, I responded, it could be just dumb luck.
Luck, or was it what Christians call the providence of God---meaning God’s care of and management of all things, according, as the Westminster Confession of faith says, to the “immutable counsel of His own will.” But if we give God credit for providing all the good things, what do we do with the bad things? Every day there are car accidents all across this country, and sometimes people die—including children and teens. What is God up to with them? Our Puritan forebears and before them, John Calvin, the great theological architect of the Reformed tradition, affirmed that nothing happens without God’s consent and absolute control, which can make it seem as if God ordains, that is commands everything that happens. For the traditional Calvinist there is no such thing as luck. Perhaps a modern way to put this is to say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Well, as far as I am concerned, the reason I had the accident was because I took the corner too fast for conditions; I should have been driving more slowly. It was my mistake. I don’t think God had anything to do with the reason for my accident. But what God was doing during the accident---well, that is another question.
I am struck, for example, by how totally calm I was during and even after the accident. I was completely without any fear, and I do wonder if my calmness was perhaps my responsiveness to God. If God is always present with us and to us, is it not possible that there are times, even instantaneous moments, when we are more receptive to God’s grace than at other times. We may not even be conscious of it. Though my accident happened very quickly, I do remember explicitly thinking that I should not slam on my brakes; it will just make matters worse. I also remember holding onto the steering wheel very deliberately, focusing my attention on where the car was heading.
Now my husband is a molecular biologist, so he always sees things through the lens of biology. In a crisis, he said, there is a fight or flight response. You could not flee from the accident, he insisted, so you fought your way through it by staying focused and not panicking. It is part of our survival instinct, he pointed out. I believe it is; that’s how we are made, but that does not argue against God’s involvement and participation in the events in our lives. After all, Christianity says we are made for God, which means that we are made to respond to God---even though so often we do not. Our lives are often filled with noise, which distracts us, and as we travel down life’s path, blockages do get in our way---sometimes we put them there; sometimes others put them there, making it harder for us to receive what God would offer. Panic, for example, can be a blockage; when we panic, we not only fail to think clearly, but we also may fail to be receptive to God’s presence in our lives.
Paul in his Letter to the Romans, wrote, “All things work together for good, for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Now this does not mean that everything, which happens is God’s will. It does not mean that everything happens for a reason. There are mistakes and accidents. God, for example, did not decide to let Babylon destroy Jerusalem and its beautiful Temple in order to make the Jews a light to the nations. It does not mean that the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima or 9/11 was God’s will, but it does suggest that in every situation, even those which are in rebellion against God’s will---God is yet working toward the good, moving the creation toward the good. Our human vision is limited; we see in linear time; we see what is before us in the moment, but God sees eternally; past, present and future are held at once, and from eternity’s viewpoint, God’s victory and goodness are assured.
During the Second World War as Great Britain fought for its life against the German Luftwaffe, one evening as planes flew over northern England, headed for the city of Durham, a mysterious mist was said to have suddenly settled over and around the town, concealing it from the German bombers. God saved the cathedral, the people exclaimed in jubilation. It stands as a sign of God’s providence. But on November 14, 1940, another city, Coventry, which also boasted a beautiful cathedral, was completely destroyed. No divine mist covered Coventry and its cathedral that day.
The next morning, November 15, the Provost of the cathedral, Richard Howard, and some other church members walked through the rubble. One of them was Jock Forbes, a stonemason and caretaker of the church grounds. Looking through the rubble, Jock found two charred beams from the 14th century roof. Fastening them into the shape of a cross, he planted the cross in a mound of rubble. A few days later a local priest, A.P. Wade found three nails from the roof and formed them into a cross. The stonemason then built a stone altar and placed it where the old altar had once stood with these words inscribed: “Father, forgive.” And I don’t think they were only referring to the Germans who bombed them. The charred cross, made from the roof’s wooden beams, was placed behind the altar and the cross, made from the three nails was placed upon the altar.
People speak of God’s providence when they are saved from crippling defeats and destruction as the city of Durham or even my little car accident. But providence can also be seen in the midst of defeat and destruction, when two people pick up two beams of charred wood and three nails and each fashions them into a cross, placing them on an altar inscribed with three words: Father, forgive. “All things work together for good for those who love God,” writes Paul, not because God wills all things to happen, not because all things which happen are good, but because there is no thing, no place, no horror that God’s love cannot reach or touch. The providence of God cannot be proven; you cannot argue anyone into believing it. Providence is only hoped for, believed in and seen through and with the eyes of faith. It was faith that encouraged those people from Coventry to make from wood and nails the crosses and a stone altar and then ask God to forgive.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 30, 2023
Matthew 13: 31-33; 44-52
Romans 8: 26-39
December 1, 2010 was a terrible weather day---rain pummeled the streets and wind pummeled the rain. The day before had been beautiful and so too the day after, but as luck would have it, December 1 was the evening my daughter and I had tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to see Puccini’s La Boheme, our favorite opera. I drove as I always do, but unfortunately, my Buick Rendezvous, which was an all wheel drive car, was in the shop, because its AWD was disabled, so I drove my mini-van, which was not nearly as good in bad weather---particularly wet, windy weather. It was miserable going on the Merritt Parkway, but as I moved closer to New York the rain let up, and so traffic was moving more quickly. I was probably traveling between 40 and 45 miles an hour, in the left hand lane, when, around a curve my rear wheels began to slide; the rear of the car then hit the left hand guard rail, which sent the car into a 360 degree spin. I spun around and across the road, from left to right, hitting the right side guard rail head on. The car, however, had thankfully lost speed in its spin, so the air bags did not even go off. We were fine, though my car was not. This was around 6:30 on a Wednesday evening; there were cars all around me, but I hit no one and no one hit me. As we sat there, waiting for help, while cars whizzed by us, my daughter said, “It’s a miracle we’re o.k.” Well, I responded, it could be just dumb luck.
Luck, or was it what Christians call the providence of God---meaning God’s care of and management of all things, according, as the Westminster Confession of faith says, to the “immutable counsel of His own will.” But if we give God credit for providing all the good things, what do we do with the bad things? Every day there are car accidents all across this country, and sometimes people die—including children and teens. What is God up to with them? Our Puritan forebears and before them, John Calvin, the great theological architect of the Reformed tradition, affirmed that nothing happens without God’s consent and absolute control, which can make it seem as if God ordains, that is commands everything that happens. For the traditional Calvinist there is no such thing as luck. Perhaps a modern way to put this is to say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Well, as far as I am concerned, the reason I had the accident was because I took the corner too fast for conditions; I should have been driving more slowly. It was my mistake. I don’t think God had anything to do with the reason for my accident. But what God was doing during the accident---well, that is another question.
I am struck, for example, by how totally calm I was during and even after the accident. I was completely without any fear, and I do wonder if my calmness was perhaps my responsiveness to God. If God is always present with us and to us, is it not possible that there are times, even instantaneous moments, when we are more receptive to God’s grace than at other times. We may not even be conscious of it. Though my accident happened very quickly, I do remember explicitly thinking that I should not slam on my brakes; it will just make matters worse. I also remember holding onto the steering wheel very deliberately, focusing my attention on where the car was heading.
Now my husband is a molecular biologist, so he always sees things through the lens of biology. In a crisis, he said, there is a fight or flight response. You could not flee from the accident, he insisted, so you fought your way through it by staying focused and not panicking. It is part of our survival instinct, he pointed out. I believe it is; that’s how we are made, but that does not argue against God’s involvement and participation in the events in our lives. After all, Christianity says we are made for God, which means that we are made to respond to God---even though so often we do not. Our lives are often filled with noise, which distracts us, and as we travel down life’s path, blockages do get in our way---sometimes we put them there; sometimes others put them there, making it harder for us to receive what God would offer. Panic, for example, can be a blockage; when we panic, we not only fail to think clearly, but we also may fail to be receptive to God’s presence in our lives.
Paul in his Letter to the Romans, wrote, “All things work together for good, for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Now this does not mean that everything, which happens is God’s will. It does not mean that everything happens for a reason. There are mistakes and accidents. God, for example, did not decide to let Babylon destroy Jerusalem and its beautiful Temple in order to make the Jews a light to the nations. It does not mean that the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima or 9/11 was God’s will, but it does suggest that in every situation, even those which are in rebellion against God’s will---God is yet working toward the good, moving the creation toward the good. Our human vision is limited; we see in linear time; we see what is before us in the moment, but God sees eternally; past, present and future are held at once, and from eternity’s viewpoint, God’s victory and goodness are assured.
During the Second World War as Great Britain fought for its life against the German Luftwaffe, one evening as planes flew over northern England, headed for the city of Durham, a mysterious mist was said to have suddenly settled over and around the town, concealing it from the German bombers. God saved the cathedral, the people exclaimed in jubilation. It stands as a sign of God’s providence. But on November 14, 1940, another city, Coventry, which also boasted a beautiful cathedral, was completely destroyed. No divine mist covered Coventry and its cathedral that day.
The next morning, November 15, the Provost of the cathedral, Richard Howard, and some other church members walked through the rubble. One of them was Jock Forbes, a stonemason and caretaker of the church grounds. Looking through the rubble, Jock found two charred beams from the 14th century roof. Fastening them into the shape of a cross, he planted the cross in a mound of rubble. A few days later a local priest, A.P. Wade found three nails from the roof and formed them into a cross. The stonemason then built a stone altar and placed it where the old altar had once stood with these words inscribed: “Father, forgive.” And I don’t think they were only referring to the Germans who bombed them. The charred cross, made from the roof’s wooden beams, was placed behind the altar and the cross, made from the three nails was placed upon the altar.
People speak of God’s providence when they are saved from crippling defeats and destruction as the city of Durham or even my little car accident. But providence can also be seen in the midst of defeat and destruction, when two people pick up two beams of charred wood and three nails and each fashions them into a cross, placing them on an altar inscribed with three words: Father, forgive. “All things work together for good for those who love God,” writes Paul, not because God wills all things to happen, not because all things which happen are good, but because there is no thing, no place, no horror that God’s love cannot reach or touch. The providence of God cannot be proven; you cannot argue anyone into believing it. Providence is only hoped for, believed in and seen through and with the eyes of faith. It was faith that encouraged those people from Coventry to make from wood and nails the crosses and a stone altar and then ask God to forgive.
July 25, 202
Dear Friends,
I have a t-shirt, which reads: In a World Where You Can Be Anything, Be Kind.” There are times we feel discouraged about a world that appears to display a lack of kindness, especially when we hear or read the news about all the cruel and horrible things human beings do to one another. But a recent study coming from UCLA, directed by Giovanni Rossi, a sociologist at the University, shows that human beings actually are more cooperative and kinder than previous studies have indicated. Other studies have tended to emphasize the difference in rules and behaviors that issue in varied standards of cooperation. So, the conclusion was that pro-social behavior was dependent upon the particular norms of the culture. But the current study, whose findings were published in a journal called, Scientific Reports, found that cross culturally human beings are very much willing to help.
The aid and help that was studied was on the normal range of life, what is called the micro level or low cost decisions The study was not looking at behaviors that involved a risk of life and limb, but rather the ordinary needs that meet people every day, such as needing help in retrieving an object that is out of reach or help in preparing a meal or cleaning up. And when people signal such a need, compliance is very high across all cultures, about 79%. Rejection and ignoring were much smaller, 10% and 11% respectively. And when the rejection came, the researchers discovered that often an explanation was given for the refusal, while when help was offered, no explanation was given.
The study examined more than 1000 requests for help in a variety of places and cultures, including towns in England, Italy, Poland, Russia and rural villages in Ghana, Laos, Ecuador and Aboriginal Australia. The question being considered is: Are human beings inherently helpful and kind or are such behaviors culturally conditioned and supported? Professor Rossi concluded that being helpful is an ingrained reflex in the human being. “While cultural variation comes into play for special occasions and high cost exchange, when we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible.” So, despite cultural difference, human beings are usually cooperative and willing to help.
The study did address the fact that there are societal factors that can contribute to a person’s willingness to help. Certainly cultures that emphasize cooperation and social harmony over competition tend to support kindness. Religion and spirituality can also encourage empathy and compassion. Role models also play an important part, but none of these can be said to cause kindness and cooperation. Rather they support and abet such behaviors.
Jennifer and Matthew Harris are philanthropists and they have given $20 million to UCLA to establish the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. The Institute, which is in the division of social sciences, will do research on kindness and create opportunities to translate the findings into real life practices with the goal of empowering citizens and leaders to build more humane societies. Matthew Harris, who is a 1984 graduate of UCLA, hopes that research can help us understand why so often we feel that kindness seems so scarce in the modern world. Hopefully, “the divide between science and spirituality can be overcome,” he said, ”and more people can be empowered to be kind.”
Currently, a range of studies are beginning. Anthropologists are studying how kindness spreads from person to person. Sociologists are studying people who regularly act unkindly and how they can be encouraged to engage in kind actions. Psychologists are wondering how and if kindness can improve people’s moods and symptoms of depression.
I think this is quite exciting research. Sometimes it seems to me that all the emphasis in education these days is on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) while the Humanities and Social Sciences are being downplayed and ignored. But it is these latter fields which ask us to ponder what the good life is, what truth is and why it matters and what it means to be fully human and alive. These are the perennial questions, which the great humanists and religious leaders have been addressing for a very long time. And I think Jesus would approve of the Kindness Institute and the questions being addressed and the studies being conducted.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I have a t-shirt, which reads: In a World Where You Can Be Anything, Be Kind.” There are times we feel discouraged about a world that appears to display a lack of kindness, especially when we hear or read the news about all the cruel and horrible things human beings do to one another. But a recent study coming from UCLA, directed by Giovanni Rossi, a sociologist at the University, shows that human beings actually are more cooperative and kinder than previous studies have indicated. Other studies have tended to emphasize the difference in rules and behaviors that issue in varied standards of cooperation. So, the conclusion was that pro-social behavior was dependent upon the particular norms of the culture. But the current study, whose findings were published in a journal called, Scientific Reports, found that cross culturally human beings are very much willing to help.
The aid and help that was studied was on the normal range of life, what is called the micro level or low cost decisions The study was not looking at behaviors that involved a risk of life and limb, but rather the ordinary needs that meet people every day, such as needing help in retrieving an object that is out of reach or help in preparing a meal or cleaning up. And when people signal such a need, compliance is very high across all cultures, about 79%. Rejection and ignoring were much smaller, 10% and 11% respectively. And when the rejection came, the researchers discovered that often an explanation was given for the refusal, while when help was offered, no explanation was given.
The study examined more than 1000 requests for help in a variety of places and cultures, including towns in England, Italy, Poland, Russia and rural villages in Ghana, Laos, Ecuador and Aboriginal Australia. The question being considered is: Are human beings inherently helpful and kind or are such behaviors culturally conditioned and supported? Professor Rossi concluded that being helpful is an ingrained reflex in the human being. “While cultural variation comes into play for special occasions and high cost exchange, when we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible.” So, despite cultural difference, human beings are usually cooperative and willing to help.
The study did address the fact that there are societal factors that can contribute to a person’s willingness to help. Certainly cultures that emphasize cooperation and social harmony over competition tend to support kindness. Religion and spirituality can also encourage empathy and compassion. Role models also play an important part, but none of these can be said to cause kindness and cooperation. Rather they support and abet such behaviors.
Jennifer and Matthew Harris are philanthropists and they have given $20 million to UCLA to establish the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. The Institute, which is in the division of social sciences, will do research on kindness and create opportunities to translate the findings into real life practices with the goal of empowering citizens and leaders to build more humane societies. Matthew Harris, who is a 1984 graduate of UCLA, hopes that research can help us understand why so often we feel that kindness seems so scarce in the modern world. Hopefully, “the divide between science and spirituality can be overcome,” he said, ”and more people can be empowered to be kind.”
Currently, a range of studies are beginning. Anthropologists are studying how kindness spreads from person to person. Sociologists are studying people who regularly act unkindly and how they can be encouraged to engage in kind actions. Psychologists are wondering how and if kindness can improve people’s moods and symptoms of depression.
I think this is quite exciting research. Sometimes it seems to me that all the emphasis in education these days is on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) while the Humanities and Social Sciences are being downplayed and ignored. But it is these latter fields which ask us to ponder what the good life is, what truth is and why it matters and what it means to be fully human and alive. These are the perennial questions, which the great humanists and religious leaders have been addressing for a very long time. And I think Jesus would approve of the Kindness Institute and the questions being addressed and the studies being conducted.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Judgment and Hope
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 23, 2023
Romans 8: 18-24
Matthew 24-30
In all my 40 years of ordination I have had only one REALLY serious question about hell, and it came from an eight year old, whose 37 year old mother, Elizabeth, was dying of a brain tumor. You heard the story before: Elizabeth, a brilliant neurosurgeon, struck with a deadly brain tumor, and her husband, the love of her life, a cardiac surgeon, who lost courage and ran, because he could not bear to see the love of his life die. “God forgive me,” he said, “I just cannot do it.” Elizabeth was a remarkable woman, because she understood that her husband’s greatest enemy was death, and even as a doctor, he could not handle it. So, how could he handle a dying wife? Though Elizabeth died broken hearted, she did not die bitter. Understanding saved her from the cruel clutches of a bitter heart and spirit.
Elizabeth’s eight year old daughter, Katie, was visiting her mother in the hospital one day, and she later asked me, ”Is my Daddy going to hell? That’s what my Nana said; she said he is going to suffer forever. But I don’t want my Daddy to go to hell. My mommy is going to go to heaven, my Nana said, but there is no room there for Daddy. Is that true?”
I told her I did not think so, but what I said is not the point of this sermon, so I am not going to expand on what I said. But I think we can all understand the rage of Katie’s Nana, who was Elizabeth’s mother. And we also understand how and why human beings make judgments, because we make them as well. We hold people accountable, and when they fail, especially miserably and cruelly, our judgments can be harsh. Are not we harsh with Putin, or the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia? And our own nation is hardly immune to severe judgment. What about slavery which many Christians at the time justified? Or how about the incarceration of the Japanese on the West Coast during World War ll? Yes, we judge, though we have heard Jesus say, “Do not judge, lest you be judged.” But the simple truth is in the real world it is impossible to avoid making judgments. After all, there is both good and evil in our world, and it is critically important to be able to tell the difference.
Our two readings this morning are indeed concerned with judgment but also with hope. Now I know many Christians today do not like Paul. He has some very antiquated and troubling notions about women, and to many he seems sin obsessed, focused on the flesh, which people tend to equate with the body. But flesh is a term Paul used to indicate opposition to God. Flesh is essentially the human tendency to be self- centered, to turn back onto oneself. Indeed, Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, defined sin as a curvature of the soul, a movement back into the self, rather than a movement outward toward others and God, which will expand and grow the self.
Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Rome in the midst of a great many challenges. Paul’s writings, by the way, are the oldest in the New Testament, thirty and forty years older than the earliest gospel, which is Mark, believed to be written around the year 70. The Roman historian Suetonius claimed that in the year 40, the emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome because of some disturbance caused by “Christus,” most likely Christ. Some of the expelled Jews had become Christian, and after Claudius’ death, they returned to Rome. The Christian Jews thought all Jews should become like them, followers of Christ. And in this Letter Paul tried to tell the Jewish Christians in Rome not to worry so much about the other Jews. Their covenant with God is still in force; God does not reject whom God has chosen. And God’s final plans and deeds are not something that can be fully seen and known by humans. And this is where hope comes in.
Paul realized that the Roman Christians were facing dire problems, including terrible persecution by the pagans. The worst persecution of Christians in Rome began under the Emperor Nero in the year 64, but already, by the time Paul wrote this letter, sometime between 57-59, the Christians were under duress. And so, Paul was not only trying to comfort them, but also reassure them that it is not only they who are suffering, but the whole creation is laboring in pain, waiting for something new to arrive. Although they cannot see the final outcome, yet they must live in hope. They are saved in hope. And when you are surrounded by so many problems that you can do very little about, hope is something substantial to cling to.
Matthew’s gospel, written almost 30 years after Paul’s Letter, shows us a community also facing challenges. Persecution was not like that in Rome, but there was this ever present tension between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians and the role that the Jewish Law should play in the lives of Christians. Everything was all mixed up, mixed together: gentile Christians, Jewish Christians and the Jewish law. People were not comfortable with all this mixture; they would have liked a more unified and simplified community, with everyone in agreement. But this was not how it was. And so there was this temptation to expel people, who did not rightly conform. If you don’t believe what we believe, then you have no place here. And this is an ongoing temptation, especially in religion. No wonder we have so much fracturing of religious communities. We have Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed and Reconstructionist Jews, Protestants, divided into many denominations, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Greek and Russian Orthodox, all part of the Christian communion. Throughout our own Christian history, we have heard the threat of hell being used against those who failed to embrace beliefs that some group defined as absolutely essential for salvation.
But notice that Matthew’s gospel is careful about quick judgments. Yes, there are weeds among the wheat; yes, there is evil, but you must be careful how you deal with it, lest you destroy too much. Besides, no human is the ultimate judge, and though finite judgments can be made in life; in fact, sometimes they must be made, yet they are never the final word. And when we think we have spoken the last word, we are living in delusion.
Since we live at such a great distance from the Roman and the Matthean Christians, it is easy for us to feel their issues are abstract, irrelevant to our lives. After all, we are not worried about the role of Jewish law in Christian belief. And we are not facing the persecution the Christians in Rome had to face. But when you think back to Katie and her Nana, and consider the moral judgment facing them both, it does not feel so distant or abstract. Judgment is a way we often console ourselves with the thought that the person or people who have done horrible wrongs have gotten or will get their due. 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, suffering in hell. How wrong he was. To exalt in anyone’s suffering is a sin; to wish hell for anyone is always sinful. And that is why we need God: because on our own we so often desire the wrong things. On our own we are often consoled by the wrong things. Hope in the final healing and restoration of all creation is what is what is worthy of us, and it is for this that we look to God.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 23, 2023
Romans 8: 18-24
Matthew 24-30
In all my 40 years of ordination I have had only one REALLY serious question about hell, and it came from an eight year old, whose 37 year old mother, Elizabeth, was dying of a brain tumor. You heard the story before: Elizabeth, a brilliant neurosurgeon, struck with a deadly brain tumor, and her husband, the love of her life, a cardiac surgeon, who lost courage and ran, because he could not bear to see the love of his life die. “God forgive me,” he said, “I just cannot do it.” Elizabeth was a remarkable woman, because she understood that her husband’s greatest enemy was death, and even as a doctor, he could not handle it. So, how could he handle a dying wife? Though Elizabeth died broken hearted, she did not die bitter. Understanding saved her from the cruel clutches of a bitter heart and spirit.
Elizabeth’s eight year old daughter, Katie, was visiting her mother in the hospital one day, and she later asked me, ”Is my Daddy going to hell? That’s what my Nana said; she said he is going to suffer forever. But I don’t want my Daddy to go to hell. My mommy is going to go to heaven, my Nana said, but there is no room there for Daddy. Is that true?”
I told her I did not think so, but what I said is not the point of this sermon, so I am not going to expand on what I said. But I think we can all understand the rage of Katie’s Nana, who was Elizabeth’s mother. And we also understand how and why human beings make judgments, because we make them as well. We hold people accountable, and when they fail, especially miserably and cruelly, our judgments can be harsh. Are not we harsh with Putin, or the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia? And our own nation is hardly immune to severe judgment. What about slavery which many Christians at the time justified? Or how about the incarceration of the Japanese on the West Coast during World War ll? Yes, we judge, though we have heard Jesus say, “Do not judge, lest you be judged.” But the simple truth is in the real world it is impossible to avoid making judgments. After all, there is both good and evil in our world, and it is critically important to be able to tell the difference.
Our two readings this morning are indeed concerned with judgment but also with hope. Now I know many Christians today do not like Paul. He has some very antiquated and troubling notions about women, and to many he seems sin obsessed, focused on the flesh, which people tend to equate with the body. But flesh is a term Paul used to indicate opposition to God. Flesh is essentially the human tendency to be self- centered, to turn back onto oneself. Indeed, Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, defined sin as a curvature of the soul, a movement back into the self, rather than a movement outward toward others and God, which will expand and grow the self.
Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Rome in the midst of a great many challenges. Paul’s writings, by the way, are the oldest in the New Testament, thirty and forty years older than the earliest gospel, which is Mark, believed to be written around the year 70. The Roman historian Suetonius claimed that in the year 40, the emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome because of some disturbance caused by “Christus,” most likely Christ. Some of the expelled Jews had become Christian, and after Claudius’ death, they returned to Rome. The Christian Jews thought all Jews should become like them, followers of Christ. And in this Letter Paul tried to tell the Jewish Christians in Rome not to worry so much about the other Jews. Their covenant with God is still in force; God does not reject whom God has chosen. And God’s final plans and deeds are not something that can be fully seen and known by humans. And this is where hope comes in.
Paul realized that the Roman Christians were facing dire problems, including terrible persecution by the pagans. The worst persecution of Christians in Rome began under the Emperor Nero in the year 64, but already, by the time Paul wrote this letter, sometime between 57-59, the Christians were under duress. And so, Paul was not only trying to comfort them, but also reassure them that it is not only they who are suffering, but the whole creation is laboring in pain, waiting for something new to arrive. Although they cannot see the final outcome, yet they must live in hope. They are saved in hope. And when you are surrounded by so many problems that you can do very little about, hope is something substantial to cling to.
Matthew’s gospel, written almost 30 years after Paul’s Letter, shows us a community also facing challenges. Persecution was not like that in Rome, but there was this ever present tension between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians and the role that the Jewish Law should play in the lives of Christians. Everything was all mixed up, mixed together: gentile Christians, Jewish Christians and the Jewish law. People were not comfortable with all this mixture; they would have liked a more unified and simplified community, with everyone in agreement. But this was not how it was. And so there was this temptation to expel people, who did not rightly conform. If you don’t believe what we believe, then you have no place here. And this is an ongoing temptation, especially in religion. No wonder we have so much fracturing of religious communities. We have Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed and Reconstructionist Jews, Protestants, divided into many denominations, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Greek and Russian Orthodox, all part of the Christian communion. Throughout our own Christian history, we have heard the threat of hell being used against those who failed to embrace beliefs that some group defined as absolutely essential for salvation.
But notice that Matthew’s gospel is careful about quick judgments. Yes, there are weeds among the wheat; yes, there is evil, but you must be careful how you deal with it, lest you destroy too much. Besides, no human is the ultimate judge, and though finite judgments can be made in life; in fact, sometimes they must be made, yet they are never the final word. And when we think we have spoken the last word, we are living in delusion.
Since we live at such a great distance from the Roman and the Matthean Christians, it is easy for us to feel their issues are abstract, irrelevant to our lives. After all, we are not worried about the role of Jewish law in Christian belief. And we are not facing the persecution the Christians in Rome had to face. But when you think back to Katie and her Nana, and consider the moral judgment facing them both, it does not feel so distant or abstract. Judgment is a way we often console ourselves with the thought that the person or people who have done horrible wrongs have gotten or will get their due. 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, suffering in hell. How wrong he was. To exalt in anyone’s suffering is a sin; to wish hell for anyone is always sinful. And that is why we need God: because on our own we so often desire the wrong things. On our own we are often consoled by the wrong things. Hope in the final healing and restoration of all creation is what is what is worthy of us, and it is for this that we look to God.
July 20, 2023
Dear Friends,
As I have written before, I am absolutely blown away by the James Webb Telescope, which is showing us images of stars being formed, stars dying, galaxies beyond what any previous telescope has been able to see. And we have seen some images of black holes. Black holes also fascinate me, because, well, they are beyond mysterious. A black hole is where the gravitational force is so strong that NOTHING can escape it. Everything that approaches the edge of a black hole, including light, gets pulled in. And there is NOTHING in the known universe that is faster than light, so even light’s amazing speed cannot outrun the reach of a black hole.
Nearly every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, and 100 BILLION other galaxies, visible from earth, show a super massive black hole at the center. The bigger the galaxy, the more massive is the central black hole, but no one knows why. It’s a great mystery, which astronomers and physicists are pondering. Of the billions and billions of stars in our Milky Way, only about 1 in 1000 is massive enough to become a black hole. Consider this: our sun is not massive enough to become a black hole, but a star weighing 25 times the weight of the sun might well become a black hole.
Black holes are formed when a star begins to run out of fuel, and then it starts to collapse before finally exploding. The outer layers of the star are thrown out into the far reaches of space, but the inner layer implodes, becoming denser and denser until there is too much matter for the limited space. The core then completely collapses, forming a black hole.
In 2019 the first image of a black hole was captured from the galaxy known as Messier 87, or M87. On April 10, 2019 the image was released to the public. Many different physicists and astronomers as well as reporters were there for the release of the image, and people began spontaneously clapping and cheering. In 2017 the black hole had been discovered, but it took two years of analysis from 8 radio observatories on 6 mountains in 4 different continents to retrieve enough information to get the image and finally release it.
Einstein’s mathematics had predicted that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping both matter and energy, but he did not like the idea. He thought it too weird. So, when black holes were finally discovered and the images could be seen, the great genius was vindicated. So, Einstein had been right all along, though even he had doubted it. Einstein also said that space-time can bend, rip and expand, and that too seemed weird.
Yes, weird, but true and wonderful. In 2003 the biggest, oldest and lowest note ever heard in the universe was “picked up”--a B flat note, 57 octaves below middle C. The sound appeared as sound waves emanating from the edge of a super massive black hole in the Galaxy NGC 1275.
We are on the cusp of such extraordinary knowledge that we should all be in awe---in awe of this incredible creation and in awe of the scientific minds that have been able to figure out so much about this extraordinary universe and beyond. Remember, it is human beings who have made the telescopes and other instruments that have allowed us to cross barriers of knowledge and learn something startingly new.
I recently read a review of a book called God After Einstein: What is Really Going on in the Universe by John Haught. Haught is apparently a bit annoyed by what he sees as an obsession with the beginning of creation, which is what intrigues cosmologists and physicists. Haught thinks that the emerging future rather than the past is what is truly fascinating. But what can we possibly know about the future? We can predict, of course, and some of our predictions are probably close to the truth---such as the prediction that the sun will one day run out of energy. And yet prediction is not exactly the same as knowledge of an event that has already transpired. So, I applaud the study of creation’s beginnings and I think such knowledge is almost too wonderful to know. We should all be thankful there are people, who push against the limits of knowledge with the FAITH that there is finally nothing to fear from knowledge. It is all about how we use what we know, and indeed, sometimes people do use knowledge for nefarious ends. Yet we can celebrate the ever expanding universe of knowledge, which should make us ever grateful to be alive in this particular time. None of us really knows what God is up to, but we can hazard a guess that whatever it is, it is pretty wonderful.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
As I have written before, I am absolutely blown away by the James Webb Telescope, which is showing us images of stars being formed, stars dying, galaxies beyond what any previous telescope has been able to see. And we have seen some images of black holes. Black holes also fascinate me, because, well, they are beyond mysterious. A black hole is where the gravitational force is so strong that NOTHING can escape it. Everything that approaches the edge of a black hole, including light, gets pulled in. And there is NOTHING in the known universe that is faster than light, so even light’s amazing speed cannot outrun the reach of a black hole.
Nearly every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, and 100 BILLION other galaxies, visible from earth, show a super massive black hole at the center. The bigger the galaxy, the more massive is the central black hole, but no one knows why. It’s a great mystery, which astronomers and physicists are pondering. Of the billions and billions of stars in our Milky Way, only about 1 in 1000 is massive enough to become a black hole. Consider this: our sun is not massive enough to become a black hole, but a star weighing 25 times the weight of the sun might well become a black hole.
Black holes are formed when a star begins to run out of fuel, and then it starts to collapse before finally exploding. The outer layers of the star are thrown out into the far reaches of space, but the inner layer implodes, becoming denser and denser until there is too much matter for the limited space. The core then completely collapses, forming a black hole.
In 2019 the first image of a black hole was captured from the galaxy known as Messier 87, or M87. On April 10, 2019 the image was released to the public. Many different physicists and astronomers as well as reporters were there for the release of the image, and people began spontaneously clapping and cheering. In 2017 the black hole had been discovered, but it took two years of analysis from 8 radio observatories on 6 mountains in 4 different continents to retrieve enough information to get the image and finally release it.
Einstein’s mathematics had predicted that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping both matter and energy, but he did not like the idea. He thought it too weird. So, when black holes were finally discovered and the images could be seen, the great genius was vindicated. So, Einstein had been right all along, though even he had doubted it. Einstein also said that space-time can bend, rip and expand, and that too seemed weird.
Yes, weird, but true and wonderful. In 2003 the biggest, oldest and lowest note ever heard in the universe was “picked up”--a B flat note, 57 octaves below middle C. The sound appeared as sound waves emanating from the edge of a super massive black hole in the Galaxy NGC 1275.
We are on the cusp of such extraordinary knowledge that we should all be in awe---in awe of this incredible creation and in awe of the scientific minds that have been able to figure out so much about this extraordinary universe and beyond. Remember, it is human beings who have made the telescopes and other instruments that have allowed us to cross barriers of knowledge and learn something startingly new.
I recently read a review of a book called God After Einstein: What is Really Going on in the Universe by John Haught. Haught is apparently a bit annoyed by what he sees as an obsession with the beginning of creation, which is what intrigues cosmologists and physicists. Haught thinks that the emerging future rather than the past is what is truly fascinating. But what can we possibly know about the future? We can predict, of course, and some of our predictions are probably close to the truth---such as the prediction that the sun will one day run out of energy. And yet prediction is not exactly the same as knowledge of an event that has already transpired. So, I applaud the study of creation’s beginnings and I think such knowledge is almost too wonderful to know. We should all be thankful there are people, who push against the limits of knowledge with the FAITH that there is finally nothing to fear from knowledge. It is all about how we use what we know, and indeed, sometimes people do use knowledge for nefarious ends. Yet we can celebrate the ever expanding universe of knowledge, which should make us ever grateful to be alive in this particular time. None of us really knows what God is up to, but we can hazard a guess that whatever it is, it is pretty wonderful.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Scattered Seeds
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 16, 2023
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
I have this fascinating book, The 100: The Most Influential Persons in History by Michael Hart. The list is the author’s opinion, and the criteria he used was both the achievement and its impact on history. No 1 is Mohammed, famous for not only beginning a new religion and spirituality, but also as a secular ruler, he brought together a group of nomadic tribes that conquered in 100 years not only what we call the Middle East, but also reached deeply into what is now Europe until the Muslims were stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732. No 2 is Isaac Newton, whose invention of calculus and the laws of motion have been the bedrock upon which so much of our scientific knowledge stands. Jesus is no. 3, a religious genius, Hart says, some of whose ethical principles, like loving the enemy, are unique in world history. Since Jesus did not establish a religious empire---It was the Apostle Paul who evangelized the gentile world---the author gave Jesus third place. Yet, there is no denying that Jesus’ parables are unequaled in their ability to draw people in and move them to them see life from a new and different perspective. And that is what we have in today’s lesson from Matthew.
Here we see Jesus in a boat, facing a crowd by the Sea of Galilee, and he tells them a story. Jesus has been very busy, doing a lot of teaching and healing, but he has been getting into a great deal of trouble with the religious authorities. They don’t like that he hangs around with the wrong kind of people and heals on the Sabbath. And so, to confound them, he begins to teach in parables, which the wise and learned do not understand, while the poor and the uneducated get the point. Parables do far more than communicate information. They dig down deeply; they burrow into our minds and our hearts, pulling thoughts and feelings out of us that we don’t realize are there. And they often turn our eyes in another direction, allowing us to see something we did not notice before.
And what do we notice? Well, we notice this Sower carelessly throwing all these seeds around. Now Jesus lived in an agrarian society, and the people who came to hear him preach, knew how to plant and harvest. They would have been shocked at the behavior of this particular sower, who did not care in the least, if he wasted the seeds. Besides, they also knew how important it is to prepare the soil for planting. Archaeologists, have found plows in Israel from 1000 years before Jesus, and they believe that the plow was the most important implement a farmer owned. Rocky soil in Israel was (and still is) common along with a lot of thorns and thistles, and so breaking up the soil is quite important. When Jesus began to tell his story, “A sower went out to sow, and some seed fell on the path and other seed fell on rocky ground and other seed fell among thorns,” people must have started scratching their heads: What kind of foolish farmer is this? And they probably quickly realized that this parable is not really about a farmer at all, but about something or someone else.
Now there are a few things we should understand about the time and the place of Matthew’s gospel, written for a mixed and even divided community of both Jewish and gentile Christians. Though both groups were followers of Jesus, there was tension between them with Jewish Christians, insisting that Jewish law must be honored, while gentile Christians extolled their freedom from the Law. But neither of these perspectives is really the proper soil---if you insist on clinging to it as the only way.
Secondly, the people in Matthew’s community were seeing a lot of new converts, but not all remained as Christians. There was kind of a swinging door with some new converts, wildly enthusiastic at first, but then they wavered and began to look elsewhere. Some returned to their Jewish roots and the synagogues that were springing up, and then there was the new temple built to the goddess Isis. A beautiful temple to a beautiful goddess does have its attractions.
Now some of the Christians in Matthew’s community blamed themselves for these disaffections. What are we doing wrong? Why are not all these people remaining with us? But in this parable Jesus seems to be relieving them of some of the responsibility. The soil is the soil, after all, and you cannot be responsible for what is not your responsibility. You can only do what you can do, and then, well, what happens is what happens. You throw the seed out, hoping that some of it will indeed take root. But the truth is we cannot always tell what the outcome will be. Sometimes we think something is poor soil, a waste of time and energy, but then we are surprised to see the blossoms.
Some years ago, when I worked in a state mental hospital on Long Island, there was this Roman Catholic priest, Father Tom, who certainly did not seem like a fit for the job. For years he had been a Latin scholar at Notre Dame University in Indiana. He was old enough to be retired, but he apparently wanted to work. Well, one day, all these beautiful paintings began to appear all over the wards---in the hallways and sometimes even in the rooms. Day after day there were more paintings, and no one claimed to know from where they came. And then a few weeks later these beautifully embroidered coverlets began appearing on patient’s beds. One of the nurses said, “Why these things don’t belong in this bleak place, where they cannot be properly appreciated. Things this gorgeous are wasted here.
But then something very unexpected began to happen. One patient, staring at all the paintings, asked for some paper and colored pencils, and she began to draw--- very well. It turned out in her younger years she had loved to draw. Another patient asked for some paints and paper, and he began to paint. In his 20’s before he became ill, he had been an art teacher. And somebody else, a schizophrenic woman, hospitalized for over 50 years, took out this old linen hand towel, frayed all around the edges, but beautifully embroidered with flowers. Very haltingly she told the nurse, “This is what I used to do---years ago. I made beautiful things before I became ugly.”
Father Tom was the one who brought his paintings into the hospital. And the coverlets were his mother’s work from decades gone by. “Beauty makes an impact,” Father Tom, insisted. God is beautiful, and God plants beauty like a seed, blossoming and growing, sometimes in places we do not expect.”
In Matthew’s parable God is the sower, throwing out seeds everywhere, because no one is too far from God’s grace. And so, God asks us to take risks---throw out the seeds not in order to be successful, but to be faithful, faithful to the one who does not give up on anyone. And if that is not Good News---I do not know what is.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 16, 2023
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
I have this fascinating book, The 100: The Most Influential Persons in History by Michael Hart. The list is the author’s opinion, and the criteria he used was both the achievement and its impact on history. No 1 is Mohammed, famous for not only beginning a new religion and spirituality, but also as a secular ruler, he brought together a group of nomadic tribes that conquered in 100 years not only what we call the Middle East, but also reached deeply into what is now Europe until the Muslims were stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732. No 2 is Isaac Newton, whose invention of calculus and the laws of motion have been the bedrock upon which so much of our scientific knowledge stands. Jesus is no. 3, a religious genius, Hart says, some of whose ethical principles, like loving the enemy, are unique in world history. Since Jesus did not establish a religious empire---It was the Apostle Paul who evangelized the gentile world---the author gave Jesus third place. Yet, there is no denying that Jesus’ parables are unequaled in their ability to draw people in and move them to them see life from a new and different perspective. And that is what we have in today’s lesson from Matthew.
Here we see Jesus in a boat, facing a crowd by the Sea of Galilee, and he tells them a story. Jesus has been very busy, doing a lot of teaching and healing, but he has been getting into a great deal of trouble with the religious authorities. They don’t like that he hangs around with the wrong kind of people and heals on the Sabbath. And so, to confound them, he begins to teach in parables, which the wise and learned do not understand, while the poor and the uneducated get the point. Parables do far more than communicate information. They dig down deeply; they burrow into our minds and our hearts, pulling thoughts and feelings out of us that we don’t realize are there. And they often turn our eyes in another direction, allowing us to see something we did not notice before.
And what do we notice? Well, we notice this Sower carelessly throwing all these seeds around. Now Jesus lived in an agrarian society, and the people who came to hear him preach, knew how to plant and harvest. They would have been shocked at the behavior of this particular sower, who did not care in the least, if he wasted the seeds. Besides, they also knew how important it is to prepare the soil for planting. Archaeologists, have found plows in Israel from 1000 years before Jesus, and they believe that the plow was the most important implement a farmer owned. Rocky soil in Israel was (and still is) common along with a lot of thorns and thistles, and so breaking up the soil is quite important. When Jesus began to tell his story, “A sower went out to sow, and some seed fell on the path and other seed fell on rocky ground and other seed fell among thorns,” people must have started scratching their heads: What kind of foolish farmer is this? And they probably quickly realized that this parable is not really about a farmer at all, but about something or someone else.
Now there are a few things we should understand about the time and the place of Matthew’s gospel, written for a mixed and even divided community of both Jewish and gentile Christians. Though both groups were followers of Jesus, there was tension between them with Jewish Christians, insisting that Jewish law must be honored, while gentile Christians extolled their freedom from the Law. But neither of these perspectives is really the proper soil---if you insist on clinging to it as the only way.
Secondly, the people in Matthew’s community were seeing a lot of new converts, but not all remained as Christians. There was kind of a swinging door with some new converts, wildly enthusiastic at first, but then they wavered and began to look elsewhere. Some returned to their Jewish roots and the synagogues that were springing up, and then there was the new temple built to the goddess Isis. A beautiful temple to a beautiful goddess does have its attractions.
Now some of the Christians in Matthew’s community blamed themselves for these disaffections. What are we doing wrong? Why are not all these people remaining with us? But in this parable Jesus seems to be relieving them of some of the responsibility. The soil is the soil, after all, and you cannot be responsible for what is not your responsibility. You can only do what you can do, and then, well, what happens is what happens. You throw the seed out, hoping that some of it will indeed take root. But the truth is we cannot always tell what the outcome will be. Sometimes we think something is poor soil, a waste of time and energy, but then we are surprised to see the blossoms.
Some years ago, when I worked in a state mental hospital on Long Island, there was this Roman Catholic priest, Father Tom, who certainly did not seem like a fit for the job. For years he had been a Latin scholar at Notre Dame University in Indiana. He was old enough to be retired, but he apparently wanted to work. Well, one day, all these beautiful paintings began to appear all over the wards---in the hallways and sometimes even in the rooms. Day after day there were more paintings, and no one claimed to know from where they came. And then a few weeks later these beautifully embroidered coverlets began appearing on patient’s beds. One of the nurses said, “Why these things don’t belong in this bleak place, where they cannot be properly appreciated. Things this gorgeous are wasted here.
But then something very unexpected began to happen. One patient, staring at all the paintings, asked for some paper and colored pencils, and she began to draw--- very well. It turned out in her younger years she had loved to draw. Another patient asked for some paints and paper, and he began to paint. In his 20’s before he became ill, he had been an art teacher. And somebody else, a schizophrenic woman, hospitalized for over 50 years, took out this old linen hand towel, frayed all around the edges, but beautifully embroidered with flowers. Very haltingly she told the nurse, “This is what I used to do---years ago. I made beautiful things before I became ugly.”
Father Tom was the one who brought his paintings into the hospital. And the coverlets were his mother’s work from decades gone by. “Beauty makes an impact,” Father Tom, insisted. God is beautiful, and God plants beauty like a seed, blossoming and growing, sometimes in places we do not expect.”
In Matthew’s parable God is the sower, throwing out seeds everywhere, because no one is too far from God’s grace. And so, God asks us to take risks---throw out the seeds not in order to be successful, but to be faithful, faithful to the one who does not give up on anyone. And if that is not Good News---I do not know what is.
July 11, 2023
I know someone who for years taught children about ecology and the environment. He worked in an alternative school, where he constantly had children outside to look at and study the natural world. If they complained about being bored, he would say, “If you are bored, you are NOT paying close attention.” Someone else said, “Our job is to move through the world, wonder smitten by reality.” Indeed, the world is an amazing place, and we should be wonder struck every single day.
A classical pianist told me when he was seven, he was awe struck by listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. “My brother,” he said, “was not so struck by music, but he was fascinated by the stars in the night sky.” And so, it is ESSENTIAL, the pianist insisted, to know the experience of awe. The poet Walt Whitman agreed. He thought a blade of grass was just as awe inspiring as a gurgling brook or a geranium. It is all in the looking, in knowing how to pay close attention to what is around you.
The deeply spiritual G.K. Chesterton believed the object of the full life is “to dig for the submerged sense of wonder.” If you are not regularly blown away by something, you are not living fully. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, was deeply impressed by children’s ability to experience awe and wonder. For the young, wonder seems to happen naturally, and Rachel Carlson, the naturalist, whose book, Silent Spring, initiated the ecology movement, believed that the duty of parents and teachers is to support and expand the sense of wonder that it will be able to withstand the strains of boredom and disenchantment that come with later years.
Goethe wrote, “I am here that I may wonder,” and the writer, Herman Hesse, took up Goethe’s theme and expanded on it, believing that the proper aim of education is to create and expand a sense of wonder for the world.
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
The Bible claims, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Fear here is not quaking in terror but suggests reverence and awe. The Book of Psalms is filled with praise for a God whose creative impulse not only gives us a beautiful and diverse creation, but also invites awe for the majesty and power of this mysterious God who makes all life new. The psalmist even wonders what it is about the human creature that God would take such an active interest in the human being. And pondering that question invites awe and wonder.
It may be that wonder is at the very root of religion. From the very beginning of our species, we have looked upon a vast world and pondered its magnificence and what is behind and above it, and what or who created it. The questions keep coming and the questions inspire awe, for even if we are unable to answer them, we still are smitten with wonder as we ponder.
Psalm 19:1: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 65:8: The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.
Psalm 34:9-10: Worship in awe and wonder, all you who’ve been made holy! For all who fear him will feast with plenty. Even the strong and the wealthy grow weak and hungry, but those who passionately pursue the Lord will never lack any good thing.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
I know someone who for years taught children about ecology and the environment. He worked in an alternative school, where he constantly had children outside to look at and study the natural world. If they complained about being bored, he would say, “If you are bored, you are NOT paying close attention.” Someone else said, “Our job is to move through the world, wonder smitten by reality.” Indeed, the world is an amazing place, and we should be wonder struck every single day.
A classical pianist told me when he was seven, he was awe struck by listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. “My brother,” he said, “was not so struck by music, but he was fascinated by the stars in the night sky.” And so, it is ESSENTIAL, the pianist insisted, to know the experience of awe. The poet Walt Whitman agreed. He thought a blade of grass was just as awe inspiring as a gurgling brook or a geranium. It is all in the looking, in knowing how to pay close attention to what is around you.
The deeply spiritual G.K. Chesterton believed the object of the full life is “to dig for the submerged sense of wonder.” If you are not regularly blown away by something, you are not living fully. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, was deeply impressed by children’s ability to experience awe and wonder. For the young, wonder seems to happen naturally, and Rachel Carlson, the naturalist, whose book, Silent Spring, initiated the ecology movement, believed that the duty of parents and teachers is to support and expand the sense of wonder that it will be able to withstand the strains of boredom and disenchantment that come with later years.
Goethe wrote, “I am here that I may wonder,” and the writer, Herman Hesse, took up Goethe’s theme and expanded on it, believing that the proper aim of education is to create and expand a sense of wonder for the world.
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
The Bible claims, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Fear here is not quaking in terror but suggests reverence and awe. The Book of Psalms is filled with praise for a God whose creative impulse not only gives us a beautiful and diverse creation, but also invites awe for the majesty and power of this mysterious God who makes all life new. The psalmist even wonders what it is about the human creature that God would take such an active interest in the human being. And pondering that question invites awe and wonder.
It may be that wonder is at the very root of religion. From the very beginning of our species, we have looked upon a vast world and pondered its magnificence and what is behind and above it, and what or who created it. The questions keep coming and the questions inspire awe, for even if we are unable to answer them, we still are smitten with wonder as we ponder.
Psalm 19:1: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 65:8: The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.
Psalm 34:9-10: Worship in awe and wonder, all you who’ve been made holy! For all who fear him will feast with plenty. Even the strong and the wealthy grow weak and hungry, but those who passionately pursue the Lord will never lack any good thing.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE SELF IN BONDAGE
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 9, 202
Romans 7: 15-25a
Every year the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary add new words, since language is dynamic and changes. And each year the editors also decide which word is to be named Word of the Year, meaning that the word reflects an important cultural or social shift, capturing in some way the spirit of the Year. For example, in 2007 the Word of the Year was carbon footprint; in 2008 it was credit crunch and in 2009 it was unfriend. In 2013 the Word of the Year was selfie. Gaslighting, meaning to grossly mislead someone for personal advantage was the word in 2021. Last year’s Word of the year was Goblin mode, which means behavior that is self indulgent and lazy.
Now I find it pretty interesting that lately the words, like selfie, gaslighting and goblin mode, put the self at the center of behaviors that can be narcissistic. I remember noticing around the year 2010 or so, when I would travel, how many people were taking pictures of themselves at various sites. While on a hiking trip in Italy, one of the guides commented on a particular hiker, who was obsessive about taking his own picture. The leader thought the behavior was over the top for someone in his 50’s. Adolescents are self obsessed; that is the nature of the beast, he said to me, but we are supposed to outgrow it.
Of course, we all understand how important it is to develop a healthy sense of self. Our job is to grow a strong and integrated self, as we learn who we are and what it is we believe is right and true and important. This does not happen all at once. We learn who we are as we grow and experience life in all its varied shades and colors and make decisions and take responsibility for the decisions we make.
I had a colleague, a Presbyterian minister, whose mother, when he was growing up, would tell him, whenever there was a question about the appropriateness of his behavior, Remember Who You Are. That was her way of reminding her son how he had been raised and that there were certain expectations about his behavior. People with weak or unformed identities can find themselves being led by others to do things, not because they really want to, but because they are overly impressionable and do not know how to resist peer pressure. We human beings are imitative creatures, so it matters profoundly the kind of people and community with whom we live and interact. My colleague grew up in the South, and when JFK was assassinated, he came home from school and told his mother how some people in the class cheered when they heard the news that this SOB, pushing civil rights in their faces, was dead. Well, his shocked mother said, in her sternest voice, “There will be no cheering in this house. Remember who you are.”
In Paul’s Letter to the Christian Church at Rome, he was certainly very concerned about who the Christian community in Rome was. He wanted them to remember who they are. Paul cared deeply about Christian community and the formation of Christian character. He wanted the members of the Roman Church to live as the redeemed people that through Jesus Christ they already were, but he also knew the power of sin. Now we tend to think of sin as specific wrong deeds, such as lying and stealing. But this is not the Pauline understanding of sin. Sin for Paul is a force lurking deep within all people, leading them to make decisions and act in ways contrary to God’s intention for human life. And so, the human project can be understood as a taming and disciplining of that force. Indeed, this is how Judaism has understood the human condition. The Jewish interpretation is that we human beings are born with a tendency toward both good and evil, and so we must learn to exercise dominion over the one that goodness might flourish. This is not achieved in an instant; it requires a lifetime of instruction, practice, and discipline.
Now Paul as a Pharisee was certainly conversant with this understanding. He understood that the Jewish Law---all 613 commandments---- was designed to discipline people, to bring the stubborn and rebellious will under control. Paul had spent his life loving and serving this Law, or at least trying to. But he discovered that all too often he could not bend and discipline his will. He knew what was right, and sometimes he could do the right, but there were other times he failed miserably. And so, we have his poignant words: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. This is the human condition. And we are all old enough to know precisely what Paul is talking about, because we have all been there.
Some years ago, when I was working as a chaplain in a hospice, I became acquainted with a friend of one my patients. Both men were Jewish, both survivors of the Holocaust. Daniel was the friend, who faithfully visited Joshua, and Daniel often spoke with me while Joshua was sleeping. He told me this riveting story about how he and his parents and 8 year old sister, were escaping from Poland after the German invasion in World War ll. “We were almost out of Poland,” he said, “when my mother fell om a rock and broke her leg, a compound fracture. There was nothing to be done. My parents told me to go ahead. “Take your sister and go. Survive and live your life.” I was 15 years old. “Go”, my parents commanded. “My sister would not come but clung to my mother, crying. I never turned around. I could not bear to see them standing there, though my sister’s cries, yet ring in my ears. I ran and hid, eventually making my way across Europe with the help of many good Christian people, finally to Israel and then after the War ended to the United States. I became a lawyer and a very successful one at that. My success was my revenge against the Germans. As you can imagine, I was very moved by Daniel’s story.
But the day that Joshua died, as Daniel stood next to the bed, where his dead friend lay, Daniel added the final chapter to the story. Joshua is the only person who knows this story, but I am now going to tell it to you, since over these months, you have listened to me go on and on. When I was in hiding in the woods, still in Poland, not at all sure I would survive, I saw and heard this German family: a mother, father and two young children. The father was dressed in a Nazi uniform, and they were picnicking in a place just beyond the woods where I was hiding. I crouched down very low and was very, very quiet. I could feel this rage gather up in my soul, and so, very carefully and deliberately I took the gun my father gave me and shot them all dead. My father was a good shot, and he taught me. I knew it was wrong; I even struggled with my conscience for a very short while. But in the end, I avenged my family. It was a stupid thing to do because I could have so easily been caught.
I was only 15, so perhaps I can be forgiven, but now, all these many decades later, I cannot even say I am sorry. I know it was wrong, but I also know how strong the sting of revenge was, and if I had the chance even now in my old age, would I do the same thing all over again? I think I would. Joshua and I have discussed this many times, and he says I am forgiven. But how can I be forgiven when that is not even what I am asking for?
Paul would understand this all too well. He understood how deeply sin lurks within us and that we cannot solve the problem of sin by an act of knowledge. We can know what is good and right, but still fail to do it. And there may even be times we are not sorry for the wrong we know we have done. The self can indeed be in bondage--- to rage, revenge, to whatever captures us not only in our weakness but also in our strength.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 9, 202
Romans 7: 15-25a
Every year the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary add new words, since language is dynamic and changes. And each year the editors also decide which word is to be named Word of the Year, meaning that the word reflects an important cultural or social shift, capturing in some way the spirit of the Year. For example, in 2007 the Word of the Year was carbon footprint; in 2008 it was credit crunch and in 2009 it was unfriend. In 2013 the Word of the Year was selfie. Gaslighting, meaning to grossly mislead someone for personal advantage was the word in 2021. Last year’s Word of the year was Goblin mode, which means behavior that is self indulgent and lazy.
Now I find it pretty interesting that lately the words, like selfie, gaslighting and goblin mode, put the self at the center of behaviors that can be narcissistic. I remember noticing around the year 2010 or so, when I would travel, how many people were taking pictures of themselves at various sites. While on a hiking trip in Italy, one of the guides commented on a particular hiker, who was obsessive about taking his own picture. The leader thought the behavior was over the top for someone in his 50’s. Adolescents are self obsessed; that is the nature of the beast, he said to me, but we are supposed to outgrow it.
Of course, we all understand how important it is to develop a healthy sense of self. Our job is to grow a strong and integrated self, as we learn who we are and what it is we believe is right and true and important. This does not happen all at once. We learn who we are as we grow and experience life in all its varied shades and colors and make decisions and take responsibility for the decisions we make.
I had a colleague, a Presbyterian minister, whose mother, when he was growing up, would tell him, whenever there was a question about the appropriateness of his behavior, Remember Who You Are. That was her way of reminding her son how he had been raised and that there were certain expectations about his behavior. People with weak or unformed identities can find themselves being led by others to do things, not because they really want to, but because they are overly impressionable and do not know how to resist peer pressure. We human beings are imitative creatures, so it matters profoundly the kind of people and community with whom we live and interact. My colleague grew up in the South, and when JFK was assassinated, he came home from school and told his mother how some people in the class cheered when they heard the news that this SOB, pushing civil rights in their faces, was dead. Well, his shocked mother said, in her sternest voice, “There will be no cheering in this house. Remember who you are.”
In Paul’s Letter to the Christian Church at Rome, he was certainly very concerned about who the Christian community in Rome was. He wanted them to remember who they are. Paul cared deeply about Christian community and the formation of Christian character. He wanted the members of the Roman Church to live as the redeemed people that through Jesus Christ they already were, but he also knew the power of sin. Now we tend to think of sin as specific wrong deeds, such as lying and stealing. But this is not the Pauline understanding of sin. Sin for Paul is a force lurking deep within all people, leading them to make decisions and act in ways contrary to God’s intention for human life. And so, the human project can be understood as a taming and disciplining of that force. Indeed, this is how Judaism has understood the human condition. The Jewish interpretation is that we human beings are born with a tendency toward both good and evil, and so we must learn to exercise dominion over the one that goodness might flourish. This is not achieved in an instant; it requires a lifetime of instruction, practice, and discipline.
Now Paul as a Pharisee was certainly conversant with this understanding. He understood that the Jewish Law---all 613 commandments---- was designed to discipline people, to bring the stubborn and rebellious will under control. Paul had spent his life loving and serving this Law, or at least trying to. But he discovered that all too often he could not bend and discipline his will. He knew what was right, and sometimes he could do the right, but there were other times he failed miserably. And so, we have his poignant words: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. This is the human condition. And we are all old enough to know precisely what Paul is talking about, because we have all been there.
Some years ago, when I was working as a chaplain in a hospice, I became acquainted with a friend of one my patients. Both men were Jewish, both survivors of the Holocaust. Daniel was the friend, who faithfully visited Joshua, and Daniel often spoke with me while Joshua was sleeping. He told me this riveting story about how he and his parents and 8 year old sister, were escaping from Poland after the German invasion in World War ll. “We were almost out of Poland,” he said, “when my mother fell om a rock and broke her leg, a compound fracture. There was nothing to be done. My parents told me to go ahead. “Take your sister and go. Survive and live your life.” I was 15 years old. “Go”, my parents commanded. “My sister would not come but clung to my mother, crying. I never turned around. I could not bear to see them standing there, though my sister’s cries, yet ring in my ears. I ran and hid, eventually making my way across Europe with the help of many good Christian people, finally to Israel and then after the War ended to the United States. I became a lawyer and a very successful one at that. My success was my revenge against the Germans. As you can imagine, I was very moved by Daniel’s story.
But the day that Joshua died, as Daniel stood next to the bed, where his dead friend lay, Daniel added the final chapter to the story. Joshua is the only person who knows this story, but I am now going to tell it to you, since over these months, you have listened to me go on and on. When I was in hiding in the woods, still in Poland, not at all sure I would survive, I saw and heard this German family: a mother, father and two young children. The father was dressed in a Nazi uniform, and they were picnicking in a place just beyond the woods where I was hiding. I crouched down very low and was very, very quiet. I could feel this rage gather up in my soul, and so, very carefully and deliberately I took the gun my father gave me and shot them all dead. My father was a good shot, and he taught me. I knew it was wrong; I even struggled with my conscience for a very short while. But in the end, I avenged my family. It was a stupid thing to do because I could have so easily been caught.
I was only 15, so perhaps I can be forgiven, but now, all these many decades later, I cannot even say I am sorry. I know it was wrong, but I also know how strong the sting of revenge was, and if I had the chance even now in my old age, would I do the same thing all over again? I think I would. Joshua and I have discussed this many times, and he says I am forgiven. But how can I be forgiven when that is not even what I am asking for?
Paul would understand this all too well. He understood how deeply sin lurks within us and that we cannot solve the problem of sin by an act of knowledge. We can know what is good and right, but still fail to do it. And there may even be times we are not sorry for the wrong we know we have done. The self can indeed be in bondage--- to rage, revenge, to whatever captures us not only in our weakness but also in our strength.
July 6, 2023
Dear Friends,
Just this past Tuesday was July 4, and I imagine all across the country people celebrated it in different ways---picnics, fireworks, concerts, and for some a quiet day at home. But for Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the new nation, was not a happy day. He had been struggling with all sorts of problems for a number of months. He had turned 83 on April 13, and two months before his birthday, a beloved granddaughter, Ann Cary Randolph Bankhead, had died in childbirth with the former President inconsolably weeping in the room next to where she had died. Ann had suffered horribly at the hands of her abusive, alcoholic husband, and though Jefferson tried to help, there was very little he could do. Grief can choke the life out of anyone, yet grief was not his only burden. Though he had counseled the nation against debt and the banks that he said encouraged it, he was a spendthrift, especially when it came to his beloved home, Monticello. His debts were so severe that he was on the cusp of losing his home.
Yet as July 4 approached Jefferson was aware of the momentous occasion. The nation had survived 50 years, not an insignificant achievement. The Mayor of Washington, D.C. wanted a splendid celebration, and he invited the three surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, who was 83, John Adams, 90, and Charles Carroll from Maryland, who was 88. He also invited James Madison and James Monroe, two former Presidents. Monroe Carroll and Adams said their health would not permit it. Madison also declined and wrote a very nice letter, saluting the nation’s birthday with this line: “Ever honored will be the day which gave birth to a new nation and to a system of self-government, making it a new epoch in the history of man.” And then there was Jefferson, also suffering from poor health.
On June 24, 1826, Jefferson sat down to write a letter to Roger Weightman, mayor of Washington, in which he too declined the invitation. Jefferson wrote that he was flattered by the invitation. “I long to meet once more,” he wrote, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword.” And then, the same passion that had penned the Declaration of Independence 50 years before, poured forth:
May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some part sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self government. The form (of government) we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.
All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves let the annual return of this day, forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.
This letter went down in history as the last letter Jefferson ever wrote. Jefferson died on July 4 around noon. A few hours later, his friend and sometimes rival, John Adams, also died with Jefferson’s name on his lips. He did not know that his friend had already died, and Adams’ final words were, “Jefferson lives.”
We can rightly admire Jefferson, though we know of the deep contradictions in his life. He spoke eloquently of the “rights of man,” and yet he enslaved many. He fathered children by Sally Hemmings, a slave and his deceased wife’s half sister. Contradictions do indeed abound in his life as they do in most people’s lives. No wonder the Apostle Paul wrote these words in Romans: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do. That is the human condition---at least some of the time.
By the way, it turned out that the letter to the Washington Mayor was not really the last letter. On that same day, but later he wrote a letter coordinating a shipment of wine from France. The man, who so eloquently spoke of human rights and yet enslaved people, could not deny himself luxuries for which he could not pay.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Just this past Tuesday was July 4, and I imagine all across the country people celebrated it in different ways---picnics, fireworks, concerts, and for some a quiet day at home. But for Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the new nation, was not a happy day. He had been struggling with all sorts of problems for a number of months. He had turned 83 on April 13, and two months before his birthday, a beloved granddaughter, Ann Cary Randolph Bankhead, had died in childbirth with the former President inconsolably weeping in the room next to where she had died. Ann had suffered horribly at the hands of her abusive, alcoholic husband, and though Jefferson tried to help, there was very little he could do. Grief can choke the life out of anyone, yet grief was not his only burden. Though he had counseled the nation against debt and the banks that he said encouraged it, he was a spendthrift, especially when it came to his beloved home, Monticello. His debts were so severe that he was on the cusp of losing his home.
Yet as July 4 approached Jefferson was aware of the momentous occasion. The nation had survived 50 years, not an insignificant achievement. The Mayor of Washington, D.C. wanted a splendid celebration, and he invited the three surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, who was 83, John Adams, 90, and Charles Carroll from Maryland, who was 88. He also invited James Madison and James Monroe, two former Presidents. Monroe Carroll and Adams said their health would not permit it. Madison also declined and wrote a very nice letter, saluting the nation’s birthday with this line: “Ever honored will be the day which gave birth to a new nation and to a system of self-government, making it a new epoch in the history of man.” And then there was Jefferson, also suffering from poor health.
On June 24, 1826, Jefferson sat down to write a letter to Roger Weightman, mayor of Washington, in which he too declined the invitation. Jefferson wrote that he was flattered by the invitation. “I long to meet once more,” he wrote, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword.” And then, the same passion that had penned the Declaration of Independence 50 years before, poured forth:
May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some part sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self government. The form (of government) we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.
All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves let the annual return of this day, forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.
This letter went down in history as the last letter Jefferson ever wrote. Jefferson died on July 4 around noon. A few hours later, his friend and sometimes rival, John Adams, also died with Jefferson’s name on his lips. He did not know that his friend had already died, and Adams’ final words were, “Jefferson lives.”
We can rightly admire Jefferson, though we know of the deep contradictions in his life. He spoke eloquently of the “rights of man,” and yet he enslaved many. He fathered children by Sally Hemmings, a slave and his deceased wife’s half sister. Contradictions do indeed abound in his life as they do in most people’s lives. No wonder the Apostle Paul wrote these words in Romans: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do. That is the human condition---at least some of the time.
By the way, it turned out that the letter to the Washington Mayor was not really the last letter. On that same day, but later he wrote a letter coordinating a shipment of wine from France. The man, who so eloquently spoke of human rights and yet enslaved people, could not deny himself luxuries for which he could not pay.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A Text of Terror
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 2, 2023
Genesis 22: 1-14
There is no doubt that this story from Genesis is a very disturbing one. Some might even call it a text of terror. And so, we have ways to get around the disturbance and the terror. Our tradition is not biblically fundamentalist, meaning that we do not believe that the bible always describes exactly what happened when. We listen for the Word of God, not directly to the Word of God, which means we must search for it, interpret the text in its place and time as well as our place and time, since we realize that understanding grows and changes. One of my seminary professors used to remind us: You must consider what the text meant THEN and what it means NOW. And the meanings may not be the same.
When I was in seminary in the early 80’s, feminist interpretations were beginning to be heard, which simply means that women’s experiences were considered. And, of course, one of the first things we should notice in the Genesis story is that Sarah, Isaac’s mother, is completely left out. Her faith is apparently of no concern to God, let alone her feelings as a mother. And so, it is not unreasonable to ask: Can the text, bible be trusted, if women’s experiences are completely ignored?
Feminist interpretation points out that God appears here as a child abuser, and in that place and time, child sacrifice among the Canaanites was not uncommon. It was probably also practiced by the Israelites and under the Israelite King Josiah around the year 640 BC sites of child sacrifice were destroyed. Now some biblical interpreters have extended the analogy of child abuse to Jesus, who suffered horribly, because (according to orthodoxy) God required the perfect sacrifice from an unblemished, that is, a sinless human---the same way the Old Testament speaks of the sacrifice of the perfect, unblemished lamb. So, our questions today are different from questions asked then. We ask, “Is a God who would demand the death of the perfect lamb or human really this really the kind of God, worthy of human trust, love and devotion? Would God truly subject Abraham to such a test and also Isaac, who found himself bound to a rock with a knife poised at his throat? It interesting to note that some Jewish interpretation made the claim that Isaac was so traumatized by the experience that he was left damaged, which is why we hear almost nothing more about him in the bible.
So, this story does indeed trouble us, though we already know the outcome. God will not require Abraham to sacrifice his son, because he sees that Abraham is willing to make the offering. He passes this test of faith. And though none of us likes the test at all, we can ponder if there are indeed times in life when faith is truly tested. The 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote that sometimes the ethical is suspended in service to a higher calling. God’s commandment is “Do not murder,” but there are times we do: in self defense and also in war and assassination.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian and pastor, entered into the plot against Hitler’s life fully knowing what God’s commands are. He understood the ethical imperative to avoid murder, and yet he would murder Hitler, if the opportunity arose. But, and this is important, he NEVER said he knew an assassination was God’s command and will. Bonhoeffer made his decision; he suspended the normal ethical rule in service to something else, something he determined was higher and more important. He prayed and he pondered, and the decision he made was his, not God’s. Bonhoeffer was a man of great faith, but faith does not necessarily issue in certitude. And if it did, would it truly be faith?
Yet Abraham’s story is presented as one without doubt. He did not doubt that the command to sacrifice his son came from God just as he did not doubt that God wanted him to leave his home and go to a new land, where he would be father of a great people, though he had no children of his own. Abraham trusted and believed God. And now just before this story, he has settled in this land of promise where he planted a tree and called God “The Everlasting One.” Then God intruded with this test of faith. Abraham had previously argued with God about the destruction of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. What if I can find at least 100 just people, he bargained with God. Will you spare the cities then? Do you want people to say that you are an unjust God, destroying the good along with the wicked? And Abraham managed to whittle the number down to 10. So, Abraham bargained for two cities, but he did not bargain for his son. Why?
Because Abraham at Moriah, the site of the near sacrifice, is not the same man who argued with God about those two cities. He had been unable to find 10 just people, so he learned that God knew something he did not know. But here, there is a difference. It is not Abraham who does not know; it is God. God did not really know if Abraham will obey the command. Would he withhold his son from God? This story is a test, but it is also a temptation, an awful temptation. And though each week we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, ”Lead us not into temptation,” nonetheless, God that is exactly what God was doing to Abraham, leading him toward a temptation---not unlike Jesus, I might add, who immediately after his baptism, was led by the Spirit of God into the wilderness where he was tempted for 40 days and nights by Satan.
A temptation always means that there are choices, at least two, if not more. In this story the choice is to obey God or disobey God, or argue with God, which Abraham did not choose to do. He was willing to obey, trusting that whatever God commanded would be ultimately life giving, not life denying.
Again, we are righty horrified by the test, but the story is not first and foremost about us. It is about God and Abraham. Oh, we do enter into the story, of course, but only after we have learned what Abraham learned---that God is a God of grace, and God will provide. That is exactly what Abraham told Isaac when his son asked where the lamb for the sacrifice was. “God will provide,” or a better translation, “God will see it before us.” And for Abraham and for us that is the learning: God sees before Abraham; God sees before us. But, according to this story, God does not see and know everything, for if God did, why would God have bothered to test or to tempt Abraham? Staying within the boundaries of this story puts us face to face with a God who tempts, a God who tests. No wonder Jesus prayed, “Lead us not into temptation.” He knew God had led him and others straight into the depths of temptation---not as a trap, but that full and abundant life might be found.
This story shows us a real relationship between God and Abraham, where each learned something fundamental about the other. God learned that Abraham will trust God completely, will withhold nothing, and Abraham learned that God will provide. It is a terrifying story, because the God we meet here is not the God we want. We want a God who is safe and tame, who makes us feel completely secure. But there are times, when we meet a God who is not always comfortable, not always safe, as in C.S. Lewis’ famous Christian allegory, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, where Aslan, the lion, is a symbol for Christ. Is Aslan safe, the children want to know. No, he is not safe, but he is good. And the same can be said for the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 2, 2023
Genesis 22: 1-14
There is no doubt that this story from Genesis is a very disturbing one. Some might even call it a text of terror. And so, we have ways to get around the disturbance and the terror. Our tradition is not biblically fundamentalist, meaning that we do not believe that the bible always describes exactly what happened when. We listen for the Word of God, not directly to the Word of God, which means we must search for it, interpret the text in its place and time as well as our place and time, since we realize that understanding grows and changes. One of my seminary professors used to remind us: You must consider what the text meant THEN and what it means NOW. And the meanings may not be the same.
When I was in seminary in the early 80’s, feminist interpretations were beginning to be heard, which simply means that women’s experiences were considered. And, of course, one of the first things we should notice in the Genesis story is that Sarah, Isaac’s mother, is completely left out. Her faith is apparently of no concern to God, let alone her feelings as a mother. And so, it is not unreasonable to ask: Can the text, bible be trusted, if women’s experiences are completely ignored?
Feminist interpretation points out that God appears here as a child abuser, and in that place and time, child sacrifice among the Canaanites was not uncommon. It was probably also practiced by the Israelites and under the Israelite King Josiah around the year 640 BC sites of child sacrifice were destroyed. Now some biblical interpreters have extended the analogy of child abuse to Jesus, who suffered horribly, because (according to orthodoxy) God required the perfect sacrifice from an unblemished, that is, a sinless human---the same way the Old Testament speaks of the sacrifice of the perfect, unblemished lamb. So, our questions today are different from questions asked then. We ask, “Is a God who would demand the death of the perfect lamb or human really this really the kind of God, worthy of human trust, love and devotion? Would God truly subject Abraham to such a test and also Isaac, who found himself bound to a rock with a knife poised at his throat? It interesting to note that some Jewish interpretation made the claim that Isaac was so traumatized by the experience that he was left damaged, which is why we hear almost nothing more about him in the bible.
So, this story does indeed trouble us, though we already know the outcome. God will not require Abraham to sacrifice his son, because he sees that Abraham is willing to make the offering. He passes this test of faith. And though none of us likes the test at all, we can ponder if there are indeed times in life when faith is truly tested. The 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote that sometimes the ethical is suspended in service to a higher calling. God’s commandment is “Do not murder,” but there are times we do: in self defense and also in war and assassination.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian and pastor, entered into the plot against Hitler’s life fully knowing what God’s commands are. He understood the ethical imperative to avoid murder, and yet he would murder Hitler, if the opportunity arose. But, and this is important, he NEVER said he knew an assassination was God’s command and will. Bonhoeffer made his decision; he suspended the normal ethical rule in service to something else, something he determined was higher and more important. He prayed and he pondered, and the decision he made was his, not God’s. Bonhoeffer was a man of great faith, but faith does not necessarily issue in certitude. And if it did, would it truly be faith?
Yet Abraham’s story is presented as one without doubt. He did not doubt that the command to sacrifice his son came from God just as he did not doubt that God wanted him to leave his home and go to a new land, where he would be father of a great people, though he had no children of his own. Abraham trusted and believed God. And now just before this story, he has settled in this land of promise where he planted a tree and called God “The Everlasting One.” Then God intruded with this test of faith. Abraham had previously argued with God about the destruction of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. What if I can find at least 100 just people, he bargained with God. Will you spare the cities then? Do you want people to say that you are an unjust God, destroying the good along with the wicked? And Abraham managed to whittle the number down to 10. So, Abraham bargained for two cities, but he did not bargain for his son. Why?
Because Abraham at Moriah, the site of the near sacrifice, is not the same man who argued with God about those two cities. He had been unable to find 10 just people, so he learned that God knew something he did not know. But here, there is a difference. It is not Abraham who does not know; it is God. God did not really know if Abraham will obey the command. Would he withhold his son from God? This story is a test, but it is also a temptation, an awful temptation. And though each week we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, ”Lead us not into temptation,” nonetheless, God that is exactly what God was doing to Abraham, leading him toward a temptation---not unlike Jesus, I might add, who immediately after his baptism, was led by the Spirit of God into the wilderness where he was tempted for 40 days and nights by Satan.
A temptation always means that there are choices, at least two, if not more. In this story the choice is to obey God or disobey God, or argue with God, which Abraham did not choose to do. He was willing to obey, trusting that whatever God commanded would be ultimately life giving, not life denying.
Again, we are righty horrified by the test, but the story is not first and foremost about us. It is about God and Abraham. Oh, we do enter into the story, of course, but only after we have learned what Abraham learned---that God is a God of grace, and God will provide. That is exactly what Abraham told Isaac when his son asked where the lamb for the sacrifice was. “God will provide,” or a better translation, “God will see it before us.” And for Abraham and for us that is the learning: God sees before Abraham; God sees before us. But, according to this story, God does not see and know everything, for if God did, why would God have bothered to test or to tempt Abraham? Staying within the boundaries of this story puts us face to face with a God who tempts, a God who tests. No wonder Jesus prayed, “Lead us not into temptation.” He knew God had led him and others straight into the depths of temptation---not as a trap, but that full and abundant life might be found.
This story shows us a real relationship between God and Abraham, where each learned something fundamental about the other. God learned that Abraham will trust God completely, will withhold nothing, and Abraham learned that God will provide. It is a terrifying story, because the God we meet here is not the God we want. We want a God who is safe and tame, who makes us feel completely secure. But there are times, when we meet a God who is not always comfortable, not always safe, as in C.S. Lewis’ famous Christian allegory, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, where Aslan, the lion, is a symbol for Christ. Is Aslan safe, the children want to know. No, he is not safe, but he is good. And the same can be said for the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
June 29, 2023
Dear Friends,
When Maya Shankar was six years old, she fell in love with the violin. And so, her parents made sure she had lessons. Her violin teacher had an unconventional method of teaching. While avoiding drills and scale playing, he began by having Maya play songs and as the years went by, she became quite proficient. One day, when she was nine, in New York with her mother, they visited Julliard. Her mother said, “Let’s go in and see how things look here.” Maya was shocked by her mother’s boldness. After all, people with no official business are not really invited to walk around Julliard’s halls. But they did more than walk around the halls; they actually managed to watch a lesson and then---because Maya’s mother was creatively imaginative and bold---Maya played a Beethoven piece for the renowned professor, who then offered her lessons. Maya had much to learn, because her technical education had been weak, but she worked extremely hard and then was admitted to a program for young, gifted musicians. At 13 she was invited to be a private student of Itzhak Perlman, but at 15, tragedy struck. While playing, she overstretched her hand, and she heard a pop. A tendon had ripped, finishing her aspiring career in music. Maya was devastated as she faced the loss of her identity as a violinist. But eventually Maya forged ahead, earning a PhD in cognitive psychology. And then one day, she stood before the graduating class at Julliard and gave the commencement speech, which consisted of three main points, applicable to LIFE.
The first thing Maya said is: Be bold, imaginatively creative. She gave the example of her mother having them enter into the Julliard building, talking to someone who was about to have a lesson, getting them into the lesson as observers and then suggesting to the professor that Maya play for him. Years later the professor admitted that though Maya had great passion for the instrument, she lacked technical skill, but he took her on, because he thought her love for the instrument was quite extraordinary in someone so young. Maya said she had AWE for music. The beauty of music stirred her so deeply that Maya’s awe also AWED the professor, who admitted that he did not think Maya would really be able to compete. But she did! She worked hard and overcame her technical deficit. So, her advice to the graduates was: “BE IN AWE.” Find something that awes you and pursue it, because awe brings depth and height to life.
Maya was awed by music, but she had to let it go professionally, because she suffered physical damage. Yet she told the graduates it is essential to ask yourself, What it is about the thing which awes you. Why does it awe you? Why do you do what you do? Maya had realized that music awed her because she witnessed how it made connections among people. Music, she had learned, was not simply her PRIVATE passion. She saw how music brought people together. At concerts she saw all these sundry persons moved by the experience of listening to music. And in realizing this Maya found a new way forward. She studied cognitive psychology because she understood she was fascinated by connections among people, and she wanted to help people make those connections.
Maya’s story reminds me of my husband’s experience when he was a graduate student at Tufts Medical School. One summer he went to Rockefeller University in New York to learn some techniques from a professor. Peter told Donald that after graduating from college he had worked on Wall Street for about five years. His father, by the way, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, so Peter had some knowledge of and facility with finance. But after a while, he realized that he did not want to be defined by money. He just did not care about it that much. And he also saw people, much older than he, who had spent their adult lives pursuing wealth, but the pursuit in many cases had not really brought them deep joy. They liked being rich; maybe some of them even loved being rich, but that was all. And that would not be enough for Peter. And so, he decided to go to graduate school in molecular biology, and he did become a very successful scientist. He had passion for his work, because he saw how the expansion of knowledge had profound impact on the lives of not only people, but also the planet. He was in awe of how much MORE was known NOW than when he was in graduate school many decades before. And my husband says the same thing. The introductory course in biology taught at universities and colleges today is NOTHING like the introductory course taught 50 years ago, when he was in college. So much more is now known and so some of the old knowledge, which though not wrong (like classification and evolutionary biology) has dropped off the introductory course, because it is not deemed as essential as some of the new knowledge. The “old stuff” is now taught in specialty courses for those who have a particular interest in it.
I was moved by Maya’s story, and her advice is universal: Be imaginatively bold and creative. Be in awe. And understand what it is that draws you to the awe. There is no doubt that the creation is awe-inspiring, and God, we believe, is the master artist of the creation---very awe-inspiring, indeed
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When Maya Shankar was six years old, she fell in love with the violin. And so, her parents made sure she had lessons. Her violin teacher had an unconventional method of teaching. While avoiding drills and scale playing, he began by having Maya play songs and as the years went by, she became quite proficient. One day, when she was nine, in New York with her mother, they visited Julliard. Her mother said, “Let’s go in and see how things look here.” Maya was shocked by her mother’s boldness. After all, people with no official business are not really invited to walk around Julliard’s halls. But they did more than walk around the halls; they actually managed to watch a lesson and then---because Maya’s mother was creatively imaginative and bold---Maya played a Beethoven piece for the renowned professor, who then offered her lessons. Maya had much to learn, because her technical education had been weak, but she worked extremely hard and then was admitted to a program for young, gifted musicians. At 13 she was invited to be a private student of Itzhak Perlman, but at 15, tragedy struck. While playing, she overstretched her hand, and she heard a pop. A tendon had ripped, finishing her aspiring career in music. Maya was devastated as she faced the loss of her identity as a violinist. But eventually Maya forged ahead, earning a PhD in cognitive psychology. And then one day, she stood before the graduating class at Julliard and gave the commencement speech, which consisted of three main points, applicable to LIFE.
The first thing Maya said is: Be bold, imaginatively creative. She gave the example of her mother having them enter into the Julliard building, talking to someone who was about to have a lesson, getting them into the lesson as observers and then suggesting to the professor that Maya play for him. Years later the professor admitted that though Maya had great passion for the instrument, she lacked technical skill, but he took her on, because he thought her love for the instrument was quite extraordinary in someone so young. Maya said she had AWE for music. The beauty of music stirred her so deeply that Maya’s awe also AWED the professor, who admitted that he did not think Maya would really be able to compete. But she did! She worked hard and overcame her technical deficit. So, her advice to the graduates was: “BE IN AWE.” Find something that awes you and pursue it, because awe brings depth and height to life.
Maya was awed by music, but she had to let it go professionally, because she suffered physical damage. Yet she told the graduates it is essential to ask yourself, What it is about the thing which awes you. Why does it awe you? Why do you do what you do? Maya had realized that music awed her because she witnessed how it made connections among people. Music, she had learned, was not simply her PRIVATE passion. She saw how music brought people together. At concerts she saw all these sundry persons moved by the experience of listening to music. And in realizing this Maya found a new way forward. She studied cognitive psychology because she understood she was fascinated by connections among people, and she wanted to help people make those connections.
Maya’s story reminds me of my husband’s experience when he was a graduate student at Tufts Medical School. One summer he went to Rockefeller University in New York to learn some techniques from a professor. Peter told Donald that after graduating from college he had worked on Wall Street for about five years. His father, by the way, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, so Peter had some knowledge of and facility with finance. But after a while, he realized that he did not want to be defined by money. He just did not care about it that much. And he also saw people, much older than he, who had spent their adult lives pursuing wealth, but the pursuit in many cases had not really brought them deep joy. They liked being rich; maybe some of them even loved being rich, but that was all. And that would not be enough for Peter. And so, he decided to go to graduate school in molecular biology, and he did become a very successful scientist. He had passion for his work, because he saw how the expansion of knowledge had profound impact on the lives of not only people, but also the planet. He was in awe of how much MORE was known NOW than when he was in graduate school many decades before. And my husband says the same thing. The introductory course in biology taught at universities and colleges today is NOTHING like the introductory course taught 50 years ago, when he was in college. So much more is now known and so some of the old knowledge, which though not wrong (like classification and evolutionary biology) has dropped off the introductory course, because it is not deemed as essential as some of the new knowledge. The “old stuff” is now taught in specialty courses for those who have a particular interest in it.
I was moved by Maya’s story, and her advice is universal: Be imaginatively bold and creative. Be in awe. And understand what it is that draws you to the awe. There is no doubt that the creation is awe-inspiring, and God, we believe, is the master artist of the creation---very awe-inspiring, indeed
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Facing Conflict
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
June 25, 2023
Genesis 21: 8-21
Matthew 10: 34-39
There are some people, who look for conflict and thrive on it, but many, if not most people, will avoid it. Families can be full of conflict, though it is often not acknowledged directly, but if you scratch beneath the surface it will rise up. Conflicts cluster around multiple themes: politics, religion, money and inheritance and then there is the perennial favored child syndrome, where siblings harbor resentment because someone in the family has a favored status. Well, there is nothing new about any of these themes. They have been around as long as human beings have been on the planet, and such stories also fill the pages of the Bible. Jesus ended up on the cross because his politics, which were all about the first being last and the last being first did not square with either the Jewish leadership or Rome. And Jesus did not always get along with his family, who sometimes thought him out of his mind. He told them he must be about his father’s business, and the father he was referring to was not Joseph. He had a favored status as God’s son. And in our story from Genesis, we have another story about a favored son, Isaac.
God had told Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, though he was an old man and his wife, Sarah, had not borne any children. As you heard in the introduction, Sarah was worried that God’s plan would be frustrated, so she got it into her head to tell her husband to sleep with her maid, Hagar, so she would conceive a child. And Abraham followed his wife’s plan with no protest, I might add. As you can imagine this dynamic is a set up for later problems, especially when Sarah, in her old age, did conceive and bore Isaac. And we just read what happened: jealous Sarah told Abraham to banish Ishmael and Hagar, which he promptly did. Now I would say the Bible covers Abraham’s cowardice in not standing up to Sarah by putting the blame on God. God told Abraham everything would be fine, and Abraham chose to believe what he heard God say. But notice Abraham did not bother to explain anything to Hagar, so she was essentially terrorized by the situation---left to die of thirst with her son. She did not even matter enough to Abraham for him to tell her what God had told him. Well, as we heard: God did provide. Ishmael and Hagar survived, and Ishmael became the father of the Arab people.
There is conflict in this story but notice how it was never squarely faced. The story tells us that Abraham was very distressed because he cared about his son. (Notice the text does not mention any care for Hagar, as if she were a throw away person. And let’s face it: that is often how women were treated and sometimes still are.) So, Abraham was distressed, but he didn’t say or do anything to show his distress to Sarah. He swallowed the conflict, and that is indeed a common human response. It happened then and it happens now. People simply do not want to deal with it and the rooms of therapists are filled with people who have unresolved conflicts, issues which would have been better dealt with years ago.
When we arrive at Matthew’s gospel for today, we hear Jesus saying what we really do not want to hear. Kind, gentle Jesus, who is all about love and acceptance speaks some harsh words. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. Son will be against father, daughter against mother and one’s foes will be members of one’s household. Later Jesus will tell a man who wants to join him, but first must bury his father, Let the dead bury the dead, a grave insult, because filial piety was at the heart of life in Jesus’ day. Though we may be shocked to hear it from Jesus, we really should not be, since life does teach us that there are decisions which do tear families apart. Consider our nation’s Civil War. Families were quite literally torn apart, when one son chose to fight for the Confederacy, and another fought for the Union. The same thing happened in Vietnam. Other families have been broken when a son or daughter comes out as gay or lesbian or transgender. Some never come out at all, though most if not all in the family knows the truth. It is simply not spoken of.
Both my husband and I grew up in families where there was a great deal of arguing and even yelling, so I learned as a youngster to argue. My father and I would go head to head, even when we agreed. A great many of the arguments in my family, which included extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, were political in nature. My father in his younger years was a Norman Thomas socialist, later turned New Deal Democrat, and I can remember some pretty heavy arguments with my mother’s family, some of whom were business people and quite economically comfortable and conservative. But though they would argue and even yell at each other, it never became personal. They disagreed about ideas, but they could live with that difference. And at the end of the argument, they were still family, beloved members of the family. My husband’s family was the same way. My father in law was a professor, who loved to argue, and he would take a side just to start an argument. But as I became older, it was obvious to me that while my father and my father in law could take intellectual disagreements, they were terrible with emotional ones. Both would run away and hide from hard truths.
When my parents second child, Bobby, was two years old, he was diagnosed with leukemia a year before my birth, and my father kept the diagnosis to himself. He decided on no treatment, since there was almost none back then, except transfusion. He never told my mother, and so Bobby died in her arms, while my father was in Chicago on a business trip. Mercifully, he did not leave my mother and my older brother alone. He took them to be with her mother in Buffalo while he was away for a few days. Granted, no one, including the doctor, expected Bobby to die so quickly, but still, when I learned the truth, I thought it a terrible betrayal. And yet my mother understood. She was as strong as they come, and she would have faced the news head on. It was my father, who could not face the truth. And my husband’s family: they could argue about all kinds of things, but the big conflict in the family revolved around my mother in law’s OCD; she was a compulsive hoarder, and her house was eventually razed to the ground with all her junk in it. Yet no one in the family was ever allowed to name or talk about it-—even after my husband’s parents were divorced. The fear of the truth and the conflict that they feared would ensue were still that strong.
The conflict Jesus was referring to in today’s reading concerned how people would react to him and his teachings about ritual cleanliness, forgiveness, redistribution of wealth, filial loyalty, and the essence of Jewish law. What did it mean to be a faithful Jew? Was it all about conformity to 613 commandments, or could it be reduced to two: Love God with the fullness of your being and love neighbor as oneself. That question did set up tremendous conflict within the family and with Jewish authorities.
Sometimes conflicts cannot be easily resolved. The gauntlet is thrown down and you are on one side or the other. You know where you stand, and you know where others stand as well. But there are so many other times when conflict is not faced. I have heard people say, “Better the family survives in the dark than falls apart when the truth is fully seen in the light of day.” I understand that position all too well. And all of us make decisions about how much conflict we will take on and how much we will push away or push down. We decide on the price we are willing to pay. Jesus paid a very high price for the conflict he faced head on. Others pay a high price too---and sometimes the high price comes when they or we deny and run away.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
June 25, 2023
Genesis 21: 8-21
Matthew 10: 34-39
There are some people, who look for conflict and thrive on it, but many, if not most people, will avoid it. Families can be full of conflict, though it is often not acknowledged directly, but if you scratch beneath the surface it will rise up. Conflicts cluster around multiple themes: politics, religion, money and inheritance and then there is the perennial favored child syndrome, where siblings harbor resentment because someone in the family has a favored status. Well, there is nothing new about any of these themes. They have been around as long as human beings have been on the planet, and such stories also fill the pages of the Bible. Jesus ended up on the cross because his politics, which were all about the first being last and the last being first did not square with either the Jewish leadership or Rome. And Jesus did not always get along with his family, who sometimes thought him out of his mind. He told them he must be about his father’s business, and the father he was referring to was not Joseph. He had a favored status as God’s son. And in our story from Genesis, we have another story about a favored son, Isaac.
God had told Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, though he was an old man and his wife, Sarah, had not borne any children. As you heard in the introduction, Sarah was worried that God’s plan would be frustrated, so she got it into her head to tell her husband to sleep with her maid, Hagar, so she would conceive a child. And Abraham followed his wife’s plan with no protest, I might add. As you can imagine this dynamic is a set up for later problems, especially when Sarah, in her old age, did conceive and bore Isaac. And we just read what happened: jealous Sarah told Abraham to banish Ishmael and Hagar, which he promptly did. Now I would say the Bible covers Abraham’s cowardice in not standing up to Sarah by putting the blame on God. God told Abraham everything would be fine, and Abraham chose to believe what he heard God say. But notice Abraham did not bother to explain anything to Hagar, so she was essentially terrorized by the situation---left to die of thirst with her son. She did not even matter enough to Abraham for him to tell her what God had told him. Well, as we heard: God did provide. Ishmael and Hagar survived, and Ishmael became the father of the Arab people.
There is conflict in this story but notice how it was never squarely faced. The story tells us that Abraham was very distressed because he cared about his son. (Notice the text does not mention any care for Hagar, as if she were a throw away person. And let’s face it: that is often how women were treated and sometimes still are.) So, Abraham was distressed, but he didn’t say or do anything to show his distress to Sarah. He swallowed the conflict, and that is indeed a common human response. It happened then and it happens now. People simply do not want to deal with it and the rooms of therapists are filled with people who have unresolved conflicts, issues which would have been better dealt with years ago.
When we arrive at Matthew’s gospel for today, we hear Jesus saying what we really do not want to hear. Kind, gentle Jesus, who is all about love and acceptance speaks some harsh words. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. Son will be against father, daughter against mother and one’s foes will be members of one’s household. Later Jesus will tell a man who wants to join him, but first must bury his father, Let the dead bury the dead, a grave insult, because filial piety was at the heart of life in Jesus’ day. Though we may be shocked to hear it from Jesus, we really should not be, since life does teach us that there are decisions which do tear families apart. Consider our nation’s Civil War. Families were quite literally torn apart, when one son chose to fight for the Confederacy, and another fought for the Union. The same thing happened in Vietnam. Other families have been broken when a son or daughter comes out as gay or lesbian or transgender. Some never come out at all, though most if not all in the family knows the truth. It is simply not spoken of.
Both my husband and I grew up in families where there was a great deal of arguing and even yelling, so I learned as a youngster to argue. My father and I would go head to head, even when we agreed. A great many of the arguments in my family, which included extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, were political in nature. My father in his younger years was a Norman Thomas socialist, later turned New Deal Democrat, and I can remember some pretty heavy arguments with my mother’s family, some of whom were business people and quite economically comfortable and conservative. But though they would argue and even yell at each other, it never became personal. They disagreed about ideas, but they could live with that difference. And at the end of the argument, they were still family, beloved members of the family. My husband’s family was the same way. My father in law was a professor, who loved to argue, and he would take a side just to start an argument. But as I became older, it was obvious to me that while my father and my father in law could take intellectual disagreements, they were terrible with emotional ones. Both would run away and hide from hard truths.
When my parents second child, Bobby, was two years old, he was diagnosed with leukemia a year before my birth, and my father kept the diagnosis to himself. He decided on no treatment, since there was almost none back then, except transfusion. He never told my mother, and so Bobby died in her arms, while my father was in Chicago on a business trip. Mercifully, he did not leave my mother and my older brother alone. He took them to be with her mother in Buffalo while he was away for a few days. Granted, no one, including the doctor, expected Bobby to die so quickly, but still, when I learned the truth, I thought it a terrible betrayal. And yet my mother understood. She was as strong as they come, and she would have faced the news head on. It was my father, who could not face the truth. And my husband’s family: they could argue about all kinds of things, but the big conflict in the family revolved around my mother in law’s OCD; she was a compulsive hoarder, and her house was eventually razed to the ground with all her junk in it. Yet no one in the family was ever allowed to name or talk about it-—even after my husband’s parents were divorced. The fear of the truth and the conflict that they feared would ensue were still that strong.
The conflict Jesus was referring to in today’s reading concerned how people would react to him and his teachings about ritual cleanliness, forgiveness, redistribution of wealth, filial loyalty, and the essence of Jewish law. What did it mean to be a faithful Jew? Was it all about conformity to 613 commandments, or could it be reduced to two: Love God with the fullness of your being and love neighbor as oneself. That question did set up tremendous conflict within the family and with Jewish authorities.
Sometimes conflicts cannot be easily resolved. The gauntlet is thrown down and you are on one side or the other. You know where you stand, and you know where others stand as well. But there are so many other times when conflict is not faced. I have heard people say, “Better the family survives in the dark than falls apart when the truth is fully seen in the light of day.” I understand that position all too well. And all of us make decisions about how much conflict we will take on and how much we will push away or push down. We decide on the price we are willing to pay. Jesus paid a very high price for the conflict he faced head on. Others pay a high price too---and sometimes the high price comes when they or we deny and run away.
June 17, 2023
Dear Friends,
I was reading an article just yesterday about a psychiatrist, who was having trouble with one of her clients. The man, usually quite talkative, was shutting down, withdrawing into himself, and nothing she said seemed to help draw him out. Then she had an idea, something she almost never did with her clients. “Let’s take a walk together,” she suggested. At first, he was totally silent with his head cast down, but as they moved along, she saw him looking all around him---trees, sky, birds. He still did not say much, but when they returned to her office, and he was getting ready to depart, he looked at her and with a tear choked voice said, “I am so lonely.”
Loneliness: it’s a persistent theme in our device obsessed culture. Just the other day I was talking with a parishioner about how all this technology has made it more difficult for people to really talk to one another. I had recently read about high schools that were making a strong effort to ban completely the use of cell phones in school. Teachers and administrators were convinced that cell phones were damaging their students’ ability to concentrate not only on their schoolwork, but also on other people. “They don’t know how to have face to face conversations and navigate conflict in real time with the physical presence of people,” one principal said. “They are also not learning how to read the signs and signals that body language gives,’ a teacher commented. Other teachers were concerned that for their students, reality was all about screen time, and if something could not be pulled up on the screen, it did not have any reality for them. Research has shown that persons between the ages of 15 to 24 spend 70% less time in social interaction compared to 20 years ago. All this is leading to a greater sense of loneliness.
Indeed, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recently said that there is an epidemic of loneliness not only in our country but also in the western world, where technology is readily available to so many people. There are those who refer to their many friends on Face Book, but friendship and meaningful relationships are about the quality of connections, not the number of people you can count as Face Book friends.
Dr. Murthy made a few claims that he said are borne out by scientific research. First, loneliness cannot be reduced to a feeling. It actually impacts the body, putting it at risk, comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Those who suffer from loneliness increase the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32% and an increased risk of 50% for dementia in older adults. What is being referred to here is a sustained loneliness, a feeling that one’s human connections are interchangeable. If one friend departs, then another can easily take her or his place. The uniqueness of people, the sense that this particular person matters and cannot be easily replaced by another Face Book friend----these are the qualities that are being lost.
The world is very fast paced these days, and one might even wonder how God keeps pace with all the changes. Consider the story of Moses, who went up Mount Sinai to receive the Law from God, remained there for 40 days, and during that time, the Israelites built an altar to other gods. Forty days were simply too long to wait for Moses’ return. I doubt that most people today would wait 40 days. If there were no cell phone contact, a rescue team would have been sent out searching for the leader. Technology has probably made us a less patient and a lonelier people. Christianity posits God as triune, Three in One, so the very nature and being of God is relationship, and we, made in the image and likeness of God, are called to be in relationship as well. When we ignore or deny or deface our image and likeness, we suffer the consequences of loneliness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I was reading an article just yesterday about a psychiatrist, who was having trouble with one of her clients. The man, usually quite talkative, was shutting down, withdrawing into himself, and nothing she said seemed to help draw him out. Then she had an idea, something she almost never did with her clients. “Let’s take a walk together,” she suggested. At first, he was totally silent with his head cast down, but as they moved along, she saw him looking all around him---trees, sky, birds. He still did not say much, but when they returned to her office, and he was getting ready to depart, he looked at her and with a tear choked voice said, “I am so lonely.”
Loneliness: it’s a persistent theme in our device obsessed culture. Just the other day I was talking with a parishioner about how all this technology has made it more difficult for people to really talk to one another. I had recently read about high schools that were making a strong effort to ban completely the use of cell phones in school. Teachers and administrators were convinced that cell phones were damaging their students’ ability to concentrate not only on their schoolwork, but also on other people. “They don’t know how to have face to face conversations and navigate conflict in real time with the physical presence of people,” one principal said. “They are also not learning how to read the signs and signals that body language gives,’ a teacher commented. Other teachers were concerned that for their students, reality was all about screen time, and if something could not be pulled up on the screen, it did not have any reality for them. Research has shown that persons between the ages of 15 to 24 spend 70% less time in social interaction compared to 20 years ago. All this is leading to a greater sense of loneliness.
Indeed, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recently said that there is an epidemic of loneliness not only in our country but also in the western world, where technology is readily available to so many people. There are those who refer to their many friends on Face Book, but friendship and meaningful relationships are about the quality of connections, not the number of people you can count as Face Book friends.
Dr. Murthy made a few claims that he said are borne out by scientific research. First, loneliness cannot be reduced to a feeling. It actually impacts the body, putting it at risk, comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Those who suffer from loneliness increase the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32% and an increased risk of 50% for dementia in older adults. What is being referred to here is a sustained loneliness, a feeling that one’s human connections are interchangeable. If one friend departs, then another can easily take her or his place. The uniqueness of people, the sense that this particular person matters and cannot be easily replaced by another Face Book friend----these are the qualities that are being lost.
The world is very fast paced these days, and one might even wonder how God keeps pace with all the changes. Consider the story of Moses, who went up Mount Sinai to receive the Law from God, remained there for 40 days, and during that time, the Israelites built an altar to other gods. Forty days were simply too long to wait for Moses’ return. I doubt that most people today would wait 40 days. If there were no cell phone contact, a rescue team would have been sent out searching for the leader. Technology has probably made us a less patient and a lonelier people. Christianity posits God as triune, Three in One, so the very nature and being of God is relationship, and we, made in the image and likeness of God, are called to be in relationship as well. When we ignore or deny or deface our image and likeness, we suffer the consequences of loneliness.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
June 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
I have always been an admirer of Albert Einstein, and in my study at home, I have a huge poster of his picture with these words: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” I don’t know if Einstein knew what many theologians have argued: God IS in the details. I also have in my office at work another picture of Einstein, which one of my brothers gave me over 30 years ago.
I think part of the reason Einstein impresses me so much is that his story and his achievements did not move in a straight line. His life was full of surprises and sometimes even contradictions. He apparently talked very late, and when he did begin to speak, he would whisper the words to himself before saying them out loud. He was also a very mediocre student. Even in graduate school, when earning his PhD, no one thought his work would set the world on fire.
In 1905 he published a series of revolutionary articles, but no one paid much attention, and in 1915, when he published the equations to support his theory o relativity, still he was ignored. Germany was fighting World War l, and Einstein did not even register as a blip on a screen. England had been one of Germany’s enemies in World War l, so how ironic that it was two English astronomers, Arthur Eddington and Frank Watson Dyson, who decided to take a serious look at Einstein’s work. In examining the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, they confirmed that Einstein’s equations worked, and that gravity would indeed cause light to bend around the sun. Suddenly Einstein genius was recognized.
Einstein had other interests besides physics. He was an amateur musician, and he loved to play the violin and the piano. In fact, it was noted that he often carried his violin everywhere he went. He owned more than several in his life, but he gave all of them the same name: Lina. While living in Princeton, New Jersey, he would host weekly chamber music sessions. He was a good violinist, not a great one, but no matter, the music brought him great joy.
Einstein was, of course, Jewish, and he did come to the United States from Germany in 1932 before it would be too late. He was an early supporter of the Zionist Movement in Israel, though he could also be critical of it. Following the death of Israel’s second president in 1952, Einstein was offered the presidency. In a letter from Israel’s ambassador to the United States he was promised “the freedom to pursue his great scientific work,” but it was expected he must live in Israel. Einstein wrote back that he was “saddened and ashamed” to turn the position down.
Though his physics led to the creation of the atomic bomb, in 1950 he came out against the bomb, and the FBI began to keep a file on him. He was a strong advocate for peace, and had some far left wing friends, such as the singer and political activist, Paul Robeson. J. Edgar Hoover tried to obtain permission to wiretap his phone and even have him deported---all without success. When Einstein died in 1955 his FBI file consisted of 1,427 pages! After Einstein’s death, his Princeton home was cleaned up, and piles of uncashed checks from Princeton University were found. He just was too busy pursuing God’s thoughts and making music and protesting against war and injustice to be concerned about such mundane matters as money and his paychecks. I don’t know if Einstein ever truly believed he had successfully probed God’s thoughts, but he certainly did.
Perhaps toward the end of his life he became more humble, realizing that the great joy was in the search and the closer he came to knowing God’s thoughts, the more mysterious they seemed.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I have always been an admirer of Albert Einstein, and in my study at home, I have a huge poster of his picture with these words: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” I don’t know if Einstein knew what many theologians have argued: God IS in the details. I also have in my office at work another picture of Einstein, which one of my brothers gave me over 30 years ago.
I think part of the reason Einstein impresses me so much is that his story and his achievements did not move in a straight line. His life was full of surprises and sometimes even contradictions. He apparently talked very late, and when he did begin to speak, he would whisper the words to himself before saying them out loud. He was also a very mediocre student. Even in graduate school, when earning his PhD, no one thought his work would set the world on fire.
In 1905 he published a series of revolutionary articles, but no one paid much attention, and in 1915, when he published the equations to support his theory o relativity, still he was ignored. Germany was fighting World War l, and Einstein did not even register as a blip on a screen. England had been one of Germany’s enemies in World War l, so how ironic that it was two English astronomers, Arthur Eddington and Frank Watson Dyson, who decided to take a serious look at Einstein’s work. In examining the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, they confirmed that Einstein’s equations worked, and that gravity would indeed cause light to bend around the sun. Suddenly Einstein genius was recognized.
Einstein had other interests besides physics. He was an amateur musician, and he loved to play the violin and the piano. In fact, it was noted that he often carried his violin everywhere he went. He owned more than several in his life, but he gave all of them the same name: Lina. While living in Princeton, New Jersey, he would host weekly chamber music sessions. He was a good violinist, not a great one, but no matter, the music brought him great joy.
Einstein was, of course, Jewish, and he did come to the United States from Germany in 1932 before it would be too late. He was an early supporter of the Zionist Movement in Israel, though he could also be critical of it. Following the death of Israel’s second president in 1952, Einstein was offered the presidency. In a letter from Israel’s ambassador to the United States he was promised “the freedom to pursue his great scientific work,” but it was expected he must live in Israel. Einstein wrote back that he was “saddened and ashamed” to turn the position down.
Though his physics led to the creation of the atomic bomb, in 1950 he came out against the bomb, and the FBI began to keep a file on him. He was a strong advocate for peace, and had some far left wing friends, such as the singer and political activist, Paul Robeson. J. Edgar Hoover tried to obtain permission to wiretap his phone and even have him deported---all without success. When Einstein died in 1955 his FBI file consisted of 1,427 pages! After Einstein’s death, his Princeton home was cleaned up, and piles of uncashed checks from Princeton University were found. He just was too busy pursuing God’s thoughts and making music and protesting against war and injustice to be concerned about such mundane matters as money and his paychecks. I don’t know if Einstein ever truly believed he had successfully probed God’s thoughts, but he certainly did.
Perhaps toward the end of his life he became more humble, realizing that the great joy was in the search and the closer he came to knowing God’s thoughts, the more mysterious they seemed.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
JOURNEYING BY STAGES
Preached By: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
June 11, 2023
Genesis 12: 1-9
Matthew 9: 9-13; 18-26
Tradition says that Abram---his name was later changed to Abraham---was 75 years old, when God told him to move. Now some people do move at that stage of life. They might sell the large home in which they raised their family and move into a smaller place, or perhaps they will move into assisted living. But making a major change like this---going to a completely new land, where all the familiarity of home is absent---because God tells you a new destiny awaits---that is really hard. And very few would do it. But Abram went, taking with him his extended family. He heard God and he obeyed. He did not argue, and he did not question---though there will be later instances where Abram will question and argue with God, but not here. He went where he was told to go; he pitched his tent and built an altar to the Lord. And then comes this sentence: And Abram journeyed by stages toward the Negeb, which today is the Negev Desert.
Journeyed by stages: let’s consider those words. Though Abram got up and left his home, he apparently did not arrive at the designated place all at once. He took his time; he journeyed by stages. And let’s face it: that is how life often is. We don’t immediately arrive at our destination. We move and grow by stages, because life takes time, and though it would seem that Abram as an old man did not have a great deal of time, but still, even he moved by stages. He did not make his journey all at once.
I have watched people make changes in their lives, sometimes because they must adjust to a new reality, like a health threat or a divorce they did not see coming, or the death of a spouse or partner. Some people do adjust quickly. They face the hard truth and accept what is facing them without mounting any fight. It is what it is, some might say. But many others take time to adjust. They move in stages, getting used to the idea not all at once, but in little bites they can manage to take.
I knew these two brothers, one, John, was an anesthesiologist and the other, Michael, was a missionary in South Africa. John had been an anesthesiologist for 10 years, and he found his work very stressful. “You get into these power plays with the surgeon,” he said. “It’s my job to make sure the patient remains stable, and sometimes I have to tell the surgeon to get out soon, or else the patient will crash. The blood pressure is going down; the heartrate is erratic, and some surgeons are so full of themselves, they don’t want to hear it. It is so stressful, and over the years I have considered many alternatives. You don’t easily change your specialty when you have trained for it for years.
Well, his brother, the missionary, who was back in the U.S. on a leave with his family, said that John had been talking about change for a long time. “He considers this specialty and that one, but he stays put. He is stuck.” But being stuck is not how John understood his situation. He had to move by stages, and he finally decided on a residency in psychiatry at Duke Medical School. It meant starting over, a big move for not only him, but also for his wife, who was a cardiac surgeon, and his three kids. When John talked about his brother, he was in awe of his decision-making prowess. “He just never seems to struggle with his decisions the way I do. We are just different; it is as simple and as complicated as that.”
Consider now our text from Matthew. Here we see Jesus, working at breakneck speed. In the chapters leading up to our reading for today, Jesus has been going around healing people: a demonic, a paralytic, a leper, Peter’s mother and others. He also stilled a storm on the Sea of Galilee. So, he has been very, very busy. Then he came upon Matthew, who was at his tax collecting booth, trying to wheedle money out of people, and Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” And Matthew followed---no discussion, no questions, no arguments. Whether or not this is historically true does not matter. The gospel writer, Matthew, who, by the way, was NOT the disciple, Matthew, was trying to make the point that Jesus was very compelling, hard to resist. And yet we do know that many people resisted Jesus, so there was something in Matthew that allowed him to respond so quickly. At least in this instance, he did not move by stages. He made his decision quickly.
And in this instance the Pharisees seemed to decide quickly as well. We are so attuned to prejudice toward the Pharisees that we too often ignore their good points. They were progressive in so many ways, wanting to stretch the meaning of the Jewish law beyond the literal written word and embrace the reflections and thoughts of other leaders and rabbis, which is, the oral interpretation of the law. They asked deep questions, and they pondered their tradition. And so, they had every good reason to ask why Jesus was hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. Such people were considered ritually unclean, bad influences---not the sort of people good and upstanding persons would want to be around. I mean virtue can be taught, and if you are trying to teach people to be virtuous, in this case to follow the Jewish Law, these are not the kinds of examples you want others to follow. It is not an unreasonable position to take. But notice Jesus had an answer: his ministry was for people who needed help. The righteous had no need of him.
Of course, there is another layer of meaning, which Jesus did not name, but it was implied. Who are the righteous ones? Is it always so easy to tell? Furthermore, are people truly as righteous as they think? The Pharisees thought they knew exactly who fit into what category. But, if you stop and consider carefully; if you pull back and think hard, you might not be so quick to conclude as the Pharisees did---that they, being righteous, had no need of Jesus and these other sinners are to be avoided. The implied truth here is that we are never as good as we think we are. Our goodness, in fact, is not why God loves us. And it was not why Jesus healed people. Their worthiness was not the issue; their need was.
And the father of the dead girl and the woman with an issue of blood realized this truth. They did not think they were owed healings. The father, a leader of the synagogue, humbly approached Jesus by kneeling. He had faith that Jesus could raise his daughter, but he did not use his leadership position to coax a miracle from Jesus. And the woman, who had been bleeding for 12 years, did not even presume to ask. Perhaps she felt she was not even worthy to make such a request. She would, after all, have been considered contaminated, ritually unclean, someone no one, certainly no male, should ever touch. “If I can only touch his cloak, I will be healed.,” she said to herself. She had that much faith, and when Jesus saw her, he recognized that her faith has made her well.
Some people came quickly to Jesus; others took their time. Some would never come. People have all kinds of reasons for doing what they do or don’t do. Whatever the goal may be, my experience has taught me that many people move by stages. They don’t usually arrive all at once, but when they do arrive, they are often grateful---not only for their arrival, but also for the journey, which, when they look back, appears as a blessing---even if they did not know it at the time.
Preached By: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
June 11, 2023
Genesis 12: 1-9
Matthew 9: 9-13; 18-26
Tradition says that Abram---his name was later changed to Abraham---was 75 years old, when God told him to move. Now some people do move at that stage of life. They might sell the large home in which they raised their family and move into a smaller place, or perhaps they will move into assisted living. But making a major change like this---going to a completely new land, where all the familiarity of home is absent---because God tells you a new destiny awaits---that is really hard. And very few would do it. But Abram went, taking with him his extended family. He heard God and he obeyed. He did not argue, and he did not question---though there will be later instances where Abram will question and argue with God, but not here. He went where he was told to go; he pitched his tent and built an altar to the Lord. And then comes this sentence: And Abram journeyed by stages toward the Negeb, which today is the Negev Desert.
Journeyed by stages: let’s consider those words. Though Abram got up and left his home, he apparently did not arrive at the designated place all at once. He took his time; he journeyed by stages. And let’s face it: that is how life often is. We don’t immediately arrive at our destination. We move and grow by stages, because life takes time, and though it would seem that Abram as an old man did not have a great deal of time, but still, even he moved by stages. He did not make his journey all at once.
I have watched people make changes in their lives, sometimes because they must adjust to a new reality, like a health threat or a divorce they did not see coming, or the death of a spouse or partner. Some people do adjust quickly. They face the hard truth and accept what is facing them without mounting any fight. It is what it is, some might say. But many others take time to adjust. They move in stages, getting used to the idea not all at once, but in little bites they can manage to take.
I knew these two brothers, one, John, was an anesthesiologist and the other, Michael, was a missionary in South Africa. John had been an anesthesiologist for 10 years, and he found his work very stressful. “You get into these power plays with the surgeon,” he said. “It’s my job to make sure the patient remains stable, and sometimes I have to tell the surgeon to get out soon, or else the patient will crash. The blood pressure is going down; the heartrate is erratic, and some surgeons are so full of themselves, they don’t want to hear it. It is so stressful, and over the years I have considered many alternatives. You don’t easily change your specialty when you have trained for it for years.
Well, his brother, the missionary, who was back in the U.S. on a leave with his family, said that John had been talking about change for a long time. “He considers this specialty and that one, but he stays put. He is stuck.” But being stuck is not how John understood his situation. He had to move by stages, and he finally decided on a residency in psychiatry at Duke Medical School. It meant starting over, a big move for not only him, but also for his wife, who was a cardiac surgeon, and his three kids. When John talked about his brother, he was in awe of his decision-making prowess. “He just never seems to struggle with his decisions the way I do. We are just different; it is as simple and as complicated as that.”
Consider now our text from Matthew. Here we see Jesus, working at breakneck speed. In the chapters leading up to our reading for today, Jesus has been going around healing people: a demonic, a paralytic, a leper, Peter’s mother and others. He also stilled a storm on the Sea of Galilee. So, he has been very, very busy. Then he came upon Matthew, who was at his tax collecting booth, trying to wheedle money out of people, and Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” And Matthew followed---no discussion, no questions, no arguments. Whether or not this is historically true does not matter. The gospel writer, Matthew, who, by the way, was NOT the disciple, Matthew, was trying to make the point that Jesus was very compelling, hard to resist. And yet we do know that many people resisted Jesus, so there was something in Matthew that allowed him to respond so quickly. At least in this instance, he did not move by stages. He made his decision quickly.
And in this instance the Pharisees seemed to decide quickly as well. We are so attuned to prejudice toward the Pharisees that we too often ignore their good points. They were progressive in so many ways, wanting to stretch the meaning of the Jewish law beyond the literal written word and embrace the reflections and thoughts of other leaders and rabbis, which is, the oral interpretation of the law. They asked deep questions, and they pondered their tradition. And so, they had every good reason to ask why Jesus was hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. Such people were considered ritually unclean, bad influences---not the sort of people good and upstanding persons would want to be around. I mean virtue can be taught, and if you are trying to teach people to be virtuous, in this case to follow the Jewish Law, these are not the kinds of examples you want others to follow. It is not an unreasonable position to take. But notice Jesus had an answer: his ministry was for people who needed help. The righteous had no need of him.
Of course, there is another layer of meaning, which Jesus did not name, but it was implied. Who are the righteous ones? Is it always so easy to tell? Furthermore, are people truly as righteous as they think? The Pharisees thought they knew exactly who fit into what category. But, if you stop and consider carefully; if you pull back and think hard, you might not be so quick to conclude as the Pharisees did---that they, being righteous, had no need of Jesus and these other sinners are to be avoided. The implied truth here is that we are never as good as we think we are. Our goodness, in fact, is not why God loves us. And it was not why Jesus healed people. Their worthiness was not the issue; their need was.
And the father of the dead girl and the woman with an issue of blood realized this truth. They did not think they were owed healings. The father, a leader of the synagogue, humbly approached Jesus by kneeling. He had faith that Jesus could raise his daughter, but he did not use his leadership position to coax a miracle from Jesus. And the woman, who had been bleeding for 12 years, did not even presume to ask. Perhaps she felt she was not even worthy to make such a request. She would, after all, have been considered contaminated, ritually unclean, someone no one, certainly no male, should ever touch. “If I can only touch his cloak, I will be healed.,” she said to herself. She had that much faith, and when Jesus saw her, he recognized that her faith has made her well.
Some people came quickly to Jesus; others took their time. Some would never come. People have all kinds of reasons for doing what they do or don’t do. Whatever the goal may be, my experience has taught me that many people move by stages. They don’t usually arrive all at once, but when they do arrive, they are often grateful---not only for their arrival, but also for the journey, which, when they look back, appears as a blessing---even if they did not know it at the time.
June 8, 2023
Dear Friends,
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, believed that virtue could be taught. It requires, however, habitual practice, which means that at first virtue is difficult, but when it becomes habit, it is less challenging to be virtuous. So, Aristotle was a big believer that virtue education should start young that in time virtuous behavior would become part of the personality. His teacher, Plato, believed the opposite---that virtue was endemic to the person, a gift from God.
Shakespeare would seem to come down on the side of Aristotle for in his play, Hamlet, the son, Hamlet, is trying to persuade his mother, Gertrude, to stay away from her new husband, who had murdered Hamlet’s father. Hamlet said, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” And then a bit later he said, “Refrain tonight,/And that shall lend a kind of easiness/To the next abstinence: the next more easy;/For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” That last line seems straight out of Aristotle, since it is the argument for habit. The more we do something, the more we practice, the easier it becomes.” And this is true, whether we are speaking of virtue or vice.
Last month the Beckman Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago released a paper by a Nobel economic laureate and two postdoctoral fellows that came down very heavily on the side of Aristotle. This was not a paper published in an ethics or philosophy or religion journal, but rather one whose concern was economics. The title of the paper was The Economic Approach to Personality, Character, and Virtue. Apparently, the paper is going to be a chapter in a soon to be published book.
James Heckman, the Nobel laureate in economics, has had a long term interest in early childhood education and the benefits that can accrue from teaching virtue to the very young. The paper referred to the Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted for three and four year old disadvantaged children over a five year period, from 1962 to 1967. During this time the intensive program showed that children, who were taught virtue, were far less likely to lie, cheat, steal and miss school. And 50 years later, when the students, then grown, were revisited, the research indicated that they did much better in life than others, who were not so fortunate to be exposed to early childhood education with a strong dose of teaching about right and wrong.
This is certainly something to consider, because there does seem to be a scarcity of virtue education these days. So many children have nothing to do with church or Sunday School, and public schools are wary of teaching ethics, when they can so easily be accused of pushing a form of behavior that comes from the dominant class, gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity. No wonder schools often avoid the subject. And yet schools readily admit they have deep challenges when it comes to bullying. How can you talk about bullying without clearly stating that it is wrong? Why is it wrong? On what basis do you make that claim? Is it simply a matter of personal opinion? Or is there a universal ethic that can make claims on everyone?
When I was growing up in suburban Buffalo, New York, I attended a very progressive elementary school, where we had a virtue of the month and a historical character who instantiated the virtue. The principal chose the virtue and the character, and it was the job of the teachers to talk and teach about it on the appropriate grade level. This is where I learned about such people as Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Tom Dooley, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, etc. I remember some of those lessons quite well, and I think it was a very positive experience. However, a few years ago, I had an elementary school teacher tell me, “That would never work today. There would be disagreements about the historical figure chosen. There would be all kinds of charges leveled like sexism, racism, classism, etc.” She claimed it would just be too hard to do. I understand her concern and her point, but by avoiding some of these hard issues and discussions, we cheat ourselves and our children out of an education. No education is perfect; something important is always left out, but an education without ethics is no education at all.
There is a line from the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy, where God has given the Law and God says to the people, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you, life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring may live. How do you choose the good, if you have not learned the critical tools that help us to think deeply about what goodness is? Remember, even Jesus said, when someone called him, "Good Teacher. Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, believed that virtue could be taught. It requires, however, habitual practice, which means that at first virtue is difficult, but when it becomes habit, it is less challenging to be virtuous. So, Aristotle was a big believer that virtue education should start young that in time virtuous behavior would become part of the personality. His teacher, Plato, believed the opposite---that virtue was endemic to the person, a gift from God.
Shakespeare would seem to come down on the side of Aristotle for in his play, Hamlet, the son, Hamlet, is trying to persuade his mother, Gertrude, to stay away from her new husband, who had murdered Hamlet’s father. Hamlet said, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” And then a bit later he said, “Refrain tonight,/And that shall lend a kind of easiness/To the next abstinence: the next more easy;/For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” That last line seems straight out of Aristotle, since it is the argument for habit. The more we do something, the more we practice, the easier it becomes.” And this is true, whether we are speaking of virtue or vice.
Last month the Beckman Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago released a paper by a Nobel economic laureate and two postdoctoral fellows that came down very heavily on the side of Aristotle. This was not a paper published in an ethics or philosophy or religion journal, but rather one whose concern was economics. The title of the paper was The Economic Approach to Personality, Character, and Virtue. Apparently, the paper is going to be a chapter in a soon to be published book.
James Heckman, the Nobel laureate in economics, has had a long term interest in early childhood education and the benefits that can accrue from teaching virtue to the very young. The paper referred to the Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted for three and four year old disadvantaged children over a five year period, from 1962 to 1967. During this time the intensive program showed that children, who were taught virtue, were far less likely to lie, cheat, steal and miss school. And 50 years later, when the students, then grown, were revisited, the research indicated that they did much better in life than others, who were not so fortunate to be exposed to early childhood education with a strong dose of teaching about right and wrong.
This is certainly something to consider, because there does seem to be a scarcity of virtue education these days. So many children have nothing to do with church or Sunday School, and public schools are wary of teaching ethics, when they can so easily be accused of pushing a form of behavior that comes from the dominant class, gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity. No wonder schools often avoid the subject. And yet schools readily admit they have deep challenges when it comes to bullying. How can you talk about bullying without clearly stating that it is wrong? Why is it wrong? On what basis do you make that claim? Is it simply a matter of personal opinion? Or is there a universal ethic that can make claims on everyone?
When I was growing up in suburban Buffalo, New York, I attended a very progressive elementary school, where we had a virtue of the month and a historical character who instantiated the virtue. The principal chose the virtue and the character, and it was the job of the teachers to talk and teach about it on the appropriate grade level. This is where I learned about such people as Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Tom Dooley, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, etc. I remember some of those lessons quite well, and I think it was a very positive experience. However, a few years ago, I had an elementary school teacher tell me, “That would never work today. There would be disagreements about the historical figure chosen. There would be all kinds of charges leveled like sexism, racism, classism, etc.” She claimed it would just be too hard to do. I understand her concern and her point, but by avoiding some of these hard issues and discussions, we cheat ourselves and our children out of an education. No education is perfect; something important is always left out, but an education without ethics is no education at all.
There is a line from the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy, where God has given the Law and God says to the people, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you, life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring may live. How do you choose the good, if you have not learned the critical tools that help us to think deeply about what goodness is? Remember, even Jesus said, when someone called him, "Good Teacher. Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
What are Human Beings That God is Mindful of Them?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
June 4, 2023
Psalm 8
Genesis 1: 26-31
The psalmist, whose tradition names as David, asks a profound question: What is the human being that God, the mighty creator of all that is, should be mindful of her or him? We can imagine David, the shepherd, lying on his back, gazing at the expanse of the starry sky, watching the moon send forth its shafts of light into the darkness of the night, and he ponders: Why would a God who created all this magnificence, pay any attention to human beings? David knows we are not only puny and weak in our strength, compared to many other animals, but we also sin. We rebel against God; we resist the limits, which forbid us to lie, cheat, covet and kill. And yet even with all those limitations, David marvels that God has given human beings incredible power and responsibility over the creation. We have a place, like all animals, but it seems that we alone of the creatures can consciously transcend our place. We reach for the stars and though we have not reached them, we have built a telescope that allows us to see stars being born and dying. And we have landed on the moon and are about to go again. Such feats would have been beyond David’s wildest imagination.
In 1969 Apollo 11 took off for the moon and 73 countries sent messages that they wanted planted there. The Vatican sent the entire words to Psalm 8, the only psalm that ever made it to the moon. And we human beings---weak, puny, and sinful creatures that we are---we are the ones who engineered that fantastic feat. So, God pays attention to human beings, close attention, to the point that we Christians say, God has fully entered into the human condition. In Jesus Christ we see what God is like when God is expressed in what is not God---that is, a limited human being, because whatever we want to say about Jesus, he was limited. He had the consciousness and the knowledge of a first century Jew, which means that he knew nothing about the Big Bang or the huge expanse of space beyond the earth. He had no knowledge of atoms and DNA and evolution and the age of the universe. All that knowledge was not his to know. But he knew how to love human beings and he knew how to love God. He was in right relationship with God, so intimate with God that his identity could not be known apart from God. So yes, God pays close attention to human beings, so closely attending that God expressed god-self in humanity. Why should this be so? What is it about human beings that is so extraordinary?
Our text from Genesis tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Notice too that this text tells us that God made male and female at the same time; woman here is not derivative from man. We call God the creator, and we too create. When you consider where and how we began, struggling to make the first tools and then develop language---it is extraordinary to contemplate the human journey. Modern homo sapiens have been around about 160,000 years, and in that time, we have been very busy. Some years ago, my husband and I were in Padua, Italy, the site of one of the great universities, where both Copernicus and Galileo taught. The Church did not approve that Galileo said the earth was not the center of the universe, and he was forced to recant or face the stake. Never mind, he knew the truth would win out, which it did. Pushing against all kinds of limits, we human beings have done marvelous things. No wonder the Psalmist asks: What is the human being that God is mindful of him or her?
Walk into a European Gothic cathedral, and you will be awed. Without the benefit of modern machines, people constructed these massive structures, filled with the light shining through the iridescent stained glass. The human brain figured out without calculators and computers the mathematics that would allow flying buttresses to support the weight of the cathedral without collapsing. It is beyond impressive. So, like God we are creative. But I read somewhere that dolphins and killer whales (more properly called orcas) have cerebral cortexes structurally capable of doing tensor calculus. Yet they do not do it. Calculus is a human activity these mammals have no interest in pursuing. Why? Perhaps because they have reached their nirvana. They are environmentally at home, and whales have no natural predators, except human beings. We humans, on the other hand are not so comfortable in our world. We have had to fight and claw and invent our way to the comfort we now have. We are restless creatures, and perhaps because we are not completely at home in our world, we have a need for God in a way that other creatures do not have. We ask questions about reality and God that drive us beyond the mundane, which make us seem a little lower than the angels.
But there is something else about us that evidence the image and likeness of God. And this is the human capacity to have great heart---to feel and experience compassion, to care deeply for others. And it is not simply care for other human beings. Last week I read this article about a man in LA, who saw a mother duck trying to cross the street with her ducklings---right out of the famous children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings. And with his children in the car, he pulled his car over and got out and stopped the traffic, so the ducks could cross. Sadly, as he returned to his car, someone came around the corner, hit and killed him. A stranger, who was at the scene of the accident said, “His last act on earth was to show compassion for life, the life of ducks. Surely God takes notice.”
On the May 14 edition of the Sunday New York Times, there was a front page article with the picture of a man named Abdul Curry, known as the Homeless Mayor of San Diego. Abdul has mental illness and addiction issues, and the closest thing Abdul has to permanent shelter was a parking garage overlooking downtown San Diego. Laine Goettsch is a medic, whose job it is to work in the forgotten alleyways and parking garages of San Diego. Abdul is her favorite client, and there was this picture of the two of them sitting together, he resting his shoulder on hers. He’s a charmer, which is how he has managed to stay in the parking garage. The man whose job it is to make sure the garage is clear overlooks Abdul, because not only is he a nice guy, but he also keeps the garage clean, even washing and detailing customer’s cars.
Laine, Abdul’s medic, whom he is supposed to see once a week, compulsively looks for him, if she cannot find him. She cares that much about a man, whom many would judge to be a throw away human being, the same way more than a few thought Jordan Neely got what he deserved, when he was recently killed in a subway with a chokehold because he was acting erratically. And Laine cares about others, trying to stabilize a man, who was throwing rocks onto a freeway from an overpass during a psychotic episode. She stopped to treat a man with second degree burns and open wounds on his feet. How much are you drinking, she asked? Profusely, he replied. It’s the only thing that stops the pain---and he meant more than the physical ones. Most people simply could not do Laine’s job, caring for the least of these as she does. She cares deeply and that too is what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. “You are wasting your time on such people,” others might say dismissively, but Laine knows and believes differently. And surely God takes notice and smiles.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
June 4, 2023
Psalm 8
Genesis 1: 26-31
The psalmist, whose tradition names as David, asks a profound question: What is the human being that God, the mighty creator of all that is, should be mindful of her or him? We can imagine David, the shepherd, lying on his back, gazing at the expanse of the starry sky, watching the moon send forth its shafts of light into the darkness of the night, and he ponders: Why would a God who created all this magnificence, pay any attention to human beings? David knows we are not only puny and weak in our strength, compared to many other animals, but we also sin. We rebel against God; we resist the limits, which forbid us to lie, cheat, covet and kill. And yet even with all those limitations, David marvels that God has given human beings incredible power and responsibility over the creation. We have a place, like all animals, but it seems that we alone of the creatures can consciously transcend our place. We reach for the stars and though we have not reached them, we have built a telescope that allows us to see stars being born and dying. And we have landed on the moon and are about to go again. Such feats would have been beyond David’s wildest imagination.
In 1969 Apollo 11 took off for the moon and 73 countries sent messages that they wanted planted there. The Vatican sent the entire words to Psalm 8, the only psalm that ever made it to the moon. And we human beings---weak, puny, and sinful creatures that we are---we are the ones who engineered that fantastic feat. So, God pays attention to human beings, close attention, to the point that we Christians say, God has fully entered into the human condition. In Jesus Christ we see what God is like when God is expressed in what is not God---that is, a limited human being, because whatever we want to say about Jesus, he was limited. He had the consciousness and the knowledge of a first century Jew, which means that he knew nothing about the Big Bang or the huge expanse of space beyond the earth. He had no knowledge of atoms and DNA and evolution and the age of the universe. All that knowledge was not his to know. But he knew how to love human beings and he knew how to love God. He was in right relationship with God, so intimate with God that his identity could not be known apart from God. So yes, God pays close attention to human beings, so closely attending that God expressed god-self in humanity. Why should this be so? What is it about human beings that is so extraordinary?
Our text from Genesis tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Notice too that this text tells us that God made male and female at the same time; woman here is not derivative from man. We call God the creator, and we too create. When you consider where and how we began, struggling to make the first tools and then develop language---it is extraordinary to contemplate the human journey. Modern homo sapiens have been around about 160,000 years, and in that time, we have been very busy. Some years ago, my husband and I were in Padua, Italy, the site of one of the great universities, where both Copernicus and Galileo taught. The Church did not approve that Galileo said the earth was not the center of the universe, and he was forced to recant or face the stake. Never mind, he knew the truth would win out, which it did. Pushing against all kinds of limits, we human beings have done marvelous things. No wonder the Psalmist asks: What is the human being that God is mindful of him or her?
Walk into a European Gothic cathedral, and you will be awed. Without the benefit of modern machines, people constructed these massive structures, filled with the light shining through the iridescent stained glass. The human brain figured out without calculators and computers the mathematics that would allow flying buttresses to support the weight of the cathedral without collapsing. It is beyond impressive. So, like God we are creative. But I read somewhere that dolphins and killer whales (more properly called orcas) have cerebral cortexes structurally capable of doing tensor calculus. Yet they do not do it. Calculus is a human activity these mammals have no interest in pursuing. Why? Perhaps because they have reached their nirvana. They are environmentally at home, and whales have no natural predators, except human beings. We humans, on the other hand are not so comfortable in our world. We have had to fight and claw and invent our way to the comfort we now have. We are restless creatures, and perhaps because we are not completely at home in our world, we have a need for God in a way that other creatures do not have. We ask questions about reality and God that drive us beyond the mundane, which make us seem a little lower than the angels.
But there is something else about us that evidence the image and likeness of God. And this is the human capacity to have great heart---to feel and experience compassion, to care deeply for others. And it is not simply care for other human beings. Last week I read this article about a man in LA, who saw a mother duck trying to cross the street with her ducklings---right out of the famous children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings. And with his children in the car, he pulled his car over and got out and stopped the traffic, so the ducks could cross. Sadly, as he returned to his car, someone came around the corner, hit and killed him. A stranger, who was at the scene of the accident said, “His last act on earth was to show compassion for life, the life of ducks. Surely God takes notice.”
On the May 14 edition of the Sunday New York Times, there was a front page article with the picture of a man named Abdul Curry, known as the Homeless Mayor of San Diego. Abdul has mental illness and addiction issues, and the closest thing Abdul has to permanent shelter was a parking garage overlooking downtown San Diego. Laine Goettsch is a medic, whose job it is to work in the forgotten alleyways and parking garages of San Diego. Abdul is her favorite client, and there was this picture of the two of them sitting together, he resting his shoulder on hers. He’s a charmer, which is how he has managed to stay in the parking garage. The man whose job it is to make sure the garage is clear overlooks Abdul, because not only is he a nice guy, but he also keeps the garage clean, even washing and detailing customer’s cars.
Laine, Abdul’s medic, whom he is supposed to see once a week, compulsively looks for him, if she cannot find him. She cares that much about a man, whom many would judge to be a throw away human being, the same way more than a few thought Jordan Neely got what he deserved, when he was recently killed in a subway with a chokehold because he was acting erratically. And Laine cares about others, trying to stabilize a man, who was throwing rocks onto a freeway from an overpass during a psychotic episode. She stopped to treat a man with second degree burns and open wounds on his feet. How much are you drinking, she asked? Profusely, he replied. It’s the only thing that stops the pain---and he meant more than the physical ones. Most people simply could not do Laine’s job, caring for the least of these as she does. She cares deeply and that too is what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. “You are wasting your time on such people,” others might say dismissively, but Laine knows and believes differently. And surely God takes notice and smiles.
READINGS FROM MAY 28TH 2023 SERVICE
Introduction:
In July, 1943 my father landed on Utah Beach in Normandy. It was a month after the Normandy Invasion, and he wrote in a letter to my mother that the locals were swimming. There was very little evidence of the mayhem that had occurred just a month before. In 2006 my mother, husband, youngest daughter, who was in Paris for her junior year in college, all visited the Normandy beaches. To see all those white crosses and Stars of David, each representing a life lost, was beyond description. My mother cried and so did I. We also went to a cemetery, where German soldiers were buried, their graves marked by dark crosses. Over the entrance to the cemetery was a sign, reading, “Not All Who Lie Here Chose the Cause for Which They died. Indeed, they did not. Unlike the American cemetery, which only noted the date of death, the German one gave the date of birth as well, so you could see how old the victim was. Many of them were only 14 or 15 years old. Toward the end of the war, Hitler was so desperate, he had children drafted. My mother cried again, this time even harder.
In 1970 the War in Viet Nam was raging. My older brother, an officer in the Air Force, educated as a mechanical engineer, was also a very gifted mathematician. His team’s job was to have the bombs dropped on Viet Nam detonate at the right time---not too early, or the plane could be negatively impacted. He was accused of insubordination, when he told his commanding officer that his math was not right, and that accusation almost ended his career. But he managed to hang on for another 14 years and then he left the Air Force and earned a PhD and then taught in college.
In 1970, the same year my older brother was working on bomb safety, my younger brother, a gentle soul, if there ever was one, applied for and received conscientious objector status. In his essay he not only wrote about how he could not and would not kill any human being, but also he wrote that he could not harm nature. He wrote about bombs destroying trees and foliage and how this was a sacrilege against the creation. The committee that examined him told him, “No one had ever mentioned the earth as a casualty of war.”
You are about to hear some reflections and some letters about peace and war and also this beautiful earth, which we call our home.
1. Lewis Thomas, a biologist. (Susan Keenan)
The most beautiful object I have ever seen in a photograph, in all my life, is the planet Earth seen from the distance of the moon, hanging there in space, obviously alive. Although it seems at first glance to be made up of innumerable separate species of living things, on closer examination every one of its working parts, including us, is interdependently connected to all the other working parts. It is the only truly closed ecosystem any of us knows about. It is a living organism that came alive about 3.8 billion years ago. I wish it a Happy Birthday and a long life ahead, for our children and their grandchildren and theirs and theirs.
2. Lt. James Trathen of the ship, The MS Bark. November 29, 1861, writing to a friend. (Susan Keenan)
It is with much pleasure that I write to you today. I left New York on the 5th, and when we entered the Gulf Stream the storm was terrible, raging wind and fierce waves all around us. In the midst of all this turmoil, one of best Seaman fell from the mast head very. Near the place where my first officer and I were standing, which instantly killed him. A gloom then descended over the whole ship.
There is nothing that can happen on board ships that will affect a sailor more than the death of a shipmate in this way. Ten men killed in a battle produces less despondency. It was two days after the sad incident when we could finally bury him at sea, and it was the most impressive scene I had ever beheld. The gale was still fierce and the sea running very high making it impossible to stand on deck without having a firm hold of some support. The corpse lay on the deck secured up in a hammock. The whole crew grouped around in front of me bareheaded with their hair streaming in the wind, looking both wild and sad. I read part of the funeral service of our Church, as much as the wind would allow, and then the body was launched into the sea. The gloom seemed immediately to pass away from the faces of all, and then things returned to normal.
The magnitude of the work before us becomes more apparent as I get into it. Our country seems sad and bleeding a every pore. I cannot think our People of the North are yet into this, and they won’t be until they see us suffer even more. This war will bring universal ruin and exhaustion to both sides.
- From Dwight Eisenhower, General from World War ll and President of the United States during the Cold War. (Cindy Nye)
- From a Union Soldier, Columbus Huddle, writing to his father about the Battle of Shiloh, April 10, 1962. We do not know who George is, perhaps a relative, even a brother or a close friend. ( Cindy Nye
With sadness I sit down to write you a few lines to let you know that I am still living, but poor George was laid low by a rebel ball Sunday morning. A musket ball went through his left hip. I did not think when he first fell that he was killed I thought that he was just wounded, but when I went back to see how bad it was, he was lying on his face, dead. I had to leave him there, because our regiment was retreating back, but the next day we buried him. He was put in a separate grave, but we had no coffins for any of our dead.
I was in the terrible fight from Sunday morning till Monday afternoon. I saw the rebels run like turkeys, but after the fight the scene was terrible, all these soldiers, both rebels and Union men, lying on the blood soaked ground TOGETHER. That scene really got to me, seeing all the dead together. In life we are enemies, but what are we in death? Are we all the same to God.
- Carl Sagan, astronomer (Julie Dyer)
- First Lieutenant Schnaittacher writing home to his parents after walking through the concentration camp, Dachau after General Eisenhower ordered American troops near the camp to see the outrage. (Julie Dyer)
A year ago I was sweating out shells on Anzio Beachhead and today I am sitting in Hitler’s luxuriously furnished apartment in Munich. What a contrast! I had the misfortune of seeing the camp yesterday. In my two years in combat, I have seen a lot of death, but nothing has ever stirred me like this. I’ve shot at Germans with intent to kill before but only because I had to or else it was me. Now I hold no hesitancy whatsoever.
The first boxcar I came to had about 30 bodies in it. Most of them had their eyes opened with an indescribable look on their faces, What did I do to deserve this look. I cannot describe how awful it was. How can people do things like this? I never believed they could until now.
The only good thing I noticed in the camp were the scores of SS guards freshly killed. Some of the prisoners could not control themselves and went from German to German bashing their heads in with rocks and stones. No one tried to stop them. We realized it was payback time for all they had suffered.
Your Son,
Horace
- West Street was a Federal Prison that held few murderers, only if they had committed some other crime. There was a famous inmate there, Louis Letke, who was guilty of murder and was wanted by New York State, so he could be executed at Sing Sing. Letke was liked by the other prisoners, because he was friendly and funny. Next to Lepke’s cell was a young conscientious objector from Iowa, a man named Lowell Naeve. Lowell tried to explain to Lepke what a conscientious objector was, but the gangster had a great deal of trouble understanding. You mean to tell me, that you are here for NOT KILLING. And then he laughed and laughed. (Julie Thureson)
- Sgt. Richard Leonard, stationed in Japan at the end of World War ll writes to a friend after walking through the city of Kure, only miles from Hiroshima. He was 24 years old when he wrote this letter. (Julie Thuerson)
Dear Arlene,
Greetings from downtown Kure. Only it really isn’t downtown, because there isn’t a town. And Nagoya that once had 3 million people now has only 10 buildings left standing. Japan is at least 50% destroyed and its cities 90% destroyed.
Meanwhile we are fraternizing to beat hell. The Japs are being as polite to us as can be, treating us like kings. They bow, salute and felicitate us into extreme egotism and you just can’t hate them for hate’s sake. The average Jap doesn’t give a damn about ruling the world anymore than you or I do. He’s just an ordinary joker who went to war because he was told told to, and he did the joy the way he was told.
War is all phony in the first place. I know that now. It’s just the vested economic, political and military leaders of the world fighting for personal prestige and fortune at the expense of their citizens. I believe the common people the world over share the same dreams of peace and security. I mixed quite thoroughly with German POW’s and now the Japs. I have been to their homes for dinner and crowded into streetcars with them, and they are all as human as people I have seen.
It would have been easy for me to hate blindly. I hated their guts when they killed my brother a year ago, but hate leads only to more hate and its only if we can get together---work and live together---and develop confidence in each other that there is any hope for a better tomorrow. Sure, we have to occupy them now, but we must watch them and help them and do everything we can to restructure them as a peace loving nation. And all this must be done through the common man.
Anti-Gun Violence Vigil, June 1 at 7 PM at the First Church in Farmington.
These are the words spoken by Sandra.
A few weeks ago, I was reading in the New York Times Opinion section an article by a mother who had lost her 14 year old daughter to cancer. And she said that the word grief is so inadequate to describe what she is going through. Of course, there is sadness that descends so deeply its depths cannot be found. But so is there also anger and frustration, protest and even the awful agony of the temptation to self-blame. Is there something more we could have/should have done? And her description of her lying next to her dead daughter for hours before the funeral home arrived to take away her body was almost more than I could read, since my eyesight was blurry from the tears flooding my eyes. And as I take that article, and apply it to the people, especially the parents, who have lost children to gun violence, yes, grief does seem like a completely inadequate word.
Those of us who have gathered here this evening, even if we have not lost someone to gun violence, can imagine the depths of such grief and anger and protest. Possibly we can do more than imagine because we can also feel those emotions. We too are frustrated and angry and we too raise our voices in protest: This should not be; this must not be, and yet tragically, it is. A tragedy is a fall from a higher state to a lower one. In the Greek dramas the fall is more often than not due to arrogance. And is there any doubt among us that in refusing to ban assault weapons, in refusing to make age and mental health appropriate decisions about who should be permitted to buy a gun, in refusing to do something about laws that allow people to carry hidden, loaded weapons on their persons, because it is deemed an act of freedom to do so---the ugly arrogance of it all, an arrogance that finally sits on the graves of so many people, children, whose futures have been robbed from them and from us.
And so we gather here, because we are called to be responsible, and at the heart of the word responsible is the word RESPOND. And so, we respond. We respond by remembering names and faces and stories of real human beings. And sometimes what we must remember is almost too horrible to be named. No parent or sibling or aunt or uncle or friend wants to recall images of bodies blown apart, heads decapitated. Of course, it is horrible, and I give the Washington Post great credit for describing what happens to a body when bullets from an AR-15 make contact. The mother who lay next to her dead 14 year old from cancer could do what none of the people whose loved ones were shot to death by assault rifles could ever do. Yes, it is horrible, but when we speak truth to power, we sometimes must remind people of the horror and refuse them the right to deny and lie. Our outrage will not permit us silence, and we should be empowered by words from George Sand, who wrote: Sometimes our outrage is our most passionate form of love.
And memory too can be a form of passionate love. I was reading not too long ago an article in the Christian Science Monitor called Ukraine Remembers. By refusing to forget all it is losing, a nation asserts its identity. The powerful have always had at their disposal the human tendency to forget, and they have used it and will use it to their advantage. Stories are wiped out; memories rewritten and remade and when that happens, we witness another tragedy, another fall. But we are here tonight to promise that we will not permit this to happen. We will remember and our memories are powerful, powerful enough to change this nation’s laws and its direction. We will march; we will vote, and though our goal will most likely take longer than any of us wish, we are in this battle for the long haul, and we will not be turned back.
We will not forget who we are, and we will not forget who they are, the ones we have lost to gun violence. And most of all, we will not forget who it is we are called to be and become: a compassionate community of people, committed to peace and the love and protection of all God’s people.
Blessings for Peace,
Sandra
These are the words spoken by Sandra.
A few weeks ago, I was reading in the New York Times Opinion section an article by a mother who had lost her 14 year old daughter to cancer. And she said that the word grief is so inadequate to describe what she is going through. Of course, there is sadness that descends so deeply its depths cannot be found. But so is there also anger and frustration, protest and even the awful agony of the temptation to self-blame. Is there something more we could have/should have done? And her description of her lying next to her dead daughter for hours before the funeral home arrived to take away her body was almost more than I could read, since my eyesight was blurry from the tears flooding my eyes. And as I take that article, and apply it to the people, especially the parents, who have lost children to gun violence, yes, grief does seem like a completely inadequate word.
Those of us who have gathered here this evening, even if we have not lost someone to gun violence, can imagine the depths of such grief and anger and protest. Possibly we can do more than imagine because we can also feel those emotions. We too are frustrated and angry and we too raise our voices in protest: This should not be; this must not be, and yet tragically, it is. A tragedy is a fall from a higher state to a lower one. In the Greek dramas the fall is more often than not due to arrogance. And is there any doubt among us that in refusing to ban assault weapons, in refusing to make age and mental health appropriate decisions about who should be permitted to buy a gun, in refusing to do something about laws that allow people to carry hidden, loaded weapons on their persons, because it is deemed an act of freedom to do so---the ugly arrogance of it all, an arrogance that finally sits on the graves of so many people, children, whose futures have been robbed from them and from us.
And so we gather here, because we are called to be responsible, and at the heart of the word responsible is the word RESPOND. And so, we respond. We respond by remembering names and faces and stories of real human beings. And sometimes what we must remember is almost too horrible to be named. No parent or sibling or aunt or uncle or friend wants to recall images of bodies blown apart, heads decapitated. Of course, it is horrible, and I give the Washington Post great credit for describing what happens to a body when bullets from an AR-15 make contact. The mother who lay next to her dead 14 year old from cancer could do what none of the people whose loved ones were shot to death by assault rifles could ever do. Yes, it is horrible, but when we speak truth to power, we sometimes must remind people of the horror and refuse them the right to deny and lie. Our outrage will not permit us silence, and we should be empowered by words from George Sand, who wrote: Sometimes our outrage is our most passionate form of love.
And memory too can be a form of passionate love. I was reading not too long ago an article in the Christian Science Monitor called Ukraine Remembers. By refusing to forget all it is losing, a nation asserts its identity. The powerful have always had at their disposal the human tendency to forget, and they have used it and will use it to their advantage. Stories are wiped out; memories rewritten and remade and when that happens, we witness another tragedy, another fall. But we are here tonight to promise that we will not permit this to happen. We will remember and our memories are powerful, powerful enough to change this nation’s laws and its direction. We will march; we will vote, and though our goal will most likely take longer than any of us wish, we are in this battle for the long haul, and we will not be turned back.
We will not forget who we are, and we will not forget who they are, the ones we have lost to gun violence. And most of all, we will not forget who it is we are called to be and become: a compassionate community of people, committed to peace and the love and protection of all God’s people.
Blessings for Peace,
Sandra
May 24, 2023
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, because the graves of veterans were decorated with flowers. Many families, in fact, used this day to visit cemeteries where their ancestors were buried and decorated them as well. It was always celebrated on May 30, no matter what day of the week May 30 was. I remember Decoration Day as “a big deal,” probably because the parent generation, whom Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation,” had just fought World War ll. Almost everyone my family knew, had a friend or family member who had been wounded or had died in the War. And there were still many World War I veterans around as well, and people would discuss the horrors of each war: the introduction of gas warfare in World War l and the atomic bombs of World War ll. The latter was said to have prevented an invasion of Japan, which saved many thousands of lives on both sides, and then in the early 90’s, a new story was told. The Japanese code had been broken, and we knew they were secretly negotiating a surrender through Russia. And so the claim is we dropped the atomic bombs to show Russia, which was becoming our new enemy, the horrific power of this new weapon. Whatever the full truth is, we all can agree that war is terrible.
It is not exactly clear when Decoration Day first began. Soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865 many towns and cities across the nation gathered to remember the dead. Waterloo, New York had set aside a day to honor the war dead on May 5, 1866, and in 1966 the Federal Government declared this site the beginning of Decoration Day. But some credit General John A. Logan as the one who first made honoring the war dead an official act. In 1868 he used General Order Number 1l, designating May 30 as the day to honor the war dead. The observance took place at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Union and Confederate soldiers were buried. Logan declared, “This day would be for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
Decoration Day later became known as Memorial Day, and now as the two World Wars are farther away from living memory, we don’t pay as close attention to the day. The wars that have followed, like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan did not involve mass mobilization as did the world wars, so perhaps these later wars have been easier to forget or ignore. Now Memorial Day is celebrated as the initiation of summer activities. Few people go to the cemeteries to pay homage to those who paid the ultimate price.
Memorial Day this year is May 29, and the day after, May 30, is the 101st anniversary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. Henry Bacon was the architect of the Memorial, and he modeled it on the Parthenon in Greece, the birthplace of democracy. Daniel Chester French was the sculptor who made the massive figure of Lincoln, stoically sitting in the Memorial. The first time I laid eyes on the Memorial, when I was 18 and in Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War, I cried, so struck was I by the marbled beauty of Lincoln’s face and his massive hands holding the arms of the chair. French’s summer estate and workshop are located in Stockbridge, MA in the Berkshires, and it is well worth a visit. French also designed and sculpted the famous Minuteman Monument in Concord, MA.
The marble and granite that went into making the Lincoln Memorial came from many different states: Massachusetts, Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Tennessee, and Alabama, symbolizing the divided states that fought on different sides in the Civil War, coming together to make something beautiful. And yet divisions were apparent on the day of the dedication. 50,000 people gathered to dedicate the Memorial, but the audience was segregated and the keynote speaker, Robert Moton, who was a black man and president of the Tuskegee Institute, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. Forty one years after that dedication, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his famous, “I Have a Dream Speech.” History moves on and moves the people along with it. We should never forget that one of the major contributions of the Jewish scriptures is its insistence that God is a God of history, who meets God’s people in the details of their individual lives as well as in the drama that we know, interpret, and remember as history.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, because the graves of veterans were decorated with flowers. Many families, in fact, used this day to visit cemeteries where their ancestors were buried and decorated them as well. It was always celebrated on May 30, no matter what day of the week May 30 was. I remember Decoration Day as “a big deal,” probably because the parent generation, whom Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation,” had just fought World War ll. Almost everyone my family knew, had a friend or family member who had been wounded or had died in the War. And there were still many World War I veterans around as well, and people would discuss the horrors of each war: the introduction of gas warfare in World War l and the atomic bombs of World War ll. The latter was said to have prevented an invasion of Japan, which saved many thousands of lives on both sides, and then in the early 90’s, a new story was told. The Japanese code had been broken, and we knew they were secretly negotiating a surrender through Russia. And so the claim is we dropped the atomic bombs to show Russia, which was becoming our new enemy, the horrific power of this new weapon. Whatever the full truth is, we all can agree that war is terrible.
It is not exactly clear when Decoration Day first began. Soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865 many towns and cities across the nation gathered to remember the dead. Waterloo, New York had set aside a day to honor the war dead on May 5, 1866, and in 1966 the Federal Government declared this site the beginning of Decoration Day. But some credit General John A. Logan as the one who first made honoring the war dead an official act. In 1868 he used General Order Number 1l, designating May 30 as the day to honor the war dead. The observance took place at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Union and Confederate soldiers were buried. Logan declared, “This day would be for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
Decoration Day later became known as Memorial Day, and now as the two World Wars are farther away from living memory, we don’t pay as close attention to the day. The wars that have followed, like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan did not involve mass mobilization as did the world wars, so perhaps these later wars have been easier to forget or ignore. Now Memorial Day is celebrated as the initiation of summer activities. Few people go to the cemeteries to pay homage to those who paid the ultimate price.
Memorial Day this year is May 29, and the day after, May 30, is the 101st anniversary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. Henry Bacon was the architect of the Memorial, and he modeled it on the Parthenon in Greece, the birthplace of democracy. Daniel Chester French was the sculptor who made the massive figure of Lincoln, stoically sitting in the Memorial. The first time I laid eyes on the Memorial, when I was 18 and in Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War, I cried, so struck was I by the marbled beauty of Lincoln’s face and his massive hands holding the arms of the chair. French’s summer estate and workshop are located in Stockbridge, MA in the Berkshires, and it is well worth a visit. French also designed and sculpted the famous Minuteman Monument in Concord, MA.
The marble and granite that went into making the Lincoln Memorial came from many different states: Massachusetts, Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Tennessee, and Alabama, symbolizing the divided states that fought on different sides in the Civil War, coming together to make something beautiful. And yet divisions were apparent on the day of the dedication. 50,000 people gathered to dedicate the Memorial, but the audience was segregated and the keynote speaker, Robert Moton, who was a black man and president of the Tuskegee Institute, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. Forty one years after that dedication, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his famous, “I Have a Dream Speech.” History moves on and moves the people along with it. We should never forget that one of the major contributions of the Jewish scriptures is its insistence that God is a God of history, who meets God’s people in the details of their individual lives as well as in the drama that we know, interpret, and remember as history.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Long Good-bye
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 21, 2023
John 16: 16-20
In John’s Gospel Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples---the long goodbye---goes on and on. It begins in chapter 14 and ends with a long prayer in chapter 17. He tells them things he wants them to know, but they don’t understand. He’s going away, he says, but they don’t know where he is going, and they don’t understand how they are to follow him. He promises them the Spirit of Truth, and when he appeared to them after his resurrection, he breathed on them The Holy Spirit. So, they are receiving power to do their work. And now in chapter 16, he tells them in a little while they will no longer see him, for he is going to the Father. And they wonder: what does a little while mean? How long is that? And he does not really explain, but he reassures them that their suffering and pain will one day turn to joy.
You have heard me say a number of times that while the bible does not always give us an accurate historical portrayal of what has happened, it does give us existential truth, that is, it reveals something deeply true about the human condition. And certainly learning to say good bye is a very important task we all need to learn. We teach little children to do it by waving their hands before they can even talk. Saying good bye is a way of separating ourselves from people, places, even things. And separation isn’t easy. Consider how hard it is when people downsize. Getting rid of stuff can be agony. I remember one of my elderly parishioners in Middletown, who was a retired Wesleyan University librarian. Books were her life, and her house was full of them. When at age 99, she had to go into assisted living, getting rid of so many of her books was pure torture. Quite frankly, she had an easier time letting go of life than she did letting go of her books.
Now Jesus was trying to help his disciples let go of him---not completely of course, since he has spent time telling them that he is in them, and they are in him as God is also in him and in them. But still, he will not be with them in the same way, and that is for them very troubling. In the reading from Acts, we hear a story about Jesus’ ascension into heaven, which is a way of talking about his separation from his disciples as well as earthly time, but also it is a symbolic way of saying that the full humanity of Jesus is now taken up into God. So, even God is changed---changed by the human story that Jesus lived, which is fully incorporated into God. And the disciples---well, they are left behind, left to live their own lives, using the wisdom and teaching Jesus gave them and the assurance he is with them always.
The same is true for us. We have our lives to live, and we can use the wisdom and knowledge we have received from Jesus and the assurance he is with us. And that assurance can help us, especially as we face tough times. And saying good bye and letting go are part of those tough times. Just this past week, while walking across the Wesleyan campus, I saw these two students, clinging to each other and crying. “You are my best friend, one said to the other. We have been together for four years and now in a few weeks, it will all be over. Our lives are going to change, but I hope our friendship won’t.” They hope they will remain best friends for life, and perhaps they will, but they are old enough to realize that time does bring change, and not all the changes time brings are what we want. It hurts to say good bye. No wonder people sometimes refuse to say it.
We have this funny notion in our heads that if we refuse to acknowledge something it won’t happen. While denial may be a strong coping mechanism, it does not control future events. In my last church there was this man, dying of congestive heart failure in the hospital, and when his wife bent down to kiss him, she said. “Good night, my darling.” “You mean goodbye, don’t you”, he answered her. “No”, she insisted. “I mean good night”. She was not ready to say goodbye, though he was. He died the next morning before she arrived at the hospital, and she deeply regretted that she had not said goodbye. But as she told me, “I was not ready to face the hard truth of saying good bye.”
There are many different kinds of good-byes, and our culture, like all cultures, has evolved rituals to bring situations to closure. Graduations, weddings, funerals, and memorial services are all ways we say good-bye, while moving toward a new beginning. They are acknowledgements that life will now be lived a bit differently. While some of our good byes are finished sentences, a completion, a moving on, there are other good byes that are more like a retreat----as when we decide we must end or give up on something---like these lines from an Emily Dickinson poem:
We learn in the retreating
How vast a One
Was recently among us
A perished sun.
Not all our perished suns are people. Sometimes we say goodbye to hopes and dreams, to youth, vitality, and energy, and finally even to life itself. We have all been beaten by certain circumstances. There are among us failed marriages, broken relationships with friends, family members, which may never heal. Some people have spent huge expanses of energy living toward a dream that may never come to fruition. It hurts to let dreams go, and yet sometimes that is what must be done. I am not sure from where the wisdom comes to know when to retreat or give up, sometimes the wisdom does come. We reach limits of strength and stamina. We retreat, not because our goal is unworthy, but because we no longer know how to work towards its birth. And when we close that door, when we stammer the words good-bye, we do so with a haunting feeling that yes, a sun indeed has perished from our lives. And yet we learn in the retreating.
When I was serving a church in New Haven, I met this woman, around the age of 30, a graduate of Julliard and a very fine violinist. But she had reached the point where she was giving up her dream of being a concert violinist. “I have made myself sick over it,” she said, “and now it is time to let go. Some are calling me a quitter, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go to any more try outs with the hope that this time---it will happen. Maybe it will, but maybe it won’t. And I can’t live with the won’t. It’s time for me to move on and do something else.” Indeed, we learn in the retreating.
And Jesus’ disciples learned in the retreating. Consider what they had once expected: a king, like King David, who ruled a sovereign nation. They had lived with Rome’s boot on the necks of the Jewish people, and they wanted it off. They wanted to be their own nation again. Isn’t this what the Messiah was supposed to accomplish? And then along came Jesus, who overturned those expectations. He did not lead the way they thought he should lead. He taught them strange things about the first being last and the last being first and loving their enemies and forgiving over and over again. And now in this long, protracted farewell discourse, he is telling them good bye. He is going away, but he insists they will not be abandoned. They have the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Truth. He tells them they will face very tough times; they will suffer, but finally their sorrow will turn to joy. They could not see around the corner; they did not understand what he meant. And so, they would have to trust that there was a new beginning waiting for them. And so do we all have to trust. We trust in a future we cannot see. There is always change; nothing stays the same. People come into our lives, and people go out of our lives, but God goes with us and is with us through all that coming and going. On this we can rely.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 21, 2023
John 16: 16-20
In John’s Gospel Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples---the long goodbye---goes on and on. It begins in chapter 14 and ends with a long prayer in chapter 17. He tells them things he wants them to know, but they don’t understand. He’s going away, he says, but they don’t know where he is going, and they don’t understand how they are to follow him. He promises them the Spirit of Truth, and when he appeared to them after his resurrection, he breathed on them The Holy Spirit. So, they are receiving power to do their work. And now in chapter 16, he tells them in a little while they will no longer see him, for he is going to the Father. And they wonder: what does a little while mean? How long is that? And he does not really explain, but he reassures them that their suffering and pain will one day turn to joy.
You have heard me say a number of times that while the bible does not always give us an accurate historical portrayal of what has happened, it does give us existential truth, that is, it reveals something deeply true about the human condition. And certainly learning to say good bye is a very important task we all need to learn. We teach little children to do it by waving their hands before they can even talk. Saying good bye is a way of separating ourselves from people, places, even things. And separation isn’t easy. Consider how hard it is when people downsize. Getting rid of stuff can be agony. I remember one of my elderly parishioners in Middletown, who was a retired Wesleyan University librarian. Books were her life, and her house was full of them. When at age 99, she had to go into assisted living, getting rid of so many of her books was pure torture. Quite frankly, she had an easier time letting go of life than she did letting go of her books.
Now Jesus was trying to help his disciples let go of him---not completely of course, since he has spent time telling them that he is in them, and they are in him as God is also in him and in them. But still, he will not be with them in the same way, and that is for them very troubling. In the reading from Acts, we hear a story about Jesus’ ascension into heaven, which is a way of talking about his separation from his disciples as well as earthly time, but also it is a symbolic way of saying that the full humanity of Jesus is now taken up into God. So, even God is changed---changed by the human story that Jesus lived, which is fully incorporated into God. And the disciples---well, they are left behind, left to live their own lives, using the wisdom and teaching Jesus gave them and the assurance he is with them always.
The same is true for us. We have our lives to live, and we can use the wisdom and knowledge we have received from Jesus and the assurance he is with us. And that assurance can help us, especially as we face tough times. And saying good bye and letting go are part of those tough times. Just this past week, while walking across the Wesleyan campus, I saw these two students, clinging to each other and crying. “You are my best friend, one said to the other. We have been together for four years and now in a few weeks, it will all be over. Our lives are going to change, but I hope our friendship won’t.” They hope they will remain best friends for life, and perhaps they will, but they are old enough to realize that time does bring change, and not all the changes time brings are what we want. It hurts to say good bye. No wonder people sometimes refuse to say it.
We have this funny notion in our heads that if we refuse to acknowledge something it won’t happen. While denial may be a strong coping mechanism, it does not control future events. In my last church there was this man, dying of congestive heart failure in the hospital, and when his wife bent down to kiss him, she said. “Good night, my darling.” “You mean goodbye, don’t you”, he answered her. “No”, she insisted. “I mean good night”. She was not ready to say goodbye, though he was. He died the next morning before she arrived at the hospital, and she deeply regretted that she had not said goodbye. But as she told me, “I was not ready to face the hard truth of saying good bye.”
There are many different kinds of good-byes, and our culture, like all cultures, has evolved rituals to bring situations to closure. Graduations, weddings, funerals, and memorial services are all ways we say good-bye, while moving toward a new beginning. They are acknowledgements that life will now be lived a bit differently. While some of our good byes are finished sentences, a completion, a moving on, there are other good byes that are more like a retreat----as when we decide we must end or give up on something---like these lines from an Emily Dickinson poem:
We learn in the retreating
How vast a One
Was recently among us
A perished sun.
Not all our perished suns are people. Sometimes we say goodbye to hopes and dreams, to youth, vitality, and energy, and finally even to life itself. We have all been beaten by certain circumstances. There are among us failed marriages, broken relationships with friends, family members, which may never heal. Some people have spent huge expanses of energy living toward a dream that may never come to fruition. It hurts to let dreams go, and yet sometimes that is what must be done. I am not sure from where the wisdom comes to know when to retreat or give up, sometimes the wisdom does come. We reach limits of strength and stamina. We retreat, not because our goal is unworthy, but because we no longer know how to work towards its birth. And when we close that door, when we stammer the words good-bye, we do so with a haunting feeling that yes, a sun indeed has perished from our lives. And yet we learn in the retreating.
When I was serving a church in New Haven, I met this woman, around the age of 30, a graduate of Julliard and a very fine violinist. But she had reached the point where she was giving up her dream of being a concert violinist. “I have made myself sick over it,” she said, “and now it is time to let go. Some are calling me a quitter, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go to any more try outs with the hope that this time---it will happen. Maybe it will, but maybe it won’t. And I can’t live with the won’t. It’s time for me to move on and do something else.” Indeed, we learn in the retreating.
And Jesus’ disciples learned in the retreating. Consider what they had once expected: a king, like King David, who ruled a sovereign nation. They had lived with Rome’s boot on the necks of the Jewish people, and they wanted it off. They wanted to be their own nation again. Isn’t this what the Messiah was supposed to accomplish? And then along came Jesus, who overturned those expectations. He did not lead the way they thought he should lead. He taught them strange things about the first being last and the last being first and loving their enemies and forgiving over and over again. And now in this long, protracted farewell discourse, he is telling them good bye. He is going away, but he insists they will not be abandoned. They have the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Truth. He tells them they will face very tough times; they will suffer, but finally their sorrow will turn to joy. They could not see around the corner; they did not understand what he meant. And so, they would have to trust that there was a new beginning waiting for them. And so do we all have to trust. We trust in a future we cannot see. There is always change; nothing stays the same. People come into our lives, and people go out of our lives, but God goes with us and is with us through all that coming and going. On this we can rely.
May 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
Recently I heard a mother talking about her 8 month old baby, whom, she discovered, loves Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. As soon as the baby hears the notes, she immediately becomes attentive and calm. At first the mother thought it was just a chance occurrence. They were driving in the car, and the baby was crying, because she had no interest in being in the car seat. But as the music played, she ceased her crying, listened, and soon fell asleep. This pattern has repeated itself numerous times. There is something about the 9th Symphony that soothes her, though not all the symphony is soothing. Yet there is no doubt that his baby responds to what she hears.
Music is quite extraordinary. A man described his wife’s Alzheimer’s, which had reached a stage, where she failed to recognize him or their three children. But if he turned on a Simon and Garfunkel Album, she could sing perfectly the words to A Bridge Over Troubled Waters and The Sounds of Silence. And when she finished the songs, she would smile. Scientists are familiar with music’s ability to open up doors from the past and trigger memories and emotions that would seem long ago forgotten. Andrew Budson, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System and a professor at Boston University, claims that music provides an auditory and emotional setting that allows people to retrieve memories that they may not be able to consciously access. There is hope that music will be an aid in dealing with all kinds of challenges, including dementia, anxiety, depression and even physical disorders, like cancer and Parkinson’s.
What scientists do know is that music signals the brain to secrete neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which is part of the brain’s reward/pleasure system. Other studies indicate that music can reduce the secretion of cortisol, a stress producing hormone and increase the secretion of oxytocin, which plays a role in labor and delivery and also parental bonding. Music activates different parts of the brain and can be used to elevate mood, support learning and create bonds with other human beings. The music we love and attach ourselves to then becomes part of our human identity as it did with the Alzheimer woman, who could not remember her family but could recall the words to her beloved Simon and Garfunkel music. And the baby who loves Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is laying down the soundtrack for her life, something that might well serve her in later years. The future may look to a time when music will be used as an alternative to medication without all the side effects of the latter. Right now, there is a company that is working to develop a music player that uses artificial intelligence “to curate” an individualized play list that hopefully can be used to guide a person from an agitated state into a calm one. Music therapists say they have witnessed changed behavior when a certain piece of music is played, and connections are made that seem consciously lost.
The brain has different types of memory. Procedural memory is the unconscious ability to remember a routine or a habit, such as touch typing or bike riding. Episodic memory, on the other hand, involves conscious recollection as when we remember what is on our “to do list.” The latter type of memory originates in the hippocampus region, which is often the first attacked, when dementia strikes. And so, the Alzheimer patient could recall songs from her adolescence, because her brain bypassed the episodic way of remembering and used the unconscious procedural way. A very well known recent example is the singer, Tony Bennett, who at 96, suffering from Alzheimer’s, could still perform his classic hits. If episodic memories are more than two years old, they have become consolidated, and though the hippocampus has been compromised or even destroyed, memories can still be accessed, because the memory is not directly or solely stored in the hippocampus. Memories, after all, are composed of different aspects—sounds, sights, smells, thought and emotion, and all this is represented by patterns of neural activity that are stored in different parts of the cerebral cortex.
One professor describes memories as “little balloons floating in different areas of the brain. When a new memory is formed, the hippocampus ties together the strings of the balloon, but if the hippocampus is destroyed, the balloons become untied and fly away. But after consolidation takes place, the various balloons become linked together by different heavy cords, and so the hippocampus is no longer required.
Research indicates that memories connected with music are more powerfully remembered than those connected with places or people. Thirty participants were exposed to 15 second music clips that were popular when they were young and then they were shown pictures of people famous during this same time frame. The participants were then asked questions about their lives---details they could recall from that past time. The result: music prompted many more detailed (autobiographical) memories than the faces. In another study participants were asked to keep a diary over a four day period recording their responses to both music and the food they ate, prepared or saw in a supermarket. Music elicited a much deeper response.
The Church should not be surprised by this. After all, throughout its long history, music has helped to carry the gospel. Nathan Soderblom, a Swedish Bishop, said in 1929, “Bach’s Cantatas are the fifth gospel.” And indeed, Japan today, which is a very secular nation and has never been particularly receptive to Christianity, is witnessing conversations to Christianity through the music of J.S. Bach. Music finds a way to communicate when words fail.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Recently I heard a mother talking about her 8 month old baby, whom, she discovered, loves Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. As soon as the baby hears the notes, she immediately becomes attentive and calm. At first the mother thought it was just a chance occurrence. They were driving in the car, and the baby was crying, because she had no interest in being in the car seat. But as the music played, she ceased her crying, listened, and soon fell asleep. This pattern has repeated itself numerous times. There is something about the 9th Symphony that soothes her, though not all the symphony is soothing. Yet there is no doubt that his baby responds to what she hears.
Music is quite extraordinary. A man described his wife’s Alzheimer’s, which had reached a stage, where she failed to recognize him or their three children. But if he turned on a Simon and Garfunkel Album, she could sing perfectly the words to A Bridge Over Troubled Waters and The Sounds of Silence. And when she finished the songs, she would smile. Scientists are familiar with music’s ability to open up doors from the past and trigger memories and emotions that would seem long ago forgotten. Andrew Budson, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System and a professor at Boston University, claims that music provides an auditory and emotional setting that allows people to retrieve memories that they may not be able to consciously access. There is hope that music will be an aid in dealing with all kinds of challenges, including dementia, anxiety, depression and even physical disorders, like cancer and Parkinson’s.
What scientists do know is that music signals the brain to secrete neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which is part of the brain’s reward/pleasure system. Other studies indicate that music can reduce the secretion of cortisol, a stress producing hormone and increase the secretion of oxytocin, which plays a role in labor and delivery and also parental bonding. Music activates different parts of the brain and can be used to elevate mood, support learning and create bonds with other human beings. The music we love and attach ourselves to then becomes part of our human identity as it did with the Alzheimer woman, who could not remember her family but could recall the words to her beloved Simon and Garfunkel music. And the baby who loves Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is laying down the soundtrack for her life, something that might well serve her in later years. The future may look to a time when music will be used as an alternative to medication without all the side effects of the latter. Right now, there is a company that is working to develop a music player that uses artificial intelligence “to curate” an individualized play list that hopefully can be used to guide a person from an agitated state into a calm one. Music therapists say they have witnessed changed behavior when a certain piece of music is played, and connections are made that seem consciously lost.
The brain has different types of memory. Procedural memory is the unconscious ability to remember a routine or a habit, such as touch typing or bike riding. Episodic memory, on the other hand, involves conscious recollection as when we remember what is on our “to do list.” The latter type of memory originates in the hippocampus region, which is often the first attacked, when dementia strikes. And so, the Alzheimer patient could recall songs from her adolescence, because her brain bypassed the episodic way of remembering and used the unconscious procedural way. A very well known recent example is the singer, Tony Bennett, who at 96, suffering from Alzheimer’s, could still perform his classic hits. If episodic memories are more than two years old, they have become consolidated, and though the hippocampus has been compromised or even destroyed, memories can still be accessed, because the memory is not directly or solely stored in the hippocampus. Memories, after all, are composed of different aspects—sounds, sights, smells, thought and emotion, and all this is represented by patterns of neural activity that are stored in different parts of the cerebral cortex.
One professor describes memories as “little balloons floating in different areas of the brain. When a new memory is formed, the hippocampus ties together the strings of the balloon, but if the hippocampus is destroyed, the balloons become untied and fly away. But after consolidation takes place, the various balloons become linked together by different heavy cords, and so the hippocampus is no longer required.
Research indicates that memories connected with music are more powerfully remembered than those connected with places or people. Thirty participants were exposed to 15 second music clips that were popular when they were young and then they were shown pictures of people famous during this same time frame. The participants were then asked questions about their lives---details they could recall from that past time. The result: music prompted many more detailed (autobiographical) memories than the faces. In another study participants were asked to keep a diary over a four day period recording their responses to both music and the food they ate, prepared or saw in a supermarket. Music elicited a much deeper response.
The Church should not be surprised by this. After all, throughout its long history, music has helped to carry the gospel. Nathan Soderblom, a Swedish Bishop, said in 1929, “Bach’s Cantatas are the fifth gospel.” And indeed, Japan today, which is a very secular nation and has never been particularly receptive to Christianity, is witnessing conversations to Christianity through the music of J.S. Bach. Music finds a way to communicate when words fail.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Included in Christ’s Love
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 14, 2023
John 14: 15-21
When I worked in New Haven at Center Church, I would periodically get a student from Yale, who had some question or concern. There was one young woman, studying sociology, who came to talk to me after she had returned from a year studying abroad in Liberia. She had not been raised in the church and had very little interest in Christianity until she noticed in her year abroad that many of the people trying to help solve some of the problems---hunger, Aids, education for females, were Christians. And that made a deep impression on her, so when she returned to the United States, she decided to investigate Christianity.
I could not help but think about her observation and wonder about the relationship between Christianity and the commitment to improve the world. Who are the people who volunteer at soup kitchens, homeless shelters and all the other sundry organizations that try to make life better for those who are hurting? Who are the people most likely to speak out in defense of those oppressed by unjust social and political structures? Who is most concerned about torture or war or capital punishment? I don’t know the statistics, but I have never been impressed that Christians have any kind of monopoly on virtue. There are many people, people from other religions and people with no religion at all, who are out in the world, trying to repair what is broken. And that is a good thing, because the world needs all the help it can get.
What is distinctive about being a Christian? Of course, Christ is central. Christians say and believe that in the life, death and destiny of Jesus Christ, God is revealed in a very special and intimate way. We see what God is like when God is expressed in what is not God---that is, when God is expressed in a human being. Faith in God means for us faith in Christ; Christ is the way we Christians know God. But what does it mean to have faith in Christ? Is it an intellectual consent, believing certain doctrines about Christ, that he is, for example, Lord and Savior? Is faith in Christ primarily about following Christ, that is, doing the kinds of things that he did----showing care and love for the least among us, refusing to do violence, and living a life, predicated on love and forgiveness?
Now surely it is unwise to separate belief from ethics, but when the Reformation battle was fought in the 16th century, one unfortunate result was a separation between faith and ethics. Luther told us we are freed from the burden of the law; it is not what we do that saves us; it is faith, which comes as God’s gift, which saves us. Though Luther certainly taught that ethics flow from faith, he also said that works with no faith provide no route to salvation. And so sometimes it seemed as if the church were more concerned about what people believe with their minds than what they actually do with their lives.
Yet when we look at Jesus, when we consider the multiple stories we have in the gospels, we do not meet a man primarily concerned with belief. On the contrary, we meet someone who wants people to do something---be a good neighbor to those who are not like you; forgive those who do you wrong; care for the poor and the hungry. Even in John’s Gospel, which most scholars interpret as portraying the risen Christ rather than the historical Jesus, we meet a man who commands his disciples to do certain things. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Now much has been made in Christianity about the virtue of obedience. Be obedient to Christ’s commands and life will flourish. But more is going on in this reading from John than mere obedience. There are consequences and benefits to loving Jesus, one of them being a movement beyond self-centeredness. To love Jesus as the Christ is to be given the gift of the Spirit, which intrudes into our lives, helping us to do things we are not at all comfortable doing. In fact, to love and follow Jesus as the Christ means that we can find ourselves doing precisely what does not come easily or naturally. It sometimes means we are called to do things we really do not want to do.
I have told you before in a sermon about Elizabeth, a neurosurgeon, afflicted with a brain tumor. She was one of my former patients and her husband, who was a surgeon---they were the love of each other’s lives, she told me, lost courage and ran. He could not bear to see the love of his life die and he could not face his two young children, 6 and 8 at the time, with the awful truth. And so, he abandoned her. She went home to her parents, her father, a retired cardiac surgeon. Though Elizabeth died broken hearted, she did not die bitter. She knew her husband well, and she said, she understood. He never dealt well with death. Elizabeth’s parents raised the children with generous financial support from their father. But he would not see them.
Long after I had left the hospital and was living here in CT, at least 17 or 18 years after Elizabeth’s death, I heard from my former boss, who was head of pastoral care, a professor of ethics at the medical school and a Roman Catholic priest. Elizabeth’s husband made contact through my boss, Bob, who was a personal friend of Elizabeth’s parents. He wanted to see his children and his in-laws. The children were grown, one of them in medical school and the other in law school.
Elizabeth’s parents were beyond rage and furious with their friend for even suggesting such a meeting. But Bob was not afraid to push hard, so eventually they agreed to talk to their two grandchildren and set up a meeting. It had been the grandmother, who had been the most passionately opposed to any meeting or reconciliation. Even after all those years, she told Bob that she had never hated anyone so deeply in her whole life. And yet she changed her mind. Why?
‘Well,” she told Bob, “you know I have been a faithful Roman Catholic my entire life. I love the church, and I do try to follow Jesus. But I could not forgive. And I did not want to forgive. In a moment I would have cut off my friendship with you in order to prevent any meeting with my son in law. One night after we had a particularly hard conversation, I went to bed and could not sleep, so in the middle of the night, I got up, went into the living room, and started to read. No, it was not the Bible. I did not need to be reminded what Jesus would have me do. Jesus was not a mother, and he did not have to see a heart broken daughter die a horrendous death and then turn around and raise two grandchildren, who not only lost their mother but also their father.
I picked up a collection of short stories and started reading one by Wendell Berry, “Pray Without Ceasing.” I should have known better than to read something with that title, but I read anyway. It was the story of a man named Thad Coulter, who in a drunken stupor killed his best friend, because his friend refused to loan him money. Arrested and then jailed, filled with horror and loathing for himself, Thad would have welcomed death, had it been offered to him. And then one day his daughter arrived, and Thad covered his face, not simply because of his guilt and shame, but because in the moment he saw his daughter he saw his guilt included in love. And then came these words: “Surely God’s love includes people who cannot bear it.” Those words, she told Bob, changed the way I saw my son in law. It helped me to do the right thing.”
God’s love, as the narrator to the story said, can be a terrible thing for those who cannot bear it. It includes Thad Coulter, mean and drunk and foolish, before he killed his friend, and it included him afterwards. It includes the disciples before they betrayed Christ, and it includes them after. It includes Mark before he abandoned Elizabeth and his children, and it includes him after. It includes you and me before we trip over our egos and do something stupid and mean spirited, and it includes us after we have fallen.
In today’s Gospel reading we heard Jesus’ command his followers to keep his commandments. That is how we as Christians are known and recognized---by keeping Christ’s commandments. And he told them (and us) that we will not be alone; his Spirit will be with us to help us do what we are commanded to do. Well, sometimes we do keep his commandments and other times we fail miserably. Faith is supposed to make us a different kind of people, but sometimes we do not live up to the faith. Sometimes we cannot live up to the faith. So isn’t it good news that even when we fail, we are included in the love that will not let us go, the love that will not abandon us, even when we abandon it.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
May 14, 2023
John 14: 15-21
When I worked in New Haven at Center Church, I would periodically get a student from Yale, who had some question or concern. There was one young woman, studying sociology, who came to talk to me after she had returned from a year studying abroad in Liberia. She had not been raised in the church and had very little interest in Christianity until she noticed in her year abroad that many of the people trying to help solve some of the problems---hunger, Aids, education for females, were Christians. And that made a deep impression on her, so when she returned to the United States, she decided to investigate Christianity.
I could not help but think about her observation and wonder about the relationship between Christianity and the commitment to improve the world. Who are the people who volunteer at soup kitchens, homeless shelters and all the other sundry organizations that try to make life better for those who are hurting? Who are the people most likely to speak out in defense of those oppressed by unjust social and political structures? Who is most concerned about torture or war or capital punishment? I don’t know the statistics, but I have never been impressed that Christians have any kind of monopoly on virtue. There are many people, people from other religions and people with no religion at all, who are out in the world, trying to repair what is broken. And that is a good thing, because the world needs all the help it can get.
What is distinctive about being a Christian? Of course, Christ is central. Christians say and believe that in the life, death and destiny of Jesus Christ, God is revealed in a very special and intimate way. We see what God is like when God is expressed in what is not God---that is, when God is expressed in a human being. Faith in God means for us faith in Christ; Christ is the way we Christians know God. But what does it mean to have faith in Christ? Is it an intellectual consent, believing certain doctrines about Christ, that he is, for example, Lord and Savior? Is faith in Christ primarily about following Christ, that is, doing the kinds of things that he did----showing care and love for the least among us, refusing to do violence, and living a life, predicated on love and forgiveness?
Now surely it is unwise to separate belief from ethics, but when the Reformation battle was fought in the 16th century, one unfortunate result was a separation between faith and ethics. Luther told us we are freed from the burden of the law; it is not what we do that saves us; it is faith, which comes as God’s gift, which saves us. Though Luther certainly taught that ethics flow from faith, he also said that works with no faith provide no route to salvation. And so sometimes it seemed as if the church were more concerned about what people believe with their minds than what they actually do with their lives.
Yet when we look at Jesus, when we consider the multiple stories we have in the gospels, we do not meet a man primarily concerned with belief. On the contrary, we meet someone who wants people to do something---be a good neighbor to those who are not like you; forgive those who do you wrong; care for the poor and the hungry. Even in John’s Gospel, which most scholars interpret as portraying the risen Christ rather than the historical Jesus, we meet a man who commands his disciples to do certain things. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Now much has been made in Christianity about the virtue of obedience. Be obedient to Christ’s commands and life will flourish. But more is going on in this reading from John than mere obedience. There are consequences and benefits to loving Jesus, one of them being a movement beyond self-centeredness. To love Jesus as the Christ is to be given the gift of the Spirit, which intrudes into our lives, helping us to do things we are not at all comfortable doing. In fact, to love and follow Jesus as the Christ means that we can find ourselves doing precisely what does not come easily or naturally. It sometimes means we are called to do things we really do not want to do.
I have told you before in a sermon about Elizabeth, a neurosurgeon, afflicted with a brain tumor. She was one of my former patients and her husband, who was a surgeon---they were the love of each other’s lives, she told me, lost courage and ran. He could not bear to see the love of his life die and he could not face his two young children, 6 and 8 at the time, with the awful truth. And so, he abandoned her. She went home to her parents, her father, a retired cardiac surgeon. Though Elizabeth died broken hearted, she did not die bitter. She knew her husband well, and she said, she understood. He never dealt well with death. Elizabeth’s parents raised the children with generous financial support from their father. But he would not see them.
Long after I had left the hospital and was living here in CT, at least 17 or 18 years after Elizabeth’s death, I heard from my former boss, who was head of pastoral care, a professor of ethics at the medical school and a Roman Catholic priest. Elizabeth’s husband made contact through my boss, Bob, who was a personal friend of Elizabeth’s parents. He wanted to see his children and his in-laws. The children were grown, one of them in medical school and the other in law school.
Elizabeth’s parents were beyond rage and furious with their friend for even suggesting such a meeting. But Bob was not afraid to push hard, so eventually they agreed to talk to their two grandchildren and set up a meeting. It had been the grandmother, who had been the most passionately opposed to any meeting or reconciliation. Even after all those years, she told Bob that she had never hated anyone so deeply in her whole life. And yet she changed her mind. Why?
‘Well,” she told Bob, “you know I have been a faithful Roman Catholic my entire life. I love the church, and I do try to follow Jesus. But I could not forgive. And I did not want to forgive. In a moment I would have cut off my friendship with you in order to prevent any meeting with my son in law. One night after we had a particularly hard conversation, I went to bed and could not sleep, so in the middle of the night, I got up, went into the living room, and started to read. No, it was not the Bible. I did not need to be reminded what Jesus would have me do. Jesus was not a mother, and he did not have to see a heart broken daughter die a horrendous death and then turn around and raise two grandchildren, who not only lost their mother but also their father.
I picked up a collection of short stories and started reading one by Wendell Berry, “Pray Without Ceasing.” I should have known better than to read something with that title, but I read anyway. It was the story of a man named Thad Coulter, who in a drunken stupor killed his best friend, because his friend refused to loan him money. Arrested and then jailed, filled with horror and loathing for himself, Thad would have welcomed death, had it been offered to him. And then one day his daughter arrived, and Thad covered his face, not simply because of his guilt and shame, but because in the moment he saw his daughter he saw his guilt included in love. And then came these words: “Surely God’s love includes people who cannot bear it.” Those words, she told Bob, changed the way I saw my son in law. It helped me to do the right thing.”
God’s love, as the narrator to the story said, can be a terrible thing for those who cannot bear it. It includes Thad Coulter, mean and drunk and foolish, before he killed his friend, and it included him afterwards. It includes the disciples before they betrayed Christ, and it includes them after. It includes Mark before he abandoned Elizabeth and his children, and it includes him after. It includes you and me before we trip over our egos and do something stupid and mean spirited, and it includes us after we have fallen.
In today’s Gospel reading we heard Jesus’ command his followers to keep his commandments. That is how we as Christians are known and recognized---by keeping Christ’s commandments. And he told them (and us) that we will not be alone; his Spirit will be with us to help us do what we are commanded to do. Well, sometimes we do keep his commandments and other times we fail miserably. Faith is supposed to make us a different kind of people, but sometimes we do not live up to the faith. Sometimes we cannot live up to the faith. So isn’t it good news that even when we fail, we are included in the love that will not let us go, the love that will not abandon us, even when we abandon it.
May 10, 2023
Dear friends,
I realize it is Mother’s Day this Sunday, but I have written about Mother’s Day in at least a few past reflection letters. So, I won’t say much about it, except to remind you that Mother’s Day began as a protest against war: women gathering together and refusing to give their husbands, sons, brothers, lovers up to the grinding war machine. Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870 this stinging rebuke against war, a clarion call to all women: It reads in part:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
When you consider that we human beings have only been on this planet for less than 0.01% of its existence, it is startling to consider all the trouble we have managed to make in our short time. War is one example, and the creeping devastation of climate change is another. But then, of course, there is art and music and science, and all the incredible things human beings have achieved. No wonder the psalmist intones: O God, what are mortals that you are mindful of them? It’s a profound question, one we don’t have an exact answer to, though we are told in the Bible that we are the creatures made in the image and likeness of God. I am not sure if that is our human arrogance speaking, or if somehow we really are able to read God’s thoughts on this matter.
Anyway, it is very instructive to consider our place in the universe as well as on our planet earth. Earth’s story began about 4.6 billion years ago. It took about 600 million years for the earth’s crust to cool down and take its shape. And then the earth needed another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to make itself known. Another 3.2 billion years after that the Cambrian Era issued in an explosive evolutionary story, even as there were mass extinction events during that time. But then 465 million years later, something quite extraordinary happened: mammals began to make their appearance. And then 300,000 years later the first homo sapiens came on the scene. So, consider how much time it took for us to appear on this planet!
During on our short time on earth, we have been quite busy. While living the life of nomads, we humans did manage to use fire to push our species forward. In the 4th millennium B.C.E. the first civilizations made their appearance and after that our history really did speed up! Consider this: In less than 6000 years we went from gathering berries and hunting the big animals to exploring space. If you drew a huge circle, marking it with 365 days, and placed the Big Bang on January 1, it is at 10:30 PM, December 31 that human beings appear. And all of recorded history only appears during the last few seconds. But what a story those last seconds tell! As Elie Wiesel once said, “God made human beings, because God loves a good story.” I just wonder if the story God has received from us is a bit more dramatic than God wanted. But once written, erasing is not an option---not even for God.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear friends,
I realize it is Mother’s Day this Sunday, but I have written about Mother’s Day in at least a few past reflection letters. So, I won’t say much about it, except to remind you that Mother’s Day began as a protest against war: women gathering together and refusing to give their husbands, sons, brothers, lovers up to the grinding war machine. Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870 this stinging rebuke against war, a clarion call to all women: It reads in part:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
When you consider that we human beings have only been on this planet for less than 0.01% of its existence, it is startling to consider all the trouble we have managed to make in our short time. War is one example, and the creeping devastation of climate change is another. But then, of course, there is art and music and science, and all the incredible things human beings have achieved. No wonder the psalmist intones: O God, what are mortals that you are mindful of them? It’s a profound question, one we don’t have an exact answer to, though we are told in the Bible that we are the creatures made in the image and likeness of God. I am not sure if that is our human arrogance speaking, or if somehow we really are able to read God’s thoughts on this matter.
Anyway, it is very instructive to consider our place in the universe as well as on our planet earth. Earth’s story began about 4.6 billion years ago. It took about 600 million years for the earth’s crust to cool down and take its shape. And then the earth needed another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to make itself known. Another 3.2 billion years after that the Cambrian Era issued in an explosive evolutionary story, even as there were mass extinction events during that time. But then 465 million years later, something quite extraordinary happened: mammals began to make their appearance. And then 300,000 years later the first homo sapiens came on the scene. So, consider how much time it took for us to appear on this planet!
During on our short time on earth, we have been quite busy. While living the life of nomads, we humans did manage to use fire to push our species forward. In the 4th millennium B.C.E. the first civilizations made their appearance and after that our history really did speed up! Consider this: In less than 6000 years we went from gathering berries and hunting the big animals to exploring space. If you drew a huge circle, marking it with 365 days, and placed the Big Bang on January 1, it is at 10:30 PM, December 31 that human beings appear. And all of recorded history only appears during the last few seconds. But what a story those last seconds tell! As Elie Wiesel once said, “God made human beings, because God loves a good story.” I just wonder if the story God has received from us is a bit more dramatic than God wanted. But once written, erasing is not an option---not even for God.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
On Heaven
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
May 7, 2023
John 14: 1-14
Some years ago, while working at the church in Middletown, one of my parishioners, Betty to whom I was quite close, asked me why she had never heard me preach a sermon on heaven. “Oh, Betty”, I said. “I really don’t know anything about heaven, and Jesus said nothing much about it. Why do you ask?” “Oh,” she said, “ I just want to know that Tammy is o.k.” It was such a poignant moment. Tammy was her 6 year old granddaughter, who had died of Ryes Syndrome nearly 20 years before. All she wanted was the reassurance that Tammy was o.k.
And who can blame her? Isn’t that what most of us want? When we lose someone we love, we do want the reassurance that they are o.k.---even though we have no clear idea about heaven. When someone dies, it is not uncommon to hear something like, “She’s in a better place?” But as someone said to me after hearing this a few times from various people, “Really, and how do they know where she is? Who gave them that information?” The simple truth is that Jesus never really spoke about heaven as a place after death. He used terms like Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven, but those references concerned present reality as much as a future fulfillment, when God’s work of justice and mercy were being done on earth as in heaven. Also, consider Jesus after his resurrection. Did he come back and give a description of heaven? No; he told his disciples to get busy and do something: Teach, baptize, make disciples, heal; help the poor, the widows and the orphans. He did not return after his resurrection for the purpose of telling his disciples that they should get ready for heaven. And yet when Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he did say: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So, we have this idea that heaven is the place where God fully rules, the place where God’s will is finally and completely realized. But more than this Jesus did not say.
In John’s Gospel we have this long discourse where Jesus is preparing to go to the cross. And, as I pointed out in the introduction to the text, John’s gospel doesn’t portray the way a first century Jew would have spoken. Instead, we have the resurrected Christ speaking---that is, how the writer imagined him to speak. And we hear Jesus (as the resurrected Christ) telling his disciples that he is going away, but they are not to worry, for he is going to prepare a place for them. And there are some beautifully comforting images here, a place of many rooms or dwelling places, which suggest that there is diversity in heaven, a place for different kinds of people with different beliefs and perspectives. Jesus speaks here as if he expects his disciples to know and understand where he is going. And what does Thomas say? Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way? And then Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, the life”.
Now let’s revisit Thomas’ words, which I find so poignantly honest. He freely admits his ignorance, which is also shared by the other disciples, who don’t dare say a word. They too are wallowing in ignorance, but they don’t admit it. Thomas, however, is not afraid to speak the truth as he understands it. And he asks the right question, “How can we know the way?” What he means here is that they are all mere mortals, living with the limitations that mortality implies. They have no direct experience of being resurrected; they do not know what heaven is really like----just as we do not know. How can we know? All we can do is imagine, using the tools and images and thoughts at our disposal coming from a variety of sources, including the bible and tradition. We have this tendency to dismiss the products of the imagination as fairy tales. But C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don, also known for his Narnia Chronicles, was a convert to the Christian faith later in life. He said, “While reason is the natural organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning.” And indeed, we do use our imaginations to construct meaning.
Many people, for example, including many in this church, imagine that after death, they will be reunited in heaven with loved ones. It is a very common belief, and yet there is no real biblical warrant for it. Jesus never said any such thing. Now, that does mean it is false. We human beings intuit and imagine all kinds of things about which we have no direct information. And heaven is indeed one of those things. And we, as well as theologians throughout the millennia, use biblical images to construct a picture of heaven. The Bible pictures heaven as a garden---the Garden of Eden, also a heavenly city---the new city of Jerusalem, all imaginatively constructed as a place of comfort and peace, where there is no more pain and sorrow, where God’s love and mercy shine forth and there is finally nothing to fear, nothing that can hurt or destroy. And, of course, why would we not want to share that peace and comfort with those whom we have loved and lost?
I read very recently about some of the early Christian martyrs, who also believed they would be reunited with loved ones after death. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who was martyred for his faith in 258, tried to encourage his fellow Christians as they faced suffering and death. He told them to imagine heaven as a place where they would meet face to face the apostles and Jesus and be reunited with their loved ones. “Heaven,” he said, “s our native land, our true home, and we have been exiled from our home while we live on earth. But soon we shall return.” And indeed, for many people, the idea of heaven as our true home is a very comforting image.
Some years ago, when I worked as a chaplain at Nassau County Medical Center, I had a patient, a 12 year old boy, who had a lethal brain tumor. While his parents could not bear to tell him he would die, his grandmother had no such hesitation, and she spoke to him of heaven, how God reigned there, how beautiful it was, a place where pain and suffering are forever banished. After some of these conversations, he would say to me something like this. “Oh, I know heaven is beautiful, but I don’t really want to go there. I want to stay here.” About a month before he died, he began to have dreams, where he would be climbing up a long, long flight of stairs, and he told me, he was sure the stairs were leading to heaven, because he was surrounded by such beauty--- waterfalls, and sunshine and blossoming flowers. But just as he arrived at the top of the stairs and was about to open the door, he would fall down the entire flight. And this dream repeated itself over and over again. Finally, one morning, with great excitement he told me, “Sandra, I finally made it up the stairs and I opened the door. It was so big and heavy; I didn’t think I would have the strength. And when I pulled it open and went in, all I saw was this great big hand, and I understood immediately that it was the hand which had opened the door for me. The hand reached out to grab me and I was terrified. I tried to run away, but I could not move. And then the hand grabbed me. But it didn’t feel like a grab; it felt like I was being gently held. Two days later he went into a coma and a few days after that, he died---being gently held.
The human imagination is a wonderful gift, and God can speak through it, just as God speaks through our reason and feelings. Recall these wise words from Albert Einstein: “There are times when imagination is more important than knowledge”. And I would say that is especially true when knowledge fails us, because there are some things beyond our capacity to know. But we can imagine, and thank God that we can.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
May 7, 2023
John 14: 1-14
Some years ago, while working at the church in Middletown, one of my parishioners, Betty to whom I was quite close, asked me why she had never heard me preach a sermon on heaven. “Oh, Betty”, I said. “I really don’t know anything about heaven, and Jesus said nothing much about it. Why do you ask?” “Oh,” she said, “ I just want to know that Tammy is o.k.” It was such a poignant moment. Tammy was her 6 year old granddaughter, who had died of Ryes Syndrome nearly 20 years before. All she wanted was the reassurance that Tammy was o.k.
And who can blame her? Isn’t that what most of us want? When we lose someone we love, we do want the reassurance that they are o.k.---even though we have no clear idea about heaven. When someone dies, it is not uncommon to hear something like, “She’s in a better place?” But as someone said to me after hearing this a few times from various people, “Really, and how do they know where she is? Who gave them that information?” The simple truth is that Jesus never really spoke about heaven as a place after death. He used terms like Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven, but those references concerned present reality as much as a future fulfillment, when God’s work of justice and mercy were being done on earth as in heaven. Also, consider Jesus after his resurrection. Did he come back and give a description of heaven? No; he told his disciples to get busy and do something: Teach, baptize, make disciples, heal; help the poor, the widows and the orphans. He did not return after his resurrection for the purpose of telling his disciples that they should get ready for heaven. And yet when Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he did say: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So, we have this idea that heaven is the place where God fully rules, the place where God’s will is finally and completely realized. But more than this Jesus did not say.
In John’s Gospel we have this long discourse where Jesus is preparing to go to the cross. And, as I pointed out in the introduction to the text, John’s gospel doesn’t portray the way a first century Jew would have spoken. Instead, we have the resurrected Christ speaking---that is, how the writer imagined him to speak. And we hear Jesus (as the resurrected Christ) telling his disciples that he is going away, but they are not to worry, for he is going to prepare a place for them. And there are some beautifully comforting images here, a place of many rooms or dwelling places, which suggest that there is diversity in heaven, a place for different kinds of people with different beliefs and perspectives. Jesus speaks here as if he expects his disciples to know and understand where he is going. And what does Thomas say? Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way? And then Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, the life”.
Now let’s revisit Thomas’ words, which I find so poignantly honest. He freely admits his ignorance, which is also shared by the other disciples, who don’t dare say a word. They too are wallowing in ignorance, but they don’t admit it. Thomas, however, is not afraid to speak the truth as he understands it. And he asks the right question, “How can we know the way?” What he means here is that they are all mere mortals, living with the limitations that mortality implies. They have no direct experience of being resurrected; they do not know what heaven is really like----just as we do not know. How can we know? All we can do is imagine, using the tools and images and thoughts at our disposal coming from a variety of sources, including the bible and tradition. We have this tendency to dismiss the products of the imagination as fairy tales. But C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don, also known for his Narnia Chronicles, was a convert to the Christian faith later in life. He said, “While reason is the natural organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning.” And indeed, we do use our imaginations to construct meaning.
Many people, for example, including many in this church, imagine that after death, they will be reunited in heaven with loved ones. It is a very common belief, and yet there is no real biblical warrant for it. Jesus never said any such thing. Now, that does mean it is false. We human beings intuit and imagine all kinds of things about which we have no direct information. And heaven is indeed one of those things. And we, as well as theologians throughout the millennia, use biblical images to construct a picture of heaven. The Bible pictures heaven as a garden---the Garden of Eden, also a heavenly city---the new city of Jerusalem, all imaginatively constructed as a place of comfort and peace, where there is no more pain and sorrow, where God’s love and mercy shine forth and there is finally nothing to fear, nothing that can hurt or destroy. And, of course, why would we not want to share that peace and comfort with those whom we have loved and lost?
I read very recently about some of the early Christian martyrs, who also believed they would be reunited with loved ones after death. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who was martyred for his faith in 258, tried to encourage his fellow Christians as they faced suffering and death. He told them to imagine heaven as a place where they would meet face to face the apostles and Jesus and be reunited with their loved ones. “Heaven,” he said, “s our native land, our true home, and we have been exiled from our home while we live on earth. But soon we shall return.” And indeed, for many people, the idea of heaven as our true home is a very comforting image.
Some years ago, when I worked as a chaplain at Nassau County Medical Center, I had a patient, a 12 year old boy, who had a lethal brain tumor. While his parents could not bear to tell him he would die, his grandmother had no such hesitation, and she spoke to him of heaven, how God reigned there, how beautiful it was, a place where pain and suffering are forever banished. After some of these conversations, he would say to me something like this. “Oh, I know heaven is beautiful, but I don’t really want to go there. I want to stay here.” About a month before he died, he began to have dreams, where he would be climbing up a long, long flight of stairs, and he told me, he was sure the stairs were leading to heaven, because he was surrounded by such beauty--- waterfalls, and sunshine and blossoming flowers. But just as he arrived at the top of the stairs and was about to open the door, he would fall down the entire flight. And this dream repeated itself over and over again. Finally, one morning, with great excitement he told me, “Sandra, I finally made it up the stairs and I opened the door. It was so big and heavy; I didn’t think I would have the strength. And when I pulled it open and went in, all I saw was this great big hand, and I understood immediately that it was the hand which had opened the door for me. The hand reached out to grab me and I was terrified. I tried to run away, but I could not move. And then the hand grabbed me. But it didn’t feel like a grab; it felt like I was being gently held. Two days later he went into a coma and a few days after that, he died---being gently held.
The human imagination is a wonderful gift, and God can speak through it, just as God speaks through our reason and feelings. Recall these wise words from Albert Einstein: “There are times when imagination is more important than knowledge”. And I would say that is especially true when knowledge fails us, because there are some things beyond our capacity to know. But we can imagine, and thank God that we can.
May 3, 2023
Dear Friends,
Many Americans, if not most, think of May 1 as just the first day of the month of May. But May Day, as it was traditionally called, has a long history. In old Great Britain the Celts believed that May 1 was the day of division, a half year mark, when the dark receded and the light ascended, and so May Day was a celebration of the sun and the light and warmth it brought. The ancient Romans devoted May 1 to Flora, goddess of flowers. And in Europe and Russia May 1 became The International Workers Day, when labor rights were celebrated. Even in the United States May 1 was celebrated as Labor Day. But in 1894 when the Pullman Strike occurred and violence ensued, President Grover Cleveland moved Labor Day to September in order to disconnect it from the demand for workers’ rights!
And then there is the May Basket, which has a long history, stretching back to the European pagan spring festival, known as Beltane. It could be quite a raucous celebration, but in time it was toned down with elements such as the Maypole dance and the May Day Basket surviving even in the United States. New England boasted a proud tradition of the May Day Basket, when people would hang a basket full of flowers and other little gifts on someone’s front door. It could be a romantic gesture, but it was also used as a simple act of kindness, letting the person know he or she is regarded and respected. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, wrote about May Basket Day in her 1880 children’s book, Jack and Jill: "Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers; such a scampering of feet in the dark; such droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another's arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly; such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling—it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener."
There is another tradition regarding May. It was moving day in New York City. You could see the population filling the streets with their personal belongings as they moved to a different address. Leases in New York City expired on May 1, and an article in the New York Times described moving day this way: "Everybody in a hurry, smashing mirrors in his haste … and many a good piece of furniture badly bruised in consequence. It was a harrowing experience." Rent increases were announced on February 1, to take effect three months later, and those who did not accept the new rents had to vacate their apartments by 9 AM on May 1. The experience was made even more harrowing because movers, known as carmen, hiked up their fees for the day, and so the city of New York finally regulated moving fees in 1890.
By the early 20th century moving day in New York had changed from May 1 to October 1. But by World War ll, moving day was no longer a frenzy. For one thing, most of the able bodied movers were pressed into military service. Then came the housing shortage after the war and rent control and other housing regulations, all of which cut down substantially the amount of moving. As someone recently said, “Moving in New York City is still stressful, but at least not everyone is doing it the same day.”
May Day for most of us is only the first day of May---nothing more. But May Day’s history reminds us that culture changes, and what was once a celebration, can easily become only a distant memory. A 98 year old woman said she remembers quite well making May Day Baskets for her grandparents and elderly aunts. “Perhaps,” she said, “our nation has fallen from its innocence, and so we don’t do simple acts of kindness like this anymore. Now privacy rules, and who knows what would happen if you went up to someone’s front door to hang a basket on the doorknob.”
Given our nation’s recent history with guns and the fear filled environment so many people inhabit, we know what can and does happen. And that should make all of us weep.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Many Americans, if not most, think of May 1 as just the first day of the month of May. But May Day, as it was traditionally called, has a long history. In old Great Britain the Celts believed that May 1 was the day of division, a half year mark, when the dark receded and the light ascended, and so May Day was a celebration of the sun and the light and warmth it brought. The ancient Romans devoted May 1 to Flora, goddess of flowers. And in Europe and Russia May 1 became The International Workers Day, when labor rights were celebrated. Even in the United States May 1 was celebrated as Labor Day. But in 1894 when the Pullman Strike occurred and violence ensued, President Grover Cleveland moved Labor Day to September in order to disconnect it from the demand for workers’ rights!
And then there is the May Basket, which has a long history, stretching back to the European pagan spring festival, known as Beltane. It could be quite a raucous celebration, but in time it was toned down with elements such as the Maypole dance and the May Day Basket surviving even in the United States. New England boasted a proud tradition of the May Day Basket, when people would hang a basket full of flowers and other little gifts on someone’s front door. It could be a romantic gesture, but it was also used as a simple act of kindness, letting the person know he or she is regarded and respected. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, wrote about May Basket Day in her 1880 children’s book, Jack and Jill: "Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers; such a scampering of feet in the dark; such droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another's arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly; such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling—it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener."
There is another tradition regarding May. It was moving day in New York City. You could see the population filling the streets with their personal belongings as they moved to a different address. Leases in New York City expired on May 1, and an article in the New York Times described moving day this way: "Everybody in a hurry, smashing mirrors in his haste … and many a good piece of furniture badly bruised in consequence. It was a harrowing experience." Rent increases were announced on February 1, to take effect three months later, and those who did not accept the new rents had to vacate their apartments by 9 AM on May 1. The experience was made even more harrowing because movers, known as carmen, hiked up their fees for the day, and so the city of New York finally regulated moving fees in 1890.
By the early 20th century moving day in New York had changed from May 1 to October 1. But by World War ll, moving day was no longer a frenzy. For one thing, most of the able bodied movers were pressed into military service. Then came the housing shortage after the war and rent control and other housing regulations, all of which cut down substantially the amount of moving. As someone recently said, “Moving in New York City is still stressful, but at least not everyone is doing it the same day.”
May Day for most of us is only the first day of May---nothing more. But May Day’s history reminds us that culture changes, and what was once a celebration, can easily become only a distant memory. A 98 year old woman said she remembers quite well making May Day Baskets for her grandparents and elderly aunts. “Perhaps,” she said, “our nation has fallen from its innocence, and so we don’t do simple acts of kindness like this anymore. Now privacy rules, and who knows what would happen if you went up to someone’s front door to hang a basket on the doorknob.”
Given our nation’s recent history with guns and the fear filled environment so many people inhabit, we know what can and does happen. And that should make all of us weep.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Comfort is Good, But It is Not Everything
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
April 30, 2023
Psalm 23
John 10: 1-10
There is probably no better-known psalm than the 23rd. Until very recently Psalm 23 was considered part of general cultural knowledge. If we grew up in the church and attended Sunday School, it was perhaps the one psalm we were expected to memorize. And because it was part of cultural knowledge, even people who were not religious, recognized the words. It is often the one scripture people will request at a funeral, sometimes because it is the only one they know or remember.
The words are very comforting. God is imaged here as the shepherd, who cares for and protects the flock. God leads the sheep to the meadows and the water, where they are fed, and their thirst is satisfied. The first line tells us that God is the shepherd, and so we shall not want---meaning that God provides whatever is needed, and so there is no reason to live in anxiety about what we shall have or get. Yet the psalm does not deny the difficulties and challenges in life---there are the dark valleys, including the valley of death, which comes to everyone and everything that lives. And yet, even in death, God is there.
Last summer I conducted a graveside service for the mother of a woman, who was very deep into the ecology movement. She asked me to read the 23rd Psalm because she found it deeply ecological. “You can just feel the balance in the psalm,” she said. “You have this sense there is enough grass and water to feed and satisfy, and when death comes, there is no need to grasp for more and more life, because at the end there is finally nothing to fear. There is God, and God’s presence is enough, enough to shepherd us through the darkest valley.” Now consider this word enough, because we live in a culture that thrives on creating desire, the desire for more and more and more. And maybe in the end enough is what the psalm is essentially all about---the realization that there is enough, and we do not need to grasp for more, because God is enough and has created a world full of enough.
At her mother’s graveside service, the daughter told this story about birds I had never heard of, red knots, which each season fly from Tierra del Fuego, located in both Argentina and Chile, to arctic islands north of Hudson Bay, a flight of 9000 miles! And in the middle of their journey, the birds stop at a particular beach along the Delaware Bay, where they feed on protein rich horseshoe crabs, which give them strength to continue their flight north. Well, people decided that these horseshoe crabs made great bait, and so they used and finally overused. And what happened? The red knots were not so much around anymore, though it took about 10 years to realize the reason and the uncomfortable truth that if they continued to use these horseshoe crabs in this excessive way, the red knots would go extinct, and so the crabs were protected, and the red knots returned. The woman finished her story with three words, “God makes enough.”
Now let’s switch scriptures and consider the reading from John, where Jesus calls himself both the good shepherd and the gate. First of all, we should understand that shepherds were of very low status; they were poor, and their lives were hard, having to endure being outside in all kinds of weather. Furthermore, shepherding was considered an unclean profession, probably because of their involvement with blood in the birth of lambs. So, that Jesus called himself the good shepherd and in Luke the lowly shepherds were the first ones to hear the good news of Jesus’ birth are ways of saying that what the world considers lowly is not how God sees things.
We are all familiar with Jesus being called a shepherd. But how often do we hear Jesus called a gate? Yet it is one of the 15 I AM statements, which are unique to John’s Gospel. I am the way, the truth, the life; I am the vine; I am the light of the world, etc. And now in John 10, Jesus calls himself the gate through which the sheep enter. And the scripture claims that there is no other legitimate way to get in except by going through this gate. If you climb over the wall, you are named a robber and a thief.
Now from our perspective, this sounds harsh in its exclusivity. But we need to understand what is going on in this text, because this passage immediately follows one in which Jesus was involved in a controversy with some Pharisees, because he had dared to heal a blind man on the Sabbath. So, Jesus was accused of being an enemy of the Jewish Law. But we should also understand that John’s Gospel was written around the year 90 or even 100, during a time of high tension between Jews, loyal to the synagogue and Jews, who were becoming Christians. Those who became followers of Jesus were expelled from the synagogues, and so the new Christian community responded by saying, no salvation except through Christ. In other words, the Christian community out of which the gospel of John emerged, declared that the Jewish Law as a means of salvation was dead. You must enter through the gate that is Christ. But these are the words of the newly formed Christian community, and we should always remember that God does not see as human beings do. Nor is God’s Word always what we directly read or hear. This is why each week when we read scripture, I say, Listen FOR the Word, rather than listen TO the Word. WE have to work to find and hear God’s Word in the midst of many words, some of which are not from God, but from limited human beings.
Now let’s consider the image of the gate, through which the sheep enter. We think of gates that open and close on hinges, but that is not how it was in Jesus’ day. At the end of the day, the shepherd led the sheep into an enclosure, surrounded by a wall. And the shepherd would lie down across the entrance to the enclosure, where the sheep would sleep. The shepherd’s body quite literally kept the sheep from wandering away. And in the morning, the shepherd would lead his sheep out. In fact, the Greek word, translated here in verse 4 as brought out---When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them---would more accurately be translated as cast or drive, the same verb John uses to describe Jesus casting out demons or driving out the money changers from the Temple. So, we are being challenged here with the suggestion that remaining safe and secure is not what God always desires and intends. Just as the sheep are driven out into a bigger and wider world, so are we. There are times we move out and take a big risk.
The woman who was deep into ecology and whose mother I buried told me about her mother, who at age 60 had joined the Peace Corps and worked in Africa. She was a nurse, and she taught health and nutrition to women. “My siblings and I were shocked”, the woman told me. “My mother loved comfort and her little luxuries, but after my father died very suddenly, she became a different person. And so, she went to Africa, and had quite a time of it, getting into some pretty heavy tussles there with the men, who became angry when she told them that their pregnant and nursing wives needed more of the meat the men thought belonged to them. She was actually beaten a few times. But my mother stayed and would not back down. My brother even tried to talk her into coming home. My dad had been a doctor and she a nurse, and they had plenty of money. And so, my brother told her, You should be comfortable now. You have earned your comfort. But you know what my mother told him. “I have lived long enough to know that comfort, while good is not everything.” A wise woman, she was, and I don’t think Jesus as the good shepherd could have said it any better.
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
April 30, 2023
Psalm 23
John 10: 1-10
There is probably no better-known psalm than the 23rd. Until very recently Psalm 23 was considered part of general cultural knowledge. If we grew up in the church and attended Sunday School, it was perhaps the one psalm we were expected to memorize. And because it was part of cultural knowledge, even people who were not religious, recognized the words. It is often the one scripture people will request at a funeral, sometimes because it is the only one they know or remember.
The words are very comforting. God is imaged here as the shepherd, who cares for and protects the flock. God leads the sheep to the meadows and the water, where they are fed, and their thirst is satisfied. The first line tells us that God is the shepherd, and so we shall not want---meaning that God provides whatever is needed, and so there is no reason to live in anxiety about what we shall have or get. Yet the psalm does not deny the difficulties and challenges in life---there are the dark valleys, including the valley of death, which comes to everyone and everything that lives. And yet, even in death, God is there.
Last summer I conducted a graveside service for the mother of a woman, who was very deep into the ecology movement. She asked me to read the 23rd Psalm because she found it deeply ecological. “You can just feel the balance in the psalm,” she said. “You have this sense there is enough grass and water to feed and satisfy, and when death comes, there is no need to grasp for more and more life, because at the end there is finally nothing to fear. There is God, and God’s presence is enough, enough to shepherd us through the darkest valley.” Now consider this word enough, because we live in a culture that thrives on creating desire, the desire for more and more and more. And maybe in the end enough is what the psalm is essentially all about---the realization that there is enough, and we do not need to grasp for more, because God is enough and has created a world full of enough.
At her mother’s graveside service, the daughter told this story about birds I had never heard of, red knots, which each season fly from Tierra del Fuego, located in both Argentina and Chile, to arctic islands north of Hudson Bay, a flight of 9000 miles! And in the middle of their journey, the birds stop at a particular beach along the Delaware Bay, where they feed on protein rich horseshoe crabs, which give them strength to continue their flight north. Well, people decided that these horseshoe crabs made great bait, and so they used and finally overused. And what happened? The red knots were not so much around anymore, though it took about 10 years to realize the reason and the uncomfortable truth that if they continued to use these horseshoe crabs in this excessive way, the red knots would go extinct, and so the crabs were protected, and the red knots returned. The woman finished her story with three words, “God makes enough.”
Now let’s switch scriptures and consider the reading from John, where Jesus calls himself both the good shepherd and the gate. First of all, we should understand that shepherds were of very low status; they were poor, and their lives were hard, having to endure being outside in all kinds of weather. Furthermore, shepherding was considered an unclean profession, probably because of their involvement with blood in the birth of lambs. So, that Jesus called himself the good shepherd and in Luke the lowly shepherds were the first ones to hear the good news of Jesus’ birth are ways of saying that what the world considers lowly is not how God sees things.
We are all familiar with Jesus being called a shepherd. But how often do we hear Jesus called a gate? Yet it is one of the 15 I AM statements, which are unique to John’s Gospel. I am the way, the truth, the life; I am the vine; I am the light of the world, etc. And now in John 10, Jesus calls himself the gate through which the sheep enter. And the scripture claims that there is no other legitimate way to get in except by going through this gate. If you climb over the wall, you are named a robber and a thief.
Now from our perspective, this sounds harsh in its exclusivity. But we need to understand what is going on in this text, because this passage immediately follows one in which Jesus was involved in a controversy with some Pharisees, because he had dared to heal a blind man on the Sabbath. So, Jesus was accused of being an enemy of the Jewish Law. But we should also understand that John’s Gospel was written around the year 90 or even 100, during a time of high tension between Jews, loyal to the synagogue and Jews, who were becoming Christians. Those who became followers of Jesus were expelled from the synagogues, and so the new Christian community responded by saying, no salvation except through Christ. In other words, the Christian community out of which the gospel of John emerged, declared that the Jewish Law as a means of salvation was dead. You must enter through the gate that is Christ. But these are the words of the newly formed Christian community, and we should always remember that God does not see as human beings do. Nor is God’s Word always what we directly read or hear. This is why each week when we read scripture, I say, Listen FOR the Word, rather than listen TO the Word. WE have to work to find and hear God’s Word in the midst of many words, some of which are not from God, but from limited human beings.
Now let’s consider the image of the gate, through which the sheep enter. We think of gates that open and close on hinges, but that is not how it was in Jesus’ day. At the end of the day, the shepherd led the sheep into an enclosure, surrounded by a wall. And the shepherd would lie down across the entrance to the enclosure, where the sheep would sleep. The shepherd’s body quite literally kept the sheep from wandering away. And in the morning, the shepherd would lead his sheep out. In fact, the Greek word, translated here in verse 4 as brought out---When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them---would more accurately be translated as cast or drive, the same verb John uses to describe Jesus casting out demons or driving out the money changers from the Temple. So, we are being challenged here with the suggestion that remaining safe and secure is not what God always desires and intends. Just as the sheep are driven out into a bigger and wider world, so are we. There are times we move out and take a big risk.
The woman who was deep into ecology and whose mother I buried told me about her mother, who at age 60 had joined the Peace Corps and worked in Africa. She was a nurse, and she taught health and nutrition to women. “My siblings and I were shocked”, the woman told me. “My mother loved comfort and her little luxuries, but after my father died very suddenly, she became a different person. And so, she went to Africa, and had quite a time of it, getting into some pretty heavy tussles there with the men, who became angry when she told them that their pregnant and nursing wives needed more of the meat the men thought belonged to them. She was actually beaten a few times. But my mother stayed and would not back down. My brother even tried to talk her into coming home. My dad had been a doctor and she a nurse, and they had plenty of money. And so, my brother told her, You should be comfortable now. You have earned your comfort. But you know what my mother told him. “I have lived long enough to know that comfort, while good is not everything.” A wise woman, she was, and I don’t think Jesus as the good shepherd could have said it any better.
April 28, 2023
Dear Friends,
Each week I write a reflection letter, based on something I have recently read or heard; topics I think have broad implications for the way we live our lives. This week I came across a letter written to Nick Cave, who is an Australian artist, writer, and actor, by a thirteen year old boy, named Ruben. I was so moved by the question posed by the letter as well as the response that I want to share it with you this week. Perhaps some of you might think that it was a failure of Nick’s to leave out God, but he did write about truth and beauty, which do participate in God’s being. And you don’t have to be thirteen years old to take Nick’s advice. His advice is good for any age.
Dear Nick,
I’m 13. In a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect; How do I live life to its absolute fullest, and not waste my potential? Especially as a creative. Also, what is a great way to spiritually enrich myself? in general, and in my creative work.
RUBEN, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Dear Ruben,
When I read this question, my initial thought was that the kid who wrote this has nothing to worry about, they’re going to be all right. Ruben, you are very smart, you are engaged with the world and I’m not sure what your creative interests are, but you can certainly already write. Not only that, you are also reaching out for answers. At thirteen, this is all brilliant! Luckily for you, Ruben, I have some! So here goes!
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defense, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.
Love, Nick
Dear Friends,
Each week I write a reflection letter, based on something I have recently read or heard; topics I think have broad implications for the way we live our lives. This week I came across a letter written to Nick Cave, who is an Australian artist, writer, and actor, by a thirteen year old boy, named Ruben. I was so moved by the question posed by the letter as well as the response that I want to share it with you this week. Perhaps some of you might think that it was a failure of Nick’s to leave out God, but he did write about truth and beauty, which do participate in God’s being. And you don’t have to be thirteen years old to take Nick’s advice. His advice is good for any age.
Dear Nick,
I’m 13. In a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect; How do I live life to its absolute fullest, and not waste my potential? Especially as a creative. Also, what is a great way to spiritually enrich myself? in general, and in my creative work.
RUBEN, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Dear Ruben,
When I read this question, my initial thought was that the kid who wrote this has nothing to worry about, they’re going to be all right. Ruben, you are very smart, you are engaged with the world and I’m not sure what your creative interests are, but you can certainly already write. Not only that, you are also reaching out for answers. At thirteen, this is all brilliant! Luckily for you, Ruben, I have some! So here goes!
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defense, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.
Love, Nick
A PLACE CALLED EMMAUS
Preached by Sandra Olsen
April 23, 2023
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Luke 24: 13-35
No one really knows where Emmaus was. There have been a lot of guesses, but no evidence that any of the proposed sites is the real place. Perhaps it does not really matter where the original site was, because Emmaus for us is more a symbolic place than a real one. It is that place we want to go in order to forget, forget a painful past or escape from a hard truth we do not want to face. Ernest Hemingway once said, “The world in the end breaks everyone, but some grow strong in the broken places.” Well, we can guess that these two men on the road to Emmaus were not feeling particularly strong. They had just lived through a horrible experience---the crucifixion of their leader---and they were trying to get away from it all, away from painful memories, away from dashed hopes and dreams. This man, Jesus, was supposed to redeem Israel, but in Jerusalem they came face to face with the brutal recognition that even a redeemer can die.
Just as we do not know where Emmaus was, we also do not know very much bout the two men traveling there. One is named Cleopas, while the other remains unnamed, and though they are not disciples, they were followers. Disappointed, broken hearted, certainly frightened, they also must have been confused, because they had heard a story from some women, who had seen a vision of angels, who told them, “Jesus lives!” So is it any surprise they are on the road---on the road to forget, on the road to escape hurt, disappointment, and confusion.
Some of us, if not most of us, have already traveled down a road like the one leading to Emmaus. Don’t we know the experience of wanting to escape and forget, wanting to leave behind a place, filled with painful memories? It’s not an unfamiliar experience. My granddaughter’s French class went to Paris, France last week, and she told her mother that on the plane was a young woman going to make a new life in France after losing her husband in a car accident. She could no longer live in Boston because it is too haunted with his memories. But don’t we all wonder if there will be any real escape? After all, the memories are not simply attached to a place like Boston; they are in the head and heart.
Sometimes the road to Emmaus is littered with all kinds of baggage: drugs, alcohol, infidelities, even excessive work---things people think will help them blot whatever pain they are trying to run away from or forget. But sometimes our Emmaus is exactly the place where memories are stored---but different kinds of memories from the place we are trying to forget. One of my friend’s sons had a terrible break up with a girlfriend, who also happened to be a borderline personality, so things became very ugly, very quickly. He insisted on coming home, because his Emmaus is the place where he always felt safe and secure. And there he has remained for the past nine months---stuck in a comfort zone he does not know how to leave. But if you’re stuck there, it is never going to be as safe and secure as it once was.
And chances are these two followers of Jesus didn’t find Emmaus as they thought it would be. We are not sure if Emmaus was their home, but it did seem to have for them the comfortable appeal of home. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? After such a traumatic experience, after death brushes painfully close, going home is what many of us would do or want to do. And in the intimate space of home, the place where food is prepared and shared, where familiarity breeds security, the two men recognized the stranger whom they had invited to remain with them. At first, they did not know him. They talked with him on the road, and they invited him to stay with them. But still, they did not recognize him--- until the bread was blessed and broken. Then they saw him as the risen Christ. But noticed what immediately happened: as soon they recognized him, he vanished.
There was no possibility of hanging on to him, just as Jesus told Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel that she could not cling to him. Jesus would offer no explanation of his resurrection. He would not give them one bit of information about what lay on the other side of life. No, in an instant, he was gone, and they were left wondering what in heaven’s name had happened. And so, they talked and marveled and reflected how their hearts had burned within them as Jesus had explained scripture while they were on the road. Within the hour the two men left the security and comfort of Emmaus and returned to Jerusalem. Jerusalem: the very place from which they had fled, the place of horrific defeat, the place of bad memories and dashed hopes---that was the place to which they returned. They went there to tell the disciples the good news: Jesus Christ is risen!
And isn’t that how life sometimes is. We go to the place where we think we will find comfort and safety, the place which we hope will help us to forget a painful past or at least help us to remember it in a new way, and what we discover is that we can’t stay, because things really are different. Life has changed, and we have changed along with it. Emmaus may be the place to which we return, but it is not the place in which we can remain, because if we do, we will be stuck, and if the Gospel is about anything, it is about NOT being stuck.
I have this friend from college, who is a very successful corporate lawyer. Alex can be very cynical about life and people. A classics major in college, he knows a great deal about Greek and Roman culture---but very little about the Bible. A few weeks ago, I suggested he read the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, because I told him that he reminded me of the Teacher, a hard headed realist who mixes his realism with his cynicism. And so, Alex read the book and told me he has been pondering the Preacher’s words: There is nothing new under the sun. Whoever wrote that book, Alex said, was dealing with the boredom of life that can set in, especially as we age. We have to live a while, Alex insisted, before we can understand that the things we put so much of our effort and our trust in---including our work and even our families---are really not big enough to hold the meaning of life. And when you feel that way---you can find yourself overwhelmed by the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done, all has happened before, as the Teacher said.
The two men on the road to Emmaus were not looking for something new. They knew intimately how hard life could be, and they were trying to escape from a painful place that was the site of a horrendous memory. And on the road, they met someone, who would change forever what they found in Emmaus. They had been blind; they could not see who Jesus was, but when they finally saw, they could not remain in Emmaus. They were driven back to Jerusalem, which they would now see with their eyes wide open. Who would have thought it? Certainly not these two men! As they walked that dusty road to Emmaus, they considered that everything concerning Jesus was swallowed up in a black hole of defeat. It was over, finished, but the surprising truth was: It had only just begun. And they would learn that indeed there is something new under the sun.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
April 23, 2023
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Luke 24: 13-35
No one really knows where Emmaus was. There have been a lot of guesses, but no evidence that any of the proposed sites is the real place. Perhaps it does not really matter where the original site was, because Emmaus for us is more a symbolic place than a real one. It is that place we want to go in order to forget, forget a painful past or escape from a hard truth we do not want to face. Ernest Hemingway once said, “The world in the end breaks everyone, but some grow strong in the broken places.” Well, we can guess that these two men on the road to Emmaus were not feeling particularly strong. They had just lived through a horrible experience---the crucifixion of their leader---and they were trying to get away from it all, away from painful memories, away from dashed hopes and dreams. This man, Jesus, was supposed to redeem Israel, but in Jerusalem they came face to face with the brutal recognition that even a redeemer can die.
Just as we do not know where Emmaus was, we also do not know very much bout the two men traveling there. One is named Cleopas, while the other remains unnamed, and though they are not disciples, they were followers. Disappointed, broken hearted, certainly frightened, they also must have been confused, because they had heard a story from some women, who had seen a vision of angels, who told them, “Jesus lives!” So is it any surprise they are on the road---on the road to forget, on the road to escape hurt, disappointment, and confusion.
Some of us, if not most of us, have already traveled down a road like the one leading to Emmaus. Don’t we know the experience of wanting to escape and forget, wanting to leave behind a place, filled with painful memories? It’s not an unfamiliar experience. My granddaughter’s French class went to Paris, France last week, and she told her mother that on the plane was a young woman going to make a new life in France after losing her husband in a car accident. She could no longer live in Boston because it is too haunted with his memories. But don’t we all wonder if there will be any real escape? After all, the memories are not simply attached to a place like Boston; they are in the head and heart.
Sometimes the road to Emmaus is littered with all kinds of baggage: drugs, alcohol, infidelities, even excessive work---things people think will help them blot whatever pain they are trying to run away from or forget. But sometimes our Emmaus is exactly the place where memories are stored---but different kinds of memories from the place we are trying to forget. One of my friend’s sons had a terrible break up with a girlfriend, who also happened to be a borderline personality, so things became very ugly, very quickly. He insisted on coming home, because his Emmaus is the place where he always felt safe and secure. And there he has remained for the past nine months---stuck in a comfort zone he does not know how to leave. But if you’re stuck there, it is never going to be as safe and secure as it once was.
And chances are these two followers of Jesus didn’t find Emmaus as they thought it would be. We are not sure if Emmaus was their home, but it did seem to have for them the comfortable appeal of home. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? After such a traumatic experience, after death brushes painfully close, going home is what many of us would do or want to do. And in the intimate space of home, the place where food is prepared and shared, where familiarity breeds security, the two men recognized the stranger whom they had invited to remain with them. At first, they did not know him. They talked with him on the road, and they invited him to stay with them. But still, they did not recognize him--- until the bread was blessed and broken. Then they saw him as the risen Christ. But noticed what immediately happened: as soon they recognized him, he vanished.
There was no possibility of hanging on to him, just as Jesus told Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel that she could not cling to him. Jesus would offer no explanation of his resurrection. He would not give them one bit of information about what lay on the other side of life. No, in an instant, he was gone, and they were left wondering what in heaven’s name had happened. And so, they talked and marveled and reflected how their hearts had burned within them as Jesus had explained scripture while they were on the road. Within the hour the two men left the security and comfort of Emmaus and returned to Jerusalem. Jerusalem: the very place from which they had fled, the place of horrific defeat, the place of bad memories and dashed hopes---that was the place to which they returned. They went there to tell the disciples the good news: Jesus Christ is risen!
And isn’t that how life sometimes is. We go to the place where we think we will find comfort and safety, the place which we hope will help us to forget a painful past or at least help us to remember it in a new way, and what we discover is that we can’t stay, because things really are different. Life has changed, and we have changed along with it. Emmaus may be the place to which we return, but it is not the place in which we can remain, because if we do, we will be stuck, and if the Gospel is about anything, it is about NOT being stuck.
I have this friend from college, who is a very successful corporate lawyer. Alex can be very cynical about life and people. A classics major in college, he knows a great deal about Greek and Roman culture---but very little about the Bible. A few weeks ago, I suggested he read the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, because I told him that he reminded me of the Teacher, a hard headed realist who mixes his realism with his cynicism. And so, Alex read the book and told me he has been pondering the Preacher’s words: There is nothing new under the sun. Whoever wrote that book, Alex said, was dealing with the boredom of life that can set in, especially as we age. We have to live a while, Alex insisted, before we can understand that the things we put so much of our effort and our trust in---including our work and even our families---are really not big enough to hold the meaning of life. And when you feel that way---you can find yourself overwhelmed by the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done, all has happened before, as the Teacher said.
The two men on the road to Emmaus were not looking for something new. They knew intimately how hard life could be, and they were trying to escape from a painful place that was the site of a horrendous memory. And on the road, they met someone, who would change forever what they found in Emmaus. They had been blind; they could not see who Jesus was, but when they finally saw, they could not remain in Emmaus. They were driven back to Jerusalem, which they would now see with their eyes wide open. Who would have thought it? Certainly not these two men! As they walked that dusty road to Emmaus, they considered that everything concerning Jesus was swallowed up in a black hole of defeat. It was over, finished, but the surprising truth was: It had only just begun. And they would learn that indeed there is something new under the sun.
April 19, 2023
Dear Friends,
Will Robinson served in Iraq for six months and then spent time in Germany receiving medical treatment. He was given a medical discharge from the Army in 2003, and at age 23 he thought of himself as a disabled person. Medications for his emotional pain were a daily trial, and he lived through numerous surgeries to help him cope with his physical challenges. Nothing seemed to help. On a fateful day in March, 2016 he was staring at the television screen when he had an encounter with the movie, Wild, the screen story of Cheryl Strayed, who walked the Pacific Crest Trail and was healed from the emotional trauma of her mother’s death and her broken apart family and marriage. She thought she had lost everything, but despite the loss, she found something she had not anticipated and was found by something she ds Something in Will clicked, and he recalled a time in Iraq when he poured over a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail that someone had sent to soldiers in a care package. That was a time he believed he had a future and he remembered thinking to himself, “Someday, I would like to walk that trail.
And that is how his journey began---a movie of Cheryl’s memoir that jogged his own memory of reading the guidebook of the Trail. He immediately went to his computer and ordered a free long distance permit to hike the Trail. On April 2 he arrived in Southern California to begin a journey that led to his healing.
Will had not intended to walk the entire trail, which begins on the Mexican border and runs to the Canadian border. His one goal was to find himself again, and he was willing to walk as many miles as it would take. Cheryl Strayed had written in her book, Wild, that she had begun her journey with the idea that her healing would come from contemplation, from reflecting on her varied experiences and integrating them into a coherent story. “But this is not how it happened,” she wrote. She was surprised by how healing the physical act of walking was. She was comforted and consoled by taking all those many steps.
And Will Robinson discovered something very similar. But he also learned that he could make connections with people. Very soon in his hike he met his trail family, who gave him his trail name, Akuna, a Swahili derived word, which roughly translates as “No Worries.” He met a woman named Cookie and n2Pie, a teacher from Ohio, and Nothing Yet, a veteran who had hiked the Appalachian trail the previous year to help calm his PTSD. After Will had returned from the trauma of war in Iraq, being around people had been almost impossible for him. He would suffer panic attacks, overcome by anxiety, but on the trail, he met people with whom he could connect, and they would help one another accomplish their goals. 100 miles into the trail, Will said that the dark clouds in his mind and spirit began to lift. “Maybe I can live again,” he began to think. “Maybe I can lead other people and inspire and motivate them to do what they need to do. And that is exactly what he did.
Since his first long distance hike in 2016 he has covered more than 11,000 miles. He has completed the 2650 mile Pacific Crest Trail from California to Washington, the 2194 mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine and the 3100 mile Continental Divide Trail from New Mexico to Montana. Then, during the pandemic he hiked the 165 mile Tahoe Rim Trail, the more than 800 mile Arizona Trail and the 270 mile Ozark Trail.
Scientists and physicians who study hiking say the research indicates that hiking in nature not only has physical benefits but also results in psychological virtues. Walking at least 90 minutes in nature can tame depression, lower anxiety and stress and “reduce rumination, “the endless loop of negative thoughts.” There is a 2019 study, Nature and Mental Health, which explored a multiple set of rewards that accrue from hiking, including more positive social interactions, a stronger sense of purpose and a keener grip on reality and the demands of living.
Before industrialization and the change in work habits, which have evolved over the centuries, our ancestors probably did not suffer from the same sort of ills we do, which often come from too much sitting and a lack of interaction with the natural world. All too often we are alienated from nature, and this has led to all kinds of problems and illnesses. Nature may not be a panacea for everything, but we should be encouraged to realize that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found themselves grasped by the healing power of nature, which helped them to recover from devastating personal losses.
There are city people, who cannot imagine living outside the hustle and bustle of urban life with all its excitement, artistic accomplishments and novelties. Yet, consider how many New Yorkers find themselves walking or running in Central Park to be uplifted and renewed by the trees, grass, and flowers, which on the scale of evolution came long before human beings made their appearance on this planet. Recall that Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount commented on the lilies of the field: “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Will Robinson served in Iraq for six months and then spent time in Germany receiving medical treatment. He was given a medical discharge from the Army in 2003, and at age 23 he thought of himself as a disabled person. Medications for his emotional pain were a daily trial, and he lived through numerous surgeries to help him cope with his physical challenges. Nothing seemed to help. On a fateful day in March, 2016 he was staring at the television screen when he had an encounter with the movie, Wild, the screen story of Cheryl Strayed, who walked the Pacific Crest Trail and was healed from the emotional trauma of her mother’s death and her broken apart family and marriage. She thought she had lost everything, but despite the loss, she found something she had not anticipated and was found by something she ds Something in Will clicked, and he recalled a time in Iraq when he poured over a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail that someone had sent to soldiers in a care package. That was a time he believed he had a future and he remembered thinking to himself, “Someday, I would like to walk that trail.
And that is how his journey began---a movie of Cheryl’s memoir that jogged his own memory of reading the guidebook of the Trail. He immediately went to his computer and ordered a free long distance permit to hike the Trail. On April 2 he arrived in Southern California to begin a journey that led to his healing.
Will had not intended to walk the entire trail, which begins on the Mexican border and runs to the Canadian border. His one goal was to find himself again, and he was willing to walk as many miles as it would take. Cheryl Strayed had written in her book, Wild, that she had begun her journey with the idea that her healing would come from contemplation, from reflecting on her varied experiences and integrating them into a coherent story. “But this is not how it happened,” she wrote. She was surprised by how healing the physical act of walking was. She was comforted and consoled by taking all those many steps.
And Will Robinson discovered something very similar. But he also learned that he could make connections with people. Very soon in his hike he met his trail family, who gave him his trail name, Akuna, a Swahili derived word, which roughly translates as “No Worries.” He met a woman named Cookie and n2Pie, a teacher from Ohio, and Nothing Yet, a veteran who had hiked the Appalachian trail the previous year to help calm his PTSD. After Will had returned from the trauma of war in Iraq, being around people had been almost impossible for him. He would suffer panic attacks, overcome by anxiety, but on the trail, he met people with whom he could connect, and they would help one another accomplish their goals. 100 miles into the trail, Will said that the dark clouds in his mind and spirit began to lift. “Maybe I can live again,” he began to think. “Maybe I can lead other people and inspire and motivate them to do what they need to do. And that is exactly what he did.
Since his first long distance hike in 2016 he has covered more than 11,000 miles. He has completed the 2650 mile Pacific Crest Trail from California to Washington, the 2194 mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine and the 3100 mile Continental Divide Trail from New Mexico to Montana. Then, during the pandemic he hiked the 165 mile Tahoe Rim Trail, the more than 800 mile Arizona Trail and the 270 mile Ozark Trail.
Scientists and physicians who study hiking say the research indicates that hiking in nature not only has physical benefits but also results in psychological virtues. Walking at least 90 minutes in nature can tame depression, lower anxiety and stress and “reduce rumination, “the endless loop of negative thoughts.” There is a 2019 study, Nature and Mental Health, which explored a multiple set of rewards that accrue from hiking, including more positive social interactions, a stronger sense of purpose and a keener grip on reality and the demands of living.
Before industrialization and the change in work habits, which have evolved over the centuries, our ancestors probably did not suffer from the same sort of ills we do, which often come from too much sitting and a lack of interaction with the natural world. All too often we are alienated from nature, and this has led to all kinds of problems and illnesses. Nature may not be a panacea for everything, but we should be encouraged to realize that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found themselves grasped by the healing power of nature, which helped them to recover from devastating personal losses.
There are city people, who cannot imagine living outside the hustle and bustle of urban life with all its excitement, artistic accomplishments and novelties. Yet, consider how many New Yorkers find themselves walking or running in Central Park to be uplifted and renewed by the trees, grass, and flowers, which on the scale of evolution came long before human beings made their appearance on this planet. Recall that Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount commented on the lilies of the field: “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Peace Be with You
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
April 16, 2023
John 20: 19-31
On the evening of the day that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, the disciples, with the exception of Thomas, were behind locked doors. They were afraid, the text says, afraid of the Jews. Now there is really no reason the disciples should have been more afraid of the Jews than of the Romans, but John’s gospel, written around the year 90 or so, when the distrust and tensions between the Christians and the Jews had grown very high, is reading the enmity back into the time after Jesus’ death. Here we see the beginning of Christian antisemitism. Of course, the fear after Jesus’ death was real. The disciples did not know what would happen next or who would accuse them of what crime. So being behind locked doors made complete sense.
And then Jesus came among them. How he gained entrance, we do not know, but he was there, and the first thing he said was, “Peace be with you.” Then he showed them his hands and his side, and though the text does not say the wounds were still visible, the implication is that they were, marking his suffering and death. A little later, Thomas will be invited to put his hand in Jesus’ side, where he was pierced by a sword. So, whatever we say about Jesus’ resurrection, it did not erase his history. His story ended with wounds and death, and though death was overcome, his wounds did not magically disappear. And isn’t that how it often is in real life? People are wounded, sometimes grievously so, and though those wounds can be overcome and healed, so they no longer hold the person in bondage, yet those wounds can remain a vital part of their story. They are not so easily forgotten or ignored.
Now imagine the fear of those disciples, and then Jesus’ sudden appearance among them and his words, “Peace be with you.” Don’t you wonder how they can possibly know peace after all they have lived through and witnessed? What did Jesus mean here by peace. Obviously, he could not have meant the absence of conflict. The disciples were surrounded by conflict with the Romans and some Jews. And though they did not know it then, the conflict would only grow. Perhaps what Jesus meant was an inner balance and calm, a sense of confidence and wellbeing that can face chaos and even evil and yet know that God, not human beings, speaks the final word. And the final word is good news. Though earlier in John‘s gospel, Jesus had spoken of peace in his long farewell address to his disciples before going to the cross, he did not yet give them peace. It was only after his death and resurrection that he uttered the words, “Peace be with you.” He could give peace only after he had lived and suffered and then was granted by God new life.
And in giving his disciples that peace---he said it a second time--- he also commissioned them to go out into the world, As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And they will be sent with the power of the Holy Spirit. So, now they have something new. The Holy Spirit is with them, and notice what the Spirit allows them to do: Offer forgiveness. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. This does not mean that the disciples cause or create the forgiveness. It does not mean that they are given the power to decide who can be forgiven. They are commissioned to offer what God has already done. God forgives. God is always forgiving, but not everyone accepts the forgiveness, and so the sins are retained (not by God) but by the person who does not let the sin go.
After everything that had happened---the experience of utter catastrophe that Jesus’ execution was, what they end up with is the power of the Holy Spirit, who pronounces God’s forgiveness. There was going to be no payback here, no vengeance allowed---though vengeance is exactly what so many people demand and want after a terrible catastrophe. But as is often the case with Jesus Christ and God, what people are looking for is not necessarily what they receive.
Some years ago, when I was serving a church in New Haven, I was visiting one of my parishioners in the hospital, where I overheard this surgeon talking to his patient in the next bed. He was trying to calm down this utterly terrified woman, who was facing cardiac surgery the next day. Now over the years I have heard many doctors talk to many patients, but there was something different about this doctor, a quality of calmness and assurance I had never before heard. I was more than impressed; I was deeply touched.
A few days later, back at the hospital for another visit, I went to the café to get something to drink, and there was the doctor, sitting alone at a table. And so, I decided to tell him how moved I was by his interaction with his patient. He thanked me and asked me to sit down, and then he told me his story, how he had been in Iraq during the war, part of a Mash like surgical team, except, he said, “we had a lot more equipment and know how than existed back in the 50’s. We were being driven back to our residence one night after a particularly grueling day of surgery, when suddenly, we hit a roadside bomb. I was completely thrown out of the car, while two other surgeons and two nurses and the driver were instantly killed. I alone survived with a few bruises and cuts. Survived physically, but mentally I was a wreck. I was consumed with rage and all I wanted was revenge against the Iraqis.
Well, I was assigned to a new team and the supervising surgeon was quite a bit older than I, and I wondered why he was even here, and so I asked him. He told me he was a Viet Nam vet, who had operated on soldiers during the Viet Nam War. He could save people now he could not back then, so he volunteered to help. He was an incredibly skillful surgeon; I learned a lot from him. But the most valuable lesson I learned was the power of life. He told me about his losses---two close friends and comrades who died in Viet Nam. And then he said, “There is no payback, no real compensation for loss and pain. The only thing you can do is come down on the healing side of life.” And so, I did, and I have. But even now I don’t know if it was a decision I made, or perhaps something bigger than I made it for me. I am not a very religious person, not even a spiritual one, but I do believe there are powers in the world that can take hold of us for good and for ill. I think a good one got ahold of me.
And so, it had---just as a good power---the Holy Spirit---got ahold of the disciples after all the terror and failure they had lived through. With Jesus’ blessing they were sent on a mission into the world. That mission had much to do with the pronouncement of forgiveness, which indeed is a healing force in the world. If you can forgive, if you can be free of the desire to pay back evil with evil; if you can move beyond your anger and rage, even when that anger and rage are well deserved----if in the midst of such pain, you can grab hold of forgiveness, then be assured that this is not your work alone and that the Peace of Christ is surely with you.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church, Unionville, CT
April 16, 2023
John 20: 19-31
On the evening of the day that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, the disciples, with the exception of Thomas, were behind locked doors. They were afraid, the text says, afraid of the Jews. Now there is really no reason the disciples should have been more afraid of the Jews than of the Romans, but John’s gospel, written around the year 90 or so, when the distrust and tensions between the Christians and the Jews had grown very high, is reading the enmity back into the time after Jesus’ death. Here we see the beginning of Christian antisemitism. Of course, the fear after Jesus’ death was real. The disciples did not know what would happen next or who would accuse them of what crime. So being behind locked doors made complete sense.
And then Jesus came among them. How he gained entrance, we do not know, but he was there, and the first thing he said was, “Peace be with you.” Then he showed them his hands and his side, and though the text does not say the wounds were still visible, the implication is that they were, marking his suffering and death. A little later, Thomas will be invited to put his hand in Jesus’ side, where he was pierced by a sword. So, whatever we say about Jesus’ resurrection, it did not erase his history. His story ended with wounds and death, and though death was overcome, his wounds did not magically disappear. And isn’t that how it often is in real life? People are wounded, sometimes grievously so, and though those wounds can be overcome and healed, so they no longer hold the person in bondage, yet those wounds can remain a vital part of their story. They are not so easily forgotten or ignored.
Now imagine the fear of those disciples, and then Jesus’ sudden appearance among them and his words, “Peace be with you.” Don’t you wonder how they can possibly know peace after all they have lived through and witnessed? What did Jesus mean here by peace. Obviously, he could not have meant the absence of conflict. The disciples were surrounded by conflict with the Romans and some Jews. And though they did not know it then, the conflict would only grow. Perhaps what Jesus meant was an inner balance and calm, a sense of confidence and wellbeing that can face chaos and even evil and yet know that God, not human beings, speaks the final word. And the final word is good news. Though earlier in John‘s gospel, Jesus had spoken of peace in his long farewell address to his disciples before going to the cross, he did not yet give them peace. It was only after his death and resurrection that he uttered the words, “Peace be with you.” He could give peace only after he had lived and suffered and then was granted by God new life.
And in giving his disciples that peace---he said it a second time--- he also commissioned them to go out into the world, As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And they will be sent with the power of the Holy Spirit. So, now they have something new. The Holy Spirit is with them, and notice what the Spirit allows them to do: Offer forgiveness. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. This does not mean that the disciples cause or create the forgiveness. It does not mean that they are given the power to decide who can be forgiven. They are commissioned to offer what God has already done. God forgives. God is always forgiving, but not everyone accepts the forgiveness, and so the sins are retained (not by God) but by the person who does not let the sin go.
After everything that had happened---the experience of utter catastrophe that Jesus’ execution was, what they end up with is the power of the Holy Spirit, who pronounces God’s forgiveness. There was going to be no payback here, no vengeance allowed---though vengeance is exactly what so many people demand and want after a terrible catastrophe. But as is often the case with Jesus Christ and God, what people are looking for is not necessarily what they receive.
Some years ago, when I was serving a church in New Haven, I was visiting one of my parishioners in the hospital, where I overheard this surgeon talking to his patient in the next bed. He was trying to calm down this utterly terrified woman, who was facing cardiac surgery the next day. Now over the years I have heard many doctors talk to many patients, but there was something different about this doctor, a quality of calmness and assurance I had never before heard. I was more than impressed; I was deeply touched.
A few days later, back at the hospital for another visit, I went to the café to get something to drink, and there was the doctor, sitting alone at a table. And so, I decided to tell him how moved I was by his interaction with his patient. He thanked me and asked me to sit down, and then he told me his story, how he had been in Iraq during the war, part of a Mash like surgical team, except, he said, “we had a lot more equipment and know how than existed back in the 50’s. We were being driven back to our residence one night after a particularly grueling day of surgery, when suddenly, we hit a roadside bomb. I was completely thrown out of the car, while two other surgeons and two nurses and the driver were instantly killed. I alone survived with a few bruises and cuts. Survived physically, but mentally I was a wreck. I was consumed with rage and all I wanted was revenge against the Iraqis.
Well, I was assigned to a new team and the supervising surgeon was quite a bit older than I, and I wondered why he was even here, and so I asked him. He told me he was a Viet Nam vet, who had operated on soldiers during the Viet Nam War. He could save people now he could not back then, so he volunteered to help. He was an incredibly skillful surgeon; I learned a lot from him. But the most valuable lesson I learned was the power of life. He told me about his losses---two close friends and comrades who died in Viet Nam. And then he said, “There is no payback, no real compensation for loss and pain. The only thing you can do is come down on the healing side of life.” And so, I did, and I have. But even now I don’t know if it was a decision I made, or perhaps something bigger than I made it for me. I am not a very religious person, not even a spiritual one, but I do believe there are powers in the world that can take hold of us for good and for ill. I think a good one got ahold of me.
And so, it had---just as a good power---the Holy Spirit---got ahold of the disciples after all the terror and failure they had lived through. With Jesus’ blessing they were sent on a mission into the world. That mission had much to do with the pronouncement of forgiveness, which indeed is a healing force in the world. If you can forgive, if you can be free of the desire to pay back evil with evil; if you can move beyond your anger and rage, even when that anger and rage are well deserved----if in the midst of such pain, you can grab hold of forgiveness, then be assured that this is not your work alone and that the Peace of Christ is surely with you.
Dear Friends,
Remember when you were a child, and your mother or father insisted you apologize for some infraction you committed. If you were like most children, apologizing does not come easily. Children often resist. I remember my own children standing there, pouting, refusing to say the words, “I’m sorry,” to me or someone else. But children are not the only ones who have difficulty with apologies. Adults do as well, especially when it comes to the sins and crimes of history. Governments simply do not like to admit wrongdoing. Has the United States ever apologized for slavery, or its treatment of the Native Americans or for Viet Nam, Iraq, or Afghanistan? We did apologize for the incarceration of Japanese people on the West Coast in prison camps during the Second World War. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan formally apologized, and reparations of $20,000 were offered to those who had suffered the incarceration. Considering that their property had been confiscated, $20,000 was a pittance---but it was better than nothing.
There are other examples of governments apologizing. The German government did apologize for the Holocaust and made payments to the nation of Israel. True, nothing could compensate for such evil, but at least there was an admission of guilt. And then there is the example of Australia. On February 13, 2008, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new prime minister, acknowledged the systemic dehumanization and degradation of Australia’s Aboriginal population. One of the persons present at the apology was Lorna Nungali, who had been four years old when she was stolen from her parents. She lived in an isolated village in the Australian outback, and the community had been hearing that children were being kidnapped by the government. Families dug holes in creek beds and had their children practice hiding there. But one day, with help from “trackers,” welfare men showed up and suddenly grabbed Lorna, her cousins and siblings and threw them in the back of a truck. Lorna can still recall her mother, screaming and crying as she clung to the side of the truck. Lorna never saw her mother again. A few days before Rudd’s apology, Lorna had sat with him and described that terrible day. He understood the depth of the injustice that had been committed against the Aboriginal people, and his speech that day was his first official parliamentary act. His apology was historic, a reminder that words do matter. Yet no American leader has ever dared to emulate what Rudd had done.
It is true that American officials have twice formally apologized for the treatment of indigenous people, but the apologies fall short in some very significant ways. On September 8, 2000, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover, delivered a speech, acknowledging the abuse the United States had inflicted on native populations. The Agency of Indian Affairs was tasked with the responsibility of protecting the Indian population, he said, but had failed miserably. Gover’s apology was heartfelt, but he was NOT speaking on behalf of the President, Bill Clinton, in any official capacity. Besides, Gover was a member of the Pawnee nation. Rudd, on the other hand, claimed that his apology was effective, precisely because he is “a white, eighth-generation Australian male, whose ancestors were criminals.” (His exact words, by the way.)
On December 19, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an “Apology to Native Peoples of the United States” into law. Here was the official policy from the President, certainly a big deal. But unlike Rudd’s apology there was no public event to mark the admission of guilt, and the sponsor of the bill, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, actually read the statement aloud five months later in a ceremony, hardly attended by anyone. The news coverage was almost non-existent, and very few people are even aware of the apology.
To be effective, an apology of this kind needs three elements: (1) the admission of wrongdoing (2) a demonstration of regret and remorse (3) a stated commitment to work toward a new future, which would not repeat the wrongs of the past. While the apologies of 2008 and 2009 did include these elements, the 2009 apology contained a disclaimer, stating that this should not be taken to mean that a financial claim against the United States Government would be honored. By adding the disclaimer, the admission of guilt was watered down, indicating that it had no real force. As I mentioned earlier, Germany’s apology came with money.
Apologies are never easy; it is always a challenge to face wrongdoing and guilt. We human beings have learned to defend ourselves against such knowledge, and we have all kinds of clever psychological and spiritual tools to keep our egos and our superegos intact. When we have done wrong, guilt is a sign of spiritual health, but it is also true that guilt can be destructive, if it has no way to make a new beginning. Recall the story of the young German soldier, Karl, (from the book, The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal), who committed terrible atrocities against Jews. He faced the guilty horror of his deed and yet he could find no forgiveness. Forgiveness may indeed be the key element. Is it any wonder then, that when Jesus was resurrected (in John’s gospel) and was gathered with his disciples, he breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit, which pronounced forgiveness on all who would accept the gift.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Remember when you were a child, and your mother or father insisted you apologize for some infraction you committed. If you were like most children, apologizing does not come easily. Children often resist. I remember my own children standing there, pouting, refusing to say the words, “I’m sorry,” to me or someone else. But children are not the only ones who have difficulty with apologies. Adults do as well, especially when it comes to the sins and crimes of history. Governments simply do not like to admit wrongdoing. Has the United States ever apologized for slavery, or its treatment of the Native Americans or for Viet Nam, Iraq, or Afghanistan? We did apologize for the incarceration of Japanese people on the West Coast in prison camps during the Second World War. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan formally apologized, and reparations of $20,000 were offered to those who had suffered the incarceration. Considering that their property had been confiscated, $20,000 was a pittance---but it was better than nothing.
There are other examples of governments apologizing. The German government did apologize for the Holocaust and made payments to the nation of Israel. True, nothing could compensate for such evil, but at least there was an admission of guilt. And then there is the example of Australia. On February 13, 2008, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new prime minister, acknowledged the systemic dehumanization and degradation of Australia’s Aboriginal population. One of the persons present at the apology was Lorna Nungali, who had been four years old when she was stolen from her parents. She lived in an isolated village in the Australian outback, and the community had been hearing that children were being kidnapped by the government. Families dug holes in creek beds and had their children practice hiding there. But one day, with help from “trackers,” welfare men showed up and suddenly grabbed Lorna, her cousins and siblings and threw them in the back of a truck. Lorna can still recall her mother, screaming and crying as she clung to the side of the truck. Lorna never saw her mother again. A few days before Rudd’s apology, Lorna had sat with him and described that terrible day. He understood the depth of the injustice that had been committed against the Aboriginal people, and his speech that day was his first official parliamentary act. His apology was historic, a reminder that words do matter. Yet no American leader has ever dared to emulate what Rudd had done.
It is true that American officials have twice formally apologized for the treatment of indigenous people, but the apologies fall short in some very significant ways. On September 8, 2000, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover, delivered a speech, acknowledging the abuse the United States had inflicted on native populations. The Agency of Indian Affairs was tasked with the responsibility of protecting the Indian population, he said, but had failed miserably. Gover’s apology was heartfelt, but he was NOT speaking on behalf of the President, Bill Clinton, in any official capacity. Besides, Gover was a member of the Pawnee nation. Rudd, on the other hand, claimed that his apology was effective, precisely because he is “a white, eighth-generation Australian male, whose ancestors were criminals.” (His exact words, by the way.)
On December 19, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an “Apology to Native Peoples of the United States” into law. Here was the official policy from the President, certainly a big deal. But unlike Rudd’s apology there was no public event to mark the admission of guilt, and the sponsor of the bill, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, actually read the statement aloud five months later in a ceremony, hardly attended by anyone. The news coverage was almost non-existent, and very few people are even aware of the apology.
To be effective, an apology of this kind needs three elements: (1) the admission of wrongdoing (2) a demonstration of regret and remorse (3) a stated commitment to work toward a new future, which would not repeat the wrongs of the past. While the apologies of 2008 and 2009 did include these elements, the 2009 apology contained a disclaimer, stating that this should not be taken to mean that a financial claim against the United States Government would be honored. By adding the disclaimer, the admission of guilt was watered down, indicating that it had no real force. As I mentioned earlier, Germany’s apology came with money.
Apologies are never easy; it is always a challenge to face wrongdoing and guilt. We human beings have learned to defend ourselves against such knowledge, and we have all kinds of clever psychological and spiritual tools to keep our egos and our superegos intact. When we have done wrong, guilt is a sign of spiritual health, but it is also true that guilt can be destructive, if it has no way to make a new beginning. Recall the story of the young German soldier, Karl, (from the book, The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal), who committed terrible atrocities against Jews. He faced the guilty horror of his deed and yet he could find no forgiveness. Forgiveness may indeed be the key element. Is it any wonder then, that when Jesus was resurrected (in John’s gospel) and was gathered with his disciples, he breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit, which pronounced forgiveness on all who would accept the gift.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHAT ABOUT THE ANGEL?
Preached by Sandra Olsen, Maundy Thursday
April 6, 2023
Luke 22: 39-46
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 1989, 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 ward, 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 word to use for someone who had lived the last 10 years of her life on the streets, 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 and even said she hated God, she couldn’t get God out of her mind. 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 God 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 downhill 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? 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 become like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”
I stopped reading, and the room was bathed in complete silence until Linda broke it. whole world seemed to stop with me 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 are outside the realm of reason. Nonetheless, I looked Linda straight in the eye, and with no audible or visible hesitation, answered, “Yes, I believe the part about the angel.” “Oh,” she said. “I thought that maybe you are 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 still recall precisely 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 that it’s more impervious than we give it credit for.” Impervious—that’s the word he spoke slowly and deliberately. I can still remember the cadence of his voice, now more than 30 years ago. Impervious, meaning 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 the gospels of Matthew and Mark and John make no mention of. Impervious: Oh, it 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 6, 2023
Luke 22: 39-46
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 1989, 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 ward, 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 word to use for someone who had lived the last 10 years of her life on the streets, 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 and even said she hated God, she couldn’t get God out of her mind. 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 God 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 downhill 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? 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 become like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”
I stopped reading, and the room was bathed in complete silence until Linda broke it. whole world seemed to stop with me 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 are outside the realm of reason. Nonetheless, I looked Linda straight in the eye, and with no audible or visible hesitation, answered, “Yes, I believe the part about the angel.” “Oh,” she said. “I thought that maybe you are 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 still recall precisely 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 that it’s more impervious than we give it credit for.” Impervious—that’s the word he spoke slowly and deliberately. I can still remember the cadence of his voice, now more than 30 years ago. Impervious, meaning 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 the gospels of Matthew and Mark and John make no mention of. Impervious: Oh, it 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?
GO HOME TO GALILEE
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2023
Preached by Sandra Olsen at
THE FIRST CHURCH IN UNIONVILLE, CT
Matthew 28: 1-10
Just as the stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospels are different from one another, so too are the Easter stories. Mark’s is the starkest. The women who went to the tomb ran away in terror. And they don’t say a word to anyone. Overwhelming fear is how Mark’s gospel ends. In Luke the women go to the tomb and when they see that it is empty, they are perplexed---that is, until an angel appears and then they are terrified. The angel tells them Jesus is risen; they run and tell the disciples, who do not believe them---except for Peter, who goes to the tomb and sees the linen cloths lying by themselves. Then he goes home. John tells us that Mary Magdalene alone went to the tomb, and mistakes Jesus for a gardener, until Jesus calls her by name. Then she recognizes him, and when she reaches out to hold him, he says, “Do not touch me or Do not cling to me.” Then she runs to Peter and John, and tells them, “I have seen the Lord,” and they too run to the tomb---but they do not see Jesus there.
And then we have Matthew, the lectionary text for today. Once again, we have women going to the tomb, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary---whoever she was. Women were the ones, who washed the dead body and prepared it with spices. The women arrived at the tomb, and suddenly there was a great earthquake and an angel, whose appearance terrorized the guards. But the angel assured the women that Jesus is risen and instructed them to tell the disciples that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee. They left the tomb filled with both fear and joy and then they met Jesus, whom they worshipped. He repeated the instruction of the angel, “Go tell my disciples to meet me in Galilee.”
Galilee: What is Galilee, beside a particular locale on a map? For Jesus and his disciples, it’s home; it’s where Jesus’ ministry took place. It’s familiar territory, the place of safety, comfort, acceptance. That’s what home means. Oh, we all realize there are some people for whom home is anything but safe and comfortable. A junior high principal told me once that keeping some of the kids in the building for as long as he could was his top priority because as soon as they set foot in their homes, they were at risk. And a woman who loved her home told me that once her husband died, her lovely home became for her an awful loneliness. But for most people home is a place of longing, that haven of safety, where we hope all manner of things shall be well. And so, after all that Jesus and his disciples had been through, it is hardly surprising that they went home to Galilee.
Maybe on the first day of eternal life, we think that Jesus should have swaggered into Jerusalem to confront the chief priest, Caiaphas and Pilot, the Roman governor, and all the other people of power, who had clamored for his death. “Boy, did you guys get it wrong.” Or maybe we think he should have striven into the Temple at Jerusalem. Remember, how I said that I would tear this building down, and build it up in three days? Well, guess what, here I am! Now do you get it?” But no, that is not what Jesus did. Instead, he went to Galilee, his home and his friends’ home, the place where the story all began, the place where he did 4/5 of his ministry, the place from which he called his disciples to come and follow him.
Galilee, that dusty, unimpressive locale, which was also diverse, a region of the nations, the Jews called it, where Jews and Gentiles had to learn to live with each other, even if they did not always like or trust each other. This was the home of Jesus’ ministry, and it is to this home he went. His ministry ended in Jerusalem, but it began in Galilee, and now in Galilee it will begin once again. Galilee is the place the disciples had tried to learn how to be disciples, and though they were a rather pathetic lot and often misunderstood who Jesus was and what he was about, it was in Galilee that Jesus spoke his final command to them. It is where he commissioned them: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
There is something so existentially true and deep about this text, something that transcends questions of history and questions of fact, something that addresses us right where we live. We can read the biblical text on so many different levels and get all hung up about what REALLY happened when, but we can also read it is as a story about God and us, a story, which helps us to truly see and understand the human condition. Our lives begin, so to speak, at home, and in one way or another, we all have to leave home to find or be found by our destiny. Even a small town guy, like Jesus and his disciples, had to leave home. They would sometimes wander into Samaritan territory, where there were different lessons to be learned, and eventually they all went to Jerusalem, that place of ultimate testing, where they would face their greatest temptation. Jesus faced his squarely: not my will, but your will, while the disciples ran away. After the crucifixion the disciples fled from Jerusalem, racing home, to nurture their feelings of total and miserable defeat. They returned to their ordinary lives in their ordinary homes, hoping that life would eventually return to normal, and there in the region of Galilee, where it had all begun, it would begin once again---at home. Home, the place where most people meet Jesus and God---at home, meaning, I think, the circumstances of ordinary living, as hard or as easy as those circumstances sometimes are----that is the place that Jesus and God usually meet us.
A friend of mine told me about a young man, named Tommy, who had studied at Loyola University in Chicago. Loyola is a Catholic school, so Tommy was required to take some religion classes. In a theology course, he was the resident atheist in the class, and he spent a great deal of energy arguing with his professor and the other students. At the end of the semester, Tommy asked his teacher, “Well, do you think I will ever find God.” No, the professor said, but I am absolutely sure that God will find you.
Well, the young man graduated, and the professor was relieved to have him out of his class, but a few years later, the professor heard that Tommy was very ill with a life threatening autoimmune disease. He was surprised when Tommy came to see him. “I am so sorry for what you are now facing,” the professor told him. AT 24 you should not have to confront the possibility of dying. Well, it could be worse, Tommy said. I could be 50 and have no values or ideals and think that booze and seducing women and making money are the biggies in life.
Tommy continued. You know how you said I would never find God, but God would find me? Well, I continued my search, banging my fists against the bronze doors of heaven, especially after I became sick. But nothing happened, nothing at all. And so, I just gave up. I’m just one of those people who have too many questions and doubts to believe. Well, this one evening I went into the living room, where my father was reading the paper. “Dad,” I said, “I want to talk with you.” Sure, my father said, but he didn’t put down his paper. No, Dad, it’s really important. And so, my father stopped reading. Dad, I just want to tell you that I love you, really love you. That wasn’t any easy thing for me to do or say. And you know what my father did? Something he never did before: he cried, hugged me, and told me he loved me too. I did the same thing with my mom and my brother and my sister, and then one day, God was there. I knew it; I could feel it, and my mind believed it. Oh, I still had all my questions and doubts, but God was there in the midst of all that. God didn’t appear to me when I pleaded or argued or pondered. Maybe I had to go through all that searching first, so God could find me at home.
Home: home to Galilee; home in Galilee. Jesus directed his disciples to meet him on a mountain top in Galilee, maybe the same mountain that Jesus preached The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, according to Matthew is the new Moses, so we should not be surprised that Jesus commissioned his disciples on a mountain. It’s all familiar territory. It’s home. And home is where Jesus commanded, “Go, and make disciples of all nations.” He gave this command in Galilee, in the ordinary place that was their home. What about us? What about our home? Who or what is waiting to meet us there? And what is God saying to us in our home?
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2023
Preached by Sandra Olsen at
THE FIRST CHURCH IN UNIONVILLE, CT
Matthew 28: 1-10
Just as the stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospels are different from one another, so too are the Easter stories. Mark’s is the starkest. The women who went to the tomb ran away in terror. And they don’t say a word to anyone. Overwhelming fear is how Mark’s gospel ends. In Luke the women go to the tomb and when they see that it is empty, they are perplexed---that is, until an angel appears and then they are terrified. The angel tells them Jesus is risen; they run and tell the disciples, who do not believe them---except for Peter, who goes to the tomb and sees the linen cloths lying by themselves. Then he goes home. John tells us that Mary Magdalene alone went to the tomb, and mistakes Jesus for a gardener, until Jesus calls her by name. Then she recognizes him, and when she reaches out to hold him, he says, “Do not touch me or Do not cling to me.” Then she runs to Peter and John, and tells them, “I have seen the Lord,” and they too run to the tomb---but they do not see Jesus there.
And then we have Matthew, the lectionary text for today. Once again, we have women going to the tomb, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary---whoever she was. Women were the ones, who washed the dead body and prepared it with spices. The women arrived at the tomb, and suddenly there was a great earthquake and an angel, whose appearance terrorized the guards. But the angel assured the women that Jesus is risen and instructed them to tell the disciples that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee. They left the tomb filled with both fear and joy and then they met Jesus, whom they worshipped. He repeated the instruction of the angel, “Go tell my disciples to meet me in Galilee.”
Galilee: What is Galilee, beside a particular locale on a map? For Jesus and his disciples, it’s home; it’s where Jesus’ ministry took place. It’s familiar territory, the place of safety, comfort, acceptance. That’s what home means. Oh, we all realize there are some people for whom home is anything but safe and comfortable. A junior high principal told me once that keeping some of the kids in the building for as long as he could was his top priority because as soon as they set foot in their homes, they were at risk. And a woman who loved her home told me that once her husband died, her lovely home became for her an awful loneliness. But for most people home is a place of longing, that haven of safety, where we hope all manner of things shall be well. And so, after all that Jesus and his disciples had been through, it is hardly surprising that they went home to Galilee.
Maybe on the first day of eternal life, we think that Jesus should have swaggered into Jerusalem to confront the chief priest, Caiaphas and Pilot, the Roman governor, and all the other people of power, who had clamored for his death. “Boy, did you guys get it wrong.” Or maybe we think he should have striven into the Temple at Jerusalem. Remember, how I said that I would tear this building down, and build it up in three days? Well, guess what, here I am! Now do you get it?” But no, that is not what Jesus did. Instead, he went to Galilee, his home and his friends’ home, the place where the story all began, the place where he did 4/5 of his ministry, the place from which he called his disciples to come and follow him.
Galilee, that dusty, unimpressive locale, which was also diverse, a region of the nations, the Jews called it, where Jews and Gentiles had to learn to live with each other, even if they did not always like or trust each other. This was the home of Jesus’ ministry, and it is to this home he went. His ministry ended in Jerusalem, but it began in Galilee, and now in Galilee it will begin once again. Galilee is the place the disciples had tried to learn how to be disciples, and though they were a rather pathetic lot and often misunderstood who Jesus was and what he was about, it was in Galilee that Jesus spoke his final command to them. It is where he commissioned them: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
There is something so existentially true and deep about this text, something that transcends questions of history and questions of fact, something that addresses us right where we live. We can read the biblical text on so many different levels and get all hung up about what REALLY happened when, but we can also read it is as a story about God and us, a story, which helps us to truly see and understand the human condition. Our lives begin, so to speak, at home, and in one way or another, we all have to leave home to find or be found by our destiny. Even a small town guy, like Jesus and his disciples, had to leave home. They would sometimes wander into Samaritan territory, where there were different lessons to be learned, and eventually they all went to Jerusalem, that place of ultimate testing, where they would face their greatest temptation. Jesus faced his squarely: not my will, but your will, while the disciples ran away. After the crucifixion the disciples fled from Jerusalem, racing home, to nurture their feelings of total and miserable defeat. They returned to their ordinary lives in their ordinary homes, hoping that life would eventually return to normal, and there in the region of Galilee, where it had all begun, it would begin once again---at home. Home, the place where most people meet Jesus and God---at home, meaning, I think, the circumstances of ordinary living, as hard or as easy as those circumstances sometimes are----that is the place that Jesus and God usually meet us.
A friend of mine told me about a young man, named Tommy, who had studied at Loyola University in Chicago. Loyola is a Catholic school, so Tommy was required to take some religion classes. In a theology course, he was the resident atheist in the class, and he spent a great deal of energy arguing with his professor and the other students. At the end of the semester, Tommy asked his teacher, “Well, do you think I will ever find God.” No, the professor said, but I am absolutely sure that God will find you.
Well, the young man graduated, and the professor was relieved to have him out of his class, but a few years later, the professor heard that Tommy was very ill with a life threatening autoimmune disease. He was surprised when Tommy came to see him. “I am so sorry for what you are now facing,” the professor told him. AT 24 you should not have to confront the possibility of dying. Well, it could be worse, Tommy said. I could be 50 and have no values or ideals and think that booze and seducing women and making money are the biggies in life.
Tommy continued. You know how you said I would never find God, but God would find me? Well, I continued my search, banging my fists against the bronze doors of heaven, especially after I became sick. But nothing happened, nothing at all. And so, I just gave up. I’m just one of those people who have too many questions and doubts to believe. Well, this one evening I went into the living room, where my father was reading the paper. “Dad,” I said, “I want to talk with you.” Sure, my father said, but he didn’t put down his paper. No, Dad, it’s really important. And so, my father stopped reading. Dad, I just want to tell you that I love you, really love you. That wasn’t any easy thing for me to do or say. And you know what my father did? Something he never did before: he cried, hugged me, and told me he loved me too. I did the same thing with my mom and my brother and my sister, and then one day, God was there. I knew it; I could feel it, and my mind believed it. Oh, I still had all my questions and doubts, but God was there in the midst of all that. God didn’t appear to me when I pleaded or argued or pondered. Maybe I had to go through all that searching first, so God could find me at home.
Home: home to Galilee; home in Galilee. Jesus directed his disciples to meet him on a mountain top in Galilee, maybe the same mountain that Jesus preached The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, according to Matthew is the new Moses, so we should not be surprised that Jesus commissioned his disciples on a mountain. It’s all familiar territory. It’s home. And home is where Jesus commanded, “Go, and make disciples of all nations.” He gave this command in Galilee, in the ordinary place that was their home. What about us? What about our home? Who or what is waiting to meet us there? And what is God saying to us in our home?
THE BETRAYAL: WHAT IS THAT TO US?
Preached by Sandra Olsen at The First Church of Christ, Congregational
In Unionville, CT
Palm/Passion Sunday, April 2, 2023
Matthew 26: 14-26; 27: 1-7
There is something fascinating about this man, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus. Artists of all kinds--- painters, novelists, poets and film makers--- have let their imaginations run wild with this enigmatic man. In Dante’s Inferno, the third part of his Divine Comedy, Judas is one of three sinners condemned to the lowest circle of hell, where he is chewed on for all eternity in the mouths of the triple headed Satan, who is immobilized in a block of ice. The other two sinners are Brutus and Cassius, who plotted against and assassinated Julius Caesar. All three men were betrayers, and betrayal, in Dante’s mind was the ultimate sin, breaking apart the order of society and family.
When we arrive in the 20th century with the novel The Last Temptation of Christ by the Greek writer, Nikos Kazantakis, we have a very different portrayal of Judas. Rather than being cast as the ultimate sinner, Judas is heroic, the only disciple strong and resolute enough to carry out the betrayal as part of God’s plan. All the other disciples were weak willed and weak minded. Only Judas could shoulder the burden of the condemnation of being the man who betrayed Jesus and so helped God to accomplish the strange work of redemption through a horrifying death. Then there is Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus of Nazareth, where Judas is portrayed not only as the keeper of the purse, but also as the intellectual, the one who could read and write Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Clearly there is something in this character that engages the human imagination.
But perhaps what engages people so much about Judas is the theme of betrayal. We would like to know more---why it is that he betrayed Jesus, but Matthew’s gospel offers us no explanation. Nothing is said about Judas’ character that would lead us to suspect him. While other characters like Peter, James and John often show themselves to be pretty clueless about Jesus and what he is about, Judas is simply there in the story as the accountant for the flock. Luke tells us that Satan entered into Judas, and John says that Judas regularly stole from the common purse, but most scholars think these comments were made long after Judas lived so as to justify his bad ending. But in Matthew nothing is said about Judas until he betrays Jesus. And we have no idea why.
He betrayed him for 30 pieces of sliver, hardly a sum that would have brought Judas great wealth. Some scholars have argued that Judas was a Zealot, calling for the violent overthrow of Roman rule and was trying to force Jesus’ hand by turning him over to the authorities, hoping that Jesus would assert his full Messianic powers. But it hardly worked out that way, did it?
This theme of betrayal by a close friend and intimate makes the story all the more poignant and real to us. We all know something about betrayal, either because we have been betrayed or have been the betrayer. Marital infidelity is among the most common of betrayals and it hurts so profoundly precisely because of the promises made and the bond of love that is supposed to last forever. Perhaps the betrayal is a secret shared with a friend, who fails to keep the confidence and shares it with others. I have heard people say that the divorce of their parents was experienced as a deep betrayal. So yes, we all know something about betrayal, because we have seen it and lived it. at least on some level.
While most of the time betrayers tend to defend themselves against the full knowledge of the wrong they have committed, making this or that excuse, yet there are times, when the truth is fully faced. The defenses and the self justification fall away, and the betrayer is left staring at the full naked truth. This is where I think the story gets really interesting---when Judas recognizes what he has done.
Listen again to how Matthew tells the story: When morning came, all the chief priests and elders of the people conferred together against Jesus in order to bring about his death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate the governor. When Judas, the betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of sliver to the chief priests and the elders. I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Throwing down the pieces of silver in the Temple, he departed, and he want and hanged himself.”
Now use your imagination. Judas is facing the awful truth and he confesses it. And in recognizing and owning his sin, he is calling out for the recognition of his humanity. What he has done is hardly trivial, but what comes back is a cold, passionless shrug of the shoulder, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.”
A few years ago, some of us here read together, The Sunflower ,by Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. I have mentioned the book before. It’s a true story about Wiesenthal’s imprisonment in a concentration camp and his appearance at the bedside of Karl, a young, dying German soldier, who had a confession to make. Ordered to round up Jewish women and children and old men, as if they were less than cattle, Karl helped to corral them into a house, which was set afire, and when they jumped from the windows, they were shot. So, here we have Karl, the young German soldier, confessing to Wiesenthal, a Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp. Karl, A Roman Catholic, sought and even begged for forgiveness---but not from a priest, but from a Jew that he might die in peace. And all Wiesenthal could offer him was silence. He did not know what to say. After all, did he really have the right to offer forgiveness on behalf of the murdered Jews? His silence was the best he could do. But imagine if out of Wiesenthal’s mouth came these words: “What is that to me? See to it yourself” Do you understand the despair behind those words? It is as if nothing matters at all, not self knowledge, not guilt, not life, your own or that of the victims. No wonder nothing remained for Judas except the taking of his life.
“What is that to me?” I cannot imagine that if Judas had confessed his sin to Jesus, he would have heard those words. And perhaps for Judas that is the saddest part of the story. He did not know or hear the forgiveness Jesus would announce from the cross, the forgiveness that is the repair of the world, a repair we cannot yet see, but one for which we are fervently hope and pray.
Preached by Sandra Olsen at The First Church of Christ, Congregational
In Unionville, CT
Palm/Passion Sunday, April 2, 2023
Matthew 26: 14-26; 27: 1-7
There is something fascinating about this man, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus. Artists of all kinds--- painters, novelists, poets and film makers--- have let their imaginations run wild with this enigmatic man. In Dante’s Inferno, the third part of his Divine Comedy, Judas is one of three sinners condemned to the lowest circle of hell, where he is chewed on for all eternity in the mouths of the triple headed Satan, who is immobilized in a block of ice. The other two sinners are Brutus and Cassius, who plotted against and assassinated Julius Caesar. All three men were betrayers, and betrayal, in Dante’s mind was the ultimate sin, breaking apart the order of society and family.
When we arrive in the 20th century with the novel The Last Temptation of Christ by the Greek writer, Nikos Kazantakis, we have a very different portrayal of Judas. Rather than being cast as the ultimate sinner, Judas is heroic, the only disciple strong and resolute enough to carry out the betrayal as part of God’s plan. All the other disciples were weak willed and weak minded. Only Judas could shoulder the burden of the condemnation of being the man who betrayed Jesus and so helped God to accomplish the strange work of redemption through a horrifying death. Then there is Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus of Nazareth, where Judas is portrayed not only as the keeper of the purse, but also as the intellectual, the one who could read and write Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Clearly there is something in this character that engages the human imagination.
But perhaps what engages people so much about Judas is the theme of betrayal. We would like to know more---why it is that he betrayed Jesus, but Matthew’s gospel offers us no explanation. Nothing is said about Judas’ character that would lead us to suspect him. While other characters like Peter, James and John often show themselves to be pretty clueless about Jesus and what he is about, Judas is simply there in the story as the accountant for the flock. Luke tells us that Satan entered into Judas, and John says that Judas regularly stole from the common purse, but most scholars think these comments were made long after Judas lived so as to justify his bad ending. But in Matthew nothing is said about Judas until he betrays Jesus. And we have no idea why.
He betrayed him for 30 pieces of sliver, hardly a sum that would have brought Judas great wealth. Some scholars have argued that Judas was a Zealot, calling for the violent overthrow of Roman rule and was trying to force Jesus’ hand by turning him over to the authorities, hoping that Jesus would assert his full Messianic powers. But it hardly worked out that way, did it?
This theme of betrayal by a close friend and intimate makes the story all the more poignant and real to us. We all know something about betrayal, either because we have been betrayed or have been the betrayer. Marital infidelity is among the most common of betrayals and it hurts so profoundly precisely because of the promises made and the bond of love that is supposed to last forever. Perhaps the betrayal is a secret shared with a friend, who fails to keep the confidence and shares it with others. I have heard people say that the divorce of their parents was experienced as a deep betrayal. So yes, we all know something about betrayal, because we have seen it and lived it. at least on some level.
While most of the time betrayers tend to defend themselves against the full knowledge of the wrong they have committed, making this or that excuse, yet there are times, when the truth is fully faced. The defenses and the self justification fall away, and the betrayer is left staring at the full naked truth. This is where I think the story gets really interesting---when Judas recognizes what he has done.
Listen again to how Matthew tells the story: When morning came, all the chief priests and elders of the people conferred together against Jesus in order to bring about his death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate the governor. When Judas, the betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of sliver to the chief priests and the elders. I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself”. Throwing down the pieces of silver in the Temple, he departed, and he want and hanged himself.”
Now use your imagination. Judas is facing the awful truth and he confesses it. And in recognizing and owning his sin, he is calling out for the recognition of his humanity. What he has done is hardly trivial, but what comes back is a cold, passionless shrug of the shoulder, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.”
A few years ago, some of us here read together, The Sunflower ,by Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. I have mentioned the book before. It’s a true story about Wiesenthal’s imprisonment in a concentration camp and his appearance at the bedside of Karl, a young, dying German soldier, who had a confession to make. Ordered to round up Jewish women and children and old men, as if they were less than cattle, Karl helped to corral them into a house, which was set afire, and when they jumped from the windows, they were shot. So, here we have Karl, the young German soldier, confessing to Wiesenthal, a Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp. Karl, A Roman Catholic, sought and even begged for forgiveness---but not from a priest, but from a Jew that he might die in peace. And all Wiesenthal could offer him was silence. He did not know what to say. After all, did he really have the right to offer forgiveness on behalf of the murdered Jews? His silence was the best he could do. But imagine if out of Wiesenthal’s mouth came these words: “What is that to me? See to it yourself” Do you understand the despair behind those words? It is as if nothing matters at all, not self knowledge, not guilt, not life, your own or that of the victims. No wonder nothing remained for Judas except the taking of his life.
“What is that to me?” I cannot imagine that if Judas had confessed his sin to Jesus, he would have heard those words. And perhaps for Judas that is the saddest part of the story. He did not know or hear the forgiveness Jesus would announce from the cross, the forgiveness that is the repair of the world, a repair we cannot yet see, but one for which we are fervently hope and pray.
April 4, 2023
Dear Friends,
On April 4, Finland became the 31st member of NATO, which more than doubles NATO’S borders with Russia. This is certainly NOT what Putin wanted. His intent was to weaken NATO, not strengthen it. So, April 4th is a milestone, and the Finnish and NATO flags flew proudly together. March 20th was another milestone as The United Nations Sustainable Development Network, released its ratings of the well being in countries all around the world. For the sixth consecutive year, Finland was rated as “the happiest country in the world.” Many Finns are quite surprised by the designation with some being suspicious about the meaning of this word “happy.” When a group of Finns were questioned about the happy designation, some described the national character as being gloomy and moody. And others admitted that concerns about immigration might work to bring a hard Right Party to power in the coming elections. And, of course, there is worry about the war in Ukraine and tensions with Russia, which are only likely to grow with Finland’s admission into NATO.
So, perhaps happy is not the best word to describe the citizens of Finland. Maybe content and contentment are preferable words. Finland has a very strong safety net, which means people do not fear the loss of home and security if disaster suddenly strikes. Financial success to most Finns is not about accruing wealth, but simply knowing they can have a sustainable life, where basic needs are met. That assurance means they do not suffer from the same levels of anxiety that many Americans do. Finns also extol the benefits of nature, which practically all Finns enjoy. “We know that being outside helps to grow contentment,” one man said. 75% of Finland is covered by forest with most of it being open to everyone, because of the law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land.
A professor at the University of Eastern Finland claimed that happiness comes from knowing when you have enough. Wanting more and more and more is a way to dissatisfaction and ultimately misery. So, he makes the claim that Finnish people know how to be satisfied with enough. Some teenagers spoke of how they felt they were raised to be content. “We are very aware of our privilege,” they admitted. “We know so many other countries have so much less, and so we really are taught not to complain.” Conventional wisdom tells us that it is easier to be happy and content in a society that guarantees a secure foundation, but that can place pressure on people to “live up to the national reputation.” Being sad or discontented makes one look ungrateful.
Deep contentment or happiness usually involves seeing life in a fuller and wider perspective. While Finns are grateful for their society’s safety net, they also recognize the importance of other things are as well. Life is made better, they assert, when the arts and music are supported. People commented how in so many other Western nations, especially the United States, people need money to pursue artistic goals. But in Finland grants are offered to people so they can pursue their creative passions, which means they do not always have to think of the commercial value of their art. They can afford to be experimental. People take music lessons at a much higher ratio than in the U. S. simply because there is more support for music. People realize that the arts humanize life by adding grace and beauty. A woman who leads an orchestra said, “Music creates a mind-set where you can face your inner feelings and fears, touching a part of our soul that we would never otherwise reach.”
Finland is not a nation with a great deal of racial diversity, and it is no surprise that homogeneous nations lack the same level of tension that challenges the United States, where diversity reigns. But there is also loss when difference is absent. Finland is 90% White, which means that people of color can easily feel alone and isolated. One man, whose father is Kenyan and mother is White, became In 2011 the first person of color to serve in Finland’s Parliament, but he left after two terms. Now he works as am actor as well as on issues relating to gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. Finland is not perfect, he admits, but it can and does change, and that gives him hope.
Someone said the Finnish way of life can best be summed up in this word, “sisu,” which translates as “grim determination in the face of hardship or adversity without complaining.” Indeed, Finland has endured much over the past 100 years. On December 6, 1917, Finland declared its independence from Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1939 Russia invaded Finland, which then lost territory to Russia. Trying to regain its territory, Finland then joined with Germany and allowed German troops in Finland as Germany prepared to invade Russia. In 1944-45 Finland fought the Lapland War against Germany, which resulted in the expulsion of German troops from Finnish land. When the Second World War ended, Finland lost 10% of its land to Russia and was required to pay war reparations to Russia. They have come a long way from then to now, building a society that in so many ways is the envy of many.
While deeply humanistic, Finland is not particularly religious with less than 2% of its population attending weekly religious services---though over 2/3 of the country identifies as Lutheran. Perhaps if you asked the Finns what religion’s purpose, they might say it is to help people live good lives, which always involves the care of the others. This Finnish society already does, so perhaps they do not feel the need for much religion. But religion also has another purpose: to orient us toward Mystery, encouraging us to ponder deeply and to love generously and to be humble as we realize we are neither the center nor the measure of all things. As we move toward the celebration of Easter, let us remember that purpose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
On April 4, Finland became the 31st member of NATO, which more than doubles NATO’S borders with Russia. This is certainly NOT what Putin wanted. His intent was to weaken NATO, not strengthen it. So, April 4th is a milestone, and the Finnish and NATO flags flew proudly together. March 20th was another milestone as The United Nations Sustainable Development Network, released its ratings of the well being in countries all around the world. For the sixth consecutive year, Finland was rated as “the happiest country in the world.” Many Finns are quite surprised by the designation with some being suspicious about the meaning of this word “happy.” When a group of Finns were questioned about the happy designation, some described the national character as being gloomy and moody. And others admitted that concerns about immigration might work to bring a hard Right Party to power in the coming elections. And, of course, there is worry about the war in Ukraine and tensions with Russia, which are only likely to grow with Finland’s admission into NATO.
So, perhaps happy is not the best word to describe the citizens of Finland. Maybe content and contentment are preferable words. Finland has a very strong safety net, which means people do not fear the loss of home and security if disaster suddenly strikes. Financial success to most Finns is not about accruing wealth, but simply knowing they can have a sustainable life, where basic needs are met. That assurance means they do not suffer from the same levels of anxiety that many Americans do. Finns also extol the benefits of nature, which practically all Finns enjoy. “We know that being outside helps to grow contentment,” one man said. 75% of Finland is covered by forest with most of it being open to everyone, because of the law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land.
A professor at the University of Eastern Finland claimed that happiness comes from knowing when you have enough. Wanting more and more and more is a way to dissatisfaction and ultimately misery. So, he makes the claim that Finnish people know how to be satisfied with enough. Some teenagers spoke of how they felt they were raised to be content. “We are very aware of our privilege,” they admitted. “We know so many other countries have so much less, and so we really are taught not to complain.” Conventional wisdom tells us that it is easier to be happy and content in a society that guarantees a secure foundation, but that can place pressure on people to “live up to the national reputation.” Being sad or discontented makes one look ungrateful.
Deep contentment or happiness usually involves seeing life in a fuller and wider perspective. While Finns are grateful for their society’s safety net, they also recognize the importance of other things are as well. Life is made better, they assert, when the arts and music are supported. People commented how in so many other Western nations, especially the United States, people need money to pursue artistic goals. But in Finland grants are offered to people so they can pursue their creative passions, which means they do not always have to think of the commercial value of their art. They can afford to be experimental. People take music lessons at a much higher ratio than in the U. S. simply because there is more support for music. People realize that the arts humanize life by adding grace and beauty. A woman who leads an orchestra said, “Music creates a mind-set where you can face your inner feelings and fears, touching a part of our soul that we would never otherwise reach.”
Finland is not a nation with a great deal of racial diversity, and it is no surprise that homogeneous nations lack the same level of tension that challenges the United States, where diversity reigns. But there is also loss when difference is absent. Finland is 90% White, which means that people of color can easily feel alone and isolated. One man, whose father is Kenyan and mother is White, became In 2011 the first person of color to serve in Finland’s Parliament, but he left after two terms. Now he works as am actor as well as on issues relating to gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. Finland is not perfect, he admits, but it can and does change, and that gives him hope.
Someone said the Finnish way of life can best be summed up in this word, “sisu,” which translates as “grim determination in the face of hardship or adversity without complaining.” Indeed, Finland has endured much over the past 100 years. On December 6, 1917, Finland declared its independence from Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1939 Russia invaded Finland, which then lost territory to Russia. Trying to regain its territory, Finland then joined with Germany and allowed German troops in Finland as Germany prepared to invade Russia. In 1944-45 Finland fought the Lapland War against Germany, which resulted in the expulsion of German troops from Finnish land. When the Second World War ended, Finland lost 10% of its land to Russia and was required to pay war reparations to Russia. They have come a long way from then to now, building a society that in so many ways is the envy of many.
While deeply humanistic, Finland is not particularly religious with less than 2% of its population attending weekly religious services---though over 2/3 of the country identifies as Lutheran. Perhaps if you asked the Finns what religion’s purpose, they might say it is to help people live good lives, which always involves the care of the others. This Finnish society already does, so perhaps they do not feel the need for much religion. But religion also has another purpose: to orient us toward Mystery, encouraging us to ponder deeply and to love generously and to be humble as we realize we are neither the center nor the measure of all things. As we move toward the celebration of Easter, let us remember that purpose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
March 29, 2023
Dear Friends,
It has been called “the gun that divides America.” I am referring to the AR-15, the assault weapon that has been used in ten of the seventeen deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2012. And now, once again, we have another mass shooting with the same deadly assault weapon, responsible for six deaths---three of them children nine years old! Any death from gun violence is horrific, but children---this is beyond horrific. The pain of those families is something none of us wants to imagine, let alone actually face in real time. I cannot bear to look at the picture of those sweet little faces now discarded on the dustbin of history.
The AR-15 was never intended to be a bestseller. Its original design in the 1950’s was for soldiers, and the Pentagon bragged that it was capable of phenomenal lethality. In other words, it was a great killing machine. This was the weapon that American soldiers used in Viet Nam, known then as the M16.
I understand that gun shows did display the AR-15 before it was banned in 1994, but it was usually pushed to the back of the display area. The goal of these gun shows was to stoke interest in rifles and handguns. Randy Luth, who was the founder of the company that was among the first to market AR-015’s, said he could remember NRA members walking by the gun and giving both the gun and him the finger. People had no respect for the gun, viewing it as something an honest hunter would never want and certainly never use.
So, what happened? Today the AR-15 is the BEST SELLING RIFLE in the country. It is estimated that 1 in 20 adults own at least one AR-15, which translates into at least 16 million people owning these lethal weapons. So, even if the gun were banned, how would we ever be able to confiscate so many weapons?
We human beings are symbol making creatures, and the AR-15 has assumed its place as a very powerful symbol. Its image covers t-shirts and sweat-shirts and is proudly printed on banners, waving in the breeze at political rallies. Some members of Congress wear the AR-15 as a lapel pin, and one member of the House, Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, actually introduced a bill to make the AR-15 the “National Rifle of America.”
It was not always this way, but something very dramatic happened when the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004 and then President, George W. Bush, did nothing to encourage its renewal. Then things began to radically change as gun manufacturers looked for new ways to make money. This was post-9/11, when the military had a short period of glorification, and the gun industry grabbed the opportunity to push a product that was a military weapon. And so, the rest is history---our history. No other country even comes close to the gun violence we have.
While it is true that 90% of gun deaths in the U.S. are caused by handguns, the AR-15 has assumed a prominent position in the minds of both pro and anti- gun rights people. Whenever there is a mass shooting, AR-15 sales immediately shoot up. It happened after Sandy Hook; it happened after Parkland, Florida and it will probably happen again after the latest Nashville shooting.
The name Eugene Stoner doesn’t mean anything to most of us, but he is the man, who invented the AR-15 in the 1950’s. At the time he was working for a small engineering firm in Hollywood. In Stoner’s mind it was only for military use. Stoner died in 1987 and by the mid-90’s other people with whom he had worked, thought the gun was past its prime. There would be no more wars like Viet Nam, people thought, and so why would such guns be needed? War will be fought with technology, aimed at infrastructure or bombs, detonated to destroy people and the cities they inhabit. The image of soldiers carrying guns was a picture from the past.
Well, here we are in 2023, and we have already suffered more mass shootings by this time of year than any previous year. And we will not do a thing about it. It does not seem to matter to us when doctors describe what an AR-15 does to the human body. “The internal organs have fallen apart in my hands as I have tried to repair what cannot be repaired,” one doctor said. And a pediatrician in Uvalde, Texas, was shaken to his core when he saw the decapitated head of a child he had once cared for in his office. But for some reason the right of people to own such weapons is more important than the pain and suffering they inflict. Children die needlessly, and as a nation we think that someone’s right to own a gun is more important than a child’s right to live.
Even the Chaplain of the Senate, The Rev. Barry Black, has had enough. In his distinctive baritone voice, he prayed, “Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous. Use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us. We pray, in your powerful name, amen.”
And let all of us add our Amen to his.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
It has been called “the gun that divides America.” I am referring to the AR-15, the assault weapon that has been used in ten of the seventeen deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2012. And now, once again, we have another mass shooting with the same deadly assault weapon, responsible for six deaths---three of them children nine years old! Any death from gun violence is horrific, but children---this is beyond horrific. The pain of those families is something none of us wants to imagine, let alone actually face in real time. I cannot bear to look at the picture of those sweet little faces now discarded on the dustbin of history.
The AR-15 was never intended to be a bestseller. Its original design in the 1950’s was for soldiers, and the Pentagon bragged that it was capable of phenomenal lethality. In other words, it was a great killing machine. This was the weapon that American soldiers used in Viet Nam, known then as the M16.
I understand that gun shows did display the AR-15 before it was banned in 1994, but it was usually pushed to the back of the display area. The goal of these gun shows was to stoke interest in rifles and handguns. Randy Luth, who was the founder of the company that was among the first to market AR-015’s, said he could remember NRA members walking by the gun and giving both the gun and him the finger. People had no respect for the gun, viewing it as something an honest hunter would never want and certainly never use.
So, what happened? Today the AR-15 is the BEST SELLING RIFLE in the country. It is estimated that 1 in 20 adults own at least one AR-15, which translates into at least 16 million people owning these lethal weapons. So, even if the gun were banned, how would we ever be able to confiscate so many weapons?
We human beings are symbol making creatures, and the AR-15 has assumed its place as a very powerful symbol. Its image covers t-shirts and sweat-shirts and is proudly printed on banners, waving in the breeze at political rallies. Some members of Congress wear the AR-15 as a lapel pin, and one member of the House, Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, actually introduced a bill to make the AR-15 the “National Rifle of America.”
It was not always this way, but something very dramatic happened when the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004 and then President, George W. Bush, did nothing to encourage its renewal. Then things began to radically change as gun manufacturers looked for new ways to make money. This was post-9/11, when the military had a short period of glorification, and the gun industry grabbed the opportunity to push a product that was a military weapon. And so, the rest is history---our history. No other country even comes close to the gun violence we have.
While it is true that 90% of gun deaths in the U.S. are caused by handguns, the AR-15 has assumed a prominent position in the minds of both pro and anti- gun rights people. Whenever there is a mass shooting, AR-15 sales immediately shoot up. It happened after Sandy Hook; it happened after Parkland, Florida and it will probably happen again after the latest Nashville shooting.
The name Eugene Stoner doesn’t mean anything to most of us, but he is the man, who invented the AR-15 in the 1950’s. At the time he was working for a small engineering firm in Hollywood. In Stoner’s mind it was only for military use. Stoner died in 1987 and by the mid-90’s other people with whom he had worked, thought the gun was past its prime. There would be no more wars like Viet Nam, people thought, and so why would such guns be needed? War will be fought with technology, aimed at infrastructure or bombs, detonated to destroy people and the cities they inhabit. The image of soldiers carrying guns was a picture from the past.
Well, here we are in 2023, and we have already suffered more mass shootings by this time of year than any previous year. And we will not do a thing about it. It does not seem to matter to us when doctors describe what an AR-15 does to the human body. “The internal organs have fallen apart in my hands as I have tried to repair what cannot be repaired,” one doctor said. And a pediatrician in Uvalde, Texas, was shaken to his core when he saw the decapitated head of a child he had once cared for in his office. But for some reason the right of people to own such weapons is more important than the pain and suffering they inflict. Children die needlessly, and as a nation we think that someone’s right to own a gun is more important than a child’s right to live.
Even the Chaplain of the Senate, The Rev. Barry Black, has had enough. In his distinctive baritone voice, he prayed, “Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous. Use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us. We pray, in your powerful name, amen.”
And let all of us add our Amen to his.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Unbind Him and Let Him Go: Life out of Death
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
April 10, 2011
Ezekiel 37: 1-14
John 11: 1-45
Can these dry bones live? Can life, new and vibrant life, come out of death? That is the question, isn’t it, and when God put the question to Ezekiel, he had the wisdom to answer,” O Lord God, you know.” And when Jesus faced that question as he stood before the tomb of his friend, Lazarus, he answered by giving two commands. “Lazarus, come out,” and when Lazarus emerged, Jesus gave a second command to those standing near, “Unbind him and let him go”.
Can these dry bones live? Can life come out of death? A small group of university students in Germany during World War ll, called The White Rose, thought the answer was Yes. They saw what was happening, the deportation of Jews, the stinging defeats Germany suffered in Russia in 1942 and 43. They believed Germany was being led to disaster and defeat, and they could recognize the face of evil, when so many others were blind. Being young and idealistic, they mistakenly thought the Germans would suddenly rise up against Hitler and the Nazi regime, and so they bravely distributed leaflets. Isn’t it true, one of the leaflets read, that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days. We will not be silent. We are your guilty conscience. We will not leave you alone. Some members of the group, like the brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were arrested and executed. But others survived, like Traute Lafrenz, who just died a few weeks ago at 103, the last surviving member of the White Rose. She had been a medical student during the War, and though she did not write the pamphlets, she helped to get the paper and ink so they could be printed and distributed. She was finally arrested and about to go on trial for her life, when the Allies invaded, and she was saved. After the war she completed her medical education and immigrated to the United States where she ran a therapeutic day school in Chicago for disadvantaged children. If you asked her, “Can dry bones live” she would surely answer, Yes. God knew it and so did we.
Now Ezekiel’s vision has been called, “The Resurrection of Dead Israel,” but this is not the same thing as the resurrection of the dead. Ezekiel’s text concerns a restored Israel as a geopolitical reality after the disaster of being conquered by the Babylonian empire in 587 B.C. Jerusalem was utterly destroyed, the Temple, a pile of smashed stones. The so called elite, the educated and skilled, had been carried off to Babylon, leaving the city bereft of leadership. And so, when Ezekiel and the returned Jews looked out at the scorched earth, all they saw was a dry, lifeless land. A nation given life at Mount Sinai, given the law that they might truly be God’s people, now lay dead in a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel and his people were in despair; hope was no longer a word in their vocabulary. And that is when God took Ezekiel and showed him that valley of dry bones. “O Mortal One, can these bones live?” And Ezekiel would not dare to answer on his own, “O, Lord God,” he said, “You know.”
This dryness, this defeat, this death, while real, would not be the final word. God will cause breath to enter the skeletons but notice that God does not do this without Ezekiel’s participation. God told Ezekiel to act: prophesy to these bones; prophesy to this breath; prophesy to the whole house of Israel and say to them, “God will put the spirit within them, and they shall live. They shall have life.” Ezekiel would do his part, believing and hoping that God would do his ---just as the White Rose hoped and believed. When Sophie Scholl was on trial, she was asked what her political motivation was. “This is not about politics,” she answered.” It is about conscience and God.” There is no God,” her interrogator screamed in her face. Sophie just looked at him and quietly answered, “Yes, there is.”
Consider the raising of Lazarus. Jesus’ motivations in bringing his friend back to life were not political in nature, but the consequences of that raising surely were. As soon as Lazarus returned to life. the resolve to destroy Jesus hardened. Why? Because the powers that be, Romans as well as Temple authorities, were put on notice that their authority was radically limited, and they were afraid, afraid of losing their power but also afraid of the one whom they could neither control nor understand. Jesus’ said “Unbind him and let him go”---and that command is to all who find themselves shackled---by fear, by grief, by loneliness, whatever it is that we human beings can find ourselves bound by.
Most of you probably know the name Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great minds and spirits of our nation. I had a professor of historical theology, who said that the United States has produced two great theologians: the first Jonathan Edwards, the second Ralph Waldo Emerson---so completely different in their beliefs. Emerson suffered the loss of his 19 year old wife in 1831 after one year of marriage. And he was devastated and bereft. He could not find his footing. He was an ordained minister, serving the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, but his grief pushed him to doubt and finally deny redemption and resurrection. He resigned his parish and set sail for Europe. The captain of the vessel did not want to take him, because he thought he would not survive, so unwell was he. Emerson traveled to Malta, Sicily, Florence and Rome and then to France. And it was there in Le Jardin des Plantes that Emerson had his epiphany, not of Christ, per se, but of life, full, vibrant, abundant life. He saw for himself in the garden the profusion of plants and flowers, birds and trees, and he felt himself and all of humanity to be part of this rich and abundant life. He attended lectures in Paris about the new sciences---chemistry and astronomy, where knowledge was exploding. How grateful he felt for such knowledge, which humanity could use for its understanding.
Emerson would travel on to England, where he met Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth, conversing with people, whose wisdom and knowledge he esteemed. When he finally returned to Boston, he was a very different man from the one who left many months before. He was on a new path, a new journey, which he would share with the world. Nature became his teacher, and he became one of its greatest students. Can these dry bones life? Can new beginnings come from painful endings? Is new life possible? Emerson would surely answer in the affirmative.
The raising of Lazarus is the last miracle Jesus performs in John’s gospel. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, where he will suffer and die and finally be resurrected. Can these dry bones live? Can life come out of death?
O, Lord God, You know. Unbind him and let him go.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
April 10, 2011
Ezekiel 37: 1-14
John 11: 1-45
Can these dry bones live? Can life, new and vibrant life, come out of death? That is the question, isn’t it, and when God put the question to Ezekiel, he had the wisdom to answer,” O Lord God, you know.” And when Jesus faced that question as he stood before the tomb of his friend, Lazarus, he answered by giving two commands. “Lazarus, come out,” and when Lazarus emerged, Jesus gave a second command to those standing near, “Unbind him and let him go”.
Can these dry bones live? Can life come out of death? A small group of university students in Germany during World War ll, called The White Rose, thought the answer was Yes. They saw what was happening, the deportation of Jews, the stinging defeats Germany suffered in Russia in 1942 and 43. They believed Germany was being led to disaster and defeat, and they could recognize the face of evil, when so many others were blind. Being young and idealistic, they mistakenly thought the Germans would suddenly rise up against Hitler and the Nazi regime, and so they bravely distributed leaflets. Isn’t it true, one of the leaflets read, that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days. We will not be silent. We are your guilty conscience. We will not leave you alone. Some members of the group, like the brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were arrested and executed. But others survived, like Traute Lafrenz, who just died a few weeks ago at 103, the last surviving member of the White Rose. She had been a medical student during the War, and though she did not write the pamphlets, she helped to get the paper and ink so they could be printed and distributed. She was finally arrested and about to go on trial for her life, when the Allies invaded, and she was saved. After the war she completed her medical education and immigrated to the United States where she ran a therapeutic day school in Chicago for disadvantaged children. If you asked her, “Can dry bones live” she would surely answer, Yes. God knew it and so did we.
Now Ezekiel’s vision has been called, “The Resurrection of Dead Israel,” but this is not the same thing as the resurrection of the dead. Ezekiel’s text concerns a restored Israel as a geopolitical reality after the disaster of being conquered by the Babylonian empire in 587 B.C. Jerusalem was utterly destroyed, the Temple, a pile of smashed stones. The so called elite, the educated and skilled, had been carried off to Babylon, leaving the city bereft of leadership. And so, when Ezekiel and the returned Jews looked out at the scorched earth, all they saw was a dry, lifeless land. A nation given life at Mount Sinai, given the law that they might truly be God’s people, now lay dead in a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel and his people were in despair; hope was no longer a word in their vocabulary. And that is when God took Ezekiel and showed him that valley of dry bones. “O Mortal One, can these bones live?” And Ezekiel would not dare to answer on his own, “O, Lord God,” he said, “You know.”
This dryness, this defeat, this death, while real, would not be the final word. God will cause breath to enter the skeletons but notice that God does not do this without Ezekiel’s participation. God told Ezekiel to act: prophesy to these bones; prophesy to this breath; prophesy to the whole house of Israel and say to them, “God will put the spirit within them, and they shall live. They shall have life.” Ezekiel would do his part, believing and hoping that God would do his ---just as the White Rose hoped and believed. When Sophie Scholl was on trial, she was asked what her political motivation was. “This is not about politics,” she answered.” It is about conscience and God.” There is no God,” her interrogator screamed in her face. Sophie just looked at him and quietly answered, “Yes, there is.”
Consider the raising of Lazarus. Jesus’ motivations in bringing his friend back to life were not political in nature, but the consequences of that raising surely were. As soon as Lazarus returned to life. the resolve to destroy Jesus hardened. Why? Because the powers that be, Romans as well as Temple authorities, were put on notice that their authority was radically limited, and they were afraid, afraid of losing their power but also afraid of the one whom they could neither control nor understand. Jesus’ said “Unbind him and let him go”---and that command is to all who find themselves shackled---by fear, by grief, by loneliness, whatever it is that we human beings can find ourselves bound by.
Most of you probably know the name Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great minds and spirits of our nation. I had a professor of historical theology, who said that the United States has produced two great theologians: the first Jonathan Edwards, the second Ralph Waldo Emerson---so completely different in their beliefs. Emerson suffered the loss of his 19 year old wife in 1831 after one year of marriage. And he was devastated and bereft. He could not find his footing. He was an ordained minister, serving the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, but his grief pushed him to doubt and finally deny redemption and resurrection. He resigned his parish and set sail for Europe. The captain of the vessel did not want to take him, because he thought he would not survive, so unwell was he. Emerson traveled to Malta, Sicily, Florence and Rome and then to France. And it was there in Le Jardin des Plantes that Emerson had his epiphany, not of Christ, per se, but of life, full, vibrant, abundant life. He saw for himself in the garden the profusion of plants and flowers, birds and trees, and he felt himself and all of humanity to be part of this rich and abundant life. He attended lectures in Paris about the new sciences---chemistry and astronomy, where knowledge was exploding. How grateful he felt for such knowledge, which humanity could use for its understanding.
Emerson would travel on to England, where he met Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth, conversing with people, whose wisdom and knowledge he esteemed. When he finally returned to Boston, he was a very different man from the one who left many months before. He was on a new path, a new journey, which he would share with the world. Nature became his teacher, and he became one of its greatest students. Can these dry bones life? Can new beginnings come from painful endings? Is new life possible? Emerson would surely answer in the affirmative.
The raising of Lazarus is the last miracle Jesus performs in John’s gospel. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, where he will suffer and die and finally be resurrected. Can these dry bones live? Can life come out of death?
O, Lord God, You know. Unbind him and let him go.
March 20, 2023
Dear Friends,
When I was a college freshman, I remember my humanities professor telling us about the burning of the Library in Louvain, Belgium. He had just been waxing eloquently on the power and beauty of knowledge and how throughout the history of the world there have always been barbarians (his word), who would try to ban or burn books to prevent knowledge from changing the world. He reminded us also how people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible into the vernacular language. And then he told us about Louvain.
The University of Louvain was founded in 1426 and its collection of books and manuscripts was not centralized, but was housed with each separate department, such as theology or philosophy or astronomy. But in 1636 the library collection was centralized with all holdings being placed in one building. Over the centuries both the library and the University grew in prestige. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, the library boasted 300,000 volumes, plus at least 1000 volumes of manuscripts. The holdings included original manuscripts of classical authors, Church Fathers and other luminaries. Many of the works were invaluable, one of a kind.
On August 19, 1914, German troops entered Louvain on its way to invade France in violation of Belgium’s neutrality. Civilian guns were confiscated by the Belgium government with strict instructions that no violence should be meted out to the invading army. But something happened: Shots rang out and German soldiers were hurt or even killed. There were two different stories: The Belgium people said the Germans panicked and shot their own troops, while the Germans insisted there were Belgium resistance fighters, who shot at the German invaders. Later that evening German troops began going from house to house, indiscriminately arresting people and executing them, including the mayor of the town as well as the rector of the University. At midnight fire was set to the library, which almost burned to the ground. Most everything was lost.
The world was outraged. The Hague Convention of 1909 had specifically stated in Article 27 that buildings dedicated to religion, the arts, science, and charity should be spared. The Germans defended themselves, saying that their act was one of self-defense, and that the resistance must be crushed and the city punished. Even some German intellectuals did not think burning the library was out of bounds. Of course, the books and manuscripts had nothing to do with any resistance and targeting a library begs for an explanation of which there are none. It IS barbarism. I remember my professor very emotionally describing how the head of the library could not even get the words out to describe the incomparable loss. He broke down after two spoken words. “Knowledge is that precious,” the professor said, “and it can be as valuable as human life, for certain forms of knowledge can and will save human life.” That last comment, by the way, was not so well received by the class. After all, this was during the Viet Nam War, and already there were too many murdered Vietnamese and Americans. Besides, the rumor of American atrocities was already more than merely rumor. We all saw the pictures of people being napalmed. To most of us 18 year olds, that seemed worse than a library being burned.
When most of us think of war, we don’t usually consider the damage to cultural artifacts and libraries---though during the Iraq war we did hear about all the cultural treasures that were destroyed. A conference was recently held at Uppsala University in Sweden called, Libraries in the Time of War. The theme was sobering with people not only mourning the destruction of libraries, but also recounting stories of tremendous bravery in an effort to save books and manuscripts. People told stories of librarians dodging snipers and bombs in Sarajevo as they tried to save books in the National Library as it burned. A librarian in Iraq smuggled books out under her clothes before the library was burned. Curators, their guards and their families lived inside the National Museum of Aleppo, Syria for more than five years to protect the collection from looting.
This is not simply PAST history. Recently it has come to the world’s attention that Putin’s war is targeting Ukraine’s libraries as a means to destroy Ukraine. Not only is he killing the people of Ukraine and kidnapping Ukrainian children to raise them as Russians, Putin is also trying to destroy their cultural treasures. He is burning their books in an effort to punish them for being who they are: proud Ukrainians with a past they claim as their own.
Just a few weeks ago the Old Testament lesson consisted of the reading of Adam and Eve’s “fall” from the Garden of Eden. They ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened. What would we human beings be without such knowledge? We would be innocent, but alas, ignorant. We now know and see the face of evil. We are no longer innocent, neither about others nor about ourselves. We see evil not only in Ukraine, but as we travel the Lenten journey to the cross, we will see evil eyeball to eyeball. And the question is: What do we do with such knowledge, when we cannot hide from the deep truth that we too are implicated?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When I was a college freshman, I remember my humanities professor telling us about the burning of the Library in Louvain, Belgium. He had just been waxing eloquently on the power and beauty of knowledge and how throughout the history of the world there have always been barbarians (his word), who would try to ban or burn books to prevent knowledge from changing the world. He reminded us also how people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible into the vernacular language. And then he told us about Louvain.
The University of Louvain was founded in 1426 and its collection of books and manuscripts was not centralized, but was housed with each separate department, such as theology or philosophy or astronomy. But in 1636 the library collection was centralized with all holdings being placed in one building. Over the centuries both the library and the University grew in prestige. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, the library boasted 300,000 volumes, plus at least 1000 volumes of manuscripts. The holdings included original manuscripts of classical authors, Church Fathers and other luminaries. Many of the works were invaluable, one of a kind.
On August 19, 1914, German troops entered Louvain on its way to invade France in violation of Belgium’s neutrality. Civilian guns were confiscated by the Belgium government with strict instructions that no violence should be meted out to the invading army. But something happened: Shots rang out and German soldiers were hurt or even killed. There were two different stories: The Belgium people said the Germans panicked and shot their own troops, while the Germans insisted there were Belgium resistance fighters, who shot at the German invaders. Later that evening German troops began going from house to house, indiscriminately arresting people and executing them, including the mayor of the town as well as the rector of the University. At midnight fire was set to the library, which almost burned to the ground. Most everything was lost.
The world was outraged. The Hague Convention of 1909 had specifically stated in Article 27 that buildings dedicated to religion, the arts, science, and charity should be spared. The Germans defended themselves, saying that their act was one of self-defense, and that the resistance must be crushed and the city punished. Even some German intellectuals did not think burning the library was out of bounds. Of course, the books and manuscripts had nothing to do with any resistance and targeting a library begs for an explanation of which there are none. It IS barbarism. I remember my professor very emotionally describing how the head of the library could not even get the words out to describe the incomparable loss. He broke down after two spoken words. “Knowledge is that precious,” the professor said, “and it can be as valuable as human life, for certain forms of knowledge can and will save human life.” That last comment, by the way, was not so well received by the class. After all, this was during the Viet Nam War, and already there were too many murdered Vietnamese and Americans. Besides, the rumor of American atrocities was already more than merely rumor. We all saw the pictures of people being napalmed. To most of us 18 year olds, that seemed worse than a library being burned.
When most of us think of war, we don’t usually consider the damage to cultural artifacts and libraries---though during the Iraq war we did hear about all the cultural treasures that were destroyed. A conference was recently held at Uppsala University in Sweden called, Libraries in the Time of War. The theme was sobering with people not only mourning the destruction of libraries, but also recounting stories of tremendous bravery in an effort to save books and manuscripts. People told stories of librarians dodging snipers and bombs in Sarajevo as they tried to save books in the National Library as it burned. A librarian in Iraq smuggled books out under her clothes before the library was burned. Curators, their guards and their families lived inside the National Museum of Aleppo, Syria for more than five years to protect the collection from looting.
This is not simply PAST history. Recently it has come to the world’s attention that Putin’s war is targeting Ukraine’s libraries as a means to destroy Ukraine. Not only is he killing the people of Ukraine and kidnapping Ukrainian children to raise them as Russians, Putin is also trying to destroy their cultural treasures. He is burning their books in an effort to punish them for being who they are: proud Ukrainians with a past they claim as their own.
Just a few weeks ago the Old Testament lesson consisted of the reading of Adam and Eve’s “fall” from the Garden of Eden. They ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened. What would we human beings be without such knowledge? We would be innocent, but alas, ignorant. We now know and see the face of evil. We are no longer innocent, neither about others nor about ourselves. We see evil not only in Ukraine, but as we travel the Lenten journey to the cross, we will see evil eyeball to eyeball. And the question is: What do we do with such knowledge, when we cannot hide from the deep truth that we too are implicated?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Big Questions
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
March 19, 2023
John 9: 1-41
Questions: People were always asking Jesus questions. Sometimes the questions were designed to try to trick Jesus, but most of the time people really wanted to know, because these questions were at the very heart of human life and human struggle. So, our story from John begins with a question put to Jesus by his disciples: Who sinned that this man was born blind? Did he sin or his parents? People often want to know why bad things happen, and even when they cannot truly know, they will assign a reason. Many people---then as well as now---had and have a hard time accepting the randomness of life.
Now Jews in Jesus’ day and even long before Jesus’ time often believed in the doctrine of divine earthly retribution. If you or a family member or even a nation did wrong, you would suffer the consequences on this earth. So, for example, when nations like Assyria and Babylon conquered Israel and then Judah, the prophets said, “Well, the covenant was forsaken and so we have suffered the consequences.” But Jesus was very careful about not assigning blame. He did not get into the sin-punishment saga. This man’s blindness, he insisted, is not about sin. But neither did Jesus understand the blindness as a completely random occurrence, because he will use it to show the power of God. And so, Jesus healed the man by rubbing mud mixed with his saliva on the man’s eyes.
Jesus then disappears from the story and does not return until the end. And then the story becomes about other characters, who are trying to understand what this healing really means. First, we have the response of neighbors. And some of the neighbors could see what had happened; they recognized the blind man as now healed. But notice there were others, who denied the man’s identity. No, this is another, who looks like him. They are blind to the healing because their assumptions about blindness from birth meant that he must remain blind. They cannot see the truth that stands before them. So, they take him to the Pharisees in the hope that the Pharisees, who were religious leaders and teachers, would be able to set things straight.
The Pharisees began the inquiry by asking the man a question: how did you receive sight. And he told them but notice their immediate response. There is no joy in the healing, only suspicion and accusation. Since Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and healing can be considered work and since work is forbidden on the Sabbath, they concluded that Jesus was not from God. So, he must be sinner. While this conclusion may seem perverse to us, in the history of the world, this kind of response to healing and goodness is not unusual. Accused witches in Europe, during the Middle Ages, most of them women, were practiced in the healing arts, often relieving pain in childbirth with the use of herbs. This was deemed dangerous and sinful by church leaders, who said it was a greater sin for these accused women to do good rather than evil, because their good acts would seduce people away from God. And so, these women were harshly punished: burned at the stake or drowned. Why? For the same reason the Pharisees were suspicious of Jesus. Power was threatened. And power, whether in ancient Israel, the Middle Ages or now is often the name of the game. People will go to great ends, even preferring blindness, to protect their power.
After the consultation with the Pharisees, some people went to the man’s parents and asked them if this man was truly their son. And they verified that he was. Now it is interesting that the text refers to parents (in the plural) rather than simply to the father. Women’s words were not taken seriously. They could not testify in Court, for example, but here notice both parents are consulted. And both confirmed that their son, who was born blind, now can see. But they did not want to say how he was healed, because they were afraid. And how often that happens in life! People know the truth, but out of fear that some negative consequence will happen they fail to speak the truth. They can see, but they don’t let anyone else know what it is they see.
The story began with a question about sin. Who sinned? And indeed, the Pharisees and others also took up the question of sin, accusing Jesus as well as the healed blind man of being sinners. They could not see the truth that was before them, and so sin became the convenient explanation. But Jesus did not get drawn into a long theological treatise on that subject. He could have; he could have pointed to all kinds of stories, dealing with the question of sin and impairment, even quoting famous rabbis on the subject. But he didn’t. He did not bother with an explanation. In fact, in John’s Gospel Jesus doesn’t bother to explain anything. He simply wanted the goodness, love, and mercy of God to be made manifest in the lives of real people, like the man blind from birth.
But I wonder if Jesus also realized that getting drawn into complicated debates, even with his own disciples, does not necessarily lead anywhere. Surely Jesus understood how easy it is to get into trouble by answering questions, just as it is easy to get into trouble by asking them. Helder Camara, who years ago, served as an archbishop in Brazil, said, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint, but when I asked a question: Why do the poor have no food, they called me a communist.”
So, questions can lead to a lot of trouble. And it seems no matter how many you ask and answer, there are always more, more questions than can ever be resolved. Harvey Cox, who taught at Harvard Divinity School for years, once said, “Growing up means learning to live with unsatisfying and incomplete endings. No matter how ordinary they are, all our lives end with a question mark.” That can be unsettling, because we prefer satisfying explanations, just like the Pharisees. But I wonder if part of the reason they were suspicious of Jesus was not only because he healed on the Sabbath, but also because he healed a nobody on the Sabbath. A nobody from a family of nobodies in a long line of nobodies. Why this man? Why not the rich man’s father or the priest’s son? Why this pathetic beggar, sitting everyday near the Temple steps, getting in the way of the crowds who pushed and stumbled and ambled in and out, why did he merit the attention of Jesus? But that’s the point, isn’t it? He didn’t merit it at all. He was simply in need. He was blind and then he was made to see.
Blind. We are all blind at some time in our lives, blind at least to some things. Some learn to see better than others, while there are those who chose to remain blind. And some are pushed hard to open their eyes--- the way Jesus rubbed the blind man’s eyes hard with mud and saliva and then commanded him to wash in the pool of Siloam. He did as commanded. He washed, opened his eyes and saw. But notice: his sight did not happen in an instant; he did not see immediately who Jesus was. A prophet, he initially thought. No, more than a prophet, the Messiah, the chosen one of God. That is what he came to see. And because of his new sight, he was driven away from the temple. He could see, but he could not stay. And the irony: the Pharisees stayed, but they could not see. They were blind because they did not desire sight. And isn’t that really the big question of this text? It isn’t about sin, but about desire. Do you desire sight? Do you desire to see who Jesus Christ truly is for you and what and how he would have you do and live?
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
March 19, 2023
John 9: 1-41
Questions: People were always asking Jesus questions. Sometimes the questions were designed to try to trick Jesus, but most of the time people really wanted to know, because these questions were at the very heart of human life and human struggle. So, our story from John begins with a question put to Jesus by his disciples: Who sinned that this man was born blind? Did he sin or his parents? People often want to know why bad things happen, and even when they cannot truly know, they will assign a reason. Many people---then as well as now---had and have a hard time accepting the randomness of life.
Now Jews in Jesus’ day and even long before Jesus’ time often believed in the doctrine of divine earthly retribution. If you or a family member or even a nation did wrong, you would suffer the consequences on this earth. So, for example, when nations like Assyria and Babylon conquered Israel and then Judah, the prophets said, “Well, the covenant was forsaken and so we have suffered the consequences.” But Jesus was very careful about not assigning blame. He did not get into the sin-punishment saga. This man’s blindness, he insisted, is not about sin. But neither did Jesus understand the blindness as a completely random occurrence, because he will use it to show the power of God. And so, Jesus healed the man by rubbing mud mixed with his saliva on the man’s eyes.
Jesus then disappears from the story and does not return until the end. And then the story becomes about other characters, who are trying to understand what this healing really means. First, we have the response of neighbors. And some of the neighbors could see what had happened; they recognized the blind man as now healed. But notice there were others, who denied the man’s identity. No, this is another, who looks like him. They are blind to the healing because their assumptions about blindness from birth meant that he must remain blind. They cannot see the truth that stands before them. So, they take him to the Pharisees in the hope that the Pharisees, who were religious leaders and teachers, would be able to set things straight.
The Pharisees began the inquiry by asking the man a question: how did you receive sight. And he told them but notice their immediate response. There is no joy in the healing, only suspicion and accusation. Since Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and healing can be considered work and since work is forbidden on the Sabbath, they concluded that Jesus was not from God. So, he must be sinner. While this conclusion may seem perverse to us, in the history of the world, this kind of response to healing and goodness is not unusual. Accused witches in Europe, during the Middle Ages, most of them women, were practiced in the healing arts, often relieving pain in childbirth with the use of herbs. This was deemed dangerous and sinful by church leaders, who said it was a greater sin for these accused women to do good rather than evil, because their good acts would seduce people away from God. And so, these women were harshly punished: burned at the stake or drowned. Why? For the same reason the Pharisees were suspicious of Jesus. Power was threatened. And power, whether in ancient Israel, the Middle Ages or now is often the name of the game. People will go to great ends, even preferring blindness, to protect their power.
After the consultation with the Pharisees, some people went to the man’s parents and asked them if this man was truly their son. And they verified that he was. Now it is interesting that the text refers to parents (in the plural) rather than simply to the father. Women’s words were not taken seriously. They could not testify in Court, for example, but here notice both parents are consulted. And both confirmed that their son, who was born blind, now can see. But they did not want to say how he was healed, because they were afraid. And how often that happens in life! People know the truth, but out of fear that some negative consequence will happen they fail to speak the truth. They can see, but they don’t let anyone else know what it is they see.
The story began with a question about sin. Who sinned? And indeed, the Pharisees and others also took up the question of sin, accusing Jesus as well as the healed blind man of being sinners. They could not see the truth that was before them, and so sin became the convenient explanation. But Jesus did not get drawn into a long theological treatise on that subject. He could have; he could have pointed to all kinds of stories, dealing with the question of sin and impairment, even quoting famous rabbis on the subject. But he didn’t. He did not bother with an explanation. In fact, in John’s Gospel Jesus doesn’t bother to explain anything. He simply wanted the goodness, love, and mercy of God to be made manifest in the lives of real people, like the man blind from birth.
But I wonder if Jesus also realized that getting drawn into complicated debates, even with his own disciples, does not necessarily lead anywhere. Surely Jesus understood how easy it is to get into trouble by answering questions, just as it is easy to get into trouble by asking them. Helder Camara, who years ago, served as an archbishop in Brazil, said, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint, but when I asked a question: Why do the poor have no food, they called me a communist.”
So, questions can lead to a lot of trouble. And it seems no matter how many you ask and answer, there are always more, more questions than can ever be resolved. Harvey Cox, who taught at Harvard Divinity School for years, once said, “Growing up means learning to live with unsatisfying and incomplete endings. No matter how ordinary they are, all our lives end with a question mark.” That can be unsettling, because we prefer satisfying explanations, just like the Pharisees. But I wonder if part of the reason they were suspicious of Jesus was not only because he healed on the Sabbath, but also because he healed a nobody on the Sabbath. A nobody from a family of nobodies in a long line of nobodies. Why this man? Why not the rich man’s father or the priest’s son? Why this pathetic beggar, sitting everyday near the Temple steps, getting in the way of the crowds who pushed and stumbled and ambled in and out, why did he merit the attention of Jesus? But that’s the point, isn’t it? He didn’t merit it at all. He was simply in need. He was blind and then he was made to see.
Blind. We are all blind at some time in our lives, blind at least to some things. Some learn to see better than others, while there are those who chose to remain blind. And some are pushed hard to open their eyes--- the way Jesus rubbed the blind man’s eyes hard with mud and saliva and then commanded him to wash in the pool of Siloam. He did as commanded. He washed, opened his eyes and saw. But notice: his sight did not happen in an instant; he did not see immediately who Jesus was. A prophet, he initially thought. No, more than a prophet, the Messiah, the chosen one of God. That is what he came to see. And because of his new sight, he was driven away from the temple. He could see, but he could not stay. And the irony: the Pharisees stayed, but they could not see. They were blind because they did not desire sight. And isn’t that really the big question of this text? It isn’t about sin, but about desire. Do you desire sight? Do you desire to see who Jesus Christ truly is for you and what and how he would have you do and live?
March 15, 2023
Dear Friends,
The other day I found myself in a discussion about education with one of my YMCA friends. We started talking about our respective elementary schools, and I told her that I think I went to the one of the best elementary schools in the nation, Windermere Blvd. Elementary School in Eggertsville, New York (suburban Buffalo). The school was built in 1951 with an indoor swimming pool, where beginning in the third grade, we had swimming lessons as part of our physical education class, a beautiful art and music room and a very fancy gymnasium, boasting of all kinds of equipment, a library, full of books and a very progressive principal, who did not allow any homework until at least the 4th grade. Every year The Windermere World was published, an anthology of short stories, poetry, and art work, created entirely by students from kindergarten to grade 6. And then there were the plays, major productions put on by various age groups working together.
While musing about the school, I recalled my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, who loved poetry and periodically would require us to memorize a poem. During the morning work time, when we were sitting at our desks, working on assignments, she would call us up to her desk, one by one, and then we would have to recite the poem. I can imagine that this was quite traumatic for some children, though I must admit, I was not very sensitive at the time to that possibility. I enjoyed memorizing, and I think I was eager to show off my skill. One of the poems we had to memorize was by Henry Van Dyke about working. Though it consists of two stanzas, we only were asked to memorize the first one.
Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom;
"Of all who live, I am the one by whom
"This work can best be done in the right way."
Then shall I see it not too great, nor small,
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers;
Then shall I cheerful greet the labouring hours,
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall
At eventide, to play and love and rest,
Because I know for me my work is best.
I would call this character development, something schools back then were really into. I am sure our teacher must have talked about the poem and why it was important, but I don’t remember any of that. All I can remember is the poem, and the idea that work is indeed a blessing, not a doom. With that thought in mind, I came across the other day something that the writer, Toni Morrison wrote about work.
It was during the Second World War and Toni Morrison had a job after school cleaning a house for two dollars a week. It was a beautiful house, she said, with wall to wall carpeting, and plastic covered sofa and chairs, a white enameled stove and a washing machine and dryer. And though in the middle of the war, there was plenty of sugar, butter and “seam up the back” stockings! Toni had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an electric iron.
As time went on, Toni became better at cleaning, and so she was given more responsibilities, like carrying a bookcase upstairs and pushing the piano across the room. She fell while carrying the bookcase and after pushing the piano, her arms and legs hurt. She wanted to refuse to do these extra jobs, but she was afraid that she would be fired and then she would lose the money that allowed her to go to the movies and buy little things for herself. Soon the woman began to offer Toni her cast off clothes---for a price. To a child who owned only two school dresses, these clothes looked simply gorgeous---until Toni’s mother asked her if she really wanted to work for cast off clothing. That comment got Toni thinking.
One day, she was whining about her job to her father, but she saw not one iota of sympathy in his eyes. There was no offering of, “Oh, you poor little thing.” All he did was put down his coffee cup on the table and say, “You don’t live there. You live here, with your people. Go to work. Get your money and come home,” which was his way of saying, “You are not the work you do. You are the person you are.”
Toni Morrison is an accomplished writer, who has worked for all kinds of people in all kinds of jobs. But she claims that since she had that conversation with her father many years ago, she understands that “her labor is not the measure of herself, and she has never placed the security of a job above the value of home.” That is certainly something to ponder---especially during this Lenten season as we consider the journey Christ took and the life he lived. Jesus wandered around without a home and left his carpenter job behind to follow wherever the realm of God would lead him.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The other day I found myself in a discussion about education with one of my YMCA friends. We started talking about our respective elementary schools, and I told her that I think I went to the one of the best elementary schools in the nation, Windermere Blvd. Elementary School in Eggertsville, New York (suburban Buffalo). The school was built in 1951 with an indoor swimming pool, where beginning in the third grade, we had swimming lessons as part of our physical education class, a beautiful art and music room and a very fancy gymnasium, boasting of all kinds of equipment, a library, full of books and a very progressive principal, who did not allow any homework until at least the 4th grade. Every year The Windermere World was published, an anthology of short stories, poetry, and art work, created entirely by students from kindergarten to grade 6. And then there were the plays, major productions put on by various age groups working together.
While musing about the school, I recalled my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, who loved poetry and periodically would require us to memorize a poem. During the morning work time, when we were sitting at our desks, working on assignments, she would call us up to her desk, one by one, and then we would have to recite the poem. I can imagine that this was quite traumatic for some children, though I must admit, I was not very sensitive at the time to that possibility. I enjoyed memorizing, and I think I was eager to show off my skill. One of the poems we had to memorize was by Henry Van Dyke about working. Though it consists of two stanzas, we only were asked to memorize the first one.
Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom;
"Of all who live, I am the one by whom
"This work can best be done in the right way."
Then shall I see it not too great, nor small,
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers;
Then shall I cheerful greet the labouring hours,
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall
At eventide, to play and love and rest,
Because I know for me my work is best.
I would call this character development, something schools back then were really into. I am sure our teacher must have talked about the poem and why it was important, but I don’t remember any of that. All I can remember is the poem, and the idea that work is indeed a blessing, not a doom. With that thought in mind, I came across the other day something that the writer, Toni Morrison wrote about work.
It was during the Second World War and Toni Morrison had a job after school cleaning a house for two dollars a week. It was a beautiful house, she said, with wall to wall carpeting, and plastic covered sofa and chairs, a white enameled stove and a washing machine and dryer. And though in the middle of the war, there was plenty of sugar, butter and “seam up the back” stockings! Toni had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an electric iron.
As time went on, Toni became better at cleaning, and so she was given more responsibilities, like carrying a bookcase upstairs and pushing the piano across the room. She fell while carrying the bookcase and after pushing the piano, her arms and legs hurt. She wanted to refuse to do these extra jobs, but she was afraid that she would be fired and then she would lose the money that allowed her to go to the movies and buy little things for herself. Soon the woman began to offer Toni her cast off clothes---for a price. To a child who owned only two school dresses, these clothes looked simply gorgeous---until Toni’s mother asked her if she really wanted to work for cast off clothing. That comment got Toni thinking.
One day, she was whining about her job to her father, but she saw not one iota of sympathy in his eyes. There was no offering of, “Oh, you poor little thing.” All he did was put down his coffee cup on the table and say, “You don’t live there. You live here, with your people. Go to work. Get your money and come home,” which was his way of saying, “You are not the work you do. You are the person you are.”
Toni Morrison is an accomplished writer, who has worked for all kinds of people in all kinds of jobs. But she claims that since she had that conversation with her father many years ago, she understands that “her labor is not the measure of herself, and she has never placed the security of a job above the value of home.” That is certainly something to ponder---especially during this Lenten season as we consider the journey Christ took and the life he lived. Jesus wandered around without a home and left his carpenter job behind to follow wherever the realm of God would lead him.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Not a Harlot: The Woman at the Well Speaks
A Monologue by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
March 12, 2023
John 4: 5-42
You know what really irritates me? When preachers--- long ago or today---assume I am a woman of low repute. Me, the Samaritan woman, whom Jesus met at Jacob’s well, the one you just heard about in John’s gospel. The conversation between Jesus and me is the longest reported in any of the gospels. And yet, so many preachers dismiss me as a harlot. John Piper, a respected preacher and writer, called me in one of sermons “a worldly sensually minded unspiritual harlot from Samaria. And would like to ask him: Exactly where did your information come from? Not from the text, but from your imagination. Now don’t get me wrong. Imagination is essential, and the Bible demands we use it, but the trouble is, when it comes to the Bible, male imaginations have ruled.
I mean isn’t it possible that my five husbands predeceased me, or perhaps some of them abandoned me or divorced me. I assure you I could not divorce them. And as for the man I am now living with, well, in my day there was something called the Levirite marriage, which we Samaritans honored (as did the Jews). When a man died without children, his widow could then marry one of his brothers, and any children, resulting from that union, would be considered the deceased husband’s. The widowed woman, by the way, was still considered the deceased man’s wife, and her new husband was not wholly her husband, even though the relationship was legally recognized.
And another thing: just because I went to the well alone, not in the company of other women, which was the custom, male preachers have concluded that I must be an outcast. But maybe I simply wanted to be alone with my own thoughts that day. Perhaps I was what you today would call an introvert. I just did not want to be around other people, listening to this and that gossip. Furthermore, did you hear Jesus say anything about me needing healing or forgiveness? No. And consider this: Just last week you heard about Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus by night. Night in John’s Gospel is a symbol for ignorance and misunderstanding. I came at noon, in the full light of the day, and that symbolizes truth, or at least openness to truth.
Jesus and his disciples had been to Judea, and they wanted to return to Galilee, so it is very interesting that the sentence right before today’s scripture reads, “But he had to go through Samaria”. But the simple truth is: Jesus did not have to go through Samaria. He chose to go. He could have gone around, which is what most Jews did. Of course, it meant an additional two or three day walk, but Jews considered Samaritans to be apostates and Samaritans returned that opinion, so most Jews and Samaritans did what they could to avoid each other’s territory. Why? You ask. Well, it all came down differences of opinions, and not much progress has been made in that department over the past 2000 plus years. You are no better than dealing with differences of opinions than we were. Usually people just shut up, because they don’t want to argue. Oh, we Samaritans had our arguments with the Jews, and after a while, we just didn’t talk to each other.
Samaritans and Jews read the same scriptures. We worshipped the same God, claimed the same spiritual ancestors, and we were both waiting and hoping for the same Messiah. But we had different ideas about the sacred mountain, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. We said it was Mount Gerizim and the Jews claimed it was Mt. Sinai. Jerusalem was the holy city for Jews, Shechem, the holy city for Samaritans. These differences were considered bad enough, but the tensions really intensified when the northern kingdom, Israel, fell to the Assyrians in 723 BC, and many Samaritans intermarried with the Assyrians. Intermarriage was anathema to the Jews.
Then in 587 B.C. the southern kingdom, Judah, fell, this time to the Babylonians, and the Jewish leaders were carried off to Babylon, where they remained for over 50 years, until the Persians were victorious over the Babylonians and permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Mind you, not all the Jews chose to go back. Some might even say it was the most fanatical fringe, who returned, and when they arrived home, they discovered that home did not look like home. Jerusalem was a desolate wasteland with the Temple completely destroyed. Now there were Samaritans living in Jerusalem, who wanted to help rebuild the Temple. After all, they honored the same scriptures and worshipped the same God, but the Jews who returned from Babylon had strong ideas about purity and worship, and so they rejected Samaritan help. The separation between Jews and Samaritans became final and bitter.
Jesus knew all this; he understood it very well, and yet he chose to go through Samaria. It was noon; the sun was high in the sky, and the day was already blistering with the heat. I was carrying my water jar, lost in my own thoughts, and I must admit I did not even notice him until he spoke. His voice shook me out of my reverie, his words coming as a command, “Give me a drink.” Why should he speak to me? Who was he to give me a command? He was a Jewish man, I, a Samaritan woman. He eHHe did not bother to explain himself. All he said was that if I knew who he was, I would ask him for living water. And then he told me that everyone who drinks of his water will never be thirsty again; it will become a spring, gushing up to eternal life.
I had no idea what he meant, and so I asked him for this water that would quench my thirst, so I would not have to come again to the well. Jesus just looked at me, his eyes boring into the very depths of my soul, and I knew that I had not understood. He was referring to spiritual fulfillment, living in the truth that gives life its deepest meaning and joy. Though I did not understand then, I did have this faint recognition that I was in the presence of something or someone new---especially when he told me that the man I was living with was not my husband and that I had five previous husbands. “Sir,” I said, “I see that you are a prophet, but also more than a prophet. And so, I left my water jar at the well, and ran to tell people what I had seen. And they believed me. What a blessing that was---to be believed, because women’s witness was so easily dismissed.
The text tells you that many more believed because of his word. His word: now this is important, because in your Bible, right before the story of Nicodemus, it reads that many people believed in Jesus because of his signs, but Jesus would not entrust himself to them, because he did not think that signs are the right reason for believing. But Word: that is another matter entirely. Recall how John’s Gospel begins: In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. So, Word is central, and it is we Samaritans, the so called heretics and outsiders, who believed the word.
But we would not have believed, had Jesus not chosen to go through Samaria. Consider who took the initiative here---Jesus, not me. Oh we sometimes think it is all on our shoulders; it is all up to us. But God takes the initiative, the God in Jesus Christ came to me. True, I responded. Grace invaded my life, and I could not resist its power. Where is the freedom in that, you might ask? Well, I will tell you. True freedom lies in the ability to respond to the good, respond to God. The harshest slavery is to turn away.
A Monologue by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
March 12, 2023
John 4: 5-42
You know what really irritates me? When preachers--- long ago or today---assume I am a woman of low repute. Me, the Samaritan woman, whom Jesus met at Jacob’s well, the one you just heard about in John’s gospel. The conversation between Jesus and me is the longest reported in any of the gospels. And yet, so many preachers dismiss me as a harlot. John Piper, a respected preacher and writer, called me in one of sermons “a worldly sensually minded unspiritual harlot from Samaria. And would like to ask him: Exactly where did your information come from? Not from the text, but from your imagination. Now don’t get me wrong. Imagination is essential, and the Bible demands we use it, but the trouble is, when it comes to the Bible, male imaginations have ruled.
I mean isn’t it possible that my five husbands predeceased me, or perhaps some of them abandoned me or divorced me. I assure you I could not divorce them. And as for the man I am now living with, well, in my day there was something called the Levirite marriage, which we Samaritans honored (as did the Jews). When a man died without children, his widow could then marry one of his brothers, and any children, resulting from that union, would be considered the deceased husband’s. The widowed woman, by the way, was still considered the deceased man’s wife, and her new husband was not wholly her husband, even though the relationship was legally recognized.
And another thing: just because I went to the well alone, not in the company of other women, which was the custom, male preachers have concluded that I must be an outcast. But maybe I simply wanted to be alone with my own thoughts that day. Perhaps I was what you today would call an introvert. I just did not want to be around other people, listening to this and that gossip. Furthermore, did you hear Jesus say anything about me needing healing or forgiveness? No. And consider this: Just last week you heard about Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus by night. Night in John’s Gospel is a symbol for ignorance and misunderstanding. I came at noon, in the full light of the day, and that symbolizes truth, or at least openness to truth.
Jesus and his disciples had been to Judea, and they wanted to return to Galilee, so it is very interesting that the sentence right before today’s scripture reads, “But he had to go through Samaria”. But the simple truth is: Jesus did not have to go through Samaria. He chose to go. He could have gone around, which is what most Jews did. Of course, it meant an additional two or three day walk, but Jews considered Samaritans to be apostates and Samaritans returned that opinion, so most Jews and Samaritans did what they could to avoid each other’s territory. Why? You ask. Well, it all came down differences of opinions, and not much progress has been made in that department over the past 2000 plus years. You are no better than dealing with differences of opinions than we were. Usually people just shut up, because they don’t want to argue. Oh, we Samaritans had our arguments with the Jews, and after a while, we just didn’t talk to each other.
Samaritans and Jews read the same scriptures. We worshipped the same God, claimed the same spiritual ancestors, and we were both waiting and hoping for the same Messiah. But we had different ideas about the sacred mountain, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. We said it was Mount Gerizim and the Jews claimed it was Mt. Sinai. Jerusalem was the holy city for Jews, Shechem, the holy city for Samaritans. These differences were considered bad enough, but the tensions really intensified when the northern kingdom, Israel, fell to the Assyrians in 723 BC, and many Samaritans intermarried with the Assyrians. Intermarriage was anathema to the Jews.
Then in 587 B.C. the southern kingdom, Judah, fell, this time to the Babylonians, and the Jewish leaders were carried off to Babylon, where they remained for over 50 years, until the Persians were victorious over the Babylonians and permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Mind you, not all the Jews chose to go back. Some might even say it was the most fanatical fringe, who returned, and when they arrived home, they discovered that home did not look like home. Jerusalem was a desolate wasteland with the Temple completely destroyed. Now there were Samaritans living in Jerusalem, who wanted to help rebuild the Temple. After all, they honored the same scriptures and worshipped the same God, but the Jews who returned from Babylon had strong ideas about purity and worship, and so they rejected Samaritan help. The separation between Jews and Samaritans became final and bitter.
Jesus knew all this; he understood it very well, and yet he chose to go through Samaria. It was noon; the sun was high in the sky, and the day was already blistering with the heat. I was carrying my water jar, lost in my own thoughts, and I must admit I did not even notice him until he spoke. His voice shook me out of my reverie, his words coming as a command, “Give me a drink.” Why should he speak to me? Who was he to give me a command? He was a Jewish man, I, a Samaritan woman. He eHHe did not bother to explain himself. All he said was that if I knew who he was, I would ask him for living water. And then he told me that everyone who drinks of his water will never be thirsty again; it will become a spring, gushing up to eternal life.
I had no idea what he meant, and so I asked him for this water that would quench my thirst, so I would not have to come again to the well. Jesus just looked at me, his eyes boring into the very depths of my soul, and I knew that I had not understood. He was referring to spiritual fulfillment, living in the truth that gives life its deepest meaning and joy. Though I did not understand then, I did have this faint recognition that I was in the presence of something or someone new---especially when he told me that the man I was living with was not my husband and that I had five previous husbands. “Sir,” I said, “I see that you are a prophet, but also more than a prophet. And so, I left my water jar at the well, and ran to tell people what I had seen. And they believed me. What a blessing that was---to be believed, because women’s witness was so easily dismissed.
The text tells you that many more believed because of his word. His word: now this is important, because in your Bible, right before the story of Nicodemus, it reads that many people believed in Jesus because of his signs, but Jesus would not entrust himself to them, because he did not think that signs are the right reason for believing. But Word: that is another matter entirely. Recall how John’s Gospel begins: In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. So, Word is central, and it is we Samaritans, the so called heretics and outsiders, who believed the word.
But we would not have believed, had Jesus not chosen to go through Samaria. Consider who took the initiative here---Jesus, not me. Oh we sometimes think it is all on our shoulders; it is all up to us. But God takes the initiative, the God in Jesus Christ came to me. True, I responded. Grace invaded my life, and I could not resist its power. Where is the freedom in that, you might ask? Well, I will tell you. True freedom lies in the ability to respond to the good, respond to God. The harshest slavery is to turn away.
March 8, 2023
Dear Friends,
I realize that February is past and with it Black History Month, but since I did not have time last week to write a reflection on the subject, I am doing so in March.
When I was in high school, I learned nothing about Black history. I learned about the Civil War, and I understood that the War was primarily about slavery, but I never learned anything about why the South managed to institute Jim Crow and ignore the intentions of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. I did know the names of some Black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Stockley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, but that was about all I knew. I don’t think back then I had ever heard of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And I knew nothing about Frederick Douglas, except the name. When I look back, I cannot imagine what people in my high school were thinking. I mean Civil Rights was BIG, and race riots were happening on a weekly basis, but no teacher ever mentioned it---except my ninth grade English teacher, Sandra Johnson, who was only in her second year of teaching. She came out and let it be known that this country had to change and give Black people their rights. A few parents complained, but she stood her ground. That was in Jacksonville, Florida, and when I moved back North the following year, no New York State teacher ever ventured near the topic. Why?
I suppose I should not be shocked when I read about all the controversy around certain books being banned and certain topics being verboten. But I am shocked, because I cannot understand why we are unable to talk about such issues. Do we think they disappear, if we don’t mention them? Or are we simply afraid to talk about them because we fear that people will become upset? And why the fear of being upset? That is something I will never understand---perhaps because I grew up in a home where uncomfortable topics were often discussed, argued over and yes, people did become upset. But they did not die from such distress, so what was or is the big deal?
But the controversy we are now facing in our schools and elsewhere concerns more than books. Certain sites, linked to the story of Black Americans are in danger of being destroyed or have already been razed to the ground. On East Commerce Street in San Antonio, for example, there were hotels and restaurants listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, which told people of color where they could obtain services. Apparently, most of those places have been destroyed. And in Boston the Harriet Tubman House, which had been founded as a place for Black women to stay, who had migrated from the South, was recently sold to a developer.
But there is some good news. The National Park Service is considering adding nine sites in Mississippi to its roster of historical places. Some of these sites are concerned with Emmett Till, a black teenager, who was visiting from Chicago and was falsely accused of grabbing a white woman. Till was later tortured and lynched and Carolyn Bryant, the woman, who accused Till of grabbing her, later admitted she was lying. Till’s mother insisted the casket be open so the world could witness what was done to her son. Other sites concern the Freedom Riders, who came South to help register black citizens to vote. Some of the sites are churches, which were torched during the Freedom Summer of 1964, because they hosted teach-ins about voter registration. Civil rights workers were investigating the firebombing of Mount Zion Methodist Church, when they were tortured and murdered: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The KKK was involved with the help of the sheriff. The first trial took place in the Neshoba County Courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and 21 people were indicted for civil rights violations of the three murdered men. (The state of Mississippi refused to charge the men with murder.) The cases were finally dropped, but again in 1967 the Justice Department indicted 18 men, and 7 men, were found guilty of civil rights violations. In 1970 the state of Mississippi indited one man, Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter. He was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison where he died in 2018.
Scholars are talking about the importance of “memory work,” which involves revisiting some of these sites and rewriting the story, which in the past was forgotten and ignored. The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama has mapped thousands of sites linked to the lynching of Black people. I went to the Lynching Museum in Montgomery a few years ago, and I can tell you it was both very upsetting and very moving. Bottles of dirt from the lynching sites along with the names and ages of the victims communicate a brutal story of racism.
None of this history is pleasant to learn and confront, but such is the challenge of education. Not everything we study and learn about makes us feel good. But if we truly believe that knowledge is power, and we can use our knowledge in ways that move us as a nation toward a new beginning---that is a good thing. When I think of what I DID NOT LEARN in my high school American history class, I consider that a kind of wounding. We are wounded by our ignorance. What we do not know is usually far more dangerous than what we know---even if we must confront the unsavory deeds of our past history. We should always remember what Jesus said: “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Ignorance holds us in bondage. And another thought from the southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, who was a devout Roman Catholic: Know the truth and the truth shall make you strange. Indeed, it can.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I realize that February is past and with it Black History Month, but since I did not have time last week to write a reflection on the subject, I am doing so in March.
When I was in high school, I learned nothing about Black history. I learned about the Civil War, and I understood that the War was primarily about slavery, but I never learned anything about why the South managed to institute Jim Crow and ignore the intentions of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. I did know the names of some Black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Stockley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, but that was about all I knew. I don’t think back then I had ever heard of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And I knew nothing about Frederick Douglas, except the name. When I look back, I cannot imagine what people in my high school were thinking. I mean Civil Rights was BIG, and race riots were happening on a weekly basis, but no teacher ever mentioned it---except my ninth grade English teacher, Sandra Johnson, who was only in her second year of teaching. She came out and let it be known that this country had to change and give Black people their rights. A few parents complained, but she stood her ground. That was in Jacksonville, Florida, and when I moved back North the following year, no New York State teacher ever ventured near the topic. Why?
I suppose I should not be shocked when I read about all the controversy around certain books being banned and certain topics being verboten. But I am shocked, because I cannot understand why we are unable to talk about such issues. Do we think they disappear, if we don’t mention them? Or are we simply afraid to talk about them because we fear that people will become upset? And why the fear of being upset? That is something I will never understand---perhaps because I grew up in a home where uncomfortable topics were often discussed, argued over and yes, people did become upset. But they did not die from such distress, so what was or is the big deal?
But the controversy we are now facing in our schools and elsewhere concerns more than books. Certain sites, linked to the story of Black Americans are in danger of being destroyed or have already been razed to the ground. On East Commerce Street in San Antonio, for example, there were hotels and restaurants listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, which told people of color where they could obtain services. Apparently, most of those places have been destroyed. And in Boston the Harriet Tubman House, which had been founded as a place for Black women to stay, who had migrated from the South, was recently sold to a developer.
But there is some good news. The National Park Service is considering adding nine sites in Mississippi to its roster of historical places. Some of these sites are concerned with Emmett Till, a black teenager, who was visiting from Chicago and was falsely accused of grabbing a white woman. Till was later tortured and lynched and Carolyn Bryant, the woman, who accused Till of grabbing her, later admitted she was lying. Till’s mother insisted the casket be open so the world could witness what was done to her son. Other sites concern the Freedom Riders, who came South to help register black citizens to vote. Some of the sites are churches, which were torched during the Freedom Summer of 1964, because they hosted teach-ins about voter registration. Civil rights workers were investigating the firebombing of Mount Zion Methodist Church, when they were tortured and murdered: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The KKK was involved with the help of the sheriff. The first trial took place in the Neshoba County Courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and 21 people were indicted for civil rights violations of the three murdered men. (The state of Mississippi refused to charge the men with murder.) The cases were finally dropped, but again in 1967 the Justice Department indicted 18 men, and 7 men, were found guilty of civil rights violations. In 1970 the state of Mississippi indited one man, Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter. He was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison where he died in 2018.
Scholars are talking about the importance of “memory work,” which involves revisiting some of these sites and rewriting the story, which in the past was forgotten and ignored. The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama has mapped thousands of sites linked to the lynching of Black people. I went to the Lynching Museum in Montgomery a few years ago, and I can tell you it was both very upsetting and very moving. Bottles of dirt from the lynching sites along with the names and ages of the victims communicate a brutal story of racism.
None of this history is pleasant to learn and confront, but such is the challenge of education. Not everything we study and learn about makes us feel good. But if we truly believe that knowledge is power, and we can use our knowledge in ways that move us as a nation toward a new beginning---that is a good thing. When I think of what I DID NOT LEARN in my high school American history class, I consider that a kind of wounding. We are wounded by our ignorance. What we do not know is usually far more dangerous than what we know---even if we must confront the unsavory deeds of our past history. We should always remember what Jesus said: “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Ignorance holds us in bondage. And another thought from the southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, who was a devout Roman Catholic: Know the truth and the truth shall make you strange. Indeed, it can.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 5, 2023
John 3: 1-17
I am not a night person; I love the morning, and I really do not like this recent time change, because now it is now even darker in the morning, when I arise at 5 AM and walk to the Y. Now John makes it very clear that Nicodemus went at night, and so I imagine it as the middle of the night, though it is also true that some painters have rendered this scene in the gloaming, which usually means twilight, but it can also mean early morning, just before the sun rises. But my imagination sticks to the middle of the night.
A lot can happen in the middle of the night, when most people are fast asleep in their beds. More babies are born, and more people die in the middle of the night than during the light of day. Many years ago, my younger brother sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night to leave for the Woodstock Festival on August 14, 1969. My parents had forbidden him to go, but at 3 a.m. he left the house to meet his friend, who had parked down the street so my parents would not hear a car or see the headlights. In the middle of the night: that’s when one of my husband’s teachers received a call from Sweden, telling him he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in biology. In the middle of the night: sometimes when we are lying awake, caught by sleeplessness, we see the situation before us so clearly. We know what we should do, or so it seems to us in the middle of the night---quit that job, confront that person, but when the daylight comes, sometimes our nighttime resolution looks different. And so, we do not always do what we had resolved to do in the middle of the night.
So, why did Nicodemus go to Jesus in the middle of the night? If he had let the night pass, if the morning light had shone upon him and the Jewish world he helped to lead, a world which demanded of him all kinds of duties and responsibilities, maybe he would never have had the nerve to pay a visit to Jesus. Maybe the light of day would have shown him that he had far too much to lose by going to see Jesus. You see, Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and though we have this tendency to harbor negative opinions about them---mainly because of Matthew’s Gospel, which shows Jesus speaking harsh words against them--- the Pharisees in so many ways were really religious progressives.
Unlike the Sadducees, who controlled the temple priesthood and believed that the written law was complete, the Pharisees embraced the oral tradition, that is, what other rabbis and teachers throughout the centuries had taught and reflected upon and were still reflecting upon. The Pharisees had this idea that the law was dynamic, because meanings change with time, but the Sadducees believed the law means what it always has meant--- not unlike some of the current people sitting on our Supreme Court. The Pharisees also affirmed the resurrection of the dead, an idea soundly rejected by the Sadducees, and unlike the Sadducees, who were wealthy aristocrats, the Pharisees worked for a living. They had a trade or a skill—tent making, like the Apostle Paul or even carpentry, like Jesus. There are scholars today, who make the case that Jesus may well at one time have been a Pharisee, since he embraced the oral interpretation of the law and believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Nicodemus as a Pharisee perhaps did not like what Jesus was teaching, though at this point in John’s gospel, Jesus’ teachings have not yet been fully laid out. We do know that the historical Jesus did not make the rigid distinction the Pharisees made between clean and unclean, either in food or in people. That alone might well have made Nicodemus uncomfortable, but our text says nothing about Nicodemus being uncomfortable. We only intuit that from his going to see Jesus at night---as if he were embarrassed to be seen.
So far in this gospel, Jesus has been baptized; he has called his disciples and he has performed the miracle at the wedding at Cana, when he turned the water into wine. This is the backdrop for Nicodemus’ coming to Jesus. And even if he were disturbed at some of Jesus’ challenges to Pharisaic ideas, he nonetheless recognized that Jesus was from God, “for no one can do these signs apart from the presence of God,” Nicodemus said. That was a very big recognition--- seeing who Jesus really was. And then Jesus made this strange comment about the necessity of being born from above. Nicodemus did not understand this at all, because he became caught up in the literal meaning of birth. And Jesus did not bother to explain. In John’s Gospel Jesus never explains anything. He just went on about spirit and flesh and how the spirit blows where it wills.
It all sounds so strange to Nicodemus that he can only ask a vague question, “How can these things be?” And Jesus answered him with another question: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not know these things? If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” Well, this is certainly the ultimate conversation stopper, transforming a dialogue into a monologue. Jesus might as well have told Nicodemus he was an idiot. What could Nicodemus possibly say now? Nothing, and indeed he did not speak another word in this particular story. If he had known or understood, he would not have bothered to come to Jesus in the middle of the night.
Now night is very important in John’s Gospel. John plays with the images of light and dark. John calls Jesus the light of the world, revealing the truth, while the darkness hides and covers the truth. After Nicodemus asked the question: How can these things be? Jesus spoke some of the most important words in the New Testament: “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.” This is the verse, which Luther called the Gospel in miniature, and it is really the essential point of the story: God’s profound love for the world. God’s love is the point, not Nicodemus, but being the human creatures we are, we are drawn to Nicodemus, because in all honesty we are a lot like him. We don’t know; we too are confused, and we often stumble around in the middle of the night. So, what happens to people like Nicodemus?
In the 7th chapter of John, when the Jewish council is showing grave worry over Jesus and considering arresting him, Nicodemus in the full light of day says, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing.” And people were shocked by what he had said. After all, he was a Pharisee, a leader among his people. Surely you are not one of them from Galilee, are you? Check the scriptures, they remind him. Nothing of any significance will come from there. We don’t hear anything more from Nicodemus until the 19th chapter, after Jesus is executed, and it is Nicodemus who brings to the grave a 100 pound mixture of myrrh and aloes.
This does not prove that Nicodemus ever became a follower of Jesus. Maybe he just observed from the sidelines. But at least he showed up, and sometimes showing up is all it takes. Nicodemus showed up at least three times, and when we consider the biblical symbolism of three, its suggestion of resurrection: Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days, before being spewed out and saved; Jesus resurrected on the third day, we might conclude that showing up three times is not insignificant.
In one of my former churches, there was this man, who struggled with serious mental illness, but there he was every Sunday morning at worship. Of course, there were those in the congregation, who might have preferred him to stay away, because well, his mental illness made them uncomfortable, especially when he would shout out in the middle of the service. So, people complained to John and me. Can’t you do something? Like what, we asked? Talk to him. Well, we did, but it did very little good. You know, my colleague said, “A lot of life is just about showing up, because let’s face it, sometimes showing up is all we can manage to do.” How true, and maybe, there are times when showing up is enough, because God does love the world, a world filled with all different kinds of people, people who show up, sometimes in the middle of the night and sometimes on a Sunday morning at 10 a.m.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
March 5, 2023
John 3: 1-17
I am not a night person; I love the morning, and I really do not like this recent time change, because now it is now even darker in the morning, when I arise at 5 AM and walk to the Y. Now John makes it very clear that Nicodemus went at night, and so I imagine it as the middle of the night, though it is also true that some painters have rendered this scene in the gloaming, which usually means twilight, but it can also mean early morning, just before the sun rises. But my imagination sticks to the middle of the night.
A lot can happen in the middle of the night, when most people are fast asleep in their beds. More babies are born, and more people die in the middle of the night than during the light of day. Many years ago, my younger brother sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night to leave for the Woodstock Festival on August 14, 1969. My parents had forbidden him to go, but at 3 a.m. he left the house to meet his friend, who had parked down the street so my parents would not hear a car or see the headlights. In the middle of the night: that’s when one of my husband’s teachers received a call from Sweden, telling him he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in biology. In the middle of the night: sometimes when we are lying awake, caught by sleeplessness, we see the situation before us so clearly. We know what we should do, or so it seems to us in the middle of the night---quit that job, confront that person, but when the daylight comes, sometimes our nighttime resolution looks different. And so, we do not always do what we had resolved to do in the middle of the night.
So, why did Nicodemus go to Jesus in the middle of the night? If he had let the night pass, if the morning light had shone upon him and the Jewish world he helped to lead, a world which demanded of him all kinds of duties and responsibilities, maybe he would never have had the nerve to pay a visit to Jesus. Maybe the light of day would have shown him that he had far too much to lose by going to see Jesus. You see, Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and though we have this tendency to harbor negative opinions about them---mainly because of Matthew’s Gospel, which shows Jesus speaking harsh words against them--- the Pharisees in so many ways were really religious progressives.
Unlike the Sadducees, who controlled the temple priesthood and believed that the written law was complete, the Pharisees embraced the oral tradition, that is, what other rabbis and teachers throughout the centuries had taught and reflected upon and were still reflecting upon. The Pharisees had this idea that the law was dynamic, because meanings change with time, but the Sadducees believed the law means what it always has meant--- not unlike some of the current people sitting on our Supreme Court. The Pharisees also affirmed the resurrection of the dead, an idea soundly rejected by the Sadducees, and unlike the Sadducees, who were wealthy aristocrats, the Pharisees worked for a living. They had a trade or a skill—tent making, like the Apostle Paul or even carpentry, like Jesus. There are scholars today, who make the case that Jesus may well at one time have been a Pharisee, since he embraced the oral interpretation of the law and believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Nicodemus as a Pharisee perhaps did not like what Jesus was teaching, though at this point in John’s gospel, Jesus’ teachings have not yet been fully laid out. We do know that the historical Jesus did not make the rigid distinction the Pharisees made between clean and unclean, either in food or in people. That alone might well have made Nicodemus uncomfortable, but our text says nothing about Nicodemus being uncomfortable. We only intuit that from his going to see Jesus at night---as if he were embarrassed to be seen.
So far in this gospel, Jesus has been baptized; he has called his disciples and he has performed the miracle at the wedding at Cana, when he turned the water into wine. This is the backdrop for Nicodemus’ coming to Jesus. And even if he were disturbed at some of Jesus’ challenges to Pharisaic ideas, he nonetheless recognized that Jesus was from God, “for no one can do these signs apart from the presence of God,” Nicodemus said. That was a very big recognition--- seeing who Jesus really was. And then Jesus made this strange comment about the necessity of being born from above. Nicodemus did not understand this at all, because he became caught up in the literal meaning of birth. And Jesus did not bother to explain. In John’s Gospel Jesus never explains anything. He just went on about spirit and flesh and how the spirit blows where it wills.
It all sounds so strange to Nicodemus that he can only ask a vague question, “How can these things be?” And Jesus answered him with another question: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not know these things? If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” Well, this is certainly the ultimate conversation stopper, transforming a dialogue into a monologue. Jesus might as well have told Nicodemus he was an idiot. What could Nicodemus possibly say now? Nothing, and indeed he did not speak another word in this particular story. If he had known or understood, he would not have bothered to come to Jesus in the middle of the night.
Now night is very important in John’s Gospel. John plays with the images of light and dark. John calls Jesus the light of the world, revealing the truth, while the darkness hides and covers the truth. After Nicodemus asked the question: How can these things be? Jesus spoke some of the most important words in the New Testament: “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.” This is the verse, which Luther called the Gospel in miniature, and it is really the essential point of the story: God’s profound love for the world. God’s love is the point, not Nicodemus, but being the human creatures we are, we are drawn to Nicodemus, because in all honesty we are a lot like him. We don’t know; we too are confused, and we often stumble around in the middle of the night. So, what happens to people like Nicodemus?
In the 7th chapter of John, when the Jewish council is showing grave worry over Jesus and considering arresting him, Nicodemus in the full light of day says, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing.” And people were shocked by what he had said. After all, he was a Pharisee, a leader among his people. Surely you are not one of them from Galilee, are you? Check the scriptures, they remind him. Nothing of any significance will come from there. We don’t hear anything more from Nicodemus until the 19th chapter, after Jesus is executed, and it is Nicodemus who brings to the grave a 100 pound mixture of myrrh and aloes.
This does not prove that Nicodemus ever became a follower of Jesus. Maybe he just observed from the sidelines. But at least he showed up, and sometimes showing up is all it takes. Nicodemus showed up at least three times, and when we consider the biblical symbolism of three, its suggestion of resurrection: Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days, before being spewed out and saved; Jesus resurrected on the third day, we might conclude that showing up three times is not insignificant.
In one of my former churches, there was this man, who struggled with serious mental illness, but there he was every Sunday morning at worship. Of course, there were those in the congregation, who might have preferred him to stay away, because well, his mental illness made them uncomfortable, especially when he would shout out in the middle of the service. So, people complained to John and me. Can’t you do something? Like what, we asked? Talk to him. Well, we did, but it did very little good. You know, my colleague said, “A lot of life is just about showing up, because let’s face it, sometimes showing up is all we can manage to do.” How true, and maybe, there are times when showing up is enough, because God does love the world, a world filled with all different kinds of people, people who show up, sometimes in the middle of the night and sometimes on a Sunday morning at 10 a.m.
REGRETS
Ash Wednesday Service
February 22, 2023
Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21
Just last Sunday we had a new member class, when we spent some time talking about our religious past and what it was that drew us to this particular community of faith. And I commented that my experience in ministry has taught me that most people, who end up in today’s mainline Protestant churches, are essentially looking for help and support to live a fulfilled life. They are not so worried about what happens after they die. They don’t come to church to guarantee their place in the celestial heaven, but they do care about living well, living a life that matters, a life that is not swallowed up in trivia. They want their lives to count for something. And indeed, Jesus spent most of his time and energy trying to help people live such lives, lives that are full and abundant. And so, he taught, often using stories and parables to encourage people to see life from a different angle and perspective. And sometimes he was simply didactic, that is, telling his listeners what it is they should do, as in our reading from Matthew. Here Jesus has some very good suggestions for how to live a spiritual life that is honest and fulfilling. He tells people to give alms, to pray and fast, but don’t make a public spectacle of it. Don’t expect to be the center of attention.
So, here we are on Ash Wednesday, when we are reminded not only what can make for the living of a good life, but also the theme of our mortality is front and center. We are told explicitly, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Never forget that you have a limited time in which to live. So, make your choices count for something.
For some years an Englishwoman by the name of Bonnie Ware worked as a palliative care nurse, helping people to die. And over the years she heard people express deep regrets as they lay dying. And so, she decided to write a book about it with the hope that she could help people to live well, so that when they come to the end of their lives, they would not be swallowed up by regret and bitterness. So here are the top five regrets of the dying.
Regret #1: I wish I’d lived a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. Growing up, we have no choice but to mirror the beliefs and values of the people who are raising us. And certainly for many people they continue on path and it works for them. But sometimes people don’t fit that pattern. They have a different vision for their lives. They don’t want to become the doctor or the lawyer or the teacher the parents want them to become. Sometimes it has nothing to do with a career, like the 56 year old woman, dying of cancer, who regretted never hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. That was her big dream. It would have necessitated taking a leave of absence from her work and leaving her family for 6 or 7 months. Her boss supported her dream, and her kids were in college. But her husband would not give his blessing, and so she never did it, and on her death bed she was overcome with anger as well as regret.
Regret #2: I wish I had not worked so hard. Now this regret was quite commonly expressed, but it more often came from men than from women. And it wasn’t only the time lost with their growing family they regretted. Many lamented that they realized far too late that they had failed to develop other interests and passions. They could see their life was out of balance, and when they retired, they discovered how empty they felt. One man complained he had no inspiration. I was inspired by my work, he said. Why did I not allow myself to be inspired by other things as well?
Regret #3: I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings. Both men and women had this regret, though the feelings they failed to express were different. Women often had a very hard time expressing their anger and frustration with people. One woman said her father had bullied her for years, and she never had the courage to tell him, “Back off!” A man regretted failing to tell his wife how fearful he was of failure. I resigned a great job because of that fear. I replaced the job, but I missed the challenge, and now I wonder if I had been able to talk about my fear, openly face it, I might have been able to work it through. And I think I would have been a lot happier.
Regret #4: I wish I had stayed connected to friends. This regret isn’t about the failure to text or email or connect on Facebook. People, expressing this regret, were talking about something much deeper. Someone commented that it had been far too long since she had laughed herself silly with a good friend. And what about crying with a friend? There are not too many people you might feel comfortable crying with, and so this person concluded, you should never let such people go. But she had. Her life was dynamic; she moved around; she changed jobs; she had different interests, book clubs, political commitments. She loved all that stuff, but somehow she realized she had failed to keep and nurture deep relationships. And at the end of her life she mourned that loss, that absence in her life, which was in so many ways full.
And finally Regret #5: I wish I had allowed myself to be happier. In some ways I find this regret the most interesting of all, because it involves an insight that youth often fails to realize, that is, the recognition that happiness is not simply something you fall into. Happiness is not so much about luck as it is about choice. We can choose to be happy.
Now this word happy can be problematic for us, because it tends to be used in a superficial manner, as if happiness were about enjoyment. We are happy, for example, while on vacation, or eating a fine meal with a friend---certainly worthy activities. The word happy is rarely found in the New Testament; joy is the preferred word, though the Old Testament does mention the word.
Happiness does not mean the absence of trouble or toil. We do have hard times; we live through all kinds of tough challenges. We face disappointment and defeat, when we learn just how strong and weak, we are. And such learning is essential for a life well lived. But how much we concentrate on the tough times, the losses, the defeats, the disappointments and how much we count our blessings---those are critical choices. And if we celebrate our blessings; if we cultivate gratitude for them, we will be happier, more joyful.
I am not sure what Jesus would think of these regrets. He inhabited a world so different from ours, a world of limited choice, where people pretty much lived where they were born and did what their parents did. No one had to remind them of their mortality. Death was an intimate experience, while we tend to push the awareness of death away into hospitals and nursing homes until it crashes through our denial. But on this evening, there is no denial. We are called to remember our mortality, to imagine it, to see it up>. If we can do that, we can resolve to live more fully and more gratefully so we do not come to the end full of regret and bitterness.
Ash Wednesday Service
February 22, 2023
Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21
Just last Sunday we had a new member class, when we spent some time talking about our religious past and what it was that drew us to this particular community of faith. And I commented that my experience in ministry has taught me that most people, who end up in today’s mainline Protestant churches, are essentially looking for help and support to live a fulfilled life. They are not so worried about what happens after they die. They don’t come to church to guarantee their place in the celestial heaven, but they do care about living well, living a life that matters, a life that is not swallowed up in trivia. They want their lives to count for something. And indeed, Jesus spent most of his time and energy trying to help people live such lives, lives that are full and abundant. And so, he taught, often using stories and parables to encourage people to see life from a different angle and perspective. And sometimes he was simply didactic, that is, telling his listeners what it is they should do, as in our reading from Matthew. Here Jesus has some very good suggestions for how to live a spiritual life that is honest and fulfilling. He tells people to give alms, to pray and fast, but don’t make a public spectacle of it. Don’t expect to be the center of attention.
So, here we are on Ash Wednesday, when we are reminded not only what can make for the living of a good life, but also the theme of our mortality is front and center. We are told explicitly, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Never forget that you have a limited time in which to live. So, make your choices count for something.
For some years an Englishwoman by the name of Bonnie Ware worked as a palliative care nurse, helping people to die. And over the years she heard people express deep regrets as they lay dying. And so, she decided to write a book about it with the hope that she could help people to live well, so that when they come to the end of their lives, they would not be swallowed up by regret and bitterness. So here are the top five regrets of the dying.
Regret #1: I wish I’d lived a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. Growing up, we have no choice but to mirror the beliefs and values of the people who are raising us. And certainly for many people they continue on path and it works for them. But sometimes people don’t fit that pattern. They have a different vision for their lives. They don’t want to become the doctor or the lawyer or the teacher the parents want them to become. Sometimes it has nothing to do with a career, like the 56 year old woman, dying of cancer, who regretted never hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. That was her big dream. It would have necessitated taking a leave of absence from her work and leaving her family for 6 or 7 months. Her boss supported her dream, and her kids were in college. But her husband would not give his blessing, and so she never did it, and on her death bed she was overcome with anger as well as regret.
Regret #2: I wish I had not worked so hard. Now this regret was quite commonly expressed, but it more often came from men than from women. And it wasn’t only the time lost with their growing family they regretted. Many lamented that they realized far too late that they had failed to develop other interests and passions. They could see their life was out of balance, and when they retired, they discovered how empty they felt. One man complained he had no inspiration. I was inspired by my work, he said. Why did I not allow myself to be inspired by other things as well?
Regret #3: I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings. Both men and women had this regret, though the feelings they failed to express were different. Women often had a very hard time expressing their anger and frustration with people. One woman said her father had bullied her for years, and she never had the courage to tell him, “Back off!” A man regretted failing to tell his wife how fearful he was of failure. I resigned a great job because of that fear. I replaced the job, but I missed the challenge, and now I wonder if I had been able to talk about my fear, openly face it, I might have been able to work it through. And I think I would have been a lot happier.
Regret #4: I wish I had stayed connected to friends. This regret isn’t about the failure to text or email or connect on Facebook. People, expressing this regret, were talking about something much deeper. Someone commented that it had been far too long since she had laughed herself silly with a good friend. And what about crying with a friend? There are not too many people you might feel comfortable crying with, and so this person concluded, you should never let such people go. But she had. Her life was dynamic; she moved around; she changed jobs; she had different interests, book clubs, political commitments. She loved all that stuff, but somehow she realized she had failed to keep and nurture deep relationships. And at the end of her life she mourned that loss, that absence in her life, which was in so many ways full.
And finally Regret #5: I wish I had allowed myself to be happier. In some ways I find this regret the most interesting of all, because it involves an insight that youth often fails to realize, that is, the recognition that happiness is not simply something you fall into. Happiness is not so much about luck as it is about choice. We can choose to be happy.
Now this word happy can be problematic for us, because it tends to be used in a superficial manner, as if happiness were about enjoyment. We are happy, for example, while on vacation, or eating a fine meal with a friend---certainly worthy activities. The word happy is rarely found in the New Testament; joy is the preferred word, though the Old Testament does mention the word.
Happiness does not mean the absence of trouble or toil. We do have hard times; we live through all kinds of tough challenges. We face disappointment and defeat, when we learn just how strong and weak, we are. And such learning is essential for a life well lived. But how much we concentrate on the tough times, the losses, the defeats, the disappointments and how much we count our blessings---those are critical choices. And if we celebrate our blessings; if we cultivate gratitude for them, we will be happier, more joyful.
I am not sure what Jesus would think of these regrets. He inhabited a world so different from ours, a world of limited choice, where people pretty much lived where they were born and did what their parents did. No one had to remind them of their mortality. Death was an intimate experience, while we tend to push the awareness of death away into hospitals and nursing homes until it crashes through our denial. But on this evening, there is no denial. We are called to remember our mortality, to imagine it, to see it up>. If we can do that, we can resolve to live more fully and more gratefully so we do not come to the end full of regret and bitterness.
TEMPTED!
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 26, 2023
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7
Matthew 4: 1-11
The first Sunday of Lent always tells the story of Jesus’ temptations from one of the three synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark or Luke. John’s gospel has no temptation scene, because Jesus from the gospel’s beginning is already the resurrected Christ. Mark’s gospel does not give us many details about the nature of the temptations, while Matthew and Luke tell us by what Jesus was tempted.
The lectionary pairs Matthew with Adam and Eve’s temptation from the book of Genesis, where the primal pair live in a lush garden of plenty. They can have anything they want, except they are commanded to avoid the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they eat of it, they are told they will die. And this is how the serpent tempts them, telling Eve that she will not die, but she will be like God, that is, knowing good and evil. And so, they eat, and once they do, they see themselves for who they are. They now recognize themselves as naked, both figuratively and literally.
Now this story is not literally true, but it is existentially true, that is, it reveals something profoundly true about our human condition. And it also leaves us with a major question to ponder: What would we be without knowledge of good and evil? Our Jewish brothers and sisters believe that the struggle to choose good over evil is exactly what God intends for us to do. Without that struggle and the choice for good over evil, we remain infants, spiritually unformed and perpetually undeveloped.
So, when we turn to the story of Jesus, immediately after his baptism, he is faced with temptation. Ponder this: It is the Spirit who led Jesus to the place of temptation. It is not Satan, who leads him, but the Spirit. Now the translation I use, The New Revised Standard Version, reads “led up,” but some translations use the word drive or driven. The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. That sounds like an aggressive act, something that Jesus could not readily avoid. When you are driven, it is as if you are pushed and pulled by forces you cannot so easily stop or control. So, there is this sense that Jesus cannot avoid what he must face in the wilderness. But he did not go there because he decided to do so on his own. No, he was led or driven there, where for 40 days and nights he would face Satan.
So, what do we make of the Spirit, who drives Jesus to the place of temptation? Are we not rightfully suspicious of people who lead their friends or others to places of temptation? If someone has a problem with drugs or alcohol, how supportive is it to take him to the party, where he knows there will be temptation? Is such a person truly a friend? Each week, we pray the Lord’s Prayer with these words: Lead us not into temptation. But here we have the Spirit doing precisely that. Why?
The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, once noted that Christians make a grave mistake when they think of Jesus as the most admirable person. Well, Luther said, go ahead and admire him, but you should also pity him, because he was the most tempted of all human beings, tempted not only in his humanity, but also in his divinity, tempted to grasp at his God-identity in such a way that his humanity would be overcome by his divinity. And that was a terrible struggle, a struggle none of us would ever want to face. Satan said to him, “If you are the Son of God,” then turn these stones into bread, throw yourself down and let the angels catch you and take all the kingdoms of the world. Satan already knows who Jesus is. He realizes he is the Son of God, and what he is trying to do is get Jesus to use the power Satan knows he has. And power is exactly what temptation is all about.
We often make the assumption that temptation is a sign of weakness. But the opposite is often true. We are often tempted by our strength, by what we are able to do. The stronger one is, the greater the temptation, which is exactly why Luther thought Jesus was worthy of pity. His strength made him vulnerable to temptation in a way that simply is impossible for those without his spiritual identity and strength. As someone once said, “You do not have a sea storm in a puddle.”
Consider how Satan makes his appearance. How does he present the temptation? It isn’t that an actual demonic figure appears and says, “Here I am to tempt you.” Temptation is deceptive, promising what it cannot truly deliver. It can appear in the guise of a friend, a comrade, who is there to help you. Later in the gospel, when Jesus tells his disciples that he must suffer and die, Peter completely rejects the idea. “This must never happen to you,” he insists. And how does Jesus respond? “Get behind me, Satan.” Now certainly Peter thought of himself as a good friend to Jesus and the mere idea that Jesus would suffer and die was a horror to him. But for Jesus the resistance to the hard truth of suffering and death was seen as an alliance with Satan. Think back to the Garden of Eden, where we saw the serpent tempt Adam and Eve. Did he say, “Do you wish to become like me, the serpent?” No, he tempted them with the promise to be like God. IF you eat the fruit, you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
We should understand that the most dangerous temptations are never invitations to debauchery, but rather invitations to great heights. Debauchery is obvious, lacking in subtlety; we know what it looks like and where it leads. It is a fall, and it does ruin lives. But debauchery is not as spiritually dangerous as the fall that comes from grasping at greatness. Consider the myth of Satan’s fall. He was not tempted by debauchery, but by godliness. He wanted to be like God. He was the best and brightest of the angels---the star Lucifer was his name, but he wanted more. He wanted to be more than an angel; he wanted to be like God, and so he fell---fell, according to the genius of Dante’s Divine Comedy, into a block of ice, upside down, unable to move, unable to change and grow. And if there is a better description of hell, I do not know it.
I asked my husband, who has spent most of his adult life as a scientist, doing research and publishing papers in scientific journals if he could think of anyone who had fudged data to make the discovery look very important. “No,” he said. “What prevents that is peer review; your experiments are always repeated by others, and so if you fudge the results, you will be found out.” And then he thought again. “Now I remember, some years back, a famous lab in Korea, I think it was, falsified data. It was shocking to the entire scientific world because the guy was already famous, already highly respected and admired. But he wanted more fame and more admiration, and the result was a big fall. His reputation was ruined. There it is: the great one grasping at more greatness
Finally, let’s consider the wilderness, the place of Jesus’ temptation. The wilderness is both a place of danger, where physical and mental strength may be challenged but it also the place where great things happen. God did not appear to Moses in Midian, where he lived with his wife and father in law and tended sheep. No, God came to Moses in the wilderness, appearing to him in a burning bush that was not consumed. And the wilderness is where the Israelites wandered for forty years as their identity as God’s people was being formed. When they finally walked beyond the wilderness into the promised land, they were not finished people, but they did have a better sense of who they were and who God was calling them to become.
And the same was true for Jesus. This meeting with Satan in the wilderness was part of his identity formation, an important and essential part to be sure. He met Satan and he prevailed, and after that testing, he knew more about himself and his God than he did before he faced the challenge. And he would continue to learn, even as he would continue to be tested.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 26, 2023
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7
Matthew 4: 1-11
The first Sunday of Lent always tells the story of Jesus’ temptations from one of the three synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark or Luke. John’s gospel has no temptation scene, because Jesus from the gospel’s beginning is already the resurrected Christ. Mark’s gospel does not give us many details about the nature of the temptations, while Matthew and Luke tell us by what Jesus was tempted.
The lectionary pairs Matthew with Adam and Eve’s temptation from the book of Genesis, where the primal pair live in a lush garden of plenty. They can have anything they want, except they are commanded to avoid the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they eat of it, they are told they will die. And this is how the serpent tempts them, telling Eve that she will not die, but she will be like God, that is, knowing good and evil. And so, they eat, and once they do, they see themselves for who they are. They now recognize themselves as naked, both figuratively and literally.
Now this story is not literally true, but it is existentially true, that is, it reveals something profoundly true about our human condition. And it also leaves us with a major question to ponder: What would we be without knowledge of good and evil? Our Jewish brothers and sisters believe that the struggle to choose good over evil is exactly what God intends for us to do. Without that struggle and the choice for good over evil, we remain infants, spiritually unformed and perpetually undeveloped.
So, when we turn to the story of Jesus, immediately after his baptism, he is faced with temptation. Ponder this: It is the Spirit who led Jesus to the place of temptation. It is not Satan, who leads him, but the Spirit. Now the translation I use, The New Revised Standard Version, reads “led up,” but some translations use the word drive or driven. The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. That sounds like an aggressive act, something that Jesus could not readily avoid. When you are driven, it is as if you are pushed and pulled by forces you cannot so easily stop or control. So, there is this sense that Jesus cannot avoid what he must face in the wilderness. But he did not go there because he decided to do so on his own. No, he was led or driven there, where for 40 days and nights he would face Satan.
So, what do we make of the Spirit, who drives Jesus to the place of temptation? Are we not rightfully suspicious of people who lead their friends or others to places of temptation? If someone has a problem with drugs or alcohol, how supportive is it to take him to the party, where he knows there will be temptation? Is such a person truly a friend? Each week, we pray the Lord’s Prayer with these words: Lead us not into temptation. But here we have the Spirit doing precisely that. Why?
The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, once noted that Christians make a grave mistake when they think of Jesus as the most admirable person. Well, Luther said, go ahead and admire him, but you should also pity him, because he was the most tempted of all human beings, tempted not only in his humanity, but also in his divinity, tempted to grasp at his God-identity in such a way that his humanity would be overcome by his divinity. And that was a terrible struggle, a struggle none of us would ever want to face. Satan said to him, “If you are the Son of God,” then turn these stones into bread, throw yourself down and let the angels catch you and take all the kingdoms of the world. Satan already knows who Jesus is. He realizes he is the Son of God, and what he is trying to do is get Jesus to use the power Satan knows he has. And power is exactly what temptation is all about.
We often make the assumption that temptation is a sign of weakness. But the opposite is often true. We are often tempted by our strength, by what we are able to do. The stronger one is, the greater the temptation, which is exactly why Luther thought Jesus was worthy of pity. His strength made him vulnerable to temptation in a way that simply is impossible for those without his spiritual identity and strength. As someone once said, “You do not have a sea storm in a puddle.”
Consider how Satan makes his appearance. How does he present the temptation? It isn’t that an actual demonic figure appears and says, “Here I am to tempt you.” Temptation is deceptive, promising what it cannot truly deliver. It can appear in the guise of a friend, a comrade, who is there to help you. Later in the gospel, when Jesus tells his disciples that he must suffer and die, Peter completely rejects the idea. “This must never happen to you,” he insists. And how does Jesus respond? “Get behind me, Satan.” Now certainly Peter thought of himself as a good friend to Jesus and the mere idea that Jesus would suffer and die was a horror to him. But for Jesus the resistance to the hard truth of suffering and death was seen as an alliance with Satan. Think back to the Garden of Eden, where we saw the serpent tempt Adam and Eve. Did he say, “Do you wish to become like me, the serpent?” No, he tempted them with the promise to be like God. IF you eat the fruit, you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
We should understand that the most dangerous temptations are never invitations to debauchery, but rather invitations to great heights. Debauchery is obvious, lacking in subtlety; we know what it looks like and where it leads. It is a fall, and it does ruin lives. But debauchery is not as spiritually dangerous as the fall that comes from grasping at greatness. Consider the myth of Satan’s fall. He was not tempted by debauchery, but by godliness. He wanted to be like God. He was the best and brightest of the angels---the star Lucifer was his name, but he wanted more. He wanted to be more than an angel; he wanted to be like God, and so he fell---fell, according to the genius of Dante’s Divine Comedy, into a block of ice, upside down, unable to move, unable to change and grow. And if there is a better description of hell, I do not know it.
I asked my husband, who has spent most of his adult life as a scientist, doing research and publishing papers in scientific journals if he could think of anyone who had fudged data to make the discovery look very important. “No,” he said. “What prevents that is peer review; your experiments are always repeated by others, and so if you fudge the results, you will be found out.” And then he thought again. “Now I remember, some years back, a famous lab in Korea, I think it was, falsified data. It was shocking to the entire scientific world because the guy was already famous, already highly respected and admired. But he wanted more fame and more admiration, and the result was a big fall. His reputation was ruined. There it is: the great one grasping at more greatness
Finally, let’s consider the wilderness, the place of Jesus’ temptation. The wilderness is both a place of danger, where physical and mental strength may be challenged but it also the place where great things happen. God did not appear to Moses in Midian, where he lived with his wife and father in law and tended sheep. No, God came to Moses in the wilderness, appearing to him in a burning bush that was not consumed. And the wilderness is where the Israelites wandered for forty years as their identity as God’s people was being formed. When they finally walked beyond the wilderness into the promised land, they were not finished people, but they did have a better sense of who they were and who God was calling them to become.
And the same was true for Jesus. This meeting with Satan in the wilderness was part of his identity formation, an important and essential part to be sure. He met Satan and he prevailed, and after that testing, he knew more about himself and his God than he did before he faced the challenge. And he would continue to learn, even as he would continue to be tested.
February 14, 2023
Dear Friends,
The newborn pulled from the rubble of a home, flattened by the earthquake, was Syrian from a rebel held town that was the site of some of the deadliest fighting in the Syrian civil war. Noting that the infant is Syrian reminds us of the fact that Syria has been radically short of earthquake assistance from other nations. Violence in the region is still ongoing, and infrastructure is severely damaged from the war. Roads are poor, and in some cases impassable. There are also sanctions against Syria, though some of them have been lifted to facilitate aid. But sadly, and tragically, very little help has been able to bypass some of the difficulties, which include the Syrian government.
Yet in the midst of so much impossibility, an infant survived against all odds. Her mother, father and four siblings were all killed, and when the newborn was found, she was still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. How long the mother was alive before dying is unknown, but the dead do not deliver babies, so we can assume that she was at least alive when her baby made her entrance into the world. Giving life to her infant daughter was her last act on this earth.
The infant was immediately taken to a hospital, where she was named Aya, which means in Arabic, “a sign of God’s existence.” Numerous pictures of Aya have been taken, as if this were a normal birth in a normal maternity ward. We can see little Aya sleeping and screaming and just staring ahead with her huge, dark eyes. She does look like a thoroughly normal baby, despite the bruising along her spine and skull. The latest word is that she is doing very well and is being nursed by the hospital head’s wife, who has herself recently given birth. There is a great uncle, who claims he wants to raise Aya, but he is now homeless and penniless, so how he would care for the infant is not easy to imagine. But apparently hundreds of people have offered to adopt Aya, for in many of their minds, she is indeed “a sign of God’s existence.”
I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family, which is to say, I don’t know what killed them. Perhaps they were crushed to death. But little Aya managed to survive for 6 days among the piles of rubble that once comprised her family’s home. Newborns, of course, don’t usually eat much the first days of their lives, so that undoubtedly helped her survive.
When bad things happen, there are always the inevitable questions about God’s existence and activity. If Aya is a sign of God’s existence, what do we have to say about all the rest of the destruction, resulting from the earthquake, including the death of Aya’s family? Is God responsible for that as well? We know that earthquakes are caused by moving plates in the earth’s crust. That is the scientific explanation, and that should be enough to let God off the hook. We also know that in Turkey, at least, there was a great deal of bribing that allowed contractors and builders to erect substandard buildings, not up to code. So, God cannot be blamed for that either. That is the old, old story of human greed.
My oldest daughter made a comment to me that she is annoyed when religious people let God off the hook, when bad things happen, but as soon as there is something good, like the survival of little Aya, people rush to give God credit. Perhaps Aya was just plain lucky, she insisted, lucky that her mother was able to give birth before dying, lucky that nothing fell on Aya to crush her, and lucky that she could survive for so many days without nutrition---though the latter is not completely unheard of for newborns. But Aya also had to be found, dug out of the rubble, and because Syria is not getting much help from the rest of the world, it was the local people, who rescued her. It seems to me that a great many things had to come together to allow Aya to be found alive. But sometimes that is how life is: against all odds, things work out.
Faith is really like a lens that we wear, and it does make the world appear different. If there is no faith in God, one can certainly look at Aya’s rescue as nothing more than luck. But, as I said to my daughter, more than luck was involved, because human beings expended much time and energy trying to save lives. And that is not luck; that is commitment, and commitment can come from faith---the faith that God is working with us to render aid where it is needed. Of course, people who do not believe in God also can and do make commitments to help. Atheists risk their lives to save others too, and they do it from a strong ethical commitment to add to the world’s hope and goodness, rather than its despair and evil.
Aya’s survival does not PROVE God’s existence, but for those with faith it can be a sign of God’s participation in human life and history. God does not prevent bad things from happening to either good or bad people. The creation is separate from God, and it operates with its own natural laws. Yet through the eyes of faith one can see glimpses or hints of God---such as Aya’s survival---but if one does not believe, Aya’s survival proves nothing about God.
The world is indeed a very big place, filled with human beings, who look at life from many different angles, allowing them to see many different things. And we do not simply look. We interpret; we bring assumptions to our seeing, which impacts what we see and are able to see. For those of us with faith, we see Aya’s life as a sign of God’s care, God’s capacity to work something good in the midst of great pain and sorrow. I would not try to talk anyone into seeing it my way. Each person must work out his or her own beliefs and be ready and willing to rework them as life presents itself. And we can be confident that life will always present us with new material with which to work.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The newborn pulled from the rubble of a home, flattened by the earthquake, was Syrian from a rebel held town that was the site of some of the deadliest fighting in the Syrian civil war. Noting that the infant is Syrian reminds us of the fact that Syria has been radically short of earthquake assistance from other nations. Violence in the region is still ongoing, and infrastructure is severely damaged from the war. Roads are poor, and in some cases impassable. There are also sanctions against Syria, though some of them have been lifted to facilitate aid. But sadly, and tragically, very little help has been able to bypass some of the difficulties, which include the Syrian government.
Yet in the midst of so much impossibility, an infant survived against all odds. Her mother, father and four siblings were all killed, and when the newborn was found, she was still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. How long the mother was alive before dying is unknown, but the dead do not deliver babies, so we can assume that she was at least alive when her baby made her entrance into the world. Giving life to her infant daughter was her last act on this earth.
The infant was immediately taken to a hospital, where she was named Aya, which means in Arabic, “a sign of God’s existence.” Numerous pictures of Aya have been taken, as if this were a normal birth in a normal maternity ward. We can see little Aya sleeping and screaming and just staring ahead with her huge, dark eyes. She does look like a thoroughly normal baby, despite the bruising along her spine and skull. The latest word is that she is doing very well and is being nursed by the hospital head’s wife, who has herself recently given birth. There is a great uncle, who claims he wants to raise Aya, but he is now homeless and penniless, so how he would care for the infant is not easy to imagine. But apparently hundreds of people have offered to adopt Aya, for in many of their minds, she is indeed “a sign of God’s existence.”
I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family, which is to say, I don’t know what killed them. Perhaps they were crushed to death. But little Aya managed to survive for 6 days among the piles of rubble that once comprised her family’s home. Newborns, of course, don’t usually eat much the first days of their lives, so that undoubtedly helped her survive.
When bad things happen, there are always the inevitable questions about God’s existence and activity. If Aya is a sign of God’s existence, what do we have to say about all the rest of the destruction, resulting from the earthquake, including the death of Aya’s family? Is God responsible for that as well? We know that earthquakes are caused by moving plates in the earth’s crust. That is the scientific explanation, and that should be enough to let God off the hook. We also know that in Turkey, at least, there was a great deal of bribing that allowed contractors and builders to erect substandard buildings, not up to code. So, God cannot be blamed for that either. That is the old, old story of human greed.
My oldest daughter made a comment to me that she is annoyed when religious people let God off the hook, when bad things happen, but as soon as there is something good, like the survival of little Aya, people rush to give God credit. Perhaps Aya was just plain lucky, she insisted, lucky that her mother was able to give birth before dying, lucky that nothing fell on Aya to crush her, and lucky that she could survive for so many days without nutrition---though the latter is not completely unheard of for newborns. But Aya also had to be found, dug out of the rubble, and because Syria is not getting much help from the rest of the world, it was the local people, who rescued her. It seems to me that a great many things had to come together to allow Aya to be found alive. But sometimes that is how life is: against all odds, things work out.
Faith is really like a lens that we wear, and it does make the world appear different. If there is no faith in God, one can certainly look at Aya’s rescue as nothing more than luck. But, as I said to my daughter, more than luck was involved, because human beings expended much time and energy trying to save lives. And that is not luck; that is commitment, and commitment can come from faith---the faith that God is working with us to render aid where it is needed. Of course, people who do not believe in God also can and do make commitments to help. Atheists risk their lives to save others too, and they do it from a strong ethical commitment to add to the world’s hope and goodness, rather than its despair and evil.
Aya’s survival does not PROVE God’s existence, but for those with faith it can be a sign of God’s participation in human life and history. God does not prevent bad things from happening to either good or bad people. The creation is separate from God, and it operates with its own natural laws. Yet through the eyes of faith one can see glimpses or hints of God---such as Aya’s survival---but if one does not believe, Aya’s survival proves nothing about God.
The world is indeed a very big place, filled with human beings, who look at life from many different angles, allowing them to see many different things. And we do not simply look. We interpret; we bring assumptions to our seeing, which impacts what we see and are able to see. For those of us with faith, we see Aya’s life as a sign of God’s care, God’s capacity to work something good in the midst of great pain and sorrow. I would not try to talk anyone into seeing it my way. Each person must work out his or her own beliefs and be ready and willing to rework them as life presents itself. And we can be confident that life will always present us with new material with which to work.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Life: The Game and the Choice
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 12, 2023
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Matthew 5: 21-37
Most of you know what happened in the year 1860: Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. But I bet none of you knows that in the same year a 23 year old man named Milton Bradley invented the Game of Life. On a red and ivory checkerboard of 64 squares, players began on the infancy square, and the one who arrived first at the happy old age square was the winner. The game was based on choices---whether or not they would continue their education, go to work, or get married. You could be doing quite well, moving along toward a happy old age, and then suddenly lose it all---by making a bad choice: gambling, drinking, stealing. If you end up in prison, you almost always lose the game, also, if you go into politics.
One hundred years later, 1960, the same year John F. Kennedy was elected President, the Milton Bradley Company issued a new game of Life. The original game, which was about virtue, vice and the pursuit of happiness was reinvented as a game about consumerism. The players got fake money as well as fake insurance and fake stock certificates. In this version the finish is not about happy old age. It is all about money; the most important squares are marked, “pay day,” and whoever has the most money at the end of the game wins.
Though different editions have been issued, the game did not change much until 2008, when a new version, The Game of Life: Twists and Turns, came on the market. In this version there is no real finish or goal, no better or worse choices. The words on the box say, “A thousand ways to live your life. You choose.” Money still plays an important role, but there is no cash, only a credit card to keep track of points. Different choices do bring different points, but the points don’t seem to be based on what we would call value or virtue, because you can get the same number of points for scuba diving as for donating a kidney or earning a PhD. And in the new game there is no square marked finish because there is no finish. There is a time limit, and when time runs out, you add up the points to determine who wins the game of life.
Now certainly Moses had a very different take on the Game of Life. As told in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses is about to die, and he knows it. He has been leading the Israelites for 40 years on their journey toward the Promised Land, and it has been anything but easy. He has had to deal with the people’s regret that they ever left behind the fleshpots of Egypt. He had to cope with their whining and complaining. He went up the mountain to receive from God The 10 Commandments and what happened when he was gone? The people built a golden calf to worship and forgot all about the God, who brought them out of Egypt. No wonder he became enraged and threw the Tablets on the ground, and for that anger, he is being prevented from crossing into the Promised Land. He could have been bitter, but according to the story, Moses gathered the people on the Plain of Moab to give them a final talk, and he told them that life isn’t about accruing money, or earning a comfortable retirement. It isn’t even about family; it is finally about God. Obedience to God, faithfulness to the covenant, he insisted, is a matter of life and death. Choice life, he said, that you and your descendants may live.
Now you should understand that most biblical scholars believe that the writing of Deuteronomy occurred after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire in 587 BC, about 550 years after Moses lived. So this story of Moses is not an eyewitness account; it is an interpretation of the meaning of the past. These Jewish historians said that God wanted the people to choose life, but the problem was that the people did not always do so, sometimes choosing lesser values and virtues.
Choose life: Isn’t that also what Jesus wanted his followers to do? But the bar---at least as Matthew tells the story--- is suddenly raised higher. It is the new law, the higher righteousness, which Jesus brings, insisting that not only should adultery and murder be avoided, but also lustful thoughts and anger. Suddenly we are judged not only for our actions, but also for our thoughts and feelings. We don’t get credit for restraining our anger and rage; we are not supposed to have anger at all. And to top it off, if our eyes or hands cause us sin, pluck it out or cut it off! Of course, these words are extreme, and not meant to be taken literally, but such harsh language does push us to consider what meaning the text can have for us today.
It is true: we are not simply our actions. Thoughts and feelings matter. If we find ourselves filled with anger and resentment---not just now and then; after all, we do have examples in scripture of Jesus being angry, but if anger becomes our mode of being; if people describe us as an angry person, or jealous, or bitter---that says something significant about our character and the kind of person we are. Choosing life in the sense that Moses and Jesus intended means not that we never experience some of these feelings like anger or lust or bitterness, but it does mean we do not remain stuck in them; we move on and choose life.
When I worked at Nassau County Medical Center as a chaplain over 30 years ago, one of my assignments was the burn unit. There was this one case, a 21 year old student at Hofstra University named Danny. He had been out with his friends one Saturday night, drinking, and he came home in the early morning hours. Well, the apartment he shared with his roommates caught fire, and because his roommates knew he had been out, they went to his room to check if he had returned. He wasn’t there, so they assumed he had not yet come home. But Danny was there---in the bathroom, throwing up his guts, because he had drunk himself sick. He passed out, oblivious to the fire, and when the firemen found him, he was lying under a collapsed ceiling, literally being cooked to death.
Burned over 80% of his body---third and even fourth degree burns, meaning his nerve cells were damaged, Danny was not expected to live---but against all odds he did---although he lost both hands above his wrists and both legs above his knees. I never saw what he looked like, because he was completely covered with bandages. In a few months Danny began to talk, and in about four months, he was speaking quite well. He and I talked quite a bit; he would tell me all about his basketball playing at Hofstra. “I have never been much of a student,” he admitted. “I have always been about physical activity.”
One day maybe around 8 months after the accident, I came into the day room, and there was Danny, all bandaged up, sitting in his wheel chair, and holding between his handless arms a basketball. “Hey,” he said to me, “look what my doc did. He put up the basketball hoop for me. He wanted to put it lower, but I said, no way, I want it regulation height. I’m not too good at it yet, but I will keep practicing my shots until I get it.” And he did improve, day after day after day until weeks turned into months. “Danny, you are amazing,” I said to him one afternoon. “If I were you, I would not want to live under these circumstances, and yet I have never heard you complain, never once heard a word of anger or even regret out of your mouth.”
Danny put down his basketball, and his eyes, which were the only part of his body not covered, looked straight at me. “Well”, he said, “the way I figure it is this. I don’t believe in God; I don’t believe there is any life beyond this one, and I will be damned if I give up on the only life I am ever going to have. I thought being a good basketball player at Hofstra was my greatest physical challenge, but I was wrong. This is, and I don’t plan to fail.”
Choose life. Danny did, and he chose it without any ambivalence or ambiguity at all. He was 21 at the time, and I cannot help but wonder how that choice looks today----if he is still alive. Choose life; choose God and goodness. And so, we try, even as we realize from tough experiences that we cannot always see clearly. We peer through a mist of grayness---or as the Apostle Paul would put it--- we see through a glass darkly---and yet, even without clarity, we still play the game of life, still we must choose. Choose life, said Moses, that you and your descendants may live. Choose life, said Jesus, that you might have it fully and abundantly.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 12, 2023
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Matthew 5: 21-37
Most of you know what happened in the year 1860: Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. But I bet none of you knows that in the same year a 23 year old man named Milton Bradley invented the Game of Life. On a red and ivory checkerboard of 64 squares, players began on the infancy square, and the one who arrived first at the happy old age square was the winner. The game was based on choices---whether or not they would continue their education, go to work, or get married. You could be doing quite well, moving along toward a happy old age, and then suddenly lose it all---by making a bad choice: gambling, drinking, stealing. If you end up in prison, you almost always lose the game, also, if you go into politics.
One hundred years later, 1960, the same year John F. Kennedy was elected President, the Milton Bradley Company issued a new game of Life. The original game, which was about virtue, vice and the pursuit of happiness was reinvented as a game about consumerism. The players got fake money as well as fake insurance and fake stock certificates. In this version the finish is not about happy old age. It is all about money; the most important squares are marked, “pay day,” and whoever has the most money at the end of the game wins.
Though different editions have been issued, the game did not change much until 2008, when a new version, The Game of Life: Twists and Turns, came on the market. In this version there is no real finish or goal, no better or worse choices. The words on the box say, “A thousand ways to live your life. You choose.” Money still plays an important role, but there is no cash, only a credit card to keep track of points. Different choices do bring different points, but the points don’t seem to be based on what we would call value or virtue, because you can get the same number of points for scuba diving as for donating a kidney or earning a PhD. And in the new game there is no square marked finish because there is no finish. There is a time limit, and when time runs out, you add up the points to determine who wins the game of life.
Now certainly Moses had a very different take on the Game of Life. As told in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses is about to die, and he knows it. He has been leading the Israelites for 40 years on their journey toward the Promised Land, and it has been anything but easy. He has had to deal with the people’s regret that they ever left behind the fleshpots of Egypt. He had to cope with their whining and complaining. He went up the mountain to receive from God The 10 Commandments and what happened when he was gone? The people built a golden calf to worship and forgot all about the God, who brought them out of Egypt. No wonder he became enraged and threw the Tablets on the ground, and for that anger, he is being prevented from crossing into the Promised Land. He could have been bitter, but according to the story, Moses gathered the people on the Plain of Moab to give them a final talk, and he told them that life isn’t about accruing money, or earning a comfortable retirement. It isn’t even about family; it is finally about God. Obedience to God, faithfulness to the covenant, he insisted, is a matter of life and death. Choice life, he said, that you and your descendants may live.
Now you should understand that most biblical scholars believe that the writing of Deuteronomy occurred after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire in 587 BC, about 550 years after Moses lived. So this story of Moses is not an eyewitness account; it is an interpretation of the meaning of the past. These Jewish historians said that God wanted the people to choose life, but the problem was that the people did not always do so, sometimes choosing lesser values and virtues.
Choose life: Isn’t that also what Jesus wanted his followers to do? But the bar---at least as Matthew tells the story--- is suddenly raised higher. It is the new law, the higher righteousness, which Jesus brings, insisting that not only should adultery and murder be avoided, but also lustful thoughts and anger. Suddenly we are judged not only for our actions, but also for our thoughts and feelings. We don’t get credit for restraining our anger and rage; we are not supposed to have anger at all. And to top it off, if our eyes or hands cause us sin, pluck it out or cut it off! Of course, these words are extreme, and not meant to be taken literally, but such harsh language does push us to consider what meaning the text can have for us today.
It is true: we are not simply our actions. Thoughts and feelings matter. If we find ourselves filled with anger and resentment---not just now and then; after all, we do have examples in scripture of Jesus being angry, but if anger becomes our mode of being; if people describe us as an angry person, or jealous, or bitter---that says something significant about our character and the kind of person we are. Choosing life in the sense that Moses and Jesus intended means not that we never experience some of these feelings like anger or lust or bitterness, but it does mean we do not remain stuck in them; we move on and choose life.
When I worked at Nassau County Medical Center as a chaplain over 30 years ago, one of my assignments was the burn unit. There was this one case, a 21 year old student at Hofstra University named Danny. He had been out with his friends one Saturday night, drinking, and he came home in the early morning hours. Well, the apartment he shared with his roommates caught fire, and because his roommates knew he had been out, they went to his room to check if he had returned. He wasn’t there, so they assumed he had not yet come home. But Danny was there---in the bathroom, throwing up his guts, because he had drunk himself sick. He passed out, oblivious to the fire, and when the firemen found him, he was lying under a collapsed ceiling, literally being cooked to death.
Burned over 80% of his body---third and even fourth degree burns, meaning his nerve cells were damaged, Danny was not expected to live---but against all odds he did---although he lost both hands above his wrists and both legs above his knees. I never saw what he looked like, because he was completely covered with bandages. In a few months Danny began to talk, and in about four months, he was speaking quite well. He and I talked quite a bit; he would tell me all about his basketball playing at Hofstra. “I have never been much of a student,” he admitted. “I have always been about physical activity.”
One day maybe around 8 months after the accident, I came into the day room, and there was Danny, all bandaged up, sitting in his wheel chair, and holding between his handless arms a basketball. “Hey,” he said to me, “look what my doc did. He put up the basketball hoop for me. He wanted to put it lower, but I said, no way, I want it regulation height. I’m not too good at it yet, but I will keep practicing my shots until I get it.” And he did improve, day after day after day until weeks turned into months. “Danny, you are amazing,” I said to him one afternoon. “If I were you, I would not want to live under these circumstances, and yet I have never heard you complain, never once heard a word of anger or even regret out of your mouth.”
Danny put down his basketball, and his eyes, which were the only part of his body not covered, looked straight at me. “Well”, he said, “the way I figure it is this. I don’t believe in God; I don’t believe there is any life beyond this one, and I will be damned if I give up on the only life I am ever going to have. I thought being a good basketball player at Hofstra was my greatest physical challenge, but I was wrong. This is, and I don’t plan to fail.”
Choose life. Danny did, and he chose it without any ambivalence or ambiguity at all. He was 21 at the time, and I cannot help but wonder how that choice looks today----if he is still alive. Choose life; choose God and goodness. And so, we try, even as we realize from tough experiences that we cannot always see clearly. We peer through a mist of grayness---or as the Apostle Paul would put it--- we see through a glass darkly---and yet, even without clarity, we still play the game of life, still we must choose. Choose life, said Moses, that you and your descendants may live. Choose life, said Jesus, that you might have it fully and abundantly.
February 7, 2023
Dear Friends,
Next Tuesday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, and most of you, I would guess, know very little about its history. Though advertising and stores push the purchase of cards, candy and other romantic items, no one bothers to explain what the genesis of the day is. And most people are too busy and preoccupied to care.
Valentine’s day really begins with a legend about a man named Valentine, born in 176 and died on February 14, 273. He was a priest or perhaps even a bishop, who found himself in big trouble because he was performing Christian marriages for Roman soldiers at a time when such a practice was forbidden. And so, he was imprisoned and given a death sentence. While awaiting execution, he made friends with his jailer’s young daughter, and the story (or legend) goes that he healed her of her blindness and deafness, which led to the jailer’s household converting to Christianity! Right before his execution he wrote a letter of farewell to the child and signed it, Your Valentine.
It’s a good story, but how do we move from there to candy hearts and romantic cards? It seems to be a disconnect. Well, it is, but there is another story that comes from one of the English language’s great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in England during the 14th century. In 1382 Chaucer wrote a romantic poem about the gathering of birds, called A Parlement of Foules, when fowls came to choose and claim their mates. The occasion for the writing of the poem was to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard ll of England to Anne of Bohemia. Chaucer wrote, “For tis was on seynt Volantynys Day/When every fowl comyeth there to chese his make.” (For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, When every fowl comes there his mate to take.)
Chaucer was a major poet, whose influence should not be underestimated. During the Middle Ages, the age of courtly love, knights would often write romantic poems and ballads to their lady loves, often forbidden love, since the women were usually married. By the 18th century in England Valentine’s Day had assumed the character we know today: the sending of flowers, cards and candy. By the 1790’s printers had already begun to make a limited number of cards with verses printed on them, known as mechanical cards, but with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the holiday really exploded. In the year 1835 over 60,000 Valentine cards were sent out, and when the postage stamp was invented in 1840 the number of cards jumped to over 400,000!
Valentine’s Day did not remain an English tradition, eventually spreading to the United States and other nations. The estimation is that 190 million Valentine’s cards are sent through the mail in the United States alone and hundreds of millions of cards are exchanged by students in school. At least that’s what happened in school when I was growing up and my own children also brought valentines to school as well. The rule was pretty strict: no one was to left out, so the teacher would send home the names of all the kids in the classroom to prevent hurt feelings---a very good idea.
Love is a major theme in the bible, but it is not romantic love which is celebrated by Jesus or the Apostle Paul. When Paul wrote of love in his great Letter to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, he says, “So faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” He is not referring here to eros, the Greek word for romantic love. He is speaking of agape, the love Christians are commanded to have for all people, even the enemy. It is a love that desires for people a full and abundant life that knows what truly matters, what truly makes for a fulfilled life by desiring the ”right things.”
Though Paul’s Letter in Corinthians is often read at weddings, which I think is a misuse of the text’s meaning, there is a great text on love in the Old Testament: The Song of Songs. The Christian Church tried to teach that this love poem is about the love between Jesus and the Church, but Old Testament scholars (like Harrell Beck, who taught me Old Testament at Boston University) say, “Don’t believe it. This is about sensual love.” And yes, I think they are right.
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Next Tuesday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, and most of you, I would guess, know very little about its history. Though advertising and stores push the purchase of cards, candy and other romantic items, no one bothers to explain what the genesis of the day is. And most people are too busy and preoccupied to care.
Valentine’s day really begins with a legend about a man named Valentine, born in 176 and died on February 14, 273. He was a priest or perhaps even a bishop, who found himself in big trouble because he was performing Christian marriages for Roman soldiers at a time when such a practice was forbidden. And so, he was imprisoned and given a death sentence. While awaiting execution, he made friends with his jailer’s young daughter, and the story (or legend) goes that he healed her of her blindness and deafness, which led to the jailer’s household converting to Christianity! Right before his execution he wrote a letter of farewell to the child and signed it, Your Valentine.
It’s a good story, but how do we move from there to candy hearts and romantic cards? It seems to be a disconnect. Well, it is, but there is another story that comes from one of the English language’s great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in England during the 14th century. In 1382 Chaucer wrote a romantic poem about the gathering of birds, called A Parlement of Foules, when fowls came to choose and claim their mates. The occasion for the writing of the poem was to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard ll of England to Anne of Bohemia. Chaucer wrote, “For tis was on seynt Volantynys Day/When every fowl comyeth there to chese his make.” (For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, When every fowl comes there his mate to take.)
Chaucer was a major poet, whose influence should not be underestimated. During the Middle Ages, the age of courtly love, knights would often write romantic poems and ballads to their lady loves, often forbidden love, since the women were usually married. By the 18th century in England Valentine’s Day had assumed the character we know today: the sending of flowers, cards and candy. By the 1790’s printers had already begun to make a limited number of cards with verses printed on them, known as mechanical cards, but with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the holiday really exploded. In the year 1835 over 60,000 Valentine cards were sent out, and when the postage stamp was invented in 1840 the number of cards jumped to over 400,000!
Valentine’s Day did not remain an English tradition, eventually spreading to the United States and other nations. The estimation is that 190 million Valentine’s cards are sent through the mail in the United States alone and hundreds of millions of cards are exchanged by students in school. At least that’s what happened in school when I was growing up and my own children also brought valentines to school as well. The rule was pretty strict: no one was to left out, so the teacher would send home the names of all the kids in the classroom to prevent hurt feelings---a very good idea.
Love is a major theme in the bible, but it is not romantic love which is celebrated by Jesus or the Apostle Paul. When Paul wrote of love in his great Letter to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, he says, “So faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” He is not referring here to eros, the Greek word for romantic love. He is speaking of agape, the love Christians are commanded to have for all people, even the enemy. It is a love that desires for people a full and abundant life that knows what truly matters, what truly makes for a fulfilled life by desiring the ”right things.”
Though Paul’s Letter in Corinthians is often read at weddings, which I think is a misuse of the text’s meaning, there is a great text on love in the Old Testament: The Song of Songs. The Christian Church tried to teach that this love poem is about the love between Jesus and the Church, but Old Testament scholars (like Harrell Beck, who taught me Old Testament at Boston University) say, “Don’t believe it. This is about sensual love.” And yes, I think they are right.
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Call of Righteousness
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 5, 2023
Isaiah 58: 1-9a
Matthew 5: 13-20
Our two readings this morning from Isaiah and Matthew are similar to our readings from last Sunday, when Micah reminded the people that God does not want burnt offerings but rather the doing of justice, the loving of kindness and humility before God. And then from Matthew we heard the Beatitudes, a list of blessings upon people whom the world often ignores and even denigrates, like the poor in spirit and the meek. Isaiah has a very similar theme to Micah in that he repeats the idea that God wants justice---open your hearts to the hungry, provide abundantly for those who are afflicted; bring the homeless poor into your house. And then in Matthew Jesus continues his Sermon on the Mount by insisting on the law of higher righteousness.
Jesus began his sermon with blessings, which are simply given, not earned, but now he moves to expectations. You are the salt of the earth, he says, so keep your saltiness. Guard, in other words, what makes you my followers, by conforming to the law of higher righteousness. Let your light shine; let others see what it is you are about by loving your enemies and forgiving as many times as you are wronged. This law of higher righteousness is supposed to be beyond righteousness, which is laid out in Jewish law. Be just in all matters; protect the foreigner, care for the widow and orphan. But Jesus apparently wanted more than conformity to Jewish Law. He wanted something bigger, higher righteousness.
I found myself thinking about this word righteousness, when a week ago Friday, I was reminded that it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. And that brought to mind, my 2006 trip to Israel, a joint Christian-Jewish venture. One of the sites we visited was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Outside the building we walked along The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations, where the names of non Jews, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, are posted next to trees planted in their memory. It was a very, very humbling experience, because you cannot help but ask yourself, What would I have done? Would I have acted to save the lives of Jewish people at the risk of my own? And are such courageous acts merely righteous, or are they of a higher righteousness?
I am now reading a book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan. Ever since I was 12 and saw the original movie and then read The Diary I have been fascinated by her story. The book is an effort to discover once and for all how and who it was who betrayed the family and with the recent availability of computers, the expertise of some very talented investigators, including one from the FBI, and finally extensive interviews, the hope is that a definitive conclusion can be reached. I have not yet finished the book, so I cannot tell you if the mystery has been solved, but what fascinates me far more than the betrayer, are the five righteous people, who risked their lives to hide these eight Jews. None of them expressly mentioned Jesus or faith. They were all gentiles, part of Christian nations, Austria, Germany or Holland, all with state churches. But I read nothing that indicated to me that religion or church played any role in their decision. What is clear is that these five people expressed a tremendous loyalty and obligation, particularly to Otto Frank, the father, who had originally owned the business operating in the building where the Secret Annex was. He had tried to figure out a plan to leave Holland, but he was blocked from getting visas to various countries, Cuba, Switzerland, the United States, and then once Germany invaded, getting out became even more difficult. So going into hiding seemed the best plan
Otto needed help, so he asked for it, and Jan Mies, the husband of one of the women, Miep, who was herself central in the hiding, said that the motivation was not heroism. “It came down to being asked,” Jan said. “You were asked to help, and so you said, “Yes.” It never occurred to you to say No.” Miep added, “It was logical and self-evident that we should help. We could do something; we could help these people, who were powerless. That was all there was to it. Of course, sometimes fear invaded our lives, and we would think, “This cannot go on.” But the care for these people and the compassion you felt for what they went through---that finally won out. In other words, righteousness won out, and the names of these five people are on The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations in the city of Jerusalem.
Most of us will never face something so radically demanding, so we will never know how much righteousness of which we are capable. We face small requests---how much money to give to the church, how many pairs of socks to donate or how many children’s names to take at Christmas time for Covenant to Care, whether to give or not to the person, begging on the street. And then there is the request for time: Will you help at the local food bank or tutoring some kids in reading at an afterschool program? None of these examples is a life shattering event, nothing like what those five people faced in hiding 8 Jews in a Secret Annex in Amsterdam during some of the darkest days in human history. None of these people were trying to be heroic. They were doing what they could do. And perhaps that is how righteousness or even higher righteousness sometimes works. It can start out with small acts, and because no one can ever see the full picture of the help that is offered, sometimes what begins small, makes a major impact.
My husband has a student with a very traumatic background. Her parents are Laotian, thoroughly traumatized by the war in Asia. Laos remains the most bombed nation in the world, and her mother spent her life living in a cave until she came to this country around the age of 20. Neither the mother nor father was capable of parenting their daughter, so she pretty much raised herself, and some of her stories are harrowing. “How did you ever get to Wesleyan?” my husband asked in disbelief. “It was all because of a guidance counselor, who told me I was smart and made me come into her office after school and sat with me while I filled out all these different college applications. I didn’t want to do it, because I thought it was hopeless. I didn’t have a dime to go to college, but a number of times she came to my last class of the day and almost dragged me down to her office. And so here I am, now applying to PhD programs in biology all because of that guidance counselor, who started it all.”
That guidance counselor was doing a job, but she was doing it extremely well---above and beyond we would say. And sometimes that is all it takes to make a big difference. Righteousness means to live in the right way, to care in the right way, which sometimes means seeing possibilities, where others might see only roadblocks and difficulties. There were many roadblocks the Jews of Isaiah’s
day faced after they returned to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon. And the same was true for the people who came to hear Jesus preach and teach during the very tough days of Roman occupation. And those righteousness gentiles who saved Jews during the Second World War, they lived under harrowing conditions that could have cost them their lives. But somehow all these people heard the call of righteousness and responded. Indeed, these people, who walked in darkness, saw a great light. May the same be true for us.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
February 5, 2023
Isaiah 58: 1-9a
Matthew 5: 13-20
Our two readings this morning from Isaiah and Matthew are similar to our readings from last Sunday, when Micah reminded the people that God does not want burnt offerings but rather the doing of justice, the loving of kindness and humility before God. And then from Matthew we heard the Beatitudes, a list of blessings upon people whom the world often ignores and even denigrates, like the poor in spirit and the meek. Isaiah has a very similar theme to Micah in that he repeats the idea that God wants justice---open your hearts to the hungry, provide abundantly for those who are afflicted; bring the homeless poor into your house. And then in Matthew Jesus continues his Sermon on the Mount by insisting on the law of higher righteousness.
Jesus began his sermon with blessings, which are simply given, not earned, but now he moves to expectations. You are the salt of the earth, he says, so keep your saltiness. Guard, in other words, what makes you my followers, by conforming to the law of higher righteousness. Let your light shine; let others see what it is you are about by loving your enemies and forgiving as many times as you are wronged. This law of higher righteousness is supposed to be beyond righteousness, which is laid out in Jewish law. Be just in all matters; protect the foreigner, care for the widow and orphan. But Jesus apparently wanted more than conformity to Jewish Law. He wanted something bigger, higher righteousness.
I found myself thinking about this word righteousness, when a week ago Friday, I was reminded that it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. And that brought to mind, my 2006 trip to Israel, a joint Christian-Jewish venture. One of the sites we visited was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Outside the building we walked along The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations, where the names of non Jews, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, are posted next to trees planted in their memory. It was a very, very humbling experience, because you cannot help but ask yourself, What would I have done? Would I have acted to save the lives of Jewish people at the risk of my own? And are such courageous acts merely righteous, or are they of a higher righteousness?
I am now reading a book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan. Ever since I was 12 and saw the original movie and then read The Diary I have been fascinated by her story. The book is an effort to discover once and for all how and who it was who betrayed the family and with the recent availability of computers, the expertise of some very talented investigators, including one from the FBI, and finally extensive interviews, the hope is that a definitive conclusion can be reached. I have not yet finished the book, so I cannot tell you if the mystery has been solved, but what fascinates me far more than the betrayer, are the five righteous people, who risked their lives to hide these eight Jews. None of them expressly mentioned Jesus or faith. They were all gentiles, part of Christian nations, Austria, Germany or Holland, all with state churches. But I read nothing that indicated to me that religion or church played any role in their decision. What is clear is that these five people expressed a tremendous loyalty and obligation, particularly to Otto Frank, the father, who had originally owned the business operating in the building where the Secret Annex was. He had tried to figure out a plan to leave Holland, but he was blocked from getting visas to various countries, Cuba, Switzerland, the United States, and then once Germany invaded, getting out became even more difficult. So going into hiding seemed the best plan
Otto needed help, so he asked for it, and Jan Mies, the husband of one of the women, Miep, who was herself central in the hiding, said that the motivation was not heroism. “It came down to being asked,” Jan said. “You were asked to help, and so you said, “Yes.” It never occurred to you to say No.” Miep added, “It was logical and self-evident that we should help. We could do something; we could help these people, who were powerless. That was all there was to it. Of course, sometimes fear invaded our lives, and we would think, “This cannot go on.” But the care for these people and the compassion you felt for what they went through---that finally won out. In other words, righteousness won out, and the names of these five people are on The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations in the city of Jerusalem.
Most of us will never face something so radically demanding, so we will never know how much righteousness of which we are capable. We face small requests---how much money to give to the church, how many pairs of socks to donate or how many children’s names to take at Christmas time for Covenant to Care, whether to give or not to the person, begging on the street. And then there is the request for time: Will you help at the local food bank or tutoring some kids in reading at an afterschool program? None of these examples is a life shattering event, nothing like what those five people faced in hiding 8 Jews in a Secret Annex in Amsterdam during some of the darkest days in human history. None of these people were trying to be heroic. They were doing what they could do. And perhaps that is how righteousness or even higher righteousness sometimes works. It can start out with small acts, and because no one can ever see the full picture of the help that is offered, sometimes what begins small, makes a major impact.
My husband has a student with a very traumatic background. Her parents are Laotian, thoroughly traumatized by the war in Asia. Laos remains the most bombed nation in the world, and her mother spent her life living in a cave until she came to this country around the age of 20. Neither the mother nor father was capable of parenting their daughter, so she pretty much raised herself, and some of her stories are harrowing. “How did you ever get to Wesleyan?” my husband asked in disbelief. “It was all because of a guidance counselor, who told me I was smart and made me come into her office after school and sat with me while I filled out all these different college applications. I didn’t want to do it, because I thought it was hopeless. I didn’t have a dime to go to college, but a number of times she came to my last class of the day and almost dragged me down to her office. And so here I am, now applying to PhD programs in biology all because of that guidance counselor, who started it all.”
That guidance counselor was doing a job, but she was doing it extremely well---above and beyond we would say. And sometimes that is all it takes to make a big difference. Righteousness means to live in the right way, to care in the right way, which sometimes means seeing possibilities, where others might see only roadblocks and difficulties. There were many roadblocks the Jews of Isaiah’s
day faced after they returned to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon. And the same was true for the people who came to hear Jesus preach and teach during the very tough days of Roman occupation. And those righteousness gentiles who saved Jews during the Second World War, they lived under harrowing conditions that could have cost them their lives. But somehow all these people heard the call of righteousness and responded. Indeed, these people, who walked in darkness, saw a great light. May the same be true for us.
Expectations & Blessings
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational, Unionville, CT
January 29, 2023
Micah: 6: 1-8
Matthew 5: 1-12
The lectionary choices for today pair together a reading from the prophet Micah and the Beatitudes or blessings from Matthew’s Gospel. So, we have here expectations and blessings, and I wonder if the people who decide on the lectionary texts---a group of biblical scholars, teachers and clergy--- intend for us to reflect on the relationship between God’s expectations of us and the blessings we receive.
Let’s begin with God’s expectations as we heard them in these verses from the Book of Micah. Micah lived during the reign of King Hezekiah, toward the end of the 8th century B.C., an unsettled time for the people of Judah, the southern kingdom, because the northern kingdom, Israel, had fallen under the control of Assyria. And so, Judah lived in fear of a similar fate. But that fear was not Micah’s primary worry. His concern was social justice. He reminded God’s people of the covenant. God would be their God and they would be God’s people, which meant that God had certain expectations of them, obligations they were to fulfill.
The Old Testament Book of Leviticus is replete with all kinds of rules and regulations about worship and right living, including ethical rules for the treatment of widows, orphans and strangers. It’s very big on ritual--- proper hand washing and food preparation rules, animal sacrifices and monetary offerings. People who had wealth, for example, were expected to sacrifice a highly prized and perfect lamb while the poorer classes might only offer a turtledove. These expectations were laid out in a very exacting manner in Leviticus, and most Christians, including clergy, simply ignore much of that book because it is so far removed from the way we conduct our lives. But it was not far from Micah’s world, and yet the proper observance of ritual was NOT Micah’s concern.
Micah has God pose a question to the people: What is it I have done that you fail to honor me? Tell me why you contend against me? How have I failed you? God expects an answer, but God does not get one. From the people’s side, there is silence. And so, God speaks, listing all that God has accomplished on behalf of the people---liberation from Egypt and victory over other oppressors; the giving of great leaders, including a woman by the name of Miriam, the protection of the people from the east to the west of Jordan---all this God has accomplished yet the people neither remember nor care. And so, God tells them flat out: what God desires above all else is not rigorous conformity to ritual. not the giving of burnt offerings---but rather the doing of justice and kindness and walking humbly with God. Do this and live the full and abundant life God desires for you. This does not mean that God rewards you with blessings, because you have done what you are expected to do. Blessings abound in life (for the unrighteous as well as the righteous) because it is the nature of God to bless. And the living of a righteous life is in and of itself a blessing, even if life might prove to be full of challenges and difficulties as it was in Micah’s time as well as in Jesus’ day.
The section from Matthew we read this morning, known as the Beatitudes, is part of the Sermon on the Mount. But notice that we hear nothing about God’s expectations. Jesus, as the new Moses, has gone up the mountain to teach, and here his teaching is the pronouncement of blessings upon all kinds of people, who are struggling with different challenges---depression, grief, lack of confidence, persecution, working on behalf of peace and mercy in a world that often prefers to give neither. When Moses ascended the mountain, he received the law from God, which are a series of commands: Do not lie, kill or steal; honor your parents, etc. But here up on the mountain, Jesus is not giving commands but is offering blessings. The Greek word, makarios, which is translated here as blessed, has a wide range of meanings that includes fortunate, happy, even privileged. But when Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, the persecuted, those hungering for righteousness and working for peace as blessed, we are a bit bewildered, because happy and privileged and fortunate are not the words that immediately come to our minds for such people.
Part of the reason we have difficulty with Jesus calling them blessed is because we tend to think in terms of happiness, and quite frankly, the American definition of happiness is not the same as the ancient world’s understanding. While Thomas Jefferson enshrined the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence as an endowed right, he certainly understood what the Greek and Roman philosophers meant by happiness, which concerned the pursuit of the good, the just, the true, the beautiful. Perhaps happiness has a long history of being misunderstood, which might explain its absence from the gospels. We never hear Jesus promising people happiness, but rather blessings. And people whose lives are full of hardship and struggle, such as the poor in spirit, the grieving, and the persecuted, may not be happy in our conventional understanding of the word, yet nonetheless they can be blessed and feel blessed.
A few weeks ago, our nation celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, when we remembered and celebrated not only his personal journey, but also the journey he pushed our nation to take. I recall very well his assassination in April, 1968, when I was a college freshman at the U. of Chicago, and I could see the flames and smoke to the north and south of the campus. In fact, our campus was full of National Guard tanks, since as the second largest land owner in the city of Chicago, after the Roman Catholic Church, the university, founded by J.D. Rockefeller, was going to be protected.
So yes, I remember all that, but I also remember Dr. King’s speech right before his death, which was played over and over again on both the radio and television. He said in his speech that he was happy; he had no fear of any man, and that although he would like to live a long life, if that was not to be, he was still happy. And I remember thinking: how could he be happy. I mean there were so many problems, so much that was not right with the country. Racism and the Vietnam War were raging. What could he mean by being happy? At 18 I was far too young to know and understand, but now, after all these many decades I think I grasp his meaning. The kind of happiness King was referring to, was the blessedness of a life that tries without (ever fully succeeding) to do what Micah said God desires, to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. It was the blessedness of which Jesus spoke, when he reminded his hearers that God’s blessings are God’s to give, not rewards for being successful.
King did not think he was successful. So many times, he failed, yet he felt that God was with him; he was surrounded by God’s love, God’s mercy and yes, God’s forgiveness. And that was blessing enough. It did not protect him from the assassin’s bullet, but then Jesus did not promise protection. He promised blessings, and King felt and knew that God gave him abundant blessings. Blessedness is not about protection from worldly harm. After all, Jesus died on a cross. And yet the blessings came, and they continue to come. The question is: Are we willing to receive them, not in the form that we might want--- success and comfort---but in the form that God gives, if we have the eyes and the spirit and the desire to see and accept.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational, Unionville, CT
January 29, 2023
Micah: 6: 1-8
Matthew 5: 1-12
The lectionary choices for today pair together a reading from the prophet Micah and the Beatitudes or blessings from Matthew’s Gospel. So, we have here expectations and blessings, and I wonder if the people who decide on the lectionary texts---a group of biblical scholars, teachers and clergy--- intend for us to reflect on the relationship between God’s expectations of us and the blessings we receive.
Let’s begin with God’s expectations as we heard them in these verses from the Book of Micah. Micah lived during the reign of King Hezekiah, toward the end of the 8th century B.C., an unsettled time for the people of Judah, the southern kingdom, because the northern kingdom, Israel, had fallen under the control of Assyria. And so, Judah lived in fear of a similar fate. But that fear was not Micah’s primary worry. His concern was social justice. He reminded God’s people of the covenant. God would be their God and they would be God’s people, which meant that God had certain expectations of them, obligations they were to fulfill.
The Old Testament Book of Leviticus is replete with all kinds of rules and regulations about worship and right living, including ethical rules for the treatment of widows, orphans and strangers. It’s very big on ritual--- proper hand washing and food preparation rules, animal sacrifices and monetary offerings. People who had wealth, for example, were expected to sacrifice a highly prized and perfect lamb while the poorer classes might only offer a turtledove. These expectations were laid out in a very exacting manner in Leviticus, and most Christians, including clergy, simply ignore much of that book because it is so far removed from the way we conduct our lives. But it was not far from Micah’s world, and yet the proper observance of ritual was NOT Micah’s concern.
Micah has God pose a question to the people: What is it I have done that you fail to honor me? Tell me why you contend against me? How have I failed you? God expects an answer, but God does not get one. From the people’s side, there is silence. And so, God speaks, listing all that God has accomplished on behalf of the people---liberation from Egypt and victory over other oppressors; the giving of great leaders, including a woman by the name of Miriam, the protection of the people from the east to the west of Jordan---all this God has accomplished yet the people neither remember nor care. And so, God tells them flat out: what God desires above all else is not rigorous conformity to ritual. not the giving of burnt offerings---but rather the doing of justice and kindness and walking humbly with God. Do this and live the full and abundant life God desires for you. This does not mean that God rewards you with blessings, because you have done what you are expected to do. Blessings abound in life (for the unrighteous as well as the righteous) because it is the nature of God to bless. And the living of a righteous life is in and of itself a blessing, even if life might prove to be full of challenges and difficulties as it was in Micah’s time as well as in Jesus’ day.
The section from Matthew we read this morning, known as the Beatitudes, is part of the Sermon on the Mount. But notice that we hear nothing about God’s expectations. Jesus, as the new Moses, has gone up the mountain to teach, and here his teaching is the pronouncement of blessings upon all kinds of people, who are struggling with different challenges---depression, grief, lack of confidence, persecution, working on behalf of peace and mercy in a world that often prefers to give neither. When Moses ascended the mountain, he received the law from God, which are a series of commands: Do not lie, kill or steal; honor your parents, etc. But here up on the mountain, Jesus is not giving commands but is offering blessings. The Greek word, makarios, which is translated here as blessed, has a wide range of meanings that includes fortunate, happy, even privileged. But when Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, the persecuted, those hungering for righteousness and working for peace as blessed, we are a bit bewildered, because happy and privileged and fortunate are not the words that immediately come to our minds for such people.
Part of the reason we have difficulty with Jesus calling them blessed is because we tend to think in terms of happiness, and quite frankly, the American definition of happiness is not the same as the ancient world’s understanding. While Thomas Jefferson enshrined the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence as an endowed right, he certainly understood what the Greek and Roman philosophers meant by happiness, which concerned the pursuit of the good, the just, the true, the beautiful. Perhaps happiness has a long history of being misunderstood, which might explain its absence from the gospels. We never hear Jesus promising people happiness, but rather blessings. And people whose lives are full of hardship and struggle, such as the poor in spirit, the grieving, and the persecuted, may not be happy in our conventional understanding of the word, yet nonetheless they can be blessed and feel blessed.
A few weeks ago, our nation celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, when we remembered and celebrated not only his personal journey, but also the journey he pushed our nation to take. I recall very well his assassination in April, 1968, when I was a college freshman at the U. of Chicago, and I could see the flames and smoke to the north and south of the campus. In fact, our campus was full of National Guard tanks, since as the second largest land owner in the city of Chicago, after the Roman Catholic Church, the university, founded by J.D. Rockefeller, was going to be protected.
So yes, I remember all that, but I also remember Dr. King’s speech right before his death, which was played over and over again on both the radio and television. He said in his speech that he was happy; he had no fear of any man, and that although he would like to live a long life, if that was not to be, he was still happy. And I remember thinking: how could he be happy. I mean there were so many problems, so much that was not right with the country. Racism and the Vietnam War were raging. What could he mean by being happy? At 18 I was far too young to know and understand, but now, after all these many decades I think I grasp his meaning. The kind of happiness King was referring to, was the blessedness of a life that tries without (ever fully succeeding) to do what Micah said God desires, to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. It was the blessedness of which Jesus spoke, when he reminded his hearers that God’s blessings are God’s to give, not rewards for being successful.
King did not think he was successful. So many times, he failed, yet he felt that God was with him; he was surrounded by God’s love, God’s mercy and yes, God’s forgiveness. And that was blessing enough. It did not protect him from the assassin’s bullet, but then Jesus did not promise protection. He promised blessings, and King felt and knew that God gave him abundant blessings. Blessedness is not about protection from worldly harm. After all, Jesus died on a cross. And yet the blessings came, and they continue to come. The question is: Are we willing to receive them, not in the form that we might want--- success and comfort---but in the form that God gives, if we have the eyes and the spirit and the desire to see and accept.
January 31, 2023
Dear Friends,
Last Friday, January 27, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on the anniversary of the of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 78 years ago. As a way of acknowledging the day, my memory revisited my trip to Israel in 2006 with a group of Christians and Jews, when one of our excursions was to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. On the grounds outside the Museum is The Avenue of The Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations, where trees are planted next to the names of non-Jews, who risked their lives to save Jewish men, women and children. I remember how we walked together as a group without saying a word. Silence seemed the most appropriate response to the entire scene both within and outside the Museum. When we boarded the bus to leave the site, silence yet prevailed. No one dared to speak. What could we say?
Today, 78 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there are yet more stories emerging about various people, who had a definite mission during the Holocaust. One such story is from Hungary. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March, 1944, and a group of Jewish underground fighters were ready. They realized something was coming, for in the fall of 1943 three Polish women arrived in Budapest from Poland and told stories about the systematic slaughter of Jews in concentration camps. Though many people ignored the warning, there were those who formed a resistance group to meet the challenge. Yet the story of this resistance is barely known, and the few remaining members of that Resistance would like their story told and remembered.
Hungary had nearly 1 million Jews before the Germans invaded. Its government was already allied with Nazi Germany, but the Soviet Army was moving toward Hungary, and the Nazis feared that Hungary would make a separate peace deal with the Allies, and so to prevent that, the Nazis invaded and began to murder Jews----568,000 of them.
David Gur is now 97 years old, but he was only 18, when the invasion came, and he was given the job of overseeing a massive forgery operation, preparing false documents for Jews and non-Jews alike, who were in the Hungarian Resistance. It was such a heavy burden and responsibility for someone so young, but he did what he could do. In December, 1944 he was arrested, brutally interrogated and tortured, but the Jewish Underground managed to stage a rescue operation and break him out of the central prison.
Gur claimed that at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary through Romania and put on ships in the Black Sea, whose final destination was Palestine. Another 10,000 Budapest Jews were saved by forged passes, which offered them protection from Nazis. Another 6,000 Hungarian Jewish children were put in “safe houses” under the protection of the International Red Cross.
Last month in Israel three remaining resistance fighters, Sara Epstein, 97, Dezi Heffner-Reiner, 95 and Betzalel Grosz, 98 received citations for their work in saving Jewish lives. David Gur received his citation in 2011, the year the first citation was granted. More than 200 other awards have been granted posthumously.
Very soon all the active participants in and survivors of the Holocaust will be dead. Currently Israel has 150,600 Holocaust survivors, but that is 15,193 less than last year. If the stories are not recorded, they will be lost forever to history. Memory never can guarantee that such a horror will not happen again, but memory is a tool and sometimes even a weapon that can help to prevent a repetition of past folly and cruelty. “Never again,” we say, but unless we remember that it happened once before, we might be tempted to forget that human beings are capable of both tremendous acts of courage and self-sacrifice as well as deeds of dastardly cruelty.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Last Friday, January 27, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on the anniversary of the of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 78 years ago. As a way of acknowledging the day, my memory revisited my trip to Israel in 2006 with a group of Christians and Jews, when one of our excursions was to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. On the grounds outside the Museum is The Avenue of The Righteous Gentiles Among the Nations, where trees are planted next to the names of non-Jews, who risked their lives to save Jewish men, women and children. I remember how we walked together as a group without saying a word. Silence seemed the most appropriate response to the entire scene both within and outside the Museum. When we boarded the bus to leave the site, silence yet prevailed. No one dared to speak. What could we say?
Today, 78 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there are yet more stories emerging about various people, who had a definite mission during the Holocaust. One such story is from Hungary. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March, 1944, and a group of Jewish underground fighters were ready. They realized something was coming, for in the fall of 1943 three Polish women arrived in Budapest from Poland and told stories about the systematic slaughter of Jews in concentration camps. Though many people ignored the warning, there were those who formed a resistance group to meet the challenge. Yet the story of this resistance is barely known, and the few remaining members of that Resistance would like their story told and remembered.
Hungary had nearly 1 million Jews before the Germans invaded. Its government was already allied with Nazi Germany, but the Soviet Army was moving toward Hungary, and the Nazis feared that Hungary would make a separate peace deal with the Allies, and so to prevent that, the Nazis invaded and began to murder Jews----568,000 of them.
David Gur is now 97 years old, but he was only 18, when the invasion came, and he was given the job of overseeing a massive forgery operation, preparing false documents for Jews and non-Jews alike, who were in the Hungarian Resistance. It was such a heavy burden and responsibility for someone so young, but he did what he could do. In December, 1944 he was arrested, brutally interrogated and tortured, but the Jewish Underground managed to stage a rescue operation and break him out of the central prison.
Gur claimed that at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary through Romania and put on ships in the Black Sea, whose final destination was Palestine. Another 10,000 Budapest Jews were saved by forged passes, which offered them protection from Nazis. Another 6,000 Hungarian Jewish children were put in “safe houses” under the protection of the International Red Cross.
Last month in Israel three remaining resistance fighters, Sara Epstein, 97, Dezi Heffner-Reiner, 95 and Betzalel Grosz, 98 received citations for their work in saving Jewish lives. David Gur received his citation in 2011, the year the first citation was granted. More than 200 other awards have been granted posthumously.
Very soon all the active participants in and survivors of the Holocaust will be dead. Currently Israel has 150,600 Holocaust survivors, but that is 15,193 less than last year. If the stories are not recorded, they will be lost forever to history. Memory never can guarantee that such a horror will not happen again, but memory is a tool and sometimes even a weapon that can help to prevent a repetition of past folly and cruelty. “Never again,” we say, but unless we remember that it happened once before, we might be tempted to forget that human beings are capable of both tremendous acts of courage and self-sacrifice as well as deeds of dastardly cruelty.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
IN THE MIDST OF CRISIS
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 22, 2023
1 Corinthians 1: 10-18
Matthew 4: 12-23
In both our scripture readings this morning there is crisis. Let’s begin with Paul’s Letter to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, written around 54---at least 16 years before Mark, the oldest Gospel. People today sometimes have the idea that the early church was of one mind, that people were united and agreed on the fundamentals of the new faith. Not true, there was a great deal of dissension, and soon after Paul had a major hand in the establishment of this primarily gentile church, there was the threat of schism. Various groups in the church were pulling away from the community and following different leaders. Paul actually mentions them, including himself, Apollos, Cephas and finally Christ, who is supposed to be the sole head of the church. Paul reminded the congregation that they were all baptized in the name of Christ and that Christ’s cross is the ultimate point of reference for their faith. The cross is the wisdom and the power of God---though to most people it looks like foolishness and failure.
Now it would have been nice if Paul’s Letter had laid to rest the dissension, but it didn’t. The Church in Corinth continued to give Paul headaches. Some people simply questioned his authority, and Paul did not appreciate that. But there were other more serious problems like the economic diversity of the church, which meant that the wealthier members were not always good with table fellowship. So, they sometimes had these sumptuous meals at the church, which did not include the poorer members. And then there were those who boasted of their so called superior spiritual gifts, claiming that had more wisdom and knowledge than others. Some people, speaking in tongues, tried to say that this particular gift made them special, and so they tried to lord power over others.
This was the reality in which Paul had to work. He tried to tell the congregation that they are one body in Jesus Christ and that they should not be defined by their special interest groups, but people, being what they are, meant that Paul’s admonitions were not always successful. He spent a great deal of time in crisis mode, going from one crisis to another, trying to calm things down and keep people together. Not so different from what some ministers try to do today. I have a colleague who recently complained that his church is split down the middle---with half of his congregation listening to Fox News and the other half to MSNBC. And at a recent Bible study, they actually argued, he said, about which station Jesus would listen to if he were alive today. “I guess Paul has nothing on you,” another colleague told him. The point is a simple one--- crisis is never very far away.
Now consider the reading from Matthew. Jesus began his ministry with a crisis---the arrest of John the Baptist. We don’t know why he waited until John’s arrest, but for some reason John’s arrest was a signal to Jesus. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum, a fishing, farming and trading village on the Sea of Galilee. Notice that the text does not tell us Jesus received any direct word from God that this is the time to begin. No, it seems that Jesus looked at the situation, assessed it, and made a decision to move ahead, probably hoping that it was the right time. And indeed, that is how life often is. Rarely do we receive a direct go ahead from God. When a crisis crosses our path, we make a decision about the next step, and though we hopefully pray about it, our prayers are more likely to give us hints and not direct instructions.
As I was thinking about Paul and Jesus working in the midst of crisis and especially noting that Jesus’ ministry began with a crisis, I recalled how my own ministry began--- in crisis. I was ordained in April, 1983 at a church in Belmont, MA, and moved to Long Island a few months later. Now I did not yet have a job, and since I was newly ordained, I had no real experience in the ministry, except what I did in seminary. About 4 PM on a Saturday afternoon in October of that same year, I received a frantic call from a funeral director. He needed someone to conduct a funeral the next afternoon for a 26 year old man, who had just committed suicide. The story went that his wife was suffering from a degenerative nerve disease, Huntington’s, and he just wanted out. He simply could not cope. Now I had never, ever done a funeral for anyone, and I certainly did not want this one. And so, I said, “NO, I can’t do it”. “Please,” he begged. “You are the ninth minister I’ve called. I got your name and number from the last one. I am desperate.”
Well, I felt pretty desperate too, because there was no way I wanted to do this, but I felt I had no choice. He told me it was useless speaking with the wife, but you can talk to the young man’s parents, who live outside of Albany. They will be driving down early tomorrow morning, but they are home now and expecting a call from a minister willing to do the service. And so, I called, and for nearly two hours was on the phone with the father as I took pages of notes. After that conversation I was so emotionally wrung out, I did not know how I would write the service. Neither the young couple nor their families had much in the way of religion, but like many people they did have a sense of the spiritual life---that there was a power of goodness and grace, operating in the world and this power could be accessed. So, I spent much of the night reading and writing, finding words of wisdom and consolation from all kinds of sources. And then not only did I try to celebrate the young man who was no more, I had to directly talk about suicide. I was not going to pretend this was an accidental death. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, thinking to myself, “So, this crisis is my initiation into ministry!” Maybe God is trying to tell me something---that I should get out before it becomes any worse.”
Well, it became worse, because when I arrived at the Funeral Home Sunday afternoon and met the wife and her mother, the wife immediately commanded me to say nothing about suicide. So, there I was, young, completely inexperienced, holding in my hand a funeral I had written, directly confronting the truth of the situation. And I told her, “I can’t do that. We are going to tell the truth, because there is pain and there is anger, and we cannot pretend otherwise. Without the truth there can be no funeral.” I was fortunate in that her mother was on my side, and her mother also told her daughter that most people already know. And so, I walked in and said what I had to say. Afterwards, people thanked me. I remember this one young woman, sobbing to me how much she appreciated my naming the anger, because anger is exactly what she felt. You said there is something beyond the anger and that in time that something will come. So, I will wait and hope. And then there were his parents, his father in particular, who was so appreciative of what I I had been able to do on such short notice.
When I think back upon that experience, as awful as it was, I also think it was a kind of grace. I did not have an easy time in the early years of my ministry and when I later entered into chaplaincy training, I certainly had some devastating experiences to cope with. But I always felt that my initiation had given me a sense that I could do this, even under the most trying of situations. But you know something? I recently concluded that If I had failed, I would have learned another important lesson---that failure does not have to kill us. As much as we hate crises and work to avoid them, sometimes at all costs, nonetheless, there are times when a crisis forces us to step up and do something we thought we could not do. And if we fail, well, then we fail. After all, there is no avoiding failure in life.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that Paul, the single most influential person in the expansion of the Christian message to the gentile world, began his work in crisis. And he continued to work amidst all kinds of crises. And Jesus, as full of the love and spirit of God as he was, he was not protected from crisis, but he did take that love and spirit of God into every crisis he had to meet. And may the same be true for us.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 22, 2023
1 Corinthians 1: 10-18
Matthew 4: 12-23
In both our scripture readings this morning there is crisis. Let’s begin with Paul’s Letter to the Christian Church in the Greek city of Corinth, written around 54---at least 16 years before Mark, the oldest Gospel. People today sometimes have the idea that the early church was of one mind, that people were united and agreed on the fundamentals of the new faith. Not true, there was a great deal of dissension, and soon after Paul had a major hand in the establishment of this primarily gentile church, there was the threat of schism. Various groups in the church were pulling away from the community and following different leaders. Paul actually mentions them, including himself, Apollos, Cephas and finally Christ, who is supposed to be the sole head of the church. Paul reminded the congregation that they were all baptized in the name of Christ and that Christ’s cross is the ultimate point of reference for their faith. The cross is the wisdom and the power of God---though to most people it looks like foolishness and failure.
Now it would have been nice if Paul’s Letter had laid to rest the dissension, but it didn’t. The Church in Corinth continued to give Paul headaches. Some people simply questioned his authority, and Paul did not appreciate that. But there were other more serious problems like the economic diversity of the church, which meant that the wealthier members were not always good with table fellowship. So, they sometimes had these sumptuous meals at the church, which did not include the poorer members. And then there were those who boasted of their so called superior spiritual gifts, claiming that had more wisdom and knowledge than others. Some people, speaking in tongues, tried to say that this particular gift made them special, and so they tried to lord power over others.
This was the reality in which Paul had to work. He tried to tell the congregation that they are one body in Jesus Christ and that they should not be defined by their special interest groups, but people, being what they are, meant that Paul’s admonitions were not always successful. He spent a great deal of time in crisis mode, going from one crisis to another, trying to calm things down and keep people together. Not so different from what some ministers try to do today. I have a colleague who recently complained that his church is split down the middle---with half of his congregation listening to Fox News and the other half to MSNBC. And at a recent Bible study, they actually argued, he said, about which station Jesus would listen to if he were alive today. “I guess Paul has nothing on you,” another colleague told him. The point is a simple one--- crisis is never very far away.
Now consider the reading from Matthew. Jesus began his ministry with a crisis---the arrest of John the Baptist. We don’t know why he waited until John’s arrest, but for some reason John’s arrest was a signal to Jesus. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum, a fishing, farming and trading village on the Sea of Galilee. Notice that the text does not tell us Jesus received any direct word from God that this is the time to begin. No, it seems that Jesus looked at the situation, assessed it, and made a decision to move ahead, probably hoping that it was the right time. And indeed, that is how life often is. Rarely do we receive a direct go ahead from God. When a crisis crosses our path, we make a decision about the next step, and though we hopefully pray about it, our prayers are more likely to give us hints and not direct instructions.
As I was thinking about Paul and Jesus working in the midst of crisis and especially noting that Jesus’ ministry began with a crisis, I recalled how my own ministry began--- in crisis. I was ordained in April, 1983 at a church in Belmont, MA, and moved to Long Island a few months later. Now I did not yet have a job, and since I was newly ordained, I had no real experience in the ministry, except what I did in seminary. About 4 PM on a Saturday afternoon in October of that same year, I received a frantic call from a funeral director. He needed someone to conduct a funeral the next afternoon for a 26 year old man, who had just committed suicide. The story went that his wife was suffering from a degenerative nerve disease, Huntington’s, and he just wanted out. He simply could not cope. Now I had never, ever done a funeral for anyone, and I certainly did not want this one. And so, I said, “NO, I can’t do it”. “Please,” he begged. “You are the ninth minister I’ve called. I got your name and number from the last one. I am desperate.”
Well, I felt pretty desperate too, because there was no way I wanted to do this, but I felt I had no choice. He told me it was useless speaking with the wife, but you can talk to the young man’s parents, who live outside of Albany. They will be driving down early tomorrow morning, but they are home now and expecting a call from a minister willing to do the service. And so, I called, and for nearly two hours was on the phone with the father as I took pages of notes. After that conversation I was so emotionally wrung out, I did not know how I would write the service. Neither the young couple nor their families had much in the way of religion, but like many people they did have a sense of the spiritual life---that there was a power of goodness and grace, operating in the world and this power could be accessed. So, I spent much of the night reading and writing, finding words of wisdom and consolation from all kinds of sources. And then not only did I try to celebrate the young man who was no more, I had to directly talk about suicide. I was not going to pretend this was an accidental death. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, thinking to myself, “So, this crisis is my initiation into ministry!” Maybe God is trying to tell me something---that I should get out before it becomes any worse.”
Well, it became worse, because when I arrived at the Funeral Home Sunday afternoon and met the wife and her mother, the wife immediately commanded me to say nothing about suicide. So, there I was, young, completely inexperienced, holding in my hand a funeral I had written, directly confronting the truth of the situation. And I told her, “I can’t do that. We are going to tell the truth, because there is pain and there is anger, and we cannot pretend otherwise. Without the truth there can be no funeral.” I was fortunate in that her mother was on my side, and her mother also told her daughter that most people already know. And so, I walked in and said what I had to say. Afterwards, people thanked me. I remember this one young woman, sobbing to me how much she appreciated my naming the anger, because anger is exactly what she felt. You said there is something beyond the anger and that in time that something will come. So, I will wait and hope. And then there were his parents, his father in particular, who was so appreciative of what I I had been able to do on such short notice.
When I think back upon that experience, as awful as it was, I also think it was a kind of grace. I did not have an easy time in the early years of my ministry and when I later entered into chaplaincy training, I certainly had some devastating experiences to cope with. But I always felt that my initiation had given me a sense that I could do this, even under the most trying of situations. But you know something? I recently concluded that If I had failed, I would have learned another important lesson---that failure does not have to kill us. As much as we hate crises and work to avoid them, sometimes at all costs, nonetheless, there are times when a crisis forces us to step up and do something we thought we could not do. And if we fail, well, then we fail. After all, there is no avoiding failure in life.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that Paul, the single most influential person in the expansion of the Christian message to the gentile world, began his work in crisis. And he continued to work amidst all kinds of crises. And Jesus, as full of the love and spirit of God as he was, he was not protected from crisis, but he did take that love and spirit of God into every crisis he had to meet. And may the same be true for us.
January 25, 2023
Dear Friends,
War is a terrible thing. Its destructive power is chilling, destroying lives on so many levels. Innocence is twisted; hope is crucified and some, who have lived through the horror, are damaged beyond repair. Years ago in seminary, I knew someone whose father was a survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Second World War. She told me it would have been better if he had died in the war. He returned home eaten up by rage and hatred. “He was cruel to my mother, my brothers, sister and me. Finally, one day when I was 15, he left. We never saw him again, and we were all relieved.”
It is January 25th, one month past Christmas. The Prince of Peace has come and gone, and once again we will wait for his coming. A colleague recently commented that the peace of Christmas is not really what we want and need right NOW. We want and need the wars to cease and people to refrain from killing each other. Any other kind of peace can so easily leave us deeply disappointed.
Yes, war is terrible on so many different fronts, including the looting and stealing of national treasures and art, as is going on now in Ukraine. How absurd that Putin has tried to justify his war against Ukraine by insisting that Russia intends to save the Ukrainian people from Nazis---- when it is Russians who are behaving as fascists, directing their violence against civilians and their infrastructure and again like the Nazis stealing and looting Ukrainian art treasures.
There are indeed many different ways to murder a people and stealing the physical embodiment of their cultural heritage is a kind of killing. Art, whether in the form of painting, architecture, language, and literature, helps to form a people’s identity, communicating who they are and who they wish to become. Art is both inspirational and aspirational, and when a people’s art is stolen and/or destroyed, a part of their identity is destroyed as well.
The city of Kherson in southern Ukraine was captured by the Russians in early March of last year, but this past November the Russians retreated from the city across the Dnipro River. When they left, Russian soldiers took truckloads of national and cultural treasures, looted from various museums. Ukrainians compare this theft to what the Nazis did during their three years of occupation, between 1941 to 1944. But in some ways this theft is even worse because the looting was aided by collaborators and informants within the city itself. The director of the Kherson Art Museum, Alina Dotsenko, entered the pillaged museum on November 11, a few days after the Russians left, and what she saw made her heart almost cease to beat: She said that at least 10,000 pieces of art, out of 14,000, were gone, stolen, looted.
Dotsenko and her trusted colleagues managed to protect the art for a while by hiding it in the basement. When the Russians invaded, they were told that the art had been removed because of renovation, and indeed, many of the walls were covered in scaffolding. There were gorgeous silver and gold frames of ancient icons that had been locked in a safe and only one manager had the key. Initially, it appeared that the plan would work and as the months moved on, the director and her managers began to believe that they would be able to protect the art from Russian hands. But there was betrayal. Two former employees of the museum told the Russians that the art was hidden in the building. Suddenly Dotsenko was called in and interrogated. “We will show you how to respect Russian power,” she was told. She was not physically abused or tortured, but she expected she would be arrested, and so rather than waiting for the inevitable, she left Kherson for Odessa, taking with her the entire digital archive of the museum’s art. Other museum employees were threatened and told to have nothing to do with the former director and her manager, but even such threats did not prevent acts of great bravery. The head of the museum’s book archives, who was an elderly woman, smuggled out a valuable 1840 edition of one of Ukrainian’s beloved poets, Taras Shevchenko. The Russian guards did not bother to search her, because they could not imagine such a daring act from someone so old!
The Museum of Fine Arts in Kherson opened in 1912 and displayed major works of both Ukrainian and Russian artists as well as various archaeological artifacts. During the Nazi occupation there was massive looting and though after the war some works were tracked down and recovered, many works have remained missing. In 1938 some of the mosaics from Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Monastery were taken by the Russians and installed in a Moscow gallery. When years later, the Ukrainians asked for their return, the response came back: “They are ours.”
When the recent war broke out, the museum had 13 employees, and the museum claims that 7 of those employees collaborated with the Russians and helped them loot treasures. All but one has left Ukraine, having chosen to settle in Crimea or other places controlled by Russia. Currently there are over 1200 criminal investigations of collaboration, but while the war is ongoing, it is very difficult for criminal prosecutions to proceed. After all, there are issues of survival that demand front and center attention.
Betrayal by close associates and friends is terrible to face. And yet it is not only a common human theme, but also a biblical theme. Jesus was betrayed by one from his inner circle; Peter denied that he knew Jesus and most of the other disciples deserted him out of fear. It was the women, who stood by and witnessed his death, and it was to a woman, Mary Magdalene to whom Jesus first appeared. We don’t know what the outcome will be in the Ukrainian investigation. Hopefully, much of the art will be eventually recovered, and as far as the collaborators go, well, who knows? But we should remember that excepting Judas, which one story claims hanged himself, all the other disciples became part of the new Christian movement. We never know what God is up to, both now and in a future we can neither see nor predict.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
War is a terrible thing. Its destructive power is chilling, destroying lives on so many levels. Innocence is twisted; hope is crucified and some, who have lived through the horror, are damaged beyond repair. Years ago in seminary, I knew someone whose father was a survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Second World War. She told me it would have been better if he had died in the war. He returned home eaten up by rage and hatred. “He was cruel to my mother, my brothers, sister and me. Finally, one day when I was 15, he left. We never saw him again, and we were all relieved.”
It is January 25th, one month past Christmas. The Prince of Peace has come and gone, and once again we will wait for his coming. A colleague recently commented that the peace of Christmas is not really what we want and need right NOW. We want and need the wars to cease and people to refrain from killing each other. Any other kind of peace can so easily leave us deeply disappointed.
Yes, war is terrible on so many different fronts, including the looting and stealing of national treasures and art, as is going on now in Ukraine. How absurd that Putin has tried to justify his war against Ukraine by insisting that Russia intends to save the Ukrainian people from Nazis---- when it is Russians who are behaving as fascists, directing their violence against civilians and their infrastructure and again like the Nazis stealing and looting Ukrainian art treasures.
There are indeed many different ways to murder a people and stealing the physical embodiment of their cultural heritage is a kind of killing. Art, whether in the form of painting, architecture, language, and literature, helps to form a people’s identity, communicating who they are and who they wish to become. Art is both inspirational and aspirational, and when a people’s art is stolen and/or destroyed, a part of their identity is destroyed as well.
The city of Kherson in southern Ukraine was captured by the Russians in early March of last year, but this past November the Russians retreated from the city across the Dnipro River. When they left, Russian soldiers took truckloads of national and cultural treasures, looted from various museums. Ukrainians compare this theft to what the Nazis did during their three years of occupation, between 1941 to 1944. But in some ways this theft is even worse because the looting was aided by collaborators and informants within the city itself. The director of the Kherson Art Museum, Alina Dotsenko, entered the pillaged museum on November 11, a few days after the Russians left, and what she saw made her heart almost cease to beat: She said that at least 10,000 pieces of art, out of 14,000, were gone, stolen, looted.
Dotsenko and her trusted colleagues managed to protect the art for a while by hiding it in the basement. When the Russians invaded, they were told that the art had been removed because of renovation, and indeed, many of the walls were covered in scaffolding. There were gorgeous silver and gold frames of ancient icons that had been locked in a safe and only one manager had the key. Initially, it appeared that the plan would work and as the months moved on, the director and her managers began to believe that they would be able to protect the art from Russian hands. But there was betrayal. Two former employees of the museum told the Russians that the art was hidden in the building. Suddenly Dotsenko was called in and interrogated. “We will show you how to respect Russian power,” she was told. She was not physically abused or tortured, but she expected she would be arrested, and so rather than waiting for the inevitable, she left Kherson for Odessa, taking with her the entire digital archive of the museum’s art. Other museum employees were threatened and told to have nothing to do with the former director and her manager, but even such threats did not prevent acts of great bravery. The head of the museum’s book archives, who was an elderly woman, smuggled out a valuable 1840 edition of one of Ukrainian’s beloved poets, Taras Shevchenko. The Russian guards did not bother to search her, because they could not imagine such a daring act from someone so old!
The Museum of Fine Arts in Kherson opened in 1912 and displayed major works of both Ukrainian and Russian artists as well as various archaeological artifacts. During the Nazi occupation there was massive looting and though after the war some works were tracked down and recovered, many works have remained missing. In 1938 some of the mosaics from Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Monastery were taken by the Russians and installed in a Moscow gallery. When years later, the Ukrainians asked for their return, the response came back: “They are ours.”
When the recent war broke out, the museum had 13 employees, and the museum claims that 7 of those employees collaborated with the Russians and helped them loot treasures. All but one has left Ukraine, having chosen to settle in Crimea or other places controlled by Russia. Currently there are over 1200 criminal investigations of collaboration, but while the war is ongoing, it is very difficult for criminal prosecutions to proceed. After all, there are issues of survival that demand front and center attention.
Betrayal by close associates and friends is terrible to face. And yet it is not only a common human theme, but also a biblical theme. Jesus was betrayed by one from his inner circle; Peter denied that he knew Jesus and most of the other disciples deserted him out of fear. It was the women, who stood by and witnessed his death, and it was to a woman, Mary Magdalene to whom Jesus first appeared. We don’t know what the outcome will be in the Ukrainian investigation. Hopefully, much of the art will be eventually recovered, and as far as the collaborators go, well, who knows? But we should remember that excepting Judas, which one story claims hanged himself, all the other disciples became part of the new Christian movement. We never know what God is up to, both now and in a future we can neither see nor predict.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
January 19, 2023
Dear Friends,
Since Monday was the official federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday I have been thinking about him. I certainly am old enough to remember the beginning of his fight for racial justice and equality. Part of the reason I remember is because I was living in Jacksonville, Florida at the time, and Jacksonville was a very southern town with many residents from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. I had my own struggles to content with, since I was a “Yankee” and blamed for the efforts to integrate. I had never before seen drinking fountains and bathrooms labeled, White and Colored, so I was more attuned to what was going on than I might have been had I remained living in suburban Buffalo, New York.
Though now we hear such eloquent accolades about King, that was certainly NOT my recollection from my southern experience. My 8th grade Sunday School teacher, who was a highly regarded English teacher, was adamantly opposed to civil rights and Martin Luther King, and she was not shy about saying so in our Sunday School class. She thought people should have the right to serve whom they wanted, and it was an abridgement of a person’s freedom if he or she were compelled to serve a black person at a lunch counter. One of my classmates, Robert, had a mother who was a philosophy professor at the local university and his father was a chemistry professor. I think they taught him to ask a great many questions, and so he did. “What about the freedom of the person wanting to be served?” he demanded to know. And her response was chilling: “Oh, that person’s freedom is less important.” Robert was undeterred: “But why? You are making an assumption that cannot be proven.” I admired Robert, but after that class he never returned to Sunday School and his parents soon left the church. My mother, on the other hand, just told me not to listen to the teacher when she spoke about civil rights, yet she contended that the teacher knew a great deal about the Bible and I could learn something from her, if I listened. She did know a great deal about the Bible, but I am not sure how effectively she applied it to real life.
Someone wrote in a recent article that “time tends to smooth the edges of controversy off of events commemorated by official holidays.” We forget that George Washington was almost fired as commander in chief when he lost too many battles to the British. And while we celebrate Labor Day every September, how many Americans know that the early union organizers were subjected to terrible violence and brutality at the hands of not only the police but also hired thugs? Yes, we do smooth out rough edges, sometimes by ignoring or forgetting certain unpleasantries of the past.
King faced fierce opposition in his lifetime. Not only was his call for racial justice rejected by many, but when he began to speak out against the Viet Nam War and economic inequality, even supporters began to criticize him. And when his assassination led to massive protest and violence in American cities, there were people who blamed King for the outburst, claiming that he had not done enough in his lifetime to quell violence. Then there was the long and hard opposition to the creation of a federal holiday, honoring him. Virginia was pressured into creating a state holiday for King in 1984, but then the General Assembly of the state dared to combine it with an existing holiday which honored the Confederate generals, Robert. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The holiday became known as Lee-Jackson-King Day, and was on the books until 2000.
Arizona refused to create a King holiday in the 1980’s, so Governor Bruce Babbitt created it by executive order in 1986. But the next governor, Evan Mecham, cancelled the holiday a few days after his 1987 inauguration. He only rescinded his decision when a host of celebrities, including Stevie Wonder, called for a boycott of the state. Though the United States Government declared January 15 as a national holiday, honoring Dr. King, still some states simply ignored it. Georgia, for example, would not mention King’s name, though the state legislature officially recognized the holiday in 1984.
People often like to forget the unpleasantries of the past. It’s embarrassing, and some counsel forgetfulness in the spirit of moving on and not clinging to the negativities of a bygone time. But embarrassments are also part of history, and unless we want to say that history does not matter, it is important that we remember as fully as we can. History is never a simple compilation of facts. History involves how facts are used to create a coherent story, how these facts are interpreted and remembered and how we feel about them. I once heard a woman “confess” that when she was 19, she participated in an anti-civil rights march in Atlanta. “I am ashamed to say,” she said, “that I actually spat upon one of the black marchers. I wish I could forget that, but it is part of who I was back then. I am grateful that I have changed and remembering who I was helps me to keep changing and growing.” Yes, history matters, including our own personal histories that do not make it into the history books.
When we read the Bible, we are reading far more than the facts of history. We are reading interpretations of what happened and what those happenings meant to the person (and the community) whose story it is to tell. When Judah fell to the Babylonians some might say that Judah simply succumbed to a superior military force, and that is all there is to it. But this is not how the prophets saw it. They saw God’s hand in the fall, and they believed that God was teaching them a lesson they needed to learn. This is not something history can either prove or disprove, but there is no doubt that such an interpretation has been an important part of the Jewish self-understanding. When we consider the crucifixion of Jesus, some see it as a cruelty visited upon an unfortunate Jew, who became a threat to both Jewish religious power as well as the imperial power of Rome. But Christians see in the crucifixion the workings of God. This does not necessarily mean that we must believe that God desired Jesus to die as the perfect sacrifice, but it does mean that the meaning of the crucifixion is not completely settled. We continue to revisit its meaning.
History is never a finished product. We are always revisiting the past, trying to come to terms with its meaning for us in the present moment. We do it with Martin Luther King, Jr, as we do with Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln and many others. And Christians can never be finished with Jesus. His story invites us into the depths, where we can meet a whole new understanding that can change our lives.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Since Monday was the official federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday I have been thinking about him. I certainly am old enough to remember the beginning of his fight for racial justice and equality. Part of the reason I remember is because I was living in Jacksonville, Florida at the time, and Jacksonville was a very southern town with many residents from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. I had my own struggles to content with, since I was a “Yankee” and blamed for the efforts to integrate. I had never before seen drinking fountains and bathrooms labeled, White and Colored, so I was more attuned to what was going on than I might have been had I remained living in suburban Buffalo, New York.
Though now we hear such eloquent accolades about King, that was certainly NOT my recollection from my southern experience. My 8th grade Sunday School teacher, who was a highly regarded English teacher, was adamantly opposed to civil rights and Martin Luther King, and she was not shy about saying so in our Sunday School class. She thought people should have the right to serve whom they wanted, and it was an abridgement of a person’s freedom if he or she were compelled to serve a black person at a lunch counter. One of my classmates, Robert, had a mother who was a philosophy professor at the local university and his father was a chemistry professor. I think they taught him to ask a great many questions, and so he did. “What about the freedom of the person wanting to be served?” he demanded to know. And her response was chilling: “Oh, that person’s freedom is less important.” Robert was undeterred: “But why? You are making an assumption that cannot be proven.” I admired Robert, but after that class he never returned to Sunday School and his parents soon left the church. My mother, on the other hand, just told me not to listen to the teacher when she spoke about civil rights, yet she contended that the teacher knew a great deal about the Bible and I could learn something from her, if I listened. She did know a great deal about the Bible, but I am not sure how effectively she applied it to real life.
Someone wrote in a recent article that “time tends to smooth the edges of controversy off of events commemorated by official holidays.” We forget that George Washington was almost fired as commander in chief when he lost too many battles to the British. And while we celebrate Labor Day every September, how many Americans know that the early union organizers were subjected to terrible violence and brutality at the hands of not only the police but also hired thugs? Yes, we do smooth out rough edges, sometimes by ignoring or forgetting certain unpleasantries of the past.
King faced fierce opposition in his lifetime. Not only was his call for racial justice rejected by many, but when he began to speak out against the Viet Nam War and economic inequality, even supporters began to criticize him. And when his assassination led to massive protest and violence in American cities, there were people who blamed King for the outburst, claiming that he had not done enough in his lifetime to quell violence. Then there was the long and hard opposition to the creation of a federal holiday, honoring him. Virginia was pressured into creating a state holiday for King in 1984, but then the General Assembly of the state dared to combine it with an existing holiday which honored the Confederate generals, Robert. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The holiday became known as Lee-Jackson-King Day, and was on the books until 2000.
Arizona refused to create a King holiday in the 1980’s, so Governor Bruce Babbitt created it by executive order in 1986. But the next governor, Evan Mecham, cancelled the holiday a few days after his 1987 inauguration. He only rescinded his decision when a host of celebrities, including Stevie Wonder, called for a boycott of the state. Though the United States Government declared January 15 as a national holiday, honoring Dr. King, still some states simply ignored it. Georgia, for example, would not mention King’s name, though the state legislature officially recognized the holiday in 1984.
People often like to forget the unpleasantries of the past. It’s embarrassing, and some counsel forgetfulness in the spirit of moving on and not clinging to the negativities of a bygone time. But embarrassments are also part of history, and unless we want to say that history does not matter, it is important that we remember as fully as we can. History is never a simple compilation of facts. History involves how facts are used to create a coherent story, how these facts are interpreted and remembered and how we feel about them. I once heard a woman “confess” that when she was 19, she participated in an anti-civil rights march in Atlanta. “I am ashamed to say,” she said, “that I actually spat upon one of the black marchers. I wish I could forget that, but it is part of who I was back then. I am grateful that I have changed and remembering who I was helps me to keep changing and growing.” Yes, history matters, including our own personal histories that do not make it into the history books.
When we read the Bible, we are reading far more than the facts of history. We are reading interpretations of what happened and what those happenings meant to the person (and the community) whose story it is to tell. When Judah fell to the Babylonians some might say that Judah simply succumbed to a superior military force, and that is all there is to it. But this is not how the prophets saw it. They saw God’s hand in the fall, and they believed that God was teaching them a lesson they needed to learn. This is not something history can either prove or disprove, but there is no doubt that such an interpretation has been an important part of the Jewish self-understanding. When we consider the crucifixion of Jesus, some see it as a cruelty visited upon an unfortunate Jew, who became a threat to both Jewish religious power as well as the imperial power of Rome. But Christians see in the crucifixion the workings of God. This does not necessarily mean that we must believe that God desired Jesus to die as the perfect sacrifice, but it does mean that the meaning of the crucifixion is not completely settled. We continue to revisit its meaning.
History is never a finished product. We are always revisiting the past, trying to come to terms with its meaning for us in the present moment. We do it with Martin Luther King, Jr, as we do with Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln and many others. And Christians can never be finished with Jesus. His story invites us into the depths, where we can meet a whole new understanding that can change our lives.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
DO IT ANYWAY: IT IS NEVER IN VAIN
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 15, 2023
Isaiah 49: 1-7
I imagine that most of us have felt like Isaiah at one time in our lives. What is the point of this activity I am pursuing? It is not working out at all. Nothing is changing, I am wasting my time. I should call it quits. People have felt this way, about their marriages, their jobs, their church, their faith. Something is way off, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot make it come out right. You are at the end of your rope as you stare ahead to what looks like a big zero. And so, you walk away, or are at least tempted to walk away.
You see Isaiah was in a terrible situation. As you heard in the introduction to the text, this part is known as Second Isaiah, most likely written during the Babylonian Exile between 587 and 516 BC. Babylon had conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, destroying the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, and then the leadership was carried off to Babylon, where they could live their lives. They were not slaves; these people were the skilled workers and intellectuals. They could make a living and actually contribute to Babylonian society, which was why they were taken to Babylon in the first place. The Babylonians did not want any riff raff; they wanted people of talent and skill, and so here the Jews were in a strange land, where they felt they could not really sing the Lord’s Song. They were aliens, living in a place they had no desire to be. And so, they were discouraged and depressed, and it was Isaiah’s job to somehow pick them up, enlighten them, give them hope and a reason to go on. And he tried. He tried the best he could do.
Now this particular section of Isaiah is known as the second suffering servant song, because it points to someone---a person, a group of persons or even a nation whose sufferings will actually bring light, that is, salvation to the world. There is a great deal of scholarly discussion and even controversy about the identity of the suffering servant---whether it is an individual, like Isaiah or perhaps the nation as a whole. Now Christians use the suffering servant songs (There are four of them) to point to Christ, but that is reading back into Israel’s history our story. And that is not as our Jewish friends see it. But whomever this suffering servant was, he, she or it, became an occasion for hope, for the hope of salvation, for light. And when light shines, the darkness is overcome. A new beginning is possible, and despair is vanquished.
This is the call of the speaker, called before his birth, the text says, while he was yet n his mother’s womb. And his mouth and his words were sharp, able to cut through to the depths of truth. Or so he thought. But note what he laments in verse 4: I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity. What a terrible place to be. When people look at their labors and their lives and see that it was all for nothing, that all the work they did issued in a big fat zero, it is almost more than they can bear. Some have ended their lives because they could not face it. Others simply give up and it is as if something vital in them has died. They are no longer the people they once were.
Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr. felt that way at times. He realized what he was up against, the encrusted racism that would not give way to even the most minimal forms of integration, let alone true equality. His life and the lives of his wife and children were threatened, and he felt he had labored in vain, that his strength was spent for nothing. And yet, yet in the darkest of nights, when he was driven to his knees, because he no longer had the strength to stand on his feet, the Word of the Lord came to him. Yet surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward with my God. And so, he stood up and he continued to work and to pray. And somehow with the grace of God he did what he could do, not perfectly, of course, because nothing human is ever perfect, but he persevered in faith, hope and love. He labored on until his life was ended by a bullet on a night in April,1968 in the midst of a garbage collector’s strike, which he supported.
Some years ago, when I worked at University Hospital, I had a patient, who was beaten within an inch of his life. He was a man in his 50’s, a lawyer, who often helped homeless people, sometimes inviting them into his home. His wife had died ten years before of cancer, and he said that her death changed him. He told me he began to notice people whom he never noticed before, like addicts and homeless persons. Over the years he had some money and a few valuables stolen from him, including one of his wife’s rings. But still, he continued to help. And then he was beaten almost to death by a mentally ill addict. One of his daughters, who lived near, was furious, and when she came to see him in the hospital, she let him have it. “You brought this on yourself, she accused, and you don’t care how the rest of us feel, how the rest of us are left worrying about you. We have begged you to stop helping in this way, but you won’t listen. You say this is about faith, well, I say, to hell with your faith,” and she stormed out of the room.
When I spoke with him later that afternoon and he told me what had happened with his daughter, he said he had no intention of giving up this line of work. Maybe I do need to be a bit more careful, he said, but I have been helping such people for 10 years now and it is only four or five times I have been burned—this last time was the worst. But you know something, he said, I was not a very religious person, but my wife was a devout Roman Catholic, and she kept these words from Mother Theresa in her wallet. I found them after she died. And he pulled this sheet of paper out of his wallet. Mother Theresa, he said, knew all about working in vain. There were always dying people on the streets of Calcutta; you picked up one person to help die in peace and there were so many more moaning for help. These words helped Mother Theresa; they helped my wife and now they help me. And then he read them out loud.
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway. I think Isaiah and John the Baptist and maybe even Jesus would agree. Do it anyway, because it is never really in vain.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
January 15, 2023
Isaiah 49: 1-7
I imagine that most of us have felt like Isaiah at one time in our lives. What is the point of this activity I am pursuing? It is not working out at all. Nothing is changing, I am wasting my time. I should call it quits. People have felt this way, about their marriages, their jobs, their church, their faith. Something is way off, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot make it come out right. You are at the end of your rope as you stare ahead to what looks like a big zero. And so, you walk away, or are at least tempted to walk away.
You see Isaiah was in a terrible situation. As you heard in the introduction to the text, this part is known as Second Isaiah, most likely written during the Babylonian Exile between 587 and 516 BC. Babylon had conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, destroying the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, and then the leadership was carried off to Babylon, where they could live their lives. They were not slaves; these people were the skilled workers and intellectuals. They could make a living and actually contribute to Babylonian society, which was why they were taken to Babylon in the first place. The Babylonians did not want any riff raff; they wanted people of talent and skill, and so here the Jews were in a strange land, where they felt they could not really sing the Lord’s Song. They were aliens, living in a place they had no desire to be. And so, they were discouraged and depressed, and it was Isaiah’s job to somehow pick them up, enlighten them, give them hope and a reason to go on. And he tried. He tried the best he could do.
Now this particular section of Isaiah is known as the second suffering servant song, because it points to someone---a person, a group of persons or even a nation whose sufferings will actually bring light, that is, salvation to the world. There is a great deal of scholarly discussion and even controversy about the identity of the suffering servant---whether it is an individual, like Isaiah or perhaps the nation as a whole. Now Christians use the suffering servant songs (There are four of them) to point to Christ, but that is reading back into Israel’s history our story. And that is not as our Jewish friends see it. But whomever this suffering servant was, he, she or it, became an occasion for hope, for the hope of salvation, for light. And when light shines, the darkness is overcome. A new beginning is possible, and despair is vanquished.
This is the call of the speaker, called before his birth, the text says, while he was yet n his mother’s womb. And his mouth and his words were sharp, able to cut through to the depths of truth. Or so he thought. But note what he laments in verse 4: I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity. What a terrible place to be. When people look at their labors and their lives and see that it was all for nothing, that all the work they did issued in a big fat zero, it is almost more than they can bear. Some have ended their lives because they could not face it. Others simply give up and it is as if something vital in them has died. They are no longer the people they once were.
Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr. felt that way at times. He realized what he was up against, the encrusted racism that would not give way to even the most minimal forms of integration, let alone true equality. His life and the lives of his wife and children were threatened, and he felt he had labored in vain, that his strength was spent for nothing. And yet, yet in the darkest of nights, when he was driven to his knees, because he no longer had the strength to stand on his feet, the Word of the Lord came to him. Yet surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward with my God. And so, he stood up and he continued to work and to pray. And somehow with the grace of God he did what he could do, not perfectly, of course, because nothing human is ever perfect, but he persevered in faith, hope and love. He labored on until his life was ended by a bullet on a night in April,1968 in the midst of a garbage collector’s strike, which he supported.
Some years ago, when I worked at University Hospital, I had a patient, who was beaten within an inch of his life. He was a man in his 50’s, a lawyer, who often helped homeless people, sometimes inviting them into his home. His wife had died ten years before of cancer, and he said that her death changed him. He told me he began to notice people whom he never noticed before, like addicts and homeless persons. Over the years he had some money and a few valuables stolen from him, including one of his wife’s rings. But still, he continued to help. And then he was beaten almost to death by a mentally ill addict. One of his daughters, who lived near, was furious, and when she came to see him in the hospital, she let him have it. “You brought this on yourself, she accused, and you don’t care how the rest of us feel, how the rest of us are left worrying about you. We have begged you to stop helping in this way, but you won’t listen. You say this is about faith, well, I say, to hell with your faith,” and she stormed out of the room.
When I spoke with him later that afternoon and he told me what had happened with his daughter, he said he had no intention of giving up this line of work. Maybe I do need to be a bit more careful, he said, but I have been helping such people for 10 years now and it is only four or five times I have been burned—this last time was the worst. But you know something, he said, I was not a very religious person, but my wife was a devout Roman Catholic, and she kept these words from Mother Theresa in her wallet. I found them after she died. And he pulled this sheet of paper out of his wallet. Mother Theresa, he said, knew all about working in vain. There were always dying people on the streets of Calcutta; you picked up one person to help die in peace and there were so many more moaning for help. These words helped Mother Theresa; they helped my wife and now they help me. And then he read them out loud.
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway. I think Isaiah and John the Baptist and maybe even Jesus would agree. Do it anyway, because it is never really in vain.
January 12, 2023
Dear Friends,
For some reason, unknown to me, I have always loved the sound of bells, chimes, whistles, even fog horns. I remember being very young, probably around 3, and waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a train whistle blowing in the distance. I found it a very comforting sound. And I always loved my Nana’s house, because she had all these chiming clocks. I loved staying overnight there and waking up in the night and counting the number of times the clock would chime. I have a grandfather’s clock in my own home, which chimes on the hour, the half hour, and the quarter hour. It plays the Westminster chime, which I also find very comforting. And, of course, there are the church bells, which until time keeping became more accurate, were a common way that people noted the hour, because that’s when they chimed.
I was probably around ten years of age, when my mother permitted me to stay up to witness the Times Square Ball coming down to mark the New Year. For some reason I expected there to be a big chiming sound, when it reached the bottom, but there was none, so I was very disappointed. Yet every year after that, with few exceptions, I would usually stay up to see that silly ball descend to mark the New Year. Once, when I was 19, my best friend from college and I went to New York to see the ball descend. Those were the days you could wander around, unlike now, when you must remain in designated “pens” for hours at a time. Both Lisa and I hated the experience, because at midnight all these strangers around you would grab you and try to kiss you. Once was enough, and I never, ever went back again. Yet every New Years’ Eve, there I am, watching that silly ball come down. But I learned something recently that I found quite interesting about ball drops.
The first ball drops were designed for ship captains, not for New Year’s Eve. In 1829 Robert Wauchope, a captain in the British Navy, designed the time ball. These raised balls were visible to ships along the British coastline, and they were manually dropped the same time each day, allowing the ships to set their chronometers (which kept track of time on the ships) to the time at the port of departure. Time balls were used throughout the world to keep track of time, though today evidence of them is not easy to find. In 1845 The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. installed one, which later helped people to determine the precise time of Lincoln’s assassination. It was used daily until 1936, but by the 1880’s most time balls fell out of fashion, because of the availability of self winding clocks.
It was the New York Times in 1907 that decided to use a ball drop to commemorate the New Year, when using fireworks were banned by the city. A reporter did some research and found that time balls had an interesting history, and so a new tradition was invented for New Year’s Eve. There have been seven different designs of the ball since 1907, and it has been dropped every year since then---except in 1942 and 1943, during the Second World War, when wartime blackouts prevented the lighted ball from dropping. Yet revelers still gathered in Times Square those two years and when midnight came, a moment of silence was observed, followed by chimes! (By the way, the current ball weighs 11,875 pounds!)
What I find so interesting about all this is that it speaks to the human desire and need to mark time. There are fascinating books written on the history of clocks and time keeping and the obsession to create the most accurate clock or watch. From the time I was quite young, I always had a watch, and I do remember in high school that my watch would lose time, a few minutes a week, which meant that I would reset it. It did not seem like a big deal to me, but when the digital revolution came in, resetting watches and clocks became an activity of the past.
We human beings do seem to have this need to note time and mark time, which is perhaps why so many of us find the passage from Ecclesiastes so fitting and even comforting: To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to kill, a time to heal, etc. My Old Testament teacher, Harrell Beck, would point out that this view of time as essentially circular, was neither the Jewish nor the Christian view of time, which interpreted history and time as linear, moving toward the goal of God’s reign or realm. He complained that he did not understand why so many people, including Christian ministers, found the passage comforting. Time in Ecclesiastes is just an ongoing circular pattern, repeating itself endlessly, going nowhere, he insisted. But I think the reason we find the passage comforting is because this is how we experience life. The truth of the passage is existential. As we live our lives, we cannot see the final end or goal, which is in God’s hands and God’s sight, not in ours. It seems to me that Ecclesiastes speaks to the actual condition of our day to day lives. I am presiding at a funeral this Saturday, and Ecclesiastes is one of the passages being read. Harrell Beck might disapprove of the choice, but at least I remember what he said and what he taught about the passage. I simply think its function is existentially true, even if not theologically exact.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
For some reason, unknown to me, I have always loved the sound of bells, chimes, whistles, even fog horns. I remember being very young, probably around 3, and waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a train whistle blowing in the distance. I found it a very comforting sound. And I always loved my Nana’s house, because she had all these chiming clocks. I loved staying overnight there and waking up in the night and counting the number of times the clock would chime. I have a grandfather’s clock in my own home, which chimes on the hour, the half hour, and the quarter hour. It plays the Westminster chime, which I also find very comforting. And, of course, there are the church bells, which until time keeping became more accurate, were a common way that people noted the hour, because that’s when they chimed.
I was probably around ten years of age, when my mother permitted me to stay up to witness the Times Square Ball coming down to mark the New Year. For some reason I expected there to be a big chiming sound, when it reached the bottom, but there was none, so I was very disappointed. Yet every year after that, with few exceptions, I would usually stay up to see that silly ball descend to mark the New Year. Once, when I was 19, my best friend from college and I went to New York to see the ball descend. Those were the days you could wander around, unlike now, when you must remain in designated “pens” for hours at a time. Both Lisa and I hated the experience, because at midnight all these strangers around you would grab you and try to kiss you. Once was enough, and I never, ever went back again. Yet every New Years’ Eve, there I am, watching that silly ball come down. But I learned something recently that I found quite interesting about ball drops.
The first ball drops were designed for ship captains, not for New Year’s Eve. In 1829 Robert Wauchope, a captain in the British Navy, designed the time ball. These raised balls were visible to ships along the British coastline, and they were manually dropped the same time each day, allowing the ships to set their chronometers (which kept track of time on the ships) to the time at the port of departure. Time balls were used throughout the world to keep track of time, though today evidence of them is not easy to find. In 1845 The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. installed one, which later helped people to determine the precise time of Lincoln’s assassination. It was used daily until 1936, but by the 1880’s most time balls fell out of fashion, because of the availability of self winding clocks.
It was the New York Times in 1907 that decided to use a ball drop to commemorate the New Year, when using fireworks were banned by the city. A reporter did some research and found that time balls had an interesting history, and so a new tradition was invented for New Year’s Eve. There have been seven different designs of the ball since 1907, and it has been dropped every year since then---except in 1942 and 1943, during the Second World War, when wartime blackouts prevented the lighted ball from dropping. Yet revelers still gathered in Times Square those two years and when midnight came, a moment of silence was observed, followed by chimes! (By the way, the current ball weighs 11,875 pounds!)
What I find so interesting about all this is that it speaks to the human desire and need to mark time. There are fascinating books written on the history of clocks and time keeping and the obsession to create the most accurate clock or watch. From the time I was quite young, I always had a watch, and I do remember in high school that my watch would lose time, a few minutes a week, which meant that I would reset it. It did not seem like a big deal to me, but when the digital revolution came in, resetting watches and clocks became an activity of the past.
We human beings do seem to have this need to note time and mark time, which is perhaps why so many of us find the passage from Ecclesiastes so fitting and even comforting: To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to kill, a time to heal, etc. My Old Testament teacher, Harrell Beck, would point out that this view of time as essentially circular, was neither the Jewish nor the Christian view of time, which interpreted history and time as linear, moving toward the goal of God’s reign or realm. He complained that he did not understand why so many people, including Christian ministers, found the passage comforting. Time in Ecclesiastes is just an ongoing circular pattern, repeating itself endlessly, going nowhere, he insisted. But I think the reason we find the passage comforting is because this is how we experience life. The truth of the passage is existential. As we live our lives, we cannot see the final end or goal, which is in God’s hands and God’s sight, not in ours. It seems to me that Ecclesiastes speaks to the actual condition of our day to day lives. I am presiding at a funeral this Saturday, and Ecclesiastes is one of the passages being read. Harrell Beck might disapprove of the choice, but at least I remember what he said and what he taught about the passage. I simply think its function is existentially true, even if not theologically exact.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Old Question that Intrudes
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
January 1, 2023
Matthew 2: 13-23
It would be comforting if we could continue to bask in the heavenly light and songs of Christmas for just a while longer. Luke is the Christmas story most of us prefer and know best. We romanticize the birth in a stable, surrounded by animals, because there was no room in the inn. And then there is Luke’s image of the poor shepherds being the first to hear the good news from the angels, who fill the heavenly skies with both their presence and their voices. Shepherds, by the way, were economically vulnerable and ritually unclean, and yet they are the ones chosen to hear the good news first. Luke does have a special feeling for the outcast, the poor and the downtrodden, so we should not be too surprised by the important role the shepherds play in his gospel.
But Mathew is different. He begins with the reaction of the rich and powerful, men like the Magi and King Herod. Matthew makes no mention at all of the shepherds, but instead has the kings, the magi, educated and wise people, who studied the movement of the stars and planets. And in Matthew it is these pagans who travel to Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn baby. In our reading for today, the magi have already made their journey, and though Herod wanted them to return to him and tell him about this newborn king, they were warned in a dream to stay away. And so, they traveled home by another road.
Of course, Herod was beyond furious, when he realized that he had been tricked by these wise men, and so because he could not find this new born king, he decreed that all baby boys 2 and under were to be put to the sword. But by the time Herod’s soldiers arrived in Bethlehem, the Holy Family had already departed, because Joseph was warned in a dream to take Mary and the baby and flee to Egypt. Joseph NEVER speaks a word in the Bible. He is supposed to remind us of Joseph in the Old Testament, who escaped the wrath of his brothers, who were jealous of him, because he was their father’s favorite, and so he ended up being sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, who told their father his favorite son was devoured by a wild beast. Joseph, however, did not remain a slave, because he was able to brilliantly interpret Pharaohs dreams. So, these two Josephs are men of dreams. And dreams sometimes save lives as they did in both the Old and New Testaments.
Now there was something profoundly disturbing about Herod. Today we would call him a paranoid sociopath. He trusted no one, having had two of his sons murdered, because he thought they were conspiring against him, and he had one of his wives killed for the same reason. He would do anything to hold on to his power. And we all can think of actors in our own world who do the same. Power is the name of the game they play. Herod did not care if babies were murdered any more than Putin cares about the babies and children dying in Ukraine today.
So, because of the evil Herod would do, Jesus and his family became refugees. They went to Egypt, a pagan place. They went not because they wanted a life of ease, but because their lives were threatened---the same way many people end up as refugees today, because their lives are threatened by war, political and economic instability, murder by drug cartels or terrorist groups, climate change, leaving them without water and food. The list goes on, and we should note that half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children, under the age of 18. And Jesus and his family shared a part of the immigrant story. In Egypt they found a home. Perhaps this is what they hoped for and expected, since their own Jewish tradition as expressed in the book of Leviticus (written at least 500 years before the birth of Jesus) also commanded respect for immigrants: It reads: “When immigrants live in your land, you must not cheat them. You must treat them as your own citizens. You must love them as yourself, for you were once immigrants in Egypt.”
Now Jesus and his family did not remain in Egypt for very long, because once Herod was dead, the story goes that Joseph was told in a dream to return. But the family did not go back to Bethlehem. Instead, they moved to Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, filled with foreigners and immigrants. No wonder many Jews at the time wondered: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Why this isn’t even a Jewish town!” And this not so Jewish town was where Jesus grew up.
Let’s face it: many of us come to church to escape all the messiness of the world outside these walls. We want to be assured of God’s love for us, and we want to find the peace that the world fails to give us. But the trouble is the love and peace God promises come amidst all the messiness and trouble in the world. This is how it was for Jesus, and this is how it is for us. There is no real escape and hardly much relief. The Holy family with a newborn baby must make a run for their lives, and the story puts us face to face once again with evil. King Herod killed babies and though God helped Jesus and his family escape, God did not save the lives of those other innocents. Perhaps it was not a large number of babies killed in Bethlehem; I read somewhere around 20. That is not a slaughter on the scale of the Holocaust or even Ukraine today, but it is still slaughter and it is still evil.
Why is it that even at Christmas time the question of evil intrudes? Why does the birth of such promised goodness invite the tyranny and hatred of the powerful? Why is it that when people demand their freedom and dignity the response is often cruelty? Old questions, aren’t they, which never go away. In Afghanistan today girls are now being denied education in middle and high schools, let alone in universities. For 20 years women trained to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, etc. and now they are forbidden to work. In Iran women are demanding their rights, and men and boys have been supporting them, and now Iran is executing people---children as young as 12 and 13 are being shot in the back of the heads because they have joined the protests. And the Iranian leadership insists this form of execution shows their tenderness toward the young, who are at least not being beheaded.
The Christmas story unfolds in real history, just as our lives do. And yes, the evil does speak, and it speaks loudly, but it does not speak the final word. That is the good news. For even in the midst of great evil we do see goodness and courage assert themselves. We do see people refuse to surrender to the evil. No human choice is ever perfect; no human choice is ever wholly godly. Yet choices must be made, and there is no doubt that some choices are better than others, and some share more of God’s blessings than others. The question for us is always: Which choices are truly worthy of our faith? And so we take the risk of decision without absolute certitude that we are deciding rightly. But then if we had certitude, we would have no need of faith.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
January 1, 2023
Matthew 2: 13-23
It would be comforting if we could continue to bask in the heavenly light and songs of Christmas for just a while longer. Luke is the Christmas story most of us prefer and know best. We romanticize the birth in a stable, surrounded by animals, because there was no room in the inn. And then there is Luke’s image of the poor shepherds being the first to hear the good news from the angels, who fill the heavenly skies with both their presence and their voices. Shepherds, by the way, were economically vulnerable and ritually unclean, and yet they are the ones chosen to hear the good news first. Luke does have a special feeling for the outcast, the poor and the downtrodden, so we should not be too surprised by the important role the shepherds play in his gospel.
But Mathew is different. He begins with the reaction of the rich and powerful, men like the Magi and King Herod. Matthew makes no mention at all of the shepherds, but instead has the kings, the magi, educated and wise people, who studied the movement of the stars and planets. And in Matthew it is these pagans who travel to Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn baby. In our reading for today, the magi have already made their journey, and though Herod wanted them to return to him and tell him about this newborn king, they were warned in a dream to stay away. And so, they traveled home by another road.
Of course, Herod was beyond furious, when he realized that he had been tricked by these wise men, and so because he could not find this new born king, he decreed that all baby boys 2 and under were to be put to the sword. But by the time Herod’s soldiers arrived in Bethlehem, the Holy Family had already departed, because Joseph was warned in a dream to take Mary and the baby and flee to Egypt. Joseph NEVER speaks a word in the Bible. He is supposed to remind us of Joseph in the Old Testament, who escaped the wrath of his brothers, who were jealous of him, because he was their father’s favorite, and so he ended up being sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, who told their father his favorite son was devoured by a wild beast. Joseph, however, did not remain a slave, because he was able to brilliantly interpret Pharaohs dreams. So, these two Josephs are men of dreams. And dreams sometimes save lives as they did in both the Old and New Testaments.
Now there was something profoundly disturbing about Herod. Today we would call him a paranoid sociopath. He trusted no one, having had two of his sons murdered, because he thought they were conspiring against him, and he had one of his wives killed for the same reason. He would do anything to hold on to his power. And we all can think of actors in our own world who do the same. Power is the name of the game they play. Herod did not care if babies were murdered any more than Putin cares about the babies and children dying in Ukraine today.
So, because of the evil Herod would do, Jesus and his family became refugees. They went to Egypt, a pagan place. They went not because they wanted a life of ease, but because their lives were threatened---the same way many people end up as refugees today, because their lives are threatened by war, political and economic instability, murder by drug cartels or terrorist groups, climate change, leaving them without water and food. The list goes on, and we should note that half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children, under the age of 18. And Jesus and his family shared a part of the immigrant story. In Egypt they found a home. Perhaps this is what they hoped for and expected, since their own Jewish tradition as expressed in the book of Leviticus (written at least 500 years before the birth of Jesus) also commanded respect for immigrants: It reads: “When immigrants live in your land, you must not cheat them. You must treat them as your own citizens. You must love them as yourself, for you were once immigrants in Egypt.”
Now Jesus and his family did not remain in Egypt for very long, because once Herod was dead, the story goes that Joseph was told in a dream to return. But the family did not go back to Bethlehem. Instead, they moved to Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, filled with foreigners and immigrants. No wonder many Jews at the time wondered: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Why this isn’t even a Jewish town!” And this not so Jewish town was where Jesus grew up.
Let’s face it: many of us come to church to escape all the messiness of the world outside these walls. We want to be assured of God’s love for us, and we want to find the peace that the world fails to give us. But the trouble is the love and peace God promises come amidst all the messiness and trouble in the world. This is how it was for Jesus, and this is how it is for us. There is no real escape and hardly much relief. The Holy family with a newborn baby must make a run for their lives, and the story puts us face to face once again with evil. King Herod killed babies and though God helped Jesus and his family escape, God did not save the lives of those other innocents. Perhaps it was not a large number of babies killed in Bethlehem; I read somewhere around 20. That is not a slaughter on the scale of the Holocaust or even Ukraine today, but it is still slaughter and it is still evil.
Why is it that even at Christmas time the question of evil intrudes? Why does the birth of such promised goodness invite the tyranny and hatred of the powerful? Why is it that when people demand their freedom and dignity the response is often cruelty? Old questions, aren’t they, which never go away. In Afghanistan today girls are now being denied education in middle and high schools, let alone in universities. For 20 years women trained to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, etc. and now they are forbidden to work. In Iran women are demanding their rights, and men and boys have been supporting them, and now Iran is executing people---children as young as 12 and 13 are being shot in the back of the heads because they have joined the protests. And the Iranian leadership insists this form of execution shows their tenderness toward the young, who are at least not being beheaded.
The Christmas story unfolds in real history, just as our lives do. And yes, the evil does speak, and it speaks loudly, but it does not speak the final word. That is the good news. For even in the midst of great evil we do see goodness and courage assert themselves. We do see people refuse to surrender to the evil. No human choice is ever perfect; no human choice is ever wholly godly. Yet choices must be made, and there is no doubt that some choices are better than others, and some share more of God’s blessings than others. The question for us is always: Which choices are truly worthy of our faith? And so we take the risk of decision without absolute certitude that we are deciding rightly. But then if we had certitude, we would have no need of faith.
One of Us
Preached by Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
January 8th, 2023
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Matthew 3: 13-17
Jesus came to John the Baptist so quietly and unobtrusively in stark contrast to John the Baptist, who was anything but quiet and unobtrusive. During Advent we read the passage immediately preceding this one, where the text tells us, “the people of Jerusalem and all of Judea” were coming to be baptized by John. And John was a wild man, dressed in his camel haired clothes, screaming at the religious leadership, who also showed up to be baptized, “Who told you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” John was not about to give them any credit for what could have been their genuine humility in coming to his baptism of repentance. He assumed the worst about them, and he told them so---hardly a way to win friends and influence people. But, for all John’s harshness, he does deserve credit for knowing who he is and what his role is. He knows he is not the One. He realizes someone greater is coming.
And then Jesus came. He came from Galilee to be baptized by John. He came without fanfare or any pretense that he was above and beyond anyone else. Yet Immediately John recognized that there was something different about this man, because the story tells us that he said to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus simply responded,” This is the way it must be to fulfill God’s commands of righteousness, which means acts of right conduct. And so, Jesus was baptized, which makes him one of us. He did not separate himself from the mass of people, coming to John for baptism. He did not show himself to be holier or better or smarter or more worthy, or even God’s chosen. He claimed no such power or title for himself. It was God, not Jesus, who named him the Son, the Beloved. You see, baptism is not something Jesus could do for himself, any more than it is something we can do for ourselves. Baptism is a gift from God, but also a submission to God. If we are babies or children, we are submitted to baptism by someone else’s decision. But as an adult Jesus made the decision to be baptized, to submit to God, and in this act two truths ring out: Jesus is one of us and he will be a different kind of Messiah.
Israel’s conventional expectation of a Messiah was one who would lead as King David did---a glorious ruler, who would make Israel into a conquering empire. But this was not how it would be. Oh, there were hints in Israelite history and scripture of another kind of savior. In the prophet, Isaiah, for example, the people heard the voice of one, who tried to bring a measure of hope and comfort in the midst of what looked like stinging defeat. The Babylonian empire had conquered the Jews, destroying their Temple, and carrying off their leaders and educated citizens to Babylon for over 50 years. Even when Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon and agreed to send the Jews home, they returned to a devastated society, and in the midst of devastation, the natural impulse is to look for power and strength from a leader like David or Solomon. And yet this is not what Isaiah told them. A servant will be sent from God, who will “bring forth justice to the nations.” That sounded good, but Isaiah continued, he will do it not by crying out or lifting up his voice or making it heard in the streets. “A bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” What kind of leadership is this? It certainly did not sound like a prescription for success. How do you rebuild a destroyed city and make a new civilization with someone who cannot even break a bruised reed?
Well, the same questions were undoubtedly asked about Jesus. He did not present himself as the one who could and would overcome Roman power. In today’s reading from Matthew, we are in the third chapter, and so far, until his baptism Jesus has not spoken one word. And when he finally speaks, he says his baptism is to fulfill all righteousness. As I said earlier, righteousness is right conduct, according to God’s commands. But the purpose of right conduct should not be reduced to a form of legalism, as if following the law is all there is to holiness. This is the problem Jesus had with some of the Jewish religious leadership. They followed the letter of the law, but Jesus charged them the lack of spirit. Oh, they did not commit adultery; they followed the proper rituals of cleanliness, but they lacked compassion and deep understanding. They failed to see that true righteousness concerns one’s relationship with God, and since God is love, the absence of love pulls one further away from God. In his baptism Jesus shows himself to be one of the people; he’s just like everyone else, even part of the riff raff. He is not in the business of lording his own righteousness over others. He will not use raw power or coercion. Instead, he will walk a path of humility and obedience to show what it truly means to love God with the fullness of heart, mind, soul, and strength. This is not what people would have expected from a Messiah or the savior of the world. He should not be like one of us, and certainly not like one of them, the wrong kind of people, whoever it is we think the wrong kind of people are.
A number of years ago, I worked for a short period of time in a drug rehabilitation center. I didn’t want to work there, but I had no other job offer and the family needed my money, so against MY desire and inclination, I took the job. Just about all the other counselors were recovered addicts, but the new social worker in charge of hiring wanted counselors with other backgrounds as well. She told me that although recovered addicts often made excellent counselors, sometimes their own past got in the way. And so, she hired some people who had no history of drug abuse.
This was probably the toughest job I have ever done in my life, partly because I felt humiliated to even be there. I mean all these other counselors had messed up big time; they had stolen, lied, cheated their families out of money and so many other things as well, and here they were, making the same salary as I, and in some cases even more. Many of them had no more education than a GED, and here I was with two Masters’ degrees and a doctorate. I remember very well when one of
my clients asked me about my recovery. I was horrified. “Why I’ve never been an addict, I protested. I never did any of that stuff.” Oh, she said. And I could tell by her Oh and her expression that suddenly she did not trust me---but not because I had not been an addict, but because by the tone of my response, she detected that I really thought I was better than she. As one of my other clients later said, “You know, you’re not better than we are---just luckier and maybe smarter. But luck and smarts don’t make you better---they just make you luckier and smarter---that’s all.”
She was right. It was something I had to learn, and learn I did. Jesus did not begin his ministry until around the age of 30, and we really do not know how much learning he had to do before he began. But in his story, we meet the One in whom God is well pleased. And he never lords his identity over anyone; he never shows by his actions or voice that he thinks he is better than anyone else. HE enters fully into the human condition. That is what his submission to John’s baptism reveals---a full identification with humanity. And that is the way God in Jesus Christ can help and save us.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
Center Church on the Green in New Haven
January 8th, 2023
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Matthew 3: 13-17
Jesus came to John the Baptist so quietly and unobtrusively in stark contrast to John the Baptist, who was anything but quiet and unobtrusive. During Advent we read the passage immediately preceding this one, where the text tells us, “the people of Jerusalem and all of Judea” were coming to be baptized by John. And John was a wild man, dressed in his camel haired clothes, screaming at the religious leadership, who also showed up to be baptized, “Who told you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” John was not about to give them any credit for what could have been their genuine humility in coming to his baptism of repentance. He assumed the worst about them, and he told them so---hardly a way to win friends and influence people. But, for all John’s harshness, he does deserve credit for knowing who he is and what his role is. He knows he is not the One. He realizes someone greater is coming.
And then Jesus came. He came from Galilee to be baptized by John. He came without fanfare or any pretense that he was above and beyond anyone else. Yet Immediately John recognized that there was something different about this man, because the story tells us that he said to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus simply responded,” This is the way it must be to fulfill God’s commands of righteousness, which means acts of right conduct. And so, Jesus was baptized, which makes him one of us. He did not separate himself from the mass of people, coming to John for baptism. He did not show himself to be holier or better or smarter or more worthy, or even God’s chosen. He claimed no such power or title for himself. It was God, not Jesus, who named him the Son, the Beloved. You see, baptism is not something Jesus could do for himself, any more than it is something we can do for ourselves. Baptism is a gift from God, but also a submission to God. If we are babies or children, we are submitted to baptism by someone else’s decision. But as an adult Jesus made the decision to be baptized, to submit to God, and in this act two truths ring out: Jesus is one of us and he will be a different kind of Messiah.
Israel’s conventional expectation of a Messiah was one who would lead as King David did---a glorious ruler, who would make Israel into a conquering empire. But this was not how it would be. Oh, there were hints in Israelite history and scripture of another kind of savior. In the prophet, Isaiah, for example, the people heard the voice of one, who tried to bring a measure of hope and comfort in the midst of what looked like stinging defeat. The Babylonian empire had conquered the Jews, destroying their Temple, and carrying off their leaders and educated citizens to Babylon for over 50 years. Even when Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon and agreed to send the Jews home, they returned to a devastated society, and in the midst of devastation, the natural impulse is to look for power and strength from a leader like David or Solomon. And yet this is not what Isaiah told them. A servant will be sent from God, who will “bring forth justice to the nations.” That sounded good, but Isaiah continued, he will do it not by crying out or lifting up his voice or making it heard in the streets. “A bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” What kind of leadership is this? It certainly did not sound like a prescription for success. How do you rebuild a destroyed city and make a new civilization with someone who cannot even break a bruised reed?
Well, the same questions were undoubtedly asked about Jesus. He did not present himself as the one who could and would overcome Roman power. In today’s reading from Matthew, we are in the third chapter, and so far, until his baptism Jesus has not spoken one word. And when he finally speaks, he says his baptism is to fulfill all righteousness. As I said earlier, righteousness is right conduct, according to God’s commands. But the purpose of right conduct should not be reduced to a form of legalism, as if following the law is all there is to holiness. This is the problem Jesus had with some of the Jewish religious leadership. They followed the letter of the law, but Jesus charged them the lack of spirit. Oh, they did not commit adultery; they followed the proper rituals of cleanliness, but they lacked compassion and deep understanding. They failed to see that true righteousness concerns one’s relationship with God, and since God is love, the absence of love pulls one further away from God. In his baptism Jesus shows himself to be one of the people; he’s just like everyone else, even part of the riff raff. He is not in the business of lording his own righteousness over others. He will not use raw power or coercion. Instead, he will walk a path of humility and obedience to show what it truly means to love God with the fullness of heart, mind, soul, and strength. This is not what people would have expected from a Messiah or the savior of the world. He should not be like one of us, and certainly not like one of them, the wrong kind of people, whoever it is we think the wrong kind of people are.
A number of years ago, I worked for a short period of time in a drug rehabilitation center. I didn’t want to work there, but I had no other job offer and the family needed my money, so against MY desire and inclination, I took the job. Just about all the other counselors were recovered addicts, but the new social worker in charge of hiring wanted counselors with other backgrounds as well. She told me that although recovered addicts often made excellent counselors, sometimes their own past got in the way. And so, she hired some people who had no history of drug abuse.
This was probably the toughest job I have ever done in my life, partly because I felt humiliated to even be there. I mean all these other counselors had messed up big time; they had stolen, lied, cheated their families out of money and so many other things as well, and here they were, making the same salary as I, and in some cases even more. Many of them had no more education than a GED, and here I was with two Masters’ degrees and a doctorate. I remember very well when one of
my clients asked me about my recovery. I was horrified. “Why I’ve never been an addict, I protested. I never did any of that stuff.” Oh, she said. And I could tell by her Oh and her expression that suddenly she did not trust me---but not because I had not been an addict, but because by the tone of my response, she detected that I really thought I was better than she. As one of my other clients later said, “You know, you’re not better than we are---just luckier and maybe smarter. But luck and smarts don’t make you better---they just make you luckier and smarter---that’s all.”
She was right. It was something I had to learn, and learn I did. Jesus did not begin his ministry until around the age of 30, and we really do not know how much learning he had to do before he began. But in his story, we meet the One in whom God is well pleased. And he never lords his identity over anyone; he never shows by his actions or voice that he thinks he is better than anyone else. HE enters fully into the human condition. That is what his submission to John’s baptism reveals---a full identification with humanity. And that is the way God in Jesus Christ can help and save us.
December 28, 2022
Dear Friends,
Nature has been having quite a dramatic time of it over the past few weeks with winter storms and plummeting temperatures blanketing large swaths of the country with cold and snow. Just yesterday I saw a picture in the Washington Post of people trying to shovel their driveway and sidewalks in Hamburg, New York, the town where I graduated from high school. I know all about lake effect snow, having spent most of my childhood in the Buffalo region. When I first moved to Massachusetts after four years spent in college in Chicago, I thought New Englanders were the biggest wimps when it came to coping with snow. Yes, nature does have a way of humbling human beings, reminding us that for all our creative brilliance and technological advancement, we cannot always outsmart nature to save ourselves from the ravages of hurricanes and snowstorms.
Shortly after seeing the picture of Hamburg’s snow, I read an article about humpback whales. Apparently, humpbacks are the most studied of all the whales, and we are learning fascinating things about their “language.” They sing these amazing songs and pass them on to other whales in the same region. When whales travel, as they do in various seasons, such as the breeding season, the whales in the area hear this new song from the male humpbacks, coming to breed. And they pick it up and pass it on. So, whales in Australia passed their songs on to other whales in French Polynesia, who in turn passed it on to whales in Ecuador. Scientists claim that nearly half the globe’s whales are now vocally connected.
It is the male humpbacks who sing, and their songs last about one half hour. Why do they sing? One conjecture is to attract females. Other whales sing as well, but the humpbacks are the ones most studied, so we know the most about their songs. There is apparently a complex structure to the language of the song. The whales combine short sounds, which we call units, into phrases, then the phrases form themes. Each song has several themes.
Sometimes the male whale will change a unit in a song or add a phrase or even delete a theme. Other males will copy it, which means that songs do change and evolve. So, different populations, which initially learned the same song, may have different versions of the one song. Of course, not all changes are copied, and I would imagine that while some whales might like the new version, there are others who do not, and so they prefer to stick to the original----not so different from human beings.
Marine biologists have been studying humpbacks for quite some time. In 1996 one biologist noticed that a particular humpback male off the east coast of Australia had given up a local song and was singing a song that had been sung on the west coast of the country. Within two years all the males on the east coast were singing the new song. More research indicated that songs sung in eastern Australia showed up in a couple of years in French Polynesia, over 6000 miles away! This led marine biologists to wonder if the songs traveled even further east across the Pacific, and so they began to collaborate with marine biologists in Ecuador. The whales in Ecuador had their own distinctive songs, but soon they were putting French Polynesian themes into their songs. So, the singing cannot simply be reduced to mere copying. There is creative use of units, phrases, and themes.
WE human beings can get quite a swelled head about our privileged place in the creation. We remember the Old Testament story of creation, where God apparently gave “dominion” to human beings over the rest of the creation. There is no doubt our hands, especially our thumb, and our upright locomotion have given us tremendous advantages. Then there is the evolution of our cerebral cortex, which has allowed us to invent something as complex as tensor calculus. And yet marine biologists, who have studied the brains of humpback whales, assure us that the cerebral cortex of whales is large and complex enough to permit them the same creative ingenuity. But whales live in an evolutionary nirvana. They have no need to change their environments, since they have no natural enemies---except humans!
We human beings, on the other hand, are restless creatures. We are not so easily at home in the world, whose environment can challenge our very survival. And so, we push against boundaries and limits. We invent things which are more than physical survival. We do not require tenor calculus to survive; we do not need choral music or symphonies or magnificent cathedrals or paintings or sculpture. And yet this is what we have made and continue to make. Whales sing songs, and they pass them on, and we are mightily impressed that they do. Even the Bible attested to the magnificence of whales, referring to them as the great leviathan. But when the psalmist sang his songs, praising the work of God’s hands, the heavens, the stars, the moon, he specifically wondered about human beings:
What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given then dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet.
We do live in a time when we are asked to reconsider our “dominion” over other creatures. What does it really mean? And the more we learn about these magnificent other creatures, hopefully, the more we shall realize that responsibility might be preferable to dominion.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Nature has been having quite a dramatic time of it over the past few weeks with winter storms and plummeting temperatures blanketing large swaths of the country with cold and snow. Just yesterday I saw a picture in the Washington Post of people trying to shovel their driveway and sidewalks in Hamburg, New York, the town where I graduated from high school. I know all about lake effect snow, having spent most of my childhood in the Buffalo region. When I first moved to Massachusetts after four years spent in college in Chicago, I thought New Englanders were the biggest wimps when it came to coping with snow. Yes, nature does have a way of humbling human beings, reminding us that for all our creative brilliance and technological advancement, we cannot always outsmart nature to save ourselves from the ravages of hurricanes and snowstorms.
Shortly after seeing the picture of Hamburg’s snow, I read an article about humpback whales. Apparently, humpbacks are the most studied of all the whales, and we are learning fascinating things about their “language.” They sing these amazing songs and pass them on to other whales in the same region. When whales travel, as they do in various seasons, such as the breeding season, the whales in the area hear this new song from the male humpbacks, coming to breed. And they pick it up and pass it on. So, whales in Australia passed their songs on to other whales in French Polynesia, who in turn passed it on to whales in Ecuador. Scientists claim that nearly half the globe’s whales are now vocally connected.
It is the male humpbacks who sing, and their songs last about one half hour. Why do they sing? One conjecture is to attract females. Other whales sing as well, but the humpbacks are the ones most studied, so we know the most about their songs. There is apparently a complex structure to the language of the song. The whales combine short sounds, which we call units, into phrases, then the phrases form themes. Each song has several themes.
Sometimes the male whale will change a unit in a song or add a phrase or even delete a theme. Other males will copy it, which means that songs do change and evolve. So, different populations, which initially learned the same song, may have different versions of the one song. Of course, not all changes are copied, and I would imagine that while some whales might like the new version, there are others who do not, and so they prefer to stick to the original----not so different from human beings.
Marine biologists have been studying humpbacks for quite some time. In 1996 one biologist noticed that a particular humpback male off the east coast of Australia had given up a local song and was singing a song that had been sung on the west coast of the country. Within two years all the males on the east coast were singing the new song. More research indicated that songs sung in eastern Australia showed up in a couple of years in French Polynesia, over 6000 miles away! This led marine biologists to wonder if the songs traveled even further east across the Pacific, and so they began to collaborate with marine biologists in Ecuador. The whales in Ecuador had their own distinctive songs, but soon they were putting French Polynesian themes into their songs. So, the singing cannot simply be reduced to mere copying. There is creative use of units, phrases, and themes.
WE human beings can get quite a swelled head about our privileged place in the creation. We remember the Old Testament story of creation, where God apparently gave “dominion” to human beings over the rest of the creation. There is no doubt our hands, especially our thumb, and our upright locomotion have given us tremendous advantages. Then there is the evolution of our cerebral cortex, which has allowed us to invent something as complex as tensor calculus. And yet marine biologists, who have studied the brains of humpback whales, assure us that the cerebral cortex of whales is large and complex enough to permit them the same creative ingenuity. But whales live in an evolutionary nirvana. They have no need to change their environments, since they have no natural enemies---except humans!
We human beings, on the other hand, are restless creatures. We are not so easily at home in the world, whose environment can challenge our very survival. And so, we push against boundaries and limits. We invent things which are more than physical survival. We do not require tenor calculus to survive; we do not need choral music or symphonies or magnificent cathedrals or paintings or sculpture. And yet this is what we have made and continue to make. Whales sing songs, and they pass them on, and we are mightily impressed that they do. Even the Bible attested to the magnificence of whales, referring to them as the great leviathan. But when the psalmist sang his songs, praising the work of God’s hands, the heavens, the stars, the moon, he specifically wondered about human beings:
What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given then dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet.
We do live in a time when we are asked to reconsider our “dominion” over other creatures. What does it really mean? And the more we learn about these magnificent other creatures, hopefully, the more we shall realize that responsibility might be preferable to dominion.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
I HEARD THE BELLS
Christmas Day, 2022
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
There are many different ways to make an announcement and one way is to use bells. Remember high school, when the bell signified whether or not you were late to a class. And of course, church bells, which announce that a service is about to begin, or that something monumental is happening or about to happen. The church bells rang out all across France and England when the war ended in Europe in 1945. And then there is the tradition of ringing church bells to announce Christmas as the morning light breaks forth.
And so it was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the church bells ringing on Christmas morning in 1863. Longfellow was one of America’s great poets, who once wrote, “Everyone has their secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and too often we think a person cold, when he is only sad.” Longfellow’s life had hardly begun in sadness. He was a child of privilege and promise. His ancestors had come to the American shore in 1676 from Yorkshire, England, and he was born in 1807 in Portland Maine to parents, who loved him and nurtured his talents. At age 3, he began school and by age 6 he was reading classical literature (in Latin) and writing stories. By 19 he had graduated from college and was a professor of language at Bowdoin College in Maine. At age 22 he had already written college textbooks, so it was hardly surprising that Harvard wooed him away from Bowdoin.
By the time he was 27, Longfellow had a national reputation, but within a year of moving to Harvard, his wife died. Grief stricken, he poured himself into his teaching, and seven years later, with a heart ready to love again, he remarried. Five children were born to him and his wife and during these years, he produced some of the poetry that is most familiar to us: Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish. The decades moved on, and life was good to the Longfellows. By 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was lionized as one of the greatest writers ever to come from the North American continent. With honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, he would have been a happy man, but in 1861, his wife, while lighting a match, caught her clothes on fire and burned to death.
Longfellows’s grief was devastating and adding to his personal loss was the American Civil War, whose brutality and cruelty brought him to his knees. He quite literally pleaded with God to end the madness of the slaughter, and then his oldest son, Charles, who was but 19 year old, was wounded. When Charles arrived home, more dead than alive, Longfellow’s sadness turned to rage. More and more wounded soldiers were arriving in Cambridge, Ma. and the poet also had friends who lost sons in the war. He could not even begin to comprehend what it was that God was doing, and a deep and dark depression set in.
On the morning of Dec. 25, 1863, he awoke to the chiming of church bells. Taking pen in hand, he wrote out five stanzas, two of which are rarely sung today: Then from each black, accursed mouth,/ The cannon thundered in the South/And with the sound the carols drowned/Of peace on earth good will to men. It was as if an earthquake rent/The hearthstones of a continent/And made forlorn the households born/Of peace on earth goodwill to men.
He would have ended his poem there on a sad and tragic note---except the bells peeled even louder, and in the midst of the chiming, he penned out two more stanzas: Then peeled the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead nor doth He sleep/The wrong shall fail/The right prevail/ With peace on earth goodwill to men. Till ringing, signing, on its way/ The world revolved from night to day/ A voice, a chime, a chant sublime/Of peace on earth, good will to men! Longfellow would later say those words came from God, not from him.
In 1872, almost 10 years later, an Englishman, John Baptiste Calkin, who was an organist and music teacher, put Longfellow’s words to a melody that not only conveyed the bleak imagery and haunting sadness of the opening verses, but also the hopeful faith in the poem’s conclusion. When published, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” quickly became one of the most popular of Christmas songs---minus the two verses about the Civil War.
The song was sung in the trenches during the First World War and also during the Second. One young army captain, Stanley Young, age 24, wrote his wife during the Battle of the Bulge. “War is so terrible, and both sides do terrible things. Just a few days ago, four young Germans, younger than I, entered our lines under a white flag with a simple offer: Surrender now, or face complete annihilation. General McAuliffe disdainfully answered “Nuts,” and when the Germans looked confused and asked for a clearer translation, Colonel Harper said, “Go to hell.”
The men all about me cheered, and I suppose I should have too, but all I felt was a deep sadness. Those German boys were hardly more than children; they did not make this war any more than I did. We are all pawns in a history not of our own making. And all God seems to do is look down upon the slaughter. Those were my thoughts a few days later as I stumbled into a church service early one morning, when it was still too dark to see. I did not even remember that it was Christmas morning. I remember nothing about the service---except for a chorus of about a dozen men, singing.” I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Then peeled the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead/Nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right, prevail/ With peace on earth, good will to men!” “Oh, my love,” the soldier finished the last line in his letter. I do so hope and pray it is true.”
And so do we all.
Christmas Day, 2022
First Church of Christ, Unionville, CT
There are many different ways to make an announcement and one way is to use bells. Remember high school, when the bell signified whether or not you were late to a class. And of course, church bells, which announce that a service is about to begin, or that something monumental is happening or about to happen. The church bells rang out all across France and England when the war ended in Europe in 1945. And then there is the tradition of ringing church bells to announce Christmas as the morning light breaks forth.
And so it was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the church bells ringing on Christmas morning in 1863. Longfellow was one of America’s great poets, who once wrote, “Everyone has their secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and too often we think a person cold, when he is only sad.” Longfellow’s life had hardly begun in sadness. He was a child of privilege and promise. His ancestors had come to the American shore in 1676 from Yorkshire, England, and he was born in 1807 in Portland Maine to parents, who loved him and nurtured his talents. At age 3, he began school and by age 6 he was reading classical literature (in Latin) and writing stories. By 19 he had graduated from college and was a professor of language at Bowdoin College in Maine. At age 22 he had already written college textbooks, so it was hardly surprising that Harvard wooed him away from Bowdoin.
By the time he was 27, Longfellow had a national reputation, but within a year of moving to Harvard, his wife died. Grief stricken, he poured himself into his teaching, and seven years later, with a heart ready to love again, he remarried. Five children were born to him and his wife and during these years, he produced some of the poetry that is most familiar to us: Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish. The decades moved on, and life was good to the Longfellows. By 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was lionized as one of the greatest writers ever to come from the North American continent. With honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, he would have been a happy man, but in 1861, his wife, while lighting a match, caught her clothes on fire and burned to death.
Longfellows’s grief was devastating and adding to his personal loss was the American Civil War, whose brutality and cruelty brought him to his knees. He quite literally pleaded with God to end the madness of the slaughter, and then his oldest son, Charles, who was but 19 year old, was wounded. When Charles arrived home, more dead than alive, Longfellow’s sadness turned to rage. More and more wounded soldiers were arriving in Cambridge, Ma. and the poet also had friends who lost sons in the war. He could not even begin to comprehend what it was that God was doing, and a deep and dark depression set in.
On the morning of Dec. 25, 1863, he awoke to the chiming of church bells. Taking pen in hand, he wrote out five stanzas, two of which are rarely sung today: Then from each black, accursed mouth,/ The cannon thundered in the South/And with the sound the carols drowned/Of peace on earth good will to men. It was as if an earthquake rent/The hearthstones of a continent/And made forlorn the households born/Of peace on earth goodwill to men.
He would have ended his poem there on a sad and tragic note---except the bells peeled even louder, and in the midst of the chiming, he penned out two more stanzas: Then peeled the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead nor doth He sleep/The wrong shall fail/The right prevail/ With peace on earth goodwill to men. Till ringing, signing, on its way/ The world revolved from night to day/ A voice, a chime, a chant sublime/Of peace on earth, good will to men! Longfellow would later say those words came from God, not from him.
In 1872, almost 10 years later, an Englishman, John Baptiste Calkin, who was an organist and music teacher, put Longfellow’s words to a melody that not only conveyed the bleak imagery and haunting sadness of the opening verses, but also the hopeful faith in the poem’s conclusion. When published, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” quickly became one of the most popular of Christmas songs---minus the two verses about the Civil War.
The song was sung in the trenches during the First World War and also during the Second. One young army captain, Stanley Young, age 24, wrote his wife during the Battle of the Bulge. “War is so terrible, and both sides do terrible things. Just a few days ago, four young Germans, younger than I, entered our lines under a white flag with a simple offer: Surrender now, or face complete annihilation. General McAuliffe disdainfully answered “Nuts,” and when the Germans looked confused and asked for a clearer translation, Colonel Harper said, “Go to hell.”
The men all about me cheered, and I suppose I should have too, but all I felt was a deep sadness. Those German boys were hardly more than children; they did not make this war any more than I did. We are all pawns in a history not of our own making. And all God seems to do is look down upon the slaughter. Those were my thoughts a few days later as I stumbled into a church service early one morning, when it was still too dark to see. I did not even remember that it was Christmas morning. I remember nothing about the service---except for a chorus of about a dozen men, singing.” I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Then peeled the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead/Nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right, prevail/ With peace on earth, good will to men!” “Oh, my love,” the soldier finished the last line in his letter. I do so hope and pray it is true.”
And so do we all.
When the Guns Were Silent
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
December 24, 2022
The time: December 1, 1914; the place, No Man’s Land, a piece of trenched earth, running across France and Belgium, where men lived and died. World War I was but four months old, and already hundreds of thousands of men were dead, maimed or missing. The newly elected Pope, Benedict XV, appealed to both sides for a Christmas truce. The only reply from the high commands from both sides was more shelling. “If men must kill,” one editor from a London newspaper wrote, “it is perhaps just as well they make no truce for Christmas.”
But by December 8th, something unusual began to happen: both sides stopped firing at meal times, despite orders to the contrary. Packages from home began ,places where the trenches of the enemies were separated by a mere 50 yards, and soon men began exchanging newspapers, rations, and Christmas gifts by throwing them out into the distance, toward the trenches of the opposing side. The orders from both sides were loud and clear: no fraternizing with the enemy, but the orders were ignored.
On the morning of December 19 a young English Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey, leaned back against the walls of his trench, trying to find an acceptable position in which to write his mother. “Mother,” he wrote, “this morning an extraordinary thing happened. Some Germans came out of their trenches and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and dying. So, we did the same. The Germans then beckoned us to come over, and we did. We talked to them for a while, and one young man gave me a cigarette---the first one I had in quite some time, which wasn’t soggy. He seemed nice, Mother, well spoken and well mannered, the kind of person you always encouraged me to have as a friend. It’s ironic; we don’t have to hate our enemy; we only have to kill him.”
For the Germans Christmas was a particularly festive time, so a few days before Christmas, little Christmas trees, illuminated by white candles, began appearing all along the German trenches. It looked like footlights in the theatre, one English soldier wrote to his wife. The Queen’s elite Westminster Rifle Guard was suspicious, and so they fired, but no shots were returned. Suddenly out of the darkness a voice shouted, “Englishmen, Englishmen, it’s Christmas Eve. You don’t shoot; we don’t shoot.” And then the Germans began to sing, Silent Night, Holy Night, followed by God Save the King.
Daylight brought the familiar view: dead bodies, strewn across No Man’s Land, though newly fallen snow had covered the worst scenes of death. Each side agreed to send men out to help bury each other’s dead, and that’s how they spent Christmas morning of 1914----burying their enemies. One German officer approached an English chaplain to tell him how a young Scotsman had died a few feet from his trench. He was beyond medical aid, the officer explained, so I stayed with him as he lay dying. He was struggling to remove something from his pocket---this picture of his wife. I held it up for him so he could see her. Perhaps you could let her know that her husband did not die alone.
The Christmas truce of 1914 was widespread, but not everywhere effective. One young English soldier by the name of Henry Williamson wrote to his mother about a “poor tormented German soldier,” who refused to step forward to participate in a joint burial service. “Have you no German sense of shame at all?” he snorted to his comrades. The soldier’s name, it was later learned, was Adolf Hitler.
In some places the truce lasted nearly two weeks; in other places, only a few days. Understand this: the truce came from the bottom up, from the soldiers in the trenches. It came despite direct orders from both the English and German high command. Official military history has tried to hide the truce; it was, after all, an embarrassment to those who would wage war. On the first day of December, 1915 to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s truce, the English command ordered constant, daylight shelling to last throughout the entire month of December. During December, 1915 there would be more men killed on any single day (averaging about 6000 per day) than yards gained in the entire year. And then four more years of war---not to determine who was right, but who was left.
So, what does this mean---this Christmas truce of 1914? As deep as the mark of sin is, it is not so deep that war is something human beings so easily desire. Oh, some do. We see it in our world today: Putin invading a sovereign nation, because he could, and power, not peace, is what he most desires. Each year Christmas comes, and we sing Silent Night, Holy Night. We remember the coming of Christ, whom we name Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, and Prince of Peace. And, of course, the story goes that the angels sing of peace: Peace on earth. Is it possible that in December of 1914 the Prince of Peace came once again among the lowly---the common soldiers from both sides who against all orders from their superiors did not fight and would not fight. The Prince of Peace comes, and continues to come. And what do we do? Do we recognize and welcome him, or do we repeat history’s terrible refrain, “Crucify him! Crucify him. And then the dastardly deed is done not on a cross but on war’s cruel battlefield? Oh God, despite our foolish ways, give us peace.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
December 24, 2022
The time: December 1, 1914; the place, No Man’s Land, a piece of trenched earth, running across France and Belgium, where men lived and died. World War I was but four months old, and already hundreds of thousands of men were dead, maimed or missing. The newly elected Pope, Benedict XV, appealed to both sides for a Christmas truce. The only reply from the high commands from both sides was more shelling. “If men must kill,” one editor from a London newspaper wrote, “it is perhaps just as well they make no truce for Christmas.”
But by December 8th, something unusual began to happen: both sides stopped firing at meal times, despite orders to the contrary. Packages from home began ,places where the trenches of the enemies were separated by a mere 50 yards, and soon men began exchanging newspapers, rations, and Christmas gifts by throwing them out into the distance, toward the trenches of the opposing side. The orders from both sides were loud and clear: no fraternizing with the enemy, but the orders were ignored.
On the morning of December 19 a young English Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey, leaned back against the walls of his trench, trying to find an acceptable position in which to write his mother. “Mother,” he wrote, “this morning an extraordinary thing happened. Some Germans came out of their trenches and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and dying. So, we did the same. The Germans then beckoned us to come over, and we did. We talked to them for a while, and one young man gave me a cigarette---the first one I had in quite some time, which wasn’t soggy. He seemed nice, Mother, well spoken and well mannered, the kind of person you always encouraged me to have as a friend. It’s ironic; we don’t have to hate our enemy; we only have to kill him.”
For the Germans Christmas was a particularly festive time, so a few days before Christmas, little Christmas trees, illuminated by white candles, began appearing all along the German trenches. It looked like footlights in the theatre, one English soldier wrote to his wife. The Queen’s elite Westminster Rifle Guard was suspicious, and so they fired, but no shots were returned. Suddenly out of the darkness a voice shouted, “Englishmen, Englishmen, it’s Christmas Eve. You don’t shoot; we don’t shoot.” And then the Germans began to sing, Silent Night, Holy Night, followed by God Save the King.
Daylight brought the familiar view: dead bodies, strewn across No Man’s Land, though newly fallen snow had covered the worst scenes of death. Each side agreed to send men out to help bury each other’s dead, and that’s how they spent Christmas morning of 1914----burying their enemies. One German officer approached an English chaplain to tell him how a young Scotsman had died a few feet from his trench. He was beyond medical aid, the officer explained, so I stayed with him as he lay dying. He was struggling to remove something from his pocket---this picture of his wife. I held it up for him so he could see her. Perhaps you could let her know that her husband did not die alone.
The Christmas truce of 1914 was widespread, but not everywhere effective. One young English soldier by the name of Henry Williamson wrote to his mother about a “poor tormented German soldier,” who refused to step forward to participate in a joint burial service. “Have you no German sense of shame at all?” he snorted to his comrades. The soldier’s name, it was later learned, was Adolf Hitler.
In some places the truce lasted nearly two weeks; in other places, only a few days. Understand this: the truce came from the bottom up, from the soldiers in the trenches. It came despite direct orders from both the English and German high command. Official military history has tried to hide the truce; it was, after all, an embarrassment to those who would wage war. On the first day of December, 1915 to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s truce, the English command ordered constant, daylight shelling to last throughout the entire month of December. During December, 1915 there would be more men killed on any single day (averaging about 6000 per day) than yards gained in the entire year. And then four more years of war---not to determine who was right, but who was left.
So, what does this mean---this Christmas truce of 1914? As deep as the mark of sin is, it is not so deep that war is something human beings so easily desire. Oh, some do. We see it in our world today: Putin invading a sovereign nation, because he could, and power, not peace, is what he most desires. Each year Christmas comes, and we sing Silent Night, Holy Night. We remember the coming of Christ, whom we name Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, and Prince of Peace. And, of course, the story goes that the angels sing of peace: Peace on earth. Is it possible that in December of 1914 the Prince of Peace came once again among the lowly---the common soldiers from both sides who against all orders from their superiors did not fight and would not fight. The Prince of Peace comes, and continues to come. And what do we do? Do we recognize and welcome him, or do we repeat history’s terrible refrain, “Crucify him! Crucify him. And then the dastardly deed is done not on a cross but on war’s cruel battlefield? Oh God, despite our foolish ways, give us peace.
A Monologue by Mary
First Church in Unionville, CT
December 18, 2022
Matthew 1: 18-24
I was so afraid when the Angel first told me. Finding out I was pregnant was shocking – to me, to my parents, to Joseph. That poor man, he did not know what “hit him,” but then neither did I. How could I? I mean I was so young, a child by your standards today. I lived in a world that was so very small. Most people never traveled very far from their homes, and women had few options. I could read but a few words, and I could not write at all. Where would I have learned? I came from a poor and humble family ---- although many years later there were stories that I came from wealth. I guess some people just couldn’t believe that the savior of the world came from such poor, humble, uneducated beginnings. Ironic, isn’t it? But then God has this habit of being ironic, paradoxical, downright mysterious.
Many of you recall the story from Luke, about how the angel Gabriel came to me and said, “Hail, favored one!” What a startling greeting, and right then and there---right at that very moment, before one more sound was uttered---I knew, I knew that this was something shockingly new, something not to be comprehended by the normal categories of human thought and experience. And that is the first thing you must understand. If you understand nothing else today, get this: the normal categories we human beings use to cope with life, to understand life, to give us support and direction and even wisdom---all that can break apart in one instant when God crosses your path. I am not talking about craziness or irrationality or an assault on reason: I mean something that pushes down into reason’s depths -- deep, deep it goes; deeper than you can imagine, really, and this is what revelation is. Never an insult to reason, but always a deepening of it. So, you see, Luke got it exactly right when he wrote that I pondered all this. I never stopped pondering, no, not for a minute. If I had, I might have gone mad! And so, for me there was a lifetime of questions, a lifetime of pondering and wondering.
Sure, I was poor, uneducated, and humble, but that does not mean I was simple minded. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions: And so, I asked what I thought was the most basic question of all: How can this be, since I have no husband? I couldn’t see how the son of God could come into the world through a situation that many would view as scandalous. In my day an unwed woman could be stoned to death for becoming pregnant. There were no paternity tests, and the only thing needed to confirm or deny paternity was the word of a man. If he said he was the father, that settled it! If a married woman had a baby by someone else beside her husband, most of the time her husband would claim the child as his own. Even a betrayed husband did not want to see his betraying wife executed! But if no man claimed the child---well, that was a big problem for the woman because then she would be stoned. As soon as a man stepped forth to say, “This is my child,” that finished it. And that is what Joseph did for me; he stepped forward to claim the child. He would make no public accusation against me. His plan was to divorce me quietly.
There is something else I want you to understand. People think that the essential question is where Jesus received half of his chromosomes – from God or from a human father. But I have come to understand that the issue is not so much about biology as it is about theology, that is, about what God is doing, what God is intending. God is always doing something in real human life. But we so often miss it. And you know something? I could have easily missed it too, and that is why Gabriel showed up and grabbed my attention.
And now when I look back on what Gabriel told me then, I think it was more than my being chosen to be the mother of the Messiah. God wanted me to be fully human, fully alive, just as God wants that for you, and the trouble is, we get so easily distracted by the details of life, which claim our attention. We have work to do, making a home and earning a living, getting food. And we all have our worries and troubles. It is so easy to become distracted, to fail to pay attention. And so when Gabriel invaded my space, my distractions were overcome by the news that I was to be a mother, the mother of the promised Messiah. I was overwhelmed both by the magnitude of this proposition and the uncertainty about how things would proceed. It is one thing to know that all will be according to God’s plan, and quite another to experience life while that plan unfolds. I felt so uncertain and afraid – afraid for myself and for Joseph, for sure, but mostly afraid for the child that I was being asked to raise and teach and nurture along his path toward fulfilling his destiny. In light of that, every other concern seemed small. And I think that is why God came here on earth to show us that although we have to live with the details, we do not have to lose ourselves in them. You see, if we look, if we are open, the details point to something beyond themselves, something bigger and more important...and perhaps something we cannot fully envision on our own, and must leave to what God has envisioned for us.
And this is what Joseph saw or dreamed. He was able to see the big picture; he didn’t get lost in the details, though he could have. The text you heard today, from Matthew’s Gospel, is nothing like Luke’s. There is no mention here of Gabriel coming to me; no mention of my pondering, no words like, “Let it be to me according to your word.” Luke says nothing about Joseph having a dream where he is reassured to take me as his wife. Each Gospel has a different perspective, a different way of telling the story. And in Matthew, Joseph is important. He is the one who opens himself to God’s will, taking me as his wife, as the text so succinctly says.
He could have dismissed me quietly, and I did wonder why he did not. I mean Joseph wasn’t one to talk or explain himself, which is why in the New Testament, there is not one spoken word from him. He was not comfortable with words, and what he was thinking is not something I ever really knew. I don’t think we understood each other very well---Joseph with his dreams and me with my questions and ponderings. Sometimes I would catch him looking sadly at me, the same way that years later, he would look sadly at Jesus, as if he knew then that there was something about Jesus neither of us would ever understand. And one day, when I saw him look at Jesus that way, I said, “Oh, Joseph, I do not understand him either and all my ponderings have brought me no nearer to understanding.” He looked at me and said, “And all my dreaming has brought me no nearer to understanding either”. So, it seemed that what separated us also brought us together.
It’s kind of like a lot of churches today, churches like yours, where people have many different beliefs about God and Jesus and the Bible and what finally matters. Maybe what brings you together is the sense that it is worthwhile to come together--- to worship, to pray, to forgive, to ponder and dream, to practice hospitality, to do justice and mercy. All this is worthwhile because you know, deep down inside, that although you do not fully understand it all, there is something beyond the understanding that calls you to be here, that calls you to believe. Oh, how I pondered and oh, how Joseph dreamed, and despite all that separated us, God brought us together that God’s work might be done through us. And perhaps that is why you are here as well----that God might do something through you and through this church. And what that is, well, you figure it out as you go along, just as Joseph and I had to do.
First Church in Unionville, CT
December 18, 2022
Matthew 1: 18-24
I was so afraid when the Angel first told me. Finding out I was pregnant was shocking – to me, to my parents, to Joseph. That poor man, he did not know what “hit him,” but then neither did I. How could I? I mean I was so young, a child by your standards today. I lived in a world that was so very small. Most people never traveled very far from their homes, and women had few options. I could read but a few words, and I could not write at all. Where would I have learned? I came from a poor and humble family ---- although many years later there were stories that I came from wealth. I guess some people just couldn’t believe that the savior of the world came from such poor, humble, uneducated beginnings. Ironic, isn’t it? But then God has this habit of being ironic, paradoxical, downright mysterious.
Many of you recall the story from Luke, about how the angel Gabriel came to me and said, “Hail, favored one!” What a startling greeting, and right then and there---right at that very moment, before one more sound was uttered---I knew, I knew that this was something shockingly new, something not to be comprehended by the normal categories of human thought and experience. And that is the first thing you must understand. If you understand nothing else today, get this: the normal categories we human beings use to cope with life, to understand life, to give us support and direction and even wisdom---all that can break apart in one instant when God crosses your path. I am not talking about craziness or irrationality or an assault on reason: I mean something that pushes down into reason’s depths -- deep, deep it goes; deeper than you can imagine, really, and this is what revelation is. Never an insult to reason, but always a deepening of it. So, you see, Luke got it exactly right when he wrote that I pondered all this. I never stopped pondering, no, not for a minute. If I had, I might have gone mad! And so, for me there was a lifetime of questions, a lifetime of pondering and wondering.
Sure, I was poor, uneducated, and humble, but that does not mean I was simple minded. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions: And so, I asked what I thought was the most basic question of all: How can this be, since I have no husband? I couldn’t see how the son of God could come into the world through a situation that many would view as scandalous. In my day an unwed woman could be stoned to death for becoming pregnant. There were no paternity tests, and the only thing needed to confirm or deny paternity was the word of a man. If he said he was the father, that settled it! If a married woman had a baby by someone else beside her husband, most of the time her husband would claim the child as his own. Even a betrayed husband did not want to see his betraying wife executed! But if no man claimed the child---well, that was a big problem for the woman because then she would be stoned. As soon as a man stepped forth to say, “This is my child,” that finished it. And that is what Joseph did for me; he stepped forward to claim the child. He would make no public accusation against me. His plan was to divorce me quietly.
There is something else I want you to understand. People think that the essential question is where Jesus received half of his chromosomes – from God or from a human father. But I have come to understand that the issue is not so much about biology as it is about theology, that is, about what God is doing, what God is intending. God is always doing something in real human life. But we so often miss it. And you know something? I could have easily missed it too, and that is why Gabriel showed up and grabbed my attention.
And now when I look back on what Gabriel told me then, I think it was more than my being chosen to be the mother of the Messiah. God wanted me to be fully human, fully alive, just as God wants that for you, and the trouble is, we get so easily distracted by the details of life, which claim our attention. We have work to do, making a home and earning a living, getting food. And we all have our worries and troubles. It is so easy to become distracted, to fail to pay attention. And so when Gabriel invaded my space, my distractions were overcome by the news that I was to be a mother, the mother of the promised Messiah. I was overwhelmed both by the magnitude of this proposition and the uncertainty about how things would proceed. It is one thing to know that all will be according to God’s plan, and quite another to experience life while that plan unfolds. I felt so uncertain and afraid – afraid for myself and for Joseph, for sure, but mostly afraid for the child that I was being asked to raise and teach and nurture along his path toward fulfilling his destiny. In light of that, every other concern seemed small. And I think that is why God came here on earth to show us that although we have to live with the details, we do not have to lose ourselves in them. You see, if we look, if we are open, the details point to something beyond themselves, something bigger and more important...and perhaps something we cannot fully envision on our own, and must leave to what God has envisioned for us.
And this is what Joseph saw or dreamed. He was able to see the big picture; he didn’t get lost in the details, though he could have. The text you heard today, from Matthew’s Gospel, is nothing like Luke’s. There is no mention here of Gabriel coming to me; no mention of my pondering, no words like, “Let it be to me according to your word.” Luke says nothing about Joseph having a dream where he is reassured to take me as his wife. Each Gospel has a different perspective, a different way of telling the story. And in Matthew, Joseph is important. He is the one who opens himself to God’s will, taking me as his wife, as the text so succinctly says.
He could have dismissed me quietly, and I did wonder why he did not. I mean Joseph wasn’t one to talk or explain himself, which is why in the New Testament, there is not one spoken word from him. He was not comfortable with words, and what he was thinking is not something I ever really knew. I don’t think we understood each other very well---Joseph with his dreams and me with my questions and ponderings. Sometimes I would catch him looking sadly at me, the same way that years later, he would look sadly at Jesus, as if he knew then that there was something about Jesus neither of us would ever understand. And one day, when I saw him look at Jesus that way, I said, “Oh, Joseph, I do not understand him either and all my ponderings have brought me no nearer to understanding.” He looked at me and said, “And all my dreaming has brought me no nearer to understanding either”. So, it seemed that what separated us also brought us together.
It’s kind of like a lot of churches today, churches like yours, where people have many different beliefs about God and Jesus and the Bible and what finally matters. Maybe what brings you together is the sense that it is worthwhile to come together--- to worship, to pray, to forgive, to ponder and dream, to practice hospitality, to do justice and mercy. All this is worthwhile because you know, deep down inside, that although you do not fully understand it all, there is something beyond the understanding that calls you to be here, that calls you to believe. Oh, how I pondered and oh, how Joseph dreamed, and despite all that separated us, God brought us together that God’s work might be done through us. And perhaps that is why you are here as well----that God might do something through you and through this church. And what that is, well, you figure it out as you go along, just as Joseph and I had to do.
December 14, 2022
Dear Friends,
I have always loved Christmas trees. Even now, when many of my friends, no longer bother putting them up, I insist we have one, a real one. My husband tells me that he will not forever be able to go out to the Christmas Tree Farm to chop one down and put in either in or on the car, and then carry it into the house. At some point, he assures me, we will have to go artificial. Well, when that time comes, I will accept it. But I told him I would buy a very expensive one, so it looked real. He rolled his eyes in his head and said, “I have no doubt about the expense.”
Evergreen conifers are among the earth’s oldest trees. Someone told me it is possible that some of the dinosaurs even crunched and munched on such trees. The conifers are a hardy lot, having survived what the dinosaurs could not which is perhaps why we humans attribute to them such characteristics as endurance and perseverance. But how did they become the chosen Christmas trees?
In 1419 in the German city of Freiburg, someone noted that he had seen a fir tree set up in a hospital and decorated with apples, gingerbread and wafers. Then in Riga, Latvia in 1510 a group of merchants decorated a tree in the main square at Christmas and later burned it at the beginning of Lent to be used as ashes. There are references to other trees, sometimes referred to solstice trees or New Year’s trees. There were also rules limiting how trees could be used. There was a regulation in Upper Alsace (now part of France) that said each citizen could take only one pine from the forest with a height of no more than eight shoes. And then in the year 1611 in a town called Turckheim in Alsace, there was a ban on cutting down any trees to be used for decorations. This was the first time the term Christmas tree was used.
Christmas trees seem to have been more Protestant and pagan than Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church disdained Christmas trees and referred to Protestantism as the “Tannenbaum religion.” In fact, the Vatican did not put up a Christmas tree until 1982. Martin Luther was said to have brought a tree to his home, decorating it with fruit and nuts as well as lit candles. But in our own country, the Puritans were not only against Christmas trees, but also against the celebration of Christmas. Anyone celebrating Christmas had to pay a hefty fine. The Puritans were not able to have their way, especially as the Germans of Pennsylvania insisted on their celebrations of Christmas, which included Christmas trees. And celebrations have a way of catching on, especially when joy is spread.
Today Americans buy over 25 million trees annually and, when you consider that many people do indeed use artificial ones, that is an impressive number. The trees on city squares or town centers always draw crowds for the lighting and the viewing. A few Saturdays ago, I was in New York with my daughter in law and five year old granddaughter to see the Nutcracker, and taking a taxi from Lincoln Center to Grand Central Station was almost impossible, since we had to go by the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. The crowds were massive, pushing, and pulling as crowds poured over the sidewalks into the streets, for the sole purpose of getting a look at a decorated and lit tree. The Puritans still may not approve, but their disapproval has long been ignored!
I doubt there is a relationship between the Christmas tree and Jesus, though someone tried to make a connection by saying the cross is a tree, shorn of all its branches and beauty. Perhaps that means decorating Christmas trees is a way of reclaiming and celebrating the beauty of nature, which sometimes human beings have abused and misused. Whatever it is, I still love Christmas trees and expect I always will.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I have always loved Christmas trees. Even now, when many of my friends, no longer bother putting them up, I insist we have one, a real one. My husband tells me that he will not forever be able to go out to the Christmas Tree Farm to chop one down and put in either in or on the car, and then carry it into the house. At some point, he assures me, we will have to go artificial. Well, when that time comes, I will accept it. But I told him I would buy a very expensive one, so it looked real. He rolled his eyes in his head and said, “I have no doubt about the expense.”
Evergreen conifers are among the earth’s oldest trees. Someone told me it is possible that some of the dinosaurs even crunched and munched on such trees. The conifers are a hardy lot, having survived what the dinosaurs could not which is perhaps why we humans attribute to them such characteristics as endurance and perseverance. But how did they become the chosen Christmas trees?
In 1419 in the German city of Freiburg, someone noted that he had seen a fir tree set up in a hospital and decorated with apples, gingerbread and wafers. Then in Riga, Latvia in 1510 a group of merchants decorated a tree in the main square at Christmas and later burned it at the beginning of Lent to be used as ashes. There are references to other trees, sometimes referred to solstice trees or New Year’s trees. There were also rules limiting how trees could be used. There was a regulation in Upper Alsace (now part of France) that said each citizen could take only one pine from the forest with a height of no more than eight shoes. And then in the year 1611 in a town called Turckheim in Alsace, there was a ban on cutting down any trees to be used for decorations. This was the first time the term Christmas tree was used.
Christmas trees seem to have been more Protestant and pagan than Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church disdained Christmas trees and referred to Protestantism as the “Tannenbaum religion.” In fact, the Vatican did not put up a Christmas tree until 1982. Martin Luther was said to have brought a tree to his home, decorating it with fruit and nuts as well as lit candles. But in our own country, the Puritans were not only against Christmas trees, but also against the celebration of Christmas. Anyone celebrating Christmas had to pay a hefty fine. The Puritans were not able to have their way, especially as the Germans of Pennsylvania insisted on their celebrations of Christmas, which included Christmas trees. And celebrations have a way of catching on, especially when joy is spread.
Today Americans buy over 25 million trees annually and, when you consider that many people do indeed use artificial ones, that is an impressive number. The trees on city squares or town centers always draw crowds for the lighting and the viewing. A few Saturdays ago, I was in New York with my daughter in law and five year old granddaughter to see the Nutcracker, and taking a taxi from Lincoln Center to Grand Central Station was almost impossible, since we had to go by the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. The crowds were massive, pushing, and pulling as crowds poured over the sidewalks into the streets, for the sole purpose of getting a look at a decorated and lit tree. The Puritans still may not approve, but their disapproval has long been ignored!
I doubt there is a relationship between the Christmas tree and Jesus, though someone tried to make a connection by saying the cross is a tree, shorn of all its branches and beauty. Perhaps that means decorating Christmas trees is a way of reclaiming and celebrating the beauty of nature, which sometimes human beings have abused and misused. Whatever it is, I still love Christmas trees and expect I always will.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
DOUBT & DISAPPOINTMENT: ARE YOU THE ONE?
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
The Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2022
Matthew 11: 2-11
Here we are on the third Sunday of Advent, known as Gaudete Sunday, or the Sunday of Joy or sometimes it is even called Rose Sunday, when the liturgical color is changed from penitential purple to rose. And yet, on this Sunday of Joy, where does our lectionary reading put us: in prison. That’s right, John the Baptist suddenly finds himself in jail. After insulting King Herod and his wife about their illegal marriage, John is suddenly reduced to pacing up and down in a tiny cell, wondering what his fate will be. He might have well expected the worse, and indeed the worse is what he received. After being decapitated, his head was arranged on a fancy serving platter per demand of Salome, King Herod’s step daughter. At least this is how the story goes. What had gone wrong?
Early in Matthew we see John offering a fiery baptism of repentance in the River Jordan, assuring those who came to be baptized that there was one who would follow him, one whose sandal thong John was not worthy to touch or tie. And when Jesus then made his appearance to John, the latter said, “You should baptize me, not me you.” So at least at the beginning John was thoroughly confident that this Jesus was indeed the one, the one who would initiate the new creation desired by God. And yet some chapters later John finds himself in prison, wondering “Are you really the one?” Where had all that confidence gone?
I guess we could say, ‘Life happened,’ and when life happens human experience intervenes to make John and us reconsider what it is we thought was so unassailably true. Like John we too wonder and question about all kinds of things, because that is partly what it means to be a human being. We are not passive meaning makers; we don’t always accept what others believe or say, especially when our own experience intrudes and pushes us in another direction, pushes us to ask questions we might not have asked before: Are you the one? Are you really the One we have been waiting for?
What do you think of the answer that Jesus gave to John’s followers, who had come to Jesus on behalf of John to ask this all important question? Notice that Jesus did not offer a direct answer to the inquiry. He did not say, “Yes, I am the one.” Instead, he basically gave a job description, listing the kinds of things he had been doing: healing the blind, the lame, the deaf and the lepers, raising the dead and preaching Good News to the poor. Now I don’t know about you, but I can imagine that if the same had been said to me, my response would have been: “Yes, yes, but are you really the One? And that is a question, never directly answered, either then or now. The answer is found in the tension----in the tension between faith and doubt, in the tension between hope and disappointment, in the tension between already and not yet. Jesus is already the redeemer, but the world has not yet been fully redeemed. So we live with doubt and disappointment, and try as we might, most of us are not completely successful at banishing them. And perhaps, if we could banish them, it might not be such a good thing for faith, for real faith (as the great 20th century Protestant theologian, Paul Tilich once said) is never in place of doubt, but rather in spite of doubt.
We all know what it means to be disappointed. We have all faced disappointment----perhaps in work, when that job we so much wanted did not come our way, in love or marriage, when what we believed would last forever, turned out to be as fleeting as the season. Disappointment: we all have lived with it when circumstances as well as people have disappointed us. But what happens when God disappoints, when you cannot rid yourself of the idea and the feeling that somehow God has let you down. What then? Perhaps this is exactly where John found himself. Maybe this is how he was feeling as he paced back and forth in his tiny cell. Why am I in this mess, and why isn’t God doing something to save me? Why, indeed? Are you the One, or am I destined to be disappointed?
There is this beautiful spiritual movie I highly recommend starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, The Painted Veil, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The movie was made in 2006, and we showed it here one evening, maybe 4 or 5 years ago. The story, set in China, is about a couple, who has a lot to learn about love and forgiveness. The couple is caught in a loveless marriage, and the husband, a doctor, is fighting a cholera epidemic in China through his research. When he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he punishes her by insisting she accompany him into the heart of the infection. There is this one scene, where the young wife, played by Naomi Watts, is talking to the Mother Superior, who runs an orphanage. And the nun tells her, “When I was 17, I fell deeply and passionately in love with God. But over the decades of my life God has proven to be so disappointing. Now God and I are like an old married couple; we don’t talk much anymore, but God knows I will never leave him, and I know God will never leave me.” And so, she stays, despite the disappointment. The passion is gone, but nonetheless there is something noble in this staying. There is something courageous in being willing to accept what is--- without demanding and expecting more, because the more that is PERHAPS around the corner is always out of our eyesight and understanding.
John the Baptist could not read the future; he did not know what kind of Messiah Jesus would be or would become, and perhaps if he had known, he would have withdrawn in horror at the idea of a crucified savior. Yes, God disappoints, because we do not fully know or understand what kind of a God it is with whom we are dealing.
Decades ago, when I working as a chaplain at a big city hospital, I was suddenly called to the emergency room, where a young woman was miscarrying. She was wailing, yelling at the top of her lungs that God had once again failed and disappointed her. And yes, her story was heart wrenching. As a young child she had been physically abused by her mother, and as a teenager she lived on the street for two years trying to escape a stepfather, who had sexually abused her. She married way too young, and that marriage ended in divorce and her second husband, the father of this baby, had been killed in a hit and run accident, just a month before. And now she was losing this pregnancy, which she said was all she had of her husband. Over and over again she railed against God, so finally in desperation I asked her: Then why do you believe? Why do you persist in holding on to a God who does nothing but hurt and disappoint you? Suddenly she let go of my hand, looked at me with this shocked expression, as if she had never before considered the question, and very slowly she answered, “No, I could never leave God.” And then a stony silence before she uttered these words, “Maybe I cannot leave God, because somehow deep down I know God can never really leave me.”
I wonder if this is how John the Baptist might have felt while in King Herod’s prison. Things certainly did not look very promising. His life was on the line, and perhaps God would not intervene to save him. Did this mean then that Jesus was God’s imposter or that salvation was all a hoax? Or did it point to the deeper truth that God is NOT made in our image as much as we try to force God to conform to our dimensions. And so sometimes the best we can do is hang on, stay with God as we pace up and down the cells, we find ourselves in, just as John paced up and down his cell, asking the question, Are you really the One?
John never received a complete answer. He died by the sword without ever laying eyes on Jesus again. Such is the human condition. We rarely receive complete answers, so we find ourselves living in the tension---the tension between doubt and faith, the tension between hope and disappointment, the tension between already and not yet. And here is the irony--- once we recognize and accept the tension, what we are left with is the quiet joy of knowing that just as we will not leave God, so God will not leave us.
Preached by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
The Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2022
Matthew 11: 2-11
Here we are on the third Sunday of Advent, known as Gaudete Sunday, or the Sunday of Joy or sometimes it is even called Rose Sunday, when the liturgical color is changed from penitential purple to rose. And yet, on this Sunday of Joy, where does our lectionary reading put us: in prison. That’s right, John the Baptist suddenly finds himself in jail. After insulting King Herod and his wife about their illegal marriage, John is suddenly reduced to pacing up and down in a tiny cell, wondering what his fate will be. He might have well expected the worse, and indeed the worse is what he received. After being decapitated, his head was arranged on a fancy serving platter per demand of Salome, King Herod’s step daughter. At least this is how the story goes. What had gone wrong?
Early in Matthew we see John offering a fiery baptism of repentance in the River Jordan, assuring those who came to be baptized that there was one who would follow him, one whose sandal thong John was not worthy to touch or tie. And when Jesus then made his appearance to John, the latter said, “You should baptize me, not me you.” So at least at the beginning John was thoroughly confident that this Jesus was indeed the one, the one who would initiate the new creation desired by God. And yet some chapters later John finds himself in prison, wondering “Are you really the one?” Where had all that confidence gone?
I guess we could say, ‘Life happened,’ and when life happens human experience intervenes to make John and us reconsider what it is we thought was so unassailably true. Like John we too wonder and question about all kinds of things, because that is partly what it means to be a human being. We are not passive meaning makers; we don’t always accept what others believe or say, especially when our own experience intrudes and pushes us in another direction, pushes us to ask questions we might not have asked before: Are you the one? Are you really the One we have been waiting for?
What do you think of the answer that Jesus gave to John’s followers, who had come to Jesus on behalf of John to ask this all important question? Notice that Jesus did not offer a direct answer to the inquiry. He did not say, “Yes, I am the one.” Instead, he basically gave a job description, listing the kinds of things he had been doing: healing the blind, the lame, the deaf and the lepers, raising the dead and preaching Good News to the poor. Now I don’t know about you, but I can imagine that if the same had been said to me, my response would have been: “Yes, yes, but are you really the One? And that is a question, never directly answered, either then or now. The answer is found in the tension----in the tension between faith and doubt, in the tension between hope and disappointment, in the tension between already and not yet. Jesus is already the redeemer, but the world has not yet been fully redeemed. So we live with doubt and disappointment, and try as we might, most of us are not completely successful at banishing them. And perhaps, if we could banish them, it might not be such a good thing for faith, for real faith (as the great 20th century Protestant theologian, Paul Tilich once said) is never in place of doubt, but rather in spite of doubt.
We all know what it means to be disappointed. We have all faced disappointment----perhaps in work, when that job we so much wanted did not come our way, in love or marriage, when what we believed would last forever, turned out to be as fleeting as the season. Disappointment: we all have lived with it when circumstances as well as people have disappointed us. But what happens when God disappoints, when you cannot rid yourself of the idea and the feeling that somehow God has let you down. What then? Perhaps this is exactly where John found himself. Maybe this is how he was feeling as he paced back and forth in his tiny cell. Why am I in this mess, and why isn’t God doing something to save me? Why, indeed? Are you the One, or am I destined to be disappointed?
There is this beautiful spiritual movie I highly recommend starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, The Painted Veil, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The movie was made in 2006, and we showed it here one evening, maybe 4 or 5 years ago. The story, set in China, is about a couple, who has a lot to learn about love and forgiveness. The couple is caught in a loveless marriage, and the husband, a doctor, is fighting a cholera epidemic in China through his research. When he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he punishes her by insisting she accompany him into the heart of the infection. There is this one scene, where the young wife, played by Naomi Watts, is talking to the Mother Superior, who runs an orphanage. And the nun tells her, “When I was 17, I fell deeply and passionately in love with God. But over the decades of my life God has proven to be so disappointing. Now God and I are like an old married couple; we don’t talk much anymore, but God knows I will never leave him, and I know God will never leave me.” And so, she stays, despite the disappointment. The passion is gone, but nonetheless there is something noble in this staying. There is something courageous in being willing to accept what is--- without demanding and expecting more, because the more that is PERHAPS around the corner is always out of our eyesight and understanding.
John the Baptist could not read the future; he did not know what kind of Messiah Jesus would be or would become, and perhaps if he had known, he would have withdrawn in horror at the idea of a crucified savior. Yes, God disappoints, because we do not fully know or understand what kind of a God it is with whom we are dealing.
Decades ago, when I working as a chaplain at a big city hospital, I was suddenly called to the emergency room, where a young woman was miscarrying. She was wailing, yelling at the top of her lungs that God had once again failed and disappointed her. And yes, her story was heart wrenching. As a young child she had been physically abused by her mother, and as a teenager she lived on the street for two years trying to escape a stepfather, who had sexually abused her. She married way too young, and that marriage ended in divorce and her second husband, the father of this baby, had been killed in a hit and run accident, just a month before. And now she was losing this pregnancy, which she said was all she had of her husband. Over and over again she railed against God, so finally in desperation I asked her: Then why do you believe? Why do you persist in holding on to a God who does nothing but hurt and disappoint you? Suddenly she let go of my hand, looked at me with this shocked expression, as if she had never before considered the question, and very slowly she answered, “No, I could never leave God.” And then a stony silence before she uttered these words, “Maybe I cannot leave God, because somehow deep down I know God can never really leave me.”
I wonder if this is how John the Baptist might have felt while in King Herod’s prison. Things certainly did not look very promising. His life was on the line, and perhaps God would not intervene to save him. Did this mean then that Jesus was God’s imposter or that salvation was all a hoax? Or did it point to the deeper truth that God is NOT made in our image as much as we try to force God to conform to our dimensions. And so sometimes the best we can do is hang on, stay with God as we pace up and down the cells, we find ourselves in, just as John paced up and down his cell, asking the question, Are you really the One?
John never received a complete answer. He died by the sword without ever laying eyes on Jesus again. Such is the human condition. We rarely receive complete answers, so we find ourselves living in the tension---the tension between doubt and faith, the tension between hope and disappointment, the tension between already and not yet. And here is the irony--- once we recognize and accept the tension, what we are left with is the quiet joy of knowing that just as we will not leave God, so God will not leave us.
A QUIET THING
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
December 4, 2022
Matthew 3: 1-12
On my recent trip to northern Spain, I visited the famous Guggenheim Museum in the city of Bilbao. While the building’s architecture was certainly interesting, I thought the contemporary art in it was just awful. Much of it was ugly, in my opinion, and the few things I found interesting to look at, were hardly (again in my humble opinion) very inspiring. While I do like much modern art---Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, to name a few, contemporary art turns me off. When I commented about this to a few of my fellow travelers, one reminded me that sometimes art must struggle to be accepted. And that is true. The Sistine Chapel, by Michelangelo, surely one of the greatest creations of western art, was criticized for too much nakedness in the scene of the Last Judgment. And indeed, artists were later hired to cover up some of the more explicitly naked creatures depicted in the fresco, though the painted coverings were in time carefully removed.
And then I recall maybe 10 years ago or so, when the Canadian sculptor by the name of Timothy Schmalz had trouble getting his statue of a homeless Jesus accepted. St. Patrick’s in New York and St. Michael’s in Toronto both rejected it, so the sculpture went to Regis College, part of the University of Toronto, where it sat for a while, until finally going to Rome, where it was blessed by Pope Francis.
The sculptor conceived the idea of portraying Jesus as homeless after he spotted a homeless person sleeping on the corner of one of Toronto’s busiest streets. It was Christmastime, and while the rest of the city was bustling with the holiday spirit, this person lay wrapped up in a sleeping bag. Schmalz did not know if the person was male or female, because all he could see was a mass of cloth lying still on the bench. And so, he sculpted Jesus as a homeless man with the wounds from his crucifixion on his bare feet. Apparently, a number of people found the sculptor offensive---until Pope Francis gave it his blessing---though there were still some who thought it was an insult to Christ to portray him as homeless.
Religious sensibilities can easily become hurt when the normal conventions are transgressed. Can you imagine what most of us would think if someone like John the Baptist marched into our church and started calling us a brood of vipers because he deemed us insufficiently repentant. Of course, we would be defensive, and might even point out to him that his accusatory style hardly seems the way to win friends and influence people. And yet, in his day, as insulting as John was, he still was quite popular among a certain group of people, like the outsiders, which would include the poor, the sick and the just plain weird, those who simply did not fit in. But it is also true that some Pharisees and Sadducees came---the Pharisees teaching some progressive ideas such as the oral interpretation of the law and the bodily resurrection, while the Sadducees were the established, wealthy class from which the temple priests came.
The strange clothing worn by John, the camel haired shirt and the leather belt around his waist, is actually code language, a reference to Elijah, that Old Testament prophet, who did battle with King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel. The story goes that Elijah never died but was taken up into heaven and would return at the end of history, when God would create a new heaven and a new earth. Now Elijah had it tough, because Jezebel was out to get him, and so in fear and anger, Elijah ran away. Furious with God for putting him in this untenable situation, he hid in the crevice of a rock, while God went by, and Elijah heard God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the still, small sound of silence. Quite interesting, because here we have in Matthew’s gospel this eccentric John, yelling at people, calling them a brood of vipers and threatening them with eternal fire, and yet here is a coded reference to Elijah, who found God in the stillness of silence, a quiet thing.
Now Elijah and John did have a lot in common. They both demanded repentance, which means to change, to turn around, to move in a new direction. Both of them wanted change, a turning away from the past toward a new future. And like John, Elijah could yell and threaten, and he also had his own bag of tricks, including making fire that would consume both the offering of the Baal worshippers as well as their priests. No wonder Jezebel was out to get him. And John, well, he had a loud voice, announcing the drama of baptism, the dying to the old life and a rebirth to a new one. He told the people that another one would come, greater than he, and while he, John, baptized with water, the one to come would baptize with fire. Notice what John said about this one in verse 12: His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. You don’t get much more dramatic build up than that.
Then in verse 13, which immediately follows this morning’s text, it simply says, Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. He came without fanfare; he came without yelling or accusing; he came without threats. He came quietly---like that still, small sound of silence, heard by Elijah. Oh, the story goes that at his birth there was a star, shining in the heavens, symbolically announcing that he would be the light of the world. But how many really paid that star any heed? Some poor shepherds out in the fields, Herod, jealous for his power and three gentile kings, who studied the movement of the stars and thought it must portend something significant. No one would have expected anything from a baby born to poor parents, a teenage mother, whose pregnancy was shrouded in scandal, and a man, named Joseph, about whom we know almost nothing, and who never spoke one word in the Bible. Such a birth would hardly have been considered of great significance. It was a quiet thing, and even the baby was said to be quiet, according to that lovely carol, Away In a Manger---“the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Yes, he came quietly without pomp and circumstance.
Of course, Jesus would later speak. He would teach and yes, in Matthew he sometimes did speak tough words to the rich and powerful and those who wielded religious authority. But when you consider the whole sound of his story, it was a quiet thing, so quiet, in fact, that the sound and drama of his life were easy to ignore, not unlike the way we so often ignore and dismiss the homeless, which is why the Canadian sculptor cast Jesus as a homeless man that we might pay closer attention to both Jesus and the homeless.
John the Baptist came with noise and drama. His strange clothes and diet and threats certainly turned heads in his direction. He was not so much trying to call attention to himself, but rather to point the way toward another, who would come quietly and unobtrusively, and yet without the might and force of either an army or riches, he would change history. It was a quiet thing, at least in comparison to all the world’s noise, and yet sometimes quiet does change the world.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
December 4, 2022
Matthew 3: 1-12
On my recent trip to northern Spain, I visited the famous Guggenheim Museum in the city of Bilbao. While the building’s architecture was certainly interesting, I thought the contemporary art in it was just awful. Much of it was ugly, in my opinion, and the few things I found interesting to look at, were hardly (again in my humble opinion) very inspiring. While I do like much modern art---Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, to name a few, contemporary art turns me off. When I commented about this to a few of my fellow travelers, one reminded me that sometimes art must struggle to be accepted. And that is true. The Sistine Chapel, by Michelangelo, surely one of the greatest creations of western art, was criticized for too much nakedness in the scene of the Last Judgment. And indeed, artists were later hired to cover up some of the more explicitly naked creatures depicted in the fresco, though the painted coverings were in time carefully removed.
And then I recall maybe 10 years ago or so, when the Canadian sculptor by the name of Timothy Schmalz had trouble getting his statue of a homeless Jesus accepted. St. Patrick’s in New York and St. Michael’s in Toronto both rejected it, so the sculpture went to Regis College, part of the University of Toronto, where it sat for a while, until finally going to Rome, where it was blessed by Pope Francis.
The sculptor conceived the idea of portraying Jesus as homeless after he spotted a homeless person sleeping on the corner of one of Toronto’s busiest streets. It was Christmastime, and while the rest of the city was bustling with the holiday spirit, this person lay wrapped up in a sleeping bag. Schmalz did not know if the person was male or female, because all he could see was a mass of cloth lying still on the bench. And so, he sculpted Jesus as a homeless man with the wounds from his crucifixion on his bare feet. Apparently, a number of people found the sculptor offensive---until Pope Francis gave it his blessing---though there were still some who thought it was an insult to Christ to portray him as homeless.
Religious sensibilities can easily become hurt when the normal conventions are transgressed. Can you imagine what most of us would think if someone like John the Baptist marched into our church and started calling us a brood of vipers because he deemed us insufficiently repentant. Of course, we would be defensive, and might even point out to him that his accusatory style hardly seems the way to win friends and influence people. And yet, in his day, as insulting as John was, he still was quite popular among a certain group of people, like the outsiders, which would include the poor, the sick and the just plain weird, those who simply did not fit in. But it is also true that some Pharisees and Sadducees came---the Pharisees teaching some progressive ideas such as the oral interpretation of the law and the bodily resurrection, while the Sadducees were the established, wealthy class from which the temple priests came.
The strange clothing worn by John, the camel haired shirt and the leather belt around his waist, is actually code language, a reference to Elijah, that Old Testament prophet, who did battle with King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel. The story goes that Elijah never died but was taken up into heaven and would return at the end of history, when God would create a new heaven and a new earth. Now Elijah had it tough, because Jezebel was out to get him, and so in fear and anger, Elijah ran away. Furious with God for putting him in this untenable situation, he hid in the crevice of a rock, while God went by, and Elijah heard God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the still, small sound of silence. Quite interesting, because here we have in Matthew’s gospel this eccentric John, yelling at people, calling them a brood of vipers and threatening them with eternal fire, and yet here is a coded reference to Elijah, who found God in the stillness of silence, a quiet thing.
Now Elijah and John did have a lot in common. They both demanded repentance, which means to change, to turn around, to move in a new direction. Both of them wanted change, a turning away from the past toward a new future. And like John, Elijah could yell and threaten, and he also had his own bag of tricks, including making fire that would consume both the offering of the Baal worshippers as well as their priests. No wonder Jezebel was out to get him. And John, well, he had a loud voice, announcing the drama of baptism, the dying to the old life and a rebirth to a new one. He told the people that another one would come, greater than he, and while he, John, baptized with water, the one to come would baptize with fire. Notice what John said about this one in verse 12: His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. You don’t get much more dramatic build up than that.
Then in verse 13, which immediately follows this morning’s text, it simply says, Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. He came without fanfare; he came without yelling or accusing; he came without threats. He came quietly---like that still, small sound of silence, heard by Elijah. Oh, the story goes that at his birth there was a star, shining in the heavens, symbolically announcing that he would be the light of the world. But how many really paid that star any heed? Some poor shepherds out in the fields, Herod, jealous for his power and three gentile kings, who studied the movement of the stars and thought it must portend something significant. No one would have expected anything from a baby born to poor parents, a teenage mother, whose pregnancy was shrouded in scandal, and a man, named Joseph, about whom we know almost nothing, and who never spoke one word in the Bible. Such a birth would hardly have been considered of great significance. It was a quiet thing, and even the baby was said to be quiet, according to that lovely carol, Away In a Manger---“the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Yes, he came quietly without pomp and circumstance.
Of course, Jesus would later speak. He would teach and yes, in Matthew he sometimes did speak tough words to the rich and powerful and those who wielded religious authority. But when you consider the whole sound of his story, it was a quiet thing, so quiet, in fact, that the sound and drama of his life were easy to ignore, not unlike the way we so often ignore and dismiss the homeless, which is why the Canadian sculptor cast Jesus as a homeless man that we might pay closer attention to both Jesus and the homeless.
John the Baptist came with noise and drama. His strange clothes and diet and threats certainly turned heads in his direction. He was not so much trying to call attention to himself, but rather to point the way toward another, who would come quietly and unobtrusively, and yet without the might and force of either an army or riches, he would change history. It was a quiet thing, at least in comparison to all the world’s noise, and yet sometimes quiet does change the world.
December 6, 2022
Dear Friends,
As I write this, I am aware that it is St. Nicholas Day, a day we remember and celebrate a saint from Turkey, who spent his life doing kind and compassionate deeds. Though he became a bishop, he was never interested in the power of his office as much as he cared about the power of doing good. So, on this day, I was overjoyed to read about a Children’s Choir from Ukraine, who will be singing in Carnegie Hall this coming Sunday.
The Shchedryk Choir, founded in 1971, is composed of 56 members, 51 girls and 5 boys, ranging in age from 11 to 25. At Carnegie Hall they will perform traditional Ukrainian songs and carols as well as music from other Ukrainian artists in a program called, Notes From Ukraine, sponsored in part by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Money raised from the concert will go to United24, an organization, dedicated to repairing damaged infrastructure.
These young people sing with a great deal of hope, since many of them have suffered the loss of loved ones, and they look to their music as healing. When the war began, the choir was practicing for a Christmas program, and suddenly the air raid sirens began to sound, and they rushed with their sheet music in hand to a nearby bomb shelter. Using the light from their cell phones, they continued to sing, filling the coldness and the fearfulness of the shelter with song that lifted the spirit of not only the singers but also others, gathered there for safety. Some of the choir members left Kyiv for other Ukrainian cites with their families, while others scattered abroad. But the choir continued to practice virtually, and though meeting in person was very difficult, the choir director was determined to keep the choir going.
When you read what some of these youngsters say, you are filled with deep sadness as well as admiration for their determination to heal from the war. One 15 year old said, “Now when I sing, I see the faces of five people I knew and loved, who have died in the war. I sing for them and to them.” Another 15 year old said she was living in a constant state of fear and she had a hard time seeing friends and relatives deal with physical injuries. But still she sings. A 13 year old commented she had suffered great psychological trauma, which she cannot even talk about, because it makes her trauma worse. And so, she too sings, and for now, at least, that is her therapy.
In August the choir came together physically for the first time since the war began. They practiced for a series of concerts in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then in the fall the singers began to practice for the Carnegie Hall debut. For the first time since the war began, they practiced in Kyiv, which was hard for some of the youngsters, since it reminded them of the initial terror of the war. This choir is one of several Ukrainian ensembles to go abroad since the war began. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra is made up of an ensemble of refugees who fled Ukraine as well as those who stayed behind. Last summer they toured Europe and the United States. And the Kyiv City Ballet toured many American cities this past fall.
The Shchedryk Choir arrived in New York last week, and they have a busy schedule of rehearsing at local churches as well as visits to Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Wednesday of last week, they gathered at Grand Central Station to sing Carol of the Bells, composed by Ukrainian composer, Mykola Leontovych. In fact, the name of the choir comes from the Ukrainian title for the music.
The great Russian writer, Dostoevsky once remarked, “Beauty will save the world,” and when you listen to the choir sing and ponder their words about what it means for them to sing, you can believe that indeed, beauty is one of the instruments God uses to redeem a hurting and besieged humanity. And I think St. Nicholas would agree.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
As I write this, I am aware that it is St. Nicholas Day, a day we remember and celebrate a saint from Turkey, who spent his life doing kind and compassionate deeds. Though he became a bishop, he was never interested in the power of his office as much as he cared about the power of doing good. So, on this day, I was overjoyed to read about a Children’s Choir from Ukraine, who will be singing in Carnegie Hall this coming Sunday.
The Shchedryk Choir, founded in 1971, is composed of 56 members, 51 girls and 5 boys, ranging in age from 11 to 25. At Carnegie Hall they will perform traditional Ukrainian songs and carols as well as music from other Ukrainian artists in a program called, Notes From Ukraine, sponsored in part by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Money raised from the concert will go to United24, an organization, dedicated to repairing damaged infrastructure.
These young people sing with a great deal of hope, since many of them have suffered the loss of loved ones, and they look to their music as healing. When the war began, the choir was practicing for a Christmas program, and suddenly the air raid sirens began to sound, and they rushed with their sheet music in hand to a nearby bomb shelter. Using the light from their cell phones, they continued to sing, filling the coldness and the fearfulness of the shelter with song that lifted the spirit of not only the singers but also others, gathered there for safety. Some of the choir members left Kyiv for other Ukrainian cites with their families, while others scattered abroad. But the choir continued to practice virtually, and though meeting in person was very difficult, the choir director was determined to keep the choir going.
When you read what some of these youngsters say, you are filled with deep sadness as well as admiration for their determination to heal from the war. One 15 year old said, “Now when I sing, I see the faces of five people I knew and loved, who have died in the war. I sing for them and to them.” Another 15 year old said she was living in a constant state of fear and she had a hard time seeing friends and relatives deal with physical injuries. But still she sings. A 13 year old commented she had suffered great psychological trauma, which she cannot even talk about, because it makes her trauma worse. And so, she too sings, and for now, at least, that is her therapy.
In August the choir came together physically for the first time since the war began. They practiced for a series of concerts in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then in the fall the singers began to practice for the Carnegie Hall debut. For the first time since the war began, they practiced in Kyiv, which was hard for some of the youngsters, since it reminded them of the initial terror of the war. This choir is one of several Ukrainian ensembles to go abroad since the war began. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra is made up of an ensemble of refugees who fled Ukraine as well as those who stayed behind. Last summer they toured Europe and the United States. And the Kyiv City Ballet toured many American cities this past fall.
The Shchedryk Choir arrived in New York last week, and they have a busy schedule of rehearsing at local churches as well as visits to Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Wednesday of last week, they gathered at Grand Central Station to sing Carol of the Bells, composed by Ukrainian composer, Mykola Leontovych. In fact, the name of the choir comes from the Ukrainian title for the music.
The great Russian writer, Dostoevsky once remarked, “Beauty will save the world,” and when you listen to the choir sing and ponder their words about what it means for them to sing, you can believe that indeed, beauty is one of the instruments God uses to redeem a hurting and besieged humanity. And I think St. Nicholas would agree.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
December 1, 2022
Dear Friends,
Chuck Collins writes about economic inequality. He has written a book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, and he has co-authored a report, Gilded Giving: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy. Collins writes that right now our nation has 728 billionaires, holding a combined wealth pf 4.48 trillion, which is an increase of 1.5 trillion since March 2020, when the pandemic began. What to do with all this wealth?
It is “interesting,” to say the least, that many billionaires are encouraging their peers to be generous to various philanthropies. But the truth is, it can take years or even decades for these pledges of gifts from billionaires to reach the nonprofit destinations. And Collins is a big believer that philanthropy is no substitute for just taxation policies.
Consider, for example, the Giving Pledge, an initiative founded in 2010 by Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates and Bill Gages as a means to encourage increased giving by the extremely wealthy. Apparently, more than 250 billionaires from 28 nations have pledged to give away the majority of their wealth. As Collins points out, this should mean we should be seeing a decline in billionaire wealth. But the opposite is true. As of 2020---ten years after the pledge---62 of the initial pledgers had not seen any decrease in their wealth. In fact, it had nearly doubled, adjusted for inflation.
While many billionaires do donate to charities, the biggest pledges are often made to family foundations or donor advised funds, which make up around 30% of all charitable donations by billionaires. And they can claim BIG tax donations for putting funds in these foundations or donor advised funds. Foundations are only required to pay out 5% of their assets each year, and most only dole out a bit more. And the donor advised funds have no minimum pay out, which means that many of them give out very small amounts.
Collins fervently believes that billionaire foundations should not be a substitute for fair taxation policies. For every dollar a billionaire gives to charity or a foundation, taxpayers pay up to 74 cents in lost federal tax revenues. In other words, tax dollars are subsidizing the system that billionaires use to avoid paying taxes! We need to be more vigorous in requiring transparency from charities and foundations---who gives what and when, and when does the payout actually reach the working charities. There are people like Mackenzie Scott, ex wife of Jeff Bezos, who gives away money directly to various chariities. Since 2019 she has given away $14 billion.
People become very nervous when politics enters the church grounds, let alone the pulpit, but we should think very carefully and deeply about the message that Jesus preached. We need to remember that he was executed as a political prisoner, someone who threatened the stability of the Roman Empire as well as the Jewish Temple. He spilled a great many words over wealth and money, taking about it more than any other single subject. He certainly taught and believed that what one did with one’s wealth was not a private matter, since how wealth is used has tremendous public consequences. He was also a supporter of the Jubilee, a celebration, occurring every 50 years, when property and wealth were returned to past owners. I don’t know how the process was administered, but certainly there were many who objected to this radical redistribution of wealth. While it is true that Jesus often accepted hospitality from the wealthy, he also told stories about how dangerous wealth could be and how it was easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than it was for a rich person to gain entrance into heaven. We don’t have to take his words literally, of course, but we should acknowledge that he had something important to say about wealth and how it should be used.
I don’t know exactly what Jesus would say to our nations’ 728 billionaires, but I don’t think he would tell them that the point of their lives is to continue to grow their wealth. What you give away does come back to bless you and others.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Chuck Collins writes about economic inequality. He has written a book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, and he has co-authored a report, Gilded Giving: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy. Collins writes that right now our nation has 728 billionaires, holding a combined wealth pf 4.48 trillion, which is an increase of 1.5 trillion since March 2020, when the pandemic began. What to do with all this wealth?
It is “interesting,” to say the least, that many billionaires are encouraging their peers to be generous to various philanthropies. But the truth is, it can take years or even decades for these pledges of gifts from billionaires to reach the nonprofit destinations. And Collins is a big believer that philanthropy is no substitute for just taxation policies.
Consider, for example, the Giving Pledge, an initiative founded in 2010 by Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates and Bill Gages as a means to encourage increased giving by the extremely wealthy. Apparently, more than 250 billionaires from 28 nations have pledged to give away the majority of their wealth. As Collins points out, this should mean we should be seeing a decline in billionaire wealth. But the opposite is true. As of 2020---ten years after the pledge---62 of the initial pledgers had not seen any decrease in their wealth. In fact, it had nearly doubled, adjusted for inflation.
While many billionaires do donate to charities, the biggest pledges are often made to family foundations or donor advised funds, which make up around 30% of all charitable donations by billionaires. And they can claim BIG tax donations for putting funds in these foundations or donor advised funds. Foundations are only required to pay out 5% of their assets each year, and most only dole out a bit more. And the donor advised funds have no minimum pay out, which means that many of them give out very small amounts.
Collins fervently believes that billionaire foundations should not be a substitute for fair taxation policies. For every dollar a billionaire gives to charity or a foundation, taxpayers pay up to 74 cents in lost federal tax revenues. In other words, tax dollars are subsidizing the system that billionaires use to avoid paying taxes! We need to be more vigorous in requiring transparency from charities and foundations---who gives what and when, and when does the payout actually reach the working charities. There are people like Mackenzie Scott, ex wife of Jeff Bezos, who gives away money directly to various chariities. Since 2019 she has given away $14 billion.
People become very nervous when politics enters the church grounds, let alone the pulpit, but we should think very carefully and deeply about the message that Jesus preached. We need to remember that he was executed as a political prisoner, someone who threatened the stability of the Roman Empire as well as the Jewish Temple. He spilled a great many words over wealth and money, taking about it more than any other single subject. He certainly taught and believed that what one did with one’s wealth was not a private matter, since how wealth is used has tremendous public consequences. He was also a supporter of the Jubilee, a celebration, occurring every 50 years, when property and wealth were returned to past owners. I don’t know how the process was administered, but certainly there were many who objected to this radical redistribution of wealth. While it is true that Jesus often accepted hospitality from the wealthy, he also told stories about how dangerous wealth could be and how it was easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than it was for a rich person to gain entrance into heaven. We don’t have to take his words literally, of course, but we should acknowledge that he had something important to say about wealth and how it should be used.
I don’t know exactly what Jesus would say to our nations’ 728 billionaires, but I don’t think he would tell them that the point of their lives is to continue to grow their wealth. What you give away does come back to bless you and others.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
EVEN THE SON DOES NOT KNOW
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
November 27, 2022
First Sunday in Advent
Matthew 24: 36-44
I recently returned from a trip to Spain and Portugal, which involved a walk along the Camino de Santiago, one of the great pilgrimages, still popular today as it has been for many centuries. There are a number of paths to take, and many walkers take five or six weeks to finally reach the great cathedral in Santiago, where masses are held for the pilgrimages. I attended one of the Masses, which was in Spanish, and the only time in the service English was used, was when the priest made it clear that no one except Roman Catholics, were welcome to take the sacrament of Holy Communion---no matter that many, if not most of the pilgrims these days, are not Roman Catholic. Still, it reminded me of another trip I took years ago, an ecumenical journey of Roman Catholics and Protestants to famous sites of the Reformation.
When I first read the lectionary choice for today from Matthew, my thoughts returned to a conversation I had with a Roman Catholic couple from Colorado. They were both very interested in history as well as ecumenical relationships. As our conversation progressed, the husband said something about the purpose of life being to get into heaven. Well, I said, I think the purpose is to be as fully alive as we can be, open to the world in all its wonderful diversity and be servants of truth and goodness and compassion. What comes after this life--- who knows? Jesus did not spend time talking about heaven as a final destination after death. He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, by which he meant a fulfillment of God’s intentions for the human community here on earth.
In today’s reading from Matthew, heaven is not the subject, but the end times are, the last things, technically known as eschatology. At the dawn of the 20th century, Albert Schweitzer---the same man who went to Africa as a doctor--- published a very important book called, The Quest of the Historical Jesus in which Schweitzer laid out the various understandings of Jesus, which Enlightenment thought—that is, critical, historical, and literary analysis--- had constructed. Toward the end of his book, Schweitzer then defended the conviction that Jesus was an eschatological figure, meaning that he lived in expectation of the end times. God, Jesus thought, was about to intervene in history and bring a climactic end to the normal run of events and establish a new kingdom, and he, Jesus, was the sign that the kingdom was imminent. This radical ending is what our Gospel reading this morning is concerned with. The end is on the way, Jesus said, so be watchful; be vigilant, because you do not know its time. But it will come like a thief in the night, and even the Son does not know the day or hour.
It is not a very comforting image, is it---some being left behind and others taken. And yes, there are a whole lot of Christians, who spend their time trying to insure that they will be among those taken rather than those left behind. Such anxiety about the end, like the anxiety about getting into heaven strikes me as too self concerned and even self defeating, for didn’t Jesus remind people that the one who would save his or her life will ultimately lose it.
We really do not know much, if anything about the end; even Jesus would not make exact predictions. Scientists tell us that just as the universe had a beginning in what they believe was a big bang, it will also have an end. Matter and energy will dissipate or collapse, imploding upon itself. And what all this means for our human destiny remains to us mere mortals a mystery, something best left to God. It is not in our hands. And so, we live, and I think this is precisely what Jesus would have us do. Live now; live fully in the present. But do not be like the people of Noah’s day, who ignored God’s commandments to do justice and love mercy. Do not be careless toward the future, but do not be overly anxious either. Change comes without our consent. Something ends and something new is born.
Last week I told you that one of my most moving experiences on my Reformation trip in Germany was visiting Wartburg Castle, where Luther hid from his enemies while translating the New Testament into German. Another moving experience was the night we spent in Nuremberg, where we heard a talk by a Lutheran pastor from what had been East Germany, communist Germany. He spoke about how hard it was to be the church before the end of the Soviet Empire in 1989. We clergy, he said, had to be so careful about what we preached in our sermons. After all, Christian ethics are not just what you do in your private life; they do have public and political consequences. We knew that, and so did the East German leadership, so it was not unusual to have spies in our midst.”
But despite the anxiety, in 1986 he, along with some of his colleagues, Protestant and Roman Catholic, began to hold prayer vigils for peace. “We decided to hold them in my church,” the pastor said, “because it was exactly in the town center. The vigils began with only a half dozen clergy, and maybe one or two others. But slowly more people came and by the end of the first year we had 50 people; by the second year, maybe 100, and then by the third year, it was 300. Then in 1989 on All Saints Day, a few days after Reformation Sunday, one evening without any planning on the clergy’s part, the church began to fill up beyond capacity. Suddenly one of my Roman Catholic colleagues came running into the church, breathless, with this announcement “There are thousands of people out in the square. They are demanding an end to Communist rule. What should we do? Surely, they will close down the churches! They will blame us.”
“There is no denying that we were afraid,” the pastor continued. “We did not know what to do. None of us relished the thought of being arrested. All of us knew the regime could be brutal. Some of us had lost family members and friends to its brutality. But then a young woman not more than 25, stood up in church and said, “This is God’s work, not ours. Let’s pray that we will not get in God’s way.” When the prayer meeting finished, we opened up the doors to over 100,000 people in the square. One week later the wall in Berlin came down. None of us saw the end of the regime coming. But it came--- without one shot being fired. Something ended, and a new beginning came upon us.”
If you think this is a story only about politics, think again. Or if you think that political reality has no place in the church, consider again. The pastor’s story, or so it seems to me, is not so far from this morning’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Both involved radical change, spiritual and political. Matthew was probably written sometime around the year 80---after the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed. And some Jews as well as Christians, including those in Matthew’s community, looked upon the Temple’s destruction as a sign that the end was coming. Well, something did end---Judaism centered on the Temple--- but something new appeared---the synagogue movement, which kept Judaism alive and the church was born.
There are all kinds of ends--- political regimes end; eras like the Renaissance, the Reformation or even the 60’s have their time, and their end. Our lives will one day end, and so too will the universe. We human beings often do not see the end coming, but maybe that is a blessing, because the final end is not in our hands, but rather in God’s. And so all we can do is to cultivate hope and trust in the God in whose hands both endings and beginnings lie.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
November 27, 2022
First Sunday in Advent
Matthew 24: 36-44
I recently returned from a trip to Spain and Portugal, which involved a walk along the Camino de Santiago, one of the great pilgrimages, still popular today as it has been for many centuries. There are a number of paths to take, and many walkers take five or six weeks to finally reach the great cathedral in Santiago, where masses are held for the pilgrimages. I attended one of the Masses, which was in Spanish, and the only time in the service English was used, was when the priest made it clear that no one except Roman Catholics, were welcome to take the sacrament of Holy Communion---no matter that many, if not most of the pilgrims these days, are not Roman Catholic. Still, it reminded me of another trip I took years ago, an ecumenical journey of Roman Catholics and Protestants to famous sites of the Reformation.
When I first read the lectionary choice for today from Matthew, my thoughts returned to a conversation I had with a Roman Catholic couple from Colorado. They were both very interested in history as well as ecumenical relationships. As our conversation progressed, the husband said something about the purpose of life being to get into heaven. Well, I said, I think the purpose is to be as fully alive as we can be, open to the world in all its wonderful diversity and be servants of truth and goodness and compassion. What comes after this life--- who knows? Jesus did not spend time talking about heaven as a final destination after death. He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, by which he meant a fulfillment of God’s intentions for the human community here on earth.
In today’s reading from Matthew, heaven is not the subject, but the end times are, the last things, technically known as eschatology. At the dawn of the 20th century, Albert Schweitzer---the same man who went to Africa as a doctor--- published a very important book called, The Quest of the Historical Jesus in which Schweitzer laid out the various understandings of Jesus, which Enlightenment thought—that is, critical, historical, and literary analysis--- had constructed. Toward the end of his book, Schweitzer then defended the conviction that Jesus was an eschatological figure, meaning that he lived in expectation of the end times. God, Jesus thought, was about to intervene in history and bring a climactic end to the normal run of events and establish a new kingdom, and he, Jesus, was the sign that the kingdom was imminent. This radical ending is what our Gospel reading this morning is concerned with. The end is on the way, Jesus said, so be watchful; be vigilant, because you do not know its time. But it will come like a thief in the night, and even the Son does not know the day or hour.
It is not a very comforting image, is it---some being left behind and others taken. And yes, there are a whole lot of Christians, who spend their time trying to insure that they will be among those taken rather than those left behind. Such anxiety about the end, like the anxiety about getting into heaven strikes me as too self concerned and even self defeating, for didn’t Jesus remind people that the one who would save his or her life will ultimately lose it.
We really do not know much, if anything about the end; even Jesus would not make exact predictions. Scientists tell us that just as the universe had a beginning in what they believe was a big bang, it will also have an end. Matter and energy will dissipate or collapse, imploding upon itself. And what all this means for our human destiny remains to us mere mortals a mystery, something best left to God. It is not in our hands. And so, we live, and I think this is precisely what Jesus would have us do. Live now; live fully in the present. But do not be like the people of Noah’s day, who ignored God’s commandments to do justice and love mercy. Do not be careless toward the future, but do not be overly anxious either. Change comes without our consent. Something ends and something new is born.
Last week I told you that one of my most moving experiences on my Reformation trip in Germany was visiting Wartburg Castle, where Luther hid from his enemies while translating the New Testament into German. Another moving experience was the night we spent in Nuremberg, where we heard a talk by a Lutheran pastor from what had been East Germany, communist Germany. He spoke about how hard it was to be the church before the end of the Soviet Empire in 1989. We clergy, he said, had to be so careful about what we preached in our sermons. After all, Christian ethics are not just what you do in your private life; they do have public and political consequences. We knew that, and so did the East German leadership, so it was not unusual to have spies in our midst.”
But despite the anxiety, in 1986 he, along with some of his colleagues, Protestant and Roman Catholic, began to hold prayer vigils for peace. “We decided to hold them in my church,” the pastor said, “because it was exactly in the town center. The vigils began with only a half dozen clergy, and maybe one or two others. But slowly more people came and by the end of the first year we had 50 people; by the second year, maybe 100, and then by the third year, it was 300. Then in 1989 on All Saints Day, a few days after Reformation Sunday, one evening without any planning on the clergy’s part, the church began to fill up beyond capacity. Suddenly one of my Roman Catholic colleagues came running into the church, breathless, with this announcement “There are thousands of people out in the square. They are demanding an end to Communist rule. What should we do? Surely, they will close down the churches! They will blame us.”
“There is no denying that we were afraid,” the pastor continued. “We did not know what to do. None of us relished the thought of being arrested. All of us knew the regime could be brutal. Some of us had lost family members and friends to its brutality. But then a young woman not more than 25, stood up in church and said, “This is God’s work, not ours. Let’s pray that we will not get in God’s way.” When the prayer meeting finished, we opened up the doors to over 100,000 people in the square. One week later the wall in Berlin came down. None of us saw the end of the regime coming. But it came--- without one shot being fired. Something ended, and a new beginning came upon us.”
If you think this is a story only about politics, think again. Or if you think that political reality has no place in the church, consider again. The pastor’s story, or so it seems to me, is not so far from this morning’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Both involved radical change, spiritual and political. Matthew was probably written sometime around the year 80---after the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed. And some Jews as well as Christians, including those in Matthew’s community, looked upon the Temple’s destruction as a sign that the end was coming. Well, something did end---Judaism centered on the Temple--- but something new appeared---the synagogue movement, which kept Judaism alive and the church was born.
There are all kinds of ends--- political regimes end; eras like the Renaissance, the Reformation or even the 60’s have their time, and their end. Our lives will one day end, and so too will the universe. We human beings often do not see the end coming, but maybe that is a blessing, because the final end is not in our hands, but rather in God’s. And so all we can do is to cultivate hope and trust in the God in whose hands both endings and beginnings lie.
November 23, 2022
Dear Friends,
When I was in the first grade, Mrs. Krauss’ class, we made pilgrim hats and cranberry sauce. Mrs. Krauss told us the story of the First Thanksgiving, describing how the Pilgrims and the Indians (We did not call them Native Americans back then) sat down and ate a meal together. She told us how helpful the Indians were to the Pilgrims and that without such help the Pilgrims would have starved. I was very impressed with this story. In fact, it was told as more than story. It was history, what actually had happened a long time ago.
We have crossed quite a bit of historical territory since then. And probably most of us are more than a bit confused about what really happened. Was there truly a Thanksgiving meal? While Thanksgiving is probably the most beloved American holiday, its history is a muddle. There is a letter from an English settler named Edward Winslow that never uses the word thanksgiving, but does mention a weeklong harvest celebration that included a three day celebration with King Massasoit and 90 Wampanoag men so that “we might after a more special manner rejoice together.” This was in 1621 in the Plymouth Colony. But some historians argue that the first Thanksgiving meal was celebrated in Florida, not Massachusetts, when in 1565, a Spanish fleet landed and planted a cross in the sandy soil of St. Augustine “to christen the soil.” The story goes that the 800 Spanish settlers shared a festive meal with the native Timucuan people. The Spanish had the food they brought with them from Europe, mainly hard rolls, and the Timucuan probably shared some fish and clams with the settlers.
Other historians claim that the first Thanksgiving was not at St. Augustine but on the St. John’s River, what is now Jacksonville. These were French Protestants, Huguenots, Calvinists like the Pilgrims, and they held a service of thanksgiving with the Timucuans to celebrate the 1564 establishment of Fort Caroline. The French explorer, Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere, wrote in his journal, “We sang a psalm of thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him that it would please his Grace to continue his goodness toward us.” Unfortunately, grace did not overcome hatred, because the Spanish attacked the French Protestants, accusing them of being heretics. The Spanish murdered 130 French Protestants, and two weeks later massacred an additional 200 French shipwreck survivors at an inlet near St. Augustine. The bloodshed undoubtedly helped to wash away the memory of any Thanksgiving meal.
James W. Baker, who wrote a book, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday, notes that it was traditional for European explorers to give thanks after a safe trans-Atlantic crossing, but he claims these isolated instances bear no relation to the American Thanksgiving. He also claims that there was NEVER a single first Thanksgiving, neither in Plymouth for the three day harvest festival in 1621 nor in any other location. It was not until 1841, he claimed, that people began to talk about the Pilgrims hosting the first Thanksgiving.
A National Day of Thanksgiving was first called for to celebrate a victory over the British at the Battle of Saratoga, which took place in two stages on September 19 and October 7, 1777. In 1789 George Washington again called for a National Day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. And during the Civil War, both the North and the South issued Thanksgiving Day celebrations following major victories. It is interesting to note that President Thomas Jefferson NEVER called for a National Day of Thanksgiving, believing that a wall of separation between church and state precluded any such celebrations.
It was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln called for an annual Thanksgiving celebration on the final Thursday in November. Sarah Josepha Hale was an impassioned advocate for the holiday, and she has become known as “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” Sarah Hale had written the children’s poem, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and she was a tireless advocate for women’s education, helping to found Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She also saw to it that a monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill was created, and she helped to save George Washington’s Mount Vernon home. For decades, Sarah Hale had written impassioned letters to various presidents, pleading for a National Day of Thanksgiving. Finally, Abraham Lincoln agreed.
As you can see, the history around Thanksgiving is extremely convoluted and multi-faceted. I must admit, however, that I still very much like what my first grade teacher told our class. The lesson back then was clear and a good one: cooperation matters, and human survival depends upon it. Jesus would certainly agree. It is a lesson that still needs learning as our nation continues to deal with hatred and prejudice.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When I was in the first grade, Mrs. Krauss’ class, we made pilgrim hats and cranberry sauce. Mrs. Krauss told us the story of the First Thanksgiving, describing how the Pilgrims and the Indians (We did not call them Native Americans back then) sat down and ate a meal together. She told us how helpful the Indians were to the Pilgrims and that without such help the Pilgrims would have starved. I was very impressed with this story. In fact, it was told as more than story. It was history, what actually had happened a long time ago.
We have crossed quite a bit of historical territory since then. And probably most of us are more than a bit confused about what really happened. Was there truly a Thanksgiving meal? While Thanksgiving is probably the most beloved American holiday, its history is a muddle. There is a letter from an English settler named Edward Winslow that never uses the word thanksgiving, but does mention a weeklong harvest celebration that included a three day celebration with King Massasoit and 90 Wampanoag men so that “we might after a more special manner rejoice together.” This was in 1621 in the Plymouth Colony. But some historians argue that the first Thanksgiving meal was celebrated in Florida, not Massachusetts, when in 1565, a Spanish fleet landed and planted a cross in the sandy soil of St. Augustine “to christen the soil.” The story goes that the 800 Spanish settlers shared a festive meal with the native Timucuan people. The Spanish had the food they brought with them from Europe, mainly hard rolls, and the Timucuan probably shared some fish and clams with the settlers.
Other historians claim that the first Thanksgiving was not at St. Augustine but on the St. John’s River, what is now Jacksonville. These were French Protestants, Huguenots, Calvinists like the Pilgrims, and they held a service of thanksgiving with the Timucuans to celebrate the 1564 establishment of Fort Caroline. The French explorer, Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere, wrote in his journal, “We sang a psalm of thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him that it would please his Grace to continue his goodness toward us.” Unfortunately, grace did not overcome hatred, because the Spanish attacked the French Protestants, accusing them of being heretics. The Spanish murdered 130 French Protestants, and two weeks later massacred an additional 200 French shipwreck survivors at an inlet near St. Augustine. The bloodshed undoubtedly helped to wash away the memory of any Thanksgiving meal.
James W. Baker, who wrote a book, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday, notes that it was traditional for European explorers to give thanks after a safe trans-Atlantic crossing, but he claims these isolated instances bear no relation to the American Thanksgiving. He also claims that there was NEVER a single first Thanksgiving, neither in Plymouth for the three day harvest festival in 1621 nor in any other location. It was not until 1841, he claimed, that people began to talk about the Pilgrims hosting the first Thanksgiving.
A National Day of Thanksgiving was first called for to celebrate a victory over the British at the Battle of Saratoga, which took place in two stages on September 19 and October 7, 1777. In 1789 George Washington again called for a National Day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. And during the Civil War, both the North and the South issued Thanksgiving Day celebrations following major victories. It is interesting to note that President Thomas Jefferson NEVER called for a National Day of Thanksgiving, believing that a wall of separation between church and state precluded any such celebrations.
It was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln called for an annual Thanksgiving celebration on the final Thursday in November. Sarah Josepha Hale was an impassioned advocate for the holiday, and she has become known as “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” Sarah Hale had written the children’s poem, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and she was a tireless advocate for women’s education, helping to found Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She also saw to it that a monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill was created, and she helped to save George Washington’s Mount Vernon home. For decades, Sarah Hale had written impassioned letters to various presidents, pleading for a National Day of Thanksgiving. Finally, Abraham Lincoln agreed.
As you can see, the history around Thanksgiving is extremely convoluted and multi-faceted. I must admit, however, that I still very much like what my first grade teacher told our class. The lesson back then was clear and a good one: cooperation matters, and human survival depends upon it. Jesus would certainly agree. It is a lesson that still needs learning as our nation continues to deal with hatred and prejudice.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
A New Kind of King, A New Kind of Grace
The Reign of Christ Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022
First Church in Unionville, CT
Colossians 1: 11-20
Luke 22: 33-43
Some years ago, I went on an ecumenical Reformation trip through many of the Reformation sites in Germany and then onto Rome and the glory of St. Peter’s and the exquisite beauty of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. But what moved me the most was seeing Wartburg Castle with this little dark room and its cold, stony walls, the place where Martin Luther in just 11 weeks translated the New Testament from Greek into German. If you looked very carefully at the wall you could see the ink stain, the mark Luther made when he threw his inkwell at the devil.
Luther doubted that he could really make God’s Word accessible to the common man and woman. Rome did not want the Bible translated into the language people spoke. He could feel, he said, the devil’s grip on his soul, and it was then that he threw his inkwell. “Be gone, Satan, you shall not tempt me away from God’s Word.” Luther’s world was one people understood to be filled with principalities and powers, powers not so unlike those to which Paul refers in his letter to the Colossians. These powers and principalities were the forces people believed influenced and even controlled their world and their destiny. A Roman soldier would think he would do well to placate the god, Mars, and both Jews and Christians would have believed in the power of angels and devils to influence earthly events. And though we might smile at such naivete, consider the powers that rule our lives---the market or the economy or politics or terrorism---principalities and powers that none of us can really touch or see, but we believe in their power to influence our lives. This is the way we talk about our reality, just as Paul and later Luther would talk about their reality. The language they used was different from ours, but they did mean what we mean--- there are forces operating outside our immediate control.
And yet what Paul is saying in Colossians is that as powerful as all these forces are, they are subservient to Christ. Christ has conquered them, but not through the traditional channels of power, not like a Caesar or a mighty warrior, but through what appears to be complete weakness and utter defeat---death on a cross, an excruciating, humiliating death. Some (including Luther) would say that Christ’s death satisfied an angry God for the insult of sin, and Christ, being the perfect human, could make the perfect sacrifice or pay the perfect payment.
But it is not God who demands blood; it’s human beings. You are going to pay, we say---pay for this and that terrible crime, like some of the parents, enraged because the young man, who killed their children at Marjorie Stoneham High School did not get the death penalty. And in Jesus’ case his “terrible” crime was the refusal to grant to the principalities and powers ultimate authority. They have their place---render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar---but not everything belongs to Caesar, or the Temple or the economy or the war. Our ultimate loyalty belongs to God, and when you live as if you really believe that (as Jesus did) you get into a lot of trouble. Now Luther was no Jesus Christ, but when he stopped ceding power to the Pope, his fate was sealed, and had it not been for Frederick the Wise, who hid Luther in Wartburg Castle, Luther would have been burned for heresy.
Now Luther made a brilliant distinction between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. The church, he claimed, was very adept at cultivating the theology of glory. The glory was all around. You could see it, touch it, smell it, and even buy it. But the theology of the cross reveals grace in what appears as weakness and defeat. It does not look like the victories the successful want and get.
In the liturgical calendar today is called The Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year with next Sunday being the first Sunday in Advent. On this Sunday Christ is crowned King. And kings are supposed to rule in power and majesty. Yet the Gospel reading the lectionary chooses is the story of Christ’s crucifixion as told in Luke. In other words, Christ’s kingship and power and victory are hidden in the humiliation and weakness and defeat of the cross. The theology of glory is easy to see. We know what success looks like, but what kind of king, what kind of grace comes in the form of a defeated crucified human being? That is not what we want, and it is not what we expect. But sometimes this is exactly how grace comes---in places and ways that have nothing to do with success or power.
As in the story of a 10 year old boy named Shay, mentally and physically challenged. His father and he were out for a walk one Saturday afternoon, when they came upon a baseball game of kids Shay knew. And Shay asked his father in his halting way if he thought the boys might let him play. His father thought he knew the answer, but still, he approached one of the boys on the field and asked on his son’s behalf. The boy looked around and said, “We’re losing by 6 runs and the game is in the 8th inning. I guess he can be on our team, and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the 9th inning.”
Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and with a broad smile put on a team t shirt. In the 8th inning, Shay’s team scored some runs but was still behind by three, and in the bottom of the 9th inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base, and Shay was scheduled to be at bat. There was some hesitation on the team, and one parent walked over, but before anyone could say a word, the team captain handed Shay the bat.
As Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher on the other team recognized what was going on---the team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, and so the pitcher moved in a few steps and threw the ball at Shay’s bat. Shay swung wildly and missed, and so the pitcher took a few more steps forward and once again threw the ball toward Shay’s bat. Again, Shay swung and missed. A third try and this time the ball made contact with the bat with a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher, who could have easily picked it up and thrown it to first base. Instead, he threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head, out of reach of all his team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, “Run Shay, run. Run to first.” Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. And then people began yelling, Run to second, run to second. Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded toward second base, the right fielder, the smallest guy on the team, had the ball, and he could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but he understood what this game was really about, and so he intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base as the runners before him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, Shay, Shay, go Shay, go. Shay reached third base only because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the right direction. When he touched third base, everyone began yelling, “Go for home, Shay, go for home. You can do it, Shay, you can make it. Shay could barely run now. His legs were shaking, and his lungs felt as if they would burst apart, but he gave it his all, limping and falling a few times before he finally reached home base, where everyone hailed him as the hero of the day.
Six months later Shay died, and Shay’s father told this story at his son’s funeral with the boys from both teams present, wearing their baseball caps and t shirts. Shay, in fact, was buried in the same pair of pants and team t-shirt he wore the day of the game. At the end of the story, the father looked out at the boys and said, “You helped to bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world that day.” And the minister added, “God throws out pieces of grace everyday, and sometimes people catch it and pass it on, as these boys did with Shay.”
We think we know what is important, what really matters. Our newspapers and television are filled with stories about big and important people and events. And yes, inflation matters and so do elections. But in Jesus’ day, his death on a cross would have hardly registered on Rome’s screen, because Rome executed thousands of Jews. What kind of king is this? And what kind of grace does this crucified king bring? As Protestants we might say it is the kind of grace that sometimes defies Popes and councils and changes the world—front page news. But sometimes it’s the kind grace that comes softly and quietly, appearing on a Saturday afternoon on a baseball field where a group of kids are playing. Who would have thought it? But then who would have thought that the man crucified at the place of the Skull was a king, a new kind of king, bringing a new kind of grace.
The Reign of Christ Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022
First Church in Unionville, CT
Colossians 1: 11-20
Luke 22: 33-43
Some years ago, I went on an ecumenical Reformation trip through many of the Reformation sites in Germany and then onto Rome and the glory of St. Peter’s and the exquisite beauty of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. But what moved me the most was seeing Wartburg Castle with this little dark room and its cold, stony walls, the place where Martin Luther in just 11 weeks translated the New Testament from Greek into German. If you looked very carefully at the wall you could see the ink stain, the mark Luther made when he threw his inkwell at the devil.
Luther doubted that he could really make God’s Word accessible to the common man and woman. Rome did not want the Bible translated into the language people spoke. He could feel, he said, the devil’s grip on his soul, and it was then that he threw his inkwell. “Be gone, Satan, you shall not tempt me away from God’s Word.” Luther’s world was one people understood to be filled with principalities and powers, powers not so unlike those to which Paul refers in his letter to the Colossians. These powers and principalities were the forces people believed influenced and even controlled their world and their destiny. A Roman soldier would think he would do well to placate the god, Mars, and both Jews and Christians would have believed in the power of angels and devils to influence earthly events. And though we might smile at such naivete, consider the powers that rule our lives---the market or the economy or politics or terrorism---principalities and powers that none of us can really touch or see, but we believe in their power to influence our lives. This is the way we talk about our reality, just as Paul and later Luther would talk about their reality. The language they used was different from ours, but they did mean what we mean--- there are forces operating outside our immediate control.
And yet what Paul is saying in Colossians is that as powerful as all these forces are, they are subservient to Christ. Christ has conquered them, but not through the traditional channels of power, not like a Caesar or a mighty warrior, but through what appears to be complete weakness and utter defeat---death on a cross, an excruciating, humiliating death. Some (including Luther) would say that Christ’s death satisfied an angry God for the insult of sin, and Christ, being the perfect human, could make the perfect sacrifice or pay the perfect payment.
But it is not God who demands blood; it’s human beings. You are going to pay, we say---pay for this and that terrible crime, like some of the parents, enraged because the young man, who killed their children at Marjorie Stoneham High School did not get the death penalty. And in Jesus’ case his “terrible” crime was the refusal to grant to the principalities and powers ultimate authority. They have their place---render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar---but not everything belongs to Caesar, or the Temple or the economy or the war. Our ultimate loyalty belongs to God, and when you live as if you really believe that (as Jesus did) you get into a lot of trouble. Now Luther was no Jesus Christ, but when he stopped ceding power to the Pope, his fate was sealed, and had it not been for Frederick the Wise, who hid Luther in Wartburg Castle, Luther would have been burned for heresy.
Now Luther made a brilliant distinction between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. The church, he claimed, was very adept at cultivating the theology of glory. The glory was all around. You could see it, touch it, smell it, and even buy it. But the theology of the cross reveals grace in what appears as weakness and defeat. It does not look like the victories the successful want and get.
In the liturgical calendar today is called The Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year with next Sunday being the first Sunday in Advent. On this Sunday Christ is crowned King. And kings are supposed to rule in power and majesty. Yet the Gospel reading the lectionary chooses is the story of Christ’s crucifixion as told in Luke. In other words, Christ’s kingship and power and victory are hidden in the humiliation and weakness and defeat of the cross. The theology of glory is easy to see. We know what success looks like, but what kind of king, what kind of grace comes in the form of a defeated crucified human being? That is not what we want, and it is not what we expect. But sometimes this is exactly how grace comes---in places and ways that have nothing to do with success or power.
As in the story of a 10 year old boy named Shay, mentally and physically challenged. His father and he were out for a walk one Saturday afternoon, when they came upon a baseball game of kids Shay knew. And Shay asked his father in his halting way if he thought the boys might let him play. His father thought he knew the answer, but still, he approached one of the boys on the field and asked on his son’s behalf. The boy looked around and said, “We’re losing by 6 runs and the game is in the 8th inning. I guess he can be on our team, and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the 9th inning.”
Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and with a broad smile put on a team t shirt. In the 8th inning, Shay’s team scored some runs but was still behind by three, and in the bottom of the 9th inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base, and Shay was scheduled to be at bat. There was some hesitation on the team, and one parent walked over, but before anyone could say a word, the team captain handed Shay the bat.
As Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher on the other team recognized what was going on---the team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, and so the pitcher moved in a few steps and threw the ball at Shay’s bat. Shay swung wildly and missed, and so the pitcher took a few more steps forward and once again threw the ball toward Shay’s bat. Again, Shay swung and missed. A third try and this time the ball made contact with the bat with a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher, who could have easily picked it up and thrown it to first base. Instead, he threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head, out of reach of all his team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, “Run Shay, run. Run to first.” Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. And then people began yelling, Run to second, run to second. Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded toward second base, the right fielder, the smallest guy on the team, had the ball, and he could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but he understood what this game was really about, and so he intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base as the runners before him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, Shay, Shay, go Shay, go. Shay reached third base only because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the right direction. When he touched third base, everyone began yelling, “Go for home, Shay, go for home. You can do it, Shay, you can make it. Shay could barely run now. His legs were shaking, and his lungs felt as if they would burst apart, but he gave it his all, limping and falling a few times before he finally reached home base, where everyone hailed him as the hero of the day.
Six months later Shay died, and Shay’s father told this story at his son’s funeral with the boys from both teams present, wearing their baseball caps and t shirts. Shay, in fact, was buried in the same pair of pants and team t-shirt he wore the day of the game. At the end of the story, the father looked out at the boys and said, “You helped to bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world that day.” And the minister added, “God throws out pieces of grace everyday, and sometimes people catch it and pass it on, as these boys did with Shay.”
We think we know what is important, what really matters. Our newspapers and television are filled with stories about big and important people and events. And yes, inflation matters and so do elections. But in Jesus’ day, his death on a cross would have hardly registered on Rome’s screen, because Rome executed thousands of Jews. What kind of king is this? And what kind of grace does this crucified king bring? As Protestants we might say it is the kind of grace that sometimes defies Popes and councils and changes the world—front page news. But sometimes it’s the kind grace that comes softly and quietly, appearing on a Saturday afternoon on a baseball field where a group of kids are playing. Who would have thought it? But then who would have thought that the man crucified at the place of the Skull was a king, a new kind of king, bringing a new kind of grace.
November 16, 2022
Dear Friends,
Right after the recent election, I came across an interesting article about a walk across Maine, made in 1972 by a then 31 year old trial lawyer and mayor of Bangor. William Cohen was a Republican, interested in serving in Congress and so in 1972 he undertook a six week walk across Maine. The man who engineered the walk, now a retired professor of government from Bowdoin College, Christian Potholm, said that today such a walk would be impossible. Media is far too interfering and leaves no privacy at all. The conversations Cohen had occurred on sidewalks or on front porches and lawns, sometimes in factories and also in peoples’ living and dining rooms. There was no knocking on doors. Signs were posted along the path that Bob Cohen would be coming along around such and such a time, and anyone wanting to speak with him, was encouraged to be “there.” And people were “there”. They wanted to see this young guy, who was walking 20 miles a day for a job none of them could ever imagine wanting. Cohen did not have a lot of plans and no money to pay for hotels and food. But people always offered him a place to spend the night as well as plenty of food. Despite walking 20 miles a day, he gained 20 pounds over the six week period.
Cohen had a small group of campaign volunteers, four or five. They hardly had any budget, maybe enough to pay for one motel room for all of them, but money for food was their own responsibility. There was this one time when the one phone booth in this small town was vandalized, and the town was just in an outrage. Well, the volunteers let Bob know about the concern, and when he arrived at the town, he talked to them about crime and how it can make people feel assaulted, even if it does not directly happen to them. And that is exactly how people felt. That phone booth was a part of their little town, a part of them, and they could not imagine why anyone would want to vandalize their phone booth. And though it may to us sound trivial, to these townspeople it mattered!
Most of the people Cohen stayed with were on the lower economic scale, and since Cohen was from a working class family, he could easily relate. He would ask them what they were looking for and what he could do for them, if he ever got to Washington, DC, but he often had the feeling they were just looking for someone to hear them, to listen to them. Think back to 1972, if you can. Things were tightening up: inflation was on the rise and the energy crisis was beginning to make its harshness felt. It would not be long before people were waiting in line to buy gas for their cars and trucks. And in Maine there were and still are a great many trucks!
Cohen won that election and the next two as well. In the House he served on the Judiciary Committee, building an impeachment case against Richard Nixon, whom he would have voted to impeach, if it had come to a formal vote. In 1976 he won a Senate Seat, and served there until 1996, when he said he would not run for re-election, because of partisan gridlock. But President Bill Clinton had other plans for Cohen, and offered him the position of Secretary of Defense, which Cohen took, the first time a President of a different Party offered a position on his Cabinet to an elected official from another Party.
The Christian Science Monitor named William Cohen “a Renaissance Man,” educated at Bowdoin College in Latin and Greek classics, a writer of poetry and non-fiction and later trained in law at Boston University School of Law. But what many in Maine remember about Bill Cohen is his famous walk across Maine, when he visited ordinary citizens and their places of work. Maine back then was known as the shoe capital of America, and indeed he visited a lot of shoe factories, where he was often gifted with a new pair of boots. He still recalls putting on one of those new boots and barely being able to walk, his feet were so tired and blistered. There were a few times he had to seek medical attention for his feet. And then there was the time he and his team went to a drive in movie, and just went around, knocking on car windows to talk to people. People thought he was crazy and told him so!
Bars may be a place to meet voters, but Cohen did not find bars to be a good place to talk to voters. “People, who are drinking,” he said, “are usually either happy or very angry. They’re almost never happy to see a politician.” He remembers this one night at a bar, when he was shaking hands with people, and one man refused to shake his hand. “Do you know me?” Cohen asked. “Yea,” the man answered. “You’re the son of a bitch who put me in jail!” Cohen decided to leave and had no interest in returning to bars, looking for votes.
There’s a book about the walk: Bill Cohen’s 1972 Campaign for Congress. An Oral History of the Walk that Changed Maine Politics. People say you could not do this today. “Too much money washing around these days,” preventing the kind of simple honesty Bill Cohen’s walk led to. He really did walk, usually 20 miles a day, and there were times, when he was far out into rural Maine, he did not see a person or a car for hours. But people saw him, a trucker or two, who would later tell other truckers that they saw “this crazy guy, walking and walking, slapping flies off his neck and face. “I guess he really wants the job.”
I would not try to compare Bill Cohen to Jesus, but Jesus did spend a lot of time on the road, just walking, meeting people and listening to what they had to say as well as telling a story now and then. I do think Jesus had a lot of a skilled politician in him. He knew how to listen and he knew how to tell a good story.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Right after the recent election, I came across an interesting article about a walk across Maine, made in 1972 by a then 31 year old trial lawyer and mayor of Bangor. William Cohen was a Republican, interested in serving in Congress and so in 1972 he undertook a six week walk across Maine. The man who engineered the walk, now a retired professor of government from Bowdoin College, Christian Potholm, said that today such a walk would be impossible. Media is far too interfering and leaves no privacy at all. The conversations Cohen had occurred on sidewalks or on front porches and lawns, sometimes in factories and also in peoples’ living and dining rooms. There was no knocking on doors. Signs were posted along the path that Bob Cohen would be coming along around such and such a time, and anyone wanting to speak with him, was encouraged to be “there.” And people were “there”. They wanted to see this young guy, who was walking 20 miles a day for a job none of them could ever imagine wanting. Cohen did not have a lot of plans and no money to pay for hotels and food. But people always offered him a place to spend the night as well as plenty of food. Despite walking 20 miles a day, he gained 20 pounds over the six week period.
Cohen had a small group of campaign volunteers, four or five. They hardly had any budget, maybe enough to pay for one motel room for all of them, but money for food was their own responsibility. There was this one time when the one phone booth in this small town was vandalized, and the town was just in an outrage. Well, the volunteers let Bob know about the concern, and when he arrived at the town, he talked to them about crime and how it can make people feel assaulted, even if it does not directly happen to them. And that is exactly how people felt. That phone booth was a part of their little town, a part of them, and they could not imagine why anyone would want to vandalize their phone booth. And though it may to us sound trivial, to these townspeople it mattered!
Most of the people Cohen stayed with were on the lower economic scale, and since Cohen was from a working class family, he could easily relate. He would ask them what they were looking for and what he could do for them, if he ever got to Washington, DC, but he often had the feeling they were just looking for someone to hear them, to listen to them. Think back to 1972, if you can. Things were tightening up: inflation was on the rise and the energy crisis was beginning to make its harshness felt. It would not be long before people were waiting in line to buy gas for their cars and trucks. And in Maine there were and still are a great many trucks!
Cohen won that election and the next two as well. In the House he served on the Judiciary Committee, building an impeachment case against Richard Nixon, whom he would have voted to impeach, if it had come to a formal vote. In 1976 he won a Senate Seat, and served there until 1996, when he said he would not run for re-election, because of partisan gridlock. But President Bill Clinton had other plans for Cohen, and offered him the position of Secretary of Defense, which Cohen took, the first time a President of a different Party offered a position on his Cabinet to an elected official from another Party.
The Christian Science Monitor named William Cohen “a Renaissance Man,” educated at Bowdoin College in Latin and Greek classics, a writer of poetry and non-fiction and later trained in law at Boston University School of Law. But what many in Maine remember about Bill Cohen is his famous walk across Maine, when he visited ordinary citizens and their places of work. Maine back then was known as the shoe capital of America, and indeed he visited a lot of shoe factories, where he was often gifted with a new pair of boots. He still recalls putting on one of those new boots and barely being able to walk, his feet were so tired and blistered. There were a few times he had to seek medical attention for his feet. And then there was the time he and his team went to a drive in movie, and just went around, knocking on car windows to talk to people. People thought he was crazy and told him so!
Bars may be a place to meet voters, but Cohen did not find bars to be a good place to talk to voters. “People, who are drinking,” he said, “are usually either happy or very angry. They’re almost never happy to see a politician.” He remembers this one night at a bar, when he was shaking hands with people, and one man refused to shake his hand. “Do you know me?” Cohen asked. “Yea,” the man answered. “You’re the son of a bitch who put me in jail!” Cohen decided to leave and had no interest in returning to bars, looking for votes.
There’s a book about the walk: Bill Cohen’s 1972 Campaign for Congress. An Oral History of the Walk that Changed Maine Politics. People say you could not do this today. “Too much money washing around these days,” preventing the kind of simple honesty Bill Cohen’s walk led to. He really did walk, usually 20 miles a day, and there were times, when he was far out into rural Maine, he did not see a person or a car for hours. But people saw him, a trucker or two, who would later tell other truckers that they saw “this crazy guy, walking and walking, slapping flies off his neck and face. “I guess he really wants the job.”
I would not try to compare Bill Cohen to Jesus, but Jesus did spend a lot of time on the road, just walking, meeting people and listening to what they had to say as well as telling a story now and then. I do think Jesus had a lot of a skilled politician in him. He knew how to listen and he knew how to tell a good story.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE STORIES WE TELL AND REMEMBER
Preached by Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST IN UNIONVILLE, CT
November 13, 2022
Isaiah 65: 17-25
Luke 21: 5-19
Just last month I was having a conversation with my oldest grandchild, Siena, who turned 17 last summer. I reminded her how at the age of 3 she was fascinated with her memory. She wanted to know why it is she could remember all these things in her head. I guess I was a very advanced child, she said, but now I realize that I don’t remember things in the same way. When I was five, I thought it was terrible when at my birthday party my cake fell on the floor, but now I think it’s funny. And I wonder, as I apply to colleges and if I don’t get into Georgetown or Yale or some other prestigious school, I will probably be very upset. But 10 or 20 years from now, I will most likely think, “How silly of me! All that prestige does not matter in the least! But that is not how I think and feel now! So, she said, I guess looking back can change everything---even our memories.
Siena’s comment reminded me of something my father said. He landed on one of the Normandy beaches, but over a month after D-Day. And all these local French people were on the beach sunbathing or swimming in the mid July ocean. My father certainly knew what happened on June 6, and so he told me he carried in his mind two images---one of the brutal landing, but the other of people swimming, and because he had personally witnessed the latter, it changed his viewpoint. I found myself thinking at the time of my landing, he told me, that life goes on, and even the horror has an end, but I am not sure I would have felt that way, had I landed on June 6. I spent the war behind a desk at the Headquarters of the 101st Army, and though I read the communications that described the battles and the losses, still I did not see it face to face, and so my memories of war are quite different from those who actually did the fighting.”
Indeed, how we remember and what we remember are often a function of the position we find ourselves in---and our position sometimes changes as my granddaughter already realizes. I visited one of my brothers a few weeks ago in New Jersey, and he and I both remembered how our parents used to say that life was getting worse and worse. School shootings, lack of civility, diminishing church attendance---all these things would elicit comments about how things are going to hell. I would argue, reminding them that they lived through a war that saw 3% of the world’s population perish. 55 million civilians died alone, 20 million from disease and starvation and another 25 million military dead. And we had genocide on a grand scale, practiced by the same nation, which gave us Bach and Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant. Your day was a lot worse than now, I would insist. But I made no headway with them, because when they remembered their past, they remembered a time when the nation was united and agreed on what the goals were. Oh, the agreements were probably not as strong as they recalled, but they had made their memories of the past, and there was no way I was going to change them. And sometimes memories are more important than the reality. Our two readings from the Bible today are really about memories---about looking back on the past, but also forward to a future.
Consider the very difficult position in which Isaiah and his people had found themselves. The unthinkable had happened in 587 B.C. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonian Empire, and the leaders were taken away to Babylon. First Isaiah had talked about the coming catastrophe because the people had failed to honor the Covenant with God; Second Isaiah had tried to comfort them in their time as captives, but now Third Isaiah faced a new situation. The Jews were now no longer captives in Babylon, and those who wanted to return to Jerusalem were allowed to do so.
Cyrus of Persia had destroyed the Babylonian empire, and he was the one who offered the Jews the option of returning. Yet not all the Jews wanted to return. A little more than 50 years had passed. Many of the original exiles had died; people had been born, who had no memory of Jerusalem, and though there were those who remembered the story, the glory of Jerusalem and the beautiful Temple and the Law God had given them---not all enthusiastically embraced that story. Some had a new story to tell themselves about their new life in Babylon. But there was a remnant, who returned, and what they found was devastation. It looked as if nothing had been done in 50 years, and it probably had not, since skilled labor was carried off to Babylon along with other forms of leadership and competence. Rebuilding was so much harder than they had imagined, and so bitterness and resentment set in. While they remembered the past they had lost, they had no new memory to sustain them. And this is exactly what Isaiah tried to give them, a new story to live for and by. The promise was that God would create a new Jerusalem, where pain and sorrow and distress would be no more. The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and no one shall hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain. This is the new creation, the promised future, something for which the returned Jews could hope as they tried to rebuild their lives.
And the new creation had not yet arrived for the people, hearing Luke’s gospel, written 40 or 50 years after Jesus lived. They were living in tough times. The Temple had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and the followers of Jesus were being brought before the authorities, both Jewish and Roman. They too had their memories. Some probably remembered Jesus in the flesh, others remembered him through the stories that were told. They had seen so much change, and they were trying to make sense of it all, just as the Jews, who returned from Babylon tried to make sense of it. And in the midst of all that turmoil and change, they remembered a story of a new beginning, the promise that if they would endure, God would make the new creation.
We all struggle to make sense of our lives and our world. We all have memories, our personal stories. But our personal stories are also part of a wider story, the story of history, the story of God in history. Both Isaiah and Luke were trying to help people see their lives in a larger context, as part of God’s story, God’s history. This is why religious traditions have texts. These stories become part of the collective memory; they tell us who we are, where we come from and where we might go. They remind us that we are not the center of the story, but we are part of the story.
When my husband and I went to Poland five years ago, we visited the concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have spoken of my experience before and some of the people I met there. One was the daughter of a man, who had survived the camp. He had lost his first wife and two children, but after the war, he moved to Israel and remarried and had another family, two daughters and a son. The daughter I met told me the most amazing thing about her father was his lack of bitterness. I never could figure out why he was not angry or bitter, she told me. He went on with his life, and though he remembered the past, he was not stuck there. I always wondered how was it possible to get over something that traumatic. When I turned 40, I finally got up the nerve to ask him. And he told me he saw himself as part of a remnant, the survivors, who went home, which is what Israel is for him, and made a new life for themselves and their children.
I left Israel in my 20’s, moving to the United States to make a new life for myself, eventually becoming a history professor. And my father was never angry or upset with me for leaving Israel, though some of his friends thought I was terrible for doing so. But he told me, “You have your own life to live, your own story to make, so live it and make it, but remember that your story should be part of something larger than yourself.” And that is good advice for us all.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST IN UNIONVILLE, CT
November 13, 2022
Isaiah 65: 17-25
Luke 21: 5-19
Just last month I was having a conversation with my oldest grandchild, Siena, who turned 17 last summer. I reminded her how at the age of 3 she was fascinated with her memory. She wanted to know why it is she could remember all these things in her head. I guess I was a very advanced child, she said, but now I realize that I don’t remember things in the same way. When I was five, I thought it was terrible when at my birthday party my cake fell on the floor, but now I think it’s funny. And I wonder, as I apply to colleges and if I don’t get into Georgetown or Yale or some other prestigious school, I will probably be very upset. But 10 or 20 years from now, I will most likely think, “How silly of me! All that prestige does not matter in the least! But that is not how I think and feel now! So, she said, I guess looking back can change everything---even our memories.
Siena’s comment reminded me of something my father said. He landed on one of the Normandy beaches, but over a month after D-Day. And all these local French people were on the beach sunbathing or swimming in the mid July ocean. My father certainly knew what happened on June 6, and so he told me he carried in his mind two images---one of the brutal landing, but the other of people swimming, and because he had personally witnessed the latter, it changed his viewpoint. I found myself thinking at the time of my landing, he told me, that life goes on, and even the horror has an end, but I am not sure I would have felt that way, had I landed on June 6. I spent the war behind a desk at the Headquarters of the 101st Army, and though I read the communications that described the battles and the losses, still I did not see it face to face, and so my memories of war are quite different from those who actually did the fighting.”
Indeed, how we remember and what we remember are often a function of the position we find ourselves in---and our position sometimes changes as my granddaughter already realizes. I visited one of my brothers a few weeks ago in New Jersey, and he and I both remembered how our parents used to say that life was getting worse and worse. School shootings, lack of civility, diminishing church attendance---all these things would elicit comments about how things are going to hell. I would argue, reminding them that they lived through a war that saw 3% of the world’s population perish. 55 million civilians died alone, 20 million from disease and starvation and another 25 million military dead. And we had genocide on a grand scale, practiced by the same nation, which gave us Bach and Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant. Your day was a lot worse than now, I would insist. But I made no headway with them, because when they remembered their past, they remembered a time when the nation was united and agreed on what the goals were. Oh, the agreements were probably not as strong as they recalled, but they had made their memories of the past, and there was no way I was going to change them. And sometimes memories are more important than the reality. Our two readings from the Bible today are really about memories---about looking back on the past, but also forward to a future.
Consider the very difficult position in which Isaiah and his people had found themselves. The unthinkable had happened in 587 B.C. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonian Empire, and the leaders were taken away to Babylon. First Isaiah had talked about the coming catastrophe because the people had failed to honor the Covenant with God; Second Isaiah had tried to comfort them in their time as captives, but now Third Isaiah faced a new situation. The Jews were now no longer captives in Babylon, and those who wanted to return to Jerusalem were allowed to do so.
Cyrus of Persia had destroyed the Babylonian empire, and he was the one who offered the Jews the option of returning. Yet not all the Jews wanted to return. A little more than 50 years had passed. Many of the original exiles had died; people had been born, who had no memory of Jerusalem, and though there were those who remembered the story, the glory of Jerusalem and the beautiful Temple and the Law God had given them---not all enthusiastically embraced that story. Some had a new story to tell themselves about their new life in Babylon. But there was a remnant, who returned, and what they found was devastation. It looked as if nothing had been done in 50 years, and it probably had not, since skilled labor was carried off to Babylon along with other forms of leadership and competence. Rebuilding was so much harder than they had imagined, and so bitterness and resentment set in. While they remembered the past they had lost, they had no new memory to sustain them. And this is exactly what Isaiah tried to give them, a new story to live for and by. The promise was that God would create a new Jerusalem, where pain and sorrow and distress would be no more. The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and no one shall hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain. This is the new creation, the promised future, something for which the returned Jews could hope as they tried to rebuild their lives.
And the new creation had not yet arrived for the people, hearing Luke’s gospel, written 40 or 50 years after Jesus lived. They were living in tough times. The Temple had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and the followers of Jesus were being brought before the authorities, both Jewish and Roman. They too had their memories. Some probably remembered Jesus in the flesh, others remembered him through the stories that were told. They had seen so much change, and they were trying to make sense of it all, just as the Jews, who returned from Babylon tried to make sense of it. And in the midst of all that turmoil and change, they remembered a story of a new beginning, the promise that if they would endure, God would make the new creation.
We all struggle to make sense of our lives and our world. We all have memories, our personal stories. But our personal stories are also part of a wider story, the story of history, the story of God in history. Both Isaiah and Luke were trying to help people see their lives in a larger context, as part of God’s story, God’s history. This is why religious traditions have texts. These stories become part of the collective memory; they tell us who we are, where we come from and where we might go. They remind us that we are not the center of the story, but we are part of the story.
When my husband and I went to Poland five years ago, we visited the concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have spoken of my experience before and some of the people I met there. One was the daughter of a man, who had survived the camp. He had lost his first wife and two children, but after the war, he moved to Israel and remarried and had another family, two daughters and a son. The daughter I met told me the most amazing thing about her father was his lack of bitterness. I never could figure out why he was not angry or bitter, she told me. He went on with his life, and though he remembered the past, he was not stuck there. I always wondered how was it possible to get over something that traumatic. When I turned 40, I finally got up the nerve to ask him. And he told me he saw himself as part of a remnant, the survivors, who went home, which is what Israel is for him, and made a new life for themselves and their children.
I left Israel in my 20’s, moving to the United States to make a new life for myself, eventually becoming a history professor. And my father was never angry or upset with me for leaving Israel, though some of his friends thought I was terrible for doing so. But he told me, “You have your own life to live, your own story to make, so live it and make it, but remember that your story should be part of something larger than yourself.” And that is good advice for us all.
THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD: MARTIN LUTHER SPEAKS
PREACHED BY SANDRA OLSEN
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 23, 2022
Romans 1: 16-17
The black preaching robe: Do you have any idea what the significance of this is, what a long journey it was to arrive at the point where many ministers (not priests) choose to wear the black preaching robe in place of the white Alb? You see the preaching robe was the dress of academics, and to wear it in the pulpit was to acknowledge that the preaching of the Word required study, disciplined prayerful study. I, Martin Luther, was a teacher, a professor at Wittenberg University, and it was in the preparation of my lectures on scripture that I understood what Paul in his Letter to the Romans meant: we are justified not by our goods works but by faith. Faith alone. And so, until very recently your clergy always wore the black robe as a symbol of their commitment to study. It is only in the last 50 years, in an effort to be ecumenical that they now also wear the Alb and stoles. Such dress in the Reformed tradition (though not in the Lutheran tradition) would have been considered papist rot, the stinking excrement of Rome.
Strong language, yes, very strong language. But the 16th century was a time when strength was required. The issues meant life or death. Civility meant nothing; you could be civil and yet be burned at the stake. I continuously asked Rome and its representatives to show me where my ideas were wrong. Show me, I said, where Jesus said you can buy your salvation through the purchase of indulgences. Show me that you are saved by your works. But all they did was speak of authority, the authority of the Church, which meant the authority of the Pope. And what of scripture? I asked. The Pope decides such matters, I was told. And so, on April 18, 1521 at the Diet of Worms I stood before those gathered and said: “Unless I am shown by the testimony of scripture that I am wrong, for I do not believe in councils or Popes, I cannot and will not recant. My conscience is captive to the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand; I can do no other, so help me God.” Some say this was a turning point in western civilization when the individual conscience stood against the power of a mighty institution.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning---when I determined to become a monk. I was supposed to be a lawyer in deference to my father, who worked hard as a miner. He wanted a better life for his children; even in the 16th century there was what you call today upward mobility. And so, I began to study law. But late one afternoon, walking home, I suddenly found myself caught in a storm, a violent storm with thunder crashing and pounding, and lightening, flashing, sending shafts of terror through the sky and into my heart. Falling to the ground, I prayed, “St. Anne, save me, and I will become a monk.” Well, as you can see, I was saved and so I had to keep my promise. I did become a monk, much to the anger and disappointment of my father. Do not you know the third commandment? he asked me. Honor thy father and mother! Yes, of course, I knew it, but sometimes obedience takes a different path. I reminded him that even Jesus Christ disappointed his parents. Jesus came as it says in Matthew’s Gospel to place enmity between a mother and her daughter and a father and his son. No, it was not easy between my father and me, and I do not think he ever really forgave me for becoming a monk rather than a lawyer.
And I was a good monk, striving to be the perfect monk. Fastidious with every little vow, every little rule, every little mistake and sin: If I spilled a glass of milk, I confessed my carelessness; if I forgot to have a candle ready for Mass, I confessed my sloth. I was trying to be perfect, and yet the other monks laughed at me. Oh, there goes Martin with his overzealous conscience. He thinks he can buy God’s love and approval with his perfectionism. But I could not, and so my fear of hell led me to hate the God who would put me in hell. “Martin,” my spiritual adviser said, “It is not God who is angry with you, but you are angry with God.” And he was right. But what was I to do?
In the midst of my spiritual agony, something else was happening. The Pope wanted to build a great cathedral in Rome, a place in honor of St. Peter, a sacred home for all the relics---the teeth of this saint or that one, the robe which Mary wore, splattered with the blood of her dead son, two hairs of Jesus Christ. Oh, the list went on and on, and though Jesus only called 12 disciples my calculations showed that with all the different cathedrals claiming to have this or that part of a disciple’s body, there must have been at least 18. When I pointed this out to one of the bishops, he told me to keep my opinions to myself. But your Lordship, I insisted, this is not an opinion. Why look at this: Saint Peter himself must have had four ears, since there are 8 different churches claiming to have one of his ears. Surely, this is an error. “The Church,” he sternly reminded me, “does not make errors.”
Well, as bad as that was, it was nothing compared to what that papist vermin, John Tetzel, said and did when he arrived at the marketplace in Jutterborg in 1517. That ecclesiastical worm had the gall to say that he saved more souls than St. Peter himself---all because of the indulgences he was authorized to sell. Carrying sealed envelopes with pieces of paper neatly tucked inside, Tetzel held them up for all to see. This is God’s great gift to you, he said. For every one of these you buy, a sin will be remitted. And do you know what else I have been empowered to do? These indulgences are not only for the sins you have already committed, but they will also work for the sins you have not yet committed. “When a coin into the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!”
So full of wrath was I that I wanted to beat his face in, but restraining myself I challenged him, “You are not worth more than the rotting excrement in the Pope’s bowels.” Yes, that is exactly what I said, and do you know what that swine Tetzel responded, “And from whose bowels do you think these indulgences come?” Yes, they came from The Holy Father, Pope Leo X. While I had no right to expect perfection from the Pope; after all, he was human, but certainly I had a right not to expect such utter and complete corruption. Willfully misleading people: the Pope knew that indulgences were impotent against sin. But he was not about truth or salvation, but about money and power and fame, for Leo wanted to be remembered as the Pope who built St. Peter’s in Rome. He needed money for that endeavor and the sale of indulgences would bring in the needed income.
That day in the marketplace was a turning point, and the revolution that came to be called the Reformation exploded. In response to Tetzel, I tacked my 95 Theses to the door of the Palace Church in Wittenberg. These were points to be debated. This is what professors commonly did. They posted their ideas to be considered and then debated. And so, the debate began. I debated men far more subtle in intellect than Tetzel; Cajetan, for example, a cardinal and general of the Dominican Order, Rome’s highest representative in Germany. He was a formidable opponent, a man of great intellect, and it gave him immense pleasure as a Dominican to go against me, an Augustinian monk. There was a competitive spirit sometimes between the two orders, and he would have liked to have proven me wrong. “All you have to do, Martin,” he said, “is confess your errors, retract your words, and do not return like a dog to its vomit.” And what about your vomit?” I asked. “Will you always return to it?” “I give you six months, Martin”, he said, “to roast yourself.” It will take more time than that, I countered.
Well, two years later in Wittenberg the bull of excommunication from Pope Leo X finally arrived. I stood before a great roaring fire, whose flames devoured the books of canon law, and I burned the bull of excommunication before the cheers of a great crowd. So long ago it was, a long and hard journey for me as well as for the Church. History moves on, and there have been changes in the Church I never would or could have foreseen. I translated the Bible from Latin into German in 11 weeks, while hiding in the Wartburg Castle. I wanted people to read and understand God’s Word, because I thought everything was at stake---especially our eternal souls.
How quaint that must sound today when so many look to nothing more than this world for their ultimate satisfaction. Perhaps that is why so many churches are empty. People are too busy in the world to want anything beyond the world, and so they will settle for a small bucket of happiness. It isn’t too much they want; it is far too little. I wanted everything---especially a gracious God who in Jesus Christ would save. Save from what, for what. For me it was salvation from hell for eternal life in heaven. But times do change, and what I was looking for then is probably not the same for you now. So, I will leave you with two short questions: What, if anything, are you looking to be saved from and what are you looking to be saved for? The questions are before you. And only you can answer them for yourself.
PREACHED BY SANDRA OLSEN
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 23, 2022
Romans 1: 16-17
The black preaching robe: Do you have any idea what the significance of this is, what a long journey it was to arrive at the point where many ministers (not priests) choose to wear the black preaching robe in place of the white Alb? You see the preaching robe was the dress of academics, and to wear it in the pulpit was to acknowledge that the preaching of the Word required study, disciplined prayerful study. I, Martin Luther, was a teacher, a professor at Wittenberg University, and it was in the preparation of my lectures on scripture that I understood what Paul in his Letter to the Romans meant: we are justified not by our goods works but by faith. Faith alone. And so, until very recently your clergy always wore the black robe as a symbol of their commitment to study. It is only in the last 50 years, in an effort to be ecumenical that they now also wear the Alb and stoles. Such dress in the Reformed tradition (though not in the Lutheran tradition) would have been considered papist rot, the stinking excrement of Rome.
Strong language, yes, very strong language. But the 16th century was a time when strength was required. The issues meant life or death. Civility meant nothing; you could be civil and yet be burned at the stake. I continuously asked Rome and its representatives to show me where my ideas were wrong. Show me, I said, where Jesus said you can buy your salvation through the purchase of indulgences. Show me that you are saved by your works. But all they did was speak of authority, the authority of the Church, which meant the authority of the Pope. And what of scripture? I asked. The Pope decides such matters, I was told. And so, on April 18, 1521 at the Diet of Worms I stood before those gathered and said: “Unless I am shown by the testimony of scripture that I am wrong, for I do not believe in councils or Popes, I cannot and will not recant. My conscience is captive to the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand; I can do no other, so help me God.” Some say this was a turning point in western civilization when the individual conscience stood against the power of a mighty institution.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning---when I determined to become a monk. I was supposed to be a lawyer in deference to my father, who worked hard as a miner. He wanted a better life for his children; even in the 16th century there was what you call today upward mobility. And so, I began to study law. But late one afternoon, walking home, I suddenly found myself caught in a storm, a violent storm with thunder crashing and pounding, and lightening, flashing, sending shafts of terror through the sky and into my heart. Falling to the ground, I prayed, “St. Anne, save me, and I will become a monk.” Well, as you can see, I was saved and so I had to keep my promise. I did become a monk, much to the anger and disappointment of my father. Do not you know the third commandment? he asked me. Honor thy father and mother! Yes, of course, I knew it, but sometimes obedience takes a different path. I reminded him that even Jesus Christ disappointed his parents. Jesus came as it says in Matthew’s Gospel to place enmity between a mother and her daughter and a father and his son. No, it was not easy between my father and me, and I do not think he ever really forgave me for becoming a monk rather than a lawyer.
And I was a good monk, striving to be the perfect monk. Fastidious with every little vow, every little rule, every little mistake and sin: If I spilled a glass of milk, I confessed my carelessness; if I forgot to have a candle ready for Mass, I confessed my sloth. I was trying to be perfect, and yet the other monks laughed at me. Oh, there goes Martin with his overzealous conscience. He thinks he can buy God’s love and approval with his perfectionism. But I could not, and so my fear of hell led me to hate the God who would put me in hell. “Martin,” my spiritual adviser said, “It is not God who is angry with you, but you are angry with God.” And he was right. But what was I to do?
In the midst of my spiritual agony, something else was happening. The Pope wanted to build a great cathedral in Rome, a place in honor of St. Peter, a sacred home for all the relics---the teeth of this saint or that one, the robe which Mary wore, splattered with the blood of her dead son, two hairs of Jesus Christ. Oh, the list went on and on, and though Jesus only called 12 disciples my calculations showed that with all the different cathedrals claiming to have this or that part of a disciple’s body, there must have been at least 18. When I pointed this out to one of the bishops, he told me to keep my opinions to myself. But your Lordship, I insisted, this is not an opinion. Why look at this: Saint Peter himself must have had four ears, since there are 8 different churches claiming to have one of his ears. Surely, this is an error. “The Church,” he sternly reminded me, “does not make errors.”
Well, as bad as that was, it was nothing compared to what that papist vermin, John Tetzel, said and did when he arrived at the marketplace in Jutterborg in 1517. That ecclesiastical worm had the gall to say that he saved more souls than St. Peter himself---all because of the indulgences he was authorized to sell. Carrying sealed envelopes with pieces of paper neatly tucked inside, Tetzel held them up for all to see. This is God’s great gift to you, he said. For every one of these you buy, a sin will be remitted. And do you know what else I have been empowered to do? These indulgences are not only for the sins you have already committed, but they will also work for the sins you have not yet committed. “When a coin into the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!”
So full of wrath was I that I wanted to beat his face in, but restraining myself I challenged him, “You are not worth more than the rotting excrement in the Pope’s bowels.” Yes, that is exactly what I said, and do you know what that swine Tetzel responded, “And from whose bowels do you think these indulgences come?” Yes, they came from The Holy Father, Pope Leo X. While I had no right to expect perfection from the Pope; after all, he was human, but certainly I had a right not to expect such utter and complete corruption. Willfully misleading people: the Pope knew that indulgences were impotent against sin. But he was not about truth or salvation, but about money and power and fame, for Leo wanted to be remembered as the Pope who built St. Peter’s in Rome. He needed money for that endeavor and the sale of indulgences would bring in the needed income.
That day in the marketplace was a turning point, and the revolution that came to be called the Reformation exploded. In response to Tetzel, I tacked my 95 Theses to the door of the Palace Church in Wittenberg. These were points to be debated. This is what professors commonly did. They posted their ideas to be considered and then debated. And so, the debate began. I debated men far more subtle in intellect than Tetzel; Cajetan, for example, a cardinal and general of the Dominican Order, Rome’s highest representative in Germany. He was a formidable opponent, a man of great intellect, and it gave him immense pleasure as a Dominican to go against me, an Augustinian monk. There was a competitive spirit sometimes between the two orders, and he would have liked to have proven me wrong. “All you have to do, Martin,” he said, “is confess your errors, retract your words, and do not return like a dog to its vomit.” And what about your vomit?” I asked. “Will you always return to it?” “I give you six months, Martin”, he said, “to roast yourself.” It will take more time than that, I countered.
Well, two years later in Wittenberg the bull of excommunication from Pope Leo X finally arrived. I stood before a great roaring fire, whose flames devoured the books of canon law, and I burned the bull of excommunication before the cheers of a great crowd. So long ago it was, a long and hard journey for me as well as for the Church. History moves on, and there have been changes in the Church I never would or could have foreseen. I translated the Bible from Latin into German in 11 weeks, while hiding in the Wartburg Castle. I wanted people to read and understand God’s Word, because I thought everything was at stake---especially our eternal souls.
How quaint that must sound today when so many look to nothing more than this world for their ultimate satisfaction. Perhaps that is why so many churches are empty. People are too busy in the world to want anything beyond the world, and so they will settle for a small bucket of happiness. It isn’t too much they want; it is far too little. I wanted everything---especially a gracious God who in Jesus Christ would save. Save from what, for what. For me it was salvation from hell for eternal life in heaven. But times do change, and what I was looking for then is probably not the same for you now. So, I will leave you with two short questions: What, if anything, are you looking to be saved from and what are you looking to be saved for? The questions are before you. And only you can answer them for yourself.
October 19, 2022
Dear Friends,
Courage is one of the four cardinal virtues, the others being justice, prudence, and temperance. Cardinal comes from a Greek word meaning hinge, so these four virtues, it was taught by Plato, Aristotle and later the Church Fathers, are the ones upon which all the other virtues hinge. The Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love, and I have always thought it was a bit of an oversight on the part of Jesus that he did not refer more to the virtue of courage. After all, his followers would face great stress and tribulation, and certainly courage was needed. Perhaps Jesus thought that if you had faith, hope and love, you did not need any other virtue, but I remain doubtful of that opinion. Courage is certainly different from faith, and I imagine that courage and faith can feed each other. You can be faithful and yet require courage to stand up for your faith.
A few weeks ago, courage came into the news when the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe granted a Russian columnist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Vaclav Havel Prize for the defense of human rights in his own nation of Russia. Kara-Murza did not do this at a safe distance from Russia. He was not writing and speaking from the safe soil of Europe or the United States. No, he spoke and wrote from within Russia, which is why his wife, Evgenia, accepted the prestigious prize for him in Strasbourg, France on October 12 while he was sitting in a Russian prison awaiting trial on charges of distributing fake news. He could receive 20 years in prison.
The prize is named after the former President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, who became President after being imprisoned for this support of the liberalization of Czechoslovakia, when it was part of the Warsaw Pact, under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. Some of you may recall that in the summer of 1968 Soviet tanks arrived in Prague to crush the prospect of democracy in this Soviet satellite. Havel was one of those imprisoned, and he said, “If the main pillar of the system in living a life, then the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” So, just as Havel sat in prison, so too does Kara-Murza. Since February all of Russia’s independent news outlets have been silenced. There is also a near total ban on the internet and social media. Thousands of people---perhaps as many as 20,000--- have been jailed for speaking against the war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza is using the monetary part of his prize to help the families of Russians, who are imprisoned because of their willingness to stand against the lies, people, he said, “who could not remain silent in the face of the atrocity, even at the cost of personal freedom.”
The Washington Post published Kara-Murza’s acceptance speech, words he could not deliver in person. “I am sorry that I am not able to join you in person today, but I look forward to being back here in Strasbourg when a peaceful, democratic and Putin-free Russia returns to this Assembly and to this Council; and when we can finally start building that whole, free, and peaceful Europe we all want to see. Even today, in the darkest of hours, I firmly believe that time will come.
This is a man of courage and wisdom, and we should all be thankful that in a time, when so many people are willing to embrace lies, there are those who speak truth to power and are willing to pay with the loss of their freedom.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Courage is one of the four cardinal virtues, the others being justice, prudence, and temperance. Cardinal comes from a Greek word meaning hinge, so these four virtues, it was taught by Plato, Aristotle and later the Church Fathers, are the ones upon which all the other virtues hinge. The Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love, and I have always thought it was a bit of an oversight on the part of Jesus that he did not refer more to the virtue of courage. After all, his followers would face great stress and tribulation, and certainly courage was needed. Perhaps Jesus thought that if you had faith, hope and love, you did not need any other virtue, but I remain doubtful of that opinion. Courage is certainly different from faith, and I imagine that courage and faith can feed each other. You can be faithful and yet require courage to stand up for your faith.
A few weeks ago, courage came into the news when the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe granted a Russian columnist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Vaclav Havel Prize for the defense of human rights in his own nation of Russia. Kara-Murza did not do this at a safe distance from Russia. He was not writing and speaking from the safe soil of Europe or the United States. No, he spoke and wrote from within Russia, which is why his wife, Evgenia, accepted the prestigious prize for him in Strasbourg, France on October 12 while he was sitting in a Russian prison awaiting trial on charges of distributing fake news. He could receive 20 years in prison.
The prize is named after the former President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, who became President after being imprisoned for this support of the liberalization of Czechoslovakia, when it was part of the Warsaw Pact, under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. Some of you may recall that in the summer of 1968 Soviet tanks arrived in Prague to crush the prospect of democracy in this Soviet satellite. Havel was one of those imprisoned, and he said, “If the main pillar of the system in living a life, then the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” So, just as Havel sat in prison, so too does Kara-Murza. Since February all of Russia’s independent news outlets have been silenced. There is also a near total ban on the internet and social media. Thousands of people---perhaps as many as 20,000--- have been jailed for speaking against the war in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza is using the monetary part of his prize to help the families of Russians, who are imprisoned because of their willingness to stand against the lies, people, he said, “who could not remain silent in the face of the atrocity, even at the cost of personal freedom.”
The Washington Post published Kara-Murza’s acceptance speech, words he could not deliver in person. “I am sorry that I am not able to join you in person today, but I look forward to being back here in Strasbourg when a peaceful, democratic and Putin-free Russia returns to this Assembly and to this Council; and when we can finally start building that whole, free, and peaceful Europe we all want to see. Even today, in the darkest of hours, I firmly believe that time will come.
This is a man of courage and wisdom, and we should all be thankful that in a time, when so many people are willing to embrace lies, there are those who speak truth to power and are willing to pay with the loss of their freedom.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Hanging on for a Blessing
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 16, 2022
Genesis 32: 22-31
One of my dearest friends, Julie, died a few weeks ago of a cancer that took her down more quickly than anyone had predicted. Though there is much in our text from Genesis that does not fit Julie’s personality, she was someone who managed to use her wounds as a blessing. Julie suffered from a genetic condition called neurofibromatosis. One of five children, she and an older brother shared the condition, which left them legally blind. Around the age of five or six, brown discolorations began to appear on Julie’s skin, and then around 13 these non cancerous fibrous growths began to pop out all over her body. We all know how cruel adolescents can be, and she was mocked and bullied. She could have withdrawn into herself, pulling away to remain unnoticed. But this is not what she did. She was out there in the world, caring, compassionate without any display of self-pity or bitterness. When I say she was one of the finest people I have ever known I am not exaggerating.
Wounds and blessings: they come in such different forms, and sometimes it is that the wounds we carry become the occasion for later blessings. Consider Jacob, someone many of us might not like, though we probably must begrudgingly admit, there is much to admire about him. He was incredibly smart and very clever. He had stolen with his mother’s help the blessing that by right belonged to his older brother, Esau, and in today’s story we see him locked in a deadly struggle as he hangs on for dear life: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Jacob not only received his blessing, but it came with a wound and a name change, Israel, which means one who has striven or strives with God.
So, Jacob was a very clever cheat and liar. Not only had he stolen the blessing that should have gone to his older brother, but also earlier in the story, he had managed to manipulate his brother out of his birthright. Esau was a man of the moment, and he was so hungry that when he saw the delicious meal that Jacob was cooking, he gave away his birthright for a delicious meal. As the story progresses, Jacob would learn what it feels like to be tricked, when his uncle and later father-in-law, Laban, tricked Jacob into first marrying his older daughter, Leah, rather than the younger one, Rachel, whom Jacob loved. Eventually, after another seven years of hard work, he would marry Rachel, and then he would return home, though he would not or could not remain there. Maybe it is true that none of us can really go home again as Thomas Wolfe wrote in his famous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
Jacob’s story is filled with struggle, and if you prefer to think that faith in God should be an easy or pleasant experience, think again, because this story shows us that sometimes the blessing comes through incredible strain and tenacity, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Now, it is important to remember that Jacob is returning after 14 long years of working for Laban, his uncle and his father in law. He is, I think, very fearful, because he is about to meet his brother, who is still rumored to be full of furious rage. And is it not possible that Jacob’s conscience is bothering him? I mean he is older and hopefully wiser now, and he probably understands that his behavior was less than impeccable. And so, one of the common interpretations of the text is that Jacob is here wrestling with his conscience, trying to come to terms with his guilt.
But the story is about more than guilt; it is also about God, about who this God is and what this God promises and demands. The promise has been reiterated a number of times, beginning with his grandfather, Abraham, continuing with his father, Isaac, and now once again, it is promised to him---that this people will be blessed and will be a great nation, though there will later be stipulations---faithfulness to the covenant, which demands justice, mercy and loving kindness. Jacob becomes the symbol for this people, Israel, who will indeed struggle with God, this God who makes god-self known, even as God is also hidden and elusive. For this stranger, this man or angel, who struggles with Jacob, is elusive. Notice that Jacob does not know with whom he wrestles. He asks for the man’s name, but he never receives an answer. What he receives is a wounding in the hip, which has him limping away. He is changed, blessed, by the encounter, but he is also wounded by it. And that is often how it is in life. Blessings come, but they often come with wounds, because sometimes it happens that we only can see the blessing, because we have been wounded, which brings me back to my dear friend, Julie.
Julie was a friend in the deepest meaning of the word, someone who helps you to love and serve the good. Years ago, when I worked at First Church in Middletown, I would periodically give this man a voucher for gas—until I learned that he was driving to and from Hartford as a drug runner, so I next time he asked me, which happened to be in the month of January, I refused. He shocked me by admitting that he sometimes did run drugs. “I need money,” he said. “I’m not like you. I don’t live in a comfortable house, and I don’t have a good job, but whatever I do, I need gas for my car, because that is where I live. “Please,” he begged, ‘it’s winter, and I need gas to keep me warm,” but I turned him down. He swore at me and left. I was bothered by the encounter, and so I told Julie, who was a member of the church, about it. And she said in so many words, “While I understand why you did what you did, I think I would have given him the voucher. We stand before someone, who asks for help, and we can never see around the corner. We don’t really know where the full truth lies. We don’t know what will happen, so for me the question is always immediate need. Can I help? If you were uncomfortable with using the church’s money, you could have used your own. Two weeks later the man was found dead, frozen to death, in his car. And I have never forgotten what Julie said: “We can never see around the corner. The question is always immediate need. Can I help?”
When I went to Center Church in New Haven, where I had a very generous clergy allowance to help the poor, I would give out cash for the shoes, or the transportation, or the winter coat and gloves they said they needed to buy. I would give them the money with these words. I am going to believe what you are telling me. You deserve the dignity of being believed, but if you are lying, that’s on you, not on me.”
We all have wounds; we all have failures, and the question is: can we use those wounds and failures to grow beautiful souls as my beautiful friend Julie did? Jacob does not strike me as a beautiful soul, but it should not be lost on us that God used Jacob, a cheat and a liar, to make and bless a whole people, Israel, whose name means, one who strives and struggles with God.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 16, 2022
Genesis 32: 22-31
One of my dearest friends, Julie, died a few weeks ago of a cancer that took her down more quickly than anyone had predicted. Though there is much in our text from Genesis that does not fit Julie’s personality, she was someone who managed to use her wounds as a blessing. Julie suffered from a genetic condition called neurofibromatosis. One of five children, she and an older brother shared the condition, which left them legally blind. Around the age of five or six, brown discolorations began to appear on Julie’s skin, and then around 13 these non cancerous fibrous growths began to pop out all over her body. We all know how cruel adolescents can be, and she was mocked and bullied. She could have withdrawn into herself, pulling away to remain unnoticed. But this is not what she did. She was out there in the world, caring, compassionate without any display of self-pity or bitterness. When I say she was one of the finest people I have ever known I am not exaggerating.
Wounds and blessings: they come in such different forms, and sometimes it is that the wounds we carry become the occasion for later blessings. Consider Jacob, someone many of us might not like, though we probably must begrudgingly admit, there is much to admire about him. He was incredibly smart and very clever. He had stolen with his mother’s help the blessing that by right belonged to his older brother, Esau, and in today’s story we see him locked in a deadly struggle as he hangs on for dear life: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Jacob not only received his blessing, but it came with a wound and a name change, Israel, which means one who has striven or strives with God.
So, Jacob was a very clever cheat and liar. Not only had he stolen the blessing that should have gone to his older brother, but also earlier in the story, he had managed to manipulate his brother out of his birthright. Esau was a man of the moment, and he was so hungry that when he saw the delicious meal that Jacob was cooking, he gave away his birthright for a delicious meal. As the story progresses, Jacob would learn what it feels like to be tricked, when his uncle and later father-in-law, Laban, tricked Jacob into first marrying his older daughter, Leah, rather than the younger one, Rachel, whom Jacob loved. Eventually, after another seven years of hard work, he would marry Rachel, and then he would return home, though he would not or could not remain there. Maybe it is true that none of us can really go home again as Thomas Wolfe wrote in his famous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
Jacob’s story is filled with struggle, and if you prefer to think that faith in God should be an easy or pleasant experience, think again, because this story shows us that sometimes the blessing comes through incredible strain and tenacity, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Now, it is important to remember that Jacob is returning after 14 long years of working for Laban, his uncle and his father in law. He is, I think, very fearful, because he is about to meet his brother, who is still rumored to be full of furious rage. And is it not possible that Jacob’s conscience is bothering him? I mean he is older and hopefully wiser now, and he probably understands that his behavior was less than impeccable. And so, one of the common interpretations of the text is that Jacob is here wrestling with his conscience, trying to come to terms with his guilt.
But the story is about more than guilt; it is also about God, about who this God is and what this God promises and demands. The promise has been reiterated a number of times, beginning with his grandfather, Abraham, continuing with his father, Isaac, and now once again, it is promised to him---that this people will be blessed and will be a great nation, though there will later be stipulations---faithfulness to the covenant, which demands justice, mercy and loving kindness. Jacob becomes the symbol for this people, Israel, who will indeed struggle with God, this God who makes god-self known, even as God is also hidden and elusive. For this stranger, this man or angel, who struggles with Jacob, is elusive. Notice that Jacob does not know with whom he wrestles. He asks for the man’s name, but he never receives an answer. What he receives is a wounding in the hip, which has him limping away. He is changed, blessed, by the encounter, but he is also wounded by it. And that is often how it is in life. Blessings come, but they often come with wounds, because sometimes it happens that we only can see the blessing, because we have been wounded, which brings me back to my dear friend, Julie.
Julie was a friend in the deepest meaning of the word, someone who helps you to love and serve the good. Years ago, when I worked at First Church in Middletown, I would periodically give this man a voucher for gas—until I learned that he was driving to and from Hartford as a drug runner, so I next time he asked me, which happened to be in the month of January, I refused. He shocked me by admitting that he sometimes did run drugs. “I need money,” he said. “I’m not like you. I don’t live in a comfortable house, and I don’t have a good job, but whatever I do, I need gas for my car, because that is where I live. “Please,” he begged, ‘it’s winter, and I need gas to keep me warm,” but I turned him down. He swore at me and left. I was bothered by the encounter, and so I told Julie, who was a member of the church, about it. And she said in so many words, “While I understand why you did what you did, I think I would have given him the voucher. We stand before someone, who asks for help, and we can never see around the corner. We don’t really know where the full truth lies. We don’t know what will happen, so for me the question is always immediate need. Can I help? If you were uncomfortable with using the church’s money, you could have used your own. Two weeks later the man was found dead, frozen to death, in his car. And I have never forgotten what Julie said: “We can never see around the corner. The question is always immediate need. Can I help?”
When I went to Center Church in New Haven, where I had a very generous clergy allowance to help the poor, I would give out cash for the shoes, or the transportation, or the winter coat and gloves they said they needed to buy. I would give them the money with these words. I am going to believe what you are telling me. You deserve the dignity of being believed, but if you are lying, that’s on you, not on me.”
We all have wounds; we all have failures, and the question is: can we use those wounds and failures to grow beautiful souls as my beautiful friend Julie did? Jacob does not strike me as a beautiful soul, but it should not be lost on us that God used Jacob, a cheat and a liar, to make and bless a whole people, Israel, whose name means, one who strives and struggles with God.
October 13, 2022
Dear Friends,
Just last week I visited one of my brothers, who lives in New Jersey. Richie lived with my mother the last five years of her life, which made it possible for her to remain at home. She was three months shy of 103 when she died, and was quite physically capable and only began to use a walker a year before her death. And mentally she was pretty with it, though her short term memory had decreased significantly the last two years of her life. Anyway, my visit with my brother was delightful. We spent one day in Ocean City, where my father loved to ride his bike along the boardwalk. My mother rarely went with him, since she did not bike, and she hated the sun beating down on her, so my father would go to spend the day there by himself. That was one thing I learned from my parents about marriage: a couple does not have to do everything together. Indeed, my husband and I are quite independent, and each of us pursues activities without the other tagging along.
Beside our visit to Ocean City, Richie and I spent a lot of time talking and remembering. We talked about our respective childhoods. Richie reminded me how much my father and I argued. “You were always taking him on,” my brother said, “while the rest of us would just be quiet. He could be a bully, and not easy to argue with, but that never stopped you. And the funny thing is,” he continued, “you two would even argue when you agreed with each other!” That was true. Both of us loved to argue, and the arguments could be pretty fierce!
Richie recalled his train set, one of the most impressive I have ever seen. It had multiple levels with all kinds of engines and villages, scattered across this huge table in our basement. My father would often go down in the late evening after we were all in bed and play with the trains. Sometimes in our beds we could hear him make the whistle sound, which amused us greatly. And then there was the boat. My parents owned an outboard motorboat, 17 feet long with a 65 horsepower engine. While everyone else in the family loved the boat, I did not, and I was so relieved when I was old enough to stay home by myself to read or do whatever I liked. My brother asked me why I did not like to go boating with the family, and the only explanation I could give was that I liked being alone, something that did not happen very often in a family with four children and two parents.
We also talked about Christmas. My father in particular made a big deal about Christmas, and both my brother and I have wonderful memories of Christmas—including the time my father tried to repair the bare spots on our tree and drilled too many holes in the trunk so the whole tree collapsed. Though now that memory brings laughter, at the time it was not funny, since my father had a terrible temper of which we were all afraid! We did get a new tree, though no one would go with him to pick it out. He was too angry for any of us kids to want to go along.
As I was thinking about my conversations with my brother about growing up, the word nostalgia came to mind. I suppose you could say that some of the conversations we had were nostalgic in character. Now nostalgia to me is not a negative word or experience, but I had recently read an article about nostalgia, which taught me a few things. First of all, the word is composed of two Greek words, meaning “homecoming” and “pain.” It was a Swiss physician who first used the term in 1688, and he considered it a very serious disease of the mind, which could weaken the body. His case studies included the story of a young girl, who took a bad fall, and was sent away to a hospital for healing. Shortly after arriving she began to refuse food and would only say, “I want to go home.” For patients suffering from nostalgia, he recommended distraction and then induced vomiting and finally opening up a vein for bleeding. “If all that failed, then send the patient home,” he advised. “That usually took care of it!” he insisted!
For hundreds of years nostalgia continued to be understood as a serious mental illness or neurological disorder. While anyone could suffer from nostalgia, it was noted that it was particularly keen in displaced persons and even as late as 1938 it was referred to as “an immigrant psychosis.” Today psychologists and psychiatrists no longer consider nostalgia a mental disorder, but rather a psychological strategy for dealing with an uncertain present and future. When feelings of emptiness or loneliness threaten to overtake someone, such feelings can be dispelled by memories from a past that are remembered as full and meaningful.
It strikes me that some of the feelings that are aroused today, when people feel unnerved or perhaps threatened by the rapidity of change are an effort to self-soothe. They look back to what they remember as better times. It drove me crazy when my father would wax eloquently on “the good old days,” which really were not as good as he remembered. “Yes,” I would say, “like the days when Black people in the South could not vote and were sometimes lynched, a time when women could not get a mortgage on their own and were often forced to leave their jobs when they became noticeably pregnant.” Those were the so called good old days my father remembered. He would become angry with me for pointing this out, but sometimes the truth does make us angry. And perhaps nostalgia is one of the coping mechanisms that allows us to live in a world that is forever changing, reminding us that there is no clinging to the past--- except in memory. Jesus, it should be noted, almost never spoke of the past. He was always looking forward---to the coming of God’s realm.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Just last week I visited one of my brothers, who lives in New Jersey. Richie lived with my mother the last five years of her life, which made it possible for her to remain at home. She was three months shy of 103 when she died, and was quite physically capable and only began to use a walker a year before her death. And mentally she was pretty with it, though her short term memory had decreased significantly the last two years of her life. Anyway, my visit with my brother was delightful. We spent one day in Ocean City, where my father loved to ride his bike along the boardwalk. My mother rarely went with him, since she did not bike, and she hated the sun beating down on her, so my father would go to spend the day there by himself. That was one thing I learned from my parents about marriage: a couple does not have to do everything together. Indeed, my husband and I are quite independent, and each of us pursues activities without the other tagging along.
Beside our visit to Ocean City, Richie and I spent a lot of time talking and remembering. We talked about our respective childhoods. Richie reminded me how much my father and I argued. “You were always taking him on,” my brother said, “while the rest of us would just be quiet. He could be a bully, and not easy to argue with, but that never stopped you. And the funny thing is,” he continued, “you two would even argue when you agreed with each other!” That was true. Both of us loved to argue, and the arguments could be pretty fierce!
Richie recalled his train set, one of the most impressive I have ever seen. It had multiple levels with all kinds of engines and villages, scattered across this huge table in our basement. My father would often go down in the late evening after we were all in bed and play with the trains. Sometimes in our beds we could hear him make the whistle sound, which amused us greatly. And then there was the boat. My parents owned an outboard motorboat, 17 feet long with a 65 horsepower engine. While everyone else in the family loved the boat, I did not, and I was so relieved when I was old enough to stay home by myself to read or do whatever I liked. My brother asked me why I did not like to go boating with the family, and the only explanation I could give was that I liked being alone, something that did not happen very often in a family with four children and two parents.
We also talked about Christmas. My father in particular made a big deal about Christmas, and both my brother and I have wonderful memories of Christmas—including the time my father tried to repair the bare spots on our tree and drilled too many holes in the trunk so the whole tree collapsed. Though now that memory brings laughter, at the time it was not funny, since my father had a terrible temper of which we were all afraid! We did get a new tree, though no one would go with him to pick it out. He was too angry for any of us kids to want to go along.
As I was thinking about my conversations with my brother about growing up, the word nostalgia came to mind. I suppose you could say that some of the conversations we had were nostalgic in character. Now nostalgia to me is not a negative word or experience, but I had recently read an article about nostalgia, which taught me a few things. First of all, the word is composed of two Greek words, meaning “homecoming” and “pain.” It was a Swiss physician who first used the term in 1688, and he considered it a very serious disease of the mind, which could weaken the body. His case studies included the story of a young girl, who took a bad fall, and was sent away to a hospital for healing. Shortly after arriving she began to refuse food and would only say, “I want to go home.” For patients suffering from nostalgia, he recommended distraction and then induced vomiting and finally opening up a vein for bleeding. “If all that failed, then send the patient home,” he advised. “That usually took care of it!” he insisted!
For hundreds of years nostalgia continued to be understood as a serious mental illness or neurological disorder. While anyone could suffer from nostalgia, it was noted that it was particularly keen in displaced persons and even as late as 1938 it was referred to as “an immigrant psychosis.” Today psychologists and psychiatrists no longer consider nostalgia a mental disorder, but rather a psychological strategy for dealing with an uncertain present and future. When feelings of emptiness or loneliness threaten to overtake someone, such feelings can be dispelled by memories from a past that are remembered as full and meaningful.
It strikes me that some of the feelings that are aroused today, when people feel unnerved or perhaps threatened by the rapidity of change are an effort to self-soothe. They look back to what they remember as better times. It drove me crazy when my father would wax eloquently on “the good old days,” which really were not as good as he remembered. “Yes,” I would say, “like the days when Black people in the South could not vote and were sometimes lynched, a time when women could not get a mortgage on their own and were often forced to leave their jobs when they became noticeably pregnant.” Those were the so called good old days my father remembered. He would become angry with me for pointing this out, but sometimes the truth does make us angry. And perhaps nostalgia is one of the coping mechanisms that allows us to live in a world that is forever changing, reminding us that there is no clinging to the past--- except in memory. Jesus, it should be noted, almost never spoke of the past. He was always looking forward---to the coming of God’s realm.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Suffer For the Gospel
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 9, 2022
2 Timothy 1: 1-14
Can you imagine what it would be like if when people showed interest in joining the church, we said to them, “How wonderful; join us in suffering for the Gospel.” The conventional wisdom is that such an approach would lead people to run in the opposite direction, because no one wants to suffer or make huge sacrifices. And yet, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England at the start of World War Ii, he told the English people: “I have only blood, sweat and tears to offer you.” And when Paul (or more likely someone using his name) was giving instruction to the young convert, Timothy, Paul told him, “Join with me in suffering for the Gospel.” And Timothy did.
That invitation flies in the face of what we think we know and understand about people and institutions. Make it easy, we say, so people will join us. And yet research indicates that churches and denominations which demand something substantial of their members---regular attendance at worship, stewardship of money and time, including bible study and mission----these churches are showing growth in a way that most main line churches only dream of. In an effort to be welcoming and inclusive, we unwittingly send the message: come and give what you want, when you want, and of course, believe and think what you want.
Now on one level there is something appropriate with such an approach, because we recognize how murky and ambiguous is the spiritual quest. We confess the partial nature of our knowledge about God and Christ, and so in some instances (at least theologically) we are understandably reticent about telling people what to think or what to do. But surely there must be a way to be inclusive of difference and partial knowing without sacrificing some measure of truth and commitment. If so many mainline churches (like ours) ask nothing, perhaps that is why they get nothing.
It is one of the ironies of the church that in periods of intense persecution the church often flourished, such as in the early centuries, following Jesus’ death, when being a Christian could get you thrown to the lions, or during the Reformation, when being a Protestant could land you tied to a stake and burned. Consider a modern example: Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister in the days of Hitler, was a strong nationalist, yet an anti-Nazi. He was arrested--- even before the war began, and when the news spread like wildfire through his church, on Sunday morning the church was packed---all these Christians gathering to pray for their minister. And each Wednesday night there was a special prayer gathering. Well, the Gestapo got word of it, and they started sending soldiers to stand at the back of the church while holding their rifles in an intimidating way. Surely, this will put a crimp in their style was their feeling. But no, each Wednesday the crowds in the church grew and grew and the more soldiers they sent, the more people showed up. Niemoller was imprisoned for nearly seven years, and during his imprisonment every Wednesday evening the church gathered to pray. That congregation knew what they were about, and they understood they faced the possibility of arrest. But they were willing to take the risk for the sake of the gospel and their pastor.
We all realize that to be human is to suffer. We have accidents, illness, and we age, which brings its own set of challenges. And then we suffer the consequences of poor choices about money, possessions, drugs, alcohol, or relationships. This is the price of our humanity; our bodies are mortal, our knowledge and self understanding are limited and imperfect, and so we suffer. But in this Letter to Timothy the writer is referring to a distinctive kind of suffering---suffering for the gospel and on account of the gospel. When this letter was written, being a Christian was a capital offense, and the Apostle Paul was beheaded in Rome for his faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another Lutheran minister and theologian I ha ve mentioned many times, paid with this life for his resistance to the Nazis, and Martin Niemoller suffered seven years in prison and concentration camps.
When I was in clinical training at a state mental hospital on Long Island, I became friendly with Father Ralph, a Roman Catholic priest. Charming as well as erudite, he loved English Renaissance poetry, quoting John Donne from memory. He ended up working on the backwards in a state mental hospital, because he had angered his superiors years before by performing weddings for divorced Catholicsand celebrating the sacrament of Holy Communion with his Methodist and Episcopal colleagues. Father Ralph was told he was full of pride and had to learn humble obedience. So, for more than 20 years he was learning as a chaplain at the state mental hospital. But I don’t think he learned as much as he was supposed to, because he would not only invite me to celebrate the sacrament with him, but also he would openly participate in the Protestant services, accepting the bread and cup as the gifts of God for the whole people of God. Most of the time the hierarchy simply ignored him, but every once in a while someone would pay him a stern visit, which would leave him sad, but not more obedient.
Well, one afternoon in early December, I was three weeks away from giving birth to Caitlin, so Father Ralph asked me to help him with Mass. “It’s Advent,” he said, when we are waiting for a birth, and you are about to give birth, so how appropriate for you to take the lead in celebrating communion.” And so there we were in a circle, and since I was leading, I had bread, rather than those flat, tasteless communion wafers. “This is my body, broken for you,” I said as I tore the bread apart. All these poor emotionally afflicted people were standing around in a circle, waiting to receive, and Lily, who would never take communion because she thought she was unworthy, took a piece of the bread. Father Ralph and I both concluded that the breaking apart of the bread symbolized her own broken life, and so she took and ate. After that Lily would only take communion from a loaf of bread. When the service was over, I noticed a man, standing over in the corner. I did not know him, but it was obvious Father Ralph did. In two weeks Father Ralph was gone, removed from the hospital for allowing me to assist him at Mass.
We live in a culture, where we rarely see people suffer for their religious convictions, and when we do, it does leave a deep impression. Now the willingness to suffer for a belief does not make the belief right or true. Terrorists are willing to suffer for their convictions, and even Lilly suffered for a belief most people would have said was mistaken. We do not have to be whole to take the sacrament. Nonetheless, the text from Timothy does ask us to ponder how great a price are we willing to pay for our religious convictions? If there is nothing at all demanded, perhaps that is one of the reasons we see such a steep decline in mainline religion’s numbers and influence. People can shrug their shoulders and say, “It doesn’t really make any difference.”
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 9, 2022
2 Timothy 1: 1-14
Can you imagine what it would be like if when people showed interest in joining the church, we said to them, “How wonderful; join us in suffering for the Gospel.” The conventional wisdom is that such an approach would lead people to run in the opposite direction, because no one wants to suffer or make huge sacrifices. And yet, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England at the start of World War Ii, he told the English people: “I have only blood, sweat and tears to offer you.” And when Paul (or more likely someone using his name) was giving instruction to the young convert, Timothy, Paul told him, “Join with me in suffering for the Gospel.” And Timothy did.
That invitation flies in the face of what we think we know and understand about people and institutions. Make it easy, we say, so people will join us. And yet research indicates that churches and denominations which demand something substantial of their members---regular attendance at worship, stewardship of money and time, including bible study and mission----these churches are showing growth in a way that most main line churches only dream of. In an effort to be welcoming and inclusive, we unwittingly send the message: come and give what you want, when you want, and of course, believe and think what you want.
Now on one level there is something appropriate with such an approach, because we recognize how murky and ambiguous is the spiritual quest. We confess the partial nature of our knowledge about God and Christ, and so in some instances (at least theologically) we are understandably reticent about telling people what to think or what to do. But surely there must be a way to be inclusive of difference and partial knowing without sacrificing some measure of truth and commitment. If so many mainline churches (like ours) ask nothing, perhaps that is why they get nothing.
It is one of the ironies of the church that in periods of intense persecution the church often flourished, such as in the early centuries, following Jesus’ death, when being a Christian could get you thrown to the lions, or during the Reformation, when being a Protestant could land you tied to a stake and burned. Consider a modern example: Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister in the days of Hitler, was a strong nationalist, yet an anti-Nazi. He was arrested--- even before the war began, and when the news spread like wildfire through his church, on Sunday morning the church was packed---all these Christians gathering to pray for their minister. And each Wednesday night there was a special prayer gathering. Well, the Gestapo got word of it, and they started sending soldiers to stand at the back of the church while holding their rifles in an intimidating way. Surely, this will put a crimp in their style was their feeling. But no, each Wednesday the crowds in the church grew and grew and the more soldiers they sent, the more people showed up. Niemoller was imprisoned for nearly seven years, and during his imprisonment every Wednesday evening the church gathered to pray. That congregation knew what they were about, and they understood they faced the possibility of arrest. But they were willing to take the risk for the sake of the gospel and their pastor.
We all realize that to be human is to suffer. We have accidents, illness, and we age, which brings its own set of challenges. And then we suffer the consequences of poor choices about money, possessions, drugs, alcohol, or relationships. This is the price of our humanity; our bodies are mortal, our knowledge and self understanding are limited and imperfect, and so we suffer. But in this Letter to Timothy the writer is referring to a distinctive kind of suffering---suffering for the gospel and on account of the gospel. When this letter was written, being a Christian was a capital offense, and the Apostle Paul was beheaded in Rome for his faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another Lutheran minister and theologian I ha ve mentioned many times, paid with this life for his resistance to the Nazis, and Martin Niemoller suffered seven years in prison and concentration camps.
When I was in clinical training at a state mental hospital on Long Island, I became friendly with Father Ralph, a Roman Catholic priest. Charming as well as erudite, he loved English Renaissance poetry, quoting John Donne from memory. He ended up working on the backwards in a state mental hospital, because he had angered his superiors years before by performing weddings for divorced Catholicsand celebrating the sacrament of Holy Communion with his Methodist and Episcopal colleagues. Father Ralph was told he was full of pride and had to learn humble obedience. So, for more than 20 years he was learning as a chaplain at the state mental hospital. But I don’t think he learned as much as he was supposed to, because he would not only invite me to celebrate the sacrament with him, but also he would openly participate in the Protestant services, accepting the bread and cup as the gifts of God for the whole people of God. Most of the time the hierarchy simply ignored him, but every once in a while someone would pay him a stern visit, which would leave him sad, but not more obedient.
Well, one afternoon in early December, I was three weeks away from giving birth to Caitlin, so Father Ralph asked me to help him with Mass. “It’s Advent,” he said, when we are waiting for a birth, and you are about to give birth, so how appropriate for you to take the lead in celebrating communion.” And so there we were in a circle, and since I was leading, I had bread, rather than those flat, tasteless communion wafers. “This is my body, broken for you,” I said as I tore the bread apart. All these poor emotionally afflicted people were standing around in a circle, waiting to receive, and Lily, who would never take communion because she thought she was unworthy, took a piece of the bread. Father Ralph and I both concluded that the breaking apart of the bread symbolized her own broken life, and so she took and ate. After that Lily would only take communion from a loaf of bread. When the service was over, I noticed a man, standing over in the corner. I did not know him, but it was obvious Father Ralph did. In two weeks Father Ralph was gone, removed from the hospital for allowing me to assist him at Mass.
We live in a culture, where we rarely see people suffer for their religious convictions, and when we do, it does leave a deep impression. Now the willingness to suffer for a belief does not make the belief right or true. Terrorists are willing to suffer for their convictions, and even Lilly suffered for a belief most people would have said was mistaken. We do not have to be whole to take the sacrament. Nonetheless, the text from Timothy does ask us to ponder how great a price are we willing to pay for our religious convictions? If there is nothing at all demanded, perhaps that is one of the reasons we see such a steep decline in mainline religion’s numbers and influence. People can shrug their shoulders and say, “It doesn’t really make any difference.”
DO YOUR DUTY
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 2, 2022
Luke 17: 5-10
When the Covid pandemic was raging---before any vaccines were available---I had a conversation with a college friend about duty. Alex is a corporate lawyer in Chicago, and his one child, a daughter, is a doctor, an internist. Well, his daughter was complaining to him about how hard her work was, especially dealing with the anxiety about becoming sick. These were, after all, the days when not so much was known about the disease, and it was unclear to everyone how long it would take to get vaccines on the market and how effective they would be. Alex was trying to be sympathetic, but he told me her whining went on way too long, so he finally blurted out “Oh, stop your whining. You signed up for this. You’re a doctor. It is your duty to treat your patients. You don’t deserve a medal for doing your duty.”
I told Alex, “I think you’re right.” And we both agreed that part of the problem in our society today is that we hardly ever hear the word duty. People are wedded to the idea that it is all about what they want to do, not what is commanded or even expected. Duty has in so many ways become an obsolete word. Over the years Alex and I have continued our conversations about duty. While he is not a Christian, he was a classics major in college, and he knows all about the Greek and Roman view of duty. While we both agree we deserve no great credit for doing our duty, nonetheless there is something beyond duty that is heroic. So, I asked him, “Do you think the firefighters who ascended the stairs of the World Trade Center were simply doing their duty, or were they heroic?” Remember, how people were cheering them as they climbed the stairs, while the workers in the Towers were descending. “Well,” he said, “though it was their duty to fight fires and try to save people, The World Trade Center was particularly harrowing, so he gave them a heroes’ award. They had a duty, and they faced it with great courage, which makes them heroes.
Duty: while that word is not a common one in our social lexicon, it is precisely what our lesson from Luke is about. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem---in the very next chapter he will throw the money changers out of the temple, and he has been trying to teach his disciples what is required of them, commanded of them as his followers. They seem to believe that it is all a matter of faith. If only they had more faith, they would be able to do what is expected. But Jesus told them, even a little faith is enough, and he implies that they already have enough, because they have been following him. It isn’t more faith they need; it is action that is required, the response to faith that is faithfulness. And then he tells this story about a slave, who comes in from his work and is expected to prepare a meal for his master. And Jesus insists that the slave is doing his duty and that is exactly what is expected of him. And his disciples should do the same---they should see themselves as worthless slaves, fulfilling their duty.
Now there were many times Jesus functioned as a social critic of his society, rendering all kinds of severe judgments particularly about the way the economy was organized. But he never took on slavery; he never once hinted that the institution of slavery was wrong, and in today’s reading, he uses slavery as the metaphor for what is expected of his disciples. They are to fulfill their duty, do what they are commanded to do as the slaves to God they are.
Twice in my ministry, I can recall conversations where the word duty intruded. One conversation was with a 93 year old woman, Ruth, to whom I became very close. After I had been in the church for 10 years, she told me, “You have been here long enough so I can trust you. And now I will tell you the truth.” And what she told me was how unhappy her marriage of 70 years had been. When her husband stood up and announced their wedding anniversary, and the entire congregation stood up and clapped, she told me it was the saddest day of her life.
What a sham my marriage is, she lamented. All those years, he verbally abused me and put me down, but I came from the right kind of people, so I was good for his business. And though I was unhappy, I felt it was my duty to preserve and preserve the home and marriage. We had a lovely home, two lovely children, and we were both active members in the community, on all the right boards and volunteer associations. I did my duty, and it is only now in my very old age that I realize I surrendered my personal happiness for the fulfillment of duty. I was raised in an era that did not teach me about duty to myself. If I had walked out on my marriage, no one would have understood---not my parents, not even my friends. And who knows if I ever would have found my footing. My husband would have fought me to the bitter end. How would I have kept my kids and even supported them? So, on my tombstone I want you to see that it is written: She did her duty. Indeed, she did, though it did not bring her the personal happiness she longed for.
Let’s be honest. It is not always easy to figure out what our duty is and where it lies and how much is owed to others and how much to self and how much to God. I knew another woman in another church, who was born in 1916. Martha was a doctor, and when she was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, she was one of three females. Her father, a lawyer, told her when she was 12 that she had the gifts of head and heart, and since they were God given gifts, she had a duty to use them. She became a very well known pediatrician, and she used both her head and her heart. Toward the end of her life, she told me that although she felt she had found her path and fulfilled her duty, which brought her great joy and a depth of meaning, she also experienced the absence of marriage and children. I never had much time to pursue relationships, and the male doctors I met were always so competitive with me, so it never worked out. I am grateful for my life and my work, but it did come at a price. And that is how I think it had to be.
The fulfillment of duty does not automatically mean that all ambiguity is overcome, all tensions resolved, and all desires fulfilled. In choosing some duties, other possibilities are closed off. We cannot fulfill everything that needs doing---even Jesus had his limits---but as Christians we live with the hope that in doing what we understand to be our duty, we fulfill something of what God would have us do.
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
October 2, 2022
Luke 17: 5-10
When the Covid pandemic was raging---before any vaccines were available---I had a conversation with a college friend about duty. Alex is a corporate lawyer in Chicago, and his one child, a daughter, is a doctor, an internist. Well, his daughter was complaining to him about how hard her work was, especially dealing with the anxiety about becoming sick. These were, after all, the days when not so much was known about the disease, and it was unclear to everyone how long it would take to get vaccines on the market and how effective they would be. Alex was trying to be sympathetic, but he told me her whining went on way too long, so he finally blurted out “Oh, stop your whining. You signed up for this. You’re a doctor. It is your duty to treat your patients. You don’t deserve a medal for doing your duty.”
I told Alex, “I think you’re right.” And we both agreed that part of the problem in our society today is that we hardly ever hear the word duty. People are wedded to the idea that it is all about what they want to do, not what is commanded or even expected. Duty has in so many ways become an obsolete word. Over the years Alex and I have continued our conversations about duty. While he is not a Christian, he was a classics major in college, and he knows all about the Greek and Roman view of duty. While we both agree we deserve no great credit for doing our duty, nonetheless there is something beyond duty that is heroic. So, I asked him, “Do you think the firefighters who ascended the stairs of the World Trade Center were simply doing their duty, or were they heroic?” Remember, how people were cheering them as they climbed the stairs, while the workers in the Towers were descending. “Well,” he said, “though it was their duty to fight fires and try to save people, The World Trade Center was particularly harrowing, so he gave them a heroes’ award. They had a duty, and they faced it with great courage, which makes them heroes.
Duty: while that word is not a common one in our social lexicon, it is precisely what our lesson from Luke is about. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem---in the very next chapter he will throw the money changers out of the temple, and he has been trying to teach his disciples what is required of them, commanded of them as his followers. They seem to believe that it is all a matter of faith. If only they had more faith, they would be able to do what is expected. But Jesus told them, even a little faith is enough, and he implies that they already have enough, because they have been following him. It isn’t more faith they need; it is action that is required, the response to faith that is faithfulness. And then he tells this story about a slave, who comes in from his work and is expected to prepare a meal for his master. And Jesus insists that the slave is doing his duty and that is exactly what is expected of him. And his disciples should do the same---they should see themselves as worthless slaves, fulfilling their duty.
Now there were many times Jesus functioned as a social critic of his society, rendering all kinds of severe judgments particularly about the way the economy was organized. But he never took on slavery; he never once hinted that the institution of slavery was wrong, and in today’s reading, he uses slavery as the metaphor for what is expected of his disciples. They are to fulfill their duty, do what they are commanded to do as the slaves to God they are.
Twice in my ministry, I can recall conversations where the word duty intruded. One conversation was with a 93 year old woman, Ruth, to whom I became very close. After I had been in the church for 10 years, she told me, “You have been here long enough so I can trust you. And now I will tell you the truth.” And what she told me was how unhappy her marriage of 70 years had been. When her husband stood up and announced their wedding anniversary, and the entire congregation stood up and clapped, she told me it was the saddest day of her life.
What a sham my marriage is, she lamented. All those years, he verbally abused me and put me down, but I came from the right kind of people, so I was good for his business. And though I was unhappy, I felt it was my duty to preserve and preserve the home and marriage. We had a lovely home, two lovely children, and we were both active members in the community, on all the right boards and volunteer associations. I did my duty, and it is only now in my very old age that I realize I surrendered my personal happiness for the fulfillment of duty. I was raised in an era that did not teach me about duty to myself. If I had walked out on my marriage, no one would have understood---not my parents, not even my friends. And who knows if I ever would have found my footing. My husband would have fought me to the bitter end. How would I have kept my kids and even supported them? So, on my tombstone I want you to see that it is written: She did her duty. Indeed, she did, though it did not bring her the personal happiness she longed for.
Let’s be honest. It is not always easy to figure out what our duty is and where it lies and how much is owed to others and how much to self and how much to God. I knew another woman in another church, who was born in 1916. Martha was a doctor, and when she was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, she was one of three females. Her father, a lawyer, told her when she was 12 that she had the gifts of head and heart, and since they were God given gifts, she had a duty to use them. She became a very well known pediatrician, and she used both her head and her heart. Toward the end of her life, she told me that although she felt she had found her path and fulfilled her duty, which brought her great joy and a depth of meaning, she also experienced the absence of marriage and children. I never had much time to pursue relationships, and the male doctors I met were always so competitive with me, so it never worked out. I am grateful for my life and my work, but it did come at a price. And that is how I think it had to be.
The fulfillment of duty does not automatically mean that all ambiguity is overcome, all tensions resolved, and all desires fulfilled. In choosing some duties, other possibilities are closed off. We cannot fulfill everything that needs doing---even Jesus had his limits---but as Christians we live with the hope that in doing what we understand to be our duty, we fulfill something of what God would have us do.
October 4, 2022
Dear Friends,
I read somewhere in the last month or so that Putin hated the city of Odesa. Oh, for him it is the jewel in the crown because of its important location as a port city, but he hates its multiculturalism, its openness to a variety of lifestyles and its acceptance of different ideas and its willingness to discuss them. All that is exactly the opposite of what Putin considers desirable in a city or a culture.
Odesa was founded by Catherine the Great in 1794, built over a Greek settlement. Her desire was for Odesa to become Russia’s gateway city to Mediterranean Europe as well as to Asia, the same way that St. Petersburg had become a gateway to northern Europe. Catherine declared Odesa an “open city,” a unique designation which permitted a free exchange of foreign goods, free trade with the Middle East as well as Europe, a blossoming of the arts, a welcoming of foreigners and the exciting exchange of ideas. As you can imagine such an image is NOT what Putin would have in mind for a Russian city made in his own image of a closed society. But now there is another reason for Odesa to be hated by Putin: It has become a city of laughter. Stand-up comedians have made their mark, making fun of the Russians, who are trying to invade and make Odesa their own. “I really feel sorry for them,” one comedian intoned. “Can you imagine what it would be like for the Russian soldiers to encounter our unruly urbanization and questionable political environment? They are simply not used to such things!” And the crowd roared in agreement.
Odesa has apparently always had its humor. After the Ottomans were defeated, Odessa was heavily influenced by Jewish humor and even the oppressive days of Soviet control issued in a kind of dark humor. “Humor helps people to pull together in difficult situations,” one comedian said, and “laughter simply lifts the human spirit as nothing else can.” Comedians, however, are not simply stuck on Russia and war. They make fun of dating during the pandemic, social media’s omnipresence in their lives and people’s inability to live without their phones. The humor works because it is the stuff of life that people recognize as their actual lives. It’s not farfetched and outside the ordinary realm of everyday experience.
There is a quote my father used to love. I heard him repeat it all throughout my growing up: “Life is a tragedy to those who feel but a comedy to those who think.” Tragedy in this sense means downward movement, while comedy moves upward, which is why Christianity is finally comedy. The Christian story ends with the victory of the risen Christ; the movement is upward. Comedy then does not have to be side splitting laughter, but there is no doubt that laughter does help and heal. People can and do laugh alone, but there is something community building in laughing together. And when wars are fought, the enemy always tries to break apart community, the bonds of trust and hope and even humor that hold people together.
One of the comedians in Odesa has an office filled with all sorts of paraphernalia: clowns, circus posters, hats, and other costumes and finally a foot high metal statue of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s brilliant 1940 film, “The Great Dictator,” is a classic example of cutting the dictator down to size with humor. Situations may change, but still there are some universal experiences that endure, and humor is one of them. Helping people laugh in dark times is what motivates the comedians of Odesa to do their work, even as war is on their doorstep. Humor is a form of power, and the people of Odesa plan to use it to its fullest.
I have never found Jesus to be particularly humorous. While he was clever and unafraid to show up those in power and authority, I cannot remember a time, when something Jesus did or said something that made me laugh. And yet I cannot help but think that he would have no objections to laughter. Introvert that he apparently was, he still enjoyed social gatherings with food and drink. And we might use our imagination here: at those same gatherings can we not also imagine laughter? Laughter, by the way, is what Dante heard as he ascended the final steps on his climb to heaven. And if heaven has laughter, then we on earth should also laugh as the angels do.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I read somewhere in the last month or so that Putin hated the city of Odesa. Oh, for him it is the jewel in the crown because of its important location as a port city, but he hates its multiculturalism, its openness to a variety of lifestyles and its acceptance of different ideas and its willingness to discuss them. All that is exactly the opposite of what Putin considers desirable in a city or a culture.
Odesa was founded by Catherine the Great in 1794, built over a Greek settlement. Her desire was for Odesa to become Russia’s gateway city to Mediterranean Europe as well as to Asia, the same way that St. Petersburg had become a gateway to northern Europe. Catherine declared Odesa an “open city,” a unique designation which permitted a free exchange of foreign goods, free trade with the Middle East as well as Europe, a blossoming of the arts, a welcoming of foreigners and the exciting exchange of ideas. As you can imagine such an image is NOT what Putin would have in mind for a Russian city made in his own image of a closed society. But now there is another reason for Odesa to be hated by Putin: It has become a city of laughter. Stand-up comedians have made their mark, making fun of the Russians, who are trying to invade and make Odesa their own. “I really feel sorry for them,” one comedian intoned. “Can you imagine what it would be like for the Russian soldiers to encounter our unruly urbanization and questionable political environment? They are simply not used to such things!” And the crowd roared in agreement.
Odesa has apparently always had its humor. After the Ottomans were defeated, Odessa was heavily influenced by Jewish humor and even the oppressive days of Soviet control issued in a kind of dark humor. “Humor helps people to pull together in difficult situations,” one comedian said, and “laughter simply lifts the human spirit as nothing else can.” Comedians, however, are not simply stuck on Russia and war. They make fun of dating during the pandemic, social media’s omnipresence in their lives and people’s inability to live without their phones. The humor works because it is the stuff of life that people recognize as their actual lives. It’s not farfetched and outside the ordinary realm of everyday experience.
There is a quote my father used to love. I heard him repeat it all throughout my growing up: “Life is a tragedy to those who feel but a comedy to those who think.” Tragedy in this sense means downward movement, while comedy moves upward, which is why Christianity is finally comedy. The Christian story ends with the victory of the risen Christ; the movement is upward. Comedy then does not have to be side splitting laughter, but there is no doubt that laughter does help and heal. People can and do laugh alone, but there is something community building in laughing together. And when wars are fought, the enemy always tries to break apart community, the bonds of trust and hope and even humor that hold people together.
One of the comedians in Odesa has an office filled with all sorts of paraphernalia: clowns, circus posters, hats, and other costumes and finally a foot high metal statue of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s brilliant 1940 film, “The Great Dictator,” is a classic example of cutting the dictator down to size with humor. Situations may change, but still there are some universal experiences that endure, and humor is one of them. Helping people laugh in dark times is what motivates the comedians of Odesa to do their work, even as war is on their doorstep. Humor is a form of power, and the people of Odesa plan to use it to its fullest.
I have never found Jesus to be particularly humorous. While he was clever and unafraid to show up those in power and authority, I cannot remember a time, when something Jesus did or said something that made me laugh. And yet I cannot help but think that he would have no objections to laughter. Introvert that he apparently was, he still enjoyed social gatherings with food and drink. And we might use our imagination here: at those same gatherings can we not also imagine laughter? Laughter, by the way, is what Dante heard as he ascended the final steps on his climb to heaven. And if heaven has laughter, then we on earth should also laugh as the angels do.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
September 29, 2022
Dear Friends,
You know how we all complain that the news media loves to concentrate on bad news? We find ourselves more than a little annoyed because every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to hear the latest news, there is always some catastrophe greeting our eyes and ears. But the Christian Science Monitor, which is a weekly magazine, always has a section called, Points of Progress, and it is filled with good news. And the Washington Post has a section called Inspired Life, which does just that---It inspires!
Last week in the Post I read about five year old Alex Hurdakis, afflicted with a fatal brain tumor, which was diagnosed when he was one. Recently, his parents were told there was nothing more medicine could do. All treatment had run out, and Alex would soon die. The news, of course, was beyond devastating, but little Alex still had some things he wanted to do and see. He loved Halloween and he wanted to see monsters. And so, a friend of the family came up with the idea of bringing Halloween to Alex. Through social media she made it known that Alex would most likely not live to see Halloween, and so she wanted the community to give Alex the gift of Halloween. And so, they did. They erected a haunted house in his yard and on September 14, 1000 people showed up in a parade of monsters, ghosts, goblins, and witches. Someone offered her services as a face painter, so people could have their face painted to look like a witch or a goblin or some other monster. All kinds of people showed up that day, including parents who had lost their own children to cancer and then there were those who were themselves going through chemotherapy and radiation.
It was far more than the family ever expected. Little Alex was thrilled and so was his two year year old sister and eight year old brother. His parents could not believe what this community in Hamilton, Ontario did for them and their family. “It was beyond beautiful,” said Nick, Alex’s father. “Though we don’t feel better about the situation, we know we are not alone.”
There are so many times in life we see or hear about a situation, and we feel powerless to do much about it. The war in Ukraine drags on, and we cannot stop it---though one of our own members, Joanne Hatch, is doing something by collecting clothes, household items and books to bring to Savers for money, which will be donated to the Ukrainian fund as well as The Farmington Community Chest. And in Alex’s case, though no one can keep the disease from progressing the community was able to bring this little boy and his family some joy. It may not sound like much, but it is something, and there are times something can make a big impact and a big difference. Jesus certainly did not heal all diseases and he did not stop war and eradicate poverty. But he did do something, and he wants us to something as well---even when the something we can do is only little. But sometimes little can be much bigger than it initially appears.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
You know how we all complain that the news media loves to concentrate on bad news? We find ourselves more than a little annoyed because every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to hear the latest news, there is always some catastrophe greeting our eyes and ears. But the Christian Science Monitor, which is a weekly magazine, always has a section called, Points of Progress, and it is filled with good news. And the Washington Post has a section called Inspired Life, which does just that---It inspires!
Last week in the Post I read about five year old Alex Hurdakis, afflicted with a fatal brain tumor, which was diagnosed when he was one. Recently, his parents were told there was nothing more medicine could do. All treatment had run out, and Alex would soon die. The news, of course, was beyond devastating, but little Alex still had some things he wanted to do and see. He loved Halloween and he wanted to see monsters. And so, a friend of the family came up with the idea of bringing Halloween to Alex. Through social media she made it known that Alex would most likely not live to see Halloween, and so she wanted the community to give Alex the gift of Halloween. And so, they did. They erected a haunted house in his yard and on September 14, 1000 people showed up in a parade of monsters, ghosts, goblins, and witches. Someone offered her services as a face painter, so people could have their face painted to look like a witch or a goblin or some other monster. All kinds of people showed up that day, including parents who had lost their own children to cancer and then there were those who were themselves going through chemotherapy and radiation.
It was far more than the family ever expected. Little Alex was thrilled and so was his two year year old sister and eight year old brother. His parents could not believe what this community in Hamilton, Ontario did for them and their family. “It was beyond beautiful,” said Nick, Alex’s father. “Though we don’t feel better about the situation, we know we are not alone.”
There are so many times in life we see or hear about a situation, and we feel powerless to do much about it. The war in Ukraine drags on, and we cannot stop it---though one of our own members, Joanne Hatch, is doing something by collecting clothes, household items and books to bring to Savers for money, which will be donated to the Ukrainian fund as well as The Farmington Community Chest. And in Alex’s case, though no one can keep the disease from progressing the community was able to bring this little boy and his family some joy. It may not sound like much, but it is something, and there are times something can make a big impact and a big difference. Jesus certainly did not heal all diseases and he did not stop war and eradicate poverty. But he did do something, and he wants us to something as well---even when the something we can do is only little. But sometimes little can be much bigger than it initially appears.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Chasms
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ, Congregational
Unionville, CT
September 25, 2022
Amos 6: 1a, 4-7
Luke 16: 19-21
Chasms: they are very difficult to get across, sometimes impossible. We can stand there, looking across this huge divide, and we simply cannot figure out how to get across. Perhaps that is the way it has always been. People are often divided, and in today’s reading from Luke we have one of humanity’s most visible, enduring and yes, ugly chasms ---the chasm between the rich and the poor. I can remember the very first time poverty entered my consciousness. I was 7 years old, on a trip with my parents over Christmas vacation to visit my grandparents in Florida. We were driving from Buffalo, New York in my parents’ brand new Oldsmobile Deluxe 88---the most luxurious car my parents ever owned. It was early on Sunday morning in South Carolina; we had just eaten breakfast, and my father, trying to get back on the major highway, took a wrong turn, which landed us on a road, winding its way through a field of shacks. I saw these little kids, running around with no shoes on and no sweater. It was December, and though South Carolina is not Buffalo, New York, it was not warm enough to be barefooted. I simply did not understand, and when I asked for an explanation, my father talked about how these people worked on farms and were very, very poor. You know, my father said, it was only 100 years ago that their ancestors were slaves. I had never seen anything like this before, and I did not understand why I lived in a nice, comfortable home and my parents drove a new, shiny car, while these children and their parents had nothing. After a few minutes the tears began to roll down my cheeks and sniffles soon followed. My mother turned around to comfort me, but my father, who was always very hard on my tears, calling them golf balls said, “Let her cry. At least for once she has something real to cry about.” And then he said something he repeated many times in his life. The saddest words in the Bible are when Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” There it was--- this huge chasm between my middle class life and those poor black children in South Carolina, and the only thing I knew how to do was to cry in empathy.
Empathy, however, is not what we get from this story in Luke. We have a poor man, named Lazarus, which means in Hebrew, “God is my help.” Notice that the rich man is the one who does all the speaking. Not surprising, because rich people have more voice and power than the poor. Yet though the poor man has no voice, he does have a name, Lazarus, while the rich man is never named in the text, though tradition has assigned him the name of Dives, which means rich man in Latin. The story paints a very powerful image of Lazarus, covered with sores, which the dogs licked, as he lay at the gate of a rich man. His one hope was to eat the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Now consider for a moment that gate. Gates open and close; they can shut others out, or let others in. And so, the rich man could have opened the gate to let Lazarus in, or he could have gone through the gate himself to offer food to Lazarus. But he did nothing. He did not even notice Lazarus. And then Dives and Lazarus find themselves on the other side of life, and this time the conditions are completely reversed. Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham, while Dives is in Hades, suffering the torment of thirst.
Now the text neither tells us that the rich man is being punished for his treatment of the poor, nor does it say that Lazarus is being rewarded for a life well lived. It only tells us that the conditions are reversed. Lazarus suffered in life while the rich man lived very well and now the opposite conditions prevail.
Notice what Dives does. He calls out to Abraham, first asking for mercy, and then he asks Abraham to command Lazarus to relieve his thirst. Apparently, he is still living in the old system, where Lazarus is a nobody, someone who should be ordered about---told to dip his finger in the cool water to satisfy Dives’ thirst. The gate, which in life, Dives did not bother to open, has now become the chasm, which neither he nor Lazarus can cross. And indeed, this seems a very powerful metaphor for what often happens in life. Gates can be so thoroughly shut against others that in time it is not gates we have, but chasms no one knows how to cross. This happens in families and human relationships; it happens in the life of the church; it happens within nations and between nations, when differences, sometimes radical differences become bitter, ugly conflicts, leaving a chasm no one knows how to cross, let alone wants to cross.
Sometimes chasms develop between different disciplines, like science and religion. There really is no conflict, but if you insist on reading religious texts literally, you will certainly find conflicts. There is also a chasm between theology and economics. Churches in the main line Protestant tradition (like ours) have a hard time talking about money. Oh, we talk about charity and the importance of helping those in need, but the truth is that the Bible is far more concerned with economy than it is with charity. The Greek word from which we derive the word economy is a compound of two words, meaning household and law or management. So, economy literally means the management or law of the household. The word household as it is biblically used does not mean individual family units, but rather the site of human livelihood, the public household. And this theme is exactly what the Old Testament prophets like Amos were passionate about, castigating Israel for its failure to produce a just economy, embracing all people, in particular the poor and oppressed, the uneducated and unskilled as well as widows and children.
Jesus too spoke prophetically about the household economy, upsetting many people, but not because he told rich people to give more to charity. That is how we Americans tend to hear his words, because we inhabit a culture of individualism, so we tend to hear the story of Lazarus and Dives solely as a critique of a selfish rich man, who did not bother to notice the poor man at his gate. But Jesus’ message was far more than individual critique. It was social critique, aimed at actual structures of the economy that worked to the exclusion of the poor. Since there was no welfare state in Jesus’ time, the Temple was the institution that had some responsibility for the poor, and Jesus was not always happy with its methods for meeting those needs. He called for something named the Jubilee, a radical re-distribution of property and wealth that was to happen every 50 years. This did not make him popular with either the wealthy or the Temple.
All economies, no matter the type, have the challenge of dealing with poverty. In our country we embrace the free market system, and though there is much deserved criticism of an unregulated market, it is also true that one of the markets greatest achievements has been the creation of a strong middle class, though these days it appears that middle class is now shrinking. Yet historically the American main line Protestant churches, have been staunch defenders of the free market system. In 1907 there was an economic crisis in the country, and JP Morgan, New York’s leading banker, called the city’s Protestant clergy together for a meeting. “It is time for reaffirming faith,” he told the clergy. “Tell your parishioners on Sunday morning to leave their money in the banks.” And many did just that, because they believed that faith was more than what you do with your private life; it is also what you do with your public life---and the economy is public.
Poverty is certainly a statistic, but it is also more than that. It has a real face and tells a real story---just as it told me when I was 7 and just as we heard it told in Luke. And the stories keep coming. We can notice the people who have a face and a name and a story. We can try to help in a charitable way. And acting charitably is a good thing. But that in no way exhausts who Jesus was and what he taught and did. He wanted far more than charity. He was out to change the system and that made him an enemy of the Temple and the Roman Empire. And there are times when he is even an enemy of our system as well, a system that allows the top 1% of households to own 32.3% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owns a mere 2.6%. And do you really think that Jesus would have nothing to say about such a state of affairs? If you do, I would caution you to think again.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
The First Church of Christ, Congregational
Unionville, CT
September 25, 2022
Amos 6: 1a, 4-7
Luke 16: 19-21
Chasms: they are very difficult to get across, sometimes impossible. We can stand there, looking across this huge divide, and we simply cannot figure out how to get across. Perhaps that is the way it has always been. People are often divided, and in today’s reading from Luke we have one of humanity’s most visible, enduring and yes, ugly chasms ---the chasm between the rich and the poor. I can remember the very first time poverty entered my consciousness. I was 7 years old, on a trip with my parents over Christmas vacation to visit my grandparents in Florida. We were driving from Buffalo, New York in my parents’ brand new Oldsmobile Deluxe 88---the most luxurious car my parents ever owned. It was early on Sunday morning in South Carolina; we had just eaten breakfast, and my father, trying to get back on the major highway, took a wrong turn, which landed us on a road, winding its way through a field of shacks. I saw these little kids, running around with no shoes on and no sweater. It was December, and though South Carolina is not Buffalo, New York, it was not warm enough to be barefooted. I simply did not understand, and when I asked for an explanation, my father talked about how these people worked on farms and were very, very poor. You know, my father said, it was only 100 years ago that their ancestors were slaves. I had never seen anything like this before, and I did not understand why I lived in a nice, comfortable home and my parents drove a new, shiny car, while these children and their parents had nothing. After a few minutes the tears began to roll down my cheeks and sniffles soon followed. My mother turned around to comfort me, but my father, who was always very hard on my tears, calling them golf balls said, “Let her cry. At least for once she has something real to cry about.” And then he said something he repeated many times in his life. The saddest words in the Bible are when Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” There it was--- this huge chasm between my middle class life and those poor black children in South Carolina, and the only thing I knew how to do was to cry in empathy.
Empathy, however, is not what we get from this story in Luke. We have a poor man, named Lazarus, which means in Hebrew, “God is my help.” Notice that the rich man is the one who does all the speaking. Not surprising, because rich people have more voice and power than the poor. Yet though the poor man has no voice, he does have a name, Lazarus, while the rich man is never named in the text, though tradition has assigned him the name of Dives, which means rich man in Latin. The story paints a very powerful image of Lazarus, covered with sores, which the dogs licked, as he lay at the gate of a rich man. His one hope was to eat the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Now consider for a moment that gate. Gates open and close; they can shut others out, or let others in. And so, the rich man could have opened the gate to let Lazarus in, or he could have gone through the gate himself to offer food to Lazarus. But he did nothing. He did not even notice Lazarus. And then Dives and Lazarus find themselves on the other side of life, and this time the conditions are completely reversed. Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham, while Dives is in Hades, suffering the torment of thirst.
Now the text neither tells us that the rich man is being punished for his treatment of the poor, nor does it say that Lazarus is being rewarded for a life well lived. It only tells us that the conditions are reversed. Lazarus suffered in life while the rich man lived very well and now the opposite conditions prevail.
Notice what Dives does. He calls out to Abraham, first asking for mercy, and then he asks Abraham to command Lazarus to relieve his thirst. Apparently, he is still living in the old system, where Lazarus is a nobody, someone who should be ordered about---told to dip his finger in the cool water to satisfy Dives’ thirst. The gate, which in life, Dives did not bother to open, has now become the chasm, which neither he nor Lazarus can cross. And indeed, this seems a very powerful metaphor for what often happens in life. Gates can be so thoroughly shut against others that in time it is not gates we have, but chasms no one knows how to cross. This happens in families and human relationships; it happens in the life of the church; it happens within nations and between nations, when differences, sometimes radical differences become bitter, ugly conflicts, leaving a chasm no one knows how to cross, let alone wants to cross.
Sometimes chasms develop between different disciplines, like science and religion. There really is no conflict, but if you insist on reading religious texts literally, you will certainly find conflicts. There is also a chasm between theology and economics. Churches in the main line Protestant tradition (like ours) have a hard time talking about money. Oh, we talk about charity and the importance of helping those in need, but the truth is that the Bible is far more concerned with economy than it is with charity. The Greek word from which we derive the word economy is a compound of two words, meaning household and law or management. So, economy literally means the management or law of the household. The word household as it is biblically used does not mean individual family units, but rather the site of human livelihood, the public household. And this theme is exactly what the Old Testament prophets like Amos were passionate about, castigating Israel for its failure to produce a just economy, embracing all people, in particular the poor and oppressed, the uneducated and unskilled as well as widows and children.
Jesus too spoke prophetically about the household economy, upsetting many people, but not because he told rich people to give more to charity. That is how we Americans tend to hear his words, because we inhabit a culture of individualism, so we tend to hear the story of Lazarus and Dives solely as a critique of a selfish rich man, who did not bother to notice the poor man at his gate. But Jesus’ message was far more than individual critique. It was social critique, aimed at actual structures of the economy that worked to the exclusion of the poor. Since there was no welfare state in Jesus’ time, the Temple was the institution that had some responsibility for the poor, and Jesus was not always happy with its methods for meeting those needs. He called for something named the Jubilee, a radical re-distribution of property and wealth that was to happen every 50 years. This did not make him popular with either the wealthy or the Temple.
All economies, no matter the type, have the challenge of dealing with poverty. In our country we embrace the free market system, and though there is much deserved criticism of an unregulated market, it is also true that one of the markets greatest achievements has been the creation of a strong middle class, though these days it appears that middle class is now shrinking. Yet historically the American main line Protestant churches, have been staunch defenders of the free market system. In 1907 there was an economic crisis in the country, and JP Morgan, New York’s leading banker, called the city’s Protestant clergy together for a meeting. “It is time for reaffirming faith,” he told the clergy. “Tell your parishioners on Sunday morning to leave their money in the banks.” And many did just that, because they believed that faith was more than what you do with your private life; it is also what you do with your public life---and the economy is public.
Poverty is certainly a statistic, but it is also more than that. It has a real face and tells a real story---just as it told me when I was 7 and just as we heard it told in Luke. And the stories keep coming. We can notice the people who have a face and a name and a story. We can try to help in a charitable way. And acting charitably is a good thing. But that in no way exhausts who Jesus was and what he taught and did. He wanted far more than charity. He was out to change the system and that made him an enemy of the Temple and the Roman Empire. And there are times when he is even an enemy of our system as well, a system that allows the top 1% of households to own 32.3% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owns a mere 2.6%. And do you really think that Jesus would have nothing to say about such a state of affairs? If you do, I would caution you to think again.
September 22, 2022
Dear Friends,
Lately I have been very impressed by the vastness of creation. The first pages of the Bible are concerned with the creation God has made and declared good. And indeed, the James Webb Telescope, showing us incredible images of exoplanets and unnamed galaxies, is beyond awesome. And now I have been awestruck once again---this time by what I recently read about ants.
Can you guess how many ants there are in the world? In all honesty, I could not even begin to guess, but I was shocked to learn from an article recently published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, that the number of ants stands at 20 quadrillion! That is 20,000 trillion, or 20,000,000,000,000,000! And the total mass of ants on earth weighs 12 megatons of carbon, which is the way scientists measure biomass. If all the ants in the world were put on a scale and weighed, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together. And for every human being living on this earth there are 2.5 million ants!
Ants inhabit every corner of the world, except perhaps some of the coldest places in the Arctic or Antarctica. They aerate soil and drag seeds underground that they might grow, and they are important sources of food for birds and other mammals. A myrmecologist (someone who studies ants) claims that if there were no ants the forests would be piled high with dead wood, since ants are critical for their ability to destroy and devour wood.
There are some troubling signs, however. Just as animal species go extinct, so too do insects. Someone estimated that up to 40% of the current insect population could be extinct. When? That is hard to say, but we do know that butterflies and beetles are facing grave threats now along with honeybees. Scientists do not know if the ant population is declining. Perhaps with so many ants on earth it is hard to judge.
The biodiversity of our planet is certainly awe inspiring. And when we consider that we human creatures are only aware of a small fraction of what lives on our earth, we should be brought to our knees in humility. But it seems that we human beings have a very hard time learning humility. We consider ourselves Number 1 on the planet and seem to be believe that having dominion over the earth means that we can do exactly what we want, no matter the impact on the rest of creation, including the planet.
The world is an incredible place, far more wonderful and diverse than we can even imagine. And if learning just a few facts about ants can help us to be more humble and more grateful for life on this earth we call home, then that is an added blessing. The Bible begins with the story of creation, and though its details might not count as accurate science, the story is told that we might be gratefully humble for the gift of life on this planet---and not only human life, but also other life as well, including ants!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Lately I have been very impressed by the vastness of creation. The first pages of the Bible are concerned with the creation God has made and declared good. And indeed, the James Webb Telescope, showing us incredible images of exoplanets and unnamed galaxies, is beyond awesome. And now I have been awestruck once again---this time by what I recently read about ants.
Can you guess how many ants there are in the world? In all honesty, I could not even begin to guess, but I was shocked to learn from an article recently published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, that the number of ants stands at 20 quadrillion! That is 20,000 trillion, or 20,000,000,000,000,000! And the total mass of ants on earth weighs 12 megatons of carbon, which is the way scientists measure biomass. If all the ants in the world were put on a scale and weighed, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together. And for every human being living on this earth there are 2.5 million ants!
Ants inhabit every corner of the world, except perhaps some of the coldest places in the Arctic or Antarctica. They aerate soil and drag seeds underground that they might grow, and they are important sources of food for birds and other mammals. A myrmecologist (someone who studies ants) claims that if there were no ants the forests would be piled high with dead wood, since ants are critical for their ability to destroy and devour wood.
There are some troubling signs, however. Just as animal species go extinct, so too do insects. Someone estimated that up to 40% of the current insect population could be extinct. When? That is hard to say, but we do know that butterflies and beetles are facing grave threats now along with honeybees. Scientists do not know if the ant population is declining. Perhaps with so many ants on earth it is hard to judge.
The biodiversity of our planet is certainly awe inspiring. And when we consider that we human creatures are only aware of a small fraction of what lives on our earth, we should be brought to our knees in humility. But it seems that we human beings have a very hard time learning humility. We consider ourselves Number 1 on the planet and seem to be believe that having dominion over the earth means that we can do exactly what we want, no matter the impact on the rest of creation, including the planet.
The world is an incredible place, far more wonderful and diverse than we can even imagine. And if learning just a few facts about ants can help us to be more humble and more grateful for life on this earth we call home, then that is an added blessing. The Bible begins with the story of creation, and though its details might not count as accurate science, the story is told that we might be gratefully humble for the gift of life on this planet---and not only human life, but also other life as well, including ants!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Giving to an Imperfect Church
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 18, 2022
Mark 12: 38-44
To be perfectly honest, most ministers do not relish stewardship sermons. And the reason is quite simple when you look at many church budgets, especially small churches like ours, most of the money is going for the minister’s salary and benefits. So, there is no denying that it can sound very self-serving to preach on church giving. “Give to the church, so I can have a job and be paid.” Furthermore, any minister with even a whit of theological insight realizes how dangerous it can be to equate giving to the church with giving to God. God and Church are not synonyms, and though the church has a divine mission---helping people to live in right relationship with God by loving God with the fullness of heart, soul, and mind--- we also realize that the church is a human institution, and as is anything human, it is deeply flawed. It can and does fail and disappoint, and though both clergy and parishioner do often try hard to preach, understand and live God’s Word, who among us would deny that our efforts and outcomes are very imperfect. And so, is it any wonder that there is often unease among clergy and parishioners when it comes to speaking about money and giving to the church?
Jesus, however, felt no such unease. He spoke about money and possessions more than any other single topic: 62% of his parables refer to money and possessions, and one out of every ten verses in the four gospels deals with wealth. The Bible includes 500 verses on prayer, a bit less than that on faith, but more than 2000 on money and what it can and cannot buy. Furthermore, Jesus certainly understood the flawed nature of religious institutions. He was hardly shy about criticizing scribes, priests, and Pharisees, sometimes because they were more concerned about rules and regulations than they are about the needs of real people. And he was very critical of the Temple and its practices. He threw the money changers out of the Temple courtyard, accusing them of making God’s house into a den of robbers. Money changers, by the way, did have an important role, because Jews came to the Temple from all over the empire with foreign money in their hands, which had to be changed into Jewish coinage. But some money changers were dishonest, which brought down Jesus’ ire on them. And now we see him sitting outside the Temple, carefully observing the scene--- rich people putting in their offering and a poor widow, giving two copper coins, all she had. She gave out of her poverty, not out of her abundance, and that is an act of great generosity.
She trusted the Temple to do God’s work, and if the Temple failed, the blame was on the Temple, not on the widow. I suppose some might call the widow naïve or even foolish for placing her trust in the Temple, but there are times when trust, like faith, is naïve. And perhaps at times it needs to be, because if we cannot believe in the goodness and worthiness of what we are doing and supporting, we would be overcome by cynicism. And cynicism is dangerous, rarely issuing in acts of generosity and compassion.
And isn’t that a reason to give to the church? We want and we need to see acts of generosity and compassion in the world, and we want and need to be part of that. We know the church is not a perfect institution, but when we risk the hope and faith that the church can be a place where God’s Word is preached, embraced, and lived, our hearts and our lives grow bigger, and our gratitude expands. Gratitude is always a good reason to give. For all we know the widow who gave her last coins to the Temple was giving because she was grateful to God. The Temple was supposed to help widows and orphans, so perhaps she was grateful for what help she did receive---though Jesus thought it should do more. While she was poor in things and money, she was rich in gratitude and faith. No wonder Jesus commended her.
A few years ago, I was at a seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary, where met this elderly man, in his 90’s. I thought he was a retired clergyman, but he told me, no, he just enjoyed theology and the stimulation that came from learning and thinking. Someone else told me he was very wealthy, a successful Wall Street investor, who had given a lot of money not only to the seminary, but also to some churches so they could expand their outreach, supporting a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. One evening he told me about being a prisoner in a Japanese camp during World War II. “It was beyond horrible,” he said, beyond anything you could imagine. The Japanese did not abide by any of the Genevan Convention rules concerning prisoners. A prisoner, in their minds, was a failed warrior, who deserved no respect. We were starved. I was sure I would not survive. And so, I hated my enemy.
One afternoon a group of Japanese soldiers, who themselves had been held prisoners, had managed to escape during an air raid attack. They were practically thrown off the vehicles that brought them to our camp. Many of them were badly injured, barely able to walk. Others were crawling on the ground, crying out and begging for water. And our captors simply ignored them. These were their own soldiers, and yet they treated them as they treated us; we were all failed warriors in their eyes. Since they had allowed themselves to be captured, they were deemed worthless, not even worthy of water. Then this English soldier went over to the bucket of water and began to give these soldiers a drink. My captors looked on as if the man were crazy, but they didn’t stop him. However, the English commander tried, screaming at the top of his lungs to stop giving aid to the enemy. But he would not stop, and then some other men began to give water too. I stood there, wanting to help, but I didn’t. The English commander continued to scream out his orders and our Japanese captors looked on in disbelief, but no one dared intervene.
Later I would learn the soldier who gave aid was a devout Christian, and I would come to realize how important it is to be part of something bigger than I, something that could push me to do good. You could call it a conversion experience. And so, I have tried to do good with what I have been given. And the church has been a big part of my life, surrounding me with people, who have pushed me to do some good while challenging me to realize what and where my treasure truly is. I have been a part of different churches, and I’ve learned that as often as churches and clergy fail, yet something of God does manage to get through.
I think Jesus would agree. Picture him sitting outside that Temple, knowing its flaws while watching all kinds of people make their offerings, and then seeing a widow, vulnerable and poor, who trusted that God could and would use the gift of her two copper coins for something that truly mattered. The question for us is: Do we hope and trust that God can do the same with our gifts to this church? And this is a question only you can answer for yourself.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 18, 2022
Mark 12: 38-44
To be perfectly honest, most ministers do not relish stewardship sermons. And the reason is quite simple when you look at many church budgets, especially small churches like ours, most of the money is going for the minister’s salary and benefits. So, there is no denying that it can sound very self-serving to preach on church giving. “Give to the church, so I can have a job and be paid.” Furthermore, any minister with even a whit of theological insight realizes how dangerous it can be to equate giving to the church with giving to God. God and Church are not synonyms, and though the church has a divine mission---helping people to live in right relationship with God by loving God with the fullness of heart, soul, and mind--- we also realize that the church is a human institution, and as is anything human, it is deeply flawed. It can and does fail and disappoint, and though both clergy and parishioner do often try hard to preach, understand and live God’s Word, who among us would deny that our efforts and outcomes are very imperfect. And so, is it any wonder that there is often unease among clergy and parishioners when it comes to speaking about money and giving to the church?
Jesus, however, felt no such unease. He spoke about money and possessions more than any other single topic: 62% of his parables refer to money and possessions, and one out of every ten verses in the four gospels deals with wealth. The Bible includes 500 verses on prayer, a bit less than that on faith, but more than 2000 on money and what it can and cannot buy. Furthermore, Jesus certainly understood the flawed nature of religious institutions. He was hardly shy about criticizing scribes, priests, and Pharisees, sometimes because they were more concerned about rules and regulations than they are about the needs of real people. And he was very critical of the Temple and its practices. He threw the money changers out of the Temple courtyard, accusing them of making God’s house into a den of robbers. Money changers, by the way, did have an important role, because Jews came to the Temple from all over the empire with foreign money in their hands, which had to be changed into Jewish coinage. But some money changers were dishonest, which brought down Jesus’ ire on them. And now we see him sitting outside the Temple, carefully observing the scene--- rich people putting in their offering and a poor widow, giving two copper coins, all she had. She gave out of her poverty, not out of her abundance, and that is an act of great generosity.
She trusted the Temple to do God’s work, and if the Temple failed, the blame was on the Temple, not on the widow. I suppose some might call the widow naïve or even foolish for placing her trust in the Temple, but there are times when trust, like faith, is naïve. And perhaps at times it needs to be, because if we cannot believe in the goodness and worthiness of what we are doing and supporting, we would be overcome by cynicism. And cynicism is dangerous, rarely issuing in acts of generosity and compassion.
And isn’t that a reason to give to the church? We want and we need to see acts of generosity and compassion in the world, and we want and need to be part of that. We know the church is not a perfect institution, but when we risk the hope and faith that the church can be a place where God’s Word is preached, embraced, and lived, our hearts and our lives grow bigger, and our gratitude expands. Gratitude is always a good reason to give. For all we know the widow who gave her last coins to the Temple was giving because she was grateful to God. The Temple was supposed to help widows and orphans, so perhaps she was grateful for what help she did receive---though Jesus thought it should do more. While she was poor in things and money, she was rich in gratitude and faith. No wonder Jesus commended her.
A few years ago, I was at a seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary, where met this elderly man, in his 90’s. I thought he was a retired clergyman, but he told me, no, he just enjoyed theology and the stimulation that came from learning and thinking. Someone else told me he was very wealthy, a successful Wall Street investor, who had given a lot of money not only to the seminary, but also to some churches so they could expand their outreach, supporting a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. One evening he told me about being a prisoner in a Japanese camp during World War II. “It was beyond horrible,” he said, beyond anything you could imagine. The Japanese did not abide by any of the Genevan Convention rules concerning prisoners. A prisoner, in their minds, was a failed warrior, who deserved no respect. We were starved. I was sure I would not survive. And so, I hated my enemy.
One afternoon a group of Japanese soldiers, who themselves had been held prisoners, had managed to escape during an air raid attack. They were practically thrown off the vehicles that brought them to our camp. Many of them were badly injured, barely able to walk. Others were crawling on the ground, crying out and begging for water. And our captors simply ignored them. These were their own soldiers, and yet they treated them as they treated us; we were all failed warriors in their eyes. Since they had allowed themselves to be captured, they were deemed worthless, not even worthy of water. Then this English soldier went over to the bucket of water and began to give these soldiers a drink. My captors looked on as if the man were crazy, but they didn’t stop him. However, the English commander tried, screaming at the top of his lungs to stop giving aid to the enemy. But he would not stop, and then some other men began to give water too. I stood there, wanting to help, but I didn’t. The English commander continued to scream out his orders and our Japanese captors looked on in disbelief, but no one dared intervene.
Later I would learn the soldier who gave aid was a devout Christian, and I would come to realize how important it is to be part of something bigger than I, something that could push me to do good. You could call it a conversion experience. And so, I have tried to do good with what I have been given. And the church has been a big part of my life, surrounding me with people, who have pushed me to do some good while challenging me to realize what and where my treasure truly is. I have been a part of different churches, and I’ve learned that as often as churches and clergy fail, yet something of God does manage to get through.
I think Jesus would agree. Picture him sitting outside that Temple, knowing its flaws while watching all kinds of people make their offerings, and then seeing a widow, vulnerable and poor, who trusted that God could and would use the gift of her two copper coins for something that truly mattered. The question for us is: Do we hope and trust that God can do the same with our gifts to this church? And this is a question only you can answer for yourself.
SEEKING AND FINDING THE LOST
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 11, 2022
Luke 15: 1-10
I don’t know how many of you have a favorite gospel, but for me it is Luke. I think many people feel this way, not only because of the wonderful Christmas story and some of our favorite parables, such as The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son, but also because Jesus is so strongly portrayed as the compassionate and caring one. He certainly does have his demanding side. Right before our passage for today he speaks of the high cost of discipleship, but we also have so many examples of Jesus bucking the conventions of religion to help those who are hurting. He heals on the Sabbath, which brings condemnation from the authorities, and he shares table fellowship with those who are considered low lifers and sinners. In fact, that is how our lesson begins today. Tax collectors, who were hated for their collaboration with Rome and other sinners were coming to hear Jesus preach, and immediately the Pharisees and scribes begin to grumble about the company Jesus keeps.
And then Jesus immediately tells two parables about a lost sheep and a lost coin. Now there are a few things to note about these parables. Jesus is obviously making a connection between the lostness of sinners and a relentless God who searches for the lost until they are found. But there is no way we can morally assign blame to a sheep and a coin that are lost. They are simply lost, and it is someone else’s responsibility to find them. Of course, the problem the religious leadership had with sinners is that they considered them blameworthy for their sins. The sinners, in other words, were the responsible ones and not anyone else. And yet here we have Jesus talking about a shepherd, who leaves the 99 in order to find the one lost sheep. But no shepherd would do that. He would not leave his flock vulnerable unless he had someone else to watch over them while he was searching for his lost sheep. But Jesus doesn’t mention that possibility. The story is told in such a way that we imagine the 99 being left alone in the wilderness, and the word wilderness always suggests a place of danger and vulnerability. But still the shepherd risks the safety of the 99 to find the one lost sheep.
Now the Pharisees and scribes were not stupid people. They knew what shepherds did and how shepherds behaved, and they realized that Jesus is pushing here for a different moral and spiritual code. A shepherd who left his flock unattended in this way, would be deemed irresponsible. And yet Jesus is here suggesting that it is worth the risk to find the one who is lost. There is no denying that the risk is REAL. More sheep might be lost, and the shepherd might never find the lost sheep, and he too, all alone in the wilderness, could meet up with a wild beast which could end his life. So, both the shepherd and the sheep could have something significant to lose. But Jesus is saying that sometimes in life danger must be risked that something else can happen---that the lost can be found.
Now in the story of the lost coin, there does not seem to be much risk at all--- just the time the woman spent in looking for the lost coin. And when she finds it, she calls her neighbors together so they can rejoice with her. That simply is not something most people would do. And the scribes and Pharisees know that this is not usual behavior, and so for them the lesson is to think about lostness in a different way. Rather than putting the blame on that which is lost, the emphasis is shifted to the one who is determined to search until the lost one is found. That puts a moral obligation on those hearing the parable and it also suggests that this is how God is. God searches until the lost are found and the suggestion from Jesus is that human beings, made in God’s image, should do the same.
Some years ago, I met this woman at the Y, and we would talk now and then. I learned from her how her husband had been working on a special project at the Twin Towers in New York, and though he was not there every day, he was there on September 11, 2001. He managed to escape the first building that was hit, and he called one of his three sons, telling him, “I’m safe, but I am going back in to help others.” “Dad, don’t do that. It’s too dangerous.” I’ll be o.k., he insisted. There are people in there, who need my help.” And that was the last time anyone heard from him. He perished.
His wife told me she had been furious, and though over the years, her fury had abated, she still could not forgive him for what she considered his blatant disregard for her and their three sons. “Strangers meant more to him than we did,” she fumed. He took a risk he should not have taken.” “Well,” I said, “if he had come out alive after helping others, you would call him a hero. And we really do not know how many others he did manage to help get out of the building. People are not heroes ONLY when they survive. They are heroes because they do brave things, putting their own lives at risk. Easy for you to say, she accused. You did not lose a husband to heroism. Your life and the life of your children were not put at risk. I did not say much after that, and we would still talk now and then about other topics.
But some years later, an accused terrorist was on trial, and a woman from Yale Divinity School, who actually began Divinity School after she lost her husband in 9/11 guest preached at my Church. She too had three teenagers, and she traveled to Cuba or Florida to offer testimony on behalf of mercy. And that is what she preached about---why she was for mercy. To her the accused man was both lost and sick. Well, some time after this, the woman at the Y, let’s call her Cheryl, was listening to the television about the man involved in the Boston Marathon bombing. I hope he gets the death penalty, she said. In response, I countered with I don’t want anyone getting the death penalty. That because you have never lost anyone to violence. And then I told her about the woman who had preached mercy at my church some years before. She never spoke to me after that.
When bad things happen, particularly when people do bad things, it is so easy to be focused on their guilt and responsibility. Moral responsibility is no small matter, and ignoring or overlooking it, has its own risks, which is why Jesus told these parables where culpability is not the issue, since coins and sheep cannot be held responsible for being lost. Jesus does this, I think, to change the direction of attention---away from the guilt of the lost and toward the moral responsibility of searching for and finding the lost. And in the very next verse after today’s lesson, Jesus will begin the story of the Prodigal Son, one of the most beloved of all Jesus’ parables, where there is both guilt and responsibility, and also a father who runs to meet his wayward son as he returns home and celebrates that the lost is now found while the older son stews in his resentment. The story of lostness continues not only in the Bible but also in our own lives.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 11, 2022
Luke 15: 1-10
I don’t know how many of you have a favorite gospel, but for me it is Luke. I think many people feel this way, not only because of the wonderful Christmas story and some of our favorite parables, such as The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son, but also because Jesus is so strongly portrayed as the compassionate and caring one. He certainly does have his demanding side. Right before our passage for today he speaks of the high cost of discipleship, but we also have so many examples of Jesus bucking the conventions of religion to help those who are hurting. He heals on the Sabbath, which brings condemnation from the authorities, and he shares table fellowship with those who are considered low lifers and sinners. In fact, that is how our lesson begins today. Tax collectors, who were hated for their collaboration with Rome and other sinners were coming to hear Jesus preach, and immediately the Pharisees and scribes begin to grumble about the company Jesus keeps.
And then Jesus immediately tells two parables about a lost sheep and a lost coin. Now there are a few things to note about these parables. Jesus is obviously making a connection between the lostness of sinners and a relentless God who searches for the lost until they are found. But there is no way we can morally assign blame to a sheep and a coin that are lost. They are simply lost, and it is someone else’s responsibility to find them. Of course, the problem the religious leadership had with sinners is that they considered them blameworthy for their sins. The sinners, in other words, were the responsible ones and not anyone else. And yet here we have Jesus talking about a shepherd, who leaves the 99 in order to find the one lost sheep. But no shepherd would do that. He would not leave his flock vulnerable unless he had someone else to watch over them while he was searching for his lost sheep. But Jesus doesn’t mention that possibility. The story is told in such a way that we imagine the 99 being left alone in the wilderness, and the word wilderness always suggests a place of danger and vulnerability. But still the shepherd risks the safety of the 99 to find the one lost sheep.
Now the Pharisees and scribes were not stupid people. They knew what shepherds did and how shepherds behaved, and they realized that Jesus is pushing here for a different moral and spiritual code. A shepherd who left his flock unattended in this way, would be deemed irresponsible. And yet Jesus is here suggesting that it is worth the risk to find the one who is lost. There is no denying that the risk is REAL. More sheep might be lost, and the shepherd might never find the lost sheep, and he too, all alone in the wilderness, could meet up with a wild beast which could end his life. So, both the shepherd and the sheep could have something significant to lose. But Jesus is saying that sometimes in life danger must be risked that something else can happen---that the lost can be found.
Now in the story of the lost coin, there does not seem to be much risk at all--- just the time the woman spent in looking for the lost coin. And when she finds it, she calls her neighbors together so they can rejoice with her. That simply is not something most people would do. And the scribes and Pharisees know that this is not usual behavior, and so for them the lesson is to think about lostness in a different way. Rather than putting the blame on that which is lost, the emphasis is shifted to the one who is determined to search until the lost one is found. That puts a moral obligation on those hearing the parable and it also suggests that this is how God is. God searches until the lost are found and the suggestion from Jesus is that human beings, made in God’s image, should do the same.
Some years ago, I met this woman at the Y, and we would talk now and then. I learned from her how her husband had been working on a special project at the Twin Towers in New York, and though he was not there every day, he was there on September 11, 2001. He managed to escape the first building that was hit, and he called one of his three sons, telling him, “I’m safe, but I am going back in to help others.” “Dad, don’t do that. It’s too dangerous.” I’ll be o.k., he insisted. There are people in there, who need my help.” And that was the last time anyone heard from him. He perished.
His wife told me she had been furious, and though over the years, her fury had abated, she still could not forgive him for what she considered his blatant disregard for her and their three sons. “Strangers meant more to him than we did,” she fumed. He took a risk he should not have taken.” “Well,” I said, “if he had come out alive after helping others, you would call him a hero. And we really do not know how many others he did manage to help get out of the building. People are not heroes ONLY when they survive. They are heroes because they do brave things, putting their own lives at risk. Easy for you to say, she accused. You did not lose a husband to heroism. Your life and the life of your children were not put at risk. I did not say much after that, and we would still talk now and then about other topics.
But some years later, an accused terrorist was on trial, and a woman from Yale Divinity School, who actually began Divinity School after she lost her husband in 9/11 guest preached at my Church. She too had three teenagers, and she traveled to Cuba or Florida to offer testimony on behalf of mercy. And that is what she preached about---why she was for mercy. To her the accused man was both lost and sick. Well, some time after this, the woman at the Y, let’s call her Cheryl, was listening to the television about the man involved in the Boston Marathon bombing. I hope he gets the death penalty, she said. In response, I countered with I don’t want anyone getting the death penalty. That because you have never lost anyone to violence. And then I told her about the woman who had preached mercy at my church some years before. She never spoke to me after that.
When bad things happen, particularly when people do bad things, it is so easy to be focused on their guilt and responsibility. Moral responsibility is no small matter, and ignoring or overlooking it, has its own risks, which is why Jesus told these parables where culpability is not the issue, since coins and sheep cannot be held responsible for being lost. Jesus does this, I think, to change the direction of attention---away from the guilt of the lost and toward the moral responsibility of searching for and finding the lost. And in the very next verse after today’s lesson, Jesus will begin the story of the Prodigal Son, one of the most beloved of all Jesus’ parables, where there is both guilt and responsibility, and also a father who runs to meet his wayward son as he returns home and celebrates that the lost is now found while the older son stews in his resentment. The story of lostness continues not only in the Bible but also in our own lives.
Dear Friends,
When ministers in our denomination are ordained, there is often a question posed about the prophetic call to speak truth to power, phrased sometimes like this: Do you promise to serve and love the truth as best as you are able to discern it, and speak, if and when necessary, truth to power, always relying on God’s grace? You may recall that the Hebrew prophets were often in the uncomfortable position of telling various leaders, including kings and priests, truths they did not particularly want to hear. It was hardly a comfortable or easy call to be a prophet, and it should come as no surprise that sometimes prophets would try to run away from the call. Jeremiah was so upset with his call to be a prophet that he accused God of abusing him!
Fast forward to our time. Chances are you never heard the name David Kay. I never had either until I read a short article about him by a man named Bob Drogin. Kay was a hero, a man who spoke truth to power, and he dearly paid for this virtue. On January 28, 2004 Kay sat at a desk in a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing room and publicly acknowledged that the intelligence upon which the Iraq War was based was completely wrong. No one else from the White House or the intelligence community had ever admitted the errors, and his admission came as a shock---not because it was wrong, but because it was public.
After the 1991 Gulf War, Kay led one of the United Nations teams hunting for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq. There is a story that he once was in a four day stand off with Iraqi troops when he refused to return evidence he had of illicit nuclear activities. His reputation as a man with guts and intelligence placed him in a Washington job working on the issue of weapons proliferation. American Intelligence would sometimes rely on him to give them the latest scoop on countries considered hostile to American interests.
After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq found no weapons of mass destruction, President Bush put the CIA in charge of the search. George Tenant, head of the CIA, put Kay in charge of the Iraq Survey Group, charged with finding the missing weapons. The Group was composed of scientists, soldiers and even spies, but no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, only the hard truth that the intelligence claiming such weapons existed was based on supposition and lies---no facts whatsoever. At the end of March Kay returned to Washington to confront people with the hard truth. After 9/11 the CIA and other intelligence agencies had failed to connect the dots, but when it came to Iraq, Kay said, “they made up the dots.”
For telling the truth, for speaking truth to power, Kay became an outcast. Hardly anyone would speak with him and some even called him a traitor—behind his back, of course, simply because his words had humiliated the CIA. He was demoted to an office without a secure computer and phone, but after a month he quit. At one point he earned his living by taking wedding photographs. He died this past August 13, and it took the media more than a week to note his death from cancer at the age of 82.
Its “interesting” how other figures in the Iraq War fared. George Tenant, who led the CIA during and after the 9/11 attacks—despite the Agency’s failed intelligence--- was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Paul Wolfowitz, who had been deputy defense secretary and a strong advocate of the Iraq War, became head of the World Bank. But the man who diligently did his homework and discovered the uncomfortable and hard truth became an outcast.
This is the way it often is. Speaking truth to power rarely makes one popular. It can cost heavily, and sometimes one pays with one’s life. Yet when truth is spoken, whether the cost is great or small, the power of its assertion, though it can take years to be heard and accepted, can give birth to hope and change.
I was deeply touched reading some of the comments made by Russians, going to pay their final respects to Gorbachev. They remembered him as a man who spoke the truth. He opened Soviet society in a way that was radically new. People could speak truthfully about government and history---at least as they understood it--- without fearing prison. Of course, now under Putin, speaking truthfully, for example, about the war in Ukraine, can land you a 15 year prison sentence.
While facts always participate in the truth, the truth can never be reduced to facts. Interpretation and imagination always enter into the picture, and even our best endeavor at understanding the truth is often partial and ambiguous. And yet we can and should celebrate those who speak the truth, especially when they are speaking to the powerful, who sometimes have very little interest in knowing what the truth is and how it can impact real lives. Remember what Jesus said, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.” The Southern writer and faithful Roman Catholic, Flannery O’Connor had her own take on what Jesus said: “Know the truth and the truth will make you odd.” And indeed, truth can make you both odd and free.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
When ministers in our denomination are ordained, there is often a question posed about the prophetic call to speak truth to power, phrased sometimes like this: Do you promise to serve and love the truth as best as you are able to discern it, and speak, if and when necessary, truth to power, always relying on God’s grace? You may recall that the Hebrew prophets were often in the uncomfortable position of telling various leaders, including kings and priests, truths they did not particularly want to hear. It was hardly a comfortable or easy call to be a prophet, and it should come as no surprise that sometimes prophets would try to run away from the call. Jeremiah was so upset with his call to be a prophet that he accused God of abusing him!
Fast forward to our time. Chances are you never heard the name David Kay. I never had either until I read a short article about him by a man named Bob Drogin. Kay was a hero, a man who spoke truth to power, and he dearly paid for this virtue. On January 28, 2004 Kay sat at a desk in a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing room and publicly acknowledged that the intelligence upon which the Iraq War was based was completely wrong. No one else from the White House or the intelligence community had ever admitted the errors, and his admission came as a shock---not because it was wrong, but because it was public.
After the 1991 Gulf War, Kay led one of the United Nations teams hunting for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq. There is a story that he once was in a four day stand off with Iraqi troops when he refused to return evidence he had of illicit nuclear activities. His reputation as a man with guts and intelligence placed him in a Washington job working on the issue of weapons proliferation. American Intelligence would sometimes rely on him to give them the latest scoop on countries considered hostile to American interests.
After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq found no weapons of mass destruction, President Bush put the CIA in charge of the search. George Tenant, head of the CIA, put Kay in charge of the Iraq Survey Group, charged with finding the missing weapons. The Group was composed of scientists, soldiers and even spies, but no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, only the hard truth that the intelligence claiming such weapons existed was based on supposition and lies---no facts whatsoever. At the end of March Kay returned to Washington to confront people with the hard truth. After 9/11 the CIA and other intelligence agencies had failed to connect the dots, but when it came to Iraq, Kay said, “they made up the dots.”
For telling the truth, for speaking truth to power, Kay became an outcast. Hardly anyone would speak with him and some even called him a traitor—behind his back, of course, simply because his words had humiliated the CIA. He was demoted to an office without a secure computer and phone, but after a month he quit. At one point he earned his living by taking wedding photographs. He died this past August 13, and it took the media more than a week to note his death from cancer at the age of 82.
Its “interesting” how other figures in the Iraq War fared. George Tenant, who led the CIA during and after the 9/11 attacks—despite the Agency’s failed intelligence--- was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Paul Wolfowitz, who had been deputy defense secretary and a strong advocate of the Iraq War, became head of the World Bank. But the man who diligently did his homework and discovered the uncomfortable and hard truth became an outcast.
This is the way it often is. Speaking truth to power rarely makes one popular. It can cost heavily, and sometimes one pays with one’s life. Yet when truth is spoken, whether the cost is great or small, the power of its assertion, though it can take years to be heard and accepted, can give birth to hope and change.
I was deeply touched reading some of the comments made by Russians, going to pay their final respects to Gorbachev. They remembered him as a man who spoke the truth. He opened Soviet society in a way that was radically new. People could speak truthfully about government and history---at least as they understood it--- without fearing prison. Of course, now under Putin, speaking truthfully, for example, about the war in Ukraine, can land you a 15 year prison sentence.
While facts always participate in the truth, the truth can never be reduced to facts. Interpretation and imagination always enter into the picture, and even our best endeavor at understanding the truth is often partial and ambiguous. And yet we can and should celebrate those who speak the truth, especially when they are speaking to the powerful, who sometimes have very little interest in knowing what the truth is and how it can impact real lives. Remember what Jesus said, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.” The Southern writer and faithful Roman Catholic, Flannery O’Connor had her own take on what Jesus said: “Know the truth and the truth will make you odd.” And indeed, truth can make you both odd and free.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
“Have Leisure and Know I Am God”
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 4, 2022
Psalm 46
Mark 2: 23-28
My youngest daughter, Caitlin, was a French major in college, and she wrote her senior thesis on Antoine de Saint Exupery, a French writer and an aviator, who died in July, 1945, when his plane crashed In the dessert for unknown reasons. He wrote poetry and a number of novels, but is perhaps best known for his wonderful novella, The Little Prince. Caitlin read the book when she was about 10 and it has never lost its power to inspire her.
The Little Prince complains a great deal about grown ups, who don’t seem to understand what is truly important. “We must be patient with them,” he says, “because they do not know how to ask the right questions. When you make a new friend, the adults ask, How old is your friend, and what do his parents do for a living---which is really a question about how much money they make. They never ask what your friend’s voice sounds like, or what games he likes to play or books she likes to read. Work and money are what grown ups care about.
Well, there is a great deal of truth in what the Little Prince says. The adult world does care about work and money, and for good reason, since work is the way most of us support ourselves and since we spend so much time working, it does make sense to find work we enjoy. But something has happened in western culture that is unique: Work has become the single most important way of defining oneself and finding meaning. The question who you are has been reduced to what it is you do for a living. And indeed, as colleges and universities open this week, they are filled with students obsessing about what kind of work they will do, which is supposed to tell them who they are as people and what their worth is or will be.
This is completely in contrast to the biblical world. Status and wealth are not new inventions; they existed in biblical times, but work was not the means of defining status. Almost all wealth was inherited, and Israelite society offered limited opportunities to create new wealth, so people pretty much did what their parents had done. That was what life was like for not only Israel, but also for most people across the globe--- until the modern age. People worked, and they worked hard, but they did not constantly work. There was a tremendous amount of down time, when there was not much work to do. In fact, until industrialization, most people were not usually enslaved to their work.
Nowhere in the Old or New Testament is work understood to be the means of finding or creating meaning, self-definition and worth. In fact, when someone was defined by their work it was because they were pursuing immoral activities, such as prostitution or tax collecting, which were considered both socially and spiritually destructive. But even good and honest work was not considered to be the gateway to deeper meaning in life; God was the gateway, and the nurturing of a relationship with God was believed to require leisure, not the busyness of work. Psalm 46 verse 10, reads in both the New Revised Standard Version as well as the King James, “Be still and know I am God.” But another possible translation, which some scholars prefer is, “Have leisure and know I am God.”
Jesus certainly was at leisure a great deal of the time, withdrawing from his disciples to be alone with God. And by leisure I do not mean idleness. Leisure is understood as a kind of deep, inner silence, when God is listened to and for. It is a time when the distractions of the world are not banging down on our minds for attention. But increasingly we are losing that leisure, because we are hooked on the busyness of activities. And technology hardly helps us to unwind and relax. Even on vacation Americans are working as they text, email and zoom.
Some like to blame our Puritan forebears for an American obsession with work. There is this popular image of the Puritan as a humorless workaholic, disdaining pleasure and leisure. While it is true that Puritans disapproved of idleness, they made a very sharp distinction between leisure and idleness. Idleness was understood as an activity with no purpose beyond the activity---work for the sake of work, or work for the sake of amassing wealth, and the reason it was considered dangerous was because its aim was too low---far, far below the goodness God desires for God’s people, who are made in the image and likeness of God. The Puritans worked hard, and while they were suspicious of idleness, they did believe that leisure was necessary for human beings to flourish.
In today’s lesson we hear Jesus insist that the Sabbath was made for people not people for the Sabbath. In other words, people need sabbath to be fully human, fully alive to God and to others. Christianity begins its week with Sabbath, so even before you do a lick of work, you are given the gift of Sabbath. This is not so much for renewal or refreshment, but rather for being, for worship, for silence, for knowing. The psalmist sang, Be still and know that I am God! And if we are too busy to be still, too obsessed with work or accomplishments, we will not know or recognize God.
Sabbath is leisure, but not the kind of leisure, filled up with fun activities. In leisure we are called to quiet and contemplate, allowing the thought process to take us somewhere beyond the world of everyday problems and tasks. In the book of Job, the Old Testament story of a man, who struggles mightily with the questions Why must I suffer?, there is a line, so easy to overlook spoken by one of Job’s friends, “God gives songs in the middle of the night.” Effortlessly, peacefully the solutions, the words, the ideas, the songs sometimes come not in the bright light of the day, but in the darkness of the night.
No wonder the psalmist sang: “Have leisure and know I am God.” When we attend to the Bible, and the stories of people like Moses, Jacob, and Elijah and of course Jesus, we see that God has this habit of showing up not in the midst of obsessive busyness, but in stillness and quiet. And as the school year begins for many in the coming week, we should know that the Greek word for leisure is skole, in Latin scola, in English school. In other words, the proper understanding of school, the place that is supposed to be where the mind and spirit deeply learn has at its root meaning leisure.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
September 4, 2022
Psalm 46
Mark 2: 23-28
My youngest daughter, Caitlin, was a French major in college, and she wrote her senior thesis on Antoine de Saint Exupery, a French writer and an aviator, who died in July, 1945, when his plane crashed In the dessert for unknown reasons. He wrote poetry and a number of novels, but is perhaps best known for his wonderful novella, The Little Prince. Caitlin read the book when she was about 10 and it has never lost its power to inspire her.
The Little Prince complains a great deal about grown ups, who don’t seem to understand what is truly important. “We must be patient with them,” he says, “because they do not know how to ask the right questions. When you make a new friend, the adults ask, How old is your friend, and what do his parents do for a living---which is really a question about how much money they make. They never ask what your friend’s voice sounds like, or what games he likes to play or books she likes to read. Work and money are what grown ups care about.
Well, there is a great deal of truth in what the Little Prince says. The adult world does care about work and money, and for good reason, since work is the way most of us support ourselves and since we spend so much time working, it does make sense to find work we enjoy. But something has happened in western culture that is unique: Work has become the single most important way of defining oneself and finding meaning. The question who you are has been reduced to what it is you do for a living. And indeed, as colleges and universities open this week, they are filled with students obsessing about what kind of work they will do, which is supposed to tell them who they are as people and what their worth is or will be.
This is completely in contrast to the biblical world. Status and wealth are not new inventions; they existed in biblical times, but work was not the means of defining status. Almost all wealth was inherited, and Israelite society offered limited opportunities to create new wealth, so people pretty much did what their parents had done. That was what life was like for not only Israel, but also for most people across the globe--- until the modern age. People worked, and they worked hard, but they did not constantly work. There was a tremendous amount of down time, when there was not much work to do. In fact, until industrialization, most people were not usually enslaved to their work.
Nowhere in the Old or New Testament is work understood to be the means of finding or creating meaning, self-definition and worth. In fact, when someone was defined by their work it was because they were pursuing immoral activities, such as prostitution or tax collecting, which were considered both socially and spiritually destructive. But even good and honest work was not considered to be the gateway to deeper meaning in life; God was the gateway, and the nurturing of a relationship with God was believed to require leisure, not the busyness of work. Psalm 46 verse 10, reads in both the New Revised Standard Version as well as the King James, “Be still and know I am God.” But another possible translation, which some scholars prefer is, “Have leisure and know I am God.”
Jesus certainly was at leisure a great deal of the time, withdrawing from his disciples to be alone with God. And by leisure I do not mean idleness. Leisure is understood as a kind of deep, inner silence, when God is listened to and for. It is a time when the distractions of the world are not banging down on our minds for attention. But increasingly we are losing that leisure, because we are hooked on the busyness of activities. And technology hardly helps us to unwind and relax. Even on vacation Americans are working as they text, email and zoom.
Some like to blame our Puritan forebears for an American obsession with work. There is this popular image of the Puritan as a humorless workaholic, disdaining pleasure and leisure. While it is true that Puritans disapproved of idleness, they made a very sharp distinction between leisure and idleness. Idleness was understood as an activity with no purpose beyond the activity---work for the sake of work, or work for the sake of amassing wealth, and the reason it was considered dangerous was because its aim was too low---far, far below the goodness God desires for God’s people, who are made in the image and likeness of God. The Puritans worked hard, and while they were suspicious of idleness, they did believe that leisure was necessary for human beings to flourish.
In today’s lesson we hear Jesus insist that the Sabbath was made for people not people for the Sabbath. In other words, people need sabbath to be fully human, fully alive to God and to others. Christianity begins its week with Sabbath, so even before you do a lick of work, you are given the gift of Sabbath. This is not so much for renewal or refreshment, but rather for being, for worship, for silence, for knowing. The psalmist sang, Be still and know that I am God! And if we are too busy to be still, too obsessed with work or accomplishments, we will not know or recognize God.
Sabbath is leisure, but not the kind of leisure, filled up with fun activities. In leisure we are called to quiet and contemplate, allowing the thought process to take us somewhere beyond the world of everyday problems and tasks. In the book of Job, the Old Testament story of a man, who struggles mightily with the questions Why must I suffer?, there is a line, so easy to overlook spoken by one of Job’s friends, “God gives songs in the middle of the night.” Effortlessly, peacefully the solutions, the words, the ideas, the songs sometimes come not in the bright light of the day, but in the darkness of the night.
No wonder the psalmist sang: “Have leisure and know I am God.” When we attend to the Bible, and the stories of people like Moses, Jacob, and Elijah and of course Jesus, we see that God has this habit of showing up not in the midst of obsessive busyness, but in stillness and quiet. And as the school year begins for many in the coming week, we should know that the Greek word for leisure is skole, in Latin scola, in English school. In other words, the proper understanding of school, the place that is supposed to be where the mind and spirit deeply learn has at its root meaning leisure.
September 1, 2022
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, Labor Day was a big deal, just as Memorial Day was. Most people did not work on those days, and stores were always closed. But in these past decades, I have noticed how little attention is actually paid to both holidays. For years now, for example, Wesleyan University begins its first day of classes on Labor Day. I always thought this was outrageous, given the very liberal leaning of the students and faculty. “Why isn’t Wesleyan standing in solidarity with workers?” I asked my husband. Apparently, it is not convenient; it throws off the academic calendar. Never mind that staff and professors object, since schools and day care centers are closed, so finding alternative child care arrangements is a major challenge. But that does not seem to matter. The Registrar controls the academic calendar, and so on campus Labor Day is ignored.
The Industrial Revolution hit its stride in the late 1800’s, and the average worker in the mills, mines and factories worked 12 hour days, seven days a week. Children as young as 5 or 6 also worked long hours at a fraction of adult pay. As manufacturing began to overtake agriculture as the backbone of employment, labor unions began to form and assert their power by marching and striking for better working conditions. On September 5, 1882, there was a famous labor march of 10,000 people from City Hall to Union Square in New York City. It was a quiet march, unlike some labor strikes, which turned violent, one of the most notorious being The Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago when several workers and policemen were killed.
By the late 1800’s there was a push for recognition of a workman’s holiday and some states did institute such recognition. But the federal government would not recognize it until a watershed moment occurred with the Pullman Railway Strike in Chicago. On May 11, 1894, workers at Pullman went on strike to protest the low wages and the termination of union representatives. Over a month later, on June 26 The American Railway Union, led by the socialist, Eugene Debs, called for a boycott of ALL Pullman Railway cars, which crippled the nation. To break the strike, the federal government sent troops into Chicago, resulting in more violence and death. Congress immediately recognized the need for action to quell the violence and send the message to American workers that they were valued, and so it passed a law, designating Labor Day a legal holiday, the first Monday in September. President Grover Cleveland signed it on June 28, 1894.
Today we are a long way from the original spirit of Labor Day, which was about temperate, just and safe working conditions. There are now no rituals to celebrate the day, just cook outs with family and friends. For most people Labor Day is the unofficial end of the summer, just as Memorial Day inaugurates it. Some people feel we could use a reinvigoration of Labor Day, since technology means people are constantly connected to their work. Even on vacation people are reading emails, texting colleagues, and attending meetings via Zoom. Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, people are working more hours not less.
The world of work in the biblical world was nothing like this. People sometimes have the mistaken notion that without technology people worked all the time. But this was definitely NOT the case. There was a great deal of downtime, when not much had to be done, especially for men. This is what allowed Jesus’ disciples to leave home and follow him. They were not absent from their homes all the time, and scholars point out that when crops needed to be planted or harvested and fishing needed doing, they would return to home and do what was required. Consider the scenes of Jesus’ teaching, when crowds would gather around him and attend to what he had to say. People had the time to sit on a grassy knoll and listen to his words. They were not working all the time---though women probably had less free time, because they were the ones who had to fetch water, bake bread and care for the children every day.
I have no idea what Jesus would think of the labor movement, but I do have an idea that the labor movement would not have approved of some of Jesus labor practices---like the story of the workers in the vineyard, who were hired last and worked but a few hours and then received the same wages as the ones who worked all day. (Matthew 20: 1-16) But then the story is really not so much about labor as it is about a God, who is happy to receive even those who show up late. I just hope God has a good plan for those who do not show up at all.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
When I was growing up, Labor Day was a big deal, just as Memorial Day was. Most people did not work on those days, and stores were always closed. But in these past decades, I have noticed how little attention is actually paid to both holidays. For years now, for example, Wesleyan University begins its first day of classes on Labor Day. I always thought this was outrageous, given the very liberal leaning of the students and faculty. “Why isn’t Wesleyan standing in solidarity with workers?” I asked my husband. Apparently, it is not convenient; it throws off the academic calendar. Never mind that staff and professors object, since schools and day care centers are closed, so finding alternative child care arrangements is a major challenge. But that does not seem to matter. The Registrar controls the academic calendar, and so on campus Labor Day is ignored.
The Industrial Revolution hit its stride in the late 1800’s, and the average worker in the mills, mines and factories worked 12 hour days, seven days a week. Children as young as 5 or 6 also worked long hours at a fraction of adult pay. As manufacturing began to overtake agriculture as the backbone of employment, labor unions began to form and assert their power by marching and striking for better working conditions. On September 5, 1882, there was a famous labor march of 10,000 people from City Hall to Union Square in New York City. It was a quiet march, unlike some labor strikes, which turned violent, one of the most notorious being The Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago when several workers and policemen were killed.
By the late 1800’s there was a push for recognition of a workman’s holiday and some states did institute such recognition. But the federal government would not recognize it until a watershed moment occurred with the Pullman Railway Strike in Chicago. On May 11, 1894, workers at Pullman went on strike to protest the low wages and the termination of union representatives. Over a month later, on June 26 The American Railway Union, led by the socialist, Eugene Debs, called for a boycott of ALL Pullman Railway cars, which crippled the nation. To break the strike, the federal government sent troops into Chicago, resulting in more violence and death. Congress immediately recognized the need for action to quell the violence and send the message to American workers that they were valued, and so it passed a law, designating Labor Day a legal holiday, the first Monday in September. President Grover Cleveland signed it on June 28, 1894.
Today we are a long way from the original spirit of Labor Day, which was about temperate, just and safe working conditions. There are now no rituals to celebrate the day, just cook outs with family and friends. For most people Labor Day is the unofficial end of the summer, just as Memorial Day inaugurates it. Some people feel we could use a reinvigoration of Labor Day, since technology means people are constantly connected to their work. Even on vacation people are reading emails, texting colleagues, and attending meetings via Zoom. Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, people are working more hours not less.
The world of work in the biblical world was nothing like this. People sometimes have the mistaken notion that without technology people worked all the time. But this was definitely NOT the case. There was a great deal of downtime, when not much had to be done, especially for men. This is what allowed Jesus’ disciples to leave home and follow him. They were not absent from their homes all the time, and scholars point out that when crops needed to be planted or harvested and fishing needed doing, they would return to home and do what was required. Consider the scenes of Jesus’ teaching, when crowds would gather around him and attend to what he had to say. People had the time to sit on a grassy knoll and listen to his words. They were not working all the time---though women probably had less free time, because they were the ones who had to fetch water, bake bread and care for the children every day.
I have no idea what Jesus would think of the labor movement, but I do have an idea that the labor movement would not have approved of some of Jesus labor practices---like the story of the workers in the vineyard, who were hired last and worked but a few hours and then received the same wages as the ones who worked all day. (Matthew 20: 1-16) But then the story is really not so much about labor as it is about a God, who is happy to receive even those who show up late. I just hope God has a good plan for those who do not show up at all.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Humiliation and Humility
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville
August 28, 2022
Luke 14: 1-14
There is a famous painting by Mary Cassatt, a French Impressionist painter, who although born in the United States, did much of her work in Paris, because as a female artist she was better accepted in France than in the United States. Her painting of 1878, The Opera, shows a woman in a black dress, holding some binoculars, directly positioned toward the stage, while a man across the theatre, leaning out of his opera box, is obviously gazing at this woman. While she is focused on the opera, he is focused on her. So, we have here two observers, gazing for different purposes, not unlike what we have in this story from Luke. Jesus was being closely watched by the Pharisees, but so too was Jesus closely watching as Pharisees, lawyers, and other guests took their seats at the table.
So, why were the Pharisees observing Jesus? Most likely to catch him doing something wrong--- like ignoring the law. And Jesus was watching them to see what kind of lesson he could teach. You might recall from last week’s gospel that Jesus had healed a woman on the Sabbath, who had been bent over for many years, and he was criticized for working on the Sabbath. Now once again on the Sabbath, he will heal another person, but this time no one will dare say anything to him. And then Jesus proceeds to teach them a lesson. But the lesson is not a very polite one. Remember, Jesus had been invited to the home of this Pharisee for dinner, and what did he do? He proceeded to remind them of dinner etiquette, when the most important guest would come late or at least last, and that person would be given a seat at the head of the table. Everyone knew where the honored place was and who should sit there, and people would try to get as close to that guest as possible. Status was the name of the game, and the closer one sits to status, the higher one’s own status will be---or so people like to believe.
But Jesus reminded his listeners that the status game is not what it is all about. Not only did he remind them of the rules, he then proceeded to criticize the guest list, telling his host that he should reach beyond status and invite the least of these--- the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. You see, physical infirmities in Jesus’ day were often viewed as a sign of divine disfavor or punishment, and poverty was often understood in the same way. So, here Jesus is, an invited guest, and he dared to publicly call out his host for inviting the wrong kind of people. Quite frankly, it bordered on a public humiliation. But humiliation was not his intent. Jesus was after humility.
Humility is a virtue, but humiliation is something else. Consider times in your life you have been humiliated, perhaps even publicly humiliated. Were those situations really good teachers? Let me give you an example from my ministry when I was publicly humiliated. I had been ordained for three years or so, and I was conducting a wedding service for a couple at a very posh country club on Long Island. The bride came from a Roman Catholic background and the groom from a Jewish one, but neither were religious, yet they felt it was important that the ceremony evoke the seriousness of the commitment they were making, and so they wanted an ordained person. Well, at the time of the wedding I was about 6 months pregnant with my fourth child, and as the ceremony was just beginning, the great grandmother of the bride, an old world Italian Catholic, stood up and said as loudly as she could, “Bad enough she is a woman and a Protestant, but a pregnant one, that is disgusting,” and she then marched out along with about 10 others, who felt they could not defy the family’s matriarch. The bride burst into tears and the groom stood there, looking as if he were about to vomit.
I felt completely humiliated, though I rationally knew that the humiliation belonged to the great grandmother and not to me. So, I took a deep breath and in a very shaky voice said, “We are about to perform a ceremony that celebrates love, and love, when it truly is love, expands, and deepens us. It neither diminishes nor humiliates, so let us proceed by celebrating love. We did proceed, but I can tell you that for most people, including the bride, the ceremony was ruined. And I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. I did not want to hear anyone’s apologies or explanations. That is how humiliation works its awful power, even when we know we have done NOTHING to deserve the humiliation.
Now let’s consider an experience of humility that did not involve me at all. It is something I recently read about, which happened 20 years ago, when three young men, then in their mid twenties, were on a wilderness trip to Alaska. They had just been dropped off on this relatively deserted island, and as the boat that brought them to their destination chugged away, one of the men remembers this sinking feeling in the pit of his gut as he suddenly deeply felt their aloneness. As the darkness of the night descended, with no warning at all, a tree fell on one of the men, pinning him to the ground in a cold puddle of water. Now the danger was not only Internal bleeding but also hypothermia. Cell phones were useless, so they radioed for help and sent up flaccid flares.
One of the young men had been an English major in college, and he had two different professors, who required the class to memorize poems. “You never know,” his professors said, “when these words might save your life.” And so, very calmly he began to repeat poem after poem from the English language’s greatest writers: Blake, Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Auden, the latter’s words suddenly becoming more than real as he gazed at the night sky:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
And there was another poem he could not remember, only one line that clung to his mind: Why are we not better than we are?
On and on he went, sometimes repeating the poems. The ending of the story was a good one; the young man was rescued, and he did not lose any body parts. Years later, when the three would have their reunions, the saved man said, “You were so calm with your voice repeating the words from some of the most beautiful poems in the English language that my own fears were calmed, and I could allow myself to believe that help would come.”
And the man who repeated the poems said something like this. “We could do nothing to remove the tree. We were imprisoned by our inaction, seeminlgy completely helpless, but I did what I could do. And while reciting those poems, the one feeling that overwhelmed my heart, head and spirit was humility. Not being able to do much, I drew out the one thing I could do, and I think it helped all three of us. We were all humbled by the circumstances in which we found ourselves---the vastness of nature’s power to bring someone to the ground and the dependence we would have on others to save us. It truly was a religious experience, and humility was both the teacher and the lesson.” I don’t think Jesus could have put it any better.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville
August 28, 2022
Luke 14: 1-14
There is a famous painting by Mary Cassatt, a French Impressionist painter, who although born in the United States, did much of her work in Paris, because as a female artist she was better accepted in France than in the United States. Her painting of 1878, The Opera, shows a woman in a black dress, holding some binoculars, directly positioned toward the stage, while a man across the theatre, leaning out of his opera box, is obviously gazing at this woman. While she is focused on the opera, he is focused on her. So, we have here two observers, gazing for different purposes, not unlike what we have in this story from Luke. Jesus was being closely watched by the Pharisees, but so too was Jesus closely watching as Pharisees, lawyers, and other guests took their seats at the table.
So, why were the Pharisees observing Jesus? Most likely to catch him doing something wrong--- like ignoring the law. And Jesus was watching them to see what kind of lesson he could teach. You might recall from last week’s gospel that Jesus had healed a woman on the Sabbath, who had been bent over for many years, and he was criticized for working on the Sabbath. Now once again on the Sabbath, he will heal another person, but this time no one will dare say anything to him. And then Jesus proceeds to teach them a lesson. But the lesson is not a very polite one. Remember, Jesus had been invited to the home of this Pharisee for dinner, and what did he do? He proceeded to remind them of dinner etiquette, when the most important guest would come late or at least last, and that person would be given a seat at the head of the table. Everyone knew where the honored place was and who should sit there, and people would try to get as close to that guest as possible. Status was the name of the game, and the closer one sits to status, the higher one’s own status will be---or so people like to believe.
But Jesus reminded his listeners that the status game is not what it is all about. Not only did he remind them of the rules, he then proceeded to criticize the guest list, telling his host that he should reach beyond status and invite the least of these--- the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. You see, physical infirmities in Jesus’ day were often viewed as a sign of divine disfavor or punishment, and poverty was often understood in the same way. So, here Jesus is, an invited guest, and he dared to publicly call out his host for inviting the wrong kind of people. Quite frankly, it bordered on a public humiliation. But humiliation was not his intent. Jesus was after humility.
Humility is a virtue, but humiliation is something else. Consider times in your life you have been humiliated, perhaps even publicly humiliated. Were those situations really good teachers? Let me give you an example from my ministry when I was publicly humiliated. I had been ordained for three years or so, and I was conducting a wedding service for a couple at a very posh country club on Long Island. The bride came from a Roman Catholic background and the groom from a Jewish one, but neither were religious, yet they felt it was important that the ceremony evoke the seriousness of the commitment they were making, and so they wanted an ordained person. Well, at the time of the wedding I was about 6 months pregnant with my fourth child, and as the ceremony was just beginning, the great grandmother of the bride, an old world Italian Catholic, stood up and said as loudly as she could, “Bad enough she is a woman and a Protestant, but a pregnant one, that is disgusting,” and she then marched out along with about 10 others, who felt they could not defy the family’s matriarch. The bride burst into tears and the groom stood there, looking as if he were about to vomit.
I felt completely humiliated, though I rationally knew that the humiliation belonged to the great grandmother and not to me. So, I took a deep breath and in a very shaky voice said, “We are about to perform a ceremony that celebrates love, and love, when it truly is love, expands, and deepens us. It neither diminishes nor humiliates, so let us proceed by celebrating love. We did proceed, but I can tell you that for most people, including the bride, the ceremony was ruined. And I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. I did not want to hear anyone’s apologies or explanations. That is how humiliation works its awful power, even when we know we have done NOTHING to deserve the humiliation.
Now let’s consider an experience of humility that did not involve me at all. It is something I recently read about, which happened 20 years ago, when three young men, then in their mid twenties, were on a wilderness trip to Alaska. They had just been dropped off on this relatively deserted island, and as the boat that brought them to their destination chugged away, one of the men remembers this sinking feeling in the pit of his gut as he suddenly deeply felt their aloneness. As the darkness of the night descended, with no warning at all, a tree fell on one of the men, pinning him to the ground in a cold puddle of water. Now the danger was not only Internal bleeding but also hypothermia. Cell phones were useless, so they radioed for help and sent up flaccid flares.
One of the young men had been an English major in college, and he had two different professors, who required the class to memorize poems. “You never know,” his professors said, “when these words might save your life.” And so, very calmly he began to repeat poem after poem from the English language’s greatest writers: Blake, Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Auden, the latter’s words suddenly becoming more than real as he gazed at the night sky:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
And there was another poem he could not remember, only one line that clung to his mind: Why are we not better than we are?
On and on he went, sometimes repeating the poems. The ending of the story was a good one; the young man was rescued, and he did not lose any body parts. Years later, when the three would have their reunions, the saved man said, “You were so calm with your voice repeating the words from some of the most beautiful poems in the English language that my own fears were calmed, and I could allow myself to believe that help would come.”
And the man who repeated the poems said something like this. “We could do nothing to remove the tree. We were imprisoned by our inaction, seeminlgy completely helpless, but I did what I could do. And while reciting those poems, the one feeling that overwhelmed my heart, head and spirit was humility. Not being able to do much, I drew out the one thing I could do, and I think it helped all three of us. We were all humbled by the circumstances in which we found ourselves---the vastness of nature’s power to bring someone to the ground and the dependence we would have on others to save us. It truly was a religious experience, and humility was both the teacher and the lesson.” I don’t think Jesus could have put it any better.
Landscapes of the Sacred
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
August 21, 2022
Someone once said, “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” Indeed, place, space, geography: it does help to make us who we are, because we human beings tend to identify ourselves with particular places. Our human history and personal experiences happen in certain spaces, and we are who we are, (at least in part) because of the places we have been and the experiences we have had there. Even in a mobile country like ours, where people move around, leaving multiple homes and places behind, the sense of place still haunts us. We never truly escape the places from which we have come, even as we claim new places, where our personal stories continue to unfold. “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.”
And the same is true for the religious and spiritual life. I was thinking about this in regard to Jeremiah, one of Israel’s great prophets, who had very little interest in doing God’s work. That is the point of our lesson today: It was not Jeremiah’s idea to be a prophet; it was God’s, and though Jeremiah tried to resist many times throughout his life, he did not manage to escape God’s call. And I wonder if that had something to do with the actual landscape in which Jeremiah lived.
I have been to Israel twice in my life, and I will tell you how moved I was by the landscape---especially the desert. This one afternoon the group I was with (Jews and Christians on a pilgrimage together) were driven in jeeps through the desert. I had this preconceived notion that the desert was this flat expanse of sand, an uninterrupted sameness going on for what looked like eternity. But that was not how it was. The terrain was pockmarked by huge sand hills and rocks, some of them like giant sculptures, jutting out of the ground toward the heavens. Up and down, we drove, careening around rocks, while the sun beat down before beginning its descent into evening. Hot in the daylight, but cold at night, the desert’s temperatures creep up and then make a precipitous descent as the sun deserts the sky.
What did this landscape mean for the people who helped to give birth to the prophetic imagination, which boldly criticizes the people for their failure to embrace justice and mercy. Such scathing critique was unique in world history. Jeremiah thought it was all God’s idea, but why did he hear and listen? Many people are deaf to God’s word---maybe most people are. So, how was it that Jeremiah could bear to hear God’s words of judgment? Was there something in the very landscape itself that unstopped his ears and opened his eyes to the grandeur of God’s demands? The place he came from had its divided loyalties between Israel to the north and Judah to the South. And Jeremiah too felt divided, a man very resistant to God’s call even as he wanted to live a normal life.
Jeremiah’s God was tough and demanding, not unlike the landscape of the desert with its shifting sands and jagged rocks, whose colors glisten in the sunlight only to become enemy hurdles that can bury and rip you apart as the light races from the sky. The sounds of the desert are eerie, sometimes frightening as the winds howl and animals roam at night, giving you the sense that in this place humans do not rule. Perhaps that is why Jeremiah heard and listened. Perhaps he felt he had no choice but to hear and respond.
The stories of our religious past happened in certain places. Particular geographies have left their marks on the men and women whose faith was forged in a Middle Eastern desert or in a colonial New England village. Our religious heritage, for example, has been heavily influenced by the theology of John Calvin, who the generation after Martin Luther And one of Calvin’s main theological points, which was so central to the Puritans, who settled New England, was the inscrutability of God, the magisterial mystery of God. Over and over again, Calvin intoned that God remains beyond anything we can think or imagine. There is a hidden quality about God, which cannot be grasped---except as God chooses to reveal God self and accommodate God-self to the limitations of human knowledge and understanding. Though Calvin was French--- he would have been burned at the stake had he remained in Paris--- most of his reforming work was done in the city of Geneva. Geneva was considered by the reformed Protestants the new Jerusalem, not unlike the way Puritans would later consider their own colony in New England as the new Jerusalem, the city on a hill as John Winthrop called it.
Geneva, the seat of reformed theology in Europe, where Calvin and his elders ruled, is a lovely city, sitting on the lake, surrounded by mountains whose tops, often covered by dense clouds, push their way toward the heavens. It is stunning, but a full panoramic view is often obscured, until the clouds clear, and then how magnificent the landscape appears. You can then see what before your eyes were blinded to. Do we really think there was no relationship between the geography of place and the reformed theology that preached the inscrutability of God? “Show me the landscape where you live, and I will tell you who you are.”
I recently read about a professor, who years ago, had taught a class of retired American history teachers, a highly motivated group of men and women, still trying to expand their understanding of what they had taught for so many years. And the professor asked them if there were any places they had visited, where they had been met by something big, so big they might even dare to name the experience holy. And the names of places came: Lenin’s Tomb, a bombed out street in Berlin, the Hiroshima Peace Park, the Battlefield at Gettysburg, a patch of forested land in Normandy, France. All these places were the sites where people were encountered by something which forever changed them.
The man, for example, who had named Lenin’s Tomb, talked about his own father, a Russian, who had been a committed communist until Stalin came to power and murdered 20 million Soviet citizens. “I always had this deep distrust of my father,” the man said, “because I could never understand his embrace of communism. Years later, after my father was dead, I made a pilgrimage to Russia and stood alone at Lenin’s Tomb, where I suddenly received a gift, a recognition of my father’s deep and keen idealism and then the terrible pain of betrayal and disappointment he lived with for the rest of his life. Though he immigrated to the United States, where he met my mother and raised five kids in a nation that was good to him, he never felt home here. This was never really his place, and when I stood at Lenin’s Tomb, somehow, I understood. But I couldn’t have figured it out on my own. It was a gift, given to me, and in a strange sort of way Lenin’s Tomb has become for me a holy place, where I was connected to my father in a new and deeper way.”
Another man told of his experiences in Berlin after the Second World War.
“I hated the Germans,” he confessed. “I had recently helped to liberate a concentration camp, and when I finally got to Berlin, I wanted to see the whole city smashed and the population decimated. I was filled with fury and hatred. And then, late one afternoon, walking alone on this deserted, bombed out street, I saw a little boy, not more than 5 or 6, wandering alone and lost. As I came closer, I noticed that his face wore an expression beyond terror, as if he had seen far more than any child can bear to see, and suddenly this deep compassion overwhelmed me, and all sense of self righteousness disappeared. I met my own guilt in the face of this child, and I knew that before God I was guilty too. I wept, because I was found by something I was not looking for.”
Jeremiah was not looking for God, but God found Jeremiah. Maybe on some level, we all have our own wildernesses or deserts to cross, the places in which we wander, sometimes lost, sometimes found. We have this illusion that our story is completely ours to write, but people like Jeremiah remind us that God sometimes writes or at least edits our stories. We all have places in our lives that help to make us who we are. “Show me the landscape where you live, and I will tell you who you are.
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
August 21, 2022
Someone once said, “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” Indeed, place, space, geography: it does help to make us who we are, because we human beings tend to identify ourselves with particular places. Our human history and personal experiences happen in certain spaces, and we are who we are, (at least in part) because of the places we have been and the experiences we have had there. Even in a mobile country like ours, where people move around, leaving multiple homes and places behind, the sense of place still haunts us. We never truly escape the places from which we have come, even as we claim new places, where our personal stories continue to unfold. “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.”
And the same is true for the religious and spiritual life. I was thinking about this in regard to Jeremiah, one of Israel’s great prophets, who had very little interest in doing God’s work. That is the point of our lesson today: It was not Jeremiah’s idea to be a prophet; it was God’s, and though Jeremiah tried to resist many times throughout his life, he did not manage to escape God’s call. And I wonder if that had something to do with the actual landscape in which Jeremiah lived.
I have been to Israel twice in my life, and I will tell you how moved I was by the landscape---especially the desert. This one afternoon the group I was with (Jews and Christians on a pilgrimage together) were driven in jeeps through the desert. I had this preconceived notion that the desert was this flat expanse of sand, an uninterrupted sameness going on for what looked like eternity. But that was not how it was. The terrain was pockmarked by huge sand hills and rocks, some of them like giant sculptures, jutting out of the ground toward the heavens. Up and down, we drove, careening around rocks, while the sun beat down before beginning its descent into evening. Hot in the daylight, but cold at night, the desert’s temperatures creep up and then make a precipitous descent as the sun deserts the sky.
What did this landscape mean for the people who helped to give birth to the prophetic imagination, which boldly criticizes the people for their failure to embrace justice and mercy. Such scathing critique was unique in world history. Jeremiah thought it was all God’s idea, but why did he hear and listen? Many people are deaf to God’s word---maybe most people are. So, how was it that Jeremiah could bear to hear God’s words of judgment? Was there something in the very landscape itself that unstopped his ears and opened his eyes to the grandeur of God’s demands? The place he came from had its divided loyalties between Israel to the north and Judah to the South. And Jeremiah too felt divided, a man very resistant to God’s call even as he wanted to live a normal life.
Jeremiah’s God was tough and demanding, not unlike the landscape of the desert with its shifting sands and jagged rocks, whose colors glisten in the sunlight only to become enemy hurdles that can bury and rip you apart as the light races from the sky. The sounds of the desert are eerie, sometimes frightening as the winds howl and animals roam at night, giving you the sense that in this place humans do not rule. Perhaps that is why Jeremiah heard and listened. Perhaps he felt he had no choice but to hear and respond.
The stories of our religious past happened in certain places. Particular geographies have left their marks on the men and women whose faith was forged in a Middle Eastern desert or in a colonial New England village. Our religious heritage, for example, has been heavily influenced by the theology of John Calvin, who the generation after Martin Luther And one of Calvin’s main theological points, which was so central to the Puritans, who settled New England, was the inscrutability of God, the magisterial mystery of God. Over and over again, Calvin intoned that God remains beyond anything we can think or imagine. There is a hidden quality about God, which cannot be grasped---except as God chooses to reveal God self and accommodate God-self to the limitations of human knowledge and understanding. Though Calvin was French--- he would have been burned at the stake had he remained in Paris--- most of his reforming work was done in the city of Geneva. Geneva was considered by the reformed Protestants the new Jerusalem, not unlike the way Puritans would later consider their own colony in New England as the new Jerusalem, the city on a hill as John Winthrop called it.
Geneva, the seat of reformed theology in Europe, where Calvin and his elders ruled, is a lovely city, sitting on the lake, surrounded by mountains whose tops, often covered by dense clouds, push their way toward the heavens. It is stunning, but a full panoramic view is often obscured, until the clouds clear, and then how magnificent the landscape appears. You can then see what before your eyes were blinded to. Do we really think there was no relationship between the geography of place and the reformed theology that preached the inscrutability of God? “Show me the landscape where you live, and I will tell you who you are.”
I recently read about a professor, who years ago, had taught a class of retired American history teachers, a highly motivated group of men and women, still trying to expand their understanding of what they had taught for so many years. And the professor asked them if there were any places they had visited, where they had been met by something big, so big they might even dare to name the experience holy. And the names of places came: Lenin’s Tomb, a bombed out street in Berlin, the Hiroshima Peace Park, the Battlefield at Gettysburg, a patch of forested land in Normandy, France. All these places were the sites where people were encountered by something which forever changed them.
The man, for example, who had named Lenin’s Tomb, talked about his own father, a Russian, who had been a committed communist until Stalin came to power and murdered 20 million Soviet citizens. “I always had this deep distrust of my father,” the man said, “because I could never understand his embrace of communism. Years later, after my father was dead, I made a pilgrimage to Russia and stood alone at Lenin’s Tomb, where I suddenly received a gift, a recognition of my father’s deep and keen idealism and then the terrible pain of betrayal and disappointment he lived with for the rest of his life. Though he immigrated to the United States, where he met my mother and raised five kids in a nation that was good to him, he never felt home here. This was never really his place, and when I stood at Lenin’s Tomb, somehow, I understood. But I couldn’t have figured it out on my own. It was a gift, given to me, and in a strange sort of way Lenin’s Tomb has become for me a holy place, where I was connected to my father in a new and deeper way.”
Another man told of his experiences in Berlin after the Second World War.
“I hated the Germans,” he confessed. “I had recently helped to liberate a concentration camp, and when I finally got to Berlin, I wanted to see the whole city smashed and the population decimated. I was filled with fury and hatred. And then, late one afternoon, walking alone on this deserted, bombed out street, I saw a little boy, not more than 5 or 6, wandering alone and lost. As I came closer, I noticed that his face wore an expression beyond terror, as if he had seen far more than any child can bear to see, and suddenly this deep compassion overwhelmed me, and all sense of self righteousness disappeared. I met my own guilt in the face of this child, and I knew that before God I was guilty too. I wept, because I was found by something I was not looking for.”
Jeremiah was not looking for God, but God found Jeremiah. Maybe on some level, we all have our own wildernesses or deserts to cross, the places in which we wander, sometimes lost, sometimes found. We have this illusion that our story is completely ours to write, but people like Jeremiah remind us that God sometimes writes or at least edits our stories. We all have places in our lives that help to make us who we are. “Show me the landscape where you live, and I will tell you who you are.
August 24, 2022
Dear Friends,
The Russian writer, Dostoevsky, once said, “Beauty will save the world.” With some hesitation the Church has agreed, which is why it has theologically affirmed that God is beautiful and through the centuries has invested in beauty, including beautiful buildings, beautiful sculpture, beautiful paintings and stained glass. The Beautiful has been a way of communicating God.
And so, when I came across an article about refugee Ukrainian artists in Paris, who are trying to inspire compassion for the Ukrainian people through the beauty of their art, it made complete sense to me. The Kiev City Ballet, for example, is exiled in France, having arrived in Paris for a tour just a few days before the war in Ukraine began. They remained in Paris along with many other Ukrainian artists, who are trying to use their art as a way of humanizing the conflict. They realize that it is not productive to continue to show the same images of war, because people simply will turn it off. The Cultural Center of Ukraine in France has a goal of offering a positive image of Ukraine to the French people for the purpose of building a lasting link between the two nations. And so, to that end many different workshops and programs are offered. On the top floor of the Center a Ukrainian woman plays a piano and sings traditional Ukrainian folk songs for a small audience. Before the war came, the songs to her were simply delightful songs, but now the songs are a way of helping her to process her emotions about the war, just as many of the ballet dancers from Kiev say the same thing about their dancing. Dancers dance and singers sing, and by doing so they are helped to realize what it is they are actually feeling.
There is a traditional Ukrainian painting style, Petrykivka, which was placed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. Used to decorate the facades of buildings with symbolic images like trees or sunflowers, the style is the subject of workshops offered at the Cultural Center. One woman, who came from Ukraine to Paris eight years ago, had never tried to paint before, but with the war going on in Ukraine, she said she needs to feel connected to the Ukrainian people and painting in this style helps her to achieve that. As a child she grew up surrounded by this kind of work, and now as an adult, who cannot go home, she says the painting allows her to feel a deep kinship with her home.
The Cultural Center recently asked Ukrainian artists to express their emotions about the war in a mural on one of the Center’s walls in partnership with students from the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. The atmosphere was politically charged and there were many French people, who did believe at least some of the Russian propaganda about the war. That was difficult for the Ukrainian artists to accept and all the artists, Ukrainian and French, had to work hard to find a balance between pure art and hidden messages. Perhaps one of the lessons learned is that pure art is rarely ever completely pure. No one comes to art without some formed perspective on particular issues, including war and national identity.
There is another project called KidsDrawPeace4Ukraine. News organizations around the world call on young persons to create art that communicates peace and good will for the children of Ukraine. The drawings are posted on social media and children from all over the world have participated. Recently, the project asked refugee children to create their own images and share them online. Some people noted that the images of the Ukrainian and French children were really not so different, though the experiences of the two groups certainly differed. There is a power and universality in art that sometimes transcends national identity and experience.
The French government is trying hard to show support for exiled Ukrainian artists by pledging monetary support. So too has the French artistic community worked to give its support. There have been televised programs of Ukrainian and French artists and dancers performing together to raise funds.
With the war effort in Ukraine requiring so much military aid and support from the West, it might seem an excess for Ukrainian ART to assume such a prominent presence in Paris. Some might feel that this is not the important place to put one’s energies and commitment. But human beings are art making creatures. Consider the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which show our human ancestors expressing themselves through art. Art is one of the endeavors that makes us human, and though Jesus did not speak about art, his stories and parables were certainly an art form. And the Church throughout its history has had the wisdom to realize that art helps us to tell and understand God’s story in a fuller way.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The Russian writer, Dostoevsky, once said, “Beauty will save the world.” With some hesitation the Church has agreed, which is why it has theologically affirmed that God is beautiful and through the centuries has invested in beauty, including beautiful buildings, beautiful sculpture, beautiful paintings and stained glass. The Beautiful has been a way of communicating God.
And so, when I came across an article about refugee Ukrainian artists in Paris, who are trying to inspire compassion for the Ukrainian people through the beauty of their art, it made complete sense to me. The Kiev City Ballet, for example, is exiled in France, having arrived in Paris for a tour just a few days before the war in Ukraine began. They remained in Paris along with many other Ukrainian artists, who are trying to use their art as a way of humanizing the conflict. They realize that it is not productive to continue to show the same images of war, because people simply will turn it off. The Cultural Center of Ukraine in France has a goal of offering a positive image of Ukraine to the French people for the purpose of building a lasting link between the two nations. And so, to that end many different workshops and programs are offered. On the top floor of the Center a Ukrainian woman plays a piano and sings traditional Ukrainian folk songs for a small audience. Before the war came, the songs to her were simply delightful songs, but now the songs are a way of helping her to process her emotions about the war, just as many of the ballet dancers from Kiev say the same thing about their dancing. Dancers dance and singers sing, and by doing so they are helped to realize what it is they are actually feeling.
There is a traditional Ukrainian painting style, Petrykivka, which was placed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. Used to decorate the facades of buildings with symbolic images like trees or sunflowers, the style is the subject of workshops offered at the Cultural Center. One woman, who came from Ukraine to Paris eight years ago, had never tried to paint before, but with the war going on in Ukraine, she said she needs to feel connected to the Ukrainian people and painting in this style helps her to achieve that. As a child she grew up surrounded by this kind of work, and now as an adult, who cannot go home, she says the painting allows her to feel a deep kinship with her home.
The Cultural Center recently asked Ukrainian artists to express their emotions about the war in a mural on one of the Center’s walls in partnership with students from the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. The atmosphere was politically charged and there were many French people, who did believe at least some of the Russian propaganda about the war. That was difficult for the Ukrainian artists to accept and all the artists, Ukrainian and French, had to work hard to find a balance between pure art and hidden messages. Perhaps one of the lessons learned is that pure art is rarely ever completely pure. No one comes to art without some formed perspective on particular issues, including war and national identity.
There is another project called KidsDrawPeace4Ukraine. News organizations around the world call on young persons to create art that communicates peace and good will for the children of Ukraine. The drawings are posted on social media and children from all over the world have participated. Recently, the project asked refugee children to create their own images and share them online. Some people noted that the images of the Ukrainian and French children were really not so different, though the experiences of the two groups certainly differed. There is a power and universality in art that sometimes transcends national identity and experience.
The French government is trying hard to show support for exiled Ukrainian artists by pledging monetary support. So too has the French artistic community worked to give its support. There have been televised programs of Ukrainian and French artists and dancers performing together to raise funds.
With the war effort in Ukraine requiring so much military aid and support from the West, it might seem an excess for Ukrainian ART to assume such a prominent presence in Paris. Some might feel that this is not the important place to put one’s energies and commitment. But human beings are art making creatures. Consider the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which show our human ancestors expressing themselves through art. Art is one of the endeavors that makes us human, and though Jesus did not speak about art, his stories and parables were certainly an art form. And the Church throughout its history has had the wisdom to realize that art helps us to tell and understand God’s story in a fuller way.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
August 18, 2022
Dear Friends,
Last week I watched a movie called, The Resistance Banker, the story of two brothers, Gigs and Walraven van Hal, who during the Second World War, used their banking skills to illegally fund the Resistance in Amsterdam. They began by funneling money to what looked like on paper a charitable fund, but as the story progressed, Walraven became even more deeply involved in theft and forgery to defeat the Nazis, help the Jews and others, who were suffering under the totalitarian regime. My daughter tells me I am obsessed with the Nazis, but I tell her time and time again that I am drawn to stories of human courage, and certainly fighting against the Nazis involved tremendous courage. This story was kept hidden for years. The Bank did not want it made known how effectively illegal monetary activities were undertaken, even if the actions were on behalf of a noble cause. Finally in 2010 a statue of Walraven, who was martyred, was placed in front of the State National Bank in Amsterdam, and the full story became public, including the making of a movie.
It is important, even vitally essential, for us to have heroes and heroines, people who can inspire us with their courage, intelligence, and commitment to the good, sometimes at great risk to their own lives. A recently retired high school history teacher noted that over the past twenty years of her career, she noticed a loss of heroes in her high school students. ‘They are impressed by celebrity,” she said, “but they don’t seem to have people, who really inspire with their example of strong moral attributes.”
I have always had heroes, and one of my earliest (at about the age of 4) was The Lone Ranger. He always was on the side of the good, and I loved the end of each episode, when he was riding away after saving someone from disaster, and the person would ask, “Who is that masked man?” And the same answer would come each week, whose words I would enthusiastically repeat, “Why don’t you know? That’s the Lone Ranger!”
Another one of my heroes is Frances Perkins. I knew about her from my father, who was a big admirer of FDR. He told me, when I was in high school and studying the New Deal in my American History class, that she was the first female Cabinet secretary, serving as the Secretary of Labor. I remember a few things he said about her: Though born in Boston, she had deep connections to the state of Maine, where both parents came from, and she often returned there to spend time with grandparents. I knew she was educated at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, and I also knew that her education there made a profound impact on her sense of justice and social obligation---hence her passionate commitment to the New Deal. And that is about all I knew. But recently I came across her name, so I ended up reading more about her, which only has made my admiration for her grow. Mary Lyon was the woman who founded Mount Holyoke, and she passionately believed that education should come with responsibility. “Education,” she said, “is to fit one to do good. Go where no one else will go; do what no one else will do,” she told her charges.
In Perkins’ last semester in college, she enrolled in a course on American Economic History in which the professor, Annah May Soule, required the students to visit the mills along the Connecticut River in Holyoke to see what the actual working conditions were. Perkins was stunned at what she saw: women and children working for long hours with no thought for their safety, or compensation should they be injured on the job. After graduation she taught, eventually moving to Chicago, where she spent her free time volunteering in Chicago Commons and Hull House, two of the oldest and most well-known settlement houses in the country. She felt a call “to do something about poverty and the unnecessary hazards to life.”
In 1907 she moved to Philadelphia, where she worked with young immigrant women, who needed help finding decent work and housing. She studied sociology and economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and two years later moved to New York, where she studied childhood malnutrition in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, which worked into a Master’s Degree at Columbia University. In 1910 she became Executive Secretary of New York City’s Consumers League, focusing on health concerns in bakeries, fire protection in factories and legislative efforts to improve the actual working conditions of people. In 1911 she witnessed the terrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 148 women and girls died, because they were locked in the building and could not escape the smoke and flames. She served on a commission, committed to protecting workers from future horrors like that one.
Frances worked in New York State Government under Governor Al Smith as his closest labor advisor for the four terms he served. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated him in the election of 1928, Frances Perkins was asked to become the state’s Industrial Commissioner, who had authority and oversight over the entire labor department. When the crash of 1929 occurred, followed by the great depression, Frances worked on the issues of unemployment. She was particularly committed to the idea of unemployment insurance, and Franklin Roosevelt actually sent her to England to study the British system. He was the first public official in the nation to publicly support unemployment insurance. With his election in 1932 to the Presidency, he appointed Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labor. She told him of her policy priorities, which he must support, she said, or she could not take the position. She would work for a 40 hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation in addition to workmen’s compensation, abolition of child labor, Social Security, universal health insurance and federal aid to the states in support of unemployment insurance. She spent the 12 years of Roosevelt’s Presidency working to accomplish those goals. When the President died in April, 1945 someone described her work not so much as the Roosevelt New Deal but the Perkins New Deal.
She continued to serve under President Truman, who appointed her to serve on The United States Civil Service Commission until 1953, when she began a career of teaching, writing, and lecturing. She died of a stroke on May 14, 1965 at the age of 85 and is buried next to her husband, Paul Wilson, in Newcastle, Maine, a place she always considered home. Her husband, by the way, suffered most of their marriage from what we would now recognize as bi-polar disorder, and so Frances was the sole economic support of the family. That experience helped to make her sensitive to the challenges families can face when illness or accident strikes. She was fortunate, she could work, but she realized that some families must contend with great burdens that make life difficult and so they need support and aid. The government, she believed, should help in such cases.
Whatever your politics, Frances Perkins is someone to be admired for her grit, her courage, her perseverance. Raised in the Plymouth Congregational Church in Worchester, where she learned of Jesus’ care for the least of these, she remembered asking her father why there was poverty, when it was clear to her that not all poor people were lazy or alcoholic, which is what her parents had taught her. Her father told her that young girls should not concern themselves with such questions. But Frances ignored those words, and we should be grateful that she did. In 1905, at the age of 25, Frances became an Episcopalian, and remained one her entire life. She fervently believed that God calls us to make the Kingdom of God in this world, and though we can never fully succeed, she thought it was life’s honorable challenge to try. What God does with our efforts is up to God, not to us.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Last week I watched a movie called, The Resistance Banker, the story of two brothers, Gigs and Walraven van Hal, who during the Second World War, used their banking skills to illegally fund the Resistance in Amsterdam. They began by funneling money to what looked like on paper a charitable fund, but as the story progressed, Walraven became even more deeply involved in theft and forgery to defeat the Nazis, help the Jews and others, who were suffering under the totalitarian regime. My daughter tells me I am obsessed with the Nazis, but I tell her time and time again that I am drawn to stories of human courage, and certainly fighting against the Nazis involved tremendous courage. This story was kept hidden for years. The Bank did not want it made known how effectively illegal monetary activities were undertaken, even if the actions were on behalf of a noble cause. Finally in 2010 a statue of Walraven, who was martyred, was placed in front of the State National Bank in Amsterdam, and the full story became public, including the making of a movie.
It is important, even vitally essential, for us to have heroes and heroines, people who can inspire us with their courage, intelligence, and commitment to the good, sometimes at great risk to their own lives. A recently retired high school history teacher noted that over the past twenty years of her career, she noticed a loss of heroes in her high school students. ‘They are impressed by celebrity,” she said, “but they don’t seem to have people, who really inspire with their example of strong moral attributes.”
I have always had heroes, and one of my earliest (at about the age of 4) was The Lone Ranger. He always was on the side of the good, and I loved the end of each episode, when he was riding away after saving someone from disaster, and the person would ask, “Who is that masked man?” And the same answer would come each week, whose words I would enthusiastically repeat, “Why don’t you know? That’s the Lone Ranger!”
Another one of my heroes is Frances Perkins. I knew about her from my father, who was a big admirer of FDR. He told me, when I was in high school and studying the New Deal in my American History class, that she was the first female Cabinet secretary, serving as the Secretary of Labor. I remember a few things he said about her: Though born in Boston, she had deep connections to the state of Maine, where both parents came from, and she often returned there to spend time with grandparents. I knew she was educated at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, and I also knew that her education there made a profound impact on her sense of justice and social obligation---hence her passionate commitment to the New Deal. And that is about all I knew. But recently I came across her name, so I ended up reading more about her, which only has made my admiration for her grow. Mary Lyon was the woman who founded Mount Holyoke, and she passionately believed that education should come with responsibility. “Education,” she said, “is to fit one to do good. Go where no one else will go; do what no one else will do,” she told her charges.
In Perkins’ last semester in college, she enrolled in a course on American Economic History in which the professor, Annah May Soule, required the students to visit the mills along the Connecticut River in Holyoke to see what the actual working conditions were. Perkins was stunned at what she saw: women and children working for long hours with no thought for their safety, or compensation should they be injured on the job. After graduation she taught, eventually moving to Chicago, where she spent her free time volunteering in Chicago Commons and Hull House, two of the oldest and most well-known settlement houses in the country. She felt a call “to do something about poverty and the unnecessary hazards to life.”
In 1907 she moved to Philadelphia, where she worked with young immigrant women, who needed help finding decent work and housing. She studied sociology and economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and two years later moved to New York, where she studied childhood malnutrition in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, which worked into a Master’s Degree at Columbia University. In 1910 she became Executive Secretary of New York City’s Consumers League, focusing on health concerns in bakeries, fire protection in factories and legislative efforts to improve the actual working conditions of people. In 1911 she witnessed the terrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 148 women and girls died, because they were locked in the building and could not escape the smoke and flames. She served on a commission, committed to protecting workers from future horrors like that one.
Frances worked in New York State Government under Governor Al Smith as his closest labor advisor for the four terms he served. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated him in the election of 1928, Frances Perkins was asked to become the state’s Industrial Commissioner, who had authority and oversight over the entire labor department. When the crash of 1929 occurred, followed by the great depression, Frances worked on the issues of unemployment. She was particularly committed to the idea of unemployment insurance, and Franklin Roosevelt actually sent her to England to study the British system. He was the first public official in the nation to publicly support unemployment insurance. With his election in 1932 to the Presidency, he appointed Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labor. She told him of her policy priorities, which he must support, she said, or she could not take the position. She would work for a 40 hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation in addition to workmen’s compensation, abolition of child labor, Social Security, universal health insurance and federal aid to the states in support of unemployment insurance. She spent the 12 years of Roosevelt’s Presidency working to accomplish those goals. When the President died in April, 1945 someone described her work not so much as the Roosevelt New Deal but the Perkins New Deal.
She continued to serve under President Truman, who appointed her to serve on The United States Civil Service Commission until 1953, when she began a career of teaching, writing, and lecturing. She died of a stroke on May 14, 1965 at the age of 85 and is buried next to her husband, Paul Wilson, in Newcastle, Maine, a place she always considered home. Her husband, by the way, suffered most of their marriage from what we would now recognize as bi-polar disorder, and so Frances was the sole economic support of the family. That experience helped to make her sensitive to the challenges families can face when illness or accident strikes. She was fortunate, she could work, but she realized that some families must contend with great burdens that make life difficult and so they need support and aid. The government, she believed, should help in such cases.
Whatever your politics, Frances Perkins is someone to be admired for her grit, her courage, her perseverance. Raised in the Plymouth Congregational Church in Worchester, where she learned of Jesus’ care for the least of these, she remembered asking her father why there was poverty, when it was clear to her that not all poor people were lazy or alcoholic, which is what her parents had taught her. Her father told her that young girls should not concern themselves with such questions. But Frances ignored those words, and we should be grateful that she did. In 1905, at the age of 25, Frances became an Episcopalian, and remained one her entire life. She fervently believed that God calls us to make the Kingdom of God in this world, and though we can never fully succeed, she thought it was life’s honorable challenge to try. What God does with our efforts is up to God, not to us.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE MIRROR OF TRUTH AND JUDGMENT
Preached by Sandra Olsen
August 14, 2022
Isaiah 5: 1-7
Luke 12: 49-56
I was very fortunate that in my public high school I had some outstanding teachers. My favorite was my English teacher in my senior year, who was not only brilliant, but also intensely dramatic and incredibly skillful at engaging his students in deep discussion. One of our most memorable discussions concerned Sophocles play Oedipus Rex.
Some of you probably know the story of Oedipus the King, who when born to royal parents was left to die, because a soothsayer told the parents their son would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Well, Oedipus did not die, but instead was found and raised by a shepherd and his wife, and so Oedipus grew up with no knowledge of his true parentage. Years later, when he heard that he would kill his father and marry his mother, in horror he left his adopted parents’ home and wandered. One day, his real father, the king of Thebes, was riding in his carriage, and he arrogantly ordered Oedipus off the road, so his carriage could pass. In a fit of rage, Oedipus killed the man he did not know was his father. He married his mother when he solved the riddle of the sphinx; what creature moves on four limbs in the morning, then two in the afternoon and finally three in the evening. The answer is the human being, who crawls as a baby, walks upright on two legs and then in old age, adds a cane. The reward for the right answer was the widowed queen in marriage. As the play evolves, Oedipus comes to the full knowledge of his actions and his identity. When he sees all, he blinds himself, leaves the palace with his two daughters and becomes a man without a country.
Now Oedipus did not consciously kill his father and marry his mother, and I remember so well how passionately some of us argued against assigning Oedipus blame and guilt and how forcefully our teacher spoke to us about unintended consequences. “We act, thinking we are doing one thing, when in reality much more is going on,” he insisted. We see only a very small part of the picture. Now, sometimes we can’t help that; we may not have access to more knowledge, or we may be too young and inexperienced to realize what is really going on. But still, we are responsible, my teacher insisted, and what he wanted us (at the callow age of 17) to understand was how remarkable Oedipus was in his insistent search for the truth. He did not hide from it, but rather painstakingly uncovered the truth, even as his journey toward it became more and more horrifying. The mirror of truth and judgment was held up, and he dared to look and see. Oedipus did not make excuses for himself, and that my teacher insisted is rare---rarer even than great intelligence or great beauty.
Oedipus is literature, and great literature reveals to us the depths of life—just like the Bible. The biblical stories we read are not all be historical fact, but there is deep and revelatory truth there---if we dare to look. And if we look at our lessons today from Isaiah and Luke, we can see that both are concerned with the mirror of truth and judgment. They reveal to us that the tendency of our human condition is to hide, to pretend we are much better than we really are, and to make excuses for why we did this or failed to do that. And let’s face it: often we are very successful at this ruse, but Isaiah and Luke remind us that God knows, God sees, and God judges. While God loves us and is merciful, love and mercy do not come without judgment.
Isaiah lived when there was a threat posed by the Assyrian empire, which had annexed the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 B.C., and now the southern kingdom, Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem, lived with the unease of having to pay tribute. The religious conventions of the time would have led the Jews to understand that since God had made a covenant with them, they would be protected. And they expected God to keep the covenant, even if they did not honor it---though the fall of the northern kingdom must have given them pause. God did not prevent Israel from falling to the Assyrians and later God would not prevent Judah from falling to the Babylonians in 587 B.C.
The passage from Isaiah is really an allegory, an extended comparison that begins with a female voice singing about her beloved, who owns a vineyard on a very fertile hill. And the voice tells us that her beloved took all kinds of measures to insure a bountiful harvest. He dug up the ground, cleared it of stones, and then planted it with choice vines. He even built a watchtower and hewed out a wine vat to mash the grapes and let the juice ferment.
But in verse three the voice switches to the vineyard owner, who calls upon the inhabitants of Judah to sit in judgment on the vineyard. Despite all the care lavished on the vineyard, it had not produced quality grapes, but only inferior, worthless ones. And so, in verse 5, the owner renders his judgment. He will remove the hedge that protects the vineyard from animals that would devour the crop. The owner will no longer hoe or prune, and finally he will command the clouds to withhold rain, making the vineyard into a wasteland. And indeed, in time Babylon would overrun Judah, sack, and destroy the beautiful Temple, built by King Solomon, because, the prophet said, God had expected justice from the people, but justice is not what they rendered.
Now when we hear the word justice, our immediate tendency is to think of the innocent getting his or her due and the guilty punished, but this not the way the word justice is used by the Hebrew prophets. Justice for them was primarily connected with the treatment of the least of these---the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger and yes, even the resident alien---people who lacked the clout to defend themselves against the upper class of Israelite society, who had structured life, tax schedules and all, for their benefit. No, the prophet said, this is not what God intends. And so, the prophetic interpretation of Judah’s eventual fall to the Babylonian empire was that it was God’s punishment for Judah’s failure to honor the covenant, to care for the least of these. Of course, there is another interpretation---Babylon was simply militarily stronger than Judah, and God had nothing to do with it.
There is a lot of distance and a tension between those two claims---God’s punishment or superior military power? No wonder Jesus said that he had come to bring a fire to the earth and to create division among households, families, and nations. The call for prophetic justice---care for the poor---is always in conflict with “business as usual.” And how does that apply to us, now living in a time of unsettling economic conditions? We hear a lot these days about a shrinking middle class, but what about an expanding poorer class? Who speaks for them? Is God holding up to us a mirror of truth and judgment? And will we look and see?
In my senior year in high school, my English teacher assigned a lot of great literature, including the Oedipus cycle by Sophocles, The Bible’s Book of Job, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, George Bernard Shaw’s plays, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and Saint Joan, Thomas Hardy’s, Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure, and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey. When I consider those readings now, it is obvious to me that one of the great themes of this literature concerned the mirror of truth and judgment. These works showed human beings acting in the world, and their actions always had more consequences than they could initially see. Such is the human condition. All of those characters faced the mirror of truth and judgment---just as Israel and Judah did. And we will too. We live in a messy world, and how we cope with that messiness, what and whom we care about are always matters of faith.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
August 14, 2022
Isaiah 5: 1-7
Luke 12: 49-56
I was very fortunate that in my public high school I had some outstanding teachers. My favorite was my English teacher in my senior year, who was not only brilliant, but also intensely dramatic and incredibly skillful at engaging his students in deep discussion. One of our most memorable discussions concerned Sophocles play Oedipus Rex.
Some of you probably know the story of Oedipus the King, who when born to royal parents was left to die, because a soothsayer told the parents their son would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Well, Oedipus did not die, but instead was found and raised by a shepherd and his wife, and so Oedipus grew up with no knowledge of his true parentage. Years later, when he heard that he would kill his father and marry his mother, in horror he left his adopted parents’ home and wandered. One day, his real father, the king of Thebes, was riding in his carriage, and he arrogantly ordered Oedipus off the road, so his carriage could pass. In a fit of rage, Oedipus killed the man he did not know was his father. He married his mother when he solved the riddle of the sphinx; what creature moves on four limbs in the morning, then two in the afternoon and finally three in the evening. The answer is the human being, who crawls as a baby, walks upright on two legs and then in old age, adds a cane. The reward for the right answer was the widowed queen in marriage. As the play evolves, Oedipus comes to the full knowledge of his actions and his identity. When he sees all, he blinds himself, leaves the palace with his two daughters and becomes a man without a country.
Now Oedipus did not consciously kill his father and marry his mother, and I remember so well how passionately some of us argued against assigning Oedipus blame and guilt and how forcefully our teacher spoke to us about unintended consequences. “We act, thinking we are doing one thing, when in reality much more is going on,” he insisted. We see only a very small part of the picture. Now, sometimes we can’t help that; we may not have access to more knowledge, or we may be too young and inexperienced to realize what is really going on. But still, we are responsible, my teacher insisted, and what he wanted us (at the callow age of 17) to understand was how remarkable Oedipus was in his insistent search for the truth. He did not hide from it, but rather painstakingly uncovered the truth, even as his journey toward it became more and more horrifying. The mirror of truth and judgment was held up, and he dared to look and see. Oedipus did not make excuses for himself, and that my teacher insisted is rare---rarer even than great intelligence or great beauty.
Oedipus is literature, and great literature reveals to us the depths of life—just like the Bible. The biblical stories we read are not all be historical fact, but there is deep and revelatory truth there---if we dare to look. And if we look at our lessons today from Isaiah and Luke, we can see that both are concerned with the mirror of truth and judgment. They reveal to us that the tendency of our human condition is to hide, to pretend we are much better than we really are, and to make excuses for why we did this or failed to do that. And let’s face it: often we are very successful at this ruse, but Isaiah and Luke remind us that God knows, God sees, and God judges. While God loves us and is merciful, love and mercy do not come without judgment.
Isaiah lived when there was a threat posed by the Assyrian empire, which had annexed the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 B.C., and now the southern kingdom, Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem, lived with the unease of having to pay tribute. The religious conventions of the time would have led the Jews to understand that since God had made a covenant with them, they would be protected. And they expected God to keep the covenant, even if they did not honor it---though the fall of the northern kingdom must have given them pause. God did not prevent Israel from falling to the Assyrians and later God would not prevent Judah from falling to the Babylonians in 587 B.C.
The passage from Isaiah is really an allegory, an extended comparison that begins with a female voice singing about her beloved, who owns a vineyard on a very fertile hill. And the voice tells us that her beloved took all kinds of measures to insure a bountiful harvest. He dug up the ground, cleared it of stones, and then planted it with choice vines. He even built a watchtower and hewed out a wine vat to mash the grapes and let the juice ferment.
But in verse three the voice switches to the vineyard owner, who calls upon the inhabitants of Judah to sit in judgment on the vineyard. Despite all the care lavished on the vineyard, it had not produced quality grapes, but only inferior, worthless ones. And so, in verse 5, the owner renders his judgment. He will remove the hedge that protects the vineyard from animals that would devour the crop. The owner will no longer hoe or prune, and finally he will command the clouds to withhold rain, making the vineyard into a wasteland. And indeed, in time Babylon would overrun Judah, sack, and destroy the beautiful Temple, built by King Solomon, because, the prophet said, God had expected justice from the people, but justice is not what they rendered.
Now when we hear the word justice, our immediate tendency is to think of the innocent getting his or her due and the guilty punished, but this not the way the word justice is used by the Hebrew prophets. Justice for them was primarily connected with the treatment of the least of these---the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger and yes, even the resident alien---people who lacked the clout to defend themselves against the upper class of Israelite society, who had structured life, tax schedules and all, for their benefit. No, the prophet said, this is not what God intends. And so, the prophetic interpretation of Judah’s eventual fall to the Babylonian empire was that it was God’s punishment for Judah’s failure to honor the covenant, to care for the least of these. Of course, there is another interpretation---Babylon was simply militarily stronger than Judah, and God had nothing to do with it.
There is a lot of distance and a tension between those two claims---God’s punishment or superior military power? No wonder Jesus said that he had come to bring a fire to the earth and to create division among households, families, and nations. The call for prophetic justice---care for the poor---is always in conflict with “business as usual.” And how does that apply to us, now living in a time of unsettling economic conditions? We hear a lot these days about a shrinking middle class, but what about an expanding poorer class? Who speaks for them? Is God holding up to us a mirror of truth and judgment? And will we look and see?
In my senior year in high school, my English teacher assigned a lot of great literature, including the Oedipus cycle by Sophocles, The Bible’s Book of Job, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, George Bernard Shaw’s plays, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and Saint Joan, Thomas Hardy’s, Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure, and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey. When I consider those readings now, it is obvious to me that one of the great themes of this literature concerned the mirror of truth and judgment. These works showed human beings acting in the world, and their actions always had more consequences than they could initially see. Such is the human condition. All of those characters faced the mirror of truth and judgment---just as Israel and Judah did. And we will too. We live in a messy world, and how we cope with that messiness, what and whom we care about are always matters of faith.
August 10, 2022
Dear Friends
Last April the New York Times printed some wonderfully touching images of New Yorkers reading in public places To read in the midst of a busy city is an act of determination and concentration, because so much noise and confusion must be actively ignored. The Times noted that in 1911 the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street branch opened its doors, and more than 50,000 persons visited that day. And ever since, people have been reading inside and outside the building, people gathering all around, on its steps and even its sidewalk, reading while they are walking. Another image was from 1935, when Bryant Park, along with other city parks, opened outdoor reading rooms. They lasted during the summer months until 1943 and then opened again in 2003.
Times Square in 1962 opened an all-night bookstore, stocking 100,000 paperback books and not one of them was pornographic, which for Times Square in that era, was something worth bragging about. You could see the intense concentration and enjoyment on people’s faces as they read. One woman was standing upright, holding a book and simply reading, oblivious, it seemed, to everything else that might have been happening around her. Another image from 1961 shows Barnard students reading outside---all of them dressed in skirts or dresses, looking seriously engaged in their reading.
There were pictures of children in New York City libraries being read to as their bodies stretched and arched toward the reader, so they could better see the pictures in the book or hear the spoken word. One image showed a child reading Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, and again, there was no doubt that the child cared deeply about the words on the pages.
In 1906 The Times published a quartet of sonnets about a train guard, who was smitten with a passenger who took the local, not the express train, so she could have more time to read her novel. And indeed, there were images on the subway of people reading. I recognized some of these images from the 70’s and 80’s when the subway cars were ugly, covered with graffiti. Yet there were people, ignoring the graffiti by being completely engrossed in a book.
Images showed people reading in all different positions, standing up, leaning against a tree or even a lamppost, or sitting on a park bench, sometimes alone, sometimes with other strangers. There were images of people lying down on the grass in Central Park with their shoes off and their heads propped up with a rolled up blanket to make reading more comfortable. Sometimes there was a couple reading to each other, and though I had no idea what they were reading, I wondered if it were poetry or perhaps a favorite novel, something intimate to share with a loved one.
I love books, and though some of you know about my excess love of dresses, I do own many more books than I do dresses. I live in a house, built in 1908 with three floors of living space, five bedrooms, my study on the third floor plus a basement. In every room, including the first floor hallway and the basement, excepting the kitchen, the bathroom and the dining room, there are bookcases. I love my books even more than I love my dresses, and when my children tell me I had better start clearing out some of these books, because they certainly do not want to do it, I tell them to go stuff it. I remind them that they each have given me some trouble, so I will simply return the favor.
I realize that many people today read on their phones or on their computers and tablets, but for me, there is nothing like holding a book in my hands. A book feels like a companion, even a friend, and though I am sure there are people who feel that way about their electronics, that is not my experience. And so, when I saw the images in The Times, I could not help but smile with a feeling of deep satisfaction and even joy. Reading is such a pleasure and even a passion to me, though there are times when my reading disturbs and even upsets me. Great writing often introduces thoughts and themes that challenge our everyday conventions, and yes, that can be disturbing. Reading can goad us to think, and the thoughts that emerge are not always comfortable. Books have changed the world by changing people and changing how they understand themselves and their world.
As Protestants, we are People of the Word. While the Roman Catholics have the sacramental system, we Protestants are focused on the written Word, which was why it was such a major turning point in history, when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Others had translated the Bible before Luther into other languages, like English, and they paid with their lives. Church leaders realized it was dangerous when people could read and interpret the Word for themselves. And so, we continue to read and ponder, and the images I saw in the Times reminded me how central reading is to human beings.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends
Last April the New York Times printed some wonderfully touching images of New Yorkers reading in public places To read in the midst of a busy city is an act of determination and concentration, because so much noise and confusion must be actively ignored. The Times noted that in 1911 the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street branch opened its doors, and more than 50,000 persons visited that day. And ever since, people have been reading inside and outside the building, people gathering all around, on its steps and even its sidewalk, reading while they are walking. Another image was from 1935, when Bryant Park, along with other city parks, opened outdoor reading rooms. They lasted during the summer months until 1943 and then opened again in 2003.
Times Square in 1962 opened an all-night bookstore, stocking 100,000 paperback books and not one of them was pornographic, which for Times Square in that era, was something worth bragging about. You could see the intense concentration and enjoyment on people’s faces as they read. One woman was standing upright, holding a book and simply reading, oblivious, it seemed, to everything else that might have been happening around her. Another image from 1961 shows Barnard students reading outside---all of them dressed in skirts or dresses, looking seriously engaged in their reading.
There were pictures of children in New York City libraries being read to as their bodies stretched and arched toward the reader, so they could better see the pictures in the book or hear the spoken word. One image showed a child reading Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, and again, there was no doubt that the child cared deeply about the words on the pages.
In 1906 The Times published a quartet of sonnets about a train guard, who was smitten with a passenger who took the local, not the express train, so she could have more time to read her novel. And indeed, there were images on the subway of people reading. I recognized some of these images from the 70’s and 80’s when the subway cars were ugly, covered with graffiti. Yet there were people, ignoring the graffiti by being completely engrossed in a book.
Images showed people reading in all different positions, standing up, leaning against a tree or even a lamppost, or sitting on a park bench, sometimes alone, sometimes with other strangers. There were images of people lying down on the grass in Central Park with their shoes off and their heads propped up with a rolled up blanket to make reading more comfortable. Sometimes there was a couple reading to each other, and though I had no idea what they were reading, I wondered if it were poetry or perhaps a favorite novel, something intimate to share with a loved one.
I love books, and though some of you know about my excess love of dresses, I do own many more books than I do dresses. I live in a house, built in 1908 with three floors of living space, five bedrooms, my study on the third floor plus a basement. In every room, including the first floor hallway and the basement, excepting the kitchen, the bathroom and the dining room, there are bookcases. I love my books even more than I love my dresses, and when my children tell me I had better start clearing out some of these books, because they certainly do not want to do it, I tell them to go stuff it. I remind them that they each have given me some trouble, so I will simply return the favor.
I realize that many people today read on their phones or on their computers and tablets, but for me, there is nothing like holding a book in my hands. A book feels like a companion, even a friend, and though I am sure there are people who feel that way about their electronics, that is not my experience. And so, when I saw the images in The Times, I could not help but smile with a feeling of deep satisfaction and even joy. Reading is such a pleasure and even a passion to me, though there are times when my reading disturbs and even upsets me. Great writing often introduces thoughts and themes that challenge our everyday conventions, and yes, that can be disturbing. Reading can goad us to think, and the thoughts that emerge are not always comfortable. Books have changed the world by changing people and changing how they understand themselves and their world.
As Protestants, we are People of the Word. While the Roman Catholics have the sacramental system, we Protestants are focused on the written Word, which was why it was such a major turning point in history, when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Others had translated the Bible before Luther into other languages, like English, and they paid with their lives. Church leaders realized it was dangerous when people could read and interpret the Word for themselves. And so, we continue to read and ponder, and the images I saw in the Times reminded me how central reading is to human beings.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
GOD AS THIEF, GOD AS DISRUPTER
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
August 7, 2022
On July 16, 1945 in a New Mexican desert at a site nicknamed Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, the first artificial nuclear explosion took place. Even Oppenheimer was not exactly sure what would happen, but when the explosion finally occurred and the emitted light looked like a thousands suns, what ran through Oppenheimer's mind was a line from the scared Hindu text, The Bagavaad Gita, when God said, "I am become death, shatterer of worlds, waiting that hour that ripens to their doom." Oppenheimer would live to regret his involvement in the making of the bomb, because he became convinced it would lead to humanity's doom. Nonetheless, it was impressive that Oppenheimer actually knew those lines from the Gita, just as he knew that the Hindus have a name for God the destroyer, Shiva.
Now in our Bible there are some images of God as the destroyer. Consider the flood in the Old Testament and in the Book of Revelation, when the old order is destroyed in order to make way for the new. Yet for the most part we modern day Christians find those texts troubling and embarrassing as we try to make God into a nice and comfortable companion whose job it is to help us through all the various messes with which life presents us. We don’t want to feel uncomfortable by a God who might be out to destroy or disrupt.
In today's text there is a subtle suggestion on the part of Jesus that God (or at least God's work) might well be experienced like a thief in the night. If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You almost be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. Why did Jesus pair the Son of Man, who indeed does God's work as well as announcing the coming of the kingdom, with a thief? Thieves break into homes, disrupt people's lives and and rip people off. How is God anything like that?
Well, consider the lives of Jesus' disciples. Their lives and that of their families were mightily disrupted. Jesus came along and called them to follow him, and they left home, though many scholars say they were not away all the time. But still it is hard to imagine that families were happy to suddenly be without the labor of a son, husband, or father. When another son told Jesus that he wanted to follow him, but first he must bury his father, Jesus' response was, "Let the dead bury the dead." How do you think that went over in a society built on filial obligation? And yet people who followed Jesus felt called by something more compelling than their families. How do we reconcile that with our notion of responsibility and obligation?
If we take seriously the time in which the Gospel of Luke was written, somewhere between 80 and 90, we know there was a great deal of concern about the delay of Jesus' return. People had expected him to come back very soon and establish God's earthly kingdom. "Sell your possessions; give alms, make purses for yourselves that do not wear out.” If life on this earth as one knows it is about to end and the new kingdom is going to be established, a different ethic is called for, so be prepared for this new time. But Jesus did not quickly return, and so in the meantime the faithful have had to figure out how to live rightly and faithfully on this earth as they await the final consummation. And sometimes as people live, they do experience God as the great disturber of their lives, the one who comes in the middle of the night like a thief.
Some years ago, I had a student intern at my church in New Haven. He had been very successful in business, but in his 50’s felt the call to ministry. During his final year at Yale Divinity, he made a trip to El Salvador, where he visited the cathedral where Bishop Oscar Romero was murdered right in the middle of celebrating Mass, as he consecrated the bread and wine. Romero was murdered for his opposition to a government that oppressed and stole from its people.. Romero could have been quiet as many priests were, but he understood silence as unfaithfulness to Christ, and he paid with his life. Is this what God wanted him to do---to die? As my student told me, God does not desire Romero’s violent death any more than God desired Jesus’ violent death, but God does desire justice and truth, and when that is pursued, the opposition raises its ugly head. And lives are disrupted and in some instances even destroyed, the price for radical afaithfulness.
A woman, who is a guidance counselor in a high school, had an interesting situation with a family with whom she was also friends. The parents were Quakers, very serious Christians, and their daughter, who was valedictorian of her class, gained admission to Amherst College, where she wanted to go. But the parents wanted her to go to the honors college at U. of CT, so they could send another student from the high school to U. Conn. “You find a student,” they told the guidance department, “whom you think can get into U Conn and prosper there, but does not have the resources to pay. Tell the family you have an anonymous donor. We think this is the right thing to do; this is what our faith calls us to do.” Well, their daughter was very unhappy. She wanted to go to Amherst, this elite, excellent and expensive private college. The parents patiently explained their position. "You can get a fine education in the honors college at U Conn. You may want to go to Amherst, but you don't need to go there. We can help somebody else."
Well, things didn't go well in the family. Grandparents got involved, and they sided with their granddaughter. The fight was ugly, but the parents stood firm, and two students went to U Conn with the daughter eventually going to law school at Colombia, while the student they helped went to business school, earned an MBA, and now works for UNICEF. To the latter God must have seemed like the bountiful giver, but for the daughter God appeared as a kind of thief, stealing from her the elite and expensive education she thought she had earned and deserved. Her relationship with her parents is still difficult, and she has nothing to do with God or church, because she thinks her parents used God as an excuse to defend a certain perspective on the world, which she did not does not share. Today, she is a corporate lawyer.
God can and does disrupt lives, but we can and should ask the tough question that really has no definitive answer, "How does anyone really know what God is asking in any specific situation?" Sometimes people do mix up personal desire with that of God's, and since God is not in the habit of speaking directly in a voice that can be recorded and verified, we human beings must do a lot of guessing. Faith is not certainty. It is not certain knowledge. As was so eloquently written in the Book of Hebrews, Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Faith is not something to be proven, but rather something to be risked, as Abraham risked, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer risked, as the people I spoke about today risked. They all believed that God was calling them to do something, and they risked that they were responding rightly. Did they know for sure? No. They could only take the risk, and that is the best that any person of faith can do. To demand more of faith, to demand certitude is to make faith into an idol-- an object fashioned by our own hands and our own desires.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
August 7, 2022
On July 16, 1945 in a New Mexican desert at a site nicknamed Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, the first artificial nuclear explosion took place. Even Oppenheimer was not exactly sure what would happen, but when the explosion finally occurred and the emitted light looked like a thousands suns, what ran through Oppenheimer's mind was a line from the scared Hindu text, The Bagavaad Gita, when God said, "I am become death, shatterer of worlds, waiting that hour that ripens to their doom." Oppenheimer would live to regret his involvement in the making of the bomb, because he became convinced it would lead to humanity's doom. Nonetheless, it was impressive that Oppenheimer actually knew those lines from the Gita, just as he knew that the Hindus have a name for God the destroyer, Shiva.
Now in our Bible there are some images of God as the destroyer. Consider the flood in the Old Testament and in the Book of Revelation, when the old order is destroyed in order to make way for the new. Yet for the most part we modern day Christians find those texts troubling and embarrassing as we try to make God into a nice and comfortable companion whose job it is to help us through all the various messes with which life presents us. We don’t want to feel uncomfortable by a God who might be out to destroy or disrupt.
In today's text there is a subtle suggestion on the part of Jesus that God (or at least God's work) might well be experienced like a thief in the night. If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You almost be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. Why did Jesus pair the Son of Man, who indeed does God's work as well as announcing the coming of the kingdom, with a thief? Thieves break into homes, disrupt people's lives and and rip people off. How is God anything like that?
Well, consider the lives of Jesus' disciples. Their lives and that of their families were mightily disrupted. Jesus came along and called them to follow him, and they left home, though many scholars say they were not away all the time. But still it is hard to imagine that families were happy to suddenly be without the labor of a son, husband, or father. When another son told Jesus that he wanted to follow him, but first he must bury his father, Jesus' response was, "Let the dead bury the dead." How do you think that went over in a society built on filial obligation? And yet people who followed Jesus felt called by something more compelling than their families. How do we reconcile that with our notion of responsibility and obligation?
If we take seriously the time in which the Gospel of Luke was written, somewhere between 80 and 90, we know there was a great deal of concern about the delay of Jesus' return. People had expected him to come back very soon and establish God's earthly kingdom. "Sell your possessions; give alms, make purses for yourselves that do not wear out.” If life on this earth as one knows it is about to end and the new kingdom is going to be established, a different ethic is called for, so be prepared for this new time. But Jesus did not quickly return, and so in the meantime the faithful have had to figure out how to live rightly and faithfully on this earth as they await the final consummation. And sometimes as people live, they do experience God as the great disturber of their lives, the one who comes in the middle of the night like a thief.
Some years ago, I had a student intern at my church in New Haven. He had been very successful in business, but in his 50’s felt the call to ministry. During his final year at Yale Divinity, he made a trip to El Salvador, where he visited the cathedral where Bishop Oscar Romero was murdered right in the middle of celebrating Mass, as he consecrated the bread and wine. Romero was murdered for his opposition to a government that oppressed and stole from its people.. Romero could have been quiet as many priests were, but he understood silence as unfaithfulness to Christ, and he paid with his life. Is this what God wanted him to do---to die? As my student told me, God does not desire Romero’s violent death any more than God desired Jesus’ violent death, but God does desire justice and truth, and when that is pursued, the opposition raises its ugly head. And lives are disrupted and in some instances even destroyed, the price for radical afaithfulness.
A woman, who is a guidance counselor in a high school, had an interesting situation with a family with whom she was also friends. The parents were Quakers, very serious Christians, and their daughter, who was valedictorian of her class, gained admission to Amherst College, where she wanted to go. But the parents wanted her to go to the honors college at U. of CT, so they could send another student from the high school to U. Conn. “You find a student,” they told the guidance department, “whom you think can get into U Conn and prosper there, but does not have the resources to pay. Tell the family you have an anonymous donor. We think this is the right thing to do; this is what our faith calls us to do.” Well, their daughter was very unhappy. She wanted to go to Amherst, this elite, excellent and expensive private college. The parents patiently explained their position. "You can get a fine education in the honors college at U Conn. You may want to go to Amherst, but you don't need to go there. We can help somebody else."
Well, things didn't go well in the family. Grandparents got involved, and they sided with their granddaughter. The fight was ugly, but the parents stood firm, and two students went to U Conn with the daughter eventually going to law school at Colombia, while the student they helped went to business school, earned an MBA, and now works for UNICEF. To the latter God must have seemed like the bountiful giver, but for the daughter God appeared as a kind of thief, stealing from her the elite and expensive education she thought she had earned and deserved. Her relationship with her parents is still difficult, and she has nothing to do with God or church, because she thinks her parents used God as an excuse to defend a certain perspective on the world, which she did not does not share. Today, she is a corporate lawyer.
God can and does disrupt lives, but we can and should ask the tough question that really has no definitive answer, "How does anyone really know what God is asking in any specific situation?" Sometimes people do mix up personal desire with that of God's, and since God is not in the habit of speaking directly in a voice that can be recorded and verified, we human beings must do a lot of guessing. Faith is not certainty. It is not certain knowledge. As was so eloquently written in the Book of Hebrews, Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Faith is not something to be proven, but rather something to be risked, as Abraham risked, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer risked, as the people I spoke about today risked. They all believed that God was calling them to do something, and they risked that they were responding rightly. Did they know for sure? No. They could only take the risk, and that is the best that any person of faith can do. To demand more of faith, to demand certitude is to make faith into an idol-- an object fashioned by our own hands and our own desires.
August 4, 2022
Dear Friends,
The world was shocked when on July 8, Shinze Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, was assassinated with a home-made gun. No people were more shocked than the citizens of Japan, since gun ownership is rare. In 1958 a law was passed saying that “no one should possess a gun or sword”---though there are exceptions for hunting, sport, or industrial purposes. But the process to obtain a gun is rigorous: a thorough background check, a mental health evaluation, a written test as well as a shooting range test and a requirement to renew the gun license every three years. Japan is a nation of 125 million, and in 2019 there were nine deaths due to guns.
Japan’s story with guns is very different from our own, but then the American story is very different from most of the world. Low gun violence simply does not come because of few guns. Switzerland, for example, which has one of the highest per capita rates of gun ownership, does not suffer from the spate of gun violence and mass shootings that our country does. The same can be said for Canada. But in both these countries people say they rely on each other and government to keep them safe. The trust level (of people and laws) is high. And their trust of guns for providing safety is really quite low.
Now consider Mexico, certainly a very violent country. The guns are, however, owned and used by gang members and drug cartels. It is not easy for the average Mexican citizen to lay his or her hands on guns---and when they do, the guns are often coming from the United States. Between 2014 and 2018 70% of the guns in Mexico came from the U.S. In fact, in 2021 the Mexican government filed a suit against some U.S. based gun manufacturers, blaming them for the steady flow of guns. It is interesting to note that some Mexican politicians have tried to loosen gun laws so that people could carry guns in cars and in private companies, but the proposal was decisively defeated. And the most successful argument against it was, “Look at the United States! We certainly do not want to be anything like that!” People just do not seem to believe that owning a gun will be of much help to them. Unlike Canada and Switzerland, where trust of other people and government is high, such trust is very low in Mexico. Only 25% of Mexicans say they trust their government and only 12.4% say most people can be trusted. In the U.S. 39.6% say most other people can be trusted and in Switzerland it is 49.3%. Switzerland suffers about 50 murders a year and only 10% of those involve a gun. In contrast 67% of homicides in our country involve guns.
A professor at Ohio State University, Dr. Roth, has been conducting research on the relationship between trust, safety, and guns from the colonial era to the present situation. And what he has discovered is that low murder rates tend to be correlated with times when trust in government and fellow citizens is high. For example, at the end of World War ll, Americans tended to express a strong trust in government, and the murder rate was quite low. The 60’s and 70’s saw a rise in violence and a parallel drop in trust of both government and other people, followed by a rise in the trust of guns. Americans, unlike the rest of the world, do seem to have this TRUST in guns. While Americans believe that guns can and will keep them safe, other people in other nations have the opposite feeling: Guns are a danger, and we need to limit them.
In Dublane, Scotland 26 years ago, a teacher and 16 children were shot to death in a shocking mass shooting. This was the impetus for the United Kingdom to ban handguns. By 1996 pistol shooting had become the fastest growing sport in the U.K., and no one thought a ban on handguns would be possible. Campaigners for strict gun control received death threats, yet the ban did go through. Since its passage, 25 years ago, there has not been one single school shooting in the entire United Kingdom.
Australia pushed through a program to buyback guns after a massacre in 1996 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The proportion of gun owners fell by 48% between 1997 and 2020. New Zealand banned ALL semi-automatic rifles less than ONE week after a mass shooter killed 51 worshippers in a mosque. And Canada, where many people are gun owners, tightened its gun laws after the 1989 mass shooting of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. While the Uvalde Texas shooting did become the impetus for the passage of the first major federal gun safety legislation in over 25 years, which bolsters background checks for those under 21 and strengthens the red flag laws, Canada’s response to Uvalde was much tougher. Within a week of the shooting in Texas, Canada introduced legislation to FREEZE the buying, selling, and importing of handguns. Canada’s Prime Minister said, “We need only to look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.” Our country, when it comes to guns, is apparently the standard NO ONE wants to follow.
It is quite fascinating that TRUST is such a major issue when it comes to guns and gun ownership. Trust in government, trust in people, and even trust in God can influence how people view guns. And certainly, how people grew up, whether or not guns were part of their culture, does have an impact as well. There was a gun tragedy in my own extended family. My father’s sister in law’s 17 year old nephew accidentally killed his 15 year old brother in a hunting accident. My parents hated guns, and though my father, a World War ll veteran, had to learn how to handle a gun, his wartime experience was behind a desk, not carrying a weapon. When he died in 2003 and his ashes were buried in a veteran’s cemetery in New Jersey, a gun salute was offered. “Oh please, no guns,” my mother said. My husband hated guns and I do too.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
The world was shocked when on July 8, Shinze Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, was assassinated with a home-made gun. No people were more shocked than the citizens of Japan, since gun ownership is rare. In 1958 a law was passed saying that “no one should possess a gun or sword”---though there are exceptions for hunting, sport, or industrial purposes. But the process to obtain a gun is rigorous: a thorough background check, a mental health evaluation, a written test as well as a shooting range test and a requirement to renew the gun license every three years. Japan is a nation of 125 million, and in 2019 there were nine deaths due to guns.
Japan’s story with guns is very different from our own, but then the American story is very different from most of the world. Low gun violence simply does not come because of few guns. Switzerland, for example, which has one of the highest per capita rates of gun ownership, does not suffer from the spate of gun violence and mass shootings that our country does. The same can be said for Canada. But in both these countries people say they rely on each other and government to keep them safe. The trust level (of people and laws) is high. And their trust of guns for providing safety is really quite low.
Now consider Mexico, certainly a very violent country. The guns are, however, owned and used by gang members and drug cartels. It is not easy for the average Mexican citizen to lay his or her hands on guns---and when they do, the guns are often coming from the United States. Between 2014 and 2018 70% of the guns in Mexico came from the U.S. In fact, in 2021 the Mexican government filed a suit against some U.S. based gun manufacturers, blaming them for the steady flow of guns. It is interesting to note that some Mexican politicians have tried to loosen gun laws so that people could carry guns in cars and in private companies, but the proposal was decisively defeated. And the most successful argument against it was, “Look at the United States! We certainly do not want to be anything like that!” People just do not seem to believe that owning a gun will be of much help to them. Unlike Canada and Switzerland, where trust of other people and government is high, such trust is very low in Mexico. Only 25% of Mexicans say they trust their government and only 12.4% say most people can be trusted. In the U.S. 39.6% say most other people can be trusted and in Switzerland it is 49.3%. Switzerland suffers about 50 murders a year and only 10% of those involve a gun. In contrast 67% of homicides in our country involve guns.
A professor at Ohio State University, Dr. Roth, has been conducting research on the relationship between trust, safety, and guns from the colonial era to the present situation. And what he has discovered is that low murder rates tend to be correlated with times when trust in government and fellow citizens is high. For example, at the end of World War ll, Americans tended to express a strong trust in government, and the murder rate was quite low. The 60’s and 70’s saw a rise in violence and a parallel drop in trust of both government and other people, followed by a rise in the trust of guns. Americans, unlike the rest of the world, do seem to have this TRUST in guns. While Americans believe that guns can and will keep them safe, other people in other nations have the opposite feeling: Guns are a danger, and we need to limit them.
In Dublane, Scotland 26 years ago, a teacher and 16 children were shot to death in a shocking mass shooting. This was the impetus for the United Kingdom to ban handguns. By 1996 pistol shooting had become the fastest growing sport in the U.K., and no one thought a ban on handguns would be possible. Campaigners for strict gun control received death threats, yet the ban did go through. Since its passage, 25 years ago, there has not been one single school shooting in the entire United Kingdom.
Australia pushed through a program to buyback guns after a massacre in 1996 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The proportion of gun owners fell by 48% between 1997 and 2020. New Zealand banned ALL semi-automatic rifles less than ONE week after a mass shooter killed 51 worshippers in a mosque. And Canada, where many people are gun owners, tightened its gun laws after the 1989 mass shooting of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. While the Uvalde Texas shooting did become the impetus for the passage of the first major federal gun safety legislation in over 25 years, which bolsters background checks for those under 21 and strengthens the red flag laws, Canada’s response to Uvalde was much tougher. Within a week of the shooting in Texas, Canada introduced legislation to FREEZE the buying, selling, and importing of handguns. Canada’s Prime Minister said, “We need only to look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.” Our country, when it comes to guns, is apparently the standard NO ONE wants to follow.
It is quite fascinating that TRUST is such a major issue when it comes to guns and gun ownership. Trust in government, trust in people, and even trust in God can influence how people view guns. And certainly, how people grew up, whether or not guns were part of their culture, does have an impact as well. There was a gun tragedy in my own extended family. My father’s sister in law’s 17 year old nephew accidentally killed his 15 year old brother in a hunting accident. My parents hated guns, and though my father, a World War ll veteran, had to learn how to handle a gun, his wartime experience was behind a desk, not carrying a weapon. When he died in 2003 and his ashes were buried in a veteran’s cemetery in New Jersey, a gun salute was offered. “Oh please, no guns,” my mother said. My husband hated guns and I do too.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
MORE IS BETTER?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
July 31, 2022
Luke 12: 13-21
We have no idea what the issue was between two brothers that would have prompted one of them to ask Jesus to tell his brother to share the family inheritance with him. It certainly was not uncommon for the oldest son to get most, if not all, of the inheritance, though in cases where there was great wealth, younger sons (and even daughters) could receive some share of the wealth. Perhaps this was a disgruntled younger son, who did not think the inheritance system was fair and so he wanted Jesus to intervene on his behalf. We simply do not know the circumstances. All we know is that Jesus refused to get involved in the family dispute. He apparently did not think the request here was so much about justice as it was about greed---about wanting more than is one’s due.
And so, Jesus simply responded by saying, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And then he went on to tell a parable about a rich man, who insisted on building bigger and better barns to store his copious crops, because more is better. More must be better. That’s the capitalistic motto, isn’t it, but Jesus did not live in a capitalistic economy, so it is obvious that one does not have to be a capitalist to want more. Wanting more seems to be something that is deep within us, even as we also know that riches do not give life its deepest meaning. But knowing that does not necessarily prevent us from wanting more or even acquiring more. People can rationally know that having a bigger house or a fancier car will not really bring them greater happiness, but they still can want them. I, for example, have more dresses than I could possibly wear in at least two or three years, but does not prevent me from buying more. No, because I like the pleasure that having lovely dress brings- me--even while I also know that all my dresses do not give to my life deep meaning. Am I a fool?
A fool is exactly what Jesus called the man who built all those barns. Is he a fool because he truly believed that the meaning of his life came down to having more? It is obvious he took great pleasure in his copious crops and barns, but if it was far more than pleasure he took; if he made his possessions the measure of his life--- that is spiritually deadening and foolish. He was going to die that night, so what good to him were all those barns and crops? There is no hint, by the way, that his death is a punishment for his greed. Death just happened to come to him with no warning. Perhaps if he had a warning, he might have considered what his life was truly all about. He might have asked himself what more really means.
We all know about more, because probably everyone here has been in circumstances where we not only wanted more, but also needed more. Maybe we needed a larger salary to pay tuition bills for kids in college, or to buy a house, or pay the property taxes that always seem to climb faster than our incomes. And though there is always a spiritual temptation involved in wanting more, it is also true that there are times when more really is better, when more truly does impact life in very positive ways.
Research has shown that when individual incomes in this country reach around $80,000 or 90,000 that is the tipping point---beyond this happiness does not increase with gains in wealth. Apparently, once people can comfortably pay their bills and then have extra money to do things they really enjoy--- going out to dinner, attending plays and concerts, traveling, the happiness quotient is quite high. But once people decide that all this is not enough; that is, once they want that bigger house in the fancier neighborhood---then when they actually get it, their happiness index either stays the same, or in many cases it actually decreases, because of a greater level of anxiety about the ability to maintain this standard. Research also indicates that people who live in neighborhoods, where the incomes of their neighbors are higher than theirs, are actually more prone to depression and even suicide than those with the same incomes, but who live in more modest neighborhoods. When you have less and are surrounded by people who have more, it is all too easy to become less happy and more focused on what you lack.
My youngest child, Caitlin, lived abroad for 12 years after college---in France and China and then 9 years in Thailand. She thought France never got over its grief of losing French as the international language; now English has that honor. China, she said, is a very competitive country, obsessed with having more. She also thought it was a mean country. She taught in an elite private school where the language of instruction was English, because all these successful and wealthy Chinese wanted their children to be completely fluent in English, so they could successfully compete in the world. Her fourth grade students were so anxious about their future success, she felt sorry for them. She was always telling them not to worry so much. But Thailand was a completely different experience. In a culture not driven by the desire or need to have more, people seemed to be happy with much less and grateful for what they have. She found it to be a much less anxious culture than our own and certainly China.
Yet greed can afflict anyone, which is why Jesus, though living in a culture, where most people were poor, still felt it important to teach a lesson about greed. Most of the people, who came to hear Jesus preach, were poor, and then as now the poor do need MORE for a better life. We know that Jesus was very concerned about justice and the redistribution of wealth. Many scholars believe he supported the Jubilee, when every 50 years, land and property were redistributed and returned to those who had lost them. But he also knew how dangerous it can be if the primary focus of life becomes getting and having. That certainly happens with the wealthy, but it can also happen if one is poor and lacks the basics. Life then becomes reduced to a struggle to get and have simply in order to survive. And that too can make life small and mean. Perhaps this is why Jesus refused to arbitrate a family inheritance squabble. He thought the focus was all wrong, just as the farmer’s focus on building bigger and better barns became all wrong. Both men were fools, because they did not realize that the focus on wealth can so easily become self-destructive and isolating.
In the case of the farmer, his isolation became so severe that in the course of three verses (17-19) he used the personal pronouns “I and my” nine times. The only conversation this man had was with himself, and it was all about what he was going to do with his wealth in the future: I will do this; I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones. I will say to my soul. In the immediate present his only goal was a kind of hedonistic pleasure: “relax, eat, drink and be merry.” No thought about anyone else, about how his wealth might be used on behalf of others. That is what greed does: it narrows the focus down to the self. It cuts off relationship.
This man was not only unaware of others and their needs, but he was also unaware of God and what God might well be asking of him. Such blindness to God is another mark of his foolishness. Psalm 14 says, “A fool says in his heart, There is no God,” which does not have to mean the denial of God’s existence, but rather a denial of God’s claim on one’s life. This rich man thought he had achieved everything on his own; he was clever and hard working, and so he was convinced that he owed nothing to anyone else, including God. The reward, he thought, belonged to him alone.
But Jesus told the story to remind his hearers and us that there are other claims on our lives. My and mine just don’t cut it. The rich man thought he was at the center of the story, and that is one of the great spiritual temptations---to think it is all about us. Whether rich, poor, or somewhere in between, any one of us can be greedy, so Jesus told the story to remind his hearers that no one is invulnerable to greed, and all should pay attention to where their focus is and needs to be.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church in Unionville, CT
July 31, 2022
Luke 12: 13-21
We have no idea what the issue was between two brothers that would have prompted one of them to ask Jesus to tell his brother to share the family inheritance with him. It certainly was not uncommon for the oldest son to get most, if not all, of the inheritance, though in cases where there was great wealth, younger sons (and even daughters) could receive some share of the wealth. Perhaps this was a disgruntled younger son, who did not think the inheritance system was fair and so he wanted Jesus to intervene on his behalf. We simply do not know the circumstances. All we know is that Jesus refused to get involved in the family dispute. He apparently did not think the request here was so much about justice as it was about greed---about wanting more than is one’s due.
And so, Jesus simply responded by saying, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And then he went on to tell a parable about a rich man, who insisted on building bigger and better barns to store his copious crops, because more is better. More must be better. That’s the capitalistic motto, isn’t it, but Jesus did not live in a capitalistic economy, so it is obvious that one does not have to be a capitalist to want more. Wanting more seems to be something that is deep within us, even as we also know that riches do not give life its deepest meaning. But knowing that does not necessarily prevent us from wanting more or even acquiring more. People can rationally know that having a bigger house or a fancier car will not really bring them greater happiness, but they still can want them. I, for example, have more dresses than I could possibly wear in at least two or three years, but does not prevent me from buying more. No, because I like the pleasure that having lovely dress brings- me--even while I also know that all my dresses do not give to my life deep meaning. Am I a fool?
A fool is exactly what Jesus called the man who built all those barns. Is he a fool because he truly believed that the meaning of his life came down to having more? It is obvious he took great pleasure in his copious crops and barns, but if it was far more than pleasure he took; if he made his possessions the measure of his life--- that is spiritually deadening and foolish. He was going to die that night, so what good to him were all those barns and crops? There is no hint, by the way, that his death is a punishment for his greed. Death just happened to come to him with no warning. Perhaps if he had a warning, he might have considered what his life was truly all about. He might have asked himself what more really means.
We all know about more, because probably everyone here has been in circumstances where we not only wanted more, but also needed more. Maybe we needed a larger salary to pay tuition bills for kids in college, or to buy a house, or pay the property taxes that always seem to climb faster than our incomes. And though there is always a spiritual temptation involved in wanting more, it is also true that there are times when more really is better, when more truly does impact life in very positive ways.
Research has shown that when individual incomes in this country reach around $80,000 or 90,000 that is the tipping point---beyond this happiness does not increase with gains in wealth. Apparently, once people can comfortably pay their bills and then have extra money to do things they really enjoy--- going out to dinner, attending plays and concerts, traveling, the happiness quotient is quite high. But once people decide that all this is not enough; that is, once they want that bigger house in the fancier neighborhood---then when they actually get it, their happiness index either stays the same, or in many cases it actually decreases, because of a greater level of anxiety about the ability to maintain this standard. Research also indicates that people who live in neighborhoods, where the incomes of their neighbors are higher than theirs, are actually more prone to depression and even suicide than those with the same incomes, but who live in more modest neighborhoods. When you have less and are surrounded by people who have more, it is all too easy to become less happy and more focused on what you lack.
My youngest child, Caitlin, lived abroad for 12 years after college---in France and China and then 9 years in Thailand. She thought France never got over its grief of losing French as the international language; now English has that honor. China, she said, is a very competitive country, obsessed with having more. She also thought it was a mean country. She taught in an elite private school where the language of instruction was English, because all these successful and wealthy Chinese wanted their children to be completely fluent in English, so they could successfully compete in the world. Her fourth grade students were so anxious about their future success, she felt sorry for them. She was always telling them not to worry so much. But Thailand was a completely different experience. In a culture not driven by the desire or need to have more, people seemed to be happy with much less and grateful for what they have. She found it to be a much less anxious culture than our own and certainly China.
Yet greed can afflict anyone, which is why Jesus, though living in a culture, where most people were poor, still felt it important to teach a lesson about greed. Most of the people, who came to hear Jesus preach, were poor, and then as now the poor do need MORE for a better life. We know that Jesus was very concerned about justice and the redistribution of wealth. Many scholars believe he supported the Jubilee, when every 50 years, land and property were redistributed and returned to those who had lost them. But he also knew how dangerous it can be if the primary focus of life becomes getting and having. That certainly happens with the wealthy, but it can also happen if one is poor and lacks the basics. Life then becomes reduced to a struggle to get and have simply in order to survive. And that too can make life small and mean. Perhaps this is why Jesus refused to arbitrate a family inheritance squabble. He thought the focus was all wrong, just as the farmer’s focus on building bigger and better barns became all wrong. Both men were fools, because they did not realize that the focus on wealth can so easily become self-destructive and isolating.
In the case of the farmer, his isolation became so severe that in the course of three verses (17-19) he used the personal pronouns “I and my” nine times. The only conversation this man had was with himself, and it was all about what he was going to do with his wealth in the future: I will do this; I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones. I will say to my soul. In the immediate present his only goal was a kind of hedonistic pleasure: “relax, eat, drink and be merry.” No thought about anyone else, about how his wealth might be used on behalf of others. That is what greed does: it narrows the focus down to the self. It cuts off relationship.
This man was not only unaware of others and their needs, but he was also unaware of God and what God might well be asking of him. Such blindness to God is another mark of his foolishness. Psalm 14 says, “A fool says in his heart, There is no God,” which does not have to mean the denial of God’s existence, but rather a denial of God’s claim on one’s life. This rich man thought he had achieved everything on his own; he was clever and hard working, and so he was convinced that he owed nothing to anyone else, including God. The reward, he thought, belonged to him alone.
But Jesus told the story to remind his hearers and us that there are other claims on our lives. My and mine just don’t cut it. The rich man thought he was at the center of the story, and that is one of the great spiritual temptations---to think it is all about us. Whether rich, poor, or somewhere in between, any one of us can be greedy, so Jesus told the story to remind his hearers that no one is invulnerable to greed, and all should pay attention to where their focus is and needs to be.
July 27, 2022
Dear Friends,
On Monday, July 25, Pope Francis made a visit to the Canadian province of Alberta, where he offered a heart-felt apology for the abuse of Indigenous people, which occurred at residential schools the Canadian government had established. For over a century 60% or 70% of these schools were run by the Roman Catholic Church, while others were run by various Protestant sects and denominations as well as the Canadian government. The children, who attended these schools, were forcibly removed from their parents’ homes with the express goal of wiping out their indigenous language, culture, and religion. They were to be thoroughly assimilated into Canadian western culture and forget any connections they might remember from their former lives.
The Canadian government had apologized some years before as had Protestant denominations, but the Vatican stalled. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the Canadian government, had declared the schools to be a form of cultural genocide and had urged the Vatican to make a formal apology in person, but the Vatican held out. A little over a year ago, a shocking discovery was made in British Columbia when ground penetrating radar uncovered evidence that Indigenous children were buried in unmarked graves. Former students had attested to this and then evidence was uncovered in other areas as well. Denial was impossible, and so the ugly truth was acknowledged. Not only was cultural genocide committed, but also cruelty was visited upon the children: mental and physical abuse were suffered by many and some even died because of the neglect and abuse. Shocking is only one word to describe the cruelty. And so, the Pope travelled to Canada to make his formal apology and begin the long road toward reconciliation.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” the Pope said. “I am sorry for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the government of that time which culminated in the system of residential schools.”
So, what difference does such an apology make? From what I have read, the response seems to have been quite positive. Indigenous people were genuinely moved that the Pope did come and speak words of sorrow in the hope that forgiveness would and could come. The acknowledgment of wrongdoing accompanying a request for forgiveness actually moved people away from rage and anger toward the hope that a new beginning is possible. Of course, there were those who felt the words were inadequate. Sorrow over the past can only go so far. If a new beginning is to come, it must come with action. And one possible action is reparations---payment to those who lived in the schools and survived and compensation to their heirs.
The Pope has promised further investigations, so more specifics can be learned, and a new beginning forged. What that new beginning might look like is left to the imagination. On the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday morning was a picture of the Pope in a wheelchair, sitting in a cemetery surrounded by white crosses. What was he thinking as he sat there? He knew that the Indigenous children who lay in the ground had no marker and no way of being known and remembered. Their identities were wiped out and their memory expunged from the Book of Life---not unlike what happened in the concentration camps in World War ll. Someone once said, “When we cannot remember, we hope that God will remember.” And how God remembers and what God does with the memory are not readily apparent to our limited ways of knowing and understanding.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
On Monday, July 25, Pope Francis made a visit to the Canadian province of Alberta, where he offered a heart-felt apology for the abuse of Indigenous people, which occurred at residential schools the Canadian government had established. For over a century 60% or 70% of these schools were run by the Roman Catholic Church, while others were run by various Protestant sects and denominations as well as the Canadian government. The children, who attended these schools, were forcibly removed from their parents’ homes with the express goal of wiping out their indigenous language, culture, and religion. They were to be thoroughly assimilated into Canadian western culture and forget any connections they might remember from their former lives.
The Canadian government had apologized some years before as had Protestant denominations, but the Vatican stalled. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the Canadian government, had declared the schools to be a form of cultural genocide and had urged the Vatican to make a formal apology in person, but the Vatican held out. A little over a year ago, a shocking discovery was made in British Columbia when ground penetrating radar uncovered evidence that Indigenous children were buried in unmarked graves. Former students had attested to this and then evidence was uncovered in other areas as well. Denial was impossible, and so the ugly truth was acknowledged. Not only was cultural genocide committed, but also cruelty was visited upon the children: mental and physical abuse were suffered by many and some even died because of the neglect and abuse. Shocking is only one word to describe the cruelty. And so, the Pope travelled to Canada to make his formal apology and begin the long road toward reconciliation.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” the Pope said. “I am sorry for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the government of that time which culminated in the system of residential schools.”
So, what difference does such an apology make? From what I have read, the response seems to have been quite positive. Indigenous people were genuinely moved that the Pope did come and speak words of sorrow in the hope that forgiveness would and could come. The acknowledgment of wrongdoing accompanying a request for forgiveness actually moved people away from rage and anger toward the hope that a new beginning is possible. Of course, there were those who felt the words were inadequate. Sorrow over the past can only go so far. If a new beginning is to come, it must come with action. And one possible action is reparations---payment to those who lived in the schools and survived and compensation to their heirs.
The Pope has promised further investigations, so more specifics can be learned, and a new beginning forged. What that new beginning might look like is left to the imagination. On the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday morning was a picture of the Pope in a wheelchair, sitting in a cemetery surrounded by white crosses. What was he thinking as he sat there? He knew that the Indigenous children who lay in the ground had no marker and no way of being known and remembered. Their identities were wiped out and their memory expunged from the Book of Life---not unlike what happened in the concentration camps in World War ll. Someone once said, “When we cannot remember, we hope that God will remember.” And how God remembers and what God does with the memory are not readily apparent to our limited ways of knowing and understanding.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Prayer
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 24, 2022
Luke 11: 1-13
Most of you know the name of The Rev. Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican bishop and anti-apartheid leader. Many considered him a modern saint. He died on December 26 of last year, and after his death all kinds of stories and remembrances were published. I read one about his visit to Harvard University some years ago, when he addressed a crowd of people, filled with activists of different ages. Expecting inspiration for their own struggles against poverty, war, and racism, many were disappointed when he spoke about prayer---about the power and potency of prayer, about how it had helped him and others in the struggle to bring change to South Africa. “Prayer,” he said, “was a teacher of patience and a daily reminder that God is working in history, that God’s justice would neither be mocked nor defeated and that finally God was the God of all, both the victims and the oppressors.” Some in the crowd grumbled, “What’s he talking about? “As long as the slaves prayed on their knees rather than fight on their feet, nothing much changed”’ Someone else said, “It was only when people came out of the church and started marching that Civil Rights got its due.” Tutu calmly replied by quoting Abraham Lincoln, “Many times I have been driven to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.” “Yes,” continued Tutu, “it takes strength and courage to move from your knees to your feet and act, but don’t underestimate the courage and strength it takes to move from your feet to your knees”.
Prayer: there is probably nothing in the religious life that confuses and unnerves us more than prayer. Many church goers openly admit they are not much good at prayer, and if you ask them to lead prayer, say at a church meeting or some other gathering, they often recoil in embarrassment, hoping that the clergy will do the praying. Public speaking is hard for many people, but public praying is even harder. Part of what makes prayer difficult for us is that we are not exactly sure what prayer is and what we can or should expect from prayer.
Oh sure, we think of prayer as talking to God, bringing our needs and desires, our wants and our fears before the divine majesty and mystery. When we pray, we often want God to do something, to fix something, though we are not sure what God is going to do with all the needs and requests. Some years ago, at a well-known medical school, there was a prayer study done among heart patients, and the results showed that people who were prayed over, whether they knew they were being prayed for or not, actually did considerably better in their recovery. On the other hand, many of us here can point to instances where we felt prayer did not work, at least in the way we were hoping. The person afflicted with cancer died despite our prayers; the needed job did not come through, the marriage collapsed despite our work and our prayers. So yes, we do sometimes wonder what good prayer really is.
I remember years ago, when I was in seminary a minister about to retire told me that he had come to the conclusion that prayer was a kind of therapy, changing the one doing the praying, but doing little to alter the outward circumstances. On the other hand, I knew a nun, who had spent 15 years, cloistered, praying for the world. Prayer, she told me, was like storming the gates of heaven with our pleas. She fervently believed that prayer does change things. Jesus told us to persist, to knock, to plead and never give up.
The Protestant reformer Martin Luther used to say that one of our mistakes with prayer is that we tend to think of it as a one way conversation---we do the talking (or the whining or complaining, as Luther was fond of saying) and God is supposed to do the listening and then the acting, changing life for the better. Now there is nothing wrong with asking God for things---that is certainly part of the tradition, and when we examine the Lord’s Prayer, as it is presented in Luke’s gospel, we find there are a number of petitions---the asking for daily bread, the request for the forgiveness of sin, and the avoidance of times of trial or temptation. But note: petition is not where the prayer begins. Rather it begins with an acknowledgment of God: Our Father, who art in heaven.
Now God in this first century culture was imagined as Father, but God can also be Mother, the Divine Parent, loving and caring for us, who although is concerned with earthly matters is also beyond earth, beyond our cares and concerns---in heaven. And this God is holy---that is what the word hallowed means, holy. With the acknowledgment of God’s identity as holy parent, the declaration is made that God’s kingdom, God’s rule, God’s will are to be accomplished on earth as they are in heaven. So, Jesus taught that before any human request or need is brought to God in prayer, the first step is an acknowledgment of God---God’s care for us as a parent and God’s rule in heaven and on earth.
Luther thought that if we could began prayer with such an acknowledgment, we would be helped to temper our insistence on getting our needs met. Our needs, wants and desires do not suddenly disappear, and indeed, they may be completely worthy and humanly very important. Jesus told us that God realizes we have needs, but the needs are to be viewed in relationship to God. This is what Desmond Tutu meant to communicate about the importance of prayer to him and to those who struggled with him for justice in South Africa. Tutu was a tireless worker for justice, and he fervently believed that God was with him in this struggle, but he began with God and not with the struggle, and for him this made all the difference. Prayer helped him to move from his knees to his feet and struggle for what he believed was right and good and just. Prayer for Bishop Tutu was more than talking to God, more than laying out human needs and crying out for justice: How long, O Lord, how long? Prayer also means listening to and for God. As the Psalmist sang so long ago, “Be still and know that I am God”. Prayer is also about that stillness.
When my husband and I visited Poland six Julys ago, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the notorious concentration camps. There in one of the buildings was a rabbi, who was silently praying. I will tell you that one of the things that struck me was how quiet everyone was. People dare not speak above a whisper. I told the rabbi I was a Christian clergywoman, and I was not too sure what it meant to pray in a place like this. “Yes,” he acknowledged, there were many desperate prayers prayed here, many of them unanswered. Yet I believe that in such a place as this prayer can become God’s truth--- the certainty that pain is not empty; the world is not a void, and the soul is not alone. Your Jesus said to pray without ceasing, and when he prayed, Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven---that is a call to action—God’s action as well as our own.”
Putting his hands in his pocket, he pulled out some sheets of paper, and gave me one. “Here,” he said, “I carry copies of this, and I give it to people I meet whom I think would be interested.” What he gave me was a prayer, written by an unknown prisoner in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, and placed by the body of a dead child:
O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will here, but remember also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart, which has grown out of this, and when they come to judgment let all the fruits, which we have borne be their forgiveness.
What good does prayer do? Jesus never once explained prayer; he never said how it worked, or why it is that some prayers seem to be answered, while others are not. He told us simply, “When you pray, say this.” Our call as Christians is to pray, and what God does with our prayers, how God uses our prayers, we leave all that to God. We cannot know what we cannot know, but we can hope that there are prayers, which God uses to heal the world of its brokenness.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 24, 2022
Luke 11: 1-13
Most of you know the name of The Rev. Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican bishop and anti-apartheid leader. Many considered him a modern saint. He died on December 26 of last year, and after his death all kinds of stories and remembrances were published. I read one about his visit to Harvard University some years ago, when he addressed a crowd of people, filled with activists of different ages. Expecting inspiration for their own struggles against poverty, war, and racism, many were disappointed when he spoke about prayer---about the power and potency of prayer, about how it had helped him and others in the struggle to bring change to South Africa. “Prayer,” he said, “was a teacher of patience and a daily reminder that God is working in history, that God’s justice would neither be mocked nor defeated and that finally God was the God of all, both the victims and the oppressors.” Some in the crowd grumbled, “What’s he talking about? “As long as the slaves prayed on their knees rather than fight on their feet, nothing much changed”’ Someone else said, “It was only when people came out of the church and started marching that Civil Rights got its due.” Tutu calmly replied by quoting Abraham Lincoln, “Many times I have been driven to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.” “Yes,” continued Tutu, “it takes strength and courage to move from your knees to your feet and act, but don’t underestimate the courage and strength it takes to move from your feet to your knees”.
Prayer: there is probably nothing in the religious life that confuses and unnerves us more than prayer. Many church goers openly admit they are not much good at prayer, and if you ask them to lead prayer, say at a church meeting or some other gathering, they often recoil in embarrassment, hoping that the clergy will do the praying. Public speaking is hard for many people, but public praying is even harder. Part of what makes prayer difficult for us is that we are not exactly sure what prayer is and what we can or should expect from prayer.
Oh sure, we think of prayer as talking to God, bringing our needs and desires, our wants and our fears before the divine majesty and mystery. When we pray, we often want God to do something, to fix something, though we are not sure what God is going to do with all the needs and requests. Some years ago, at a well-known medical school, there was a prayer study done among heart patients, and the results showed that people who were prayed over, whether they knew they were being prayed for or not, actually did considerably better in their recovery. On the other hand, many of us here can point to instances where we felt prayer did not work, at least in the way we were hoping. The person afflicted with cancer died despite our prayers; the needed job did not come through, the marriage collapsed despite our work and our prayers. So yes, we do sometimes wonder what good prayer really is.
I remember years ago, when I was in seminary a minister about to retire told me that he had come to the conclusion that prayer was a kind of therapy, changing the one doing the praying, but doing little to alter the outward circumstances. On the other hand, I knew a nun, who had spent 15 years, cloistered, praying for the world. Prayer, she told me, was like storming the gates of heaven with our pleas. She fervently believed that prayer does change things. Jesus told us to persist, to knock, to plead and never give up.
The Protestant reformer Martin Luther used to say that one of our mistakes with prayer is that we tend to think of it as a one way conversation---we do the talking (or the whining or complaining, as Luther was fond of saying) and God is supposed to do the listening and then the acting, changing life for the better. Now there is nothing wrong with asking God for things---that is certainly part of the tradition, and when we examine the Lord’s Prayer, as it is presented in Luke’s gospel, we find there are a number of petitions---the asking for daily bread, the request for the forgiveness of sin, and the avoidance of times of trial or temptation. But note: petition is not where the prayer begins. Rather it begins with an acknowledgment of God: Our Father, who art in heaven.
Now God in this first century culture was imagined as Father, but God can also be Mother, the Divine Parent, loving and caring for us, who although is concerned with earthly matters is also beyond earth, beyond our cares and concerns---in heaven. And this God is holy---that is what the word hallowed means, holy. With the acknowledgment of God’s identity as holy parent, the declaration is made that God’s kingdom, God’s rule, God’s will are to be accomplished on earth as they are in heaven. So, Jesus taught that before any human request or need is brought to God in prayer, the first step is an acknowledgment of God---God’s care for us as a parent and God’s rule in heaven and on earth.
Luther thought that if we could began prayer with such an acknowledgment, we would be helped to temper our insistence on getting our needs met. Our needs, wants and desires do not suddenly disappear, and indeed, they may be completely worthy and humanly very important. Jesus told us that God realizes we have needs, but the needs are to be viewed in relationship to God. This is what Desmond Tutu meant to communicate about the importance of prayer to him and to those who struggled with him for justice in South Africa. Tutu was a tireless worker for justice, and he fervently believed that God was with him in this struggle, but he began with God and not with the struggle, and for him this made all the difference. Prayer helped him to move from his knees to his feet and struggle for what he believed was right and good and just. Prayer for Bishop Tutu was more than talking to God, more than laying out human needs and crying out for justice: How long, O Lord, how long? Prayer also means listening to and for God. As the Psalmist sang so long ago, “Be still and know that I am God”. Prayer is also about that stillness.
When my husband and I visited Poland six Julys ago, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the notorious concentration camps. There in one of the buildings was a rabbi, who was silently praying. I will tell you that one of the things that struck me was how quiet everyone was. People dare not speak above a whisper. I told the rabbi I was a Christian clergywoman, and I was not too sure what it meant to pray in a place like this. “Yes,” he acknowledged, there were many desperate prayers prayed here, many of them unanswered. Yet I believe that in such a place as this prayer can become God’s truth--- the certainty that pain is not empty; the world is not a void, and the soul is not alone. Your Jesus said to pray without ceasing, and when he prayed, Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven---that is a call to action—God’s action as well as our own.”
Putting his hands in his pocket, he pulled out some sheets of paper, and gave me one. “Here,” he said, “I carry copies of this, and I give it to people I meet whom I think would be interested.” What he gave me was a prayer, written by an unknown prisoner in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, and placed by the body of a dead child:
O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will here, but remember also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart, which has grown out of this, and when they come to judgment let all the fruits, which we have borne be their forgiveness.
What good does prayer do? Jesus never once explained prayer; he never said how it worked, or why it is that some prayers seem to be answered, while others are not. He told us simply, “When you pray, say this.” Our call as Christians is to pray, and what God does with our prayers, how God uses our prayers, we leave all that to God. We cannot know what we cannot know, but we can hope that there are prayers, which God uses to heal the world of its brokenness.
July 14, 2022
Dear Friends,
This is truly incredible---the most exciting knowledge that has come our way in quite a long time. I am referring to the images that are coming from the James Webb Telescope, revealing what has been invisible details of the universe. I wrote about the Telescope some months ago, but now we can actually see images of multiple galaxies, stars bursting, dying and becoming nebulae. On Wednesday morning, I opened up The New York Times to see on the front page a picture of the cliffs of the Carina Nebula with stars in the background, surrounded by multiple galaxies. The light from these galaxies originated more than 13 billion years ago. The James Webb is going to give us images close to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. This is truly spectacular!
The first image from Webb, which was shown on Monday, is named SMACS 0723. It is a patch of the sky that is visible in the Southern Hemisphere, and it includes a massive cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light years away from our earth. Before Webb the record for the earliest and farthest galaxy ever seen is 420 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers expect Webb to break that record time and time again.
Astronomers are fascinated by the birth and death of stars. Most stars, including our sun, will come to an end, forming a nebula, which is like a colorful gas cloud. The cloud will expand and eventually fade away into the space between stars. But Webb shows that light is emitted from complex carbon molecules that travel through space, settling in clouds that eventually give birth to new stars, planets, and asteroids. These carbon molecules seem to be born from the same process that give rise to stars. There is so much to be learned and so much that is not yet understood. One astronomer commented that just as Hubble changed what was known, Webb will do the same. In many respects, he said, “we will have to rip up the previous work we have done and start over.”
I think we all can imagine how hard it is to rip up previous work and begin again. We human beings have this tendency to hang on to what we believe/think is true, and when new knowledge intrudes and does not square with what we thought we knew, it is painful, and we resist. I remember very well when my husband was a graduate student, and he had been working on a series of experiments for many months, hoping the work would lead to a thesis. Well, it came to nothing. He had to admit this line of thinking was a dead end. At first, he could not believe it; he did not want to believe it, because he had to throw out five months of solid experimentation. He tried to consider all kinds of different explanations for why things did not work out. He argued with his supervising professor. But finally, he was forced to conclude that this line of work and thought would not lead him to where he needed to go. He had to rip it up and start over. And then something new had the chance to be born. This also reminds me how very difficult, impossible really, it was for Albert Einstein to wrap his head around the fact that light can behave as both a wave and a particle (photon). “I do not believe,” he said, “that God plays dice with the universe.” He wanted to know God’s thoughts.
The Webb Telescope cost over $30 billion and took over 30 years to develop, the brainchild of at least 20,000 engineers, astronomers, and technicians from NASA, and the Canadian and European Space Agencies. On Tuesday there was a ceremony at which two of the astronomers congratulated and praised the teams that had worked so long and so well together. Dr. Mather claimed he had never worried that Webb would not succeed, while the other astronomer, Dr. Zurbuchen said, “I get paid to worry.” And perhaps God does too—worry, that is!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
This is truly incredible---the most exciting knowledge that has come our way in quite a long time. I am referring to the images that are coming from the James Webb Telescope, revealing what has been invisible details of the universe. I wrote about the Telescope some months ago, but now we can actually see images of multiple galaxies, stars bursting, dying and becoming nebulae. On Wednesday morning, I opened up The New York Times to see on the front page a picture of the cliffs of the Carina Nebula with stars in the background, surrounded by multiple galaxies. The light from these galaxies originated more than 13 billion years ago. The James Webb is going to give us images close to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. This is truly spectacular!
The first image from Webb, which was shown on Monday, is named SMACS 0723. It is a patch of the sky that is visible in the Southern Hemisphere, and it includes a massive cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light years away from our earth. Before Webb the record for the earliest and farthest galaxy ever seen is 420 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers expect Webb to break that record time and time again.
Astronomers are fascinated by the birth and death of stars. Most stars, including our sun, will come to an end, forming a nebula, which is like a colorful gas cloud. The cloud will expand and eventually fade away into the space between stars. But Webb shows that light is emitted from complex carbon molecules that travel through space, settling in clouds that eventually give birth to new stars, planets, and asteroids. These carbon molecules seem to be born from the same process that give rise to stars. There is so much to be learned and so much that is not yet understood. One astronomer commented that just as Hubble changed what was known, Webb will do the same. In many respects, he said, “we will have to rip up the previous work we have done and start over.”
I think we all can imagine how hard it is to rip up previous work and begin again. We human beings have this tendency to hang on to what we believe/think is true, and when new knowledge intrudes and does not square with what we thought we knew, it is painful, and we resist. I remember very well when my husband was a graduate student, and he had been working on a series of experiments for many months, hoping the work would lead to a thesis. Well, it came to nothing. He had to admit this line of thinking was a dead end. At first, he could not believe it; he did not want to believe it, because he had to throw out five months of solid experimentation. He tried to consider all kinds of different explanations for why things did not work out. He argued with his supervising professor. But finally, he was forced to conclude that this line of work and thought would not lead him to where he needed to go. He had to rip it up and start over. And then something new had the chance to be born. This also reminds me how very difficult, impossible really, it was for Albert Einstein to wrap his head around the fact that light can behave as both a wave and a particle (photon). “I do not believe,” he said, “that God plays dice with the universe.” He wanted to know God’s thoughts.
The Webb Telescope cost over $30 billion and took over 30 years to develop, the brainchild of at least 20,000 engineers, astronomers, and technicians from NASA, and the Canadian and European Space Agencies. On Tuesday there was a ceremony at which two of the astronomers congratulated and praised the teams that had worked so long and so well together. Dr. Mather claimed he had never worried that Webb would not succeed, while the other astronomer, Dr. Zurbuchen said, “I get paid to worry.” And perhaps God does too—worry, that is!
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
When the Enemy Saves
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 10, 2022
Luke 10: 25-37
There is probably no more familiar story in the Bible than the Good Samaritan. Even people with no church background often know it. It used to be considered part of general western cultural knowledge, but in today’s society, that is probably changing. Anyway, I would guess that everyone here knows it. But it is always useful to revisit even the most familiar text to see if any new insights can emerge.
This parable is unique to Luke, though both Matthew and Mark have someone ask a question about which is the greatest commandment. The exchange in Luke is between a lawyer and Jesus and it begins with a question, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In Matthew’s gospel the question is Which is the greatest commandment and in Mark’s gospel it is which is the first commandment, but Luke makes no attempt to rank the commandments. Like the quintessential teacher he is, Jesus responds to the question by asking questions: What is written in the law? What do you read there? And the lawyer responds by citing a verse from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love of God and love for neighbor permeate the Jewish law. And so, Jesus simply responds, “Do this and live.”
But the lawyer is not finished, and he then poses a question about the neighbor: Who is my neighbor? If eternal life is gained by loving God fully and loving the neighbor as oneself, it is interesting that this lawyer seems to know who God is, but he does not know the identity of his neighbor, and Jesus responds by telling the story of a man, beaten, and left for dead, who is helped and quite literally saved by a Samaritan. Now we are never directly told that the injured man is a Jew, but since Jesus is Jewish and the lawyer, who approaches Jesus is most likely Jewish, and the people, who would be hearing this story are probably a mixture of Jews and gentiles, who would know the enmity between the Samaritans the Jews, it is a safe interpretation to identify the man as Jewish. And what we see is a man, considered the enemy of the Jew, who helps and saves him.
The friction between Jew and Samaritan goes back to the days of the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 BC, where Samaritans also lived. Although they read the same scriptures, the Jews considered Sinai the sacred mountain, while the Samaritans thought it was Mount Gerizim. But the real tension grew when after the Assyrians invaded, the Samaritans began to intermarry with them, and intermarriage to the Jewish was anathema. It was considered a pollution of the bloodline, and after that Samaritans were viewed as thoroughly unclean and polluted. So, Jews and Samaritans hated each other, and everyone knew it. No one listening to this story, Jew or gentile, would have expected the Samaritan to be the one who would offer aid. The priest and the Levite walked by on the other side of the road to avoid any contact with what they perhaps thought was a dead body. Priests could become ritually unclean if they touched a dead body, but Levites were only in danger of ritual contamination if they touched a dead body while performing their sacred duties.
When Jesus asked who the neighbor was to the man, the lawyer correctly answered, “The one who showed him mercy,” and then Jesus said, “Go, and do likewise.” And because of that command, we tend to see the story from the perspective of the Samaritan, and so we understand the ethical dimension of the story in terms of what we are called to do---render mercy and aid.
But what happens if we see the story from the perspective of the beaten man, the one left for dead. What does it mean when the one who helps you, the one who literally saves your life is your enemy? How does that change the meaning of the story for us? How do we carry that lesson into the actual living of our lives.
I have a very good friend and colleague, Kaz, who for three years, while he was a student at Yale Divinity School, was my student intern. Kaz has been serving for the past 10 years a church in Marlborough, MA. He is Polish with a PhD in law and he never thought he could become a minister because he is gay. But the United States was friendlier to gay pastors than the Reformed Church in Poland, so Kaz changed professions and countries of residence. He is now a dual citizen. Anyway, Kaz’s Nana, the mother of his mother, lived through the Second World War in Poland.
The Nazis hated the Slavs almost as much as they hated the Jews, which is why they invaded Poland in 1939 and Russia in June, 1941, despite the pact Hitler and Stalin had signed. The Germans murdered many Poles and forced others, like Kaz’s Nana to leave their homes. She was told to report to the train station, where she would be deported to another city or town. She had with her, her three year old daughter, who would become Kaz’s mother. While standing on the train platform, there was this young German soldier, not more than 17 or 18, and Kaz’s Nana described him as the perfect example of an Aryan---blond hair, blue eyes, handsome and strong. He stared at Kaz’s Nana and her little girl, and then he lifted his arm and pointed to the woods beyond the train station. “Run, Mother, run,” he commanded. And that is exactly what his nana did. Holding her daughter and the bag she was carrying, she ran to the woods. Cowering there for a while, considering what she would do next, she suddenly heard the sound of machine guns as she witnessed the people on the train platform being brutally shot down. She ran for her life, hiding in the woods until she found shelter in another town with other Poles, willing to help her and her child.
When she told the story to Kaz, she said even after all these years, she did not fully understand why she did what the young soldier told her to do. She did not understand why she believed him. “I hated the Germans,” she confessed. “They were less than human to me, so why did I listen to that boy? And why did he save me? Perhaps I reminded him of his mother, or perhaps your mother reminded him of his little sister. I don’t know. I only know that my life and the life of your mother were saved by someone who was my enemy and the enemy of Poland. And what that has meant for me is that after the war I was never able to successfully hate the Germans as so many other Poles did. Yes, I saw what they did. I saw the destruction of my beloved Warsaw and later I would learn the full story of their massacre of the Jews as well as the Poles. I knew all that, and yet because I was saved by one of them, I was forced to come to terms with the truth that guilt and innocence are not evenly shared. My life and the life of your mother were in that young man’s hands, and we are both alive because of him. He was my enemy, and yet he literally became my savior. He saved us from certain death.
When we see ourselves as the brutalized man, left to die by the side of the road, and consider what it might mean for us to be saved by the one we hate or consider our enemy, the parable of the Good Samaritan does take on a different ethical dimension, because it removes us from the position of power, where we all prefer to be, and puts us in the position of victim. And the world never looks the same to the powerful as it does to the victim. In this case the Samaritan, the enemy of the Jew, had power; he had agency, meaning he could act and act responsibly and virtuously. And that is admirable, and Jesus tells us, “Go and do likewise.” But there may be times in life when we are not in the position of power. We may find ourselves victimized---victimized by circumstances beyond our control, and then we are dependent upon others to show us the care and compassion we need. We don’t want to be victims and much of the time we do not want to be dependent, but life sometimes writes us into a story in which we would prefer not to play a role. But, when forced by circumstances, how do we respond? What do we learn and what can we learn when the one or ones who help us are not our family, not our friends, but the one we call enemy?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
July 10, 2022
Luke 10: 25-37
There is probably no more familiar story in the Bible than the Good Samaritan. Even people with no church background often know it. It used to be considered part of general western cultural knowledge, but in today’s society, that is probably changing. Anyway, I would guess that everyone here knows it. But it is always useful to revisit even the most familiar text to see if any new insights can emerge.
This parable is unique to Luke, though both Matthew and Mark have someone ask a question about which is the greatest commandment. The exchange in Luke is between a lawyer and Jesus and it begins with a question, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In Matthew’s gospel the question is Which is the greatest commandment and in Mark’s gospel it is which is the first commandment, but Luke makes no attempt to rank the commandments. Like the quintessential teacher he is, Jesus responds to the question by asking questions: What is written in the law? What do you read there? And the lawyer responds by citing a verse from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love of God and love for neighbor permeate the Jewish law. And so, Jesus simply responds, “Do this and live.”
But the lawyer is not finished, and he then poses a question about the neighbor: Who is my neighbor? If eternal life is gained by loving God fully and loving the neighbor as oneself, it is interesting that this lawyer seems to know who God is, but he does not know the identity of his neighbor, and Jesus responds by telling the story of a man, beaten, and left for dead, who is helped and quite literally saved by a Samaritan. Now we are never directly told that the injured man is a Jew, but since Jesus is Jewish and the lawyer, who approaches Jesus is most likely Jewish, and the people, who would be hearing this story are probably a mixture of Jews and gentiles, who would know the enmity between the Samaritans the Jews, it is a safe interpretation to identify the man as Jewish. And what we see is a man, considered the enemy of the Jew, who helps and saves him.
The friction between Jew and Samaritan goes back to the days of the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 BC, where Samaritans also lived. Although they read the same scriptures, the Jews considered Sinai the sacred mountain, while the Samaritans thought it was Mount Gerizim. But the real tension grew when after the Assyrians invaded, the Samaritans began to intermarry with them, and intermarriage to the Jewish was anathema. It was considered a pollution of the bloodline, and after that Samaritans were viewed as thoroughly unclean and polluted. So, Jews and Samaritans hated each other, and everyone knew it. No one listening to this story, Jew or gentile, would have expected the Samaritan to be the one who would offer aid. The priest and the Levite walked by on the other side of the road to avoid any contact with what they perhaps thought was a dead body. Priests could become ritually unclean if they touched a dead body, but Levites were only in danger of ritual contamination if they touched a dead body while performing their sacred duties.
When Jesus asked who the neighbor was to the man, the lawyer correctly answered, “The one who showed him mercy,” and then Jesus said, “Go, and do likewise.” And because of that command, we tend to see the story from the perspective of the Samaritan, and so we understand the ethical dimension of the story in terms of what we are called to do---render mercy and aid.
But what happens if we see the story from the perspective of the beaten man, the one left for dead. What does it mean when the one who helps you, the one who literally saves your life is your enemy? How does that change the meaning of the story for us? How do we carry that lesson into the actual living of our lives.
I have a very good friend and colleague, Kaz, who for three years, while he was a student at Yale Divinity School, was my student intern. Kaz has been serving for the past 10 years a church in Marlborough, MA. He is Polish with a PhD in law and he never thought he could become a minister because he is gay. But the United States was friendlier to gay pastors than the Reformed Church in Poland, so Kaz changed professions and countries of residence. He is now a dual citizen. Anyway, Kaz’s Nana, the mother of his mother, lived through the Second World War in Poland.
The Nazis hated the Slavs almost as much as they hated the Jews, which is why they invaded Poland in 1939 and Russia in June, 1941, despite the pact Hitler and Stalin had signed. The Germans murdered many Poles and forced others, like Kaz’s Nana to leave their homes. She was told to report to the train station, where she would be deported to another city or town. She had with her, her three year old daughter, who would become Kaz’s mother. While standing on the train platform, there was this young German soldier, not more than 17 or 18, and Kaz’s Nana described him as the perfect example of an Aryan---blond hair, blue eyes, handsome and strong. He stared at Kaz’s Nana and her little girl, and then he lifted his arm and pointed to the woods beyond the train station. “Run, Mother, run,” he commanded. And that is exactly what his nana did. Holding her daughter and the bag she was carrying, she ran to the woods. Cowering there for a while, considering what she would do next, she suddenly heard the sound of machine guns as she witnessed the people on the train platform being brutally shot down. She ran for her life, hiding in the woods until she found shelter in another town with other Poles, willing to help her and her child.
When she told the story to Kaz, she said even after all these years, she did not fully understand why she did what the young soldier told her to do. She did not understand why she believed him. “I hated the Germans,” she confessed. “They were less than human to me, so why did I listen to that boy? And why did he save me? Perhaps I reminded him of his mother, or perhaps your mother reminded him of his little sister. I don’t know. I only know that my life and the life of your mother were saved by someone who was my enemy and the enemy of Poland. And what that has meant for me is that after the war I was never able to successfully hate the Germans as so many other Poles did. Yes, I saw what they did. I saw the destruction of my beloved Warsaw and later I would learn the full story of their massacre of the Jews as well as the Poles. I knew all that, and yet because I was saved by one of them, I was forced to come to terms with the truth that guilt and innocence are not evenly shared. My life and the life of your mother were in that young man’s hands, and we are both alive because of him. He was my enemy, and yet he literally became my savior. He saved us from certain death.
When we see ourselves as the brutalized man, left to die by the side of the road, and consider what it might mean for us to be saved by the one we hate or consider our enemy, the parable of the Good Samaritan does take on a different ethical dimension, because it removes us from the position of power, where we all prefer to be, and puts us in the position of victim. And the world never looks the same to the powerful as it does to the victim. In this case the Samaritan, the enemy of the Jew, had power; he had agency, meaning he could act and act responsibly and virtuously. And that is admirable, and Jesus tells us, “Go and do likewise.” But there may be times in life when we are not in the position of power. We may find ourselves victimized---victimized by circumstances beyond our control, and then we are dependent upon others to show us the care and compassion we need. We don’t want to be victims and much of the time we do not want to be dependent, but life sometimes writes us into a story in which we would prefer not to play a role. But, when forced by circumstances, how do we respond? What do we learn and what can we learn when the one or ones who help us are not our family, not our friends, but the one we call enemy?
July 6, 2022
Dear Friends,
Despite the horror of the gun assault on the Chicago suburb, Highland Park, leaving seven people dead and dozens wounded and the gun violence that daily afflicts the southside of Chicago without national attention, most Americans tried to enjoy the Fourth of July this past Monday. For two years celebrations of the 4th were severely limited because of Covid, so people were looking forward to trips and picnics and the iconic fireworks displays in various cities and towns across the nation. The Fourth is a day to remember and celebrate those achievements in our history, which make us proud, even as we also admit the nation has never lived up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. There are a number of events worth celebrating and remembering, and certainly one of the worthiest is the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 by President Lyndon Johnson.
When Johnson was Senate Majority leader, he had pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and as President, he was determined to pass the stronger civil rights legislation that John F. Kennedy had wanted to pass in 1963 before he was assassinated in Dallas. In fact, five days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson addressed Congress, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights act for which he fought so long.”
In 1964 only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered to vote, and the summer of 1964 became known as Freedom Summer as people set out to register to vote black citizens of Mississippi. Bob Moses was a New York City teacher, who began to register people in 1961, and the registration continued through the next summers, with 1964 boasting the greatest number of volunteers going south to help with the drive. Three of the volunteers were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and they disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21. No one had any idea where they were, but many suspected the worst, even as some Mississippians said it was all a hoax. There was outrage across the country, and Johnson tried to use that outrage to push hard for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The House of Representatives had been working to pass a bill since the summer of 1963, but all the following fall and winter it had been held up in the Rules Committee by its chair, a staunch segregationist from Virginia. Howard Smith. But over the winter of 1964 congressmen heard from so many of their constituents, angry about the hold up that Smith finally let it move out of Committee. On February 10, 1964 the House passed the bill and sent it to the Senate. The trouble with the Senate was that many of the southern Democrats tended to be staunch segregationists, so breaking the filibuster was not an easy task. In those years the filibuster demanded that people actually hold the floor by talking, so squads of senators took turns speaking and reading. Richard Russell, a Democrat from Georgia and a friend of Lyndon Johnson, made his feelings known when he said, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about the social equality and intermingling and the amalgamation of the races in our states.”
As the spring settled on the nation, many people, both Black and White, demonstrated in favor of the legislation. The Senate was three votes shy of breaking the filibuster, and there were Republicans, who though supporting civil rights, did not want to support more government regulation in the economic lives of business, so they refused to pass the bill. On June 18 Black people jumped into a Whites Only swimming pool in St. Augustine, Florida, and then the owner was caught on camera dumping acid into the pool. The image of a White man pouring acid into a pool to prevent Black persons from swimming was too much for some people, and the choke hold on the Senate was broken. The Republican Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, then delivered the three votes necessary to break the filibuster to the majority leader, Mike Mansfield. The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent its version back to the House. The seething anger over the missing three civil rights workers gave Johnson the fire to pressure the House to pass the bill. Johnson signed the bill on July 2.
But right before writing his name on the bill, he addressed the nation. Johnson spoke of the triumph of the American Revolution, but he also said that those who founded the new nation realized that “freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.” The purpose of the law,” he said, “is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American so long as he respects the rights of others. It does say that those who are equal before God shall now be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
On August 4, 1964 the three bodies of the murdered civil rights workers were unearthed in a dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Ku Klux Klan had been responsible for the murders, one of them a law enforcement officer. As much hope as the nation felt in the signing of the bill on that July 2, the three murdered bodies were a reminder of just how far fear and hatred can viciously reach. The same is true today, which is why Jesus reminded his followers to be “gentle as doves and as wise as serpents.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Despite the horror of the gun assault on the Chicago suburb, Highland Park, leaving seven people dead and dozens wounded and the gun violence that daily afflicts the southside of Chicago without national attention, most Americans tried to enjoy the Fourth of July this past Monday. For two years celebrations of the 4th were severely limited because of Covid, so people were looking forward to trips and picnics and the iconic fireworks displays in various cities and towns across the nation. The Fourth is a day to remember and celebrate those achievements in our history, which make us proud, even as we also admit the nation has never lived up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. There are a number of events worth celebrating and remembering, and certainly one of the worthiest is the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 by President Lyndon Johnson.
When Johnson was Senate Majority leader, he had pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and as President, he was determined to pass the stronger civil rights legislation that John F. Kennedy had wanted to pass in 1963 before he was assassinated in Dallas. In fact, five days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson addressed Congress, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights act for which he fought so long.”
In 1964 only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered to vote, and the summer of 1964 became known as Freedom Summer as people set out to register to vote black citizens of Mississippi. Bob Moses was a New York City teacher, who began to register people in 1961, and the registration continued through the next summers, with 1964 boasting the greatest number of volunteers going south to help with the drive. Three of the volunteers were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and they disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21. No one had any idea where they were, but many suspected the worst, even as some Mississippians said it was all a hoax. There was outrage across the country, and Johnson tried to use that outrage to push hard for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The House of Representatives had been working to pass a bill since the summer of 1963, but all the following fall and winter it had been held up in the Rules Committee by its chair, a staunch segregationist from Virginia. Howard Smith. But over the winter of 1964 congressmen heard from so many of their constituents, angry about the hold up that Smith finally let it move out of Committee. On February 10, 1964 the House passed the bill and sent it to the Senate. The trouble with the Senate was that many of the southern Democrats tended to be staunch segregationists, so breaking the filibuster was not an easy task. In those years the filibuster demanded that people actually hold the floor by talking, so squads of senators took turns speaking and reading. Richard Russell, a Democrat from Georgia and a friend of Lyndon Johnson, made his feelings known when he said, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about the social equality and intermingling and the amalgamation of the races in our states.”
As the spring settled on the nation, many people, both Black and White, demonstrated in favor of the legislation. The Senate was three votes shy of breaking the filibuster, and there were Republicans, who though supporting civil rights, did not want to support more government regulation in the economic lives of business, so they refused to pass the bill. On June 18 Black people jumped into a Whites Only swimming pool in St. Augustine, Florida, and then the owner was caught on camera dumping acid into the pool. The image of a White man pouring acid into a pool to prevent Black persons from swimming was too much for some people, and the choke hold on the Senate was broken. The Republican Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, then delivered the three votes necessary to break the filibuster to the majority leader, Mike Mansfield. The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent its version back to the House. The seething anger over the missing three civil rights workers gave Johnson the fire to pressure the House to pass the bill. Johnson signed the bill on July 2.
But right before writing his name on the bill, he addressed the nation. Johnson spoke of the triumph of the American Revolution, but he also said that those who founded the new nation realized that “freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.” The purpose of the law,” he said, “is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American so long as he respects the rights of others. It does say that those who are equal before God shall now be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
On August 4, 1964 the three bodies of the murdered civil rights workers were unearthed in a dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Ku Klux Klan had been responsible for the murders, one of them a law enforcement officer. As much hope as the nation felt in the signing of the bill on that July 2, the three murdered bodies were a reminder of just how far fear and hatred can viciously reach. The same is true today, which is why Jesus reminded his followers to be “gentle as doves and as wise as serpents.”
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
The Repairability Index
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 3, 2022
2 Kings 5: 1-14
I recently read that France now requires an index on certain electronic products, like cell phones and computers, that lets the consumer know how difficult it might be to get it repaired or even buy replacement parts. Apparently, you can look up the code and see how challenging or expensive a fix might be. It is supposed to help consumers make informed judgments before buying a product or wasting a great deal of money and time trying to get it repaired. It is not perfect, of course, but it does help, and apparently people have been relatively pleased with the results.
It is good to have an idea of how challenging it might be to fix something, but when it comes to human beings coming up with an accurate repairability index would be, well, extremely difficult. While it is certainly true that medicine gives odds on something working or not and insurance companies will consider the odds of healing before agreeing to spending a pile of money on a particular procedure, accurate predicting is extremely challenging. I have a college friend, who has been suffering for over 25 years from a rare form of slow growing cancer where these tiny carcinoids appear in different organs of the body. Because they are so slow growing, they do not respond to chemo, but they have responded to some new radical forms of treatment, very, very expensive, I might add. One shot is over $60,000 and the new radiation therapy he is about to receive in July is over $600,000. He told me a few weeks ago that the insurance always initially rejects the treatment, but Alex is a very smart corporate lawyer, and so far, he has always outfoxed the insurance company, which has ended up paying and paying year after year. And he has outlived all the predictions. His repairability index, though judged low, has turned out to be amazingly high.
Yes, human beings are tricky creatures when it comes to predicting their repairability, and no more so than when it comes to predicting psychological and spiritual recovery. I have seen addicts have their recovery programs rejected or at least questioned after they have failed numerous other ones, but then, miraculously, after the next attempt, against all predictions, healing took hold. Who can figure?
Our story today from the Second Book of Kings is about repairability, or healing. Naaman, a mighty warrior from Syria, is afflicted with leprosy, what is now known as Hansen’s disease. Though in biblical times, it was treated as a dreaded disease and highly infectious, my husband tells me it is not all that infectious and most of the time it is not all that serious, although it can become so. It is possible for the body to be almost eaten to shreds by these little sores that can cover and consume the body. So Naaman was suffering from leprosy. His name, by the way, literally means pleasant or pleasing---interesting, because the Syrians and the Israelites were often at war, but here we meet a pleasant foreigner. A servant, who was an Israelite, captured in a raid, told Naaman’s wife that he should seek healing form Elisha, the prophet, who had replaced Elijah about whom we read last week. And Naaman’s king mistakenly thought he had to send copious gifts to the King of Israel in order to ask for healing for his mighty warrior. The Israelite king took this as a grave insult, tearing his clothes, at the mere suggestion that he might have power over healing, and so Elisha, the prophet, had to intervene and set the king straight. And this is how it often is in real life. The high and the mighty are so easily offended because they tend to think everything is about them.
And Naaman made the same mistake. He became offended when Elisha failed to address him in person with the instructions to wash seven times in the River Jordan. He thought the rivers in Syria must be even better for healing. So, like the King of Israel, he too became bent out of shape. But look who brought Naaman back to reality---again the lowly, the servants. They reminded Naaman that if he had been given a challenging and difficult task, he would have done it, but because the task was so easy, he thought he was above its simplicity. But, despite his pride, he listened to the servants, followed the instructions about bathing and was healed. Sometimes that’s all it takes---enough humility to listen and respond.
A friend of mine recently told me a story about her neighbor, a man around 70, who had not spoken to his parents in over 50 years. Apparently, it had to do with Viet Nam. His father had been a decorated flier in World War Il, and when the son was drafted, he went to Canada rather than serve in a war he considered unwinnable and unjust. The father was furious with his son, and apparently said some pretty terrible things, accusing his son of cowardice, telling him he was ashamed to call him his son. “You,” he accused, “are no longer my son.” And so, the son left for Canada and never returned to the United States. Well, the father, now in his 90’s, was dying of Alzheimer’s, and the son, despite the terrible rift in their relationship, actually regretted the rupture. “I don’t know why I stayed away so long,” he told my friend. “I should have gone there years ago, but I am stubborn and proud, and I was waiting for my father to reach out. But he never did. Besides, I just did not know what to say. I did not know how to get over the breach. And now my father does not even have enough of a working brain to know me and know my sorrow. Now it is too late.”
Well, one day his 14 year old grandson was over the house and the man was speaking to his wife once again about the situation. “And my poor mother,” he was saying to his wife. “She had nothing to do with it, but she did not think she could buck my father, and I was so angry at her, because I thought she did not have the strength to do the right thing.” And do you know what that 14 year old said? “Grandpa, why didn’t you have the strength to do the right thing? Why don’t you go NOW and say, “I’m sorry?” Out of the mouth of babes.
And so, the man went. He flew to Chicago and arrived at the nursing home, where his father had been living for the past two years. Entering his father’s room, he immediately recognized the wizened old man, lying in the bed. His hands were placed flat on the sheet, and though gnarled with age, the son still recognized the strength that had once been in them. His mother was sitting in a chair, hunched and tired looking, but she immediately recognized her son, and wrapped her arms around him in a loving embrace. “I’m sorry,” the son said, and when his father heard those words, he opened his eyes and stared. The son sat down next to his father and took his hand and held it for three days until the man died. His last breath was a peaceful one.
We human beings have this tendency to trip over our pride, which often prevents us from not only doing the right thing but even recognizing the right thing. And sometimes it is the small ones, the less experienced ones, the least of these, like children, adolescents, or servants, who see what we are so often blind to as well as blinded by. Not everything can be repaired. Some things, including relationships, are never fixed. That family would never recover the 50 years of anger and bitterness that were surrendered to pride. But something did happen; something was repaired, and even if not perfectly, it was worth the trip, worth the effort, even if the repairability index seemed very low.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
July 3, 2022
2 Kings 5: 1-14
I recently read that France now requires an index on certain electronic products, like cell phones and computers, that lets the consumer know how difficult it might be to get it repaired or even buy replacement parts. Apparently, you can look up the code and see how challenging or expensive a fix might be. It is supposed to help consumers make informed judgments before buying a product or wasting a great deal of money and time trying to get it repaired. It is not perfect, of course, but it does help, and apparently people have been relatively pleased with the results.
It is good to have an idea of how challenging it might be to fix something, but when it comes to human beings coming up with an accurate repairability index would be, well, extremely difficult. While it is certainly true that medicine gives odds on something working or not and insurance companies will consider the odds of healing before agreeing to spending a pile of money on a particular procedure, accurate predicting is extremely challenging. I have a college friend, who has been suffering for over 25 years from a rare form of slow growing cancer where these tiny carcinoids appear in different organs of the body. Because they are so slow growing, they do not respond to chemo, but they have responded to some new radical forms of treatment, very, very expensive, I might add. One shot is over $60,000 and the new radiation therapy he is about to receive in July is over $600,000. He told me a few weeks ago that the insurance always initially rejects the treatment, but Alex is a very smart corporate lawyer, and so far, he has always outfoxed the insurance company, which has ended up paying and paying year after year. And he has outlived all the predictions. His repairability index, though judged low, has turned out to be amazingly high.
Yes, human beings are tricky creatures when it comes to predicting their repairability, and no more so than when it comes to predicting psychological and spiritual recovery. I have seen addicts have their recovery programs rejected or at least questioned after they have failed numerous other ones, but then, miraculously, after the next attempt, against all predictions, healing took hold. Who can figure?
Our story today from the Second Book of Kings is about repairability, or healing. Naaman, a mighty warrior from Syria, is afflicted with leprosy, what is now known as Hansen’s disease. Though in biblical times, it was treated as a dreaded disease and highly infectious, my husband tells me it is not all that infectious and most of the time it is not all that serious, although it can become so. It is possible for the body to be almost eaten to shreds by these little sores that can cover and consume the body. So Naaman was suffering from leprosy. His name, by the way, literally means pleasant or pleasing---interesting, because the Syrians and the Israelites were often at war, but here we meet a pleasant foreigner. A servant, who was an Israelite, captured in a raid, told Naaman’s wife that he should seek healing form Elisha, the prophet, who had replaced Elijah about whom we read last week. And Naaman’s king mistakenly thought he had to send copious gifts to the King of Israel in order to ask for healing for his mighty warrior. The Israelite king took this as a grave insult, tearing his clothes, at the mere suggestion that he might have power over healing, and so Elisha, the prophet, had to intervene and set the king straight. And this is how it often is in real life. The high and the mighty are so easily offended because they tend to think everything is about them.
And Naaman made the same mistake. He became offended when Elisha failed to address him in person with the instructions to wash seven times in the River Jordan. He thought the rivers in Syria must be even better for healing. So, like the King of Israel, he too became bent out of shape. But look who brought Naaman back to reality---again the lowly, the servants. They reminded Naaman that if he had been given a challenging and difficult task, he would have done it, but because the task was so easy, he thought he was above its simplicity. But, despite his pride, he listened to the servants, followed the instructions about bathing and was healed. Sometimes that’s all it takes---enough humility to listen and respond.
A friend of mine recently told me a story about her neighbor, a man around 70, who had not spoken to his parents in over 50 years. Apparently, it had to do with Viet Nam. His father had been a decorated flier in World War Il, and when the son was drafted, he went to Canada rather than serve in a war he considered unwinnable and unjust. The father was furious with his son, and apparently said some pretty terrible things, accusing his son of cowardice, telling him he was ashamed to call him his son. “You,” he accused, “are no longer my son.” And so, the son left for Canada and never returned to the United States. Well, the father, now in his 90’s, was dying of Alzheimer’s, and the son, despite the terrible rift in their relationship, actually regretted the rupture. “I don’t know why I stayed away so long,” he told my friend. “I should have gone there years ago, but I am stubborn and proud, and I was waiting for my father to reach out. But he never did. Besides, I just did not know what to say. I did not know how to get over the breach. And now my father does not even have enough of a working brain to know me and know my sorrow. Now it is too late.”
Well, one day his 14 year old grandson was over the house and the man was speaking to his wife once again about the situation. “And my poor mother,” he was saying to his wife. “She had nothing to do with it, but she did not think she could buck my father, and I was so angry at her, because I thought she did not have the strength to do the right thing.” And do you know what that 14 year old said? “Grandpa, why didn’t you have the strength to do the right thing? Why don’t you go NOW and say, “I’m sorry?” Out of the mouth of babes.
And so, the man went. He flew to Chicago and arrived at the nursing home, where his father had been living for the past two years. Entering his father’s room, he immediately recognized the wizened old man, lying in the bed. His hands were placed flat on the sheet, and though gnarled with age, the son still recognized the strength that had once been in them. His mother was sitting in a chair, hunched and tired looking, but she immediately recognized her son, and wrapped her arms around him in a loving embrace. “I’m sorry,” the son said, and when his father heard those words, he opened his eyes and stared. The son sat down next to his father and took his hand and held it for three days until the man died. His last breath was a peaceful one.
We human beings have this tendency to trip over our pride, which often prevents us from not only doing the right thing but even recognizing the right thing. And sometimes it is the small ones, the less experienced ones, the least of these, like children, adolescents, or servants, who see what we are so often blind to as well as blinded by. Not everything can be repaired. Some things, including relationships, are never fixed. That family would never recover the 50 years of anger and bitterness that were surrendered to pride. But something did happen; something was repaired, and even if not perfectly, it was worth the trip, worth the effort, even if the repairability index seemed very low.
June 28, 2022
Dear Friends
My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, believed in the power of biography to shape the minds and moral character of her students. She was always telling us stories of people, who made a difference. Sometimes they were persons of historical significance, known to many, and at other times they were people who just did what was good and right without public fanfare or knowledge. I thought of Mrs. Guyette the other day, when I came across the obituary of a woman name Andree Geulen, who died at the age of 100. Mrs. Guyette would have loved her story, and she would have loved even more the sharing of it with her young and impressionable students.
Andree Geulen was born in 1921 and grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Later she taught in a Belgian all girls boarding school in Brussels, when her Jewish students were suddenly ordered by the occupying Nazis to put a yellow star on their uniforms. The Jewish girls were so humiliated by this that Andree remembers how they would clutch their notebooks to their chests in an effort to hide the hated yellow star. And so, what did the teacher do? She had all her students, Jews and non-Jews alike, put aprons on over their uniforms, which hid the stars. A few weeks later she noticed that some of her Jewish students were no longer in class. It did not take her long to discover the terrible reason: The students, along with their families, had been rounded up and were on their way to Auschwitz.
The horrified teacher knew that she had to do something, and so she volunteered with The Committee for the Defense of the Jews, which hid Jewish children in convents, farms, monasteries, boarding schools and with other families, willing to hide Jewish children. “It was a race against time,” she said. “I had addresses of Jewish families and it was my job to get to the Jewish children before the Gestapo did.” Between the fall of 1942 and September, 1944 Geulen personally saved between 300 and 400 children. When she died on May 31 in a Belgium nursing home, she was the last survivor of a cadre of twelve women who worked for the Committee and saved over 4000 Jewish children. As we can imagine, the work of the Committee was not only dangerous, it was also emotionally harrowing. Parents would give up their children to these women without knowing where their children were going or even if they would ever see them again. Many of these parents died in concentration camps.
In 2017 there was an exhibition at Queens College about the Belgian resistance, and Andree Geulen was there. She described how torturous it was to pull children away from parents, who begged to know where their children were going. But no information was ever given to the parents to keep everything as secret as possible. Ms. Geulen said if she had been a mother at the time, she does not think she would have been able to do what she did. She described how each child was given a new name and was told not to tell anyone she or he was Jewish. Of course, young children did not understand this at all, and Ms. Geulen recalls being on a train with a young girl, when another passenger asked the girl her name. The child turned to Ms. Geulen and asked, “Should I tell her my new name or my old one?” Luckily, the passenger was not at all sympathetic to the Nazis.
In May, 1943 the Nazis raided the boarding school, where Ms. Geulen was teaching, where twelve Jewish children were hidden. The school’s headmistress and her husband were sent to concentration camps from which they never returned, but though Ms. Geulen was questioned, she was never arrested or faced any charges. She always believed her blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin as well as her impeccable German worked to her advantage when it came to dealing with Nazis. After all, she presented with the “perfect visage” of an Aryan! When being questioned, one German officer asked her, “Are you not ashamed of teaching Jewish children?” Her response: “Are you not ashamed of persecuting Jewish children?”
After the war was over, she worked hard to reunite the children with their parents, but this too was emotionally grueling work. The youngest children often did not remember their parents, and they did not want to leave the only family they had known. And sometimes it was extremely painful to put the children in orphanages when it was finally recognized that the parents would not be returning.
In 1989 Andree Geulen was honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and center for research in Jerusalem. She has a place on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, a recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi horror. I recall visiting the Museum in 2006 and walking along the outside avenue, reading the names of people from all over the world. One of my fellow travelers remarked, “There are way too few names here.” True, and if there had been a groundswell of protest from the gentiles, there would have been no Holocaust. The Nazis managed to do their murderous work because there was hardly an objection from the wider population. Where there was substantial objection---such as from the Roman Catholic Church in Bulgaria—the Jews fared much better.
In the last decades of her life, Ms. Geulen found a new career in documenting some of the stories of the hidden Belgian children. One of them, Helene Weiss, discovered Ms. Geulen’s address and sent her a letter of gratitude as well as some pictures of her children and grandchildren. “If it weren’t for you,” she wrote, “they would not be here.” How true! As I said, my sixth grade teacher would have loved this story, and she would have loved even more telling us the story and then asking us questions to encourage us to think more deeply about what goodness is and why it matters if we pursue it.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends
My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Guyette, believed in the power of biography to shape the minds and moral character of her students. She was always telling us stories of people, who made a difference. Sometimes they were persons of historical significance, known to many, and at other times they were people who just did what was good and right without public fanfare or knowledge. I thought of Mrs. Guyette the other day, when I came across the obituary of a woman name Andree Geulen, who died at the age of 100. Mrs. Guyette would have loved her story, and she would have loved even more the sharing of it with her young and impressionable students.
Andree Geulen was born in 1921 and grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Later she taught in a Belgian all girls boarding school in Brussels, when her Jewish students were suddenly ordered by the occupying Nazis to put a yellow star on their uniforms. The Jewish girls were so humiliated by this that Andree remembers how they would clutch their notebooks to their chests in an effort to hide the hated yellow star. And so, what did the teacher do? She had all her students, Jews and non-Jews alike, put aprons on over their uniforms, which hid the stars. A few weeks later she noticed that some of her Jewish students were no longer in class. It did not take her long to discover the terrible reason: The students, along with their families, had been rounded up and were on their way to Auschwitz.
The horrified teacher knew that she had to do something, and so she volunteered with The Committee for the Defense of the Jews, which hid Jewish children in convents, farms, monasteries, boarding schools and with other families, willing to hide Jewish children. “It was a race against time,” she said. “I had addresses of Jewish families and it was my job to get to the Jewish children before the Gestapo did.” Between the fall of 1942 and September, 1944 Geulen personally saved between 300 and 400 children. When she died on May 31 in a Belgium nursing home, she was the last survivor of a cadre of twelve women who worked for the Committee and saved over 4000 Jewish children. As we can imagine, the work of the Committee was not only dangerous, it was also emotionally harrowing. Parents would give up their children to these women without knowing where their children were going or even if they would ever see them again. Many of these parents died in concentration camps.
In 2017 there was an exhibition at Queens College about the Belgian resistance, and Andree Geulen was there. She described how torturous it was to pull children away from parents, who begged to know where their children were going. But no information was ever given to the parents to keep everything as secret as possible. Ms. Geulen said if she had been a mother at the time, she does not think she would have been able to do what she did. She described how each child was given a new name and was told not to tell anyone she or he was Jewish. Of course, young children did not understand this at all, and Ms. Geulen recalls being on a train with a young girl, when another passenger asked the girl her name. The child turned to Ms. Geulen and asked, “Should I tell her my new name or my old one?” Luckily, the passenger was not at all sympathetic to the Nazis.
In May, 1943 the Nazis raided the boarding school, where Ms. Geulen was teaching, where twelve Jewish children were hidden. The school’s headmistress and her husband were sent to concentration camps from which they never returned, but though Ms. Geulen was questioned, she was never arrested or faced any charges. She always believed her blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin as well as her impeccable German worked to her advantage when it came to dealing with Nazis. After all, she presented with the “perfect visage” of an Aryan! When being questioned, one German officer asked her, “Are you not ashamed of teaching Jewish children?” Her response: “Are you not ashamed of persecuting Jewish children?”
After the war was over, she worked hard to reunite the children with their parents, but this too was emotionally grueling work. The youngest children often did not remember their parents, and they did not want to leave the only family they had known. And sometimes it was extremely painful to put the children in orphanages when it was finally recognized that the parents would not be returning.
In 1989 Andree Geulen was honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and center for research in Jerusalem. She has a place on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, a recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi horror. I recall visiting the Museum in 2006 and walking along the outside avenue, reading the names of people from all over the world. One of my fellow travelers remarked, “There are way too few names here.” True, and if there had been a groundswell of protest from the gentiles, there would have been no Holocaust. The Nazis managed to do their murderous work because there was hardly an objection from the wider population. Where there was substantial objection---such as from the Roman Catholic Church in Bulgaria—the Jews fared much better.
In the last decades of her life, Ms. Geulen found a new career in documenting some of the stories of the hidden Belgian children. One of them, Helene Weiss, discovered Ms. Geulen’s address and sent her a letter of gratitude as well as some pictures of her children and grandchildren. “If it weren’t for you,” she wrote, “they would not be here.” How true! As I said, my sixth grade teacher would have loved this story, and she would have loved even more telling us the story and then asking us questions to encourage us to think more deeply about what goodness is and why it matters if we pursue it.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Return To Your Home
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville
June 19, 2022
Luke 8: 26-39
It was very unusual for us Jews to go into gentile territory. Though Jesus had this tendency to surprise us, even he did not go very often where the gentiles lived. But this time he did. We all had been in a boat, when suddenly this fierce storm came up on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus was sleeping, so we woke him up, accusing him of not caring if we perished. He calmed the storm and then castigated us for our little faith. And right after that calming, he decided to take us into gentile territory. Why? Sometimes I think he just liked to shock us to the point we would be forced to rethink and reconsider some of our assumptions. With Jesus you could never remain settled, that is, where you were comfortable. Just in case you have not figured it out, I am one of the disciples---which one it does not matter, at least not in this story.
So, there we were in the country of the Gerasenes, on the opposite shore from Galilee, and immediately we were confronted by this wild man, possessed by demons. The poor man’s feet and hands were bloody from his restraints, which he managed to pull off, but not without harm to himself. His eyes had this wild look about them, and he was practically naked. He had no home; he lived among the tombs, which for us Jews is unclean territory. I think that if we were not so afraid of him, we would have felt compassion for his situation. I mean he was unwanted by everyone; his family did not know how to cope with him, and the townspeople were afraid. To be possessed by a demon is a fearful thing, so how can you blame people for abandoning him. No one could do anything with this man---except Jesus. And the strange thing was that immediately the demons recognized Jesus’ power and authority. No one else had, not even we disciples. We thought of Jesus as an extraordinary teacher and healer, but no one would have called him “the Son of the Most High God,” which is what the demon called Jesus. And that struck us as more than strange; there was something frightening about it, because it was to us a signal that Jesus was much more than we realized. But how was it that the demon knew what we did not? That was a mystery.
Jesus commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man and it obeyed him, but only after Jesus did two things. First, he asked the spirit’s name, which was Legion, a word meaning many, but also a word for a company of Roman soldiers, numbering 5 or 6,000, which now, when I think back on it, was a play on words, a way of acknowledging that living under Roman rule was not only hard for us Jews, but also a challenge for gentiles. And the second thing that happened before the spirits emerged from the man was their request that they not be forced to return to the abyss, which was simply a word for the place of God’s enemies. The evil spirits wanted to go into the herd of pigs, and when Jesus allowed them to do so, the pigs raced off the edge of the bank, into the lake, where they were drowned, at least the pigs were drowned, but we disciples had our doubts about the spirits. I think it takes more than water to get rid of the evil spirits---but perhaps this was meant as a subtle reference to baptism, where the old self dies and a new one is reborn. And I can tell you that this man was reborn. He was completely remade, in his right mind, clothed, clean, respectable.
But the townspeople were not happy; they were afraid. And, of course, the owners of the pigs were pretty upset. No one knew what to think about what had just happened. And when people are confused like that; when their minds do not know the categories to put certain experiences into, well, fear rules. They recognized they were in completely new territory, and so they thought the best solution was for Jesus to leave. And Jesus complied with their request. He offered no argument at all. He got into the boat and was ready to depart, but the healed man wanted to go with us. He begged Jesus to take him along, and I can tell you there was something heart breaking, almost a bit pathetic about the man’s request. I remember thinking to myself, “Well, he has nowhere else to go. His family and community had rejected him, so why would he go back? But how could we take a gentile with us? What would people think? What would they say? I did not see how it could possibly work. But Jesus turned him down flat. No discussion at all. Jesus told him he must return to his home and declare what God had done for him. And so, he went. In a sense I think we can say he was the first evangelist, but evangelizing not in a distant place, but rather the place he had called home.
Home: consider what that word means. Now in my time most people remained at home. Rarely did they move away from the place they were born. But this poor man was expelled from his home. For years he could not go home, and now Jesus commanded him to return. But I could not help but wonder if he really wanted to go. As much as we might love home and as much as sick people want nothing more than to return home, we also should understand that sometimes home is a hard place to be. Sometimes home is the place that treats you like an outsider, perhaps because you are different---hold different opinions about this or that, or you may have a different kind of life style--- then home does not really feel like home. And perhaps this is how it was for the Gerasene.
Jesus certainly realized how challenging home can be. He hardly had an easy relationship with his home. His family thought him out of his mind, and there were some instances in which his own townspeople had their full of what they thought was his nonsense, even wanting to push him off a cliff. So surely Jesus realized how tough home can be and how hard it sometimes is to go home. No wonder one of your own novelists would write millennia after I lived, You Can’t Go Home Again, because sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you change so much that home does not really feel like home any more, and the people you have known and loved don’t recognize who you have become.
I think it was that way for Jesus. He never seemed to be comfortable in Nazareth, and I don’t think most people were comfortable having him there. His family loved him, but they did not understand him, and so there was this breach that could not be overcome. We all noticed it, because whenever we disciples went home, we had a real homecoming. Oh, people wondered why we were off with this strange man, but you should understand that we did regularly return honme. We had work to do at home, homes to care for, families to provide for, fishing to do. WE were not ALWAYS on the road with Jesus, away from home But Jesus, even when he was back home, he was far away.
I don’t know how it was for the healed Gerasene. Perhaps he could go home again. Perhaps his family and friends were relieved that he was well. I understood that he had been sick for quite a long time, so I can imagine that going home was not easy for him. He had been through something his family and the people of his town would never fully understand---neither his illness nor his healing. But such is life. We often are with people who have been through experiences we will never have or never fully understand, and so they stand on different ground from us---like the soldier I recently met who had been in Afghanistan.
He said he was doing a lot better after two years of living in hell. But he also said that his family, including his wife, could never understand what he had been through; they could not feel what he felt. And they could not understand why sometimes being home is so painful for him, why home no longer means what it once did. “All we can do,” the soldier told me, “is acknowledge the lack of shared experience and understanding. We can listen to each other, and hope that listening is enough.” Well, I hope it is enough, but listening is hard work, something that many people do not want to do. And so, I wonder if people bothered to listen to the Gerasene man. Did they listen to his experience of sickness and healing, or did they turn away in fear and confusion? How about all of you? Do you listen, or do you turn away as well?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville
June 19, 2022
Luke 8: 26-39
It was very unusual for us Jews to go into gentile territory. Though Jesus had this tendency to surprise us, even he did not go very often where the gentiles lived. But this time he did. We all had been in a boat, when suddenly this fierce storm came up on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus was sleeping, so we woke him up, accusing him of not caring if we perished. He calmed the storm and then castigated us for our little faith. And right after that calming, he decided to take us into gentile territory. Why? Sometimes I think he just liked to shock us to the point we would be forced to rethink and reconsider some of our assumptions. With Jesus you could never remain settled, that is, where you were comfortable. Just in case you have not figured it out, I am one of the disciples---which one it does not matter, at least not in this story.
So, there we were in the country of the Gerasenes, on the opposite shore from Galilee, and immediately we were confronted by this wild man, possessed by demons. The poor man’s feet and hands were bloody from his restraints, which he managed to pull off, but not without harm to himself. His eyes had this wild look about them, and he was practically naked. He had no home; he lived among the tombs, which for us Jews is unclean territory. I think that if we were not so afraid of him, we would have felt compassion for his situation. I mean he was unwanted by everyone; his family did not know how to cope with him, and the townspeople were afraid. To be possessed by a demon is a fearful thing, so how can you blame people for abandoning him. No one could do anything with this man---except Jesus. And the strange thing was that immediately the demons recognized Jesus’ power and authority. No one else had, not even we disciples. We thought of Jesus as an extraordinary teacher and healer, but no one would have called him “the Son of the Most High God,” which is what the demon called Jesus. And that struck us as more than strange; there was something frightening about it, because it was to us a signal that Jesus was much more than we realized. But how was it that the demon knew what we did not? That was a mystery.
Jesus commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man and it obeyed him, but only after Jesus did two things. First, he asked the spirit’s name, which was Legion, a word meaning many, but also a word for a company of Roman soldiers, numbering 5 or 6,000, which now, when I think back on it, was a play on words, a way of acknowledging that living under Roman rule was not only hard for us Jews, but also a challenge for gentiles. And the second thing that happened before the spirits emerged from the man was their request that they not be forced to return to the abyss, which was simply a word for the place of God’s enemies. The evil spirits wanted to go into the herd of pigs, and when Jesus allowed them to do so, the pigs raced off the edge of the bank, into the lake, where they were drowned, at least the pigs were drowned, but we disciples had our doubts about the spirits. I think it takes more than water to get rid of the evil spirits---but perhaps this was meant as a subtle reference to baptism, where the old self dies and a new one is reborn. And I can tell you that this man was reborn. He was completely remade, in his right mind, clothed, clean, respectable.
But the townspeople were not happy; they were afraid. And, of course, the owners of the pigs were pretty upset. No one knew what to think about what had just happened. And when people are confused like that; when their minds do not know the categories to put certain experiences into, well, fear rules. They recognized they were in completely new territory, and so they thought the best solution was for Jesus to leave. And Jesus complied with their request. He offered no argument at all. He got into the boat and was ready to depart, but the healed man wanted to go with us. He begged Jesus to take him along, and I can tell you there was something heart breaking, almost a bit pathetic about the man’s request. I remember thinking to myself, “Well, he has nowhere else to go. His family and community had rejected him, so why would he go back? But how could we take a gentile with us? What would people think? What would they say? I did not see how it could possibly work. But Jesus turned him down flat. No discussion at all. Jesus told him he must return to his home and declare what God had done for him. And so, he went. In a sense I think we can say he was the first evangelist, but evangelizing not in a distant place, but rather the place he had called home.
Home: consider what that word means. Now in my time most people remained at home. Rarely did they move away from the place they were born. But this poor man was expelled from his home. For years he could not go home, and now Jesus commanded him to return. But I could not help but wonder if he really wanted to go. As much as we might love home and as much as sick people want nothing more than to return home, we also should understand that sometimes home is a hard place to be. Sometimes home is the place that treats you like an outsider, perhaps because you are different---hold different opinions about this or that, or you may have a different kind of life style--- then home does not really feel like home. And perhaps this is how it was for the Gerasene.
Jesus certainly realized how challenging home can be. He hardly had an easy relationship with his home. His family thought him out of his mind, and there were some instances in which his own townspeople had their full of what they thought was his nonsense, even wanting to push him off a cliff. So surely Jesus realized how tough home can be and how hard it sometimes is to go home. No wonder one of your own novelists would write millennia after I lived, You Can’t Go Home Again, because sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you change so much that home does not really feel like home any more, and the people you have known and loved don’t recognize who you have become.
I think it was that way for Jesus. He never seemed to be comfortable in Nazareth, and I don’t think most people were comfortable having him there. His family loved him, but they did not understand him, and so there was this breach that could not be overcome. We all noticed it, because whenever we disciples went home, we had a real homecoming. Oh, people wondered why we were off with this strange man, but you should understand that we did regularly return honme. We had work to do at home, homes to care for, families to provide for, fishing to do. WE were not ALWAYS on the road with Jesus, away from home But Jesus, even when he was back home, he was far away.
I don’t know how it was for the healed Gerasene. Perhaps he could go home again. Perhaps his family and friends were relieved that he was well. I understood that he had been sick for quite a long time, so I can imagine that going home was not easy for him. He had been through something his family and the people of his town would never fully understand---neither his illness nor his healing. But such is life. We often are with people who have been through experiences we will never have or never fully understand, and so they stand on different ground from us---like the soldier I recently met who had been in Afghanistan.
He said he was doing a lot better after two years of living in hell. But he also said that his family, including his wife, could never understand what he had been through; they could not feel what he felt. And they could not understand why sometimes being home is so painful for him, why home no longer means what it once did. “All we can do,” the soldier told me, “is acknowledge the lack of shared experience and understanding. We can listen to each other, and hope that listening is enough.” Well, I hope it is enough, but listening is hard work, something that many people do not want to do. And so, I wonder if people bothered to listen to the Gerasene man. Did they listen to his experience of sickness and healing, or did they turn away in fear and confusion? How about all of you? Do you listen, or do you turn away as well?
TOUGH WORDS IN TOUGH TIMES
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
June 26, 2022
1 Kings 19: 1-15a
Luke 9: 51-62
Two weeks ago I was at a theology seminar called, “The Word of God,” and one of my colleagues brought up a point that none of us had previously considered. Referring to the Lord’s Prayer, which we all understand to be a model for prayer---after all, Jesus said, “When you pray, pray like this”---she pointed out that nowhere does this prayer include praying for the sick. Jesus healed the sick, but when he gave us the Lord’s Prayer as a model for our praying, he did not include the sick. I find that very strange, she mused.
I never thought about that, someone else said, but I suppose we should not be surprised. We always think that following Jesus is going to make our lives easier, safer, more comfortable, but actually the opposite is true. Jesus is so demanding. And then our discussion turned to a recent scripture lesson---the one about the Gerasene demonic, who after being healed of his horrible malady was not permitted to follow Jesus as he begged to do, but instead was told to return home to the people who had rejected him ---a very difficult assignment, to say the least. Jesus did not give the man a break, though he had spent years, possessed by demons, rejected by his family and community, forced to live among the tombs, where his body was often lacerated on the rocks and his spirit, ripped to shreds by demons or what we today might call epilepsy or some other illness. Jesus did not hesitate to say tough words in tough times.
And in today’s lessons we have more of the same---more difficult assignments, more tough words in tough times. God or Jesus does not let up. First, consider Elijah, who was nothing if not zealous for God. He had been confronting King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel, about their worship of Baal, and in a contest Elijah beat her prophets, who failed to make fire to burn up the offering to Baal. Elijah’s prayer to God brought success, and then Elijah saw to it that Jezebel’s 450 prophets were put to the sword. So, is it any wonder that Jezebel was rip roaring angry and promised to repay Elijah in kind? And so, Elijah ran. Weary to the bone, both physically and spiritually, he pretty much felt he had nothing more to give. He was ready to give up everything, including his life. And there on a mountain top, God walked by---and Elijah met God not in the power of the wind, the earthquake or fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. That’s how it sometimes is in life, isn’t it? We want a word, an answer, a reassurance, and all we get is silence. But notice the silence did not last; maybe Elijah would have preferred the silence to the tough words God spoke, ordering him to Damascus, where he was to anoint two kings and a prophet. No, his work was not yet done. He was not yet allowed to rest. More tough words in what was for Elijah very tough times.
And in our lesson from Luke we meet a tough and exacting Jesus, who also doesn’t let up. Unlike Elijah Jesus does not countenance violence against those who will not receive him, and he sternly castigated his disciples for misunderstanding the call to righteousness. But Jesus made it clear to a would be follower that he could not expect comfort or even a stable home. And to the one who wanted to bury his father before following Jesus, he was told, “Let the dead bury the dead.” That would be bad enough in our day, but in Jesus’ time, obligations of parents to children and children to parents were rigidly applied. A son must bury his father, and to fail to do so would be considered a severe breaking of the law to honor parents. That Jesus would say such a thing would have been heard as completely shocking---so much so, most people would have walked away in anger and disgust. And that really is point: the demands on the followers are so severe that most people turn around and walk away.
Maybe, someone at my seminar suggested, the church is for catching people who walk away from the hard demands of discipleship. The church is easier on us than Jesus is, and then she told us this story about a time she was working at a fairly wealthy Episcopal Church. She had this parishioner whose infection led to sepsis, and she almost died, but after her organs were washed in bleach, she turned the corner and was on the mend. It was then she had a dream, and in her dream, Jesus came to her and said, “You know that soup kitchen your church wants to build by expanding its kitchen, costing nearly one million dollars? I want you to pay for it. You’ve got the money.”
And the woman in her dream was quite shocked, and said to Jesus, “Why are you bothering me with this now? Can’t you see I have been very sick. I almost died.”
“That is no excuse,” said Jesus. You did not die, and so I expect you to do something big. You can make a difference in this case, so do it.
But the church is going to borrow the money, she told Jesus. The church can afford to take out a loan; they will be able to repay it easily
.
That is not the point, Jesus insisted. The point is: I want you to pay for it. You need to pay for it. And so, the woman, who was quite unnerved, called her minister to come to the hospital. And she told her the story.
How do you know it really was Jesus, the minister asked?
Well, she said, I know this was not my idea. I never would have thought this up. I don’t like giving away so much of my money. I am not happy about it.
Then, maybe you should not do it, the minister said. Maybe you will regret it later, after you are out of the hospital and fully recovered.
I probably will regret it, but that is not the point. The point is Jesus told me to do it, and so, I had better listen.
Has Jesus ever told you to do something like this before?
No, never, she said, which is why I believe it was Jesus.
You know, the minister said, when we have been very sick, the mind can play all kinds of games with us. I think you need to wait a while before you do any check writing---just to make sure.
Make sure of what, she asked?
Make sure that you want to do this.
I already told you, I don’t want to do it, but this is what Jesus told me to do, so I am going to listen. What kind of minister are you, anyway? Why are you so suspicious of Jesus?
It’s not Jesus I’m suspicious of; it’s you. I don’t want to deal with you after you decide that you made a big mistake. I don’t want to be accused of squeezing money out of you.
It seems to me, the woman said very sternly, you are using the word I far too much. This is not about you; it is about Jesus and what Jesus wants. Most of the time Jesus is not so clear, but this one time he is, so I am going to listen, and I would think that as a minister you would listen too.
Well, I think I will have to discuss it with the Consistory. They can make the final decision.
And the final decision was to accept the check. But no one on the Consistory was comfortable, and no one really believed that Jesus told her to do it. It is all in her mind, they said; her conscience is speaking to her.
But, someone at the seminar asked, isn’t this how God works? Doesn’t God use our minds, our consciences, and our imaginations? What else does God have to work with?
The trouble is, someone else said, we are all so acclimated to ambiguity and unknowing that we run away from anything that suggests the certainty of God. Yes, much of the time we are uncertain and ambiguous, but there are these times when God does get through, and thank God some people listen, even if the words are tough in tough times.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
June 26, 2022
1 Kings 19: 1-15a
Luke 9: 51-62
Two weeks ago I was at a theology seminar called, “The Word of God,” and one of my colleagues brought up a point that none of us had previously considered. Referring to the Lord’s Prayer, which we all understand to be a model for prayer---after all, Jesus said, “When you pray, pray like this”---she pointed out that nowhere does this prayer include praying for the sick. Jesus healed the sick, but when he gave us the Lord’s Prayer as a model for our praying, he did not include the sick. I find that very strange, she mused.
I never thought about that, someone else said, but I suppose we should not be surprised. We always think that following Jesus is going to make our lives easier, safer, more comfortable, but actually the opposite is true. Jesus is so demanding. And then our discussion turned to a recent scripture lesson---the one about the Gerasene demonic, who after being healed of his horrible malady was not permitted to follow Jesus as he begged to do, but instead was told to return home to the people who had rejected him ---a very difficult assignment, to say the least. Jesus did not give the man a break, though he had spent years, possessed by demons, rejected by his family and community, forced to live among the tombs, where his body was often lacerated on the rocks and his spirit, ripped to shreds by demons or what we today might call epilepsy or some other illness. Jesus did not hesitate to say tough words in tough times.
And in today’s lessons we have more of the same---more difficult assignments, more tough words in tough times. God or Jesus does not let up. First, consider Elijah, who was nothing if not zealous for God. He had been confronting King Ahab and his queen, Jezebel, about their worship of Baal, and in a contest Elijah beat her prophets, who failed to make fire to burn up the offering to Baal. Elijah’s prayer to God brought success, and then Elijah saw to it that Jezebel’s 450 prophets were put to the sword. So, is it any wonder that Jezebel was rip roaring angry and promised to repay Elijah in kind? And so, Elijah ran. Weary to the bone, both physically and spiritually, he pretty much felt he had nothing more to give. He was ready to give up everything, including his life. And there on a mountain top, God walked by---and Elijah met God not in the power of the wind, the earthquake or fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. That’s how it sometimes is in life, isn’t it? We want a word, an answer, a reassurance, and all we get is silence. But notice the silence did not last; maybe Elijah would have preferred the silence to the tough words God spoke, ordering him to Damascus, where he was to anoint two kings and a prophet. No, his work was not yet done. He was not yet allowed to rest. More tough words in what was for Elijah very tough times.
And in our lesson from Luke we meet a tough and exacting Jesus, who also doesn’t let up. Unlike Elijah Jesus does not countenance violence against those who will not receive him, and he sternly castigated his disciples for misunderstanding the call to righteousness. But Jesus made it clear to a would be follower that he could not expect comfort or even a stable home. And to the one who wanted to bury his father before following Jesus, he was told, “Let the dead bury the dead.” That would be bad enough in our day, but in Jesus’ time, obligations of parents to children and children to parents were rigidly applied. A son must bury his father, and to fail to do so would be considered a severe breaking of the law to honor parents. That Jesus would say such a thing would have been heard as completely shocking---so much so, most people would have walked away in anger and disgust. And that really is point: the demands on the followers are so severe that most people turn around and walk away.
Maybe, someone at my seminar suggested, the church is for catching people who walk away from the hard demands of discipleship. The church is easier on us than Jesus is, and then she told us this story about a time she was working at a fairly wealthy Episcopal Church. She had this parishioner whose infection led to sepsis, and she almost died, but after her organs were washed in bleach, she turned the corner and was on the mend. It was then she had a dream, and in her dream, Jesus came to her and said, “You know that soup kitchen your church wants to build by expanding its kitchen, costing nearly one million dollars? I want you to pay for it. You’ve got the money.”
And the woman in her dream was quite shocked, and said to Jesus, “Why are you bothering me with this now? Can’t you see I have been very sick. I almost died.”
“That is no excuse,” said Jesus. You did not die, and so I expect you to do something big. You can make a difference in this case, so do it.
But the church is going to borrow the money, she told Jesus. The church can afford to take out a loan; they will be able to repay it easily
.
That is not the point, Jesus insisted. The point is: I want you to pay for it. You need to pay for it. And so, the woman, who was quite unnerved, called her minister to come to the hospital. And she told her the story.
How do you know it really was Jesus, the minister asked?
Well, she said, I know this was not my idea. I never would have thought this up. I don’t like giving away so much of my money. I am not happy about it.
Then, maybe you should not do it, the minister said. Maybe you will regret it later, after you are out of the hospital and fully recovered.
I probably will regret it, but that is not the point. The point is Jesus told me to do it, and so, I had better listen.
Has Jesus ever told you to do something like this before?
No, never, she said, which is why I believe it was Jesus.
You know, the minister said, when we have been very sick, the mind can play all kinds of games with us. I think you need to wait a while before you do any check writing---just to make sure.
Make sure of what, she asked?
Make sure that you want to do this.
I already told you, I don’t want to do it, but this is what Jesus told me to do, so I am going to listen. What kind of minister are you, anyway? Why are you so suspicious of Jesus?
It’s not Jesus I’m suspicious of; it’s you. I don’t want to deal with you after you decide that you made a big mistake. I don’t want to be accused of squeezing money out of you.
It seems to me, the woman said very sternly, you are using the word I far too much. This is not about you; it is about Jesus and what Jesus wants. Most of the time Jesus is not so clear, but this one time he is, so I am going to listen, and I would think that as a minister you would listen too.
Well, I think I will have to discuss it with the Consistory. They can make the final decision.
And the final decision was to accept the check. But no one on the Consistory was comfortable, and no one really believed that Jesus told her to do it. It is all in her mind, they said; her conscience is speaking to her.
But, someone at the seminar asked, isn’t this how God works? Doesn’t God use our minds, our consciences, and our imaginations? What else does God have to work with?
The trouble is, someone else said, we are all so acclimated to ambiguity and unknowing that we run away from anything that suggests the certainty of God. Yes, much of the time we are uncertain and ambiguous, but there are these times when God does get through, and thank God some people listen, even if the words are tough in tough times.
SUFFERING FOR WHAT?
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
June 12, 2022
Romans 5: 1-5
Last week, Pentecost Sunday, we heard the story from Acts, when the Spirit blew like a mighty wind, bringing understanding to the whole gathered community. We also heard portions of the Sermon on the Mount, where Christ laid out the law of higher righteousness. In Matthew’s gospel to have the Spirit of Christ means living that law---caring for the least of these and renouncing violence and acts of raw power grabbing. In other words, in Matthew’s gospel followers of Christ are recognized through what they do. But when we arrive at Paul’s Letters, the example and teachings of Jesus Christ are not so apparent. Paul never repeats any of our favorite parables, showing what a good life looks like, and he rarely refers to Jesus’ life at all---except his death on the cross. For Paul having the Spirit of Christ is not so much about doing as it is about being; not so much about the outward action in the world, as it is about the inward turning toward Christ in faith and hope. The Spirit gives faith, and faith is supposed to endure the sufferings life brings.
Let’s face it, suffering is a major challenge in life, and quite frankly, it is probably the most serious challenge to the Christian faith, to any faith. People have literally stopped believing in God because they have suffered terrible pain and sorrow, and they wonder how it is that a good and gracious God can permit such sufferings. What has impressed me in my ministry, including work in hospitals, is that people can often endure assaults on their own bodies, but when the same happens to someone they love, especially to a child, that is when the struggle can easily move to another level.
I knew this woman whose 6 year old was dying of leukemia. It was a long, drawn out battle and after he died, she told me what was left inside of her was NOTHING. “It is like a big black hole in me,” she said, “sucking in all the life and light I ever had, leaving nothing but utter and complete darkness. I could feel nothing for anyone, not my husband, not my friends, nothing. God too became nothing to me. While my child was fighting to live, I could pray and even sometimes become angry at God, but once my son died, God too was swallowed up into that giant black hole. My husband and I separated less than a year after Galen died, and then we quickly divorced. We were not angry at each other; we did not blame each other. It was just that there was nothing left. We both became empty shells of what we once had been.”
What would any of us dare to say to her? Who among us would have the nerve to quote this passage from Romans: We boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love had been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit? Perhaps some might think her faith weak, but who has the right to judge another’s faith? She did not think of her faith as weak; she was active in her local Presbyterian Church; she prayed and read the Bible regularly, and she pondered the big questions. She did not expect easy answers, and she did not expect God to repair all the brokenness in the world. Though she hoped and fervently prayed that her son would live, when he died, she told me she did not even blame God for his death. It was just that suddenly God had become a nothing, a shocking irrelevancy.
Now, perhaps in time, even years, she might regain her balance and perhaps she will find God or God find her. We never know how our spiritual lives will change, evolve, and grow. We can go through something harrowing, and then come out on the other side after a very long, dark journey, finding ourselves to be different persons, stronger, more courageous, more faithful. At the time we were going through the experience and even in the aftermath, we could not see one foot ahead of us, but we never know what or how life will teach us, and we never know how God will use our experiences to change us.
When I worked in New Haven, I would often walk across the Green, and sometimes on a lovely day, I would just sit there for a short while. That’s when I met this young man, who had returned from Iraq, a psychological casualty of the war. He and I just struck up a conversation one day, and whenever he saw me, it was obvious he wanted to talk. He told me all about his breakdown, how he had lost his bearings. His three best friends had been killed and then his commanding officer, whom he liked and trusted, stepped on a landmine, also killed. “I broke apart,” he told me. “I was in such bad shape, they me sent home.” But home was not an easy place to be. His father had been an officer in Viet Nam with all kinds of medals and citations for bravery. “My father does not make any allowances for what he thinks is weakness,” he told me, “but then my father makes no room in his life for anything like vulnerability. He pushes it all down deep inside. And maybe that helps him cope. But I am not like my father. I am beginning to understand that my feelings are really not weaknesses at all, but a kind of strength. I have become friendly with this minister at the Unitarian Church, and he and I talk about God a lot. And I am discovering that the less I try to make God conform to my idea of what God should do or be, the more I find God to be a help and comfort to me. I don’t know very much about God, he said, but I don’t have to. I just need God to know me. And somehow, I think God does.
Our passage from Romans got me to thinking about that young man, remembering all our conversations. His suffering had produced endurance, and his endurance produced character and his character produced hope. And his hope did not disappoint him, and he would not give up, no matter how wounded his psyche and soul were. Why was his pain so different from that mother’s? But just as none of us can truly judge another’s faith, we cannot judge another’s pain. But that mother had more than her own pain to bear; she also had her child’s whom she loved and had to watch die, helpless to do anything but wait and watch. Wounds are not all the same, and people bear different wounds differently.
I don’t think this passage from Romans is something we have the right to say to someone else, who is in pain. We can say it to ourselves, but we don’t have enough authority to say it to another. Remember, Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Rome, and writing is not exactly the same thing as saying something to someone’s face, especially someone in great pain. The church in Rome did have its sufferings; there were persecutions and all kinds of misunderstandings and accusations, and I would imagine that sometimes God did seem at a distance. Perhaps there were times God seemed to disappoint. But they endured, as Paul also endured. Just as we too sometimes endure. And our endurance is a kind of victory. We get through it, and though we may look back and wonder how we endured it all, nonetheless, our endurance brought us out to the other side. We can then feel stronger, though at the time of our endurance, we did not recognize anything that looked like strength. Having endured our character is built up and then we can look to hope. And hope that really is hope and remains hope does not disappoint. It is like what that young man said about God: the less he tried to get God to conform to what he thought God should do and be, the more God was a comfort and help to him. And perhaps the same is true of hope. The more we can embrace hope without trying to fill in all the details of what we think hope should deliver, then hope can truly be a comfort and help to us.
None of us escapes suffering, though some suffer more than others, and it is also true that some can use their sufferings in ways that build them up rather than rip them apart and down. Jesus certainly suffered, not only the ignoble indignity of a cruel death on a cross, but he also suffered what he experienced as God’s abandonment. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why, indeed, but at least he called out, My God, my God. There is something in that word that is endurance, an endurance of character and a hope that all manner of things shall finally be made well by a good and gracious God.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT
June 12, 2022
Romans 5: 1-5
Last week, Pentecost Sunday, we heard the story from Acts, when the Spirit blew like a mighty wind, bringing understanding to the whole gathered community. We also heard portions of the Sermon on the Mount, where Christ laid out the law of higher righteousness. In Matthew’s gospel to have the Spirit of Christ means living that law---caring for the least of these and renouncing violence and acts of raw power grabbing. In other words, in Matthew’s gospel followers of Christ are recognized through what they do. But when we arrive at Paul’s Letters, the example and teachings of Jesus Christ are not so apparent. Paul never repeats any of our favorite parables, showing what a good life looks like, and he rarely refers to Jesus’ life at all---except his death on the cross. For Paul having the Spirit of Christ is not so much about doing as it is about being; not so much about the outward action in the world, as it is about the inward turning toward Christ in faith and hope. The Spirit gives faith, and faith is supposed to endure the sufferings life brings.
Let’s face it, suffering is a major challenge in life, and quite frankly, it is probably the most serious challenge to the Christian faith, to any faith. People have literally stopped believing in God because they have suffered terrible pain and sorrow, and they wonder how it is that a good and gracious God can permit such sufferings. What has impressed me in my ministry, including work in hospitals, is that people can often endure assaults on their own bodies, but when the same happens to someone they love, especially to a child, that is when the struggle can easily move to another level.
I knew this woman whose 6 year old was dying of leukemia. It was a long, drawn out battle and after he died, she told me what was left inside of her was NOTHING. “It is like a big black hole in me,” she said, “sucking in all the life and light I ever had, leaving nothing but utter and complete darkness. I could feel nothing for anyone, not my husband, not my friends, nothing. God too became nothing to me. While my child was fighting to live, I could pray and even sometimes become angry at God, but once my son died, God too was swallowed up into that giant black hole. My husband and I separated less than a year after Galen died, and then we quickly divorced. We were not angry at each other; we did not blame each other. It was just that there was nothing left. We both became empty shells of what we once had been.”
What would any of us dare to say to her? Who among us would have the nerve to quote this passage from Romans: We boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love had been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit? Perhaps some might think her faith weak, but who has the right to judge another’s faith? She did not think of her faith as weak; she was active in her local Presbyterian Church; she prayed and read the Bible regularly, and she pondered the big questions. She did not expect easy answers, and she did not expect God to repair all the brokenness in the world. Though she hoped and fervently prayed that her son would live, when he died, she told me she did not even blame God for his death. It was just that suddenly God had become a nothing, a shocking irrelevancy.
Now, perhaps in time, even years, she might regain her balance and perhaps she will find God or God find her. We never know how our spiritual lives will change, evolve, and grow. We can go through something harrowing, and then come out on the other side after a very long, dark journey, finding ourselves to be different persons, stronger, more courageous, more faithful. At the time we were going through the experience and even in the aftermath, we could not see one foot ahead of us, but we never know what or how life will teach us, and we never know how God will use our experiences to change us.
When I worked in New Haven, I would often walk across the Green, and sometimes on a lovely day, I would just sit there for a short while. That’s when I met this young man, who had returned from Iraq, a psychological casualty of the war. He and I just struck up a conversation one day, and whenever he saw me, it was obvious he wanted to talk. He told me all about his breakdown, how he had lost his bearings. His three best friends had been killed and then his commanding officer, whom he liked and trusted, stepped on a landmine, also killed. “I broke apart,” he told me. “I was in such bad shape, they me sent home.” But home was not an easy place to be. His father had been an officer in Viet Nam with all kinds of medals and citations for bravery. “My father does not make any allowances for what he thinks is weakness,” he told me, “but then my father makes no room in his life for anything like vulnerability. He pushes it all down deep inside. And maybe that helps him cope. But I am not like my father. I am beginning to understand that my feelings are really not weaknesses at all, but a kind of strength. I have become friendly with this minister at the Unitarian Church, and he and I talk about God a lot. And I am discovering that the less I try to make God conform to my idea of what God should do or be, the more I find God to be a help and comfort to me. I don’t know very much about God, he said, but I don’t have to. I just need God to know me. And somehow, I think God does.
Our passage from Romans got me to thinking about that young man, remembering all our conversations. His suffering had produced endurance, and his endurance produced character and his character produced hope. And his hope did not disappoint him, and he would not give up, no matter how wounded his psyche and soul were. Why was his pain so different from that mother’s? But just as none of us can truly judge another’s faith, we cannot judge another’s pain. But that mother had more than her own pain to bear; she also had her child’s whom she loved and had to watch die, helpless to do anything but wait and watch. Wounds are not all the same, and people bear different wounds differently.
I don’t think this passage from Romans is something we have the right to say to someone else, who is in pain. We can say it to ourselves, but we don’t have enough authority to say it to another. Remember, Paul wrote this letter to the Christian Church in Rome, and writing is not exactly the same thing as saying something to someone’s face, especially someone in great pain. The church in Rome did have its sufferings; there were persecutions and all kinds of misunderstandings and accusations, and I would imagine that sometimes God did seem at a distance. Perhaps there were times God seemed to disappoint. But they endured, as Paul also endured. Just as we too sometimes endure. And our endurance is a kind of victory. We get through it, and though we may look back and wonder how we endured it all, nonetheless, our endurance brought us out to the other side. We can then feel stronger, though at the time of our endurance, we did not recognize anything that looked like strength. Having endured our character is built up and then we can look to hope. And hope that really is hope and remains hope does not disappoint. It is like what that young man said about God: the less he tried to get God to conform to what he thought God should do and be, the more God was a comfort and help to him. And perhaps the same is true of hope. The more we can embrace hope without trying to fill in all the details of what we think hope should deliver, then hope can truly be a comfort and help to us.
None of us escapes suffering, though some suffer more than others, and it is also true that some can use their sufferings in ways that build them up rather than rip them apart and down. Jesus certainly suffered, not only the ignoble indignity of a cruel death on a cross, but he also suffered what he experienced as God’s abandonment. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why, indeed, but at least he called out, My God, my God. There is something in that word that is endurance, an endurance of character and a hope that all manner of things shall finally be made well by a good and gracious God.
Turning the Other Cheek?
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville,
June 5, 2022
Matthew 5: 38-48
Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit. You heard the dramatic story in the book of Acts about the Spirit’s arrival, how it blew like a mighty wind, bringing understanding as it descended upon the the gahtered community. But what is this Spirit? We all use this word spirit rather loosely, talking about a spirit of freedom, a spirit of forgiveness, a spirit of inclusion and tolerance, a spirit of understanding and truth. But when Christians refer to Pentecost, the reference is not to a general spirit, but rather to Christ’s Spirit, and in Matthew’s gospel something very specific was meant---- radical care and concern for the poor---the least of these--- and embracing a particular form of non-violence. To have the spirit of Christ mandated that life was to conform to the law of higher righteousness.
Let’s turn to the text and consider what these words actually meant in their original context. Jesus is being very political here, meaning that he understands who has the power, in this case Rome, and how that power is to be answered by people who do not have the same power Rome has. Let’s begin with: “Do not resist one who is evil.” Now the English word resist is a translation of a Greek word, which means literally against an armed rebellion. So the meaning might be better stated: “Do not repay evil by an armed rebellion.” Palestine was under Roman occupation. Twenty years before Jesus walked this earth, there had been an armed rebellion of Galileans against Rome, which resulted in over 2000 crucifixions, lining the roads into and out of Galilean towns. It is not farfetched to think that some of those who heard Jesus preach had friends and relatives who meant that cruel end. So, Jesus is not preaching an unrealistic ethical purity here. He wants his hearers to understand exactly how armed rebellion ends.
Consider the rule: If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other. Pay attention to the word right, because in order to hit someone with an open fist or hand on the right cheek, one must use the left hand. But this was a right handed society; only the most unclean tasks were performed with the left hand. If one wanted to strike a blow with the right hand, one would need to deliver it to the left cheek. But Jesus said the right one. What he is describing is a situation in which someone delivers a slap using the back side of the right hand to the right cheek---the kind of slap a master would deliver to his servant, a father to his son, an officer to someone lower in rank. This is not about a violent fight, but rather an act of humiliation and insult delivered to those considered inferior. So to turn the other cheek, the left one, to a superior who has just humiliated them says “Your slap of humiliation did not work. You are going to have to strike me on the left cheek and to do that you are going to have to use your open right hand or right fist. I am going to force you to acknowledge me as your equal. I will not be humiliated by your back handed slap.
Now for the next example: If someone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well. We have an issue here with translation. The word coat is the outer garment, but the word cloak in the Greek usually means the inner garment, the underwear. The situation Jesus is describing is a legal one in which a person has pledged his or her coat as collateral. In Exodus it says, If ever you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down, for that is their only covering. It would only be the very poor who would have nothing but their coat to offer as collateral. Jesus is describing a situation in which a poor person has been hauled into court, because he cannot repay the loan to get his coat back. So Jesus counsels him to give away his underwear and stand there naked. But nakedness was strickly taboo in ancient Israel, and the shame and the curse fell not upon the naked one but upon the person viewing the nakedness. This goes back to the Old Testament story when one of Noah’s sons saw him naked when Noah was drunk. Noah then cursed his son for beholding his nakedness. So by stripping off the inner garments in court, the debtor brings the creditor into the same situation that brought down a curse upon Noah’s son. The system is unmasked as one worthy of cursing.
Now for the last example. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him 2 miles. Again, this is a very specific situation, drawn from the practice of limiting the amount of forced labor a Roman soldier could compel a subject citizen to carry his heavy pack, usually weighing between 65 and 85 pounds. A soldier could insist that someone carry his pack one mile. Indeed, there were markers along the roadside designating the allowable distance. To force a subject to go beyond the mile imposed fines on the soldier. And yet here Jesus is counseling the offer of another mile. What would a soldier think if another mile were offered? Are you insulting my strength? Are you trying to get me into trouble? So, the initiative has been taken by the oppressed, and the oppressor is put on the defensive.
So what does all this mean for us today? Obviously, our world has changed, and mainline Protestants are neither fundamentalists nor originalists, who would deny that the meaning changes over time. We do not live in Jesus’ time and place, which means that we are burdened with the task of figuring out for ourselves what it might mean for us to have the spirit of Christ. What kind of lives are we to live? How are we to make choices? What is wrong and what is right? People often want definite answers, insisting on simplicity in what is a very complicated world. And yet that complicated world is the one in which God meets us and speaks to us. And it is God who must reckon with the fact that all God’s people neither hear nor understand in the same way. And if God must reckon with that difference then so must we.
Preached by Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ in Unionville,
June 5, 2022
Matthew 5: 38-48
Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit. You heard the dramatic story in the book of Acts about the Spirit’s arrival, how it blew like a mighty wind, bringing understanding as it descended upon the the gahtered community. But what is this Spirit? We all use this word spirit rather loosely, talking about a spirit of freedom, a spirit of forgiveness, a spirit of inclusion and tolerance, a spirit of understanding and truth. But when Christians refer to Pentecost, the reference is not to a general spirit, but rather to Christ’s Spirit, and in Matthew’s gospel something very specific was meant---- radical care and concern for the poor---the least of these--- and embracing a particular form of non-violence. To have the spirit of Christ mandated that life was to conform to the law of higher righteousness.
Let’s turn to the text and consider what these words actually meant in their original context. Jesus is being very political here, meaning that he understands who has the power, in this case Rome, and how that power is to be answered by people who do not have the same power Rome has. Let’s begin with: “Do not resist one who is evil.” Now the English word resist is a translation of a Greek word, which means literally against an armed rebellion. So the meaning might be better stated: “Do not repay evil by an armed rebellion.” Palestine was under Roman occupation. Twenty years before Jesus walked this earth, there had been an armed rebellion of Galileans against Rome, which resulted in over 2000 crucifixions, lining the roads into and out of Galilean towns. It is not farfetched to think that some of those who heard Jesus preach had friends and relatives who meant that cruel end. So, Jesus is not preaching an unrealistic ethical purity here. He wants his hearers to understand exactly how armed rebellion ends.
Consider the rule: If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other. Pay attention to the word right, because in order to hit someone with an open fist or hand on the right cheek, one must use the left hand. But this was a right handed society; only the most unclean tasks were performed with the left hand. If one wanted to strike a blow with the right hand, one would need to deliver it to the left cheek. But Jesus said the right one. What he is describing is a situation in which someone delivers a slap using the back side of the right hand to the right cheek---the kind of slap a master would deliver to his servant, a father to his son, an officer to someone lower in rank. This is not about a violent fight, but rather an act of humiliation and insult delivered to those considered inferior. So to turn the other cheek, the left one, to a superior who has just humiliated them says “Your slap of humiliation did not work. You are going to have to strike me on the left cheek and to do that you are going to have to use your open right hand or right fist. I am going to force you to acknowledge me as your equal. I will not be humiliated by your back handed slap.
Now for the next example: If someone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well. We have an issue here with translation. The word coat is the outer garment, but the word cloak in the Greek usually means the inner garment, the underwear. The situation Jesus is describing is a legal one in which a person has pledged his or her coat as collateral. In Exodus it says, If ever you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down, for that is their only covering. It would only be the very poor who would have nothing but their coat to offer as collateral. Jesus is describing a situation in which a poor person has been hauled into court, because he cannot repay the loan to get his coat back. So Jesus counsels him to give away his underwear and stand there naked. But nakedness was strickly taboo in ancient Israel, and the shame and the curse fell not upon the naked one but upon the person viewing the nakedness. This goes back to the Old Testament story when one of Noah’s sons saw him naked when Noah was drunk. Noah then cursed his son for beholding his nakedness. So by stripping off the inner garments in court, the debtor brings the creditor into the same situation that brought down a curse upon Noah’s son. The system is unmasked as one worthy of cursing.
Now for the last example. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him 2 miles. Again, this is a very specific situation, drawn from the practice of limiting the amount of forced labor a Roman soldier could compel a subject citizen to carry his heavy pack, usually weighing between 65 and 85 pounds. A soldier could insist that someone carry his pack one mile. Indeed, there were markers along the roadside designating the allowable distance. To force a subject to go beyond the mile imposed fines on the soldier. And yet here Jesus is counseling the offer of another mile. What would a soldier think if another mile were offered? Are you insulting my strength? Are you trying to get me into trouble? So, the initiative has been taken by the oppressed, and the oppressor is put on the defensive.
So what does all this mean for us today? Obviously, our world has changed, and mainline Protestants are neither fundamentalists nor originalists, who would deny that the meaning changes over time. We do not live in Jesus’ time and place, which means that we are burdened with the task of figuring out for ourselves what it might mean for us to have the spirit of Christ. What kind of lives are we to live? How are we to make choices? What is wrong and what is right? People often want definite answers, insisting on simplicity in what is a very complicated world. And yet that complicated world is the one in which God meets us and speaks to us. And it is God who must reckon with the fact that all God’s people neither hear nor understand in the same way. And if God must reckon with that difference then so must we.
June 9, 2022
In 1958 the young, tall, lanky, and brilliant pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, perhaps the most renown and competitive piano competition in the entire world. This was in the midst of the Cold War, and the story goes (perhaps apocryphal) that the judges actually called Nikita Khrushchev to determine what they should do. Apparently, the Russians did not relish the idea of giving victory to an American. The question was simple: Is he the best? And when the answer came back in the affirmative, Van Cliburn was named the winner. It was viewed as a victory for the world and for the arts. Power politics would not have the final say.
The challenge continues. In an auditorium at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth another competition is underway: The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious competitions in classical music. It too has defied power politics by refusing to bend to the pressure of banning Russian musicians. Among the contestants are six Russians, two from Belarus and one from the Ukraine. The Russian pianists are far from comfortable, and some of them have stated their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Many of them live outside of Russia, and one simply said, “I am trying to stay focused on the music.” Another woman said she believes it is her duty as an artist to show solidarity with Ukraine. Another Russian pianist said he thought it was important for the Russian artists to be present at the competition to show there is another side to Russia beside the aggression of Putin. One pianist said that while he felt distant from contemporary Russian culture, yet he does feel a connection to Russia through its great music. This person will begin graduate study at the Yale School of Music in the fall.
We can imagine that it is hardly easy to be Russian in these circumstances. Many organizations have cut ties with Russian artists and athletes. Some people, in fact, have been very critical of the Van Cliburn’s refusal to play politics. The war is viewed as immoral by most countries, and there are many people who feel that only the complete isolation of Russia, including its artists, will send the correct message. And yet how does banning a talented 23 year old pianist, who has worked hard his whole young life to perfect his art and has no political power over the course of the war, help Ukraine and the world to become a more peaceful place? Such a question is hardly trivial. And it is not trivial that the pianists from Russia, Belarus and the one Ukrainian sat together, speaking in Russia about the interpretation of music, various teachers, and the feel of the onstage piano.
Some will argue that the arts play a healing role in the world. Beauty is something that brings people together and the recognition of great talent, no matter the country of origin, draws people together in a way that few other events do. The great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, once remarked, “Beauty will save the world,” and so it can seem foolish and short sighted to refuse to seat those who can make people weep over the exquisite rendition of a piece of music. Furthermore, in this case, the one Ukrainian pianist has no problem with the presence of the Russians and has gone out of his way to be encouraging. But the competition has also made it clear that it will tolerate no pro-war statements from any of the players. If such positions are declared, the threat is immediate expulsion from the competition.
There is no doubt, however, that the war does play a role. The chair of the Jury, Marin Alsop, who is also a renown conductor, says you can feel the tension and the intense emotion. “Perhaps it is projection” he admits, “but I do not think so.” The sole Ukrainian pianist, Dmytro Choni, from Kyiv, said he believes that in dark times music can serve as a therapy. “The goal of music is to unite people, to give relief from what is going on in the world. Music can be a cure, a treatment. It has always been like this, but maybe in these times it is especially relevant.” May it be so.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
In 1958 the young, tall, lanky, and brilliant pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, perhaps the most renown and competitive piano competition in the entire world. This was in the midst of the Cold War, and the story goes (perhaps apocryphal) that the judges actually called Nikita Khrushchev to determine what they should do. Apparently, the Russians did not relish the idea of giving victory to an American. The question was simple: Is he the best? And when the answer came back in the affirmative, Van Cliburn was named the winner. It was viewed as a victory for the world and for the arts. Power politics would not have the final say.
The challenge continues. In an auditorium at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth another competition is underway: The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious competitions in classical music. It too has defied power politics by refusing to bend to the pressure of banning Russian musicians. Among the contestants are six Russians, two from Belarus and one from the Ukraine. The Russian pianists are far from comfortable, and some of them have stated their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Many of them live outside of Russia, and one simply said, “I am trying to stay focused on the music.” Another woman said she believes it is her duty as an artist to show solidarity with Ukraine. Another Russian pianist said he thought it was important for the Russian artists to be present at the competition to show there is another side to Russia beside the aggression of Putin. One pianist said that while he felt distant from contemporary Russian culture, yet he does feel a connection to Russia through its great music. This person will begin graduate study at the Yale School of Music in the fall.
We can imagine that it is hardly easy to be Russian in these circumstances. Many organizations have cut ties with Russian artists and athletes. Some people, in fact, have been very critical of the Van Cliburn’s refusal to play politics. The war is viewed as immoral by most countries, and there are many people who feel that only the complete isolation of Russia, including its artists, will send the correct message. And yet how does banning a talented 23 year old pianist, who has worked hard his whole young life to perfect his art and has no political power over the course of the war, help Ukraine and the world to become a more peaceful place? Such a question is hardly trivial. And it is not trivial that the pianists from Russia, Belarus and the one Ukrainian sat together, speaking in Russia about the interpretation of music, various teachers, and the feel of the onstage piano.
Some will argue that the arts play a healing role in the world. Beauty is something that brings people together and the recognition of great talent, no matter the country of origin, draws people together in a way that few other events do. The great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, once remarked, “Beauty will save the world,” and so it can seem foolish and short sighted to refuse to seat those who can make people weep over the exquisite rendition of a piece of music. Furthermore, in this case, the one Ukrainian pianist has no problem with the presence of the Russians and has gone out of his way to be encouraging. But the competition has also made it clear that it will tolerate no pro-war statements from any of the players. If such positions are declared, the threat is immediate expulsion from the competition.
There is no doubt, however, that the war does play a role. The chair of the Jury, Marin Alsop, who is also a renown conductor, says you can feel the tension and the intense emotion. “Perhaps it is projection” he admits, “but I do not think so.” The sole Ukrainian pianist, Dmytro Choni, from Kyiv, said he believes that in dark times music can serve as a therapy. “The goal of music is to unite people, to give relief from what is going on in the world. Music can be a cure, a treatment. It has always been like this, but maybe in these times it is especially relevant.” May it be so.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
June 2, 2022
Dear Friends,
Lucy Harper is on a mission. In fact, she has been on a mission for at least seven years as she tries to encourage Americans to think about their country in a different way. Distressed over the deep divisions in cultural and political issues, she has been traveling across the nation, teaching classes and leading workshops telling people, “America is not a political prize to be fought over, but an idea to be fought for.” Her success, she admits, is not overly impressive.
In 2015 she became part of the American Network, an organization whose goal is to create groups or networks of Americans, who work to help their communities look at the nation “through the lens of values.” Everyone, she says, knows about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, but the values of the United States really come down to balance: freedom and equality, law and ethics, common wealth and private wealth, unity and diversity. All these different values, which sometimes do conflict, must be balanced, she maintains. And it the balance, even the desire for balance that is the problem today. People no longer want to work toward balance.
She and her husband have been teaching a course on The American Vision at The University of Miami’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Yet she has noticed that there are current events courses being taught, some from a liberal and others from a conservative perspective. The ideological splits are so deep, she maintains, that different courses are taught to avoid the nasty interactions that result when people bring their ideological bent to class. She finds this deeply discouraging and dangerous. So now she is trying another approach---though the medium of a play. Some of the nation’s most renown thinkers, like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton share the stage as they debate what makes America what it is or wants to be. She does not know what the impact will be. The play opens this weekend at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and it will move on to the University of California at Berkley in the fall. Her hope is that the play will spark thought and debate among people, whose minds can change when they meet IDEAS, different from their own. We have arrived at a point, she claims, where we only want to talk with people, who think as we do. But that kind of insular thinking is bringing us to the brink of disaster. We must find a new way to open ourselves to a wider realm of thinking and feeling. The world, after all, is a big place, and it is hard to appreciate the bigness if we are so committed to our own little place in the world.
I wonder what Jesus would have thought of this approach. He certainly never traveled very far from his home, perhaps not more than 70 miles or so, and he probably tended to stay within the Jewish community, though there is little doubt that his interaction with gentiles, made an impact, forcing him beyond the world he knew so well. He became a reformer of Jewish law, believing that the law of higher righteousness or love was more important for the flourishing of life than following the strict letter of the law. From where did that idea come? I imagine Jesus as a master of conversation, both listening to others as he also thought and taught. Perhaps in conversing with so many different people, he began to see a new approach to law and to life. Talking and listening, listening, and talking. We all could do a bit more of both, and we could do it with the blessings of God in Jesus Christ.
Blessings always,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Lucy Harper is on a mission. In fact, she has been on a mission for at least seven years as she tries to encourage Americans to think about their country in a different way. Distressed over the deep divisions in cultural and political issues, she has been traveling across the nation, teaching classes and leading workshops telling people, “America is not a political prize to be fought over, but an idea to be fought for.” Her success, she admits, is not overly impressive.
In 2015 she became part of the American Network, an organization whose goal is to create groups or networks of Americans, who work to help their communities look at the nation “through the lens of values.” Everyone, she says, knows about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, but the values of the United States really come down to balance: freedom and equality, law and ethics, common wealth and private wealth, unity and diversity. All these different values, which sometimes do conflict, must be balanced, she maintains. And it the balance, even the desire for balance that is the problem today. People no longer want to work toward balance.
She and her husband have been teaching a course on The American Vision at The University of Miami’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Yet she has noticed that there are current events courses being taught, some from a liberal and others from a conservative perspective. The ideological splits are so deep, she maintains, that different courses are taught to avoid the nasty interactions that result when people bring their ideological bent to class. She finds this deeply discouraging and dangerous. So now she is trying another approach---though the medium of a play. Some of the nation’s most renown thinkers, like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton share the stage as they debate what makes America what it is or wants to be. She does not know what the impact will be. The play opens this weekend at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and it will move on to the University of California at Berkley in the fall. Her hope is that the play will spark thought and debate among people, whose minds can change when they meet IDEAS, different from their own. We have arrived at a point, she claims, where we only want to talk with people, who think as we do. But that kind of insular thinking is bringing us to the brink of disaster. We must find a new way to open ourselves to a wider realm of thinking and feeling. The world, after all, is a big place, and it is hard to appreciate the bigness if we are so committed to our own little place in the world.
I wonder what Jesus would have thought of this approach. He certainly never traveled very far from his home, perhaps not more than 70 miles or so, and he probably tended to stay within the Jewish community, though there is little doubt that his interaction with gentiles, made an impact, forcing him beyond the world he knew so well. He became a reformer of Jewish law, believing that the law of higher righteousness or love was more important for the flourishing of life than following the strict letter of the law. From where did that idea come? I imagine Jesus as a master of conversation, both listening to others as he also thought and taught. Perhaps in conversing with so many different people, he began to see a new approach to law and to life. Talking and listening, listening, and talking. We all could do a bit more of both, and we could do it with the blessings of God in Jesus Christ.
Blessings always,
Sandra
THREE WAR STORIES
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
Memorial Day Week-end, May 29, 2022
Exodus 21: 12-27
Matthew 5: 17-26
When I was a freshman in college, the required Humanities course included a number of classics on the subject of war: Herodotus, The History of the Persian Wars, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and the great Russian novel, War and Peace by Tolstoy. Now this was in the midst of the Viet Nam War, and I can tell you we were not pleased with reading about war. When the regular professor was suddenly taken ill, we had this gentle, wise, retired professor. He understood the anger of the college students regarding Viet Nam, but he began the class by telling us a story from World War I, when the Germans set fire to the famous library in Louvain, Belgium.
When the President of the Library attempted to speak of the loss---irreplaceable ancient manuscripts and scrolls, he stuttered out the words, La Bibliotheque, French for library, but he could not go on. He broke down weeping. “I want you,” the professor told us, “to understand the depth of his grief, the loss of knowledge that could never be regained. You will have here the opportunity to read great thoughts and ideas, and the love of knowledge and the love of learning are civilizing forces that can fight against the barbarity of war. And something else, you will read this in Herodotus: As brutal as war is, sometimes war also shows forth great virtues: courage, compassion, self sacrifice, the grief of lost love. And virtue is part of what your education is about.”
Today I am going to tell you three brief stories of war, all from different wars, with different perspectives. And as you hear these true tales, put them in dialogue with what you heard from the Jewish law as well as from the gospel of Jesus Christ.
There was nothing in the background of Joshua Chamberlain that would have suggested he would become a great warrior. A professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, he taught rhetoric, natural theology, and languages. When the Civil War came, this husband and a father of four, age 33, enlisted in the Union Army, much to the grief of his wife, Fanny, whom he adored. Appalled at the secession of the southern states and morally opposed to slavery, in 1862 he entered the Union Army as a lieutenant colonel and three years later left the army as a General. Chamberlain commanded the 20th Maine, and on July 3,1863 Chamberlain and his men found themselves on a long escarpment called Cemetery Ridge facing the Confederate Army. This was the Battle of Gettysburg.
It was absolutely vital, General Meade told him, to hold your line at all costs, for if Lee could overwhelm the Union forces here, he would have a gateway into Washington, DC, and a victory which might convince England and France to support the Confederacy. Chamberlain received a chilling order from Meade that morning: “Any man who does not do his duty should be immediately executed.” But instilling fear was not Chamberlain’s method. He led by courageous example, fighting in the very heat of battle at the head of the battle lines. Finally, at one point, when the ammunition was almost gone and defeat seemed imminent, Chamberlain yelled out one word, Bayonet as he pulled out his and led the charge. The word caught like fire and swept along the ranks. The men charged ahead in a rage, following their leader, and the Confederates turned around and ran.
There would be other battles and other examples of Chamberlain’s great bravery, and his uncanny ability to cheat death many times over, but he is also remembered for a different kind of noble bravery. When General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, the Confederates were starving, and the Union Army fed them. Three days later, Grant asked Chamberlain to command the ceremony in which the Confederate Army would formally surrender. Chamberlain described Lee as “a commanding form, superbly mounted, richly accoutered, of imposing bearing and noble countenance with an expression of deep sadness overmastered by deep strength.” When Chamberlain witnessed the downcast ranks of the defeated Confederate Army, he resolved to mark these defeated warriors by an act of respect, welcoming them back into the Union. Chamberlain ordered his buglers to sound and his soldiers to raise their weapons in a traditional salute. And Lee, shocked at this show of deep respect, then ordered his troops to return the same. There would be no exchange of hatred that day between the soldiers. “We are all on one side now,” Chamberlain said with hope in his heart.
Vera Brittain was studying at Oxford University, when, in 1915 she enlisted as a nurse in England’s armed services. Before the end of the war, she would serve in London, Malta and close to the Western Front in France. She lost all the men she loved to the war, including her fiancé, Roland Leighton, her brother, Edward and two very close friends. Vera was waiting for her fiancé to return on leave on Christmas, 1915, when the day after Christmas the phone rang. Running to receive the call, which she surely thought must be from Roland, she learned instead that he had died on December 23, 1915. He was shot while going to repair the barbed wire fencing in No Man’s Land.
Vera wrote in her book, Testament of Youth, “I would whisper like a maniac to the somber, indifferent light, “Oh, my love, so proud, so confident, so contemptuous of humiliation, you, who were meant to lead a forlorn hope, to fall in a great fight---just to be shot like a rat in the dark as you go to repair a fence. Why did you go so boldly and heedlessly into No Man’s Land, when you knew that your leave was so near? Dearest, why did you? Why did you?
And hardest of all for her to bear was the silence. He had left, she wrote, no message for those of us who loved him. He had gone down to the grave consciously indifferent to all of us who loved him so much. All throughout the first months of 1916, my letters and diaries emphasize again and again the grief of having no word to cherish through the long empty years. I waited and waited for the hope of a message, and though I had heard from his colonel, his company commander, a Catholic priest and was even visited by an officer, who wanted to help me, I learned all there was to learn about his death, including that at the end I had been quite forgotten. And so Vera lived with a grief that she transmuted into work for peace as well as a book, both a memoir and an elegy for the generation who came of age on the eve of the war and then vanished in its trenches.
Nicholas Winton came from a wealthy Jewish family, who had immigrated to England from Germany in the late 1800’s. By 1938 Nicholas was a successful stockbroker about to go to Switzerland on a vacation with a friend. But his friend called and told him he was in Prague helping refugees, who were trying to flee Hitler. Nicholas arrived in Prague on New Year’s Eve, 1938, and was shocked at what he witnessed: freezing refugee camps, filled with desperate people. Many were convinced that soon Hitler would arrive in Czechoslovakia, and then what would they do? How would they escape? Nicholas Winton then took a particular interest in a certain kind of refugee: those adults who were willing to stay but were trying to get their children out of the country. He set up an office in Prague and asked his mother to do the same in London. What do we need to do to get these children to safety in England? That was his mission.
He returned to London in January, 1939 with hundreds of photos and details of children. Though he continued to work as a stockbroker during the day, every evening he worked on his rescue plan. The Home Office in London had previously said it would accept unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany and Austria, but now it agreed to include Czechoslovakia. The bar was set high; he had to find families who would accept the children and also 50 pounds per child, today worth about $3500. Though many donated, he would also use his own money to fill in the many gaps. His first transport left Prague on March 14, 1939. There were two in April, one in May, one in June, two in July, and one in August. The journey ended at London’s Liverpool Street Station. As the children alighted from the train, they sat on benches on one side of a curtain and the new parents on the other side. As each name was called out, the children went through an opening in the curtain and were welcomed by the new parents on the other side. On September 1,1939 Nicholas Winton had scheduled his largest transport, but this was the day Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War began. Almost all of them died in concentration camps.
No one would have ever known about Nicholas Winton, but his wife found a scrapbook, assembled by one of Nicholas’ assistants, and wanted to know who all these children were, and so Nicholas told her the story. The story made it to the newspapers and then on a BBC Program called, That’s Life. Winton was invited to the program, but he did not know that some of the grown up children he had saved were also there. The woman sitting next to Nicholas introduced herself as Vera Diamont, who came to London on a train from Prague in 1939. When the program’s host asked if there were any others present who made a similar trip, dozens stood up. Nicholas Winton, normally so reserved, broke down in tears. There were over 6000 people alive at that time in 1989 who were descendants of the 668 people he had saved. Among the saved were at least three Nobel Laureates. Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106, cared for toward the end of his life by Vera Diamont, one of the people he saved.
War is indeed a terrible thing, brutal and ugly. But I think that old retired professor, who taught some humanities classes to me now over 50 years ago, knew of what he spoke. Sometimes in the worst of times virtue does assert itself and make itself known. And I think Jesus, as much as he was opposed to violence, would agree. He was, after all, a keen observer of the human condition, and he knew that sometimes out of the depths something great can emerge---great courage, great grief, great compassion.
Preached by: Sandra Olsen
First Church of Christ, Congregational in Unionville, CT
Memorial Day Week-end, May 29, 2022
Exodus 21: 12-27
Matthew 5: 17-26
When I was a freshman in college, the required Humanities course included a number of classics on the subject of war: Herodotus, The History of the Persian Wars, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and the great Russian novel, War and Peace by Tolstoy. Now this was in the midst of the Viet Nam War, and I can tell you we were not pleased with reading about war. When the regular professor was suddenly taken ill, we had this gentle, wise, retired professor. He understood the anger of the college students regarding Viet Nam, but he began the class by telling us a story from World War I, when the Germans set fire to the famous library in Louvain, Belgium.
When the President of the Library attempted to speak of the loss---irreplaceable ancient manuscripts and scrolls, he stuttered out the words, La Bibliotheque, French for library, but he could not go on. He broke down weeping. “I want you,” the professor told us, “to understand the depth of his grief, the loss of knowledge that could never be regained. You will have here the opportunity to read great thoughts and ideas, and the love of knowledge and the love of learning are civilizing forces that can fight against the barbarity of war. And something else, you will read this in Herodotus: As brutal as war is, sometimes war also shows forth great virtues: courage, compassion, self sacrifice, the grief of lost love. And virtue is part of what your education is about.”
Today I am going to tell you three brief stories of war, all from different wars, with different perspectives. And as you hear these true tales, put them in dialogue with what you heard from the Jewish law as well as from the gospel of Jesus Christ.
There was nothing in the background of Joshua Chamberlain that would have suggested he would become a great warrior. A professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, he taught rhetoric, natural theology, and languages. When the Civil War came, this husband and a father of four, age 33, enlisted in the Union Army, much to the grief of his wife, Fanny, whom he adored. Appalled at the secession of the southern states and morally opposed to slavery, in 1862 he entered the Union Army as a lieutenant colonel and three years later left the army as a General. Chamberlain commanded the 20th Maine, and on July 3,1863 Chamberlain and his men found themselves on a long escarpment called Cemetery Ridge facing the Confederate Army. This was the Battle of Gettysburg.
It was absolutely vital, General Meade told him, to hold your line at all costs, for if Lee could overwhelm the Union forces here, he would have a gateway into Washington, DC, and a victory which might convince England and France to support the Confederacy. Chamberlain received a chilling order from Meade that morning: “Any man who does not do his duty should be immediately executed.” But instilling fear was not Chamberlain’s method. He led by courageous example, fighting in the very heat of battle at the head of the battle lines. Finally, at one point, when the ammunition was almost gone and defeat seemed imminent, Chamberlain yelled out one word, Bayonet as he pulled out his and led the charge. The word caught like fire and swept along the ranks. The men charged ahead in a rage, following their leader, and the Confederates turned around and ran.
There would be other battles and other examples of Chamberlain’s great bravery, and his uncanny ability to cheat death many times over, but he is also remembered for a different kind of noble bravery. When General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, the Confederates were starving, and the Union Army fed them. Three days later, Grant asked Chamberlain to command the ceremony in which the Confederate Army would formally surrender. Chamberlain described Lee as “a commanding form, superbly mounted, richly accoutered, of imposing bearing and noble countenance with an expression of deep sadness overmastered by deep strength.” When Chamberlain witnessed the downcast ranks of the defeated Confederate Army, he resolved to mark these defeated warriors by an act of respect, welcoming them back into the Union. Chamberlain ordered his buglers to sound and his soldiers to raise their weapons in a traditional salute. And Lee, shocked at this show of deep respect, then ordered his troops to return the same. There would be no exchange of hatred that day between the soldiers. “We are all on one side now,” Chamberlain said with hope in his heart.
Vera Brittain was studying at Oxford University, when, in 1915 she enlisted as a nurse in England’s armed services. Before the end of the war, she would serve in London, Malta and close to the Western Front in France. She lost all the men she loved to the war, including her fiancé, Roland Leighton, her brother, Edward and two very close friends. Vera was waiting for her fiancé to return on leave on Christmas, 1915, when the day after Christmas the phone rang. Running to receive the call, which she surely thought must be from Roland, she learned instead that he had died on December 23, 1915. He was shot while going to repair the barbed wire fencing in No Man’s Land.
Vera wrote in her book, Testament of Youth, “I would whisper like a maniac to the somber, indifferent light, “Oh, my love, so proud, so confident, so contemptuous of humiliation, you, who were meant to lead a forlorn hope, to fall in a great fight---just to be shot like a rat in the dark as you go to repair a fence. Why did you go so boldly and heedlessly into No Man’s Land, when you knew that your leave was so near? Dearest, why did you? Why did you?
And hardest of all for her to bear was the silence. He had left, she wrote, no message for those of us who loved him. He had gone down to the grave consciously indifferent to all of us who loved him so much. All throughout the first months of 1916, my letters and diaries emphasize again and again the grief of having no word to cherish through the long empty years. I waited and waited for the hope of a message, and though I had heard from his colonel, his company commander, a Catholic priest and was even visited by an officer, who wanted to help me, I learned all there was to learn about his death, including that at the end I had been quite forgotten. And so Vera lived with a grief that she transmuted into work for peace as well as a book, both a memoir and an elegy for the generation who came of age on the eve of the war and then vanished in its trenches.
Nicholas Winton came from a wealthy Jewish family, who had immigrated to England from Germany in the late 1800’s. By 1938 Nicholas was a successful stockbroker about to go to Switzerland on a vacation with a friend. But his friend called and told him he was in Prague helping refugees, who were trying to flee Hitler. Nicholas arrived in Prague on New Year’s Eve, 1938, and was shocked at what he witnessed: freezing refugee camps, filled with desperate people. Many were convinced that soon Hitler would arrive in Czechoslovakia, and then what would they do? How would they escape? Nicholas Winton then took a particular interest in a certain kind of refugee: those adults who were willing to stay but were trying to get their children out of the country. He set up an office in Prague and asked his mother to do the same in London. What do we need to do to get these children to safety in England? That was his mission.
He returned to London in January, 1939 with hundreds of photos and details of children. Though he continued to work as a stockbroker during the day, every evening he worked on his rescue plan. The Home Office in London had previously said it would accept unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany and Austria, but now it agreed to include Czechoslovakia. The bar was set high; he had to find families who would accept the children and also 50 pounds per child, today worth about $3500. Though many donated, he would also use his own money to fill in the many gaps. His first transport left Prague on March 14, 1939. There were two in April, one in May, one in June, two in July, and one in August. The journey ended at London’s Liverpool Street Station. As the children alighted from the train, they sat on benches on one side of a curtain and the new parents on the other side. As each name was called out, the children went through an opening in the curtain and were welcomed by the new parents on the other side. On September 1,1939 Nicholas Winton had scheduled his largest transport, but this was the day Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War began. Almost all of them died in concentration camps.
No one would have ever known about Nicholas Winton, but his wife found a scrapbook, assembled by one of Nicholas’ assistants, and wanted to know who all these children were, and so Nicholas told her the story. The story made it to the newspapers and then on a BBC Program called, That’s Life. Winton was invited to the program, but he did not know that some of the grown up children he had saved were also there. The woman sitting next to Nicholas introduced herself as Vera Diamont, who came to London on a train from Prague in 1939. When the program’s host asked if there were any others present who made a similar trip, dozens stood up. Nicholas Winton, normally so reserved, broke down in tears. There were over 6000 people alive at that time in 1989 who were descendants of the 668 people he had saved. Among the saved were at least three Nobel Laureates. Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106, cared for toward the end of his life by Vera Diamont, one of the people he saved.
War is indeed a terrible thing, brutal and ugly. But I think that old retired professor, who taught some humanities classes to me now over 50 years ago, knew of what he spoke. Sometimes in the worst of times virtue does assert itself and make itself known. And I think Jesus, as much as he was opposed to violence, would agree. He was, after all, a keen observer of the human condition, and he knew that sometimes out of the depths something great can emerge---great courage, great grief, great compassion.
May 26, 2022
Dear Friends,
What can any of us say about the terrible slaughter of 21 people in a Texas elementary school in Texas? Words fail us as our hearts break. Sometimes silence is the best response, yet we might also be moved to prayer. Here is a prayer written by Maren Tirabassi, a retired UCC minister and poet. Read it and use it as you are able.
God, rock the weeping parents
of Uvalde, Texas
in your tender arms.
Ease the fear and pain of brothers and sisters,
and sit beside them in nightmares.
Companion where comforting fails,
and hold those who grieve Eva Mireles,
and the other adult who died.
Ease the hearts of emergency responders,
of medical teams working now,
with the families of the injured.
Give calm moments
in the tornado of loss, guilt, confusion,
of family, friends, work mates
of Salvador Ramos,
and especially those
who know his grandmother.
Be with teachers and counselors
of the Robb Elementary School
as school ends abruptly
to recognize trauma
among survivors this month
and for years to come,
and bring counselors to the counselors
who will hold this in their hearts,
and teach us all the things
that make for peace.
Holy One, who calls – Woe
upon all who put a stone for stumbling
before any child, have mercy on us
if we do not remove weapons
from the hands of children,
and from the schools of children.
amen.
Written by Maren Tirabassi
Dear Friends,
What can any of us say about the terrible slaughter of 21 people in a Texas elementary school in Texas? Words fail us as our hearts break. Sometimes silence is the best response, yet we might also be moved to prayer. Here is a prayer written by Maren Tirabassi, a retired UCC minister and poet. Read it and use it as you are able.
God, rock the weeping parents
of Uvalde, Texas
in your tender arms.
Ease the fear and pain of brothers and sisters,
and sit beside them in nightmares.
Companion where comforting fails,
and hold those who grieve Eva Mireles,
and the other adult who died.
Ease the hearts of emergency responders,
of medical teams working now,
with the families of the injured.
Give calm moments
in the tornado of loss, guilt, confusion,
of family, friends, work mates
of Salvador Ramos,
and especially those
who know his grandmother.
Be with teachers and counselors
of the Robb Elementary School
as school ends abruptly
to recognize trauma
among survivors this month
and for years to come,
and bring counselors to the counselors
who will hold this in their hearts,
and teach us all the things
that make for peace.
Holy One, who calls – Woe
upon all who put a stone for stumbling
before any child, have mercy on us
if we do not remove weapons
from the hands of children,
and from the schools of children.
amen.
Written by Maren Tirabassi
May 18, 2022
Dear Friends,
There are times, when I retrieve my New York Times from the front steps, I almost dread what I might read---stories of war, gun violence, school failures, etc. But on Friday, May 13 on the front page was something that made my heart leap: First Visual Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy. There it was, a reddish orange and yellow ball, the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It made me gasp. I remember decades ago reading about black holes as if they were theoretical, since no astronomer had yet seen one. But they were actually postulated over 100 years ago from the mathematics of Einstein’s 1915 Theory of Relativity. And now here it is, described by the Times as “a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space.” Another scientist called it “the gentle giant at the center of our universe.” This black hole was “discovered” 20 years ago, but until now no one had a direct picture.
This is not the first image of a black hole. In 2019 an image of a black hole in the Galaxy Messier 87 was captured, and that image is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said, “We have seen what we thought was unseeable.” This is breathtakingly significant. We are pushing boundaries of knowledge that until very recently were believed to be impossible to push. All this can lead to a deeper understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how stars can generate quasars, which are “geysers of energy” that can be seen across the universe. In 1971 two scientists at Cambridge University in England suggested that massive black holes could be the source of quasars. While they had worked out the mathematics of it, no one had yet seen a black hole.
While Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the conclusion that black holes “exist,” that conclusion was not something Einstein liked or wanted. He did not approve of the idea that space-time could “quiver, bend, rip, expand and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole.” The gravity of a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape it. Black holes seem to be all throughout the universe, at the center of every galaxy, some of them the result of stars that have collapsed inward and just keep going or growing. Materials like dust, gas, shredded stars fall into a black hole and are heated up millions of degrees in a dense storm of electromagnetic fields. Much of the material remains within the black hole, but some of it is “spit out,” like a great firestorm, and this is what is known as a quasar. These quasars are so bright they outshine galaxies many thousand times over.
The reason the black hole at the center of our Milky Way is called “the gentle giant” is because it is quite inefficient. Though incredibly bright, it only puts out a few hundred times as much energy as the sun, yet it is FOUR MILLION TIMES as massive. Compared to the black hole in M87, our black hole is one thousandth the mass, but it evolves more than a thousand times faster, altering its appearance every five minutes. In observing the black hole in M87, one physicist said, “It was like the great Buddha, just sitting here.” But observing our black hole is a completely different experience with its constant motion and changes.
In my study at home, I have a huge, framed poster of Albert Einstein with this quote from him: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” And yet it is these details out of which new knowledge will come and grow. I think it is marvelously exciting. The psalmist talks about “such knowledge being too wonderful for me.” And indeed, it is.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
There are times, when I retrieve my New York Times from the front steps, I almost dread what I might read---stories of war, gun violence, school failures, etc. But on Friday, May 13 on the front page was something that made my heart leap: First Visual Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy. There it was, a reddish orange and yellow ball, the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It made me gasp. I remember decades ago reading about black holes as if they were theoretical, since no astronomer had yet seen one. But they were actually postulated over 100 years ago from the mathematics of Einstein’s 1915 Theory of Relativity. And now here it is, described by the Times as “a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space.” Another scientist called it “the gentle giant at the center of our universe.” This black hole was “discovered” 20 years ago, but until now no one had a direct picture.
This is not the first image of a black hole. In 2019 an image of a black hole in the Galaxy Messier 87 was captured, and that image is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said, “We have seen what we thought was unseeable.” This is breathtakingly significant. We are pushing boundaries of knowledge that until very recently were believed to be impossible to push. All this can lead to a deeper understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how stars can generate quasars, which are “geysers of energy” that can be seen across the universe. In 1971 two scientists at Cambridge University in England suggested that massive black holes could be the source of quasars. While they had worked out the mathematics of it, no one had yet seen a black hole.
While Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the conclusion that black holes “exist,” that conclusion was not something Einstein liked or wanted. He did not approve of the idea that space-time could “quiver, bend, rip, expand and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole.” The gravity of a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape it. Black holes seem to be all throughout the universe, at the center of every galaxy, some of them the result of stars that have collapsed inward and just keep going or growing. Materials like dust, gas, shredded stars fall into a black hole and are heated up millions of degrees in a dense storm of electromagnetic fields. Much of the material remains within the black hole, but some of it is “spit out,” like a great firestorm, and this is what is known as a quasar. These quasars are so bright they outshine galaxies many thousand times over.
The reason the black hole at the center of our Milky Way is called “the gentle giant” is because it is quite inefficient. Though incredibly bright, it only puts out a few hundred times as much energy as the sun, yet it is FOUR MILLION TIMES as massive. Compared to the black hole in M87, our black hole is one thousandth the mass, but it evolves more than a thousand times faster, altering its appearance every five minutes. In observing the black hole in M87, one physicist said, “It was like the great Buddha, just sitting here.” But observing our black hole is a completely different experience with its constant motion and changes.
In my study at home, I have a huge, framed poster of Albert Einstein with this quote from him: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” And yet it is these details out of which new knowledge will come and grow. I think it is marvelously exciting. The psalmist talks about “such knowledge being too wonderful for me.” And indeed, it is.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
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: [email protected]. 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. “I too have forgotten---except I do remember the alphabet.” “Well,” the rabbi yelled joyfully, start repeating it now.” And so, the Servant began reciting the alphabet, at first only in whispers, but then more loudly and forcefully as the rabbi joined him in the repetition, until finally the rabbi remembered. He remembered the words and the prayers and the stories and all the questions his tradition had been asking for such a very long time. And it was his memory that gave to him the power to take them both home.
“And so,” my rabbi friend said to me, “there is a sacred duty to remember. We Jews remember the stories, as you Christians too remember your sacred stories. And we both remember the important questions from those stories, and we ask them over and over again, because we are all traveling by stages, just like the ancient Israelites. We learn little by little, and sometimes we forget, but God does not forget, and so God reminds us, God prods our memories as we journey along together by stages, asking the important questions that help us to see what life is all about and what we owe to each other and to God.
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. “I too have forgotten---except I do remember the alphabet.” “Well,” the rabbi yelled joyfully, start repeating it now.” And so, the Servant began reciting the alphabet, at first only in whispers, but then more loudly and forcefully as the rabbi joined him in the repetition, until finally the rabbi remembered. He remembered the words and the prayers and the stories and all the questions his tradition had been asking for such a very long time. And it was his memory that gave to him the power to take them both home.
“And so,” my rabbi friend said to me, “there is a sacred duty to remember. We Jews remember the stories, as you Christians too remember your sacred stories. And we both remember the important questions from those stories, and we ask them over and over again, because we are all traveling by stages, just like the ancient Israelites. We learn little by little, and sometimes we forget, but God does not forget, and so God reminds us, God prods our memories as we journey along together by stages, asking the important questions that help us to see what life is all about and what we owe to each other and to God.
September 30, 2020
Dear Friends,
“It’s gone,” reported the Sempervirens Fund, a redwood conservancy, established in 1902 to help found the Big Basin Redwoods State Park, home to the biggest and oldest redwoods in the world, some dating as far back as the Roman Empire. The Park, cascading down the Santa Cruz Mountains toward the Pacific Ocean, is about 45 miles south of San Francisco. It boasts 18,000 acres and has trees the size of New York skyscrapers. And when the word went out that the redwoods were gone, those who heard the words, quickly went into mourning. But the word of loss was premature, and now there is good news of resilience. The giant redwoods will survive, while the Douglas firs and the Tan Oaks will have their obituaries written.
The Big Basin Redwoods State Park is closed, its historic headquarters burned to the ground and many other buildings reduced to ash. While most conifers do not sprout back when traumatized by fire, redwoods have a remarkable ability to sprout again. They are, in other words, incredibly resilient, and in these days of Covid-19 and a national death of over 208,000, we all can celebrate the resilience of these remarkable trees.
Apparently, the resilience comes from a thick, insulating bark several feet thick. Dormant buds lie beneath the bark until activated by a trauma, like fire or lightening. And this is what happened when fire from a lightening storm began on August 16. Redwoods do not suffer from the normal tree enemies, like fungus and beetles, and they also resist rot. Though the trees needles were burned brown, and the trunks suffered terrible scorching, past performance has shown these trees coming back with a flush of green growth in a matter of months. At least this is what happened in 1989 and 1990, when in a very controversial experiment, some of these trees were purposely burned to seethe results. Foresters already had some ideas, because apparently the Indigenous people burned the forests until the mid 1880’s in an effort to cultivate certain needed resources, like material for basket weaving. Foresters began to realize that fires burning under moderation conditions (as the Native people initiated) actually protect the forest against extreme fire.
If you were allowed to walk the Park today, you would see a ground covered in ash and undergrowth completely blackened by fire. You would also see that some of the mighty trees have fallen to the ground, but most are standing, like “Mother of the Forest,” a tree that had once reached 329 feet, but now is 293 feet. By next spring the prediction is that all the dead foliage will have fallen to the ground, making a blanket of dead needles and leaves, and at the base of these giant trees small redwoods will be beginning to grow. The hugely wide trunks will be displaying a leafy greenery, and the prediction is that in 3 or 4 years the trees will look fairly normal, except for the bark, which will remain blackened for a number of years. But eventually that bark will be sloughed off, as new growth underneath asserts its dominance.
Who is not uplifted by stories of resilience, the phoenix rising from the ashes? A few years ago, the incoming Wesleyan freshman class was required to read a book by one of the English professors, Christine Crosby, who suffered a devastating bicycle accident, leaving her a paraplegic. Some years ago, long before her accident, I took one of her courses on Victorian literature, offered at night for Graduate Liberal Studies students. She was a brilliant teacher, and when the accident first occurred, no one knew if she would ever be able to return to teaching. But she did. Wheel chaired bound, dealing with constant pain and severe limitation in movement, she is on campus, teaching and inspiring students, as she always has, but now there is another dimension to her teaching: the resilience of surviving an accident that nearly killed her and changed her life forever.
Yes, we do admire resilience, especially when it is allied with courage. And that is unique to the human being. Of course, we celebrate the survival of the redwoods, but when it comes to human life, it is not simply survival we admire. It is survival with a purpose, survival that has a direction and goal, survival that says something about the kind of values that are worth living and sometimes even dying for. When I took Professor Crosby’s class on Victorian literature, we read such classics as Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, novels which ask the readers to ponder questions about the kind of life most worth living. And the answers those novels suggest go way beyond mere survival. It is a life that loves and serves truth that the experience of being alive may indeed be deeper, richer and more beautiful. This is the life God intends for God’s people.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
“It’s gone,” reported the Sempervirens Fund, a redwood conservancy, established in 1902 to help found the Big Basin Redwoods State Park, home to the biggest and oldest redwoods in the world, some dating as far back as the Roman Empire. The Park, cascading down the Santa Cruz Mountains toward the Pacific Ocean, is about 45 miles south of San Francisco. It boasts 18,000 acres and has trees the size of New York skyscrapers. And when the word went out that the redwoods were gone, those who heard the words, quickly went into mourning. But the word of loss was premature, and now there is good news of resilience. The giant redwoods will survive, while the Douglas firs and the Tan Oaks will have their obituaries written.
The Big Basin Redwoods State Park is closed, its historic headquarters burned to the ground and many other buildings reduced to ash. While most conifers do not sprout back when traumatized by fire, redwoods have a remarkable ability to sprout again. They are, in other words, incredibly resilient, and in these days of Covid-19 and a national death of over 208,000, we all can celebrate the resilience of these remarkable trees.
Apparently, the resilience comes from a thick, insulating bark several feet thick. Dormant buds lie beneath the bark until activated by a trauma, like fire or lightening. And this is what happened when fire from a lightening storm began on August 16. Redwoods do not suffer from the normal tree enemies, like fungus and beetles, and they also resist rot. Though the trees needles were burned brown, and the trunks suffered terrible scorching, past performance has shown these trees coming back with a flush of green growth in a matter of months. At least this is what happened in 1989 and 1990, when in a very controversial experiment, some of these trees were purposely burned to seethe results. Foresters already had some ideas, because apparently the Indigenous people burned the forests until the mid 1880’s in an effort to cultivate certain needed resources, like material for basket weaving. Foresters began to realize that fires burning under moderation conditions (as the Native people initiated) actually protect the forest against extreme fire.
If you were allowed to walk the Park today, you would see a ground covered in ash and undergrowth completely blackened by fire. You would also see that some of the mighty trees have fallen to the ground, but most are standing, like “Mother of the Forest,” a tree that had once reached 329 feet, but now is 293 feet. By next spring the prediction is that all the dead foliage will have fallen to the ground, making a blanket of dead needles and leaves, and at the base of these giant trees small redwoods will be beginning to grow. The hugely wide trunks will be displaying a leafy greenery, and the prediction is that in 3 or 4 years the trees will look fairly normal, except for the bark, which will remain blackened for a number of years. But eventually that bark will be sloughed off, as new growth underneath asserts its dominance.
Who is not uplifted by stories of resilience, the phoenix rising from the ashes? A few years ago, the incoming Wesleyan freshman class was required to read a book by one of the English professors, Christine Crosby, who suffered a devastating bicycle accident, leaving her a paraplegic. Some years ago, long before her accident, I took one of her courses on Victorian literature, offered at night for Graduate Liberal Studies students. She was a brilliant teacher, and when the accident first occurred, no one knew if she would ever be able to return to teaching. But she did. Wheel chaired bound, dealing with constant pain and severe limitation in movement, she is on campus, teaching and inspiring students, as she always has, but now there is another dimension to her teaching: the resilience of surviving an accident that nearly killed her and changed her life forever.
Yes, we do admire resilience, especially when it is allied with courage. And that is unique to the human being. Of course, we celebrate the survival of the redwoods, but when it comes to human life, it is not simply survival we admire. It is survival with a purpose, survival that has a direction and goal, survival that says something about the kind of values that are worth living and sometimes even dying for. When I took Professor Crosby’s class on Victorian literature, we read such classics as Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, novels which ask the readers to ponder questions about the kind of life most worth living. And the answers those novels suggest go way beyond mere survival. It is a life that loves and serves truth that the experience of being alive may indeed be deeper, richer and more beautiful. This is the life God intends for God’s people.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
GOD IS NOT ABOUT FAIRNESS by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 9/27/2020
Exodus 16: 2-15
Matthew 20: 1-16
We all know about fairness. Those of us who are parents or teachers, have heard the complaint, “It’s not fair,” from children almost as soon as they could put words together, and the complaint goes on and on---through high school into college and well beyond. My oldest daughter still complains that it was not fair that she had to wait until 14 to get her ears pierced, while I allowed her sister, who is 9.5 years younger, to have her ears pierced at 6. As a minister, I have heard many adults complain about siblings, who received differential treatment, such as: “My brother went to a private school, while I had to attend the public one, though I was the far superior student”. Or, “My parents bought my older brother a car, which he drove to school every day, but when I was in high school as a girl, I had to take the bus. Or my parents left the family home to my sister, because she promised to live in it, but she put it on the market immediately and kept all the money! And so, the stories go: It’s not fair!
Fairness is a big deal to us, and as we all realize, it is not always about petty concerns. Fairness can be a matter of life and death. At least that is how the Israelites saw it after their liberation from Egypt. Here they were, wandering in the wilderness, and they were legitimately worried about starving to death. Looking back at their former life in Egypt, things did not look so bad. Sure, they had been slaves, but at least they had plenty of food to eat, and after all they had suffered, it hardly seemed fair that they should perish from hunger. And so, they whined and complained to Moses, who asked God to feed the people, which God did. But God gave them a command: gather only enough food for the day. That hardly made sense to people on the verge of starvation, and so just in case God forgot to provide, they gathered more than a day’s supply, but all to no avail, since the manna rotted and could not be consumed the next day. There is a moral here about trust and greed, but that lesson is usually lost on anyone who is concerned about getting and protecting their fair share.
And why shouldn’t we be concerned about our fair share, especially in an economy, which is increasingly concentrating wealth in a smaller percentage of the population. The 400 richest people in our country own more of the nation’s wealth than the 150 million who make up the bottom 60%. And the top 0.1% owns more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 80%. “It’s not fair,” is on the lips of many people these days, and with that complaint in mind, we hear this morning’s parable from Matthew.
Sure, it does not seem fair that all the workers were paid the same, no matter how many hours they worked. In the United States today the average employee needs to work more than one month to earn what the average CEO earns in one hour. So yes, feelings are a bit raw on this subject of fairness, especially when the fairness has to do with money. But the parable is really not about money or labor relations. It is about God’s goodness and God’s grace, which is not something we can earn.
There has always been this tendency to see the blessings of life as something directly related to our own goodness, that is, our reward from God for living wisely and well. This belief is scattered across the pages of the Old Testament, something known as the doctrine of divine earthly retribution. But this belief is not consistently defended in scripture, because we also have a book like Job, which clearly shows that although Job was good and righteous, he still suffered. And Jesus pointed out how a tower fell and killed righteous people, so he too acknowledged that life is not always fair. Whatever we want to say about God, it does not appear that we can earn God’s love and approval. As the Protestant reformers affirmed so many centuries ago, “Grace is free; it’s a gift.”
And that is exactly what this parable from Matthew is about: unearned grace. Everyone does not get the same worldly goods, but everyone gets God’s love, because no one is in the position of being more favored or more loved by God. That was probably very hard for the Jewish Christians of Matthew’s Gospel to hear, because they saw themselves as the chosen people with a special covenant with God. The Jews as a people had been through so much, wandering in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in the Promised Land, struggling to become a nation only to later experience the terrible sting of defeats at the hands of stronger empires. And now in the year 85, the time Matthew’s gospel was probably written, Rome had its boot on their necks. We can imagine that the Jewish Christians thought they deserved more than these upstart gentiles. We can imagine the complaint, “It’s not fair. What kind of deal is this? The latecomers, these gentiles, now getting the same as the ones who were there from the very beginning? NO, it did not seem fair at all!
Some years ago, when I was working as a hospital chaplain, I had a patient, who was being treated for neurological problems. And we got into a conversation about fairness. He was French from the city of Paris, and during the German occupation of the Second World War, he was an adolescent. His father and older brother were in the Resistance, but he was only 15, when the Occupation began, so he was not expected to join the Resistance--- until the war dragged on, and turning 17,18,19, the pressure mounted.
But the Resistance did not interest him. His interest was painting. He told me he did not want to kill any Germans, though he saw Germans kill the French every day. His sister, 3 years older than he, played the piano, and though there were plenty of young women in the Resistance, no one in the family placed any pressure on her to join. But with him, it was constant, and finally, when he turned 20, his parents ordered him to leave. “They would not share their house with a coward,” they said. He couldn’t believe it. Cowardice was not the issue, at least not as he saw it. He was a quiet, gentle soul, characteristics he shared with his sister. It was so unfair. But he had no choice, and so he left, eventually living with another family outside of Paris, teaching their children, how to draw and paint while doing all kinds of jobs around the house.
When the war ended, he returned home, but no one was there. His father and brother had been shot as Resistance fighters, and his sister and mother were arrested for complicity, and later shot as well. He alone made it out of the war. And for a while he told me he believed it was all divine justice. They got what they deserved for throwing him out, and he was convinced that God had protected him. But that belief and feeling did not last long, because he had to come to terms with all the lost lives, including children who had done nothing to deserve their fates.
“It was a major turning point for me,” he said, “when I realized that not only is the world not fair, but neither is God. I mean God is not about fairness. God is about love, and that love was the same for me, my sister, my parents and brother, and even the same for the enemy. And with that realization I decided to study for the priesthood, but I didn’t stay, because I realized that even in the church there were many who did not believe that God loves everyone. After the war, many people, including many priests, were hoping for vengeance and punishment.”
We all know that life is not fair, but maybe God is not either. Maybe we don’t get what we deserve; we get what God wants to give us, which is unconditional love and mercy. While we live on this earth, we do have our responsibilities. We struggle with our own sense of limited human justice in an effort to make life a bit fairer. And that is a good thing. But even as we do so, we should realize that human justice does not equal divine justice, and indeed, that is how it must be. Let God be God that we might be the truly human ones God calls us to be.
Exodus 16: 2-15
Matthew 20: 1-16
We all know about fairness. Those of us who are parents or teachers, have heard the complaint, “It’s not fair,” from children almost as soon as they could put words together, and the complaint goes on and on---through high school into college and well beyond. My oldest daughter still complains that it was not fair that she had to wait until 14 to get her ears pierced, while I allowed her sister, who is 9.5 years younger, to have her ears pierced at 6. As a minister, I have heard many adults complain about siblings, who received differential treatment, such as: “My brother went to a private school, while I had to attend the public one, though I was the far superior student”. Or, “My parents bought my older brother a car, which he drove to school every day, but when I was in high school as a girl, I had to take the bus. Or my parents left the family home to my sister, because she promised to live in it, but she put it on the market immediately and kept all the money! And so, the stories go: It’s not fair!
Fairness is a big deal to us, and as we all realize, it is not always about petty concerns. Fairness can be a matter of life and death. At least that is how the Israelites saw it after their liberation from Egypt. Here they were, wandering in the wilderness, and they were legitimately worried about starving to death. Looking back at their former life in Egypt, things did not look so bad. Sure, they had been slaves, but at least they had plenty of food to eat, and after all they had suffered, it hardly seemed fair that they should perish from hunger. And so, they whined and complained to Moses, who asked God to feed the people, which God did. But God gave them a command: gather only enough food for the day. That hardly made sense to people on the verge of starvation, and so just in case God forgot to provide, they gathered more than a day’s supply, but all to no avail, since the manna rotted and could not be consumed the next day. There is a moral here about trust and greed, but that lesson is usually lost on anyone who is concerned about getting and protecting their fair share.
And why shouldn’t we be concerned about our fair share, especially in an economy, which is increasingly concentrating wealth in a smaller percentage of the population. The 400 richest people in our country own more of the nation’s wealth than the 150 million who make up the bottom 60%. And the top 0.1% owns more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 80%. “It’s not fair,” is on the lips of many people these days, and with that complaint in mind, we hear this morning’s parable from Matthew.
Sure, it does not seem fair that all the workers were paid the same, no matter how many hours they worked. In the United States today the average employee needs to work more than one month to earn what the average CEO earns in one hour. So yes, feelings are a bit raw on this subject of fairness, especially when the fairness has to do with money. But the parable is really not about money or labor relations. It is about God’s goodness and God’s grace, which is not something we can earn.
There has always been this tendency to see the blessings of life as something directly related to our own goodness, that is, our reward from God for living wisely and well. This belief is scattered across the pages of the Old Testament, something known as the doctrine of divine earthly retribution. But this belief is not consistently defended in scripture, because we also have a book like Job, which clearly shows that although Job was good and righteous, he still suffered. And Jesus pointed out how a tower fell and killed righteous people, so he too acknowledged that life is not always fair. Whatever we want to say about God, it does not appear that we can earn God’s love and approval. As the Protestant reformers affirmed so many centuries ago, “Grace is free; it’s a gift.”
And that is exactly what this parable from Matthew is about: unearned grace. Everyone does not get the same worldly goods, but everyone gets God’s love, because no one is in the position of being more favored or more loved by God. That was probably very hard for the Jewish Christians of Matthew’s Gospel to hear, because they saw themselves as the chosen people with a special covenant with God. The Jews as a people had been through so much, wandering in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in the Promised Land, struggling to become a nation only to later experience the terrible sting of defeats at the hands of stronger empires. And now in the year 85, the time Matthew’s gospel was probably written, Rome had its boot on their necks. We can imagine that the Jewish Christians thought they deserved more than these upstart gentiles. We can imagine the complaint, “It’s not fair. What kind of deal is this? The latecomers, these gentiles, now getting the same as the ones who were there from the very beginning? NO, it did not seem fair at all!
Some years ago, when I was working as a hospital chaplain, I had a patient, who was being treated for neurological problems. And we got into a conversation about fairness. He was French from the city of Paris, and during the German occupation of the Second World War, he was an adolescent. His father and older brother were in the Resistance, but he was only 15, when the Occupation began, so he was not expected to join the Resistance--- until the war dragged on, and turning 17,18,19, the pressure mounted.
But the Resistance did not interest him. His interest was painting. He told me he did not want to kill any Germans, though he saw Germans kill the French every day. His sister, 3 years older than he, played the piano, and though there were plenty of young women in the Resistance, no one in the family placed any pressure on her to join. But with him, it was constant, and finally, when he turned 20, his parents ordered him to leave. “They would not share their house with a coward,” they said. He couldn’t believe it. Cowardice was not the issue, at least not as he saw it. He was a quiet, gentle soul, characteristics he shared with his sister. It was so unfair. But he had no choice, and so he left, eventually living with another family outside of Paris, teaching their children, how to draw and paint while doing all kinds of jobs around the house.
When the war ended, he returned home, but no one was there. His father and brother had been shot as Resistance fighters, and his sister and mother were arrested for complicity, and later shot as well. He alone made it out of the war. And for a while he told me he believed it was all divine justice. They got what they deserved for throwing him out, and he was convinced that God had protected him. But that belief and feeling did not last long, because he had to come to terms with all the lost lives, including children who had done nothing to deserve their fates.
“It was a major turning point for me,” he said, “when I realized that not only is the world not fair, but neither is God. I mean God is not about fairness. God is about love, and that love was the same for me, my sister, my parents and brother, and even the same for the enemy. And with that realization I decided to study for the priesthood, but I didn’t stay, because I realized that even in the church there were many who did not believe that God loves everyone. After the war, many people, including many priests, were hoping for vengeance and punishment.”
We all know that life is not fair, but maybe God is not either. Maybe we don’t get what we deserve; we get what God wants to give us, which is unconditional love and mercy. While we live on this earth, we do have our responsibilities. We struggle with our own sense of limited human justice in an effort to make life a bit fairer. And that is a good thing. But even as we do so, we should realize that human justice does not equal divine justice, and indeed, that is how it must be. Let God be God that we might be the truly human ones God calls us to be.
September 23, 2020
Dear Friends,
Every year for at least the last decade the American Bible Society takes a “State of the Bible Survey” to get an idea of how engaged people are with the Bible. On July 22 they released the latest results, which showed that Bible engagement is way down, especially since the pandemic. Bible engagement is measured by how frequently the Bible is read as well as its impact on choices, relationships, values and understanding of the what makes for a full and good life. Deep engagement with the Bible dropped from 28% to 22.7% between January and June. According to the director of the project that means there are 13 million people who are now reading the Bible less than they did a year ago.
Frequency of Bible reading also dropped over the past year. Daily Bible reading dropped from 14% to 9% and reading at least a few times a week dropped from 14% to 12%. And the number of people who said they NEVER read or considered the Bible now hovers near 90 million, while ten years ago it was around 64 million.
The biggest change has come from those in the middle, the occasional users, who might pick up the Bible now and then. Today far fewer readers are even occasional. The regular readers, which can be defined as once a week, have held pretty steadily, that is, until the pandemic. So, what is it about the pandemic that has made such a sharp decrease?
One answer concerns women. Women have led men in Bible reading for as long as the survey has been conducted, but now men have pulled ahead. One explanation for this is that since the pandemic, women’s responsibilities have expanded. Many women’s jobs have moved from the workplace to the home, where they also have to supervise children’s schoolwork as well as take care of the home. So, they feel they have simply run out of time. You might think that the loss of commuting time would translate into time for other things, but apparently, this is not what has happened. The stress level at home has also increased, and this does not lend itself to bible reading and study.
Another explanation concerns the role of the church. Since many churches have been closed with services being held online, group Bible study has also dropped. Even if Zoom Bible study is offered, people don’t engage as frequently, since they already feel they spend too much time online with their own work as well as children’s schooling online. All this adds up to too much time in front of a computer! Besides, there is something that is definitely lost in the face to face encounter. When people gather in a group to read and reflect on scripture, there is personal connection among people, and when people feel connected, they are more likely to ask questions and share their own doubts and confusions. But when you are alone in front of a screen with other faces plastered on the same screen, a level of intimacy and trust is lost. Bible study for most people is not simply about an academic understanding of the Bible. They also want to apply it to real life situations, so they can live a more fulfilled life, and apparently there is less willingness to engage with such deep questions when people feel at a distance from others.
This is not only true of Bible study; it also applies to other study as well. My husband is a molecular biologist, and this semester he is teaching online a general education course about how we become sick and how we heal. Being a general education course means that it does not assume scientific knowledge or background, so he has a multitude of majors and backgrounds in his course. He claims that they gave as a reason for taking the course their curiosity about the immune system, especially in these days of a pandemic. He has taught this course at least three or four times before, but he has noticed that with Zoom the students are less inclined to ask questions. “They just sit there, staring at me and the images I am showing them, but they don’t talk.” And the same was true last semester, when in March, all courses suddenly went on Zoom. His microbiology course, which is usually taken by science majors, also went silent. He said the students looked depressed, which they probably were. After all, they were not happy about suddenly being sent home.
There are certainly times when being alone is conducive to learning, reflection and study. Deep thinking can be aided by quiet and calm. Yet there are also times our thinking deepens, when we hear the questions others ask and the line of reasoning and imagination others take to reach the conclusions they do. I wonder if fewer people are reading the Bible these days because they feel more alone, more separated from others and less likely to have people around them to discuss those things that really matter.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Every year for at least the last decade the American Bible Society takes a “State of the Bible Survey” to get an idea of how engaged people are with the Bible. On July 22 they released the latest results, which showed that Bible engagement is way down, especially since the pandemic. Bible engagement is measured by how frequently the Bible is read as well as its impact on choices, relationships, values and understanding of the what makes for a full and good life. Deep engagement with the Bible dropped from 28% to 22.7% between January and June. According to the director of the project that means there are 13 million people who are now reading the Bible less than they did a year ago.
Frequency of Bible reading also dropped over the past year. Daily Bible reading dropped from 14% to 9% and reading at least a few times a week dropped from 14% to 12%. And the number of people who said they NEVER read or considered the Bible now hovers near 90 million, while ten years ago it was around 64 million.
The biggest change has come from those in the middle, the occasional users, who might pick up the Bible now and then. Today far fewer readers are even occasional. The regular readers, which can be defined as once a week, have held pretty steadily, that is, until the pandemic. So, what is it about the pandemic that has made such a sharp decrease?
One answer concerns women. Women have led men in Bible reading for as long as the survey has been conducted, but now men have pulled ahead. One explanation for this is that since the pandemic, women’s responsibilities have expanded. Many women’s jobs have moved from the workplace to the home, where they also have to supervise children’s schoolwork as well as take care of the home. So, they feel they have simply run out of time. You might think that the loss of commuting time would translate into time for other things, but apparently, this is not what has happened. The stress level at home has also increased, and this does not lend itself to bible reading and study.
Another explanation concerns the role of the church. Since many churches have been closed with services being held online, group Bible study has also dropped. Even if Zoom Bible study is offered, people don’t engage as frequently, since they already feel they spend too much time online with their own work as well as children’s schooling online. All this adds up to too much time in front of a computer! Besides, there is something that is definitely lost in the face to face encounter. When people gather in a group to read and reflect on scripture, there is personal connection among people, and when people feel connected, they are more likely to ask questions and share their own doubts and confusions. But when you are alone in front of a screen with other faces plastered on the same screen, a level of intimacy and trust is lost. Bible study for most people is not simply about an academic understanding of the Bible. They also want to apply it to real life situations, so they can live a more fulfilled life, and apparently there is less willingness to engage with such deep questions when people feel at a distance from others.
This is not only true of Bible study; it also applies to other study as well. My husband is a molecular biologist, and this semester he is teaching online a general education course about how we become sick and how we heal. Being a general education course means that it does not assume scientific knowledge or background, so he has a multitude of majors and backgrounds in his course. He claims that they gave as a reason for taking the course their curiosity about the immune system, especially in these days of a pandemic. He has taught this course at least three or four times before, but he has noticed that with Zoom the students are less inclined to ask questions. “They just sit there, staring at me and the images I am showing them, but they don’t talk.” And the same was true last semester, when in March, all courses suddenly went on Zoom. His microbiology course, which is usually taken by science majors, also went silent. He said the students looked depressed, which they probably were. After all, they were not happy about suddenly being sent home.
There are certainly times when being alone is conducive to learning, reflection and study. Deep thinking can be aided by quiet and calm. Yet there are also times our thinking deepens, when we hear the questions others ask and the line of reasoning and imagination others take to reach the conclusions they do. I wonder if fewer people are reading the Bible these days because they feel more alone, more separated from others and less likely to have people around them to discuss those things that really matter.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
GIVING TO GOD AND GIVING TO CAESAR by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen
9/20/2020
Exodus 33: 12-23
Matthew 22: 15-22
Moses gets called by God to do something extraordinary, like lead the Israelites out of their oppression in Egypt, and so he wanted a sign from God. Who can blame him? If he were really going to lead his people out of Egypt, assuring them that this divinity was the real thing, not some fake or poor imitation, a sign would have been important. And God said, “O.k., but you can only see my backside; you cannot see my glory directly.
And I wonder if some of the religious leadership who came to Jesus were interested in the same thing. I mean isn’t it possible that at least some of them were trying to ascertain if God’s glory was truly reflected in Jesus? They had heard him teach; they had witnessed his healings, and so surely their curiosity was aroused. Who is this guy? Now I have to point out that such a sympathetic portrayal of the religious leadership is NOT how Matthew portrays them. He gives them no credit at all, which is unfortunate, because Matthew’s Gospel has probably helped to fuel some of the anti-Jewish thinking and behavior that has infected Christianity throughout its history. When Matthew wrote, around the year 85, it was tough going for Jews who were trying to follow Christ. The Temple had been destroyed and the synagogues, founded and run by the Pharisees, were springing up and giving new, vital life to those Jews, who wanted to remain full Jews, faithful to the Law. And Jewish Christians were being expelled from these synagogues. They were told they were no longer Jews. This is the context in which Matthew wrote, so by the time we arrive at chapter 22, Matthew has no sympathy at all for the Jewish leadership, who, according to him, is totally intent on killing Jesus. Matthew allows no subtlety or ambiguity.
So, this very important question about paying taxes doesn’t really get answered in a satisfactory way. Jesus is portrayed as very clever, putting the leadership in its place, who, according to Matthew, was only interested in setting a trap for Jesus. They knew exactly what they were asking. If Jesus answered that the Jews (as an occupied people) should not pay taxes, that is evidence enough to charge him with sedition. But if he said, “Yes, taxes are owed,” the Pharisees as well ordinary citizens would be furious, because the tax policy was unjust, taking way too much money from the people.
Note where Jesus is: He is in the Temple, sacred space, and a coin with the image of Caesar’s head on it, is essentially a desecration of this sacred space. You see, taxes had to be paid to Rome with Roman coins, and the coin not only displayed an image of the emperor’s head, but it also had an inscription, Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest. To the Jews this violated the commandments---to have no other God but God and to make no graven images.
Jesus, however, avoided any discussion of these issues. He simply said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” A clever response if someone is trying to entrap you, but it doesn’t help anyone to figure out exactly what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God. And we too are faced with the same question, and money does enter into our answer.
People may not like to pay taxes, but without them, how is our society to be maintained? How else are roads to be built, schools to be run, mail and health services to be delivered? And when a natural disaster strikes, don’t we expect the government to help? So, someone has to pay---though the argument these days seems to be about how little some people can get away with paying.
So yes, Caesar does have a claim on our money. We do have a responsibility to pay taxes, whether we like it or not. But God? What kind of claim does God have? Unlike the government, neither God nor the church will present you with a tax bill, though in the early days of our history, you were presented with such a bill. The Congregational Church was the established church here in Connecticut, which meant you had to support it, whether or not you were a member or even a Christian. But all this changed in 1818, when the state’s first Constitution was ratified, doing away with an established church. Dissenting Christians, like Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians had been leading the charge against an established church for many years, and finally they got their wish. No tax money would go to support any church, let alone an established one.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God when, let’s say, homeless people sleep on the steps of the church? For us here, this is not a problem, but I had to ask that question of the people of my former church in New Haven, because as a downtown church, we were always having people sleeping either on the porch of the Parish House or in the back of the church, behind a fenced in area. Caesar’s law reminds us of property rights and safety and cleanliness issues, but God’s law as given in Christ tells us that what we do to the least of these we do to Christ. So, whose obligation was being met, when the police were called, and belongings were thrown out---dirty sleeping bags and plastic bags of unwashed clothes?
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God, when we meet radical evil as we did in 9/11 and when we witnessed it again in the killing of George Floyd and so many other black persons? Do we resign ourselves to living in the two kingdoms as Augustine and Martin Luther maintained---the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God, and because God’s kingdom has not yet fully come, we have to restrain and sometimes even punish evil that innocent life might be protected? This is how countless numbers of Christians defend the death penalty or war or even abortion. We do not live in a perfect world and so accommodation to imperfection is made, and sometimes the price of such accommodation is conscience, which cannot always be clear and clean.
What do we owe to God, and what do we owe to Caesar? And what does that question have to do with our checkbooks? Now, it is certainly true that the church and God are not the same things, and to equate them is to be guilty of idolatry, which treats something that is not God as if it were God. Yet, the church is the one place whose business it is to worship God, and the church’s call is to be ever vigilant about who and what God is and what God calls us to do. The church considers questions that no other institution really cares about---like last week’s question about forgiveness. So, our behavior is up for consideration, and let’s face it, our financial behavior says something very significant about the kind of people we are.
I remember some years ago my sister in law, who is an accountant, said to me, “I know more about the souls of my clients than you would ever know about your parishioners’ souls, because I see their checkbooks. I know where their money goes.” And where our money goes says something significant about us as human beings. It says what we care about. Now there are certain things we have to care about like the bills that keep the electricity and heat on and the mortgage or rent paid. But when it comes to money, there is need and then there is want, and let’s be honest, we often spend a great deal of money on our wants. I don’t need to travel, but I want to, because I love it. I’m curious about the world. I don’t need all the dresses I buy, but I want to buy them, because well, I love dresses, though I have way more than I need.
And if we love God, how do we show that love? If loving God were suddenly made illegal, if being a Christian were considered a crime, consider what kind of evidence could be brought against you, and would it be enough to convict you? Would the evidence be your attendance at church and the money you give there? Would it be the help you offer to the person who has no one to take her to the grocery store or the doctor’s office? Would it be the money you give to Save the Children or your volunteering to help tutor a child?
Jesus spent a great deal of time showing us how to live fully and well. He left us so many stories, pointing the way toward abundant life. And many of those stories involved money, because he knew that money is a spiritual issue, and what we do with money involves our spirit. You have to decide what God means to you and what the church means to you and how you put those two together. No one can decide that for you.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God? It would be nice, if there were a precise formula to follow to arrive at the answer. But there is not. We struggle to answer as we also realize that God’s kingdom, which is not of this world, does make demands on the earthly one. And some of those demands concern money. So, if we are haunted by the question of what we owe to whom, that is how it should be, because sometimes that is how God speaks to us---in our troubled and haunted hearts and minds.
9/20/2020
Exodus 33: 12-23
Matthew 22: 15-22
Moses gets called by God to do something extraordinary, like lead the Israelites out of their oppression in Egypt, and so he wanted a sign from God. Who can blame him? If he were really going to lead his people out of Egypt, assuring them that this divinity was the real thing, not some fake or poor imitation, a sign would have been important. And God said, “O.k., but you can only see my backside; you cannot see my glory directly.
And I wonder if some of the religious leadership who came to Jesus were interested in the same thing. I mean isn’t it possible that at least some of them were trying to ascertain if God’s glory was truly reflected in Jesus? They had heard him teach; they had witnessed his healings, and so surely their curiosity was aroused. Who is this guy? Now I have to point out that such a sympathetic portrayal of the religious leadership is NOT how Matthew portrays them. He gives them no credit at all, which is unfortunate, because Matthew’s Gospel has probably helped to fuel some of the anti-Jewish thinking and behavior that has infected Christianity throughout its history. When Matthew wrote, around the year 85, it was tough going for Jews who were trying to follow Christ. The Temple had been destroyed and the synagogues, founded and run by the Pharisees, were springing up and giving new, vital life to those Jews, who wanted to remain full Jews, faithful to the Law. And Jewish Christians were being expelled from these synagogues. They were told they were no longer Jews. This is the context in which Matthew wrote, so by the time we arrive at chapter 22, Matthew has no sympathy at all for the Jewish leadership, who, according to him, is totally intent on killing Jesus. Matthew allows no subtlety or ambiguity.
So, this very important question about paying taxes doesn’t really get answered in a satisfactory way. Jesus is portrayed as very clever, putting the leadership in its place, who, according to Matthew, was only interested in setting a trap for Jesus. They knew exactly what they were asking. If Jesus answered that the Jews (as an occupied people) should not pay taxes, that is evidence enough to charge him with sedition. But if he said, “Yes, taxes are owed,” the Pharisees as well ordinary citizens would be furious, because the tax policy was unjust, taking way too much money from the people.
Note where Jesus is: He is in the Temple, sacred space, and a coin with the image of Caesar’s head on it, is essentially a desecration of this sacred space. You see, taxes had to be paid to Rome with Roman coins, and the coin not only displayed an image of the emperor’s head, but it also had an inscription, Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest. To the Jews this violated the commandments---to have no other God but God and to make no graven images.
Jesus, however, avoided any discussion of these issues. He simply said, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” A clever response if someone is trying to entrap you, but it doesn’t help anyone to figure out exactly what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God. And we too are faced with the same question, and money does enter into our answer.
People may not like to pay taxes, but without them, how is our society to be maintained? How else are roads to be built, schools to be run, mail and health services to be delivered? And when a natural disaster strikes, don’t we expect the government to help? So, someone has to pay---though the argument these days seems to be about how little some people can get away with paying.
So yes, Caesar does have a claim on our money. We do have a responsibility to pay taxes, whether we like it or not. But God? What kind of claim does God have? Unlike the government, neither God nor the church will present you with a tax bill, though in the early days of our history, you were presented with such a bill. The Congregational Church was the established church here in Connecticut, which meant you had to support it, whether or not you were a member or even a Christian. But all this changed in 1818, when the state’s first Constitution was ratified, doing away with an established church. Dissenting Christians, like Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians had been leading the charge against an established church for many years, and finally they got their wish. No tax money would go to support any church, let alone an established one.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God when, let’s say, homeless people sleep on the steps of the church? For us here, this is not a problem, but I had to ask that question of the people of my former church in New Haven, because as a downtown church, we were always having people sleeping either on the porch of the Parish House or in the back of the church, behind a fenced in area. Caesar’s law reminds us of property rights and safety and cleanliness issues, but God’s law as given in Christ tells us that what we do to the least of these we do to Christ. So, whose obligation was being met, when the police were called, and belongings were thrown out---dirty sleeping bags and plastic bags of unwashed clothes?
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God, when we meet radical evil as we did in 9/11 and when we witnessed it again in the killing of George Floyd and so many other black persons? Do we resign ourselves to living in the two kingdoms as Augustine and Martin Luther maintained---the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God, and because God’s kingdom has not yet fully come, we have to restrain and sometimes even punish evil that innocent life might be protected? This is how countless numbers of Christians defend the death penalty or war or even abortion. We do not live in a perfect world and so accommodation to imperfection is made, and sometimes the price of such accommodation is conscience, which cannot always be clear and clean.
What do we owe to God, and what do we owe to Caesar? And what does that question have to do with our checkbooks? Now, it is certainly true that the church and God are not the same things, and to equate them is to be guilty of idolatry, which treats something that is not God as if it were God. Yet, the church is the one place whose business it is to worship God, and the church’s call is to be ever vigilant about who and what God is and what God calls us to do. The church considers questions that no other institution really cares about---like last week’s question about forgiveness. So, our behavior is up for consideration, and let’s face it, our financial behavior says something very significant about the kind of people we are.
I remember some years ago my sister in law, who is an accountant, said to me, “I know more about the souls of my clients than you would ever know about your parishioners’ souls, because I see their checkbooks. I know where their money goes.” And where our money goes says something significant about us as human beings. It says what we care about. Now there are certain things we have to care about like the bills that keep the electricity and heat on and the mortgage or rent paid. But when it comes to money, there is need and then there is want, and let’s be honest, we often spend a great deal of money on our wants. I don’t need to travel, but I want to, because I love it. I’m curious about the world. I don’t need all the dresses I buy, but I want to buy them, because well, I love dresses, though I have way more than I need.
And if we love God, how do we show that love? If loving God were suddenly made illegal, if being a Christian were considered a crime, consider what kind of evidence could be brought against you, and would it be enough to convict you? Would the evidence be your attendance at church and the money you give there? Would it be the help you offer to the person who has no one to take her to the grocery store or the doctor’s office? Would it be the money you give to Save the Children or your volunteering to help tutor a child?
Jesus spent a great deal of time showing us how to live fully and well. He left us so many stories, pointing the way toward abundant life. And many of those stories involved money, because he knew that money is a spiritual issue, and what we do with money involves our spirit. You have to decide what God means to you and what the church means to you and how you put those two together. No one can decide that for you.
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God? It would be nice, if there were a precise formula to follow to arrive at the answer. But there is not. We struggle to answer as we also realize that God’s kingdom, which is not of this world, does make demands on the earthly one. And some of those demands concern money. So, if we are haunted by the question of what we owe to whom, that is how it should be, because sometimes that is how God speaks to us---in our troubled and haunted hearts and minds.
September 15, 2020
Dear Friends,
In the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as Jesus was going around Galilee choosing disciples, Philip told Nathanael that he should “come and see” the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote. “He is from Nazareth,” Philip said, and Nathanael’s response was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth in Jesus’ day was a small, secluded, easy to ignore village, so Nathanael’s question was not completely out of line. And today, what is Nazareth like? For one thing it is quite colorful with numerous spice shops, olive presses and distinctive cuisine. It is also the largest Arab city in Israel with 60% of its inhabitants Muslim and about 40% Christian. Apparently, very few Jews live in Nazareth. !
Last year an interesting liturgy festival was held there, the brainchild of an Arab Christian citizen, whose dream it has been to bring western classical music to the Arabs living in Galilee and beyond in the rest of Israel. When Nabeel Abboud Ashkar and his brother, Saleem, were growing up, their parents, who were lovers of western classical music, made sure their sons had lessons in piano and the violin. Saleem turned out to be a piano prodigy, playing a Mozart concerto at the age of ten with the Haifa Symphony Orchestra. At 17 he played in Chicago with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and at 22 he was in Carnegie Hall. His brother’s musical career, however, was not in a straight line. Nabeel studied both physics and music at the university, finally joining an orchestra in Spain, whose goal was to bring young Israelis and Arabs together to play classical music in some of the greatest concert halls in the world. In 2006 he returned to Nazareth with the goal of establishing the city’s first classical music conservatory.
The conservatory began with 25 students, but by the end of the first year it had nearly doubled in size. The students were at first only Muslim and Christian, but eventually Jewish students also joined. He then took some 8 and 9 year old students, who had been playing their instruments for less than three years to a competition in Tel Avi. To enter the competition the students were supposed to have been studying for five years, but such details did not stop Nabeel. And the result was that ten of his students won prizes. When the jury asked where the students were from, and they answered, “Nazareth,” there was shock. In fact, the question was asked a second time, because they could not believe they had heard correctly. I guess some things never change. The suspicion is still that nothing this good could ever come out of Nazareth! Yet, to the contrary, much good has been coming out of Nazareth. Two of the conservatory students won first prize in a violin competition in Tel Avi. The result of all this success has been the expansion of the program to other parts of Israel with the intention of getting Arab and Jewish students to study and play together.
The Festival of Liturgy, which took place in Nazareth last year, began with a concert by a choir from Germany, which sang a variety of sacred music from Tallis to Brahms and Britten. It also included some Jewish music and in the future the hope is to include Muslim liturgical music as well. The aim of the festival is to bring all kinds of people together to experience great music while celebrating the city of Nazareth and its cultural and religious diversity. Though much of the music was Christian, by no means is the Festival intended for Christians only. In fact, the Festival was supported by Muslim, Jewish and Christian business owners, and over half the attendees were Jews from all over Israel while the rest were Christians and Muslims from Nazareth.
When people of different backgrounds come together to study and play music, something very special happens. Deep bonds grow because they share a love for the music, and they want others to experience the sheer beauty of it. So, it is more than the enjoyment of playing together, as important as that is. It is also the experience of playing for other people, inviting others into the musical experience, which for many people was completely new. Most had never heard Mozart’s Mass in C Minor or Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. And people were deeply moved by the sheer and powerful beauty of it. This is not to be understood as western hegemony, as if western music is to be understood as the pinnacle of achievement. It is about sharing something which is beautiful, and beauty can indeed bring people together. In fact, the great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, who was a Christian, once said, “Beauty will save the world.” While the dogma of the church will not go that far, certainly the church has taught that beauty can be a pathway toward God, a journey into the heart of God---though like all pathways, it has its pitfalls and is neither an infallible guide nor an assured pathway. After all, we should never forget that some of the Nazi leaders could weep over the exquisite beauty of a Beethoven violin sonata and then return to the evil business of murdering Jews.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
In the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as Jesus was going around Galilee choosing disciples, Philip told Nathanael that he should “come and see” the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote. “He is from Nazareth,” Philip said, and Nathanael’s response was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth in Jesus’ day was a small, secluded, easy to ignore village, so Nathanael’s question was not completely out of line. And today, what is Nazareth like? For one thing it is quite colorful with numerous spice shops, olive presses and distinctive cuisine. It is also the largest Arab city in Israel with 60% of its inhabitants Muslim and about 40% Christian. Apparently, very few Jews live in Nazareth. !
Last year an interesting liturgy festival was held there, the brainchild of an Arab Christian citizen, whose dream it has been to bring western classical music to the Arabs living in Galilee and beyond in the rest of Israel. When Nabeel Abboud Ashkar and his brother, Saleem, were growing up, their parents, who were lovers of western classical music, made sure their sons had lessons in piano and the violin. Saleem turned out to be a piano prodigy, playing a Mozart concerto at the age of ten with the Haifa Symphony Orchestra. At 17 he played in Chicago with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and at 22 he was in Carnegie Hall. His brother’s musical career, however, was not in a straight line. Nabeel studied both physics and music at the university, finally joining an orchestra in Spain, whose goal was to bring young Israelis and Arabs together to play classical music in some of the greatest concert halls in the world. In 2006 he returned to Nazareth with the goal of establishing the city’s first classical music conservatory.
The conservatory began with 25 students, but by the end of the first year it had nearly doubled in size. The students were at first only Muslim and Christian, but eventually Jewish students also joined. He then took some 8 and 9 year old students, who had been playing their instruments for less than three years to a competition in Tel Avi. To enter the competition the students were supposed to have been studying for five years, but such details did not stop Nabeel. And the result was that ten of his students won prizes. When the jury asked where the students were from, and they answered, “Nazareth,” there was shock. In fact, the question was asked a second time, because they could not believe they had heard correctly. I guess some things never change. The suspicion is still that nothing this good could ever come out of Nazareth! Yet, to the contrary, much good has been coming out of Nazareth. Two of the conservatory students won first prize in a violin competition in Tel Avi. The result of all this success has been the expansion of the program to other parts of Israel with the intention of getting Arab and Jewish students to study and play together.
The Festival of Liturgy, which took place in Nazareth last year, began with a concert by a choir from Germany, which sang a variety of sacred music from Tallis to Brahms and Britten. It also included some Jewish music and in the future the hope is to include Muslim liturgical music as well. The aim of the festival is to bring all kinds of people together to experience great music while celebrating the city of Nazareth and its cultural and religious diversity. Though much of the music was Christian, by no means is the Festival intended for Christians only. In fact, the Festival was supported by Muslim, Jewish and Christian business owners, and over half the attendees were Jews from all over Israel while the rest were Christians and Muslims from Nazareth.
When people of different backgrounds come together to study and play music, something very special happens. Deep bonds grow because they share a love for the music, and they want others to experience the sheer beauty of it. So, it is more than the enjoyment of playing together, as important as that is. It is also the experience of playing for other people, inviting others into the musical experience, which for many people was completely new. Most had never heard Mozart’s Mass in C Minor or Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. And people were deeply moved by the sheer and powerful beauty of it. This is not to be understood as western hegemony, as if western music is to be understood as the pinnacle of achievement. It is about sharing something which is beautiful, and beauty can indeed bring people together. In fact, the great Russian writer, Dostoevsky, who was a Christian, once said, “Beauty will save the world.” While the dogma of the church will not go that far, certainly the church has taught that beauty can be a pathway toward God, a journey into the heart of God---though like all pathways, it has its pitfalls and is neither an infallible guide nor an assured pathway. After all, we should never forget that some of the Nazi leaders could weep over the exquisite beauty of a Beethoven violin sonata and then return to the evil business of murdering Jews.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
September 9, 2020
When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, there was this great Chevrolet ad on television, showing a family driving across the country in their new Chevrolet, while the song played in the background, “See the USA, in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to buy.” I loved that ad, because the thought of traveling across the country and seeing all these different places was so exciting to me. Those were the decades of the great American road trip. When families did travel, the kids were piled into the car (often a station wagon) and away they went! No one ever flew; at least I never knew anyone. Flying was far too expensive, and back then family size was larger than today. What middle class family could comfortably afford to buy plane tickets for 3, 4, 5 or even 6 kids plus parents? So, yes, people drove. My family never went on a trip across the country, but we did visit New York City, the Finger Lakes and Lake George. I was very envious of families who drove all the way to California to see Disney Land or to Wyoming to visit Yellowstone National Park. My parents said those options were too expensive for us, and so my siblings and I had to be satisfied with trips closer to home.
You may not realize it, but this summer became once again the summer of the road trip. Even families who could afford the plane fare were not about to fly, so people decided to drive to the places they wanted to visit. And many of them drove RV’s. The RV rental market hit the roof, because not only did people not want to fly, but they also did not want to spend time in hotels or motels, not with Covid-19 as the threat. So here they were, driving across the country in vehicles with which they were not very comfortable, and along the way some very useful and interesting things did happen.
First of all, these newbies received a lot of help and support from people who had been driving RV’s for years. Some couples complained that the RV came with a manual, and that was all the instruction they managed to get. No one at the rental place was interested in helping you figure out what to do, but if you managed to make it through the day and arrived at your park for the night, there were always plenty of people, willing to help.
Secondly, everyone in the RV parks seemed to have the same desire: they all wanted to forget the pandemic and just capture a feeling of normalcy. And by and large, many managed to achieve this. Rather than listening to the news or reading it on their tablets and phones, they sat outside with other people and they talked about, well, a variety of topics. When it seemed as if someone were getting dangerously close to a controversial subject, someone else would have the good sense to point out the beauty of the night sky, studded with stars and planets across a wide band of magnificent darkness. There were always some city people among the group, and they inevitably marveled how gorgeous the sky was. Light pollution in the city is the norm, and so it is all too easy to forget how stunning the night sky can be.
Some of the road trips were out west, across the Continental Divide, and especially for people who had never driven a RV before, there was the shock of how slowly the vehicles took the hills and mountains. “I would put the pedal to the floor, someone complained, the engine would roar, and the speedometer would remain the same. We just crawled along.” The more experienced drivers would just laugh. Yet there was a lesson in the slowness---more time to look.
In hours the riders passed through four different kinds of landscapes: from lightly tanned foothills to rock strewn canyons to spruce rich mountainsides, cresting at 11,000 feet, then to alpine meadows, filled with aspens, swaying in the wind. A couple from Massachusetts, looking at the vast landscape spread like a delicious meal before their eyes, could not believe they were somewhere else beside their house where they had been in lock down mode for many months. “So, there really is a big world out there, they mused! Indeed, there is.
Someone, who forty years before had visited Wyoming with her family, suddenly had an experience of
déjà vu. There she was with her husband, heading up Route 89 through Wyoming’s Star Valley, when suddenly she recalled the experience decades before. She remembered shooting baskets on a dirt court with a cowboy at a dude ranch. She remembered the campground where she met an old man, traveling all alone in a makeshift van, who sat with her for what seemed like forever, explaining the difference in fishing rods. And finally, she recalled the air show she saw in Afton, all these biplanes climbing straight up toward the sky before sliding downward, tumbling and looping in the most impossible of movements. And there, forty years later, were planes, sitting on a runway, ready to put on a show. She sent a picture of the planes to her father back in Massachusetts. “Dad,” she wrote, somethings never change.
People on the road wanted a sense of normalcy; they wanted to forget, at least for a while. But they received so much more---a sense of peace and quiet, solace and beauty. We need to be reminded now and then that we human beings are not the center of the story. As people traveled through the beautiful landscape, they were reminded time and time again that the land is dismissive of the pandemic, and though we should not be, still it is uplifting and even comforting to be reminded that there is far more to the world than our troubles and worries and obsessions. God is yet intent on teaching us lessons, if we have the heart, the mind, the spirit to pay heed.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, there was this great Chevrolet ad on television, showing a family driving across the country in their new Chevrolet, while the song played in the background, “See the USA, in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to buy.” I loved that ad, because the thought of traveling across the country and seeing all these different places was so exciting to me. Those were the decades of the great American road trip. When families did travel, the kids were piled into the car (often a station wagon) and away they went! No one ever flew; at least I never knew anyone. Flying was far too expensive, and back then family size was larger than today. What middle class family could comfortably afford to buy plane tickets for 3, 4, 5 or even 6 kids plus parents? So, yes, people drove. My family never went on a trip across the country, but we did visit New York City, the Finger Lakes and Lake George. I was very envious of families who drove all the way to California to see Disney Land or to Wyoming to visit Yellowstone National Park. My parents said those options were too expensive for us, and so my siblings and I had to be satisfied with trips closer to home.
You may not realize it, but this summer became once again the summer of the road trip. Even families who could afford the plane fare were not about to fly, so people decided to drive to the places they wanted to visit. And many of them drove RV’s. The RV rental market hit the roof, because not only did people not want to fly, but they also did not want to spend time in hotels or motels, not with Covid-19 as the threat. So here they were, driving across the country in vehicles with which they were not very comfortable, and along the way some very useful and interesting things did happen.
First of all, these newbies received a lot of help and support from people who had been driving RV’s for years. Some couples complained that the RV came with a manual, and that was all the instruction they managed to get. No one at the rental place was interested in helping you figure out what to do, but if you managed to make it through the day and arrived at your park for the night, there were always plenty of people, willing to help.
Secondly, everyone in the RV parks seemed to have the same desire: they all wanted to forget the pandemic and just capture a feeling of normalcy. And by and large, many managed to achieve this. Rather than listening to the news or reading it on their tablets and phones, they sat outside with other people and they talked about, well, a variety of topics. When it seemed as if someone were getting dangerously close to a controversial subject, someone else would have the good sense to point out the beauty of the night sky, studded with stars and planets across a wide band of magnificent darkness. There were always some city people among the group, and they inevitably marveled how gorgeous the sky was. Light pollution in the city is the norm, and so it is all too easy to forget how stunning the night sky can be.
Some of the road trips were out west, across the Continental Divide, and especially for people who had never driven a RV before, there was the shock of how slowly the vehicles took the hills and mountains. “I would put the pedal to the floor, someone complained, the engine would roar, and the speedometer would remain the same. We just crawled along.” The more experienced drivers would just laugh. Yet there was a lesson in the slowness---more time to look.
In hours the riders passed through four different kinds of landscapes: from lightly tanned foothills to rock strewn canyons to spruce rich mountainsides, cresting at 11,000 feet, then to alpine meadows, filled with aspens, swaying in the wind. A couple from Massachusetts, looking at the vast landscape spread like a delicious meal before their eyes, could not believe they were somewhere else beside their house where they had been in lock down mode for many months. “So, there really is a big world out there, they mused! Indeed, there is.
Someone, who forty years before had visited Wyoming with her family, suddenly had an experience of
déjà vu. There she was with her husband, heading up Route 89 through Wyoming’s Star Valley, when suddenly she recalled the experience decades before. She remembered shooting baskets on a dirt court with a cowboy at a dude ranch. She remembered the campground where she met an old man, traveling all alone in a makeshift van, who sat with her for what seemed like forever, explaining the difference in fishing rods. And finally, she recalled the air show she saw in Afton, all these biplanes climbing straight up toward the sky before sliding downward, tumbling and looping in the most impossible of movements. And there, forty years later, were planes, sitting on a runway, ready to put on a show. She sent a picture of the planes to her father back in Massachusetts. “Dad,” she wrote, somethings never change.
People on the road wanted a sense of normalcy; they wanted to forget, at least for a while. But they received so much more---a sense of peace and quiet, solace and beauty. We need to be reminded now and then that we human beings are not the center of the story. As people traveled through the beautiful landscape, they were reminded time and time again that the land is dismissive of the pandemic, and though we should not be, still it is uplifting and even comforting to be reminded that there is far more to the world than our troubles and worries and obsessions. God is yet intent on teaching us lessons, if we have the heart, the mind, the spirit to pay heed.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE COMMAND IS: FORGIVE by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 9/13/2020
Matthew 18: 21-25
On the 25th Anniversary of the Rwandan massacre, a minister I know gathered some images of the victims of the violence sitting or standing in proximity to the perpetrators of the violence. She showed these images during her sermon on forgiveness. How is it possible, she asked her congregation, for victims to sit near those who had committed such atrocities? And how is that the guilty could come and be among those whom they had so grievously harmed?
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, said that on an institutional level, it is not possible. “True forgiveness, he said, “forgives only the unforgivable and that require something no human institution, no court of law or government can offer.” According to Derrida, and there are many who share this view, forgiveness requires personal encounter, and so in the personal encounter, the impossible actually can become not only possible, but also actual. People can forgive, even what is unforgivable.
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian message with stories and parables scattered throughout the four gospels. And, of course, our imaginations are seared by the image of the dying, crucified Jesus, who in Luke’s gospel, commands God to forgive: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Our gospel lesson for today from the 18th chapter of Matthew emphasizes the necessity of forgiveness. Peter directly put the question to Jesus: How many times must I forgive—seven times? The number seven is critical here, because quite frankly three would have been a very reasonable offer, according to Jewish law. After three times, as the perpetrator, you are out, and as the one who has been sinned against, you are released from the obligation to forgive.
So, when Peter asked, “Should I forgive 7 times,” that number was beyond normal expectations. Seven was understood to be a number of completeness: six days of creation, but rest on the seventh day; the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and seven-fold vengeance, alluded to in the Old Testament. But Jesus did not stop at 7; it’s 77 times, or in some translations 7 times 70. This latter number, by the way, is a reference to a story in Genesis, where a character named Lamech had no intention of forgiving his enemies and boasted that he would avenge himself 77 times against anyone who dared to attack him. And so, Jesus was essentially saying, “Be the opposite of Lamech. Your forgiveness should be as unrelenting as Lamech’s vengeance.”
After the exchange between Peter and Jesus, we then move to a story about a master and his slave or a king and his servant. The slave owes an extravagant sum of money. Ten thousand talents in today’s economy translate into billions of dollars, so there is simply no way the slave could have repaid his master. Knowing the impossibility of repayment, the master or king showed mercy and forgave the entire debt. But the slave failed to do the same. While a much smaller amount of money is owed him---payment for about 100 days of labor--- he had the debtor thrown into prison. The master was then told what the slave had done, and lest you think of this as tattling, this parable comes immediately after a section which deals directly with sinful behavior. Ignoring sin is precisely what Jesus had just instructed his people NOT to do, so bringing the sin to light is exactly what was required.
But then we get this harsh picture of the unforgiving slave being thrown into prison, where he was tortured. Now this is not meant to be a literal description about how God will deal with persons who fail to live up to the divine command to forgive. This is not an argument for the everlasting punishment of hell, which makes God guilty of the failure to forgive. We are dealing here with hyperbole; Jesus is shown exaggerating to get his point across. But there is something very spiritually and psychologically accurate about what happens when we hang on to our anger and hurts, when we refuse or are unable to forgive. Bitterness, anger and hurt do create a kind of prison for us, where we are tortured by memories that plague and haunt us. There are people who have no desire to forgive, but there are others, who want to forgive and yet cannot do so. They feel trapped, imprisoned, tortured by their anger.
I remember very clearly when I was a student in divinity school, doing my required unit of clinical pastoral education at Deaconess Hospital in Boston. On the heart unit I met this woman, whose 10 year old son had been killed by a drunk driver while the boy was walking to school. When I first met the mother, I thought the incident had recently happened, so visceral was her anger and rage. But later I learned the sad truth: Her son had been killed 15 years before, and though she said she wanted to forgive the driver of the car, who had served 10 years in prison, she simply could not. “I even went to visit him in prison,” she confessed, “but all I felt was this raging hate. I am ashamed to admit it, but now I still consumed by that same hatred. I cannot let go, and I do not understand why.” Her heart was not only literally ill, but also symbolically so. She was stuck, locked in prison, and she did not know how to open the door.
This is precisely why many Christian theologians and philosophers speak of the impossibility of forgiveness. It is not something we can necessarily achieve on our own, because it does go against the human grain. We can make ourselves do certain things, that is, behave in certain ways. We can be polite and refuse to extract vengeance, but we cannot force the heart to feel what it does not feel. And so, we suffer, and our hearts become smaller and tighter as we live in a prison from which there seems to be no escape.
Christians speak of the divine in-flowing of grace, forgiveness as a gift that comes from God. It is always a question how much power God uses to overcome human resistance. Is God’s grace truly irresistible as the early Calvinists would say? Some say yes; others say no, but who among us really knows? What we do know is that when we see people who live an ethic of forgiveness, we are deeply moved.
Lyndon Harris was an Episcopal priest, who worked at St. Paul’s Chapel, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. For nearly a year after 9/11, he was on the scene, supporting those who were working to clean up the sit, meeting with people whose loved ones had been killed, trying to give them comfort as well as hope. But then it all came crashing down. He found himself in a dark valley of anger and depression, and soon he lost his marriage, his career and almost his sanity. For some years he lived in darkness. And what finally brought him to the light? He admits his healing was a mystery, but he claims it eventually came through the mercy of God and the love and support of friends. “I finally learned,” he said, what Nelson Mandela had taught. “Not forgiving is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.”
In March 2002, barely 6 months after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a firefighter found in all the rubble some pages from the Gospel of Matthew, fused on a hunk of metal. They were the words from The Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus commands love of enemies. When the firefighter found them, he just stood there, transfixed, and then he began to weep before falling to his knees. A woman by the name of Alexandra Asseily, who has helped to plant Memory Gardens in places of great pain, said, “Forgiveness allows us to actually let go of the pain in the memory, and if we let go of the pain in the memory, we can have the memory, but it doesn’t control us.”
Here lies both the question and the mystery: how to forgive so that we can let go of the pain in the memory. Some will say, “The desire is enough; if the desire is there, the release into forgiveness will finally follow.” Others will say, human desire is never enough. Grace, which means in this case, the power of God to change us and lead us, is finally what allows us to forgive. As controlling as we human beings often are, we cannot create or control grace. We can only hope, pray and wait for it to come, and when it comes, be grateful that it has entered our hearts and our lives, making us new beings in Jesus Christ.
Matthew 18: 21-25
On the 25th Anniversary of the Rwandan massacre, a minister I know gathered some images of the victims of the violence sitting or standing in proximity to the perpetrators of the violence. She showed these images during her sermon on forgiveness. How is it possible, she asked her congregation, for victims to sit near those who had committed such atrocities? And how is that the guilty could come and be among those whom they had so grievously harmed?
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, said that on an institutional level, it is not possible. “True forgiveness, he said, “forgives only the unforgivable and that require something no human institution, no court of law or government can offer.” According to Derrida, and there are many who share this view, forgiveness requires personal encounter, and so in the personal encounter, the impossible actually can become not only possible, but also actual. People can forgive, even what is unforgivable.
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian message with stories and parables scattered throughout the four gospels. And, of course, our imaginations are seared by the image of the dying, crucified Jesus, who in Luke’s gospel, commands God to forgive: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Our gospel lesson for today from the 18th chapter of Matthew emphasizes the necessity of forgiveness. Peter directly put the question to Jesus: How many times must I forgive—seven times? The number seven is critical here, because quite frankly three would have been a very reasonable offer, according to Jewish law. After three times, as the perpetrator, you are out, and as the one who has been sinned against, you are released from the obligation to forgive.
So, when Peter asked, “Should I forgive 7 times,” that number was beyond normal expectations. Seven was understood to be a number of completeness: six days of creation, but rest on the seventh day; the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and seven-fold vengeance, alluded to in the Old Testament. But Jesus did not stop at 7; it’s 77 times, or in some translations 7 times 70. This latter number, by the way, is a reference to a story in Genesis, where a character named Lamech had no intention of forgiving his enemies and boasted that he would avenge himself 77 times against anyone who dared to attack him. And so, Jesus was essentially saying, “Be the opposite of Lamech. Your forgiveness should be as unrelenting as Lamech’s vengeance.”
After the exchange between Peter and Jesus, we then move to a story about a master and his slave or a king and his servant. The slave owes an extravagant sum of money. Ten thousand talents in today’s economy translate into billions of dollars, so there is simply no way the slave could have repaid his master. Knowing the impossibility of repayment, the master or king showed mercy and forgave the entire debt. But the slave failed to do the same. While a much smaller amount of money is owed him---payment for about 100 days of labor--- he had the debtor thrown into prison. The master was then told what the slave had done, and lest you think of this as tattling, this parable comes immediately after a section which deals directly with sinful behavior. Ignoring sin is precisely what Jesus had just instructed his people NOT to do, so bringing the sin to light is exactly what was required.
But then we get this harsh picture of the unforgiving slave being thrown into prison, where he was tortured. Now this is not meant to be a literal description about how God will deal with persons who fail to live up to the divine command to forgive. This is not an argument for the everlasting punishment of hell, which makes God guilty of the failure to forgive. We are dealing here with hyperbole; Jesus is shown exaggerating to get his point across. But there is something very spiritually and psychologically accurate about what happens when we hang on to our anger and hurts, when we refuse or are unable to forgive. Bitterness, anger and hurt do create a kind of prison for us, where we are tortured by memories that plague and haunt us. There are people who have no desire to forgive, but there are others, who want to forgive and yet cannot do so. They feel trapped, imprisoned, tortured by their anger.
I remember very clearly when I was a student in divinity school, doing my required unit of clinical pastoral education at Deaconess Hospital in Boston. On the heart unit I met this woman, whose 10 year old son had been killed by a drunk driver while the boy was walking to school. When I first met the mother, I thought the incident had recently happened, so visceral was her anger and rage. But later I learned the sad truth: Her son had been killed 15 years before, and though she said she wanted to forgive the driver of the car, who had served 10 years in prison, she simply could not. “I even went to visit him in prison,” she confessed, “but all I felt was this raging hate. I am ashamed to admit it, but now I still consumed by that same hatred. I cannot let go, and I do not understand why.” Her heart was not only literally ill, but also symbolically so. She was stuck, locked in prison, and she did not know how to open the door.
This is precisely why many Christian theologians and philosophers speak of the impossibility of forgiveness. It is not something we can necessarily achieve on our own, because it does go against the human grain. We can make ourselves do certain things, that is, behave in certain ways. We can be polite and refuse to extract vengeance, but we cannot force the heart to feel what it does not feel. And so, we suffer, and our hearts become smaller and tighter as we live in a prison from which there seems to be no escape.
Christians speak of the divine in-flowing of grace, forgiveness as a gift that comes from God. It is always a question how much power God uses to overcome human resistance. Is God’s grace truly irresistible as the early Calvinists would say? Some say yes; others say no, but who among us really knows? What we do know is that when we see people who live an ethic of forgiveness, we are deeply moved.
Lyndon Harris was an Episcopal priest, who worked at St. Paul’s Chapel, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. For nearly a year after 9/11, he was on the scene, supporting those who were working to clean up the sit, meeting with people whose loved ones had been killed, trying to give them comfort as well as hope. But then it all came crashing down. He found himself in a dark valley of anger and depression, and soon he lost his marriage, his career and almost his sanity. For some years he lived in darkness. And what finally brought him to the light? He admits his healing was a mystery, but he claims it eventually came through the mercy of God and the love and support of friends. “I finally learned,” he said, what Nelson Mandela had taught. “Not forgiving is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.”
In March 2002, barely 6 months after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a firefighter found in all the rubble some pages from the Gospel of Matthew, fused on a hunk of metal. They were the words from The Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus commands love of enemies. When the firefighter found them, he just stood there, transfixed, and then he began to weep before falling to his knees. A woman by the name of Alexandra Asseily, who has helped to plant Memory Gardens in places of great pain, said, “Forgiveness allows us to actually let go of the pain in the memory, and if we let go of the pain in the memory, we can have the memory, but it doesn’t control us.”
Here lies both the question and the mystery: how to forgive so that we can let go of the pain in the memory. Some will say, “The desire is enough; if the desire is there, the release into forgiveness will finally follow.” Others will say, human desire is never enough. Grace, which means in this case, the power of God to change us and lead us, is finally what allows us to forgive. As controlling as we human beings often are, we cannot create or control grace. We can only hope, pray and wait for it to come, and when it comes, be grateful that it has entered our hearts and our lives, making us new beings in Jesus Christ.
September 2, 2020
Dear Friends,
Some years ago, the former dean of Yale Law School, Anthony Kronman, wrote a book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman’s contention was that since many colleges and universities not only had a religious foundation but were also completely committed to the Western Canon consisting of the great books and ideas of Western civilization, there was a fairly strong agreement on what constituted a good life. Students would read the great classics, and classes were often ordered around questions of the good life and what it meant to be a good human being. What kind of life is most worth living? What is the good and how do we recognize it and pursue it? There was actually a hierarchy of values, and some values were treated as clearly superior to others. When students read, for example, the Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, it was obvious that a focus on wealth and fame is not what brings happiness and a fulfilled life. And happiness was not understood as a private state of happy feelings. A truly happy life was a connected life, a life that felt responsible to and for others, a life that recognized the public good and made contributions to it.
My undergraduate education was at the University of Chicago, where the commitment to the Great Books was unquestioned. If you were not interested in such exposure; if you did not want to take all the required courses, of which there were many, this was not the school for you. But even when I was a student, the foundations were beginning to shake. Multiculturalism was on the rise, though I don’t recall that word ever being used, and feminism was raising uncomfortable questions. I remember quite clearly the University being questioned about its choices of great books. Why, for example, were there almost no female writers on the list? Why is Harvey’s treatise on blood circulation deemed more important than Jane Austen’s writings? Now those foundations of western civilization have all but disappeared from the required curriculum. Anthony Kronman finds this to be a worrisome trend, because our democracy, our understanding of freedom and person hood and individual rights are ideas that come from the story of western civilization. This is not to say there are not other worthy things to learn from other civilizations----It was required that I take a year of a non-western civilization--- but if we ignore or reject the particular gifts of the West (while also recognizing its failings) we will not understand our past and how we have become who we are in a world that is rapidly changing. And how to we navigate wisely those changes?
Kronman’s book contends that because so many students today lack a religious foundation and an exposure to the classical questions of identity as well as life’s meaning and goals, they are finding themselves overwhelmed and confused. Now some of these feelings are simply what being young is all about. One professor said, “Students these days are told to follow their passion, but how can they possibly know what their passion is, since they are so young and inexperienced? You only know your passion as you live, make choices and then reflect upon your experiences.” And so, colleges and universities all across the country have been designing courses to help students move ahead without feeling that they have to have everything all figured out. Kids too often come to college, and they think it is all about what kind of career they want to pursue. But the really important question is, What kind of person do you want to become? And can one’s choice of job or career help that endeavor?
Yale University last year offered a new course called, “Psychology and the Good Life.” Over 1200 students enrolled, and it is now considered the most popular course on campus. At Smith College, my oldest daughter’s Alma mater, The Lazarus Center for Career Development teaches workshops called, “Getting Unstuck When You Don’t Know What’s Next.” Stanford University has something called The Stanford Life Design Lab, which creates courses that are supposed to help students approach life. As one professor said, “Life is not just about designing a job. It’s love, play, work and help. A well lived and joyful life is the goal we want to help people attain.”
Traditionally this is what religion was supposed to help people do. Jesus said he came that we might have full and abundant lives, and the stories he told were designed to raise questions and help point the way toward a fuller life. When he told the story of the Good Samaritan, for example, he was speaking to a Jewish audience, who despised the Samaritans for intermarrying with their Assyrian conquerors seven hundred years before. Both Jews and Samaritans read the same scriptures and worshiped the same God, but the Jews avoided intermarriage with other groups, and so they despised Samaritans for being impure. So, when Jesus told a story about a Jewish man helping a badly beaten Samaritan, this was not what they would have expected to hear. Jesus asked his listener who was the neighbor to the Samaritan, and when the answer came, “The one who showed mercy,” Jesus told them to go and do likewise. They understood that Jesus was holding up a different standard from the conventional one. Embedded in that story, as in so many other gospel stories, are questions of character---the kind of people we might want to become as well as the kind of people God desires us to be.
All cultures have numerous ways of helping people to understand who they are and who they might wish to become. Stories and histories are told, and wisdoms are passed on, and all this helps to build the foundations of a people’s identity. We now know that some of what we have recognized as foundational to our identity as Americans has excluded far too many people---both women and persons of color, for example. This does not mean that the foundation should be ripped to shreds, as some fear is happening, but it does mean that all of us (young and old alike) are asked to consider not only personal identities---What kind of person do we wish to become?---but also What kind of nation are we being called to become? When we honestly look at what is happening in our country right now, we should ask ourselves, What kind of people are we anyway? As Kronman’s book reminds us, we have many resources to use as we chart the way ahead, and for those of us who are Christian, the story of Jesus Christ and the stories he told are indeed foundational.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Some years ago, the former dean of Yale Law School, Anthony Kronman, wrote a book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman’s contention was that since many colleges and universities not only had a religious foundation but were also completely committed to the Western Canon consisting of the great books and ideas of Western civilization, there was a fairly strong agreement on what constituted a good life. Students would read the great classics, and classes were often ordered around questions of the good life and what it meant to be a good human being. What kind of life is most worth living? What is the good and how do we recognize it and pursue it? There was actually a hierarchy of values, and some values were treated as clearly superior to others. When students read, for example, the Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, it was obvious that a focus on wealth and fame is not what brings happiness and a fulfilled life. And happiness was not understood as a private state of happy feelings. A truly happy life was a connected life, a life that felt responsible to and for others, a life that recognized the public good and made contributions to it.
My undergraduate education was at the University of Chicago, where the commitment to the Great Books was unquestioned. If you were not interested in such exposure; if you did not want to take all the required courses, of which there were many, this was not the school for you. But even when I was a student, the foundations were beginning to shake. Multiculturalism was on the rise, though I don’t recall that word ever being used, and feminism was raising uncomfortable questions. I remember quite clearly the University being questioned about its choices of great books. Why, for example, were there almost no female writers on the list? Why is Harvey’s treatise on blood circulation deemed more important than Jane Austen’s writings? Now those foundations of western civilization have all but disappeared from the required curriculum. Anthony Kronman finds this to be a worrisome trend, because our democracy, our understanding of freedom and person hood and individual rights are ideas that come from the story of western civilization. This is not to say there are not other worthy things to learn from other civilizations----It was required that I take a year of a non-western civilization--- but if we ignore or reject the particular gifts of the West (while also recognizing its failings) we will not understand our past and how we have become who we are in a world that is rapidly changing. And how to we navigate wisely those changes?
Kronman’s book contends that because so many students today lack a religious foundation and an exposure to the classical questions of identity as well as life’s meaning and goals, they are finding themselves overwhelmed and confused. Now some of these feelings are simply what being young is all about. One professor said, “Students these days are told to follow their passion, but how can they possibly know what their passion is, since they are so young and inexperienced? You only know your passion as you live, make choices and then reflect upon your experiences.” And so, colleges and universities all across the country have been designing courses to help students move ahead without feeling that they have to have everything all figured out. Kids too often come to college, and they think it is all about what kind of career they want to pursue. But the really important question is, What kind of person do you want to become? And can one’s choice of job or career help that endeavor?
Yale University last year offered a new course called, “Psychology and the Good Life.” Over 1200 students enrolled, and it is now considered the most popular course on campus. At Smith College, my oldest daughter’s Alma mater, The Lazarus Center for Career Development teaches workshops called, “Getting Unstuck When You Don’t Know What’s Next.” Stanford University has something called The Stanford Life Design Lab, which creates courses that are supposed to help students approach life. As one professor said, “Life is not just about designing a job. It’s love, play, work and help. A well lived and joyful life is the goal we want to help people attain.”
Traditionally this is what religion was supposed to help people do. Jesus said he came that we might have full and abundant lives, and the stories he told were designed to raise questions and help point the way toward a fuller life. When he told the story of the Good Samaritan, for example, he was speaking to a Jewish audience, who despised the Samaritans for intermarrying with their Assyrian conquerors seven hundred years before. Both Jews and Samaritans read the same scriptures and worshiped the same God, but the Jews avoided intermarriage with other groups, and so they despised Samaritans for being impure. So, when Jesus told a story about a Jewish man helping a badly beaten Samaritan, this was not what they would have expected to hear. Jesus asked his listener who was the neighbor to the Samaritan, and when the answer came, “The one who showed mercy,” Jesus told them to go and do likewise. They understood that Jesus was holding up a different standard from the conventional one. Embedded in that story, as in so many other gospel stories, are questions of character---the kind of people we might want to become as well as the kind of people God desires us to be.
All cultures have numerous ways of helping people to understand who they are and who they might wish to become. Stories and histories are told, and wisdoms are passed on, and all this helps to build the foundations of a people’s identity. We now know that some of what we have recognized as foundational to our identity as Americans has excluded far too many people---both women and persons of color, for example. This does not mean that the foundation should be ripped to shreds, as some fear is happening, but it does mean that all of us (young and old alike) are asked to consider not only personal identities---What kind of person do we wish to become?---but also What kind of nation are we being called to become? When we honestly look at what is happening in our country right now, we should ask ourselves, What kind of people are we anyway? As Kronman’s book reminds us, we have many resources to use as we chart the way ahead, and for those of us who are Christian, the story of Jesus Christ and the stories he told are indeed foundational.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Work and Leisure by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 9/6/2020
Genesis 3: 8-19
Psalm 46
A professor in Amsterdam, who studies patterns of work and leisure, told of a conversation she had with the manager of an American company, which had a division in Amsterdam. The manager was American and had only been at his job for two weeks. It was 8 on a Friday evening, and he had an important shipment to get out on Monday, so he called his assistant at home, asking her to contact some of the workers so they could get things done over the week end. The first thing the assistant told her boss was, “I don’t work on week-ends, and I do not expect to be called at home.”
“Well, excuse me,” her boss said,” but I am the new manager here, and we are a company competing in the global economy. We have an important shipment to get out, and I appreciate people who are team players.”
“O.K.,” she said, “I can do what you ask, but under Dutch law, you will have to pay all of us double time for unscheduled overtime, week end work. But none of this is necessary; we will get the job done on Monday.”
“Oh forget it,” the frustrated manager retorted, and then he hung up. On Monday morning his assistant and her team all showed up, ready to do the work. The shipment was sent on time, and the manager admitted to the professor that although it took him time to change, he eventually did. Though his Dutch workers worked less hours than their American counterparts, the work did get done. And the manager admitted that his life was better; his family was happier, and he was less anxious about his work.
Until the recession of 2008, when work patterns did alter, Americans worked some of the longest hours in the post industrial world. Why? Well, some might say it is simple greed, made palatable by a Protestant heritage that has celebrated individualism at the expense of the common good. It is true that Protestantism made friends with capitalism in a way that Roman Catholicism never did. Some have argued that the original Calvinist idea that election to salvation is limited---only for the elect--- created a deep anxiety about the state of one’s soul, and so, the argument goes, people worked harder in the marketplace, piling up success to prove that they were among the elect, destined for salvation.
We are descendants of the Puritans, and we all know the popular image of the Puritan as a humorless workaholic, disdaining pleasure and leisure. While it is true that Puritans disapproved of idleness, they made a very sharp distinction between leisure and idleness. Idleness was understood as an activity with no purpose beyond the activity---work for the sake of work, or work for the sake of amassing wealth great wealth, and the reason it was considered dangerous was because its aim was too low---far, far below the goodness God desires for God’s people. Donald Trump in his book, The Art of the Deal, describes a day filled with telephone calls and meetings, lasting no more than a few minutes.
“I don’t do it for money,” he wrote. “I do it to do it.” And I would guess that there are many financially successful people like this. They do it for the challenge, to win in a competitive race, and from the Puritan perspective, this is idleness, no matter how many hours or how hard they work. Idleness is work whose aims are far too low.
Leisure is something different, something we see in the story of Adam and Eve before the fall---the delight of tilling and keeping the garden with no anxiety about their work. It is only after their disobedience, when they are expelled from the Garden, that work becomes drudgery. And yet, the Puritans celebrated leisure, and when rightly pursued, leisure allows human beings to step beyond the working world and make contact with life giving forces that renew and remake us. In Psalm 46, we read the line, “Be still and know that I am God,” or as another translation has it: “Be at leisure and know that I am God.” In other words, there is something only stillness and leisure can do for us and bring to us. Our spirits cannot flourish without time for stillness. We are more than what we do for a living, and yet there are many, many people whose labor and work are the pivotal points of their identity.
I remember when my father retired at age 63. He spent his life working in business and banking as a middle level manager, something he hated, so retirement for him was liberation. He was a voracious reader and a lover of classical music, and that is what he spent his retirement years doing---reading and listening to music. My parents moved to a retirement community in New Jersey, and I recall my father complaining about all these men who would go on and on about their former work---how important their contribution had been, how much they were needed. My father, never known for his patience, became tired of this prattle as he called it, and finally blurted out, “Aren’t you guys anything more than your former jobs?” Well, Olsen, one man almost sneered, and what are you? I am what I think, listen to and read, my father shot back. My job was what I did to earn a living---that was all it ever was.
But that really was not true. His job had more power over him than he would admit. Growing up with a father who hated his job made a deep impression on my siblings and me. Let’s face it: you spend a lot of time working, and if you hate your job, it does something to you. Some people cope with this better than others, but in my father’s case, it left him short tempered, frustrated and unhappy. He worked to make a living---to support my mother and us four kids in a middle class life style. But for him that was never enough. He would have liked his work to provide him with more----more meaning and enjoyment.
And, of course, so would most people. When I married my husband, I obviously got to know his father, who, unlike my own father, loved his work. My father in law was a professor at Harvard for 48 years in the graduate School of Education, and he often said that he was paid too much for doing what he loved. “They should pay the garbage collector more than they pay me,” he used to say. He wasn’t kidding; he would have done his job for a lot less money, because he received from his job a great deal more than monetary compensation.
Work is not everything; it does not define the whole person, but it does matter. Work gives us the means of our sustenance, and in these difficult days, when so many have lost their jobs, taking work for granted is not something many people can afford to do.
So yes, work matters, because it also affords people a measure of dignity. Most people want to feel that their labor makes some kind of contribution; that it is not for nothing.
I have a friend, who for some years, though well paid for her work was depressed about it, because she dealt in junk mail. “I get all this stuff out,” she said to me once, “and I do it efficiently and even cheaply for which I am rewarded, but what am I really contributing? Nothing, but junk!”
Tomorrow is Labor Day, a day we are called to honor the labor that people do. Most Americans today have no knowledge that in 1894, six days after the Pullman Strike ended, Congress unanimously made Labor Day a national holiday. President Grover Cleveland was smarting from criticism about his decision to call out federal troops to quell the strike, and he did not want to be viewed as labor’s enemy. And so, should none of us: As our final hymn proclaims, “Come, labor on, claim the high calling angels cannot share.”
Genesis 3: 8-19
Psalm 46
A professor in Amsterdam, who studies patterns of work and leisure, told of a conversation she had with the manager of an American company, which had a division in Amsterdam. The manager was American and had only been at his job for two weeks. It was 8 on a Friday evening, and he had an important shipment to get out on Monday, so he called his assistant at home, asking her to contact some of the workers so they could get things done over the week end. The first thing the assistant told her boss was, “I don’t work on week-ends, and I do not expect to be called at home.”
“Well, excuse me,” her boss said,” but I am the new manager here, and we are a company competing in the global economy. We have an important shipment to get out, and I appreciate people who are team players.”
“O.K.,” she said, “I can do what you ask, but under Dutch law, you will have to pay all of us double time for unscheduled overtime, week end work. But none of this is necessary; we will get the job done on Monday.”
“Oh forget it,” the frustrated manager retorted, and then he hung up. On Monday morning his assistant and her team all showed up, ready to do the work. The shipment was sent on time, and the manager admitted to the professor that although it took him time to change, he eventually did. Though his Dutch workers worked less hours than their American counterparts, the work did get done. And the manager admitted that his life was better; his family was happier, and he was less anxious about his work.
Until the recession of 2008, when work patterns did alter, Americans worked some of the longest hours in the post industrial world. Why? Well, some might say it is simple greed, made palatable by a Protestant heritage that has celebrated individualism at the expense of the common good. It is true that Protestantism made friends with capitalism in a way that Roman Catholicism never did. Some have argued that the original Calvinist idea that election to salvation is limited---only for the elect--- created a deep anxiety about the state of one’s soul, and so, the argument goes, people worked harder in the marketplace, piling up success to prove that they were among the elect, destined for salvation.
We are descendants of the Puritans, and we all know the popular image of the Puritan as a humorless workaholic, disdaining pleasure and leisure. While it is true that Puritans disapproved of idleness, they made a very sharp distinction between leisure and idleness. Idleness was understood as an activity with no purpose beyond the activity---work for the sake of work, or work for the sake of amassing wealth great wealth, and the reason it was considered dangerous was because its aim was too low---far, far below the goodness God desires for God’s people. Donald Trump in his book, The Art of the Deal, describes a day filled with telephone calls and meetings, lasting no more than a few minutes.
“I don’t do it for money,” he wrote. “I do it to do it.” And I would guess that there are many financially successful people like this. They do it for the challenge, to win in a competitive race, and from the Puritan perspective, this is idleness, no matter how many hours or how hard they work. Idleness is work whose aims are far too low.
Leisure is something different, something we see in the story of Adam and Eve before the fall---the delight of tilling and keeping the garden with no anxiety about their work. It is only after their disobedience, when they are expelled from the Garden, that work becomes drudgery. And yet, the Puritans celebrated leisure, and when rightly pursued, leisure allows human beings to step beyond the working world and make contact with life giving forces that renew and remake us. In Psalm 46, we read the line, “Be still and know that I am God,” or as another translation has it: “Be at leisure and know that I am God.” In other words, there is something only stillness and leisure can do for us and bring to us. Our spirits cannot flourish without time for stillness. We are more than what we do for a living, and yet there are many, many people whose labor and work are the pivotal points of their identity.
I remember when my father retired at age 63. He spent his life working in business and banking as a middle level manager, something he hated, so retirement for him was liberation. He was a voracious reader and a lover of classical music, and that is what he spent his retirement years doing---reading and listening to music. My parents moved to a retirement community in New Jersey, and I recall my father complaining about all these men who would go on and on about their former work---how important their contribution had been, how much they were needed. My father, never known for his patience, became tired of this prattle as he called it, and finally blurted out, “Aren’t you guys anything more than your former jobs?” Well, Olsen, one man almost sneered, and what are you? I am what I think, listen to and read, my father shot back. My job was what I did to earn a living---that was all it ever was.
But that really was not true. His job had more power over him than he would admit. Growing up with a father who hated his job made a deep impression on my siblings and me. Let’s face it: you spend a lot of time working, and if you hate your job, it does something to you. Some people cope with this better than others, but in my father’s case, it left him short tempered, frustrated and unhappy. He worked to make a living---to support my mother and us four kids in a middle class life style. But for him that was never enough. He would have liked his work to provide him with more----more meaning and enjoyment.
And, of course, so would most people. When I married my husband, I obviously got to know his father, who, unlike my own father, loved his work. My father in law was a professor at Harvard for 48 years in the graduate School of Education, and he often said that he was paid too much for doing what he loved. “They should pay the garbage collector more than they pay me,” he used to say. He wasn’t kidding; he would have done his job for a lot less money, because he received from his job a great deal more than monetary compensation.
Work is not everything; it does not define the whole person, but it does matter. Work gives us the means of our sustenance, and in these difficult days, when so many have lost their jobs, taking work for granted is not something many people can afford to do.
So yes, work matters, because it also affords people a measure of dignity. Most people want to feel that their labor makes some kind of contribution; that it is not for nothing.
I have a friend, who for some years, though well paid for her work was depressed about it, because she dealt in junk mail. “I get all this stuff out,” she said to me once, “and I do it efficiently and even cheaply for which I am rewarded, but what am I really contributing? Nothing, but junk!”
Tomorrow is Labor Day, a day we are called to honor the labor that people do. Most Americans today have no knowledge that in 1894, six days after the Pullman Strike ended, Congress unanimously made Labor Day a national holiday. President Grover Cleveland was smarting from criticism about his decision to call out federal troops to quell the strike, and he did not want to be viewed as labor’s enemy. And so, should none of us: As our final hymn proclaims, “Come, labor on, claim the high calling angels cannot share.”
August 26, 2020
I have a t-shirt with a quote from Bryan Stevenson, We Are More Than the Worst Thing We Have Ever Done. Stevenson is a Harvard Law School trained lawyer, who works on behalf of incarcerated Black people on death row. His book, Just Mercy, is a moving, sometimes harrowing read about his efforts to help wrongly convicted Black people of capital crimes. I literally had to put the book down a number of times, because it was so upsetting---prosecutors willfully and knowingly calling for the death penalty on persons they either knew to be innocent or had totally inadequate proof of guilt. I was thinking about Stevenson’s quote when the mail arrived with a copy of The Christian Science Monitor, a weekly news periodical.
The lead story was called, Breaking Good, about helping lifers out on parole. The story began with a man named Louie Hammonds, a lifer in Pelican Bay State Prison, a super-max prison in California. Hammonds was hardly a nice guy. He had been a gang leader, finally convicted for shooting a man in a bar seven times. “Lock him up and throw away the key” was the attitude everyone had toward him, and in all honesty, Hammonds did not do much to change their minds. But one day, while shackled, a prison guard bent down to tie one of his shoes. “I don’t want you to trip and fall down,” the guard said. Does not sound like much, does it? I mean the act would hardly get the compassion award of the year, and yet for Hammonds, who was not accustomed to acts of kindness being directed his way, was overcome by the guard’s act. “I was humbled,” he said. “That guard showed me his humanity, and even gave some of that humanity to me.” And that constituted a new beginning for him. He began to think differently.
Who gets offered redemption? That question did not emerge from a minister or the church. It came from someone working inside prison walls in the state of California and wondering about the 34,000 plus persons, sentenced to life in prison. California, by the way, has more lifers than any other PLACE on the face of this earth. It has not escaped the notice of American prison officials that other democratic nations do not mete out such long prison sentences. Norway, for example, where Anders Breivik in 2011 went on a shooting and bombing spree at an international camp, killing 77 people, was sentenced to only 21 years, the maximum allowed in Norway. His prison is outside Oslo, and he is housed in a three room suite with exercise equipment, a television and computer with no internet connection. While many Americans are outraged when prisoners are treated humanely, Norway officials say, “If you want people to learn to be decent, you have to treat them decently, and locking people up with nothing to do, only grows resentment and rage.” As one American prison official put it, “If you are in prison for life, what is the motivation to change? Why do you want to try to be a better person, if there is no hope for you at all---just more of the same?”
And so, California has an experimental program, running on the premise that ex-prisoners, who have successfully navigated life outside of prison, can help lifers adjust to parole. Since 2010 6000 lifers in California have been released, and if they want to stay out of prison, they must participate in the program, which meets regularly for conversation, reflection, support and counseling. The ex-prisoners, who run the conversations, are pretty good at cutting through all the bull, and they are not afraid to call people on their dishonesty or self-delusion. People talk about the importance of self-love and respect for others, why such things matter, and how such concerns can actually change lives. Lifers say that such topics were never on their minds before. They never considered what kind of person they might wish to become. They never considered what impact their actions might have on other human beings and why they should consider other people at all.
There is no magic to the program and conversation alone is never the key. The simple truth is that research indicates that people tend to age out of criminality and that lifers released from prison after serving many decades are rarely at risk for repeating a life of crime. A recent study out of New Jersey found only a 1.14% recidivism rate in a study of juveniles who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and then released many decades later. Drug addiction and alcoholism cannot claim success anywhere near that rate.
Who gets offered redemption? When it comes to life outside prison, few are offered another chance. Tough decisions are made about people and whether or not they have the capacity to learn and change and stay out of prison. Prison is normally not the place to grow emotionally, and when people are released after being incarcerated for 30 or 40 years, a 50 or 60 year old man may have the emotional maturity of the 21 year old he was when he became an inmate. But, if there is a deep desire to stay out of prison, the chance for a new beginning may indeed grow into success. What is desired does matter, and age brings some change, even if it is the lack of energy to commit crime.
Some time after the George Floyd murder, I was listening to a woman talk about punishment. She was rightfully upset that some police do terrible things with no consequence. But then she said something that struck me hard. She had some friends, who had lived good, exemplary lives and then one night in separate incidents, they got drunk, fatally killed people in a car accident and now are in prison. “And that is right.” She said. “That is where they should be. They need to be punished. Punishment is what is needed.”
But to what end is punishment? If punishment is the end point, we end up with not only a bloated prison population, but also a distorted way of thinking about God and humanity. I am grateful I did not grow up with the idea that God’s final intent is to punish and that redemption is only for the fortunate few. I was taught that God not only offers redemption to all, but also works to give redemption to all.
In Dante’s brilliant masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, the lowest point in hell is not a burning pit of fire but rather a frozen block of ice. And there is Satan, upside down, encased in ice, completely unable to move. What a powerful metaphor! We are in hell, when we are frozen, when we cannot or will not change, and when we are prevented from changing, because circumstances are against us, as they are against some people. I am uplifted by the faith that proclaims, “God is never finished with us, even when everyone else gives up.” And I am also uplifted and encouraged to learn that even in some of the most horrific of circumstances there are those who will take a chance on people so many others would just lock up and throw away the key.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
I have a t-shirt with a quote from Bryan Stevenson, We Are More Than the Worst Thing We Have Ever Done. Stevenson is a Harvard Law School trained lawyer, who works on behalf of incarcerated Black people on death row. His book, Just Mercy, is a moving, sometimes harrowing read about his efforts to help wrongly convicted Black people of capital crimes. I literally had to put the book down a number of times, because it was so upsetting---prosecutors willfully and knowingly calling for the death penalty on persons they either knew to be innocent or had totally inadequate proof of guilt. I was thinking about Stevenson’s quote when the mail arrived with a copy of The Christian Science Monitor, a weekly news periodical.
The lead story was called, Breaking Good, about helping lifers out on parole. The story began with a man named Louie Hammonds, a lifer in Pelican Bay State Prison, a super-max prison in California. Hammonds was hardly a nice guy. He had been a gang leader, finally convicted for shooting a man in a bar seven times. “Lock him up and throw away the key” was the attitude everyone had toward him, and in all honesty, Hammonds did not do much to change their minds. But one day, while shackled, a prison guard bent down to tie one of his shoes. “I don’t want you to trip and fall down,” the guard said. Does not sound like much, does it? I mean the act would hardly get the compassion award of the year, and yet for Hammonds, who was not accustomed to acts of kindness being directed his way, was overcome by the guard’s act. “I was humbled,” he said. “That guard showed me his humanity, and even gave some of that humanity to me.” And that constituted a new beginning for him. He began to think differently.
Who gets offered redemption? That question did not emerge from a minister or the church. It came from someone working inside prison walls in the state of California and wondering about the 34,000 plus persons, sentenced to life in prison. California, by the way, has more lifers than any other PLACE on the face of this earth. It has not escaped the notice of American prison officials that other democratic nations do not mete out such long prison sentences. Norway, for example, where Anders Breivik in 2011 went on a shooting and bombing spree at an international camp, killing 77 people, was sentenced to only 21 years, the maximum allowed in Norway. His prison is outside Oslo, and he is housed in a three room suite with exercise equipment, a television and computer with no internet connection. While many Americans are outraged when prisoners are treated humanely, Norway officials say, “If you want people to learn to be decent, you have to treat them decently, and locking people up with nothing to do, only grows resentment and rage.” As one American prison official put it, “If you are in prison for life, what is the motivation to change? Why do you want to try to be a better person, if there is no hope for you at all---just more of the same?”
And so, California has an experimental program, running on the premise that ex-prisoners, who have successfully navigated life outside of prison, can help lifers adjust to parole. Since 2010 6000 lifers in California have been released, and if they want to stay out of prison, they must participate in the program, which meets regularly for conversation, reflection, support and counseling. The ex-prisoners, who run the conversations, are pretty good at cutting through all the bull, and they are not afraid to call people on their dishonesty or self-delusion. People talk about the importance of self-love and respect for others, why such things matter, and how such concerns can actually change lives. Lifers say that such topics were never on their minds before. They never considered what kind of person they might wish to become. They never considered what impact their actions might have on other human beings and why they should consider other people at all.
There is no magic to the program and conversation alone is never the key. The simple truth is that research indicates that people tend to age out of criminality and that lifers released from prison after serving many decades are rarely at risk for repeating a life of crime. A recent study out of New Jersey found only a 1.14% recidivism rate in a study of juveniles who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and then released many decades later. Drug addiction and alcoholism cannot claim success anywhere near that rate.
Who gets offered redemption? When it comes to life outside prison, few are offered another chance. Tough decisions are made about people and whether or not they have the capacity to learn and change and stay out of prison. Prison is normally not the place to grow emotionally, and when people are released after being incarcerated for 30 or 40 years, a 50 or 60 year old man may have the emotional maturity of the 21 year old he was when he became an inmate. But, if there is a deep desire to stay out of prison, the chance for a new beginning may indeed grow into success. What is desired does matter, and age brings some change, even if it is the lack of energy to commit crime.
Some time after the George Floyd murder, I was listening to a woman talk about punishment. She was rightfully upset that some police do terrible things with no consequence. But then she said something that struck me hard. She had some friends, who had lived good, exemplary lives and then one night in separate incidents, they got drunk, fatally killed people in a car accident and now are in prison. “And that is right.” She said. “That is where they should be. They need to be punished. Punishment is what is needed.”
But to what end is punishment? If punishment is the end point, we end up with not only a bloated prison population, but also a distorted way of thinking about God and humanity. I am grateful I did not grow up with the idea that God’s final intent is to punish and that redemption is only for the fortunate few. I was taught that God not only offers redemption to all, but also works to give redemption to all.
In Dante’s brilliant masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, the lowest point in hell is not a burning pit of fire but rather a frozen block of ice. And there is Satan, upside down, encased in ice, completely unable to move. What a powerful metaphor! We are in hell, when we are frozen, when we cannot or will not change, and when we are prevented from changing, because circumstances are against us, as they are against some people. I am uplifted by the faith that proclaims, “God is never finished with us, even when everyone else gives up.” And I am also uplifted and encouraged to learn that even in some of the most horrific of circumstances there are those who will take a chance on people so many others would just lock up and throw away the key.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
SURVIVAL: FOR WHAT? by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/30/2020
Matthew 16: 21-28
When I was growing up, my father used to say about Jesus, “You have to wonder about a guy who picked such losers for followers. Why didn’t he choose a brighter bunch?” The Gospels writers might have wondered the same thing, because there is no doubt about it, the disciples are not portrayed in a very positive light. They are forever misunderstanding Jesus. I have to confess, Peter was never my favorite, too impulsive, all heart with very little head. Yet Peter is the disciple who rightly confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, son of the Living God. All three synoptic gospels give Peter that role, though Matthew’s Gospel is the only one who puts him as the head of the church. And now in this week’s lesson, right after being praised by Jesus for recognizing the truth, Peter gets kicked in the stomach when Jesus calls him Satan. “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me.” But in all honesty, who can blame Peter? We can all imagine what it feels like to be told something that feels so wrong, so out of syn with reality as we know it, that we too protest. “God forbid. This must never happen.”
A couple gallantly struggles to keep their marriage together for a number of years. They try couple’s therapy, marriage encounter; they patiently wait and hope to see if things improve, but after years of working and hoping, they are exhausted from the effort. And now the time comes when the couple must tell their three children, who are 9, 12 and 16 that their hearts are about to break apart, because the parents just can’t make a go of it. And the children have no idea what is coming: “God forbid. This must never happen!”
And what about the 30 year old who sits across from a doctor, telling her that the sore on her eyelid is inoperable cancer, and she has less than a year to live. God forbid! This must never happen.
We know, don’t we, what it is like to hear something that kicks us right smack in the stomach and wrings the heart dry. It feels so completely wrong, and yet here this other person is telling us, “This is the way it is, the way it must be.” “God forbid,” we protest. “This must not happen.”
Well, this is exactly what it must have been like for Peter. He heard something from the lips of Jesus that was crazy, so outside the orbit in which he had lived that there was no way he could accept it. And the irony for him is that this came right after he had just received praise from Jesus for having correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Last week we heard Jesus tell Peter that he will be the rock upon which Jesus will build the church. And now this rock is pulverized, when Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” What an incredible put down! Peter goes from rock to stumbling block in just a few short sentences. Who wouldn’t be confused?
Now it is always important to remember when we try to understand the bible that the writer always has an agenda, a particular way of seeing and interpreting. And remember that the story is told from the perspective of looking back. And as we all know, when we look back at something, oh, the view looks quite different. We see things we did not notice before, and then there are things we saw before that drop out of the picture. They no longer seem important. Now Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime around the year 85, well after the earthly life of Jesus and after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70. With the destruction of the Temple, Judaism radically changed, from a Temple centered religion with all its ritual laws and rules of sacrifice, to a synagogue centered religion, where people met not to make sacrifice but to read, pray and ponder the meaning of the law in the new world they found themselves in. So, Judaism and Christianity were essentially siblings, growing up along side one another, each, however, with different notions of what a Messiah looked like.
The trouble with Jesus was that to the Jews he did not look like any kind of messiah they would recognize. The last thing a messiah was supposed to do was end up on a cross. A messiah was supposed to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. A messiah was supposed to return Israel to the grandeur of its past, like the time King David ruled a United Kingdom and Solomon dispensed wisdom from the grandeur of the Temple he had built. A messiah implied power, political power as well as religious power, but here the Jews were in the year 85 with their temple destroyed and their identity humiliated by Rome. Of course, they could recognize Jesus as a wise and good teacher, a miracle worker and a healer, but messiah---not on your life!
A Messiah is supposed to sit on a throne not hang on a cross. And in Jesus’ day the cross meant something very specific. It meant you were an enemy of Rome, and Rome crucified its enemies---at least enemies, who were not Roman citizens. So, there is no denying that in Matthew’s particular context loyalty to Jesus Christ meant resistance to Rome. But the big question was: how does one resist?
It is amazing that a movement could be successfully built on the command to take up your cross and follow. Yet it worked. People flocked to Christianity, beginning at first with the poor and the dis-empowered and then the educated classes began to follow. Now because we do have a sense of history, we can see what happened as the church gained power and success and great wealth. As Martin Luther would charge in what became known as the Reformation, the church looked more like the church of Caesar than the church of Jesus Christ. When survival becomes more important than the question of what is surviving, then somehow the way of Jesus Christ gets lost. It can happen with churches and with people.
Many decades ago, while working as a chaplain, I met this man, who had been a Roman Catholic priest during World War ll. He was French, lived in Paris, where he worked for the French Resistance. “I would do nothing directly violent,” he said, “but I got information, which helped the Resistance do violent things. My conscience was not clear, but I lived in a time when I could not afford the luxury of a clear conscience. God will judge; I don’t have the wisdom to do so,” he insisted.
He told me how he was finally arrested along with two other priests. “One I knew was as guilty as I,” he said, “but the third, it was all a mistake. He was not a bad man, just a very timid one. He had no sympathies for the Nazis; he simply went about his priestly work, and tried to ignore politics. Why he was arrested, I don’t know, but mistakes were made. There we were, all packed together in this truck, tied together like a bunch of cattle. No one was guarding us; there was only the driver and a guy sitting next to him with his rifle poised. We were told that if any of us escaped, we all would be shot on the spot. No inquiry, no trial, no nothing, just a bullet. Well, most of us thought we would be shot anyway, so what did an escape matter? After about 20 minutes, this one young kid, maybe neither 16 nor 17 got free and jumped off the truck. We were glad for him, but do you know what that timid priest did, he shouted to the driver. In less than five minutes, the kid was captured and shot. Right there in front of us, shot dead.
I remember two things,” he continued his story---“the look of sheer defiance on that kid’s face as he met death and the look of utter shame and desolation on the priest’s face. He knew what he had done not only to that boy but also to Christ. I just looked at him without saying a word, but the other priest went up to him and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to God.”
The only thing that cowardly man could do was hang his head while tears rolled down his cheeks. As you see, I survived, but at the war’s end, I left the priesthood as well as the church. I saw that the most important mark of the church came to be its survival, and I just could not buy that. That’s why Pope Pius XII did not speak out against Hitler; that’s why the state Lutheran church told its clergy to take a loyalty oath to the Fuhrer, and this was why the priest shouted the alarm at an escape. It was all about survival. I understand survival, he said. I was lucky enough to survive. But you always have to ask, what we are trying to survive for. What is it that we are trying to do and to be?
A pretty important question, isn’t it? Peter could not imagine that anything was more important than Jesus’ survival. How else could Jesus bring in God’s kingdom unless he survived? Start with survival, we tell ourselves, because everything flows from that. Or does it? Is the survival question really the most important one to ask, not only as individuals, but also as a church? As the priest said, “You always need to ask yourself, “What are you trying to survive for? What is that you are trying to do and to be?”
Matthew 16: 21-28
When I was growing up, my father used to say about Jesus, “You have to wonder about a guy who picked such losers for followers. Why didn’t he choose a brighter bunch?” The Gospels writers might have wondered the same thing, because there is no doubt about it, the disciples are not portrayed in a very positive light. They are forever misunderstanding Jesus. I have to confess, Peter was never my favorite, too impulsive, all heart with very little head. Yet Peter is the disciple who rightly confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, son of the Living God. All three synoptic gospels give Peter that role, though Matthew’s Gospel is the only one who puts him as the head of the church. And now in this week’s lesson, right after being praised by Jesus for recognizing the truth, Peter gets kicked in the stomach when Jesus calls him Satan. “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me.” But in all honesty, who can blame Peter? We can all imagine what it feels like to be told something that feels so wrong, so out of syn with reality as we know it, that we too protest. “God forbid. This must never happen.”
A couple gallantly struggles to keep their marriage together for a number of years. They try couple’s therapy, marriage encounter; they patiently wait and hope to see if things improve, but after years of working and hoping, they are exhausted from the effort. And now the time comes when the couple must tell their three children, who are 9, 12 and 16 that their hearts are about to break apart, because the parents just can’t make a go of it. And the children have no idea what is coming: “God forbid. This must never happen!”
And what about the 30 year old who sits across from a doctor, telling her that the sore on her eyelid is inoperable cancer, and she has less than a year to live. God forbid! This must never happen.
We know, don’t we, what it is like to hear something that kicks us right smack in the stomach and wrings the heart dry. It feels so completely wrong, and yet here this other person is telling us, “This is the way it is, the way it must be.” “God forbid,” we protest. “This must not happen.”
Well, this is exactly what it must have been like for Peter. He heard something from the lips of Jesus that was crazy, so outside the orbit in which he had lived that there was no way he could accept it. And the irony for him is that this came right after he had just received praise from Jesus for having correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Last week we heard Jesus tell Peter that he will be the rock upon which Jesus will build the church. And now this rock is pulverized, when Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” What an incredible put down! Peter goes from rock to stumbling block in just a few short sentences. Who wouldn’t be confused?
Now it is always important to remember when we try to understand the bible that the writer always has an agenda, a particular way of seeing and interpreting. And remember that the story is told from the perspective of looking back. And as we all know, when we look back at something, oh, the view looks quite different. We see things we did not notice before, and then there are things we saw before that drop out of the picture. They no longer seem important. Now Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime around the year 85, well after the earthly life of Jesus and after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70. With the destruction of the Temple, Judaism radically changed, from a Temple centered religion with all its ritual laws and rules of sacrifice, to a synagogue centered religion, where people met not to make sacrifice but to read, pray and ponder the meaning of the law in the new world they found themselves in. So, Judaism and Christianity were essentially siblings, growing up along side one another, each, however, with different notions of what a Messiah looked like.
The trouble with Jesus was that to the Jews he did not look like any kind of messiah they would recognize. The last thing a messiah was supposed to do was end up on a cross. A messiah was supposed to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. A messiah was supposed to return Israel to the grandeur of its past, like the time King David ruled a United Kingdom and Solomon dispensed wisdom from the grandeur of the Temple he had built. A messiah implied power, political power as well as religious power, but here the Jews were in the year 85 with their temple destroyed and their identity humiliated by Rome. Of course, they could recognize Jesus as a wise and good teacher, a miracle worker and a healer, but messiah---not on your life!
A Messiah is supposed to sit on a throne not hang on a cross. And in Jesus’ day the cross meant something very specific. It meant you were an enemy of Rome, and Rome crucified its enemies---at least enemies, who were not Roman citizens. So, there is no denying that in Matthew’s particular context loyalty to Jesus Christ meant resistance to Rome. But the big question was: how does one resist?
It is amazing that a movement could be successfully built on the command to take up your cross and follow. Yet it worked. People flocked to Christianity, beginning at first with the poor and the dis-empowered and then the educated classes began to follow. Now because we do have a sense of history, we can see what happened as the church gained power and success and great wealth. As Martin Luther would charge in what became known as the Reformation, the church looked more like the church of Caesar than the church of Jesus Christ. When survival becomes more important than the question of what is surviving, then somehow the way of Jesus Christ gets lost. It can happen with churches and with people.
Many decades ago, while working as a chaplain, I met this man, who had been a Roman Catholic priest during World War ll. He was French, lived in Paris, where he worked for the French Resistance. “I would do nothing directly violent,” he said, “but I got information, which helped the Resistance do violent things. My conscience was not clear, but I lived in a time when I could not afford the luxury of a clear conscience. God will judge; I don’t have the wisdom to do so,” he insisted.
He told me how he was finally arrested along with two other priests. “One I knew was as guilty as I,” he said, “but the third, it was all a mistake. He was not a bad man, just a very timid one. He had no sympathies for the Nazis; he simply went about his priestly work, and tried to ignore politics. Why he was arrested, I don’t know, but mistakes were made. There we were, all packed together in this truck, tied together like a bunch of cattle. No one was guarding us; there was only the driver and a guy sitting next to him with his rifle poised. We were told that if any of us escaped, we all would be shot on the spot. No inquiry, no trial, no nothing, just a bullet. Well, most of us thought we would be shot anyway, so what did an escape matter? After about 20 minutes, this one young kid, maybe neither 16 nor 17 got free and jumped off the truck. We were glad for him, but do you know what that timid priest did, he shouted to the driver. In less than five minutes, the kid was captured and shot. Right there in front of us, shot dead.
I remember two things,” he continued his story---“the look of sheer defiance on that kid’s face as he met death and the look of utter shame and desolation on the priest’s face. He knew what he had done not only to that boy but also to Christ. I just looked at him without saying a word, but the other priest went up to him and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to God.”
The only thing that cowardly man could do was hang his head while tears rolled down his cheeks. As you see, I survived, but at the war’s end, I left the priesthood as well as the church. I saw that the most important mark of the church came to be its survival, and I just could not buy that. That’s why Pope Pius XII did not speak out against Hitler; that’s why the state Lutheran church told its clergy to take a loyalty oath to the Fuhrer, and this was why the priest shouted the alarm at an escape. It was all about survival. I understand survival, he said. I was lucky enough to survive. But you always have to ask, what we are trying to survive for. What is it that we are trying to do and to be?
A pretty important question, isn’t it? Peter could not imagine that anything was more important than Jesus’ survival. How else could Jesus bring in God’s kingdom unless he survived? Start with survival, we tell ourselves, because everything flows from that. Or does it? Is the survival question really the most important one to ask, not only as individuals, but also as a church? As the priest said, “You always need to ask yourself, “What are you trying to survive for? What is that you are trying to do and to be?”
August 20, 2020
How can anyone who is able to use reason, and who believes in dealing out justice to all God’s creature, think it is right to withhold from one half the human race rights and privileges freely accord to the other half which is neither or deserving nor more capable of exercising them? Mary Church Terrell, prominent Black leader of the women’s suffrage movement, also a daughter of slaves. She pushed White suffragists to include Black women in the battle for suffrage.
Dear Friends,
Tuesday, August 18, 2020 was the 100 year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, when women finally won the right to vote. They were not given the right; they won it, working for nearly one hundred years for a victory that was never promised or assured. It was a hard fought and ugly battle, pitched not only against elite, politically powerful men, but also against women, who assiduously worked against female suffrage. (Note: Not all women were included in in the 19th Amendment. Chinese women, even if born in this country, were not recognized as citizens and Native American women were also denied suffrage. Also Black women were often prevented from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)
In recognition of this important milestone, President Trump decided to sign a pardon for Susan B. Anthony, who had been one of the nation’s leading feminists and advocates for women’s suffrage. On election day, 1872 In the city of Rochester, where she lived, Susan B. Anthony showed up at a polling place to cast her ballot. Later that day a federal marshal arrived at her home and arrested her for illegally voting. She was tried, found guilty and fined $100. She had no intention of paying the fine and wanted to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a well wisher, paid the fine, thus ending her legal battle. Anthony was furious, because she believed the fight should continue. Historians, who have studied Anthony, claim she would be displeased with the pardon. Her arrest and conviction were points of pride with her, and to be pardoned, the historians claim, is an admission of guilt. While it is true, she voted illegally, Anthony would say that the country had no right to deny women their suffrage, and so it is the nation that needs pardoning, not she! One female historian, Amy Gordon, editor of Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, agreed that Anthony would certainly have turned down the pardon, because the President’s pardon gives validity to her trial.
Whatever we think about the pardon, Tuesday was a momentous day. It came during the week when a woman of color was nominated for Vice President of the United States. It came as The Me Too Movement continues to raise the specter of sexual assault against women. And it came three months before a Presidential election, in which women’s votes will be key in determining the winner. Women’s suffrage is part of a longer story which embraces voting rights, citizenship rights and women’s rights---all issues the country is still grappling with today.
While there are many fascinating aspects to the story of female suffrage, some of the most interesting concern the people, including the women, who opposed it. As church people, we might be interested to know that some of the strong opposition actually came from the church with clergy pointing out that scripture puts women in a subordinate position. The story of Adam and Eve from Genesis 2 was a favorite way to argue for subordination, since Eve is made from Adam’s rib. But this completely ignores Genesis 1, where man and woman are made at the same time. It is also true that many mainline Protestant churches heartily supported female suffrage, perhaps as much as half. After all, many churches had been heavily involved in reform movements, including anti-slavery work, so women’s suffrage was part of that reform agenda.
We all know about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but how many of us realize that the disaster was used as an argument against the extension of voting rights to women? Soon after the sinking, an article appeared in The Woman’s Protest, a journal dedicated to opposing suffrage for women. Called “A Lesson that Came from the Sea,” by a leading anti-suffragist, Josephine Jewell Dodge, the article argued that as the ship began to sink, the cry that went up was not, “Voters first!” but “Women first!” And Dodge claimed that the women did not think of arguing for equality in that particular situation. (I would point out, however, that there were plenty of women who refused to leave their husbands behind on the ship, and that many of the women who climbed aboard the lifeboats were holding babies and young children in their arms.) Dodge went on to argue that the ghastly disaster “pointed out the everlasting difference of the sexes.” It is fascinating that she was the daughter of an outspoken suffragist, and though she opposed female suffrage, Dodge was also a reformer, working to secure education for the poor. In fact, many of the women anti-suffragists were reformers, working on behalf of child welfare, education and prison reform.
As the suffrage movement gained strength toward the end of the 19th century, many women raised their opposing voices. The default position of practically everyone was that politics and government were concerns that belonged solely to men and that when men voted, they were voting for their wives and families as well as themselves. So why would women need to vote, since their concerns were already taken care of. When women met at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to draft their statement calling for equality, Lucretia Mott, a Quaker feminist, warned against including any statement about female suffrage, lest it “make us look ridiculous.” In 1871 a 16th Amendment to the Constitution was proposed for women suffrage---after the 15th, which granted Black men the right to vote. But immediately 19 wives of Republican senators, Civil War generals and cabinet members published a petition against it. In fact, female opposition tended to come from elite, wealthy, White women, married to prominent White men. One female historian claimed she could find not one example of a Black woman opposing female suffrage.
So why the opposition? What was the fear? One prominent woman, a trained artist and founder of The Art Students League of New York, Helena de Kay Gilder, believed that the burden of the ballot “would corrupt women and even unsex them!’ Then there was Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College in New York. While she strongly believed women should be educated, she did not believe they should vote, and her debates with her suffragist sister, Maud, gained much press attention.
The female opposition did not say that women should remain at home. In fact, the most prominent among them believed strongly in women’s public role, fighting for the common good for all people. But, they said, a concern with politics and voting would only prove corrosive to women’s ability to be non-partisan and support those causes, which needed no political party to gain ascendancy.
Much has changed over the past 100 years, and the role of women is certainly part of that change. We can also ask and wonder what God has been up to in all this change. As I mentioned earlier churches and their clergy played a prominent role in both support of and opposition to women’s suffrage. And those Christians who supported the cause firmly believed that just as God’s liberating Spirit had moved to bring freedom and liberty to the slaves, so too was God’s Spirit moving to bring the vote to women. God’s Spirit is still moving, and just as people had different interpretations of that movement one hundred years ago, so people have different interpretations today. The question is not whether God is involved in politics, because the Bible is filled with God’s activity in politics. God acts on the side of justice, and justice involves politics. The question then as now is HOW is God involved and what can we learn from God’s involvement? These are questions worth asking and pondering.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
How can anyone who is able to use reason, and who believes in dealing out justice to all God’s creature, think it is right to withhold from one half the human race rights and privileges freely accord to the other half which is neither or deserving nor more capable of exercising them? Mary Church Terrell, prominent Black leader of the women’s suffrage movement, also a daughter of slaves. She pushed White suffragists to include Black women in the battle for suffrage.
Dear Friends,
Tuesday, August 18, 2020 was the 100 year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, when women finally won the right to vote. They were not given the right; they won it, working for nearly one hundred years for a victory that was never promised or assured. It was a hard fought and ugly battle, pitched not only against elite, politically powerful men, but also against women, who assiduously worked against female suffrage. (Note: Not all women were included in in the 19th Amendment. Chinese women, even if born in this country, were not recognized as citizens and Native American women were also denied suffrage. Also Black women were often prevented from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)
In recognition of this important milestone, President Trump decided to sign a pardon for Susan B. Anthony, who had been one of the nation’s leading feminists and advocates for women’s suffrage. On election day, 1872 In the city of Rochester, where she lived, Susan B. Anthony showed up at a polling place to cast her ballot. Later that day a federal marshal arrived at her home and arrested her for illegally voting. She was tried, found guilty and fined $100. She had no intention of paying the fine and wanted to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a well wisher, paid the fine, thus ending her legal battle. Anthony was furious, because she believed the fight should continue. Historians, who have studied Anthony, claim she would be displeased with the pardon. Her arrest and conviction were points of pride with her, and to be pardoned, the historians claim, is an admission of guilt. While it is true, she voted illegally, Anthony would say that the country had no right to deny women their suffrage, and so it is the nation that needs pardoning, not she! One female historian, Amy Gordon, editor of Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, agreed that Anthony would certainly have turned down the pardon, because the President’s pardon gives validity to her trial.
Whatever we think about the pardon, Tuesday was a momentous day. It came during the week when a woman of color was nominated for Vice President of the United States. It came as The Me Too Movement continues to raise the specter of sexual assault against women. And it came three months before a Presidential election, in which women’s votes will be key in determining the winner. Women’s suffrage is part of a longer story which embraces voting rights, citizenship rights and women’s rights---all issues the country is still grappling with today.
While there are many fascinating aspects to the story of female suffrage, some of the most interesting concern the people, including the women, who opposed it. As church people, we might be interested to know that some of the strong opposition actually came from the church with clergy pointing out that scripture puts women in a subordinate position. The story of Adam and Eve from Genesis 2 was a favorite way to argue for subordination, since Eve is made from Adam’s rib. But this completely ignores Genesis 1, where man and woman are made at the same time. It is also true that many mainline Protestant churches heartily supported female suffrage, perhaps as much as half. After all, many churches had been heavily involved in reform movements, including anti-slavery work, so women’s suffrage was part of that reform agenda.
We all know about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but how many of us realize that the disaster was used as an argument against the extension of voting rights to women? Soon after the sinking, an article appeared in The Woman’s Protest, a journal dedicated to opposing suffrage for women. Called “A Lesson that Came from the Sea,” by a leading anti-suffragist, Josephine Jewell Dodge, the article argued that as the ship began to sink, the cry that went up was not, “Voters first!” but “Women first!” And Dodge claimed that the women did not think of arguing for equality in that particular situation. (I would point out, however, that there were plenty of women who refused to leave their husbands behind on the ship, and that many of the women who climbed aboard the lifeboats were holding babies and young children in their arms.) Dodge went on to argue that the ghastly disaster “pointed out the everlasting difference of the sexes.” It is fascinating that she was the daughter of an outspoken suffragist, and though she opposed female suffrage, Dodge was also a reformer, working to secure education for the poor. In fact, many of the women anti-suffragists were reformers, working on behalf of child welfare, education and prison reform.
As the suffrage movement gained strength toward the end of the 19th century, many women raised their opposing voices. The default position of practically everyone was that politics and government were concerns that belonged solely to men and that when men voted, they were voting for their wives and families as well as themselves. So why would women need to vote, since their concerns were already taken care of. When women met at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to draft their statement calling for equality, Lucretia Mott, a Quaker feminist, warned against including any statement about female suffrage, lest it “make us look ridiculous.” In 1871 a 16th Amendment to the Constitution was proposed for women suffrage---after the 15th, which granted Black men the right to vote. But immediately 19 wives of Republican senators, Civil War generals and cabinet members published a petition against it. In fact, female opposition tended to come from elite, wealthy, White women, married to prominent White men. One female historian claimed she could find not one example of a Black woman opposing female suffrage.
So why the opposition? What was the fear? One prominent woman, a trained artist and founder of The Art Students League of New York, Helena de Kay Gilder, believed that the burden of the ballot “would corrupt women and even unsex them!’ Then there was Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College in New York. While she strongly believed women should be educated, she did not believe they should vote, and her debates with her suffragist sister, Maud, gained much press attention.
The female opposition did not say that women should remain at home. In fact, the most prominent among them believed strongly in women’s public role, fighting for the common good for all people. But, they said, a concern with politics and voting would only prove corrosive to women’s ability to be non-partisan and support those causes, which needed no political party to gain ascendancy.
Much has changed over the past 100 years, and the role of women is certainly part of that change. We can also ask and wonder what God has been up to in all this change. As I mentioned earlier churches and their clergy played a prominent role in both support of and opposition to women’s suffrage. And those Christians who supported the cause firmly believed that just as God’s liberating Spirit had moved to bring freedom and liberty to the slaves, so too was God’s Spirit moving to bring the vote to women. God’s Spirit is still moving, and just as people had different interpretations of that movement one hundred years ago, so people have different interpretations today. The question is not whether God is involved in politics, because the Bible is filled with God’s activity in politics. God acts on the side of justice, and justice involves politics. The question then as now is HOW is God involved and what can we learn from God’s involvement? These are questions worth asking and pondering.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHO DO YOU SAY I AM? by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/23/2020
Romans 12: 1-8
Matthew 16: 13-20
As a child I was an avid fan of the television show, The Lone Ranger. I was particularly impressed by the drama of the show’s ending, when the person, who had been helped by the Lone Ranger, would always ask the same question, “Who is that masked man?” And the answer too was always the same: “Why don’t you know, that’s the Lone Ranger! Hi Ho, Silver, away! ”And then William Tell’s Overture would play as the Lone Ranger rode off into the future. When I was very young, four and five, I especially took great delight in shouting out the answer, because well, at age four, there were so many questions I could not answer, and so it was sheer joy to shout out the one I did know.
Who is that man? This is the question put to us by our text today from Matthew. In some ways Jesus did and still does appear as the masked man, someone whose identity is not necessarily obvious to all, someone doing good for others without expecting to be rewarded. Since Jesus is such a central part of our western culture, the question of his identity comes up time and time again, even for those who are not Christian. People are always trying to figure out exactly who he is.
I grew up in the church, faithfully attending Presbyterian Sunday school from the age of 2 to about 14, and throughout most of those years, I accepted what I had been taught about Jesus. He was the Messiah, God’s Son. But adolescence brings a whole new set of questions, and so by the time I left for college, I was not so sure who Jesus was. What did it mean, for example, to say that someone was God’s Son? I did not believe this was a question of biology---as if Jesus literally received 23 chromosomes from his father God. But still, I recognized there was something decisive and authoritative about this man, though I could not put it into words. By the time I finished college, I was pretty much finished with the church, at least for a while, but I was not finished with Jesus. He still continued to interest and even haunts me. Who is this man? A great moral teacher and leader, founder of a new religion, Son of God?
People have been asking such questions for a very long time now, and we are particularly fortunate to live in an age that has at its disposal more knowledge about the first century than our ancestors in the faith ever had. We have an understanding of the some of the forces and influences that impacted Jesus and his time. If God is indeed a God of history, as both the Old and New Testaments affirm, we cannot afford to ignore history, for God makes god-self known there. And Jesus lived in history, in a particular time and place. Now historical knowledge is not the same thing as faith, but faith participates in knowledge and in history. Even the name Jesus Christ is an attempt to bring faith and history together. We often utter the name as if Jesus were the first name and Christ the last name, but Christ is a title, the Greek word for Messiah, so what we are saying in the name Jesus Christ is that the historical person of Jesus, the one who lived and died in Palestine in the first century, is the chosen one of God. He reveals to us what God is like and how God looks when God shows up in a human life.
We know that at the time of Jesus, Israel was an occupied nation under Roman rule.
What a calamity that was for the Jews, for how could they, the chosen people of God, be given over to the rule of pagans and idolaters? The Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah had an answer to that question: sin. Israel had a long history of suffering under occupations: Assyria, Babylonia and Persia, and the prophets had declared that this was because Israel had failed to honor its covenant with God. The people had flagrantly disregarded the law, failing to show compassion for the poor and the outcast. Conquest, according to the prophetic understanding, was the punishment for sin, and so, once again Israel in the first century was a conquered nation, and therefore, according to the prophetic understanding, guilty of sin.
And this is why the historical Jesus spoke so much about the forgiveness of sins. He stood directly in the prophetic line, believing that the redemption of Israel meant that God forgives Israel its sin. Now it is important to understand that forgiveness for Jesus was not primarily about personal sin, like adultery, theft and murder, but it was much more about corporate sin, Israel’s failure to live as the people of God, which demanded justice for the poor and care for the widow and orphan. Western culture, since the Reformation, has an individualistic bias, and so we normally see sin as individual acts. Most Americans shy away from any talk of corporate sin, which is one reason it is so difficult in our nation to talk about racism and sexism and economic injustice ---all examples of corporate sin. People try to individualize the discussion by saying, “We were not the ones who kidnapped people in Africa and brought them here as slaves. We did not fight to keep slavery legal. We are not the ones who passed tax laws, concentrating 77.1% of the nation’s wealth in the top 10%, while the bottom 50% of Americans owns a mere 1% of the nation’s wealth. We are not the ones who stood with our knees on George Floyd’s neck----all true, but the prophets, including Jesus, would remind us how the system has been designed to benefit certain people at the expense of others. Guilt is assigned not directly but indirectly through association with particular groups, defined by race, gender, income, wealth and power. Whether or not you have directly caused the social sin, if you have benefited from male, white or wealth privilege, there is a sense in which you share guilt. Now you may not like this perspective, but it is the biblical view as put forth by the Old Testament prophets and shared by Jesus.
Jesus taught that God's forgiveness of Israel was the sign that the kingdom was breaking in, and that God was indeed acting in history to make all things (including Israel) new. As the new prophet and messiah, Jesus was specifically offering a new path for Israel to take. Israel would be the light of the world, a city on a hill, not because it would lord power over its enemies, but because it would love its enemies. Other groups at the time had different perspectives, like the Zealots, who were ready to use violence against Rome to achieve Israel's liberation. Then there were the followers of King Herod, including some members of the high priestly class, who were willing to compromise with Rome that some of Rome’s power might trickle down to them. And there were the purists, groups like the Essenes, who would remove themselves completely from society and try to live as a pure, separate community.
For Jesus none of these options was acceptable. They were not the way of God’s kingdom, he insisted. While Jesus did not believe that Israel could overthrow Rome, he did think that God could and would. Rome would be shown for what it was---a power hungry beast, whose crimes would be brought to full light, even as Israel's crimes would also come to light. Repent and believe was the heart of Jesus' message, a call to turn away from violence, exclusivity and compromise and embrace compassion and open table fellowship, where all would be welcome, as a sign of the radical welcoming that is God's kingdom.
We know that this welcoming of sinners and outcasts were deeply offensive to the Jewish religious leaders, not because they were all snobs and thought themselves too good to relate to such people. The real reason this open invitation, this radical graciousness to the least of these was so threatening to the leadership was because Jesus offered it himself on behalf of God, totally bypassing the Temple and its cult. From the Jewish perspective this was most certainly blasphemy! No wonder he had to die. And die he did; executed by the collusion between Roman and Jewish power. But his death did not finish the story, because new life came, and no matter how we interpret the resurrection, no one can deny that its aftermath led to the birth of the church. And against all odds, including persecution, the church grew and flourished.
Now admittedly in the western world, at least, the church these days is facing huge challenges. In our own country main line Protestant churches close every day, and so we might wonder why in such an atmosphere Christians should care about the historical Jesus. But the hard and simple truth is that whenever the church shows no concern for the historical Jesus, as it did in the early 20th century, when Albert Schweitzer published his book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, shocking so many people that the church laid those questions to rest, then this gap of knowledge helped to lay the groundwork for a hateful ideology in Germany, which enslaved the state Lutheran church with images of Jesus that justified indifference and even hatred of the Jews. In our own country images of Jesus as the supreme white man were used to justify slavery as well as the Jim Crow laws that followed the Civil War and still haunt our history today.
History does not reveal everything we might want to know about Jesus, and history does not create faith. But history does show us Jesus standing up to worldly and yes political power with the only force he had---the force of love and forgiveness. In the actual life Jesus lived, we Christians claim we can see God showing up, pushing back and beyond the boundaries people draw around themselves and their lives. And so, the question, which came to Peter so long ago, also comes to us: Who do you say I am? And, if we dare to answer, “You are the Christ, the chosen one of God,” we should answer not only with our hearts but also with our minds, recalling what the Apostle Paul so eloquently wrote long ago: Be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12: 1-8
Matthew 16: 13-20
As a child I was an avid fan of the television show, The Lone Ranger. I was particularly impressed by the drama of the show’s ending, when the person, who had been helped by the Lone Ranger, would always ask the same question, “Who is that masked man?” And the answer too was always the same: “Why don’t you know, that’s the Lone Ranger! Hi Ho, Silver, away! ”And then William Tell’s Overture would play as the Lone Ranger rode off into the future. When I was very young, four and five, I especially took great delight in shouting out the answer, because well, at age four, there were so many questions I could not answer, and so it was sheer joy to shout out the one I did know.
Who is that man? This is the question put to us by our text today from Matthew. In some ways Jesus did and still does appear as the masked man, someone whose identity is not necessarily obvious to all, someone doing good for others without expecting to be rewarded. Since Jesus is such a central part of our western culture, the question of his identity comes up time and time again, even for those who are not Christian. People are always trying to figure out exactly who he is.
I grew up in the church, faithfully attending Presbyterian Sunday school from the age of 2 to about 14, and throughout most of those years, I accepted what I had been taught about Jesus. He was the Messiah, God’s Son. But adolescence brings a whole new set of questions, and so by the time I left for college, I was not so sure who Jesus was. What did it mean, for example, to say that someone was God’s Son? I did not believe this was a question of biology---as if Jesus literally received 23 chromosomes from his father God. But still, I recognized there was something decisive and authoritative about this man, though I could not put it into words. By the time I finished college, I was pretty much finished with the church, at least for a while, but I was not finished with Jesus. He still continued to interest and even haunts me. Who is this man? A great moral teacher and leader, founder of a new religion, Son of God?
People have been asking such questions for a very long time now, and we are particularly fortunate to live in an age that has at its disposal more knowledge about the first century than our ancestors in the faith ever had. We have an understanding of the some of the forces and influences that impacted Jesus and his time. If God is indeed a God of history, as both the Old and New Testaments affirm, we cannot afford to ignore history, for God makes god-self known there. And Jesus lived in history, in a particular time and place. Now historical knowledge is not the same thing as faith, but faith participates in knowledge and in history. Even the name Jesus Christ is an attempt to bring faith and history together. We often utter the name as if Jesus were the first name and Christ the last name, but Christ is a title, the Greek word for Messiah, so what we are saying in the name Jesus Christ is that the historical person of Jesus, the one who lived and died in Palestine in the first century, is the chosen one of God. He reveals to us what God is like and how God looks when God shows up in a human life.
We know that at the time of Jesus, Israel was an occupied nation under Roman rule.
What a calamity that was for the Jews, for how could they, the chosen people of God, be given over to the rule of pagans and idolaters? The Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah had an answer to that question: sin. Israel had a long history of suffering under occupations: Assyria, Babylonia and Persia, and the prophets had declared that this was because Israel had failed to honor its covenant with God. The people had flagrantly disregarded the law, failing to show compassion for the poor and the outcast. Conquest, according to the prophetic understanding, was the punishment for sin, and so, once again Israel in the first century was a conquered nation, and therefore, according to the prophetic understanding, guilty of sin.
And this is why the historical Jesus spoke so much about the forgiveness of sins. He stood directly in the prophetic line, believing that the redemption of Israel meant that God forgives Israel its sin. Now it is important to understand that forgiveness for Jesus was not primarily about personal sin, like adultery, theft and murder, but it was much more about corporate sin, Israel’s failure to live as the people of God, which demanded justice for the poor and care for the widow and orphan. Western culture, since the Reformation, has an individualistic bias, and so we normally see sin as individual acts. Most Americans shy away from any talk of corporate sin, which is one reason it is so difficult in our nation to talk about racism and sexism and economic injustice ---all examples of corporate sin. People try to individualize the discussion by saying, “We were not the ones who kidnapped people in Africa and brought them here as slaves. We did not fight to keep slavery legal. We are not the ones who passed tax laws, concentrating 77.1% of the nation’s wealth in the top 10%, while the bottom 50% of Americans owns a mere 1% of the nation’s wealth. We are not the ones who stood with our knees on George Floyd’s neck----all true, but the prophets, including Jesus, would remind us how the system has been designed to benefit certain people at the expense of others. Guilt is assigned not directly but indirectly through association with particular groups, defined by race, gender, income, wealth and power. Whether or not you have directly caused the social sin, if you have benefited from male, white or wealth privilege, there is a sense in which you share guilt. Now you may not like this perspective, but it is the biblical view as put forth by the Old Testament prophets and shared by Jesus.
Jesus taught that God's forgiveness of Israel was the sign that the kingdom was breaking in, and that God was indeed acting in history to make all things (including Israel) new. As the new prophet and messiah, Jesus was specifically offering a new path for Israel to take. Israel would be the light of the world, a city on a hill, not because it would lord power over its enemies, but because it would love its enemies. Other groups at the time had different perspectives, like the Zealots, who were ready to use violence against Rome to achieve Israel's liberation. Then there were the followers of King Herod, including some members of the high priestly class, who were willing to compromise with Rome that some of Rome’s power might trickle down to them. And there were the purists, groups like the Essenes, who would remove themselves completely from society and try to live as a pure, separate community.
For Jesus none of these options was acceptable. They were not the way of God’s kingdom, he insisted. While Jesus did not believe that Israel could overthrow Rome, he did think that God could and would. Rome would be shown for what it was---a power hungry beast, whose crimes would be brought to full light, even as Israel's crimes would also come to light. Repent and believe was the heart of Jesus' message, a call to turn away from violence, exclusivity and compromise and embrace compassion and open table fellowship, where all would be welcome, as a sign of the radical welcoming that is God's kingdom.
We know that this welcoming of sinners and outcasts were deeply offensive to the Jewish religious leaders, not because they were all snobs and thought themselves too good to relate to such people. The real reason this open invitation, this radical graciousness to the least of these was so threatening to the leadership was because Jesus offered it himself on behalf of God, totally bypassing the Temple and its cult. From the Jewish perspective this was most certainly blasphemy! No wonder he had to die. And die he did; executed by the collusion between Roman and Jewish power. But his death did not finish the story, because new life came, and no matter how we interpret the resurrection, no one can deny that its aftermath led to the birth of the church. And against all odds, including persecution, the church grew and flourished.
Now admittedly in the western world, at least, the church these days is facing huge challenges. In our own country main line Protestant churches close every day, and so we might wonder why in such an atmosphere Christians should care about the historical Jesus. But the hard and simple truth is that whenever the church shows no concern for the historical Jesus, as it did in the early 20th century, when Albert Schweitzer published his book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, shocking so many people that the church laid those questions to rest, then this gap of knowledge helped to lay the groundwork for a hateful ideology in Germany, which enslaved the state Lutheran church with images of Jesus that justified indifference and even hatred of the Jews. In our own country images of Jesus as the supreme white man were used to justify slavery as well as the Jim Crow laws that followed the Civil War and still haunt our history today.
History does not reveal everything we might want to know about Jesus, and history does not create faith. But history does show us Jesus standing up to worldly and yes political power with the only force he had---the force of love and forgiveness. In the actual life Jesus lived, we Christians claim we can see God showing up, pushing back and beyond the boundaries people draw around themselves and their lives. And so, the question, which came to Peter so long ago, also comes to us: Who do you say I am? And, if we dare to answer, “You are the Christ, the chosen one of God,” we should answer not only with our hearts but also with our minds, recalling what the Apostle Paul so eloquently wrote long ago: Be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
The Outsider by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/16/2020
Matthew 15: 10-28
Let’s face it: outsiders often unnerve people. There seems to be something in our genetic makeup that encourages or at least allows us to form in-groups and designate others as out-groups. Perhaps in our long genetic past, when survival was such a challenge, because of food scarcity and the threat posed by animals as well as marauding strangers, it made sense to form in-groups as a means of protection. And we human beings are not the only ones who do this. Chimpanzees, who share 99% of our DNA, do the same thing. It certainly is not one of our most endearing traits, because history attests that war and genocide have resulted from such designations. And yet, despite the fear and suspicion that the outsider can present, there is also no denying that sometimes the outsider brings exactly what is needed. And this is precisely what we have in the story of the unnamed Canaanite woman.
In so many ways she really was the ultimate outsider. First of all, she was a woman, and women counted for less than men. They were not allowed to study Torah, Jewish Law, and they could not testify in court, even if they were an eyewitness to a crime, because their word meant nothing. And this woman was a Canaanite, whom the Jews considered to be idolaters, meaning that they worshiped other gods, often gods of nature---god of the wind, the sea, the storm, the harvest. We know almost nothing about her. She is nameless, but that is often how it is in biblical stories. Except for the disciples and some other characters like Jesus’ parents, then Mary, Martha and Lazarus, the tax collector, Zacchaeus, most people are described by their condition, a blind, mute or deaf man, a person, possessed by a demon, a Samaritan, a father with two sons. They all are nameless.
What we do know about this woman is that she was a mother whose daughter was described as demon possessed. We are not really sure what that means. It could be a form of mental illness or perhaps epilepsy or something else that made her behavior seem strange. And if you were described as demon possessed, you can bet that meant trouble not only for you but also for your whole family. Chronic illness is a grinding experience not only for the person so afflicted, but also for the family. And sometimes then as now such illness can lead to abandonment. People sometimes leave, because they say they just can’t take it anymore. I saw a number of such cases when I worked in hospitals as a chaplain. But, whether this woman had a husband or not, it is clear that she as mother is the dominant actor. She is the one, actively seeking healing for her daughter.
Now up to this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been dealing with some pretty harsh critics. He had crossed the Sea of Galilee and landed on the west shore, where he was accosted by the Pharisees and scribes, who condemned him for what they saw as his ritual impurity. He did not follow all the kosher laws, and he did not demand that his disciples strictly adhere to the rules of ritual hand washing. This does not mean that Jesus was going out of his way to flaunt his disregard for such rules, because sometimes he did abide by them, but they were never uppermost in his mind. Though he certainly understood that these rules helped to define the Jewish people, setting them apart from gentiles, he did not believe that they constituted the most important part of Jewish identity. As he said, “It was not what you put into your mouth that made you unclean, but what came out of it---evil intentions and lies.” And after saying this, he left, moving into the gentile districts of Tyre and Sidon.
Now why did Jesus move into gentile territory? Jews normally did not go there unless they had business to conduct, but Jesus was not a merchant, so he would not have had a practical reason to be in gentile territory. But we are in Matthew’s gospel, and we know that in the mid 80’s, when this gospel was written, there was tremendous tension between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians, both very suspicious of the other. And yet here we have Jesus moving into gentile territory, where he changes his mind in response to a gentile woman.
She was certainly assertive, pushy some might say, but then she was a desperate mother, acting on behalf of her daughter. “Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David,” she pleaded. How many times she called out, we do not know, but she was annoying the disciples, who wanted Jesus to send her away, so finally he spoke, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That is apparently how he understood his mission, as a Jew to the Jews. She then knelt in a gesture of deep humility and again, asked for help, but all she got was a figurative kick in the gut. Jesus compared her to a dog. But this was no time for pride, because she knew it was all about her daughter, not about her. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And he answered, “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” And it was done; her daughter was healed.
Now some people might prefer to believe that Jesus was just testing her, but in this particular gospel, where there is so much tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians, it seems far more likely that the writer placed this story here to show that Jesus himself moved and changed and embraced a larger view, including the gentiles. And if Jesus could do it, his followers are called to do the same. If Jesus grew and changed, then so could they. And the one who brought about this change and growth was an outsider. And indeed, sometimes it is the outsider who brings in something that is missing.
A week and a half ago I conducted a memorial service for my friend, Judy. She and I were indeed friends, but I had been her minister in New Haven, and then I became her conservator. For the past two years she had been living in a nursing home in Marlborough, CT. Judy did not have an easy life. She had suffered abuse as a child and a teen, and mental illness was no stranger to her. A highly intelligent person, educated at one of the most intellectually elite schools in London and later at Quinnipiac University, she did become a nurse and worked with the mentally ill. Yet much of her adult life was lived as an outsider, the result of her own health and emotional challenges. And when you live on the margins like that, in and out of various living arrangements, when you die, there are rarely many people present at your service. Most of the people you knew and lived with don’t have cars and access to transportation. Her ex-husband was at the service, and two clergy, the Episcopal priest at the church in Waterbury, where she had been a member years before and where her service was held and I, who conducted most of the service.
As we exited the church and went into the beautiful courtyard, where her ashes were to be interred, a man suddenly joined us. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I was wondering if I could stand here with you while you bury the lady’s ashes. The secretary told me there weren’t many here, and I thought I would add myself to the group.” “Of course, Daniel,” the priest said. “You are welcome to join us.” And so, Daniel stayed. I learned later that Daniel did odd jobs around the church and lived in a small room nearby, and also suffered from mental illness. At the end of the burial service, he said to me, “You know Rev, when I die, I don’t expect there will be more than one or two people there, maybe just the priest. And so, I thought it mattered that I was here for this lady, Judy, because it mattered that she lived and that she died. Her life meant something, and though there were only four of us here, I think that the number four is important. It’s an even number, two plus two make four. That is better than the odd number 3. At least that is what I think.” “I think so too, Daniel,” I said. “Four rounds it all out. “I think Judy would be so pleased to have you here.”
Outsiders can and do make us nervous at times. We can think of outsiders as threats, as indeed, sometimes they are. Yet there are times when outsiders do for us and teach us what no one else can do---as the Canaanite woman did for Jesus and for the Jewish Christians in Matthew’s community and as Daniel did for the three of us who with him became four, rounding it all out, which I think in this case was pleasing not only to Judy but also to God.
Matthew 15: 10-28
Let’s face it: outsiders often unnerve people. There seems to be something in our genetic makeup that encourages or at least allows us to form in-groups and designate others as out-groups. Perhaps in our long genetic past, when survival was such a challenge, because of food scarcity and the threat posed by animals as well as marauding strangers, it made sense to form in-groups as a means of protection. And we human beings are not the only ones who do this. Chimpanzees, who share 99% of our DNA, do the same thing. It certainly is not one of our most endearing traits, because history attests that war and genocide have resulted from such designations. And yet, despite the fear and suspicion that the outsider can present, there is also no denying that sometimes the outsider brings exactly what is needed. And this is precisely what we have in the story of the unnamed Canaanite woman.
In so many ways she really was the ultimate outsider. First of all, she was a woman, and women counted for less than men. They were not allowed to study Torah, Jewish Law, and they could not testify in court, even if they were an eyewitness to a crime, because their word meant nothing. And this woman was a Canaanite, whom the Jews considered to be idolaters, meaning that they worshiped other gods, often gods of nature---god of the wind, the sea, the storm, the harvest. We know almost nothing about her. She is nameless, but that is often how it is in biblical stories. Except for the disciples and some other characters like Jesus’ parents, then Mary, Martha and Lazarus, the tax collector, Zacchaeus, most people are described by their condition, a blind, mute or deaf man, a person, possessed by a demon, a Samaritan, a father with two sons. They all are nameless.
What we do know about this woman is that she was a mother whose daughter was described as demon possessed. We are not really sure what that means. It could be a form of mental illness or perhaps epilepsy or something else that made her behavior seem strange. And if you were described as demon possessed, you can bet that meant trouble not only for you but also for your whole family. Chronic illness is a grinding experience not only for the person so afflicted, but also for the family. And sometimes then as now such illness can lead to abandonment. People sometimes leave, because they say they just can’t take it anymore. I saw a number of such cases when I worked in hospitals as a chaplain. But, whether this woman had a husband or not, it is clear that she as mother is the dominant actor. She is the one, actively seeking healing for her daughter.
Now up to this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been dealing with some pretty harsh critics. He had crossed the Sea of Galilee and landed on the west shore, where he was accosted by the Pharisees and scribes, who condemned him for what they saw as his ritual impurity. He did not follow all the kosher laws, and he did not demand that his disciples strictly adhere to the rules of ritual hand washing. This does not mean that Jesus was going out of his way to flaunt his disregard for such rules, because sometimes he did abide by them, but they were never uppermost in his mind. Though he certainly understood that these rules helped to define the Jewish people, setting them apart from gentiles, he did not believe that they constituted the most important part of Jewish identity. As he said, “It was not what you put into your mouth that made you unclean, but what came out of it---evil intentions and lies.” And after saying this, he left, moving into the gentile districts of Tyre and Sidon.
Now why did Jesus move into gentile territory? Jews normally did not go there unless they had business to conduct, but Jesus was not a merchant, so he would not have had a practical reason to be in gentile territory. But we are in Matthew’s gospel, and we know that in the mid 80’s, when this gospel was written, there was tremendous tension between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians, both very suspicious of the other. And yet here we have Jesus moving into gentile territory, where he changes his mind in response to a gentile woman.
She was certainly assertive, pushy some might say, but then she was a desperate mother, acting on behalf of her daughter. “Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David,” she pleaded. How many times she called out, we do not know, but she was annoying the disciples, who wanted Jesus to send her away, so finally he spoke, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That is apparently how he understood his mission, as a Jew to the Jews. She then knelt in a gesture of deep humility and again, asked for help, but all she got was a figurative kick in the gut. Jesus compared her to a dog. But this was no time for pride, because she knew it was all about her daughter, not about her. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And he answered, “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” And it was done; her daughter was healed.
Now some people might prefer to believe that Jesus was just testing her, but in this particular gospel, where there is so much tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians, it seems far more likely that the writer placed this story here to show that Jesus himself moved and changed and embraced a larger view, including the gentiles. And if Jesus could do it, his followers are called to do the same. If Jesus grew and changed, then so could they. And the one who brought about this change and growth was an outsider. And indeed, sometimes it is the outsider who brings in something that is missing.
A week and a half ago I conducted a memorial service for my friend, Judy. She and I were indeed friends, but I had been her minister in New Haven, and then I became her conservator. For the past two years she had been living in a nursing home in Marlborough, CT. Judy did not have an easy life. She had suffered abuse as a child and a teen, and mental illness was no stranger to her. A highly intelligent person, educated at one of the most intellectually elite schools in London and later at Quinnipiac University, she did become a nurse and worked with the mentally ill. Yet much of her adult life was lived as an outsider, the result of her own health and emotional challenges. And when you live on the margins like that, in and out of various living arrangements, when you die, there are rarely many people present at your service. Most of the people you knew and lived with don’t have cars and access to transportation. Her ex-husband was at the service, and two clergy, the Episcopal priest at the church in Waterbury, where she had been a member years before and where her service was held and I, who conducted most of the service.
As we exited the church and went into the beautiful courtyard, where her ashes were to be interred, a man suddenly joined us. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I was wondering if I could stand here with you while you bury the lady’s ashes. The secretary told me there weren’t many here, and I thought I would add myself to the group.” “Of course, Daniel,” the priest said. “You are welcome to join us.” And so, Daniel stayed. I learned later that Daniel did odd jobs around the church and lived in a small room nearby, and also suffered from mental illness. At the end of the burial service, he said to me, “You know Rev, when I die, I don’t expect there will be more than one or two people there, maybe just the priest. And so, I thought it mattered that I was here for this lady, Judy, because it mattered that she lived and that she died. Her life meant something, and though there were only four of us here, I think that the number four is important. It’s an even number, two plus two make four. That is better than the odd number 3. At least that is what I think.” “I think so too, Daniel,” I said. “Four rounds it all out. “I think Judy would be so pleased to have you here.”
Outsiders can and do make us nervous at times. We can think of outsiders as threats, as indeed, sometimes they are. Yet there are times when outsiders do for us and teach us what no one else can do---as the Canaanite woman did for Jesus and for the Jewish Christians in Matthew’s community and as Daniel did for the three of us who with him became four, rounding it all out, which I think in this case was pleasing not only to Judy but also to God.
August 12, 2020
Dear Friends,
Years ago, one of my parishioners, who suffered from periodic debilitating depression, made a startling discovery: “The dawn,” she proclaimed, is stunningly beautiful.” And believe it or not, that discovery helped to change her life. She explained to me that even in her younger years, when she did not struggle so much with depression, she was never, ever a morning person. “I would always go to bed quite late, 1:00 or 2:00 AM, but later, when depression became my enemy, I would stay up even later, finally going to bed around 4 or 4:30 AM. But there was this one summer morning in eastern Maine, when visiting family, who owned a cottage on the ocean, she happened to be up to witness the dawn, which in Maine comes early during the summer. “I could not believe how beautiful the scene was,” she said. “The sun rising over the water, the sky, painted in different hues of blue and violet and yellow. I simply stared, utterly transformed by the sight. I was accustomed to seeing the sky darken as evening shadows fell not only across the sky, but also across the landscape, but the rising of the sun---why that I had never seen! And it kind of gave me a new and different perspective. It was the birth of something new, something different, not the endings I was so accustomed to seeing in my depressed state.”
I had not thought of Patricia and her revelation until I happened to come across the August 12 edition of “The Christian Century,” which had invited people to write their reflections on the dawn. One man, Don Stevenson, wrote, ”Dawn is the holder of a very thin veil that separates darkness from light. It knows the reality of darkness even as it declares the presence of light. Dawn is that break into the day where the new begins, giving grace its definition.” Perhaps that sounds abstract---but the man was writing about his oldest daughter, named Dawn, who although filled with light, had her own demons to fight. She ended up homeless, dying from cancer in a shelter for medically compromised homeless people. For both father and daughter the dawn came during their last visit together, when she struggled out of her bed to play and sing, Amazing Grace on the keyboard she kept next to her bed. She had been lost, but now she did indeed feel found.
And then there is the reflection, written by a woman from Oakland, CA, Alicia Van Riggs. She was one of those people who commuted to work every day on a bicycle. Some years ago, on a very early summer morning, she found herself riding “under a lavender velvet sky.” That sky alone was breathtaking, but then she noticed above the western horizon a full golden moon. Getting off her bike, she stared at the scene, even a poet would have trouble describing, and then suddenly burst into tears. At first, she was not sure why she was crying. Sure, beauty does sometimes move us to tears, but that alone was not the reason. No, it was because she was alone with no one to share the experience. Beauty longs to be shared, she thought, and suddenly, there he was, out of the corner of her eye, she saw an older man, pushing a grocery cart filled with bottles and cans. He was about to pass her by, when he noticed her tear stained face. “Are you o.k.?” he wanted to know. “Yes,” she answered, it’s just that it is so beautiful,” and then pushing her eyes and chin toward the moon, he followed her movement. “Wow,” he said. “That IS beautiful!” Taking out a can of Mountain Dew, he popped it open, took a sip and then handed it to Alicia. “Want some?” he asked. “No thanks,” she replied. They both just stared at the dawn for a while before each of them went on his and her way.
Now, years later Alicia still recalls that dawn and that man. She still rides by that place, but the moon and the sky have never once repeated that act, and she has never seen that man again. She wishes she had taken a sip of that Mountain Dew, because, she now realizes he was offering her a kind of communion. Communion, after all, is about sharing and gratitude and the intimacy of God, which meets us not only in the church’s ritual of bread and wine, but also in other intimate places in our lives---often when we least expect it and are not looking for anything in particular. After all, this woman was simply riding her bicycle to work, and yet the moment became one of extraordinary grace.
I’m a morning person, and I have seen many dawns, but most of the time I am not so attentive to them---except when I am in Maine, in Bar Harbor. Then I pay attention, since I am rarely so busy there. Many people like to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain to witness the sun’s rising, since it is the first place the sun hits land in the United States. I, however, prefer the walk down the road, leading to the water’s edge, which looks out far beyond, where distant mountains reach toward the sky, sometimes clear blue, at other times foggy gray. It’s quiet in the early morning, and even if I miss the rising of the sun, I still can feel the power of the dawn, which reminds me that with each new day a new beginning is promised.
Blessings on you,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Years ago, one of my parishioners, who suffered from periodic debilitating depression, made a startling discovery: “The dawn,” she proclaimed, is stunningly beautiful.” And believe it or not, that discovery helped to change her life. She explained to me that even in her younger years, when she did not struggle so much with depression, she was never, ever a morning person. “I would always go to bed quite late, 1:00 or 2:00 AM, but later, when depression became my enemy, I would stay up even later, finally going to bed around 4 or 4:30 AM. But there was this one summer morning in eastern Maine, when visiting family, who owned a cottage on the ocean, she happened to be up to witness the dawn, which in Maine comes early during the summer. “I could not believe how beautiful the scene was,” she said. “The sun rising over the water, the sky, painted in different hues of blue and violet and yellow. I simply stared, utterly transformed by the sight. I was accustomed to seeing the sky darken as evening shadows fell not only across the sky, but also across the landscape, but the rising of the sun---why that I had never seen! And it kind of gave me a new and different perspective. It was the birth of something new, something different, not the endings I was so accustomed to seeing in my depressed state.”
I had not thought of Patricia and her revelation until I happened to come across the August 12 edition of “The Christian Century,” which had invited people to write their reflections on the dawn. One man, Don Stevenson, wrote, ”Dawn is the holder of a very thin veil that separates darkness from light. It knows the reality of darkness even as it declares the presence of light. Dawn is that break into the day where the new begins, giving grace its definition.” Perhaps that sounds abstract---but the man was writing about his oldest daughter, named Dawn, who although filled with light, had her own demons to fight. She ended up homeless, dying from cancer in a shelter for medically compromised homeless people. For both father and daughter the dawn came during their last visit together, when she struggled out of her bed to play and sing, Amazing Grace on the keyboard she kept next to her bed. She had been lost, but now she did indeed feel found.
And then there is the reflection, written by a woman from Oakland, CA, Alicia Van Riggs. She was one of those people who commuted to work every day on a bicycle. Some years ago, on a very early summer morning, she found herself riding “under a lavender velvet sky.” That sky alone was breathtaking, but then she noticed above the western horizon a full golden moon. Getting off her bike, she stared at the scene, even a poet would have trouble describing, and then suddenly burst into tears. At first, she was not sure why she was crying. Sure, beauty does sometimes move us to tears, but that alone was not the reason. No, it was because she was alone with no one to share the experience. Beauty longs to be shared, she thought, and suddenly, there he was, out of the corner of her eye, she saw an older man, pushing a grocery cart filled with bottles and cans. He was about to pass her by, when he noticed her tear stained face. “Are you o.k.?” he wanted to know. “Yes,” she answered, it’s just that it is so beautiful,” and then pushing her eyes and chin toward the moon, he followed her movement. “Wow,” he said. “That IS beautiful!” Taking out a can of Mountain Dew, he popped it open, took a sip and then handed it to Alicia. “Want some?” he asked. “No thanks,” she replied. They both just stared at the dawn for a while before each of them went on his and her way.
Now, years later Alicia still recalls that dawn and that man. She still rides by that place, but the moon and the sky have never once repeated that act, and she has never seen that man again. She wishes she had taken a sip of that Mountain Dew, because, she now realizes he was offering her a kind of communion. Communion, after all, is about sharing and gratitude and the intimacy of God, which meets us not only in the church’s ritual of bread and wine, but also in other intimate places in our lives---often when we least expect it and are not looking for anything in particular. After all, this woman was simply riding her bicycle to work, and yet the moment became one of extraordinary grace.
I’m a morning person, and I have seen many dawns, but most of the time I am not so attentive to them---except when I am in Maine, in Bar Harbor. Then I pay attention, since I am rarely so busy there. Many people like to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain to witness the sun’s rising, since it is the first place the sun hits land in the United States. I, however, prefer the walk down the road, leading to the water’s edge, which looks out far beyond, where distant mountains reach toward the sky, sometimes clear blue, at other times foggy gray. It’s quiet in the early morning, and even if I miss the rising of the sun, I still can feel the power of the dawn, which reminds me that with each new day a new beginning is promised.
Blessings on you,
Sandra
August 9, 2020
Dear Friends,
I imagine not too many Americans pay much attention to what is going on in Saudi Arabia. Some women MIGHT recall that women finally were given the right to drive cars in 2016. And then, I am sure, all of us remember with horror the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist, Jamil Khashoggi, by Saudis, likely approved, many believe, by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Then there are the numerous imprisonments of human rights activists, who are trying to move Saudi Arabia into a more progressive 21st century as well as Saudi support for the government in Yemen, where a civil war continues to rage. And yet, despite these negatives, something unexpected and exciting is happening in the area of the arts and music.
For many decades now the ultra-Orthodox religious clerics have been insisting that live music, theater, cinema and dance are all anti-Islamic. When they came to power in 1979, local extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and accused the House of Saud of catering to decadent western culture. The House of Saud, sensing that this was no passing fad, then took a swift turn to the right, and one of the first sacrifices was the arts. Suddenly the cinema, music and much of the visual arts were banned. Gender mixing was also forbidden. Musical instruments were banned, and if you were discovered to have one in your possession, it was smashed right before your eyes. Not only was the playing of instruments in groups banned, but also music lessons and keyboards were outlawed. And this was the way things were until 2019, when suddenly the Crown Prince began to consolidate his power, and then began to encourage the embracing of art, music and cinema. This is all part of his plan to transform the kingdom and its economy, which has been completely dependent upon oil for revenue. By diversifying the culture, the Crown Prince also hopes to diversify the economy and thus bring new life (and revenue) into the country. Within the past year such notables as Lionel Richie and Andrea Bocelli have been invited to perform in a glitzy hall in the midst of the Saudi desert. And, as Lionel Richie said, “Things here will never be the same again.”
It is hard to imagine Lionel Richie strolling up and down the stage in the middle of the Saudi desert, yelling at the top of his lungs, “I want some pandemonium.” At first all the robed men and women would do is gently sway back and forth. A few clapped to the beat, but it was all pretty tame. Finally, on the fourth song, one woman took the plunge. Running down the stairs, she moved herself right in front of the orchestra. Then another woman came, then another and another. Finally, a third of the audience was shouting, twisting, singing in unison, “She’s a brick house. She’s mighty-mighty.” It is certainly not what you would expect in conservative Saudi Arabia.
So, what is going on and why? Some cynically suggest that the Crown Prince is trying to deflect attention away from all his anti-democratic behaviors and policies. And that may indeed be the case. But it is hard to deny that once the arts are allowed expression, there are changes which cannot so easily be denied or controlled. After all, creativity and self-expression are usually the enemies of authoritarian regimes. We also believe that the arts are humanizing. I have never understood how the Nazis appeared to be such art lovers, while stealing from the great European art museums and collectors for their own private possession. Those in charge of concentration camps could weep at the beauty of a Bach cantata while murdering the prisoners in their charge. What did the beauty of art and music do for them? If beauty is indeed a pathway toward God, as the church has taught and supported, it is not a guaranteed path, as history attests. But we can always hope that the arts will prod people to grow and change toward compassion and kindness.
In 2017 The King Abdulaziz World Center for World Culture opened in eastern Saudi Arabia with a museum, cinema, theater and art gallery. Not only are works from local artists being sought, but also international artists are offered space to show their art. One such work, called “Sorry/I Forgive You” is by the Libyan Canadian artist Arwa Abouon. Notice that both a man and a woman are the forgiver as well as the forgiven. Other Saudi cities are hosting exhibitions of international artists, who are openly political, expressing opinions on social inequality, consumerism and injustice. From a western point of view, this is pretty tame, but not in a controlled society like Saudi Arabia.
One of the most important stated goals is to introduce music and the arts at an early age to encourage the creation of local Saudi art as well as creative and critical thinking. This is new for a society that has been completely comfortable with government jobs, whose income was guaranteed by oil. Saudis are now beginning to flock to live concerts, where they can hear musicians, who are self-taught, because there have been no music teachers and lessons. And they are discovering that music is a way of communicating and creating connections among people, who might not often speak to or interact with one another.
We do not know what the outcome of all this will be. It may be MORE than the House of Saud bargained for. In a society where houses are fenced in by concrete walls, to keep people separated from one another, the arts reach out and beyond, so new thoughts and ideas then have a chance to find their way in. And once ideas begin to freely flow, it is hard to stop them and even harder to control them. One man stood before a graffiti image of a 2015 work called, “Son of a Migrant From Syria,” featuring Steve Jobs carrying a sack over his left shoulder and an Apple II in his right hand. This was originally painted in the city of Calais in France, where there was a huge refugee camp. “So, what is this supposed to mean?” the man asked. A woman volunteer replied, “It’s about migrants,” she said. “Steve Jobs is of Syrian origin, and refugees and migrants can contribute and excel, just as Steve Jobs did.” “I did not realize,” he responded, “that art and graffiti could have a larger message.” And once that larger message is realized and embraced, life is never the same, whether in Saudi Arabia or our own nation.
Blessings,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I imagine not too many Americans pay much attention to what is going on in Saudi Arabia. Some women MIGHT recall that women finally were given the right to drive cars in 2016. And then, I am sure, all of us remember with horror the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist, Jamil Khashoggi, by Saudis, likely approved, many believe, by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Then there are the numerous imprisonments of human rights activists, who are trying to move Saudi Arabia into a more progressive 21st century as well as Saudi support for the government in Yemen, where a civil war continues to rage. And yet, despite these negatives, something unexpected and exciting is happening in the area of the arts and music.
For many decades now the ultra-Orthodox religious clerics have been insisting that live music, theater, cinema and dance are all anti-Islamic. When they came to power in 1979, local extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and accused the House of Saud of catering to decadent western culture. The House of Saud, sensing that this was no passing fad, then took a swift turn to the right, and one of the first sacrifices was the arts. Suddenly the cinema, music and much of the visual arts were banned. Gender mixing was also forbidden. Musical instruments were banned, and if you were discovered to have one in your possession, it was smashed right before your eyes. Not only was the playing of instruments in groups banned, but also music lessons and keyboards were outlawed. And this was the way things were until 2019, when suddenly the Crown Prince began to consolidate his power, and then began to encourage the embracing of art, music and cinema. This is all part of his plan to transform the kingdom and its economy, which has been completely dependent upon oil for revenue. By diversifying the culture, the Crown Prince also hopes to diversify the economy and thus bring new life (and revenue) into the country. Within the past year such notables as Lionel Richie and Andrea Bocelli have been invited to perform in a glitzy hall in the midst of the Saudi desert. And, as Lionel Richie said, “Things here will never be the same again.”
It is hard to imagine Lionel Richie strolling up and down the stage in the middle of the Saudi desert, yelling at the top of his lungs, “I want some pandemonium.” At first all the robed men and women would do is gently sway back and forth. A few clapped to the beat, but it was all pretty tame. Finally, on the fourth song, one woman took the plunge. Running down the stairs, she moved herself right in front of the orchestra. Then another woman came, then another and another. Finally, a third of the audience was shouting, twisting, singing in unison, “She’s a brick house. She’s mighty-mighty.” It is certainly not what you would expect in conservative Saudi Arabia.
So, what is going on and why? Some cynically suggest that the Crown Prince is trying to deflect attention away from all his anti-democratic behaviors and policies. And that may indeed be the case. But it is hard to deny that once the arts are allowed expression, there are changes which cannot so easily be denied or controlled. After all, creativity and self-expression are usually the enemies of authoritarian regimes. We also believe that the arts are humanizing. I have never understood how the Nazis appeared to be such art lovers, while stealing from the great European art museums and collectors for their own private possession. Those in charge of concentration camps could weep at the beauty of a Bach cantata while murdering the prisoners in their charge. What did the beauty of art and music do for them? If beauty is indeed a pathway toward God, as the church has taught and supported, it is not a guaranteed path, as history attests. But we can always hope that the arts will prod people to grow and change toward compassion and kindness.
In 2017 The King Abdulaziz World Center for World Culture opened in eastern Saudi Arabia with a museum, cinema, theater and art gallery. Not only are works from local artists being sought, but also international artists are offered space to show their art. One such work, called “Sorry/I Forgive You” is by the Libyan Canadian artist Arwa Abouon. Notice that both a man and a woman are the forgiver as well as the forgiven. Other Saudi cities are hosting exhibitions of international artists, who are openly political, expressing opinions on social inequality, consumerism and injustice. From a western point of view, this is pretty tame, but not in a controlled society like Saudi Arabia.
One of the most important stated goals is to introduce music and the arts at an early age to encourage the creation of local Saudi art as well as creative and critical thinking. This is new for a society that has been completely comfortable with government jobs, whose income was guaranteed by oil. Saudis are now beginning to flock to live concerts, where they can hear musicians, who are self-taught, because there have been no music teachers and lessons. And they are discovering that music is a way of communicating and creating connections among people, who might not often speak to or interact with one another.
We do not know what the outcome of all this will be. It may be MORE than the House of Saud bargained for. In a society where houses are fenced in by concrete walls, to keep people separated from one another, the arts reach out and beyond, so new thoughts and ideas then have a chance to find their way in. And once ideas begin to freely flow, it is hard to stop them and even harder to control them. One man stood before a graffiti image of a 2015 work called, “Son of a Migrant From Syria,” featuring Steve Jobs carrying a sack over his left shoulder and an Apple II in his right hand. This was originally painted in the city of Calais in France, where there was a huge refugee camp. “So, what is this supposed to mean?” the man asked. A woman volunteer replied, “It’s about migrants,” she said. “Steve Jobs is of Syrian origin, and refugees and migrants can contribute and excel, just as Steve Jobs did.” “I did not realize,” he responded, “that art and graffiti could have a larger message.” And once that larger message is realized and embraced, life is never the same, whether in Saudi Arabia or our own nation.
Blessings,
Sandra
AT 3:00 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING by Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 8/9/2020
Matthew 14: 22-33
Early in the morning: that is the time the text says that Jesus came walking on the water toward the disciples. The Greek literally says the third watch, which begins at 3 AM, so it is possible that this story takes place at that bewitching hour, when we human beings can find ourselves assaulted by fears and worries that appear less critical in the daylight. At 3 AM our failures look worse and our successes less impressive. In those early morning hours depression weighs on hearts, and despair tempts the soul. The American writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, “The Crack Up,” “In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
3:00 o’clock in the morning: I read somewhere that experts negotiating with terrorists, who are holding hostages, prefer to negotiate at 3 or 4 AM, because at those hours, “every ideal and ideology go limp in the dark exhaustion of that hour.” As one poet (Wislawa Szymborska) put it, “The hour between night and day/ The hour between toss and turn/ No one feels fine at 4 o’clock in the morning.” And so is it any wonder that when Jesus came walking across the water toward the disciples at that early morning hour, they did not recognize him. They could not clearly see who was there, and so gripped by fear, they thought it was a ghost.
Now let’s review what has been going on in this section of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew is not necessarily telling a story in chronological order. He is trying to make certain points, and some of the points concern the community of faith out of which this gospel came. So, the writer is not only talking about Jesus and his disciples, but he is also talking about his particular community, this mixed group of gentiles and Jews, who were trying to be followers of Christ as they lived their lives around the year 80 or 85, when this gospel was written.
At the beginning of chapter 14 we learn that King Herod had John the Baptist killed, and when Jesus heard about it, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place, so he could be alone---to pray, to think, to ponder his next step. But, as we heard last week, the crowds followed him, and when he went ashore, hoping to be alone, there were crowds, who had come on foot, and so he taught and healed them, blessed the five loaves of bread and two fish and then told the disciples to distribute the food. So, note what is being said here. While Jesus is the source of the blessing, it is the job, the call of the disciples, his followers, to do the actual work of feeding. And this is exactly what they did. They fed the crowd.
After this feeding of the 5000, the text says, “Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side.” Getting into the boat and going to the other side was not the disciples’ idea. It was Jesus who commanded them to get into the boat. Remember, he wanted to have some time alone, and we are told in verse 27 that he went up the mountain by himself to pray. So, there his disciples are out in the boat without Jesus as they struggle to get across to the other side. But they are not making much progress, because there is a pretty strong headwind.
Now what is this boat? Remember, biblical stories are full of symbolism, so what might this boat symbolize? The church, this newly constituted community of faith that in Matthew’s day and time was also struggling against some pretty strong headwinds—serious tensions between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians. And so, Matthew tells us that the boat (the church) is not making much progress here, not only because of all the tension, but also because it fails to recognize who Jesus is and what it is he asks and demands. And as Jesus moves across the water, appearing to the disciples as a ghost, what does Peter say and do? He calls out, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
Now Peter does not know for sure if it is Jesus, but he apparently believes that if it is, then Jesus would ask him to do something crazy like getting out of the boat and walking on water. Now it is easy for people to be distracted by this so called miracle of nature, walking on water, but the point here is not so much an actual miracle of nature, but rather, the important point is the movement out of the boat, out of the church into the water, an area, which symbolizes an uncomfortable and difficult place to be. Consider what the symbolism of the story is saying: Move out of the church, out of the comfort of your little community, into a wider world, into a territory, where you are not at all comfortable, places where you fear you will sink and drown. Jesus was not calling Peter to a place of comfort, but rather to a mission of discomfort, a place of new challenge and new possibility.
And of course, the church, then as now, always struggles with newness. If you look at the history of the Church, you can see the struggle all over the place. Think back to the days before the Reformation, when reading the Bible in the language of the people was considered a dangerous idea. John Wycliffe was burned at the stake for translating the bible into English. Martin Luther translated the bible into German, and he too would have burned had he not been protected by Frederick the Wise, one of the German electors, who helped to elect the Holy Roman Emperor.
Just last Sunday I listened online to the reading of a play, Martin Luther on Trial, and there is no doubt that Luther was filled with dangerous ideas. He did away, for example, with the sacrament of confession, teaching that Christians can directly confess to God without a priest as an intermediary. He also taught that salvation does not come from good works, but as a gift of grace through faith. But, make no mistake about it: Luther too had his doubts, and at 3 AM in the morning Satan often assailed him, Luther said. It was then, at that bewitching hour, when he wondered if he was doing the right thing. What makes you think you are right, Dr. Luther, when the Church has been teaching its truth for 1500 years, Satan demanded to know. How do you know you have the truth? And at 3:00 in the morning, Luther was not confident he had an answer.
Consider the Church during the period of the Civil War. We all know about the split between the North and the South, but there were churches whose clergy had different perspectives on slavery in the same city. While The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn was passionately opposed to slavery, The Rev. Joel Parker of The Fourth Ave. Presbyterian Church in New York, believed slavery was ordained by God. And there were a whole lot of people, clergy as well as lay, who just wanted to avoid the topic, because it was so upsetting and complicated. They did not know what to do or how to think.
And one of these tentative church members, by the name of Jeremiah Morse, suddenly found himself awakened by a knock at his door at 3 AM. It was a neighbor who had with him a mother and her two children, trying to escape’s slavery’s grasp through the Underground Railroad. They needed help---food and money, and the neighbor was asking for help on their behalf. They need more than I have, he said. Can you help them? And Jeremiah Morse, who had never been sure about slavery, suddenly at 3 AM, found his conscience stirred in a way it had never before been stirred. And so, began his work with the Underground Railroad. Years later he pondered what he would have done had it been the clear light of day when he was asked for help. In the dead darkness of night, I was suddenly haunted by the thought that this might be God knocking at my door, and so rather than shutting God out, I let God in.
In this morning’s lesson from Matthew, note well where Jesus is. While he made his disciples get into the boat, Jesus did not get in with them. He came to them on the water, reminding his disciples and us that the comfortable and the familiar are not always the places God meets us and calls us to be. So, in our lives today, as the church and as individuals, we can ask ourselves: where might be the places of discomfort and anxiety, where Jesus is calling us to go?
Matthew 14: 22-33
Early in the morning: that is the time the text says that Jesus came walking on the water toward the disciples. The Greek literally says the third watch, which begins at 3 AM, so it is possible that this story takes place at that bewitching hour, when we human beings can find ourselves assaulted by fears and worries that appear less critical in the daylight. At 3 AM our failures look worse and our successes less impressive. In those early morning hours depression weighs on hearts, and despair tempts the soul. The American writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, “The Crack Up,” “In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”
3:00 o’clock in the morning: I read somewhere that experts negotiating with terrorists, who are holding hostages, prefer to negotiate at 3 or 4 AM, because at those hours, “every ideal and ideology go limp in the dark exhaustion of that hour.” As one poet (Wislawa Szymborska) put it, “The hour between night and day/ The hour between toss and turn/ No one feels fine at 4 o’clock in the morning.” And so is it any wonder that when Jesus came walking across the water toward the disciples at that early morning hour, they did not recognize him. They could not clearly see who was there, and so gripped by fear, they thought it was a ghost.
Now let’s review what has been going on in this section of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew is not necessarily telling a story in chronological order. He is trying to make certain points, and some of the points concern the community of faith out of which this gospel came. So, the writer is not only talking about Jesus and his disciples, but he is also talking about his particular community, this mixed group of gentiles and Jews, who were trying to be followers of Christ as they lived their lives around the year 80 or 85, when this gospel was written.
At the beginning of chapter 14 we learn that King Herod had John the Baptist killed, and when Jesus heard about it, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place, so he could be alone---to pray, to think, to ponder his next step. But, as we heard last week, the crowds followed him, and when he went ashore, hoping to be alone, there were crowds, who had come on foot, and so he taught and healed them, blessed the five loaves of bread and two fish and then told the disciples to distribute the food. So, note what is being said here. While Jesus is the source of the blessing, it is the job, the call of the disciples, his followers, to do the actual work of feeding. And this is exactly what they did. They fed the crowd.
After this feeding of the 5000, the text says, “Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side.” Getting into the boat and going to the other side was not the disciples’ idea. It was Jesus who commanded them to get into the boat. Remember, he wanted to have some time alone, and we are told in verse 27 that he went up the mountain by himself to pray. So, there his disciples are out in the boat without Jesus as they struggle to get across to the other side. But they are not making much progress, because there is a pretty strong headwind.
Now what is this boat? Remember, biblical stories are full of symbolism, so what might this boat symbolize? The church, this newly constituted community of faith that in Matthew’s day and time was also struggling against some pretty strong headwinds—serious tensions between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians. And so, Matthew tells us that the boat (the church) is not making much progress here, not only because of all the tension, but also because it fails to recognize who Jesus is and what it is he asks and demands. And as Jesus moves across the water, appearing to the disciples as a ghost, what does Peter say and do? He calls out, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
Now Peter does not know for sure if it is Jesus, but he apparently believes that if it is, then Jesus would ask him to do something crazy like getting out of the boat and walking on water. Now it is easy for people to be distracted by this so called miracle of nature, walking on water, but the point here is not so much an actual miracle of nature, but rather, the important point is the movement out of the boat, out of the church into the water, an area, which symbolizes an uncomfortable and difficult place to be. Consider what the symbolism of the story is saying: Move out of the church, out of the comfort of your little community, into a wider world, into a territory, where you are not at all comfortable, places where you fear you will sink and drown. Jesus was not calling Peter to a place of comfort, but rather to a mission of discomfort, a place of new challenge and new possibility.
And of course, the church, then as now, always struggles with newness. If you look at the history of the Church, you can see the struggle all over the place. Think back to the days before the Reformation, when reading the Bible in the language of the people was considered a dangerous idea. John Wycliffe was burned at the stake for translating the bible into English. Martin Luther translated the bible into German, and he too would have burned had he not been protected by Frederick the Wise, one of the German electors, who helped to elect the Holy Roman Emperor.
Just last Sunday I listened online to the reading of a play, Martin Luther on Trial, and there is no doubt that Luther was filled with dangerous ideas. He did away, for example, with the sacrament of confession, teaching that Christians can directly confess to God without a priest as an intermediary. He also taught that salvation does not come from good works, but as a gift of grace through faith. But, make no mistake about it: Luther too had his doubts, and at 3 AM in the morning Satan often assailed him, Luther said. It was then, at that bewitching hour, when he wondered if he was doing the right thing. What makes you think you are right, Dr. Luther, when the Church has been teaching its truth for 1500 years, Satan demanded to know. How do you know you have the truth? And at 3:00 in the morning, Luther was not confident he had an answer.
Consider the Church during the period of the Civil War. We all know about the split between the North and the South, but there were churches whose clergy had different perspectives on slavery in the same city. While The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn was passionately opposed to slavery, The Rev. Joel Parker of The Fourth Ave. Presbyterian Church in New York, believed slavery was ordained by God. And there were a whole lot of people, clergy as well as lay, who just wanted to avoid the topic, because it was so upsetting and complicated. They did not know what to do or how to think.
And one of these tentative church members, by the name of Jeremiah Morse, suddenly found himself awakened by a knock at his door at 3 AM. It was a neighbor who had with him a mother and her two children, trying to escape’s slavery’s grasp through the Underground Railroad. They needed help---food and money, and the neighbor was asking for help on their behalf. They need more than I have, he said. Can you help them? And Jeremiah Morse, who had never been sure about slavery, suddenly at 3 AM, found his conscience stirred in a way it had never before been stirred. And so, began his work with the Underground Railroad. Years later he pondered what he would have done had it been the clear light of day when he was asked for help. In the dead darkness of night, I was suddenly haunted by the thought that this might be God knocking at my door, and so rather than shutting God out, I let God in.
In this morning’s lesson from Matthew, note well where Jesus is. While he made his disciples get into the boat, Jesus did not get in with them. He came to them on the water, reminding his disciples and us that the comfortable and the familiar are not always the places God meets us and calls us to be. So, in our lives today, as the church and as individuals, we can ask ourselves: where might be the places of discomfort and anxiety, where Jesus is calling us to go?
July 29, 2020
Dear Friends in Christ,
Not too long ago, I came across an interesting article in the journal,“The Christian Century,” which referred to a poll taken by the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Associated Press Center for Public Affairs. It found that 31% of Americans, who believe in God, feel strongly that Covid-19 is a sign from God telling humanity that it must change. The same number feel this sentiment somewhat, so 62% believe God is trying to tell us something. While evangelical Christians are more likely to believe this strongly (43%), Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (which includes us) come in at 28% feeling strongly with 33% of main-liners feeling this somewhat. But 37% of mainline Protestants, 35% of Roman Catholics and 58% of the religiously unaffiliated do not believe God is trying to tell humanity anything at all through this virus. So, consider: where do you stand? Do you think God is trying to tell us anything? And what might God be trying to say?
An Anglican priest at St. George’s Anglican Church in Ontario said her greatest fear is that Covid-19 will change nothing. It seems, she said, that after every major disaster there is this overwhelming feeling that things will become different. Many felt this way after 9/11, after all the mass shootings, the forest fires and hurricanes, believed to be a result of climate change, and most recently the killing of black men and women by police. So, the feeling goes, surely things will change after all this.
But will they? When six year old children were shot at Sandy Hook, many (including me) felt this was indeed the tipping point. I thought Americans just would not tolerate such innocence being brutally murdered, but we did and we do. And now with the Black Lives Matter Movement rising in temperature and tempo, we can rightly wonder the same thing. Will the call for change be sustained? Will it lead to real change, both in the heart and in the systems that keep racism alive? And what about the virus? What are we learning, and will that knowledge and understanding lead to significant change?
A Protestant minister, when referring to this time we are now living through, referred to it as apocalyptic. You might have heard this word mentioned in church, referring biblically to times of radical shift and change. The Book of Revelation is called apocalyptic, but not because it predicts what the end of history will look like. The word itself means an unveiling, a time when that which is hidden and out of sight becomes blatantly present and clear, so denial is much harder to achieve. But we human beings are masters of denial. As Freud once taught, denial is one of our most effective coping mechanisms, a tool of self-defense. And yet there are these times when even denial runs its course and is finished. When you are facing a pile of dead bodies now over 150,000, and the body count is disproportionately persons of color and poverty, it is harder to deny that this virus has something to do with how resources and health care are distributed in our nation. When you actually see on your television screen a man pinned down, crying out that he cannot breathe, while a knee is indifferently placed on his neck and then you witness the outrage, the the seething anger and resentment and the protests that go on day after day, it is hard to deny that something major is happening. We are seeing realities that have been among us for quite some time, yet we did not see, or did not want to see.
I do not believe for one instance that God sends disasters (like a virus) to teach us something, but that does not mean that when disaster strikes there are not lessons to be learned. God’s voice may speak to us in and through the disaster without God directly causing it to befall us. We are certainly seeing what happens when our society fails to invest in public health. Over the past few decades there has been a marked decrease in the number of people employed in public health and the amount of money so allocated, perhaps as much as a 25% reduction. Each year state and city health budgets are reduced, since unlike the federal budget, a deficit budget cannot be passed. And so, when a health crisis occurs, like Covid-19, what do we think is going to happen? Not enough masks, surgical gowns, not enough coordination of services with some hospitals, serving the indigent, completely overwhelmed, while other private, wealthy hospitals, serving the well insured, are nowhere near capacity.
One hardly needs to be a Christian to acknowledge all what is happening before our eyes, but the Christian doctrine of the tribune God reminds us that God is revealed and known in relationship, traditionally presented: God as Father, Son and Spirit. And it is this God, who shows us that we, made in God’s image, are also made for and in relationship. And when we deny this, we deny a central truth of our humanity, and the result of that denial is quite literally death. For months now people have been saying, “We are all in this together,” but the truth is that some people are more in it than others---the elderly, the poor, people of color. While we hang signs thanking essential workers, we are perfectly comfortable paying them paltry wages and denying them paid sick time and vacation. While God calls us to be together in relationship, we do a very good job of separating ourselves from one another. And for many people, there is no shame at all in this separation. In fact, this is the way they want it, since it preserves the privilege that is theirs (and ours) by human (not divine) design.
I am not sure what the 62% of believers actually think God is trying to teach humanity through this pandemic. As I said earlier, God can teach us something through an event without directly causing the event. If God indeed acts in history, as our faith proclaims, events can become the lens through which we see and hear God. And God may be reminding us that we are all creatures of this earth, who breathe air, drink water, cultivate the land that we can eat, work play and raise the next generations. So, are we going to do all this with greater justice, equity and compassion? Or are we going to continue on a path that preserves the privileges that so many take for granted?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends in Christ,
Not too long ago, I came across an interesting article in the journal,“The Christian Century,” which referred to a poll taken by the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Associated Press Center for Public Affairs. It found that 31% of Americans, who believe in God, feel strongly that Covid-19 is a sign from God telling humanity that it must change. The same number feel this sentiment somewhat, so 62% believe God is trying to tell us something. While evangelical Christians are more likely to believe this strongly (43%), Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (which includes us) come in at 28% feeling strongly with 33% of main-liners feeling this somewhat. But 37% of mainline Protestants, 35% of Roman Catholics and 58% of the religiously unaffiliated do not believe God is trying to tell humanity anything at all through this virus. So, consider: where do you stand? Do you think God is trying to tell us anything? And what might God be trying to say?
An Anglican priest at St. George’s Anglican Church in Ontario said her greatest fear is that Covid-19 will change nothing. It seems, she said, that after every major disaster there is this overwhelming feeling that things will become different. Many felt this way after 9/11, after all the mass shootings, the forest fires and hurricanes, believed to be a result of climate change, and most recently the killing of black men and women by police. So, the feeling goes, surely things will change after all this.
But will they? When six year old children were shot at Sandy Hook, many (including me) felt this was indeed the tipping point. I thought Americans just would not tolerate such innocence being brutally murdered, but we did and we do. And now with the Black Lives Matter Movement rising in temperature and tempo, we can rightly wonder the same thing. Will the call for change be sustained? Will it lead to real change, both in the heart and in the systems that keep racism alive? And what about the virus? What are we learning, and will that knowledge and understanding lead to significant change?
A Protestant minister, when referring to this time we are now living through, referred to it as apocalyptic. You might have heard this word mentioned in church, referring biblically to times of radical shift and change. The Book of Revelation is called apocalyptic, but not because it predicts what the end of history will look like. The word itself means an unveiling, a time when that which is hidden and out of sight becomes blatantly present and clear, so denial is much harder to achieve. But we human beings are masters of denial. As Freud once taught, denial is one of our most effective coping mechanisms, a tool of self-defense. And yet there are these times when even denial runs its course and is finished. When you are facing a pile of dead bodies now over 150,000, and the body count is disproportionately persons of color and poverty, it is harder to deny that this virus has something to do with how resources and health care are distributed in our nation. When you actually see on your television screen a man pinned down, crying out that he cannot breathe, while a knee is indifferently placed on his neck and then you witness the outrage, the the seething anger and resentment and the protests that go on day after day, it is hard to deny that something major is happening. We are seeing realities that have been among us for quite some time, yet we did not see, or did not want to see.
I do not believe for one instance that God sends disasters (like a virus) to teach us something, but that does not mean that when disaster strikes there are not lessons to be learned. God’s voice may speak to us in and through the disaster without God directly causing it to befall us. We are certainly seeing what happens when our society fails to invest in public health. Over the past few decades there has been a marked decrease in the number of people employed in public health and the amount of money so allocated, perhaps as much as a 25% reduction. Each year state and city health budgets are reduced, since unlike the federal budget, a deficit budget cannot be passed. And so, when a health crisis occurs, like Covid-19, what do we think is going to happen? Not enough masks, surgical gowns, not enough coordination of services with some hospitals, serving the indigent, completely overwhelmed, while other private, wealthy hospitals, serving the well insured, are nowhere near capacity.
One hardly needs to be a Christian to acknowledge all what is happening before our eyes, but the Christian doctrine of the tribune God reminds us that God is revealed and known in relationship, traditionally presented: God as Father, Son and Spirit. And it is this God, who shows us that we, made in God’s image, are also made for and in relationship. And when we deny this, we deny a central truth of our humanity, and the result of that denial is quite literally death. For months now people have been saying, “We are all in this together,” but the truth is that some people are more in it than others---the elderly, the poor, people of color. While we hang signs thanking essential workers, we are perfectly comfortable paying them paltry wages and denying them paid sick time and vacation. While God calls us to be together in relationship, we do a very good job of separating ourselves from one another. And for many people, there is no shame at all in this separation. In fact, this is the way they want it, since it preserves the privilege that is theirs (and ours) by human (not divine) design.
I am not sure what the 62% of believers actually think God is trying to teach humanity through this pandemic. As I said earlier, God can teach us something through an event without directly causing the event. If God indeed acts in history, as our faith proclaims, events can become the lens through which we see and hear God. And God may be reminding us that we are all creatures of this earth, who breathe air, drink water, cultivate the land that we can eat, work play and raise the next generations. So, are we going to do all this with greater justice, equity and compassion? Or are we going to continue on a path that preserves the privileges that so many take for granted?
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Challenging Words: Sin & Grace by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/26/2020
Matthew 13: 31-33,
Romans 8: 28-39
Have you ever had a profound experience of sin---not necessarily your own, but an experience that shook you to the smithy of your being, when you recognized that what you were witnessing or realizing was sin? I think for many of us the experience of witnessing George Floyd’s murder was such a time. I recall visiting the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and being overwhelmed not only by the sense of evil, but also sin---the recognition that real, flesh and blood human beings committed these brutal acts of atrocity upon other human beings. Now I want to ask you to consider something else, if you can. Have you ever had a profound sense of your own sinfulness---the recognition that you have deeply transgressed against the moral or divine law?
When I was 19 and a sophomore at the U. of Chicago, I became acquainted with a group of Roman Catholic seminarians, who were working on behalf of social justice issues. I was young, impressionable and very curious, so this one 25 year old seminarian, doing work in a Chicago jail, got me enough clearance to accompany him. I could not visit any prisoners, but I was able to see what the jail was like. Well, soon after entering we heard this screaming and crying, and as it turned out a young woman had just tried to hang herself, and was being dragged away, none too gently, I might add. Now there was simply no room in my very limited experience to integrate what I had just witnessed. I was shattered. But it was not the indifferent cruelty I had seen, but rather it was my own witness that tortured me. I felt like a voyeur; there, not out of compassion for the imprisoned, no, it was curiosity. Just who did I think I was, a spoiled brat, gawking at someone else’s pain and misfortune, because I was curious? For days I could neither sleep nor eat, so finally in desperation I went to speak with one of the university therapists, but we got nowhere. She could not understand what it was I felt guilty about, and so I abruptly terminated. But since I was still in great pain and turmoil, I went to speak with one of the University chaplains, who like me was Presbyterian.
He listened to me very carefully and rather than telling me I had done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of, he told me I was describing perfectly what it means to be in a state of sin. St Augustine could not have described it better than you. And then he gave me to read one of the greatest sermons of the 20th century, Paul Tillich’s You Are Accepted. I took it back to my apartment and read it over and over again. There is one particular part I found most helpful, and I would like to share it with you this morning:
We cannot transform our lives unless we allow them to be transformed by a stroke of grace. It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it will not happen so long as we think in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life. It strikes us when the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know.”
Those words for me were healing. I learned that sin is not so much about moral guilt and failing as it is about estrangement and separation. And I learned also that our consciousness of sin grows to the extent that we also experience grace. The Apostle Paul understood this, for he said many times, “where sin abounds, grace abounds even more”---meaning that without grace there is no recognition of sin. And indeed, when I visited the concentration camps, I was haunted and sickened by the realization that the Nazi High Command had kept copiously detailed records of their crimes, believing that history would praise them for murderous deeds. They neither recognized their sin, nor did they recognize grace. They inhabited what for them was a graceless world. They were completely blind.
When we consider Matthew’s gospel and the struggle of that community to find their way toward a new beginning, leading, they hoped to the Kingdom of Heaven, we can understand their concern for certain rules and regulations. The Jewish Christians still wanted to be Jews, following the ways of the law as a means to righteousness, and so they had a catalogue of do’s and don’ts, acts that in their world would have been treated as sin---failure, for example, to wash one’s hands in a prescribed fashion, or pay the required temple tax or offer the proper sacrifice. And then there were all the 613 commandments that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament, which also prescribed acts of charity toward the widow and the orphan. But the truth is that one can do all those things, be pious and generous and yet still feel alienated, still feel separated---divided from others, divided within the self and yes, divided from God, known not as some potentate, issuing harsh commands, but God as the ground of being-itself. And we can feel our alienation from God without being morally guilty of any act. As the theologian, Paul Tillich, once said, “Before sin is ever an act, it is a state—a state of being alienated and separated.”
The reason so many people have a problem with the word sin and the reason many churches like ours have done away with regular prayers of confession is because too many people think of sin as a list of don’ts, a list of moral failures about which they should hang their heads in shame. Too many Christians hear and learn the language of sin without first learning the language of grace, the conviction of God’s presence, love and mercy. When grace-filled language and experience are learned first, we come to recognize sin later as a denial or rejection of the grace that always surrounds us and from which finally there is no escape. This is what the Apostle Paul means in his Letter to the Romans, when he said, “nothing in all the creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.”
We all have had the experience of alienation and separation, even if we do not consciously recognize it. We know what it means to be separated from others, as I knew at 19, when I felt I had violated another life by being a prurient voyeur to unbearable pain. We know what it means to feel separation from loved ones when sometimes the demands they make upon us seem to wring us dry. We have, we fear, nothing more to give. And so, in self-defense, we withdraw, we separate. And who has not sometimes experienced the divisions within ourselves, the self-doubt and self-loathing, when we do not live up to our expectations. Who does not know the separation from God, from the Ground of Being, when we find ourselves wondering it there really is any purpose to life? Does anything truly matter beyond the boundaries of our own small worlds? Is there something, someone whom we can really trust? To answer No to any of those questions is, as Luther called it, the sin of unbelief. This is not about intellectual assent or understanding. It is about the attempt to remove oneself from the very ground and purpose of being-itself, which is God and to make of oneself the final measure of worth and meaning.
But in spite of all that failure and confusion there can be a moment of deep grace, when we are accepted by that which is greater than we. After such an experience, Paul Tillich preached in his great sermon, “we may not be better than before; we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment grace conquers sin and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience: no religious, moral or intellectual presupposition: nothing but acceptance.
Matthew 13: 31-33,
Romans 8: 28-39
Have you ever had a profound experience of sin---not necessarily your own, but an experience that shook you to the smithy of your being, when you recognized that what you were witnessing or realizing was sin? I think for many of us the experience of witnessing George Floyd’s murder was such a time. I recall visiting the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and being overwhelmed not only by the sense of evil, but also sin---the recognition that real, flesh and blood human beings committed these brutal acts of atrocity upon other human beings. Now I want to ask you to consider something else, if you can. Have you ever had a profound sense of your own sinfulness---the recognition that you have deeply transgressed against the moral or divine law?
When I was 19 and a sophomore at the U. of Chicago, I became acquainted with a group of Roman Catholic seminarians, who were working on behalf of social justice issues. I was young, impressionable and very curious, so this one 25 year old seminarian, doing work in a Chicago jail, got me enough clearance to accompany him. I could not visit any prisoners, but I was able to see what the jail was like. Well, soon after entering we heard this screaming and crying, and as it turned out a young woman had just tried to hang herself, and was being dragged away, none too gently, I might add. Now there was simply no room in my very limited experience to integrate what I had just witnessed. I was shattered. But it was not the indifferent cruelty I had seen, but rather it was my own witness that tortured me. I felt like a voyeur; there, not out of compassion for the imprisoned, no, it was curiosity. Just who did I think I was, a spoiled brat, gawking at someone else’s pain and misfortune, because I was curious? For days I could neither sleep nor eat, so finally in desperation I went to speak with one of the university therapists, but we got nowhere. She could not understand what it was I felt guilty about, and so I abruptly terminated. But since I was still in great pain and turmoil, I went to speak with one of the University chaplains, who like me was Presbyterian.
He listened to me very carefully and rather than telling me I had done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of, he told me I was describing perfectly what it means to be in a state of sin. St Augustine could not have described it better than you. And then he gave me to read one of the greatest sermons of the 20th century, Paul Tillich’s You Are Accepted. I took it back to my apartment and read it over and over again. There is one particular part I found most helpful, and I would like to share it with you this morning:
We cannot transform our lives unless we allow them to be transformed by a stroke of grace. It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it will not happen so long as we think in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life. It strikes us when the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know.”
Those words for me were healing. I learned that sin is not so much about moral guilt and failing as it is about estrangement and separation. And I learned also that our consciousness of sin grows to the extent that we also experience grace. The Apostle Paul understood this, for he said many times, “where sin abounds, grace abounds even more”---meaning that without grace there is no recognition of sin. And indeed, when I visited the concentration camps, I was haunted and sickened by the realization that the Nazi High Command had kept copiously detailed records of their crimes, believing that history would praise them for murderous deeds. They neither recognized their sin, nor did they recognize grace. They inhabited what for them was a graceless world. They were completely blind.
When we consider Matthew’s gospel and the struggle of that community to find their way toward a new beginning, leading, they hoped to the Kingdom of Heaven, we can understand their concern for certain rules and regulations. The Jewish Christians still wanted to be Jews, following the ways of the law as a means to righteousness, and so they had a catalogue of do’s and don’ts, acts that in their world would have been treated as sin---failure, for example, to wash one’s hands in a prescribed fashion, or pay the required temple tax or offer the proper sacrifice. And then there were all the 613 commandments that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament, which also prescribed acts of charity toward the widow and the orphan. But the truth is that one can do all those things, be pious and generous and yet still feel alienated, still feel separated---divided from others, divided within the self and yes, divided from God, known not as some potentate, issuing harsh commands, but God as the ground of being-itself. And we can feel our alienation from God without being morally guilty of any act. As the theologian, Paul Tillich, once said, “Before sin is ever an act, it is a state—a state of being alienated and separated.”
The reason so many people have a problem with the word sin and the reason many churches like ours have done away with regular prayers of confession is because too many people think of sin as a list of don’ts, a list of moral failures about which they should hang their heads in shame. Too many Christians hear and learn the language of sin without first learning the language of grace, the conviction of God’s presence, love and mercy. When grace-filled language and experience are learned first, we come to recognize sin later as a denial or rejection of the grace that always surrounds us and from which finally there is no escape. This is what the Apostle Paul means in his Letter to the Romans, when he said, “nothing in all the creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.”
We all have had the experience of alienation and separation, even if we do not consciously recognize it. We know what it means to be separated from others, as I knew at 19, when I felt I had violated another life by being a prurient voyeur to unbearable pain. We know what it means to feel separation from loved ones when sometimes the demands they make upon us seem to wring us dry. We have, we fear, nothing more to give. And so, in self-defense, we withdraw, we separate. And who has not sometimes experienced the divisions within ourselves, the self-doubt and self-loathing, when we do not live up to our expectations. Who does not know the separation from God, from the Ground of Being, when we find ourselves wondering it there really is any purpose to life? Does anything truly matter beyond the boundaries of our own small worlds? Is there something, someone whom we can really trust? To answer No to any of those questions is, as Luther called it, the sin of unbelief. This is not about intellectual assent or understanding. It is about the attempt to remove oneself from the very ground and purpose of being-itself, which is God and to make of oneself the final measure of worth and meaning.
But in spite of all that failure and confusion there can be a moment of deep grace, when we are accepted by that which is greater than we. After such an experience, Paul Tillich preached in his great sermon, “we may not be better than before; we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment grace conquers sin and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience: no religious, moral or intellectual presupposition: nothing but acceptance.
MIXED ALL TOGETHER by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/19/20
Matthew 13: 24-30; 36-43
Some months ago, right before the pandemic shut life down, one of my college friends called me about something that happened to her husband, which she thought I, as a minister, would find quite amusing. Her husband, Randy, when coming out of Home Depot, was approached by a man, who asked him a question “Are you wheat or are you a tare?” “What’s a tare?” Randy asked. “A weed,” said the man. “Don’t you know your bible?” “I guess not,” Randy replied, heading toward his car. “Well, what are you? Wheat or a weed?” Randy just shrugged his shoulders. The gentleman was in no mood for non-commitment, so he persisted. “Don’t you know what you are?” “I guess”, Randy replied, “I’m a mixture of both,” and then as quickly as he could, he made his way toward the car. Calling after him, the man yelled, “There is no mixing in God’s kingdom. You are either one or the other. "Well, in me everything is mixed together,” Randy insisted as he slammed the car door and drove away.
Religion (and it does not matter which one) often is not receptive to this mixing together, since so much effort is spent trying to sort everything out, including people. Religion has often been in the business of making distinctions and separations: the profane from the sacred, the pure from the impure, truth from falsehood, evil from good. And historically religious communities have often been concerned about who is really the true believer, the true follower, the true disciple, whose heart is turned toward God in the right or righteous way. And Matthew’s community was no different. The community out of which the Gospel of Matthew came was very much concerned with questions of purity. Who truly belonged to Christ and who should be cast out?
Now understand this gospel was not written by one of Jesus’ disciples, named Matthew. Most likely it was written sometime in the 80’s by someone, who probably used Matthew’s name to give credence and weight to his words. And this person, whoever he was, came out of a particular community, a particular context, the way we all come out of particular communities, expressive of certain values, concerns and interests. So biblical study is always concerned with context, with wanting to know what the overriding questions and concerns were of the community out of which the Gospel came.
Matthew’s world was a Jewish one, and so we see there a great deal of concern with law and righteousness. Jesus is portrayed in Matthew as the new Moses, who comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and the law Jesus brings is a higher, stricter one than the law Moses brought. But as Jewish as Matthew’s community was, it was also in the unique situation of being challenged from the outside by gentiles, who were also followers of Jesus. So, these Jewish followers of Jesus had to decide what to do with these gentile followers. Their mission ultimately became one of opening their doors to gentiles, but as you can imagine, this was not an easy or comfortable thing to do. It meant that their way of being religious was in transition. And transition is never easy, because it forces people to ask questions about their relationship to the past while forging ahead to an unsettled and unknown future---not unlike what we are now going through in our nation, concerning issues of racial justice. And because of Matthew’s unique situation, where past and future were meeting and colliding, this Gospel is very much concerned with the question of fulfillment. How is the promise God made to the Jewish people being fulfilled? That’s what Matthew’s community wanted to know.
They believed the promise made to Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation; they knew about the glorious past of King David and Solomon, when the northern and southern kingdoms were united, and they looked to a Messiah to bring back that glory. But Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime around the year 80 or 85, ten years or so after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70, so from where these Jews stood, things looked very different from the original promise. Not only was there no united kingdom and kingship, but their Messiah did not look like a conventional Messiah. And now gentiles were moving into the community, becoming followers of Jesus Christ while many Jews were rejecting Jesus.
So, what was the Matthean community to make of this new situation? The old distinctions between pure and impure simply could not hold in this new world. The coming of God’s Kingdom in which everything appeared to be mixed up was very different from the Kingdom they had expected in which everything would be separated. And so, the parable of the wheat and the weeds is an expression of this concern. Not really so different from our situation today. Our nation does not look like it did at its founding, nor does it even look like it did 40, 50, 60 years ago.
But the question put to us by the parable is not the one addressed to Randy: Are you a weed or wheat? The parable makes clear that the servants do not posses the necessary discerning capacity to answer that question. Oh, it is true that the servants say they can see the weeds, but their job is not to pull those weeds out. That is left for the judge to do. God in this parable is the one who sews the seed, knowing that bad seed will also grow, but notice that even God does not rush to judgment. Even God waits to see what happens. So, the question is not what you are now---a weed or wheat, but under whose reign do you labor? Under whose watch do you want to grow? To rush to judgment, to be so ready to condemn by pulling out the weeds before the harvest only compromises the harvest, only harms what is to come in the future. To rush to judgment, in fact, is to be on the side of the enemy, whose desire it is to grow division and death. The enemy plants the weeds and the temptation is to rush in with the cleavers to immediately remove what looks like weeds. But no, time and patience are required that the harvest may come to its full fruition.
When we put ourselves into Matthew’s world, we realize what a risk they took. The usual categories of pure and impure, clean and unclean, inside and outside, acceptable and unacceptable were breaking down, swept away by a future into which gentiles were coming. Jews and gentiles together in a new community! Who would have expected it? Who would have even wanted it? And yet, there it was---contrary to all expectations!
And this too is the point---contrary to our expectations, the future dawns in a new and different way. We so often think we see and understand what is happening, but our vision and our understanding are partial at best, and very likely distorted. The weeds in this parable were something called bearded darnel, which in the early stages of growth look just like wheat and grow just like wheat, but in reality are poisonous. And we can well imagine that some of the early Jewish followers of Jesus, seeing gentiles coming into their community, had the feeling that just maybe these gentiles would prove to be poison. There had always been these strict religious rules in Judaism about sorting and separating out: Jew and Gentile were not to mix, at least not religiously! So, what is happening? Does this mean that these gentiles are really poison, and in the end will be sorted out---thrown into the fire?
Well, I suppose some were tempted to come to that conclusion, confident they knew who and where the weeds were. But Matthew’s Gospel does something very interesting. It proclaims that God’s Kingdom is not only future but also present. And that means that the kingdom is present even when everything is all mixed up together, even when the wheat and weeds grow together. Maybe this isn’t how we think God should work. Maybe we think we would be a lot happier if God would do something right now about all the weeds in our midst.
I was thinking about this very question when I came upon an article in the Christian Century written by the cousin of Dep Middleton, who was the minister of Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, where on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a bible study. He entered as a stranger and was treated as a guest. Though he was white, and they were black, they did not attach stereotypes to him, but simply shared with him fellowship, prayer, worship and study. Dep, seated next to him, shared her bible, and she was apparently the first to be shot. We hardly know how to think about such evil, and certainly this passage from Matthew does not attempt to explain it. It simply says that this is the way the world is, and God’s kingdom, which is future but also present, is right in the midst of wheat and weeds growing together.
And there is something else to consider, which, I admit is a bit disturbing. The story gives us no clear criteria for judging between the wheat and the weeds. Only God truly knows what makes for goodness or for evil. Only God can judge. Of course, in this world and in our daily lives we must make all kinds of judgments; we have to make decisions about people, including their motivations and abilities. But these are always proximate decisions, never ultimate or final ones. Judging Dylann Roof guilty of murder does not mean he is unworthy of God’s grace. We judge as human beings and should never allow ourselves into believing that we see as God sees or know as God knows.
Matthew 13: 24-30; 36-43
Some months ago, right before the pandemic shut life down, one of my college friends called me about something that happened to her husband, which she thought I, as a minister, would find quite amusing. Her husband, Randy, when coming out of Home Depot, was approached by a man, who asked him a question “Are you wheat or are you a tare?” “What’s a tare?” Randy asked. “A weed,” said the man. “Don’t you know your bible?” “I guess not,” Randy replied, heading toward his car. “Well, what are you? Wheat or a weed?” Randy just shrugged his shoulders. The gentleman was in no mood for non-commitment, so he persisted. “Don’t you know what you are?” “I guess”, Randy replied, “I’m a mixture of both,” and then as quickly as he could, he made his way toward the car. Calling after him, the man yelled, “There is no mixing in God’s kingdom. You are either one or the other. "Well, in me everything is mixed together,” Randy insisted as he slammed the car door and drove away.
Religion (and it does not matter which one) often is not receptive to this mixing together, since so much effort is spent trying to sort everything out, including people. Religion has often been in the business of making distinctions and separations: the profane from the sacred, the pure from the impure, truth from falsehood, evil from good. And historically religious communities have often been concerned about who is really the true believer, the true follower, the true disciple, whose heart is turned toward God in the right or righteous way. And Matthew’s community was no different. The community out of which the Gospel of Matthew came was very much concerned with questions of purity. Who truly belonged to Christ and who should be cast out?
Now understand this gospel was not written by one of Jesus’ disciples, named Matthew. Most likely it was written sometime in the 80’s by someone, who probably used Matthew’s name to give credence and weight to his words. And this person, whoever he was, came out of a particular community, a particular context, the way we all come out of particular communities, expressive of certain values, concerns and interests. So biblical study is always concerned with context, with wanting to know what the overriding questions and concerns were of the community out of which the Gospel came.
Matthew’s world was a Jewish one, and so we see there a great deal of concern with law and righteousness. Jesus is portrayed in Matthew as the new Moses, who comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and the law Jesus brings is a higher, stricter one than the law Moses brought. But as Jewish as Matthew’s community was, it was also in the unique situation of being challenged from the outside by gentiles, who were also followers of Jesus. So, these Jewish followers of Jesus had to decide what to do with these gentile followers. Their mission ultimately became one of opening their doors to gentiles, but as you can imagine, this was not an easy or comfortable thing to do. It meant that their way of being religious was in transition. And transition is never easy, because it forces people to ask questions about their relationship to the past while forging ahead to an unsettled and unknown future---not unlike what we are now going through in our nation, concerning issues of racial justice. And because of Matthew’s unique situation, where past and future were meeting and colliding, this Gospel is very much concerned with the question of fulfillment. How is the promise God made to the Jewish people being fulfilled? That’s what Matthew’s community wanted to know.
They believed the promise made to Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation; they knew about the glorious past of King David and Solomon, when the northern and southern kingdoms were united, and they looked to a Messiah to bring back that glory. But Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime around the year 80 or 85, ten years or so after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70, so from where these Jews stood, things looked very different from the original promise. Not only was there no united kingdom and kingship, but their Messiah did not look like a conventional Messiah. And now gentiles were moving into the community, becoming followers of Jesus Christ while many Jews were rejecting Jesus.
So, what was the Matthean community to make of this new situation? The old distinctions between pure and impure simply could not hold in this new world. The coming of God’s Kingdom in which everything appeared to be mixed up was very different from the Kingdom they had expected in which everything would be separated. And so, the parable of the wheat and the weeds is an expression of this concern. Not really so different from our situation today. Our nation does not look like it did at its founding, nor does it even look like it did 40, 50, 60 years ago.
But the question put to us by the parable is not the one addressed to Randy: Are you a weed or wheat? The parable makes clear that the servants do not posses the necessary discerning capacity to answer that question. Oh, it is true that the servants say they can see the weeds, but their job is not to pull those weeds out. That is left for the judge to do. God in this parable is the one who sews the seed, knowing that bad seed will also grow, but notice that even God does not rush to judgment. Even God waits to see what happens. So, the question is not what you are now---a weed or wheat, but under whose reign do you labor? Under whose watch do you want to grow? To rush to judgment, to be so ready to condemn by pulling out the weeds before the harvest only compromises the harvest, only harms what is to come in the future. To rush to judgment, in fact, is to be on the side of the enemy, whose desire it is to grow division and death. The enemy plants the weeds and the temptation is to rush in with the cleavers to immediately remove what looks like weeds. But no, time and patience are required that the harvest may come to its full fruition.
When we put ourselves into Matthew’s world, we realize what a risk they took. The usual categories of pure and impure, clean and unclean, inside and outside, acceptable and unacceptable were breaking down, swept away by a future into which gentiles were coming. Jews and gentiles together in a new community! Who would have expected it? Who would have even wanted it? And yet, there it was---contrary to all expectations!
And this too is the point---contrary to our expectations, the future dawns in a new and different way. We so often think we see and understand what is happening, but our vision and our understanding are partial at best, and very likely distorted. The weeds in this parable were something called bearded darnel, which in the early stages of growth look just like wheat and grow just like wheat, but in reality are poisonous. And we can well imagine that some of the early Jewish followers of Jesus, seeing gentiles coming into their community, had the feeling that just maybe these gentiles would prove to be poison. There had always been these strict religious rules in Judaism about sorting and separating out: Jew and Gentile were not to mix, at least not religiously! So, what is happening? Does this mean that these gentiles are really poison, and in the end will be sorted out---thrown into the fire?
Well, I suppose some were tempted to come to that conclusion, confident they knew who and where the weeds were. But Matthew’s Gospel does something very interesting. It proclaims that God’s Kingdom is not only future but also present. And that means that the kingdom is present even when everything is all mixed up together, even when the wheat and weeds grow together. Maybe this isn’t how we think God should work. Maybe we think we would be a lot happier if God would do something right now about all the weeds in our midst.
I was thinking about this very question when I came upon an article in the Christian Century written by the cousin of Dep Middleton, who was the minister of Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, where on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a bible study. He entered as a stranger and was treated as a guest. Though he was white, and they were black, they did not attach stereotypes to him, but simply shared with him fellowship, prayer, worship and study. Dep, seated next to him, shared her bible, and she was apparently the first to be shot. We hardly know how to think about such evil, and certainly this passage from Matthew does not attempt to explain it. It simply says that this is the way the world is, and God’s kingdom, which is future but also present, is right in the midst of wheat and weeds growing together.
And there is something else to consider, which, I admit is a bit disturbing. The story gives us no clear criteria for judging between the wheat and the weeds. Only God truly knows what makes for goodness or for evil. Only God can judge. Of course, in this world and in our daily lives we must make all kinds of judgments; we have to make decisions about people, including their motivations and abilities. But these are always proximate decisions, never ultimate or final ones. Judging Dylann Roof guilty of murder does not mean he is unworthy of God’s grace. We judge as human beings and should never allow ourselves into believing that we see as God sees or know as God knows.
Kindness (Reflection Letter)
July 8, 2020
As many of you know, I lost a friend last Friday night. She had been a member of one of my former churches and later I became her conservator. Over the past ten years, we had become quite close. Though she had Covid-19, she was declared cured, but a few weeks later, she became septic and all her systems began to shut down. I had to make the hard decision with the help and support of a wonderful doctor to discontinue medical treatment. Anyway, after arriving home from the hospital with her two bags in my hand, I opened one up to find a t-shirt with these words on it, “Make America Kind Again.” I could not help but feel her last message to me concerned kindness, and given the fact that the staff at Hartford Hospital showed me incredible kindness as I sat with Judy, while all the machines and medication were turned off, the quality of kindness was certainly on my mind. When I left the hospital, I told the nurses how much I appreciated their kindness, shown to me as well as to Judy, who although comatose, was treated with great respect, tenderness and kindness.
And then on Sunday, my dear friend and colleague, Carolyn Young, whom many of you know, since she has preached here a number of times, preached a sermon on kindness. So, yes, kindness was definitely the message of the week.
Carolyn began her sermon with a story about the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, an Arab-American, who wrote a poem called, Kindness. The poet had only been married a week, when on her honeymoon in India, her husband and she were robbed on a bus, where one of their fellow riders was murdered, his body cruelly deposited on the side of the road. Waiting for her husband to return with some money, she was suddenly inspired to write these words:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Indeed, kindness makes its most powerful imprint on us, when we have lost something or someone and suddenly without expecting it or even looking for it, we are found by someone, who reaches out in compassion and kindness. It is when you feel the loss and the emptiness that kindness rushes in to fill the lonely and forlorn space. Kindness is that quality which, when suddenly freely offered, feels like a gift that keeps on giving. As it says in the last line of the poem, kindness can go with us “everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.”
There are times when acts of kindness are ignored and even rejected. Sometimes people are in such an angry or even hateful place they cannot accept the gift. So full of something that threatens to consume them, they cannot make room for the kindness being offered. All we can do is offer; we cannot force anyone to accept.
As a minister I have seen relationships ripped apart, because someone could not move outside the circle of his or her anger long enough to see that something genuinely kind was being offered. Sometimes the past has this ugly power to take over the present and then the future, holding time itself in its thrall, refusing to give way to genuine kindness when it is offered.
I remember so well this woman whose 10 year old son was hit and killed by a car. It was not the driver’s fault; the boy, chasing a baseball, ran right in front of the car, and the driver, slamming on her breaks, could not stop the car before it made lethal contact. While many people offered help and support, the mother would accept nothing. She was too angry and too grief stricken to accept the various kindnesses being offered, and the anger endured for years. She became a prisoner of her anger, telling her minister that she had lived so long with her anger, she did not know how to let it go. She admitted she did not want to let it go, so familiar a companion it had become. She had indeed lost someone precious; she knew how desolate the landscape was. She knew the deep sorrow and the pain, and according to the poet that is the time when “only kindness can make sense anymore.” So, when a neighbor suddenly lost her 16 year old son in a car accident, this sorrowing, angry mother found herself reaching out in kindness to another hurting human being. And then she discovered her own sorrow strangely and warmly embraced by the kindness that has the capacity to bind sorrowing human beings together.
Never underestimate the power of kindness. It can change and heal the world.
July 8, 2020
As many of you know, I lost a friend last Friday night. She had been a member of one of my former churches and later I became her conservator. Over the past ten years, we had become quite close. Though she had Covid-19, she was declared cured, but a few weeks later, she became septic and all her systems began to shut down. I had to make the hard decision with the help and support of a wonderful doctor to discontinue medical treatment. Anyway, after arriving home from the hospital with her two bags in my hand, I opened one up to find a t-shirt with these words on it, “Make America Kind Again.” I could not help but feel her last message to me concerned kindness, and given the fact that the staff at Hartford Hospital showed me incredible kindness as I sat with Judy, while all the machines and medication were turned off, the quality of kindness was certainly on my mind. When I left the hospital, I told the nurses how much I appreciated their kindness, shown to me as well as to Judy, who although comatose, was treated with great respect, tenderness and kindness.
And then on Sunday, my dear friend and colleague, Carolyn Young, whom many of you know, since she has preached here a number of times, preached a sermon on kindness. So, yes, kindness was definitely the message of the week.
Carolyn began her sermon with a story about the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, an Arab-American, who wrote a poem called, Kindness. The poet had only been married a week, when on her honeymoon in India, her husband and she were robbed on a bus, where one of their fellow riders was murdered, his body cruelly deposited on the side of the road. Waiting for her husband to return with some money, she was suddenly inspired to write these words:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Indeed, kindness makes its most powerful imprint on us, when we have lost something or someone and suddenly without expecting it or even looking for it, we are found by someone, who reaches out in compassion and kindness. It is when you feel the loss and the emptiness that kindness rushes in to fill the lonely and forlorn space. Kindness is that quality which, when suddenly freely offered, feels like a gift that keeps on giving. As it says in the last line of the poem, kindness can go with us “everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.”
There are times when acts of kindness are ignored and even rejected. Sometimes people are in such an angry or even hateful place they cannot accept the gift. So full of something that threatens to consume them, they cannot make room for the kindness being offered. All we can do is offer; we cannot force anyone to accept.
As a minister I have seen relationships ripped apart, because someone could not move outside the circle of his or her anger long enough to see that something genuinely kind was being offered. Sometimes the past has this ugly power to take over the present and then the future, holding time itself in its thrall, refusing to give way to genuine kindness when it is offered.
I remember so well this woman whose 10 year old son was hit and killed by a car. It was not the driver’s fault; the boy, chasing a baseball, ran right in front of the car, and the driver, slamming on her breaks, could not stop the car before it made lethal contact. While many people offered help and support, the mother would accept nothing. She was too angry and too grief stricken to accept the various kindnesses being offered, and the anger endured for years. She became a prisoner of her anger, telling her minister that she had lived so long with her anger, she did not know how to let it go. She admitted she did not want to let it go, so familiar a companion it had become. She had indeed lost someone precious; she knew how desolate the landscape was. She knew the deep sorrow and the pain, and according to the poet that is the time when “only kindness can make sense anymore.” So, when a neighbor suddenly lost her 16 year old son in a car accident, this sorrowing, angry mother found herself reaching out in kindness to another hurting human being. And then she discovered her own sorrow strangely and warmly embraced by the kindness that has the capacity to bind sorrowing human beings together.
Never underestimate the power of kindness. It can change and heal the world.
THE WASTEFUL SOWER by: Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/12/20
Her name was Alice, and all she wanted, she said, was a blue gown. Alice was around 80 years old, and for 40 years she had been a patient at the state mental hospital, where I worked. She had lived there so long in the days before effective medication, which no one really believed she could make it in the outside world, even with the best community support. And so, like many others, there she stayed and lived, or as some would say, existed, waiting to die. While many patients showed no interest in anything except the cigarettes they could smoke three times a day, Alice had a passion---a blue gown. That’s the only subject she would ever talk about, describing details of this blue chiffon dress with dark blue forget me not flowers, scattered all over it. “That’s all I want,” she would say, and then she would describe the gown again and again and again. There were plenty of times I tried to avoid Alice, because I simply could not bear to hear about the gown one more time, but sometimes I could not escape. If she saw me, she would gently take my hand and lead me into her room and show me a chair, where she expected me to sit. And then she would begin to talk about the blue gown.
“What’s this about a blue gown?” I asked the Roman Catholic priest, Father Dan, who had been there for 18 years. “As long as I can remember, Alice has talked about that gown,” he said. “Maybe it is something she wore when she was young.”
I was very fond of Father Dan. He had this infectious laugh and a twinkle in his eyes to match. I admired him for his ability to accept everyone as a child of God. He was a kind and patient man, far more patient than I, since I had seen him many times talk with Alice, and when she would go on and on about her blue gown, he would tell her how lovely the gown would look on her and how the color would perfectly match her beautiful blue eyes.
Father Dan, I suspected, was a bit of a renegade. He would not talk much about his life as a priest, but we all knew that most of the time, the priests who ended up assigned to a mental hospital had either done something displeasing to the hierarchy, or were simply too old or too weak to work in a parish. The so called “best and brightest” were never given such assignments. Yet it was obvious to anyone who bothered to talk with Father Dan that he was among the elite with a PhD from Notre Dame and the ability to play classical piano and read and speak fluently four different languages. So, he must have done something, I concluded. Why else would he be here?
I asked him how he came to work in the hospital, but all he would say was they couldn’t find anyone else. “Most priests would dread this sort of assignment, he said, “but I love it.” And indeed, he did. He loved the patients and he also loved the staff, and everyone in turn loved Father Dan. I had only been working at the hospital for a few months, when he approached me and said, “Why don’t you join me for the service today. I am celebrating the Eucharist, and I would love to have you help.” I was shocked; I mean Protestants were not welcome at the table. But there I was, not only assisting him, but also saying the words of institution as well as the prayer of consecration. When I acted surprised, he simply said. “This is Christ’s table, not Rome’s. Well, he was right, I thought. And this, I concluded, was what must have gotten him into trouble with his bishop. He did not follow the rules.
One Wednesday afternoon Father Dan was presiding over communion, and the text for the day was the parable of the sower from Matthew. He began by talking about parables, how Jesus taught using these stories that made people think and see in a new way. But not everyone sees, he said, and not everyone wants to understand, he continued. Some people just prefer to close their eyes and see everything with their own little minds. It’s hard, he continued, to let yourself be open to a new way, and Jesus knew and knows how hard it is. He knew that many people cannot do it or will not do it. They will listen, but never understand; they will look, but never perceive.
Now as his sermon went on, it was quite obvious that Father Dan was preaching beyond the capacity of the patients. I mean most of them hardly spoke; most of them had this blank, institutionalized stare. Now people of all faiths or even no faith would come to Father Dan’s services simply because it was something to do, and so it was quite a mix of people--- Protestants, Catholics and even Jewish patients who would gather for the service. And also, staff would come, and on this particular day there was another priest sitting in the back of the chapel.
Father Dan pointed out in his sermon that the sower who went out to plant his seeds did no preparatory work. “If you are going to plant so you can have a good harvest,” Father Dan said, you have to prepare. He told us how he had grown up on a farm. “And let me tell you,” he said, “farmers don’t just go out and carelessly scatter their seed the way this inept farmer did. No, they don’t. They first remove rocks and weeds. They plow the soil into neat and straight furrows. And then ever so carefully they put the seed in the furrows and cover it up, spacing them about eight inches apart. “So,” he asked, “is it any wonder that this harvest was not exactly a stellar one. After all, most of the seed was wasted, thrown by the roadside, where birds would eat it, or thrown into a clump of weeds, where it was choked. Only some of this seed came to harvest---maybe only 10%, maybe even less. And yet Jesus thinks this is a good harvest! Not in the world I grew up in; not even in the world we live in now. But in God’s world, there is no such thing as waste. God throws the seed everywhere. There’s no place unworthy of seed, no place where God’s word cannot be spread. Maybe it won’t grow, but who really knows, who really can tell, why or how or when the seed will take root and blossom.”
Come now, he said, for all things are ready. This is Christ’s table, the table where the bread and wine are God’s gifts to all God’s people. And so, all God’s people came forward, a cast of sundry characters, each with her own story, each with his own pain, and they received---including Jonah, the old Jewish man, wearing a yarmulke on top of his head. Now this would bother none of us here; we celebrate an open table, where all are invited. But Father Dan was a Roman Catholic, and this is simply not the way of Rome.
Well, in less than a month’s time, Father Dan was gone. We did not know the details, but he had been visited a number of times by a priest, whom we suspected had reported that Father Dan crossed lines no priest is supposed to cross. Then some months later a package arrived at the hospital, addressed to Alice, and when the staff opened it up, there it was, the most beautiful blue gown you could imagine, scattered with forget-me-nots. And yes, the blue did match Alice’s blue eyes, which even decades of illness had not dimmed. And in the box, along with the gown was the score to the song---Alice Blue Gown. Of course, my grandmother used to sing it when I was a little girl, but I had failed to make the connection. “Til it wilted, I wore it; I’ll always adore it, my sweet little Alice blue gown!” There was no note or card, but we all knew it was Father Dan who had the gown sewn. And when Alice saw it, she hugged the dress and cried, and when she died a year later, she was buried in her beautiful Alice blue gown.
Seeds get scattered everywhere, and some of those seeds look to us as if they are wasted, but it is not for us to decide on the waste. Only God can judge that, and so we as Christians, we as the church should sometimes dare to scatter with abandon, like the wasteful sower in our story. There are so many people, who would never have taken the time to pay attention to Alice, never would have thought to have a gown sewn for this afflicted, yet grace filled woman? We never know if, how, when or where the seeds we scatter will take root and blossom. But when they do, what a surprise, what a mystery, what grace!
Now play Alice Blue Gown
Her name was Alice, and all she wanted, she said, was a blue gown. Alice was around 80 years old, and for 40 years she had been a patient at the state mental hospital, where I worked. She had lived there so long in the days before effective medication, which no one really believed she could make it in the outside world, even with the best community support. And so, like many others, there she stayed and lived, or as some would say, existed, waiting to die. While many patients showed no interest in anything except the cigarettes they could smoke three times a day, Alice had a passion---a blue gown. That’s the only subject she would ever talk about, describing details of this blue chiffon dress with dark blue forget me not flowers, scattered all over it. “That’s all I want,” she would say, and then she would describe the gown again and again and again. There were plenty of times I tried to avoid Alice, because I simply could not bear to hear about the gown one more time, but sometimes I could not escape. If she saw me, she would gently take my hand and lead me into her room and show me a chair, where she expected me to sit. And then she would begin to talk about the blue gown.
“What’s this about a blue gown?” I asked the Roman Catholic priest, Father Dan, who had been there for 18 years. “As long as I can remember, Alice has talked about that gown,” he said. “Maybe it is something she wore when she was young.”
I was very fond of Father Dan. He had this infectious laugh and a twinkle in his eyes to match. I admired him for his ability to accept everyone as a child of God. He was a kind and patient man, far more patient than I, since I had seen him many times talk with Alice, and when she would go on and on about her blue gown, he would tell her how lovely the gown would look on her and how the color would perfectly match her beautiful blue eyes.
Father Dan, I suspected, was a bit of a renegade. He would not talk much about his life as a priest, but we all knew that most of the time, the priests who ended up assigned to a mental hospital had either done something displeasing to the hierarchy, or were simply too old or too weak to work in a parish. The so called “best and brightest” were never given such assignments. Yet it was obvious to anyone who bothered to talk with Father Dan that he was among the elite with a PhD from Notre Dame and the ability to play classical piano and read and speak fluently four different languages. So, he must have done something, I concluded. Why else would he be here?
I asked him how he came to work in the hospital, but all he would say was they couldn’t find anyone else. “Most priests would dread this sort of assignment, he said, “but I love it.” And indeed, he did. He loved the patients and he also loved the staff, and everyone in turn loved Father Dan. I had only been working at the hospital for a few months, when he approached me and said, “Why don’t you join me for the service today. I am celebrating the Eucharist, and I would love to have you help.” I was shocked; I mean Protestants were not welcome at the table. But there I was, not only assisting him, but also saying the words of institution as well as the prayer of consecration. When I acted surprised, he simply said. “This is Christ’s table, not Rome’s. Well, he was right, I thought. And this, I concluded, was what must have gotten him into trouble with his bishop. He did not follow the rules.
One Wednesday afternoon Father Dan was presiding over communion, and the text for the day was the parable of the sower from Matthew. He began by talking about parables, how Jesus taught using these stories that made people think and see in a new way. But not everyone sees, he said, and not everyone wants to understand, he continued. Some people just prefer to close their eyes and see everything with their own little minds. It’s hard, he continued, to let yourself be open to a new way, and Jesus knew and knows how hard it is. He knew that many people cannot do it or will not do it. They will listen, but never understand; they will look, but never perceive.
Now as his sermon went on, it was quite obvious that Father Dan was preaching beyond the capacity of the patients. I mean most of them hardly spoke; most of them had this blank, institutionalized stare. Now people of all faiths or even no faith would come to Father Dan’s services simply because it was something to do, and so it was quite a mix of people--- Protestants, Catholics and even Jewish patients who would gather for the service. And also, staff would come, and on this particular day there was another priest sitting in the back of the chapel.
Father Dan pointed out in his sermon that the sower who went out to plant his seeds did no preparatory work. “If you are going to plant so you can have a good harvest,” Father Dan said, you have to prepare. He told us how he had grown up on a farm. “And let me tell you,” he said, “farmers don’t just go out and carelessly scatter their seed the way this inept farmer did. No, they don’t. They first remove rocks and weeds. They plow the soil into neat and straight furrows. And then ever so carefully they put the seed in the furrows and cover it up, spacing them about eight inches apart. “So,” he asked, “is it any wonder that this harvest was not exactly a stellar one. After all, most of the seed was wasted, thrown by the roadside, where birds would eat it, or thrown into a clump of weeds, where it was choked. Only some of this seed came to harvest---maybe only 10%, maybe even less. And yet Jesus thinks this is a good harvest! Not in the world I grew up in; not even in the world we live in now. But in God’s world, there is no such thing as waste. God throws the seed everywhere. There’s no place unworthy of seed, no place where God’s word cannot be spread. Maybe it won’t grow, but who really knows, who really can tell, why or how or when the seed will take root and blossom.”
Come now, he said, for all things are ready. This is Christ’s table, the table where the bread and wine are God’s gifts to all God’s people. And so, all God’s people came forward, a cast of sundry characters, each with her own story, each with his own pain, and they received---including Jonah, the old Jewish man, wearing a yarmulke on top of his head. Now this would bother none of us here; we celebrate an open table, where all are invited. But Father Dan was a Roman Catholic, and this is simply not the way of Rome.
Well, in less than a month’s time, Father Dan was gone. We did not know the details, but he had been visited a number of times by a priest, whom we suspected had reported that Father Dan crossed lines no priest is supposed to cross. Then some months later a package arrived at the hospital, addressed to Alice, and when the staff opened it up, there it was, the most beautiful blue gown you could imagine, scattered with forget-me-nots. And yes, the blue did match Alice’s blue eyes, which even decades of illness had not dimmed. And in the box, along with the gown was the score to the song---Alice Blue Gown. Of course, my grandmother used to sing it when I was a little girl, but I had failed to make the connection. “Til it wilted, I wore it; I’ll always adore it, my sweet little Alice blue gown!” There was no note or card, but we all knew it was Father Dan who had the gown sewn. And when Alice saw it, she hugged the dress and cried, and when she died a year later, she was buried in her beautiful Alice blue gown.
Seeds get scattered everywhere, and some of those seeds look to us as if they are wasted, but it is not for us to decide on the waste. Only God can judge that, and so we as Christians, we as the church should sometimes dare to scatter with abandon, like the wasteful sower in our story. There are so many people, who would never have taken the time to pay attention to Alice, never would have thought to have a gown sewn for this afflicted, yet grace filled woman? We never know if, how, when or where the seeds we scatter will take root and blossom. But when they do, what a surprise, what a mystery, what grace!
Now play Alice Blue Gown
July 2, 2020, (Acceptance of Suffering Weekly Reflection)
Dear Friends,
This week the news has not been good, at least concerning the virus. Though our state has been doing quite well, we are seeing the virus rage across the South, Southwest as well as California. One of my sons has a colleague in Florida, who wanted to know if most people in Connecticut were wearing masks. “Yes,” Ashley replied. “We wear them in stores, offices, any place, where other people are gathered.” “Wow!” His friend was shocked. “Hardly anyone is wearing them here,” he intoned. So, is it any surprise that in certain parts of the country the virus is spreading? But as Dr. Fauci reminded us this week, no part of the country is safe as long as some parts are experiencing exponential growth. We are indeed part of a larger whole and though our federal system allows states to make their own rules and regulations, our state borders are porous to people as well as to germs.
With this reality in mind I recall something I read in the New York Times Arts section in mid-June. It is hardly something I would have expected to find there. The article was named: Bad Things Happen: Accepting It is Good. The gist of the article was that although we should not surrender to pessimism, it is important to make room for suffering. And we have certainly seen a great deal of it lately. Not only is the virus holding us captive, but also, we have seen the ugly blatancy of racism and the death it spews out, not to mention the economic catastrophe that has cost Americans 40 million jobs, the greatest loss since the Great Depression. We are facing tremendous challenges, and those challenges are resulting in terrible suffering for many people.
Accepting that “bad things happen” does not mean there is no room for protest and fight. Of course, we are called to use our resources to help those in need as we also take a very hard look at some of the systemic injustices in our society, which has meant that the load of suffering is unevenly distributed. Not only do Black and Brown people suffer more at the hands of law enforcement than do White people, but also the virus has afflicted and killed them in greater numbers. This is the reality we all need to face.
But there is something else that needs facing. Too many people---especially people of privilege---seem to think they should be immune to suffering. Though we can certainly make a strong case that a poor national response has led to greater suffering and death than needed to be, yet even a robust response would not have completely knocked the virus out. We still would have to confront the raw fact that we cannot control as much as we want to control. Because we have seen so much medical progress in our era, we seem to think we should be able to solve any problem we are called to face. A vaccine against the virus is very likely, but there is no vaccine against all suffering.
The New York Times article quoted a philosophy professor, Agnes Callard, at the University of Chicago, who referred to the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who turned ethical thought around when he put at its center pain and suffering rather than pleasure and well being. While Schopenhauer is known for his pessimism, one of those people who sees the glass as half empty rather than half full, he nevertheless reminds us of an important truth: life is indeed punctuated by joy and sorrow, defeat and victory, randomness as well as planned intention. And we are not guaranteed that the distribution will be equitable or even comprehensible! While we can and should work for greater justice in the distribution of suffering, this does not mean we can correct for all suffering. And accepting that reality is a form of wisdom. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes basically embraced this perspective as did the Buddha, who taught suffering was the basic condition of life.
Professor Callard also said that some forms of suffering should be embraced, and she puts love in that category. “Part of what makes human life good is loving things that can be taken away from us,” she said. “You can live a smaller, more solitary life that has less pain in it. But there isn’t a way to fully love someone and care about them while shielding yourself from the pain of their loss.”
We can live as if pain is always an insult to pleasure and darkness a refutation of the light, but there is another way to understand and even appreciate the contrast. We can see these contrasts as giving to life its depth and meaning. When we look at a great painting by Vermeer or Rembrandt or the Impressionists, whom so many adore for the brightness of the colors, it is the play of light and dark, the appearance of shadows that allows the beauty of the painting to be seen. Perhaps life is not so different. After all, Jesus never said we would know no suffering and death, though he promised they would not be the final word. Love is.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
This week the news has not been good, at least concerning the virus. Though our state has been doing quite well, we are seeing the virus rage across the South, Southwest as well as California. One of my sons has a colleague in Florida, who wanted to know if most people in Connecticut were wearing masks. “Yes,” Ashley replied. “We wear them in stores, offices, any place, where other people are gathered.” “Wow!” His friend was shocked. “Hardly anyone is wearing them here,” he intoned. So, is it any surprise that in certain parts of the country the virus is spreading? But as Dr. Fauci reminded us this week, no part of the country is safe as long as some parts are experiencing exponential growth. We are indeed part of a larger whole and though our federal system allows states to make their own rules and regulations, our state borders are porous to people as well as to germs.
With this reality in mind I recall something I read in the New York Times Arts section in mid-June. It is hardly something I would have expected to find there. The article was named: Bad Things Happen: Accepting It is Good. The gist of the article was that although we should not surrender to pessimism, it is important to make room for suffering. And we have certainly seen a great deal of it lately. Not only is the virus holding us captive, but also, we have seen the ugly blatancy of racism and the death it spews out, not to mention the economic catastrophe that has cost Americans 40 million jobs, the greatest loss since the Great Depression. We are facing tremendous challenges, and those challenges are resulting in terrible suffering for many people.
Accepting that “bad things happen” does not mean there is no room for protest and fight. Of course, we are called to use our resources to help those in need as we also take a very hard look at some of the systemic injustices in our society, which has meant that the load of suffering is unevenly distributed. Not only do Black and Brown people suffer more at the hands of law enforcement than do White people, but also the virus has afflicted and killed them in greater numbers. This is the reality we all need to face.
But there is something else that needs facing. Too many people---especially people of privilege---seem to think they should be immune to suffering. Though we can certainly make a strong case that a poor national response has led to greater suffering and death than needed to be, yet even a robust response would not have completely knocked the virus out. We still would have to confront the raw fact that we cannot control as much as we want to control. Because we have seen so much medical progress in our era, we seem to think we should be able to solve any problem we are called to face. A vaccine against the virus is very likely, but there is no vaccine against all suffering.
The New York Times article quoted a philosophy professor, Agnes Callard, at the University of Chicago, who referred to the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who turned ethical thought around when he put at its center pain and suffering rather than pleasure and well being. While Schopenhauer is known for his pessimism, one of those people who sees the glass as half empty rather than half full, he nevertheless reminds us of an important truth: life is indeed punctuated by joy and sorrow, defeat and victory, randomness as well as planned intention. And we are not guaranteed that the distribution will be equitable or even comprehensible! While we can and should work for greater justice in the distribution of suffering, this does not mean we can correct for all suffering. And accepting that reality is a form of wisdom. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes basically embraced this perspective as did the Buddha, who taught suffering was the basic condition of life.
Professor Callard also said that some forms of suffering should be embraced, and she puts love in that category. “Part of what makes human life good is loving things that can be taken away from us,” she said. “You can live a smaller, more solitary life that has less pain in it. But there isn’t a way to fully love someone and care about them while shielding yourself from the pain of their loss.”
We can live as if pain is always an insult to pleasure and darkness a refutation of the light, but there is another way to understand and even appreciate the contrast. We can see these contrasts as giving to life its depth and meaning. When we look at a great painting by Vermeer or Rembrandt or the Impressionists, whom so many adore for the brightness of the colors, it is the play of light and dark, the appearance of shadows that allows the beauty of the painting to be seen. Perhaps life is not so different. After all, Jesus never said we would know no suffering and death, though he promised they would not be the final word. Love is.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE BURDENS WE CARRY by: The Rev. Dr. Sandra L. Olsen 7/5/2020
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-30
Kenny was a gifted nurse, who worked in a hospital burn unit. He was not only technically skillful, but he was also funny, helping both staff and patients to laugh. And in a place like a burn unit, laughter can be life saving. As talented as Kenny was, however, he did not believe nursing was his call. He really wanted to be a New York City fire fighter. He loved the adrenal rush that came for him in the battle against time and death, both in the emergency room of the burn unit, and he hoped in a burning New York City skyscraper. He had applied to the NYC Fire Department twice before but had been turned down. On his third try, he made it!
At his farewell party people said a lot of wonderful things about Kenny, but the most surprising words came from one of the plastic surgeons, who had worked closely with Kenny and admired him greatly. This surgeon was said to have the hands and fingers of an angel, so deftly did he sew new skin on burned bodies. While the doctor praised Kenny’s skill, what he really spoke about was following one’s call. And that is why he envied Kenny. He startled the entire staff when he confessed that medicine had never been his call; he was a violinist, a graduate of Julliard, but he just did not have the fortitude or maybe even the talent to make it as a concert violinist. And so, he decided to go to medical school and become a plastic surgeon. “I envy you, Kenny,” he said, “because you are among the blessed, able to follow your call.” Ten years later at Kenny’s memorial service, held after his death on September 11th 2001 at the World Trade Center, the surgeon again spoke, and again mentioned call. “I still envy Kenny,” he said. “He followed his call, even to the end.”
The burdens people carry. Here this talented doctor, admired and respected by colleagues and patients alike carried the burden of not following his call. Perhaps some might accuse him of ingratitude or self-obsession, but, as his minister said, “There was no denying his profound unhappiness. His sufferings were real, and real suffering demands honest respect.”
The burdens people carry: illness, loss of job and home, financial insecurity, broken relationships and yes, even the inability to follow what one believes is one’s call. Life is filled with such problems, and sometimes these problems feel like burdens too heavy to carry. Is it any wonder then that these words from Matthew are among the most favored in the New Testament: Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
In this 11th chapter Jesus is not speaking about all burdens; he is referring specifically to religious burdens, put on the people by a religious establishment that demanded conformity to certain rules. This would include things like ritual purity, financial obligations to the Temple, obligatory sacrifices, etc. Jesus was critical of the scribes and priests, who controlled Temple life, but he was also critical of the Pharisees, who though more temperate, because they allowed both written and oral interpretation of the law, were still demanding about conformity to ritual practice---hand washing, avoiding people who were considered ritually unclean like Samaritans and tax collectors.
“You find fault with everything,” Jesus is essentially saying to these religious leaders. “John the Baptist was an ascetic, and you accused him of having a demon. I eat and drink, and you accuse me of being a drunkard and a glutton. You are not satisfied with anything—except your own narrow way. Don’t you understand? This is not what religion and faith are all about. It is not about all these religious duties. You can follow them or not follow them, but whatever you do, understand that they are not at the core of faithfulness. They don’t move you any closer to God. This is the wisdom that even infants can know, but sometimes such wisdom is hidden from the learned and the wise.”
Jesus never meant that closeness to God would remove all burdens. After all, Jesus certainly had his burdens to carry. In this chapter alone he has problems with religious authorities that are gunning for him. But while many of us struggle to find God, or experience God’s active presence in our lives, Jesus did not struggle to be in relationship with God. Even in his abandonment on the cross, his cry was still, “My God.” His intimacy with God is a kind of yoking. To be yoked is to be attached. Oxen are yoked together to pull a heavy burden. So, to follow this metaphor, to be yoked to Jesus is to be attached to one who is intimate with God, so intimate, in fact, that he shows us the human face of God. And when we see that face, when we see what God is like, our burdens and problems can look differently. Yes, we still carry them, but they are lighter, because God also carries them. In Jesus Christ our burdens and sufferings are taken up into the heart of God, and God is with us in our sufferings.
The sacrament of communion is all about an intimacy with God through Jesus Christ, who suffered, died, was resurrected and ascended into God, which means that the fullness of Christ’s humanity, including his suffering and death, was taken into God. So, when you take the bread and juice or wine this morning, symbols of Christ’s body and blood, remember that he too bore burdens. Jesus never promised to remove from us all burdens, as God did not remove them from him, but Christ did promise that the load is lightened when we yoke our lives to him, and let him show us the way to be fully human, fully alive to God’s power in our lives.
Yes, we all carry burdens, and some of them are indeed heavy, hard to carry. Not long after Kenny’s death, the surgeon began bringing his violin to the hospital, and sometimes before surgery to calm a frightened patient, or sometimes after surgery, to help alleviate the pain, he would go around the burn unit and play for the patients. He thought he was doing it to help others, and he was, but his playing also helped him. In a strange sort of way, for the doctor Kenny’s death was redemptive, helping him to see his call in a new way. Such is the healing grace of God, working in our lives to lighten the load, even when we least expect it.
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-30
Kenny was a gifted nurse, who worked in a hospital burn unit. He was not only technically skillful, but he was also funny, helping both staff and patients to laugh. And in a place like a burn unit, laughter can be life saving. As talented as Kenny was, however, he did not believe nursing was his call. He really wanted to be a New York City fire fighter. He loved the adrenal rush that came for him in the battle against time and death, both in the emergency room of the burn unit, and he hoped in a burning New York City skyscraper. He had applied to the NYC Fire Department twice before but had been turned down. On his third try, he made it!
At his farewell party people said a lot of wonderful things about Kenny, but the most surprising words came from one of the plastic surgeons, who had worked closely with Kenny and admired him greatly. This surgeon was said to have the hands and fingers of an angel, so deftly did he sew new skin on burned bodies. While the doctor praised Kenny’s skill, what he really spoke about was following one’s call. And that is why he envied Kenny. He startled the entire staff when he confessed that medicine had never been his call; he was a violinist, a graduate of Julliard, but he just did not have the fortitude or maybe even the talent to make it as a concert violinist. And so, he decided to go to medical school and become a plastic surgeon. “I envy you, Kenny,” he said, “because you are among the blessed, able to follow your call.” Ten years later at Kenny’s memorial service, held after his death on September 11th 2001 at the World Trade Center, the surgeon again spoke, and again mentioned call. “I still envy Kenny,” he said. “He followed his call, even to the end.”
The burdens people carry. Here this talented doctor, admired and respected by colleagues and patients alike carried the burden of not following his call. Perhaps some might accuse him of ingratitude or self-obsession, but, as his minister said, “There was no denying his profound unhappiness. His sufferings were real, and real suffering demands honest respect.”
The burdens people carry: illness, loss of job and home, financial insecurity, broken relationships and yes, even the inability to follow what one believes is one’s call. Life is filled with such problems, and sometimes these problems feel like burdens too heavy to carry. Is it any wonder then that these words from Matthew are among the most favored in the New Testament: Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
In this 11th chapter Jesus is not speaking about all burdens; he is referring specifically to religious burdens, put on the people by a religious establishment that demanded conformity to certain rules. This would include things like ritual purity, financial obligations to the Temple, obligatory sacrifices, etc. Jesus was critical of the scribes and priests, who controlled Temple life, but he was also critical of the Pharisees, who though more temperate, because they allowed both written and oral interpretation of the law, were still demanding about conformity to ritual practice---hand washing, avoiding people who were considered ritually unclean like Samaritans and tax collectors.
“You find fault with everything,” Jesus is essentially saying to these religious leaders. “John the Baptist was an ascetic, and you accused him of having a demon. I eat and drink, and you accuse me of being a drunkard and a glutton. You are not satisfied with anything—except your own narrow way. Don’t you understand? This is not what religion and faith are all about. It is not about all these religious duties. You can follow them or not follow them, but whatever you do, understand that they are not at the core of faithfulness. They don’t move you any closer to God. This is the wisdom that even infants can know, but sometimes such wisdom is hidden from the learned and the wise.”
Jesus never meant that closeness to God would remove all burdens. After all, Jesus certainly had his burdens to carry. In this chapter alone he has problems with religious authorities that are gunning for him. But while many of us struggle to find God, or experience God’s active presence in our lives, Jesus did not struggle to be in relationship with God. Even in his abandonment on the cross, his cry was still, “My God.” His intimacy with God is a kind of yoking. To be yoked is to be attached. Oxen are yoked together to pull a heavy burden. So, to follow this metaphor, to be yoked to Jesus is to be attached to one who is intimate with God, so intimate, in fact, that he shows us the human face of God. And when we see that face, when we see what God is like, our burdens and problems can look differently. Yes, we still carry them, but they are lighter, because God also carries them. In Jesus Christ our burdens and sufferings are taken up into the heart of God, and God is with us in our sufferings.
The sacrament of communion is all about an intimacy with God through Jesus Christ, who suffered, died, was resurrected and ascended into God, which means that the fullness of Christ’s humanity, including his suffering and death, was taken into God. So, when you take the bread and juice or wine this morning, symbols of Christ’s body and blood, remember that he too bore burdens. Jesus never promised to remove from us all burdens, as God did not remove them from him, but Christ did promise that the load is lightened when we yoke our lives to him, and let him show us the way to be fully human, fully alive to God’s power in our lives.
Yes, we all carry burdens, and some of them are indeed heavy, hard to carry. Not long after Kenny’s death, the surgeon began bringing his violin to the hospital, and sometimes before surgery to calm a frightened patient, or sometimes after surgery, to help alleviate the pain, he would go around the burn unit and play for the patients. He thought he was doing it to help others, and he was, but his playing also helped him. In a strange sort of way, for the doctor Kenny’s death was redemptive, helping him to see his call in a new way. Such is the healing grace of God, working in our lives to lighten the load, even when we least expect it.
June 24, 2020
Dear Friends,
I have this little book, Be Happy, 170 Ways to Transform Your Day. It is not a book of essays, but a series of short quips, followed by a few sentences of interpretation, designed to get you thinking. Some of the quips are: Follow Your Heart, Accentuate the Positive; Stop Underestimating Yourself, Change Directions, Find Freedom, Be Yourself. I liked all of them, but there were two, which really grabbed my attention: Put the Past Behind You and Confront Your Fears.
About putting the past behind you, Patrick Lindsay, the author of the book, wrote, “You can’t change it, so don’t wear it like a chain. Understand it. Learn from it. Turn the experience into a positive. Use it to look ahead.” Over the years of my ministry, including five years spent in hospital chaplaincy, I have certainly heard and seen people who cannot put the past behind them. Indeed, some do wear it like chain. Why do we do this? Though it is usually not a healthy, too many times we cling to the hurts and pains of the past, revisiting them over and over again, like a long playing record that goes on and on and on.
But it is not only the negative past people cling to. Sometimes people have a sprint of brilliance at the beginning and are tempted to think that is all there is to their lives. I remember this very talented violinist I met in the hospital, who had won a prestigious musical award at the age of 21. And then he just stopped playing. “I had nowhere to go after that achievement,” he said. “I felt that everyone would be looking at me for more and more and more. And I did not want the pressure, so I just put my violin down and have never played again. That was it for me.” I don’t think I would have thought it was such an awful decision if he had felt at peace with it. But he wasn’t. He told me he had surrendered his talent, because he could not take the pressure, and from his point of view, winning that one contest was the only thing that really counted in his life. I think he neither understood his past nor learned from it. The culmination of his story was his dying mother’s request that he play his violin at her memorial service. But no, he could not even do that. Sadly, he wore his past like a chain around his neck.
And what about confronting our fears? Let’s face it, Jesus spent a great deal of his time telling people not to be afraid, precisely because he knew people are very afraid. We all are afraid, and I don’t think telling people to put away their fears does much good. But I will give Jesus credit for intending more than a command. I think he really did mean confront your fears. In the book, Be Happy, the author writes: “Confront your fears is so easy to say, but difficult to do. But until you face your fears, you’re always looking back. You’re a diminished version of yourself. Do it by degrees. Do it with the help of others but stare down your fears. Watch yourself grow as the fears shrink.”
Again, I have learned from the people to whom I have ministered along the way. I remember Jessica, who seemed absolutely fearless. She had been an emergency room nurse at a big city hospital in Boston, and then she worked with an international agency in the occupied territories of the West Bank, giving medical help to people who often lacked it. You can imagine the drama of some of her stories, especially in the West Bank, where there were times her life was literally on the line. And so, I asked her if she were ever afraid. At first, she did not seem to want to answer, and then she finally said, “All fear in me is gone, because I have already suffered the worst fear that anyone could ever have.” Her entire family, a husband and two young children, were killed in a head on collision. “You fear,” she said, losing people you love. That has already happened to me, so I have nothing left to fear.”
Over the years I have thought about Jessica many times. When we speak of confronting our fears, we usually mean to say there is a choice. We face our fears, or we do not. But Jessica had no choice, at least initially. Her worst fear suddenly came crashing into her life. And she had to face it or die. So, she faced her grief head on, and in facing her grief, she also faced her fear. In the end, she said, she finally felt liberated from fear. She could not make up her mind if that was a good thing. “It is not normal to live without fear,” she insisted, “but it does give me a freedom I never would have chosen, yet it has chosen me, and so I live the best way I know how.”
Love does make us vulnerable, and vulnerability can make us afraid. Jessica was only 34 when she suffered that terrible loss, and I think she was determined to never be vulnerable again. Ten years later, however, she married a man, who had lost his wife to breast cancer, leaving him with three children to raise, ages 10, 12 and 15. Once again she was vulnerable, and once again she knew fear, but she had already confronted it once, and indeed, her life had grown, even as she once again embraced the fear that comes from loving people whom we realize we might lose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
I have this little book, Be Happy, 170 Ways to Transform Your Day. It is not a book of essays, but a series of short quips, followed by a few sentences of interpretation, designed to get you thinking. Some of the quips are: Follow Your Heart, Accentuate the Positive; Stop Underestimating Yourself, Change Directions, Find Freedom, Be Yourself. I liked all of them, but there were two, which really grabbed my attention: Put the Past Behind You and Confront Your Fears.
About putting the past behind you, Patrick Lindsay, the author of the book, wrote, “You can’t change it, so don’t wear it like a chain. Understand it. Learn from it. Turn the experience into a positive. Use it to look ahead.” Over the years of my ministry, including five years spent in hospital chaplaincy, I have certainly heard and seen people who cannot put the past behind them. Indeed, some do wear it like chain. Why do we do this? Though it is usually not a healthy, too many times we cling to the hurts and pains of the past, revisiting them over and over again, like a long playing record that goes on and on and on.
But it is not only the negative past people cling to. Sometimes people have a sprint of brilliance at the beginning and are tempted to think that is all there is to their lives. I remember this very talented violinist I met in the hospital, who had won a prestigious musical award at the age of 21. And then he just stopped playing. “I had nowhere to go after that achievement,” he said. “I felt that everyone would be looking at me for more and more and more. And I did not want the pressure, so I just put my violin down and have never played again. That was it for me.” I don’t think I would have thought it was such an awful decision if he had felt at peace with it. But he wasn’t. He told me he had surrendered his talent, because he could not take the pressure, and from his point of view, winning that one contest was the only thing that really counted in his life. I think he neither understood his past nor learned from it. The culmination of his story was his dying mother’s request that he play his violin at her memorial service. But no, he could not even do that. Sadly, he wore his past like a chain around his neck.
And what about confronting our fears? Let’s face it, Jesus spent a great deal of his time telling people not to be afraid, precisely because he knew people are very afraid. We all are afraid, and I don’t think telling people to put away their fears does much good. But I will give Jesus credit for intending more than a command. I think he really did mean confront your fears. In the book, Be Happy, the author writes: “Confront your fears is so easy to say, but difficult to do. But until you face your fears, you’re always looking back. You’re a diminished version of yourself. Do it by degrees. Do it with the help of others but stare down your fears. Watch yourself grow as the fears shrink.”
Again, I have learned from the people to whom I have ministered along the way. I remember Jessica, who seemed absolutely fearless. She had been an emergency room nurse at a big city hospital in Boston, and then she worked with an international agency in the occupied territories of the West Bank, giving medical help to people who often lacked it. You can imagine the drama of some of her stories, especially in the West Bank, where there were times her life was literally on the line. And so, I asked her if she were ever afraid. At first, she did not seem to want to answer, and then she finally said, “All fear in me is gone, because I have already suffered the worst fear that anyone could ever have.” Her entire family, a husband and two young children, were killed in a head on collision. “You fear,” she said, losing people you love. That has already happened to me, so I have nothing left to fear.”
Over the years I have thought about Jessica many times. When we speak of confronting our fears, we usually mean to say there is a choice. We face our fears, or we do not. But Jessica had no choice, at least initially. Her worst fear suddenly came crashing into her life. And she had to face it or die. So, she faced her grief head on, and in facing her grief, she also faced her fear. In the end, she said, she finally felt liberated from fear. She could not make up her mind if that was a good thing. “It is not normal to live without fear,” she insisted, “but it does give me a freedom I never would have chosen, yet it has chosen me, and so I live the best way I know how.”
Love does make us vulnerable, and vulnerability can make us afraid. Jessica was only 34 when she suffered that terrible loss, and I think she was determined to never be vulnerable again. Ten years later, however, she married a man, who had lost his wife to breast cancer, leaving him with three children to raise, ages 10, 12 and 15. Once again she was vulnerable, and once again she knew fear, but she had already confronted it once, and indeed, her life had grown, even as she once again embraced the fear that comes from loving people whom we realize we might lose.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
GOD WILL PROVIDE OR GOD WILL SEE by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 6/28/20
Genesis 22: 1-14
There is probably no more troubling text in all of scripture than the story of God’s command to Abraham that he offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering to God. Alice Miller, a famous German psychiatrist, used this story as a searing critique of abusive child rearing practices. God, she said, is here portrayed as the ultimate child abuser, and this is hardly the role model we want or need. Feminist biblical interpretation has also followed that line of thought, extending it to Jesus, who has been understood as the sacrifice for human sin. Such a God, the feminists contend, would not be worthy of our devotion, trust and love.
So yes, this story is troubling, because even if God had no intention of accepting the sacrifice, Abraham did not know that. And think of poor terrified Isaac, bound to a sacrificial stone while a knife is raised to his throat. Ancient Jewish commentary said the experience was so traumatic for Isaac that he was permanently damaged, which is why, the Jewish teachers said, we hear almost nothing from him after that. So, we all see the story of trauma and abuse but is there anything else? One of my seminary professors used to say we should ask of the text at least two questions: What did it mean then, and what does it mean now? We often rush (for good reason) to the NOW, but if we allow ourselves to get inside the biblical story and understand it from the viewpoint of another time and place, we might find something THEN that is also applicable NOW.
We know that child sacrifice was practiced not only by the Canaanites, but also by the early Hebrews, who worshiped Yahweh, Israel’s God. But sometime after 620 B.C. under the reforms of Israel’s King, Josiah, the cultic space where child sacrifice had been practiced was destroyed, and some scholars interpret the story of Isaac’s near sacrifice as part of a reform, outlawing all child sacrifice. Now this offers some important historical perspective, but a critique of child sacrifice is probably not how the story functioned as sacred scripture for either the Jews or early Christians. The story was about a test, a test of Abraham’s faith in God. “By faith,” the text in Hebrews reads, “Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.” According to the Genesis story this was a real test, because God did not know how Abraham would respond.
Abraham’s whole story is a journey of faith. It began when God told him to move to a new land, which “I will give to you and your descendants,” God said. But Abraham and his wife did not have any children, so Abraham was promised something extraordinary. Yet Abraham and Sarah went, and throughout Genesis we have a number of stories about how they both struggled to believe and trust God. It was not easy going; there were a lot of bumps along the way, examples of both faith and unbelief, but finally Isaac was born, and the promise looked fulfilled. At the end of chapter 21, immediately preceding this morning’s lesson, Abraham had settled in the land that although was not yet his, was nonetheless, the land of promise, and there he planted a tree and called God the everlasting one. Finally, Abraham seemed to be settled.
And then God intruded. The reader or the hearer is told straight away that the command to sacrifice Isaac is a test. Now understand that the community of faith who heard this story, Jews and later Christians, knew that Isaac’s life was spared, so there is no real fear that the horror will come to pass. The story’s emphasis is placed upon Abraham, not Isaac. If we get into Abraham’s head, we can imagine him wondering why God would take back the promise God had fulfilled. And what strikes me as so peculiar is that this man who had argued with God over the threatened destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the man who had bargained with God that if he found at least 100, then 50, then ten just people, the cities would be spared! Abraham had bargained for a city but did not bargain for his own son.
He asked no questions and raised no protest. The story is told in such a way that there is no doubt that the command is God’s. Of course, we today would immediately say that God does not command such things, but that conviction is now, not then. The Abraham who now faces God at Moriah is not the same man who had faced God at Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember, that despite Abraham’s clever bargaining, he could not find 10 just people, and so the cities were destroyed for their wickedness. God in that story had seen and
known something Abraham had not seen or known. But in today’s story God does not know everything. God does not know what Abraham will do. The story is presented as a real test, but it is also a temptation. God is tempting Abraham.
A temptation always means that there are alternative choices. In this story, the choice is between obeying God or disobeying, and obedience here means trust, trusting that what God demands is ultimately life fulfilling, not life denying. Though we recoil in horror, the story is not first of all about us. It is about Abraham and his faith that what God commands is life, full and abundant life. We do come into the story, but only after we understand what it is that Abraham has learned.
And what Abraham learned and saw was that God will provide. These are the very words spoken by Abraham to his son, when Isaac asked his father where the lamb for the sacrifice was. “God will provide,” Abraham answered, or a better translation of the Hebrew text would be, “God will see it, the lamb for a burnt offering, my Son”, or another translation, “God will see it before us, my Son.” And yes, that is the point. That is the learning. God sees before Abraham; God sees before us; God knows before Abraham; God knows before us. But, according to this story, God does not see and know everything, for if God did, why would God have bothered to test, to tempt Abraham? Staying within the boundaries of this story puts us face to face with a God who tempts, a God who tests. And the tests and temptation are horrifying. No wonder, Jesus, who immediately after his baptism was led into the wilderness not by Satan but by the Spirit, where he was tempted by Satan, taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” Presumably Jesus prayed those words, because he knew that God had led him and others right smack into temptation’s depths.
Now some interpreters have argued that Abraham’s faith was such that he knew God would spare his son, since he said to his companions, when Isaac and he departed from them on the final leg of the journey, “We will return to you.” But the story’s power derives from the uncertainty of the journey. It was uncertain for Abraham as well as for God, and when Abraham lifted the knife to slay his son, the story means to say that he was going to carry it through. And when God saw that, then God knew.
“Now I know,” God said to Abraham. God now knows that Abraham will not withhold anything from God, not even the promised son, the son on whom the whole promise seems to depend. And because of what God now knows and sees, God provides the ram, and Abraham now sees what God provides. Abraham sees the ram, caught in the thicket. So, we have here a real relationship between God and Abraham with both of them learning something they did not know before.
William Willimon was for years the preacher and chaplain at the Duke University Chapel in North Carolina, and before that he served churches as a minister. Well, during one Bible study people were discussing and even arguing over this very story. What does it mean to you? Willimon asked. “ I’ll tell you what it means,” one middle aged man said. “It means that my family and I are going to begin looking for another church.” “But why”? Willimon asked in astonishment. “Because when I look at the God of Abraham”, the man continued, “I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, business like Rotary club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s God could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to meet that kind of God. It would at least be interesting.”
Interesting, yes, but also terrifying. And isn’t that too what the story also suggests? The God of Abraham cannot so easily be roped into the corral of our comfortable thoughts, where we tend to make God sound so safe and tame. Do any of you recall C.S. Lewis famous Christian allegory, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where Aslan, the lion, is a symbol for Christ. Someone reminds the children that Aslan is not safe, though he is good.
Life is not safe, and often, like Abraham, we think we have arrived at the point of security only to have something crashing through the walls of our safety---like this dreadful virus. And then we wonder where God is, what God is up to. Like Abraham we would like to settle in the place where we can plant a tree and feel secure. Abraham had arrived in the promised land and would have liked to watch the tree he planted grow. But he was told to go on another journey. And so are we all. So is the church, pulled and pushed by circumstances we do not always control or understand. We ask, “Where is God in these circumstances?” And often times we do not know; we do not see---until we have taken some risks (as Abraham did) and in the thick of things (or in the thicket, as the text says) we see that God provides.
Genesis 22: 1-14
There is probably no more troubling text in all of scripture than the story of God’s command to Abraham that he offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering to God. Alice Miller, a famous German psychiatrist, used this story as a searing critique of abusive child rearing practices. God, she said, is here portrayed as the ultimate child abuser, and this is hardly the role model we want or need. Feminist biblical interpretation has also followed that line of thought, extending it to Jesus, who has been understood as the sacrifice for human sin. Such a God, the feminists contend, would not be worthy of our devotion, trust and love.
So yes, this story is troubling, because even if God had no intention of accepting the sacrifice, Abraham did not know that. And think of poor terrified Isaac, bound to a sacrificial stone while a knife is raised to his throat. Ancient Jewish commentary said the experience was so traumatic for Isaac that he was permanently damaged, which is why, the Jewish teachers said, we hear almost nothing from him after that. So, we all see the story of trauma and abuse but is there anything else? One of my seminary professors used to say we should ask of the text at least two questions: What did it mean then, and what does it mean now? We often rush (for good reason) to the NOW, but if we allow ourselves to get inside the biblical story and understand it from the viewpoint of another time and place, we might find something THEN that is also applicable NOW.
We know that child sacrifice was practiced not only by the Canaanites, but also by the early Hebrews, who worshiped Yahweh, Israel’s God. But sometime after 620 B.C. under the reforms of Israel’s King, Josiah, the cultic space where child sacrifice had been practiced was destroyed, and some scholars interpret the story of Isaac’s near sacrifice as part of a reform, outlawing all child sacrifice. Now this offers some important historical perspective, but a critique of child sacrifice is probably not how the story functioned as sacred scripture for either the Jews or early Christians. The story was about a test, a test of Abraham’s faith in God. “By faith,” the text in Hebrews reads, “Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.” According to the Genesis story this was a real test, because God did not know how Abraham would respond.
Abraham’s whole story is a journey of faith. It began when God told him to move to a new land, which “I will give to you and your descendants,” God said. But Abraham and his wife did not have any children, so Abraham was promised something extraordinary. Yet Abraham and Sarah went, and throughout Genesis we have a number of stories about how they both struggled to believe and trust God. It was not easy going; there were a lot of bumps along the way, examples of both faith and unbelief, but finally Isaac was born, and the promise looked fulfilled. At the end of chapter 21, immediately preceding this morning’s lesson, Abraham had settled in the land that although was not yet his, was nonetheless, the land of promise, and there he planted a tree and called God the everlasting one. Finally, Abraham seemed to be settled.
And then God intruded. The reader or the hearer is told straight away that the command to sacrifice Isaac is a test. Now understand that the community of faith who heard this story, Jews and later Christians, knew that Isaac’s life was spared, so there is no real fear that the horror will come to pass. The story’s emphasis is placed upon Abraham, not Isaac. If we get into Abraham’s head, we can imagine him wondering why God would take back the promise God had fulfilled. And what strikes me as so peculiar is that this man who had argued with God over the threatened destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the man who had bargained with God that if he found at least 100, then 50, then ten just people, the cities would be spared! Abraham had bargained for a city but did not bargain for his own son.
He asked no questions and raised no protest. The story is told in such a way that there is no doubt that the command is God’s. Of course, we today would immediately say that God does not command such things, but that conviction is now, not then. The Abraham who now faces God at Moriah is not the same man who had faced God at Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember, that despite Abraham’s clever bargaining, he could not find 10 just people, and so the cities were destroyed for their wickedness. God in that story had seen and
known something Abraham had not seen or known. But in today’s story God does not know everything. God does not know what Abraham will do. The story is presented as a real test, but it is also a temptation. God is tempting Abraham.
A temptation always means that there are alternative choices. In this story, the choice is between obeying God or disobeying, and obedience here means trust, trusting that what God demands is ultimately life fulfilling, not life denying. Though we recoil in horror, the story is not first of all about us. It is about Abraham and his faith that what God commands is life, full and abundant life. We do come into the story, but only after we understand what it is that Abraham has learned.
And what Abraham learned and saw was that God will provide. These are the very words spoken by Abraham to his son, when Isaac asked his father where the lamb for the sacrifice was. “God will provide,” Abraham answered, or a better translation of the Hebrew text would be, “God will see it, the lamb for a burnt offering, my Son”, or another translation, “God will see it before us, my Son.” And yes, that is the point. That is the learning. God sees before Abraham; God sees before us; God knows before Abraham; God knows before us. But, according to this story, God does not see and know everything, for if God did, why would God have bothered to test, to tempt Abraham? Staying within the boundaries of this story puts us face to face with a God who tempts, a God who tests. And the tests and temptation are horrifying. No wonder, Jesus, who immediately after his baptism was led into the wilderness not by Satan but by the Spirit, where he was tempted by Satan, taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” Presumably Jesus prayed those words, because he knew that God had led him and others right smack into temptation’s depths.
Now some interpreters have argued that Abraham’s faith was such that he knew God would spare his son, since he said to his companions, when Isaac and he departed from them on the final leg of the journey, “We will return to you.” But the story’s power derives from the uncertainty of the journey. It was uncertain for Abraham as well as for God, and when Abraham lifted the knife to slay his son, the story means to say that he was going to carry it through. And when God saw that, then God knew.
“Now I know,” God said to Abraham. God now knows that Abraham will not withhold anything from God, not even the promised son, the son on whom the whole promise seems to depend. And because of what God now knows and sees, God provides the ram, and Abraham now sees what God provides. Abraham sees the ram, caught in the thicket. So, we have here a real relationship between God and Abraham with both of them learning something they did not know before.
William Willimon was for years the preacher and chaplain at the Duke University Chapel in North Carolina, and before that he served churches as a minister. Well, during one Bible study people were discussing and even arguing over this very story. What does it mean to you? Willimon asked. “ I’ll tell you what it means,” one middle aged man said. “It means that my family and I are going to begin looking for another church.” “But why”? Willimon asked in astonishment. “Because when I look at the God of Abraham”, the man continued, “I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, business like Rotary club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s God could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to meet that kind of God. It would at least be interesting.”
Interesting, yes, but also terrifying. And isn’t that too what the story also suggests? The God of Abraham cannot so easily be roped into the corral of our comfortable thoughts, where we tend to make God sound so safe and tame. Do any of you recall C.S. Lewis famous Christian allegory, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where Aslan, the lion, is a symbol for Christ. Someone reminds the children that Aslan is not safe, though he is good.
Life is not safe, and often, like Abraham, we think we have arrived at the point of security only to have something crashing through the walls of our safety---like this dreadful virus. And then we wonder where God is, what God is up to. Like Abraham we would like to settle in the place where we can plant a tree and feel secure. Abraham had arrived in the promised land and would have liked to watch the tree he planted grow. But he was told to go on another journey. And so are we all. So is the church, pulled and pushed by circumstances we do not always control or understand. We ask, “Where is God in these circumstances?” And often times we do not know; we do not see---until we have taken some risks (as Abraham did) and in the thick of things (or in the thicket, as the text says) we see that God provides.
June 18, 2020
Dear Friends,
There are two special days approaching, which we should note and celebrate. The first one is June 19th, known as Juneteenth and the second is Father’s Day, celebrated this year on June 21st. Many of you are probably unaware of Juneteenth; I only learned about it quite recently, though its first celebrations actually go back to June 19, 1865, when newly freed African-Americans celebrated their emancipation from the curse of slavery.
On January 1, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in only those states in rebellion against the Union. Enslavers were supposed to inform their slaves they were free but SURPRISE, most never said a word, so the good news of emancipation travelled via other routes! On June 19, 1865 Major General Gordan Granger announced in Galveston, Texas to a resistant and shocked crowd that President Lincoln had actually freed the slaves 2.5 years earlier! Texas, by the way, was the last state to make the announcement. So, Juneteenth, a combination of the words June and nineteenth, became a day to celebrate emancipation, though actually it was the 13th Amendment that officially ended slavery in all states. Today there are forty seven states, which recognize Juneteenth as a day of celebration, usually accompanied with marches, dinners and speeches, reminding all of us of the long walk and struggle to freedom, which continue even now. We are still walking, struggling, pushing, pulling, moaning and groaning as we try to make actual what was promised over a century ago. Given all that has been going on in our country lately, we should realize how much more work needs to be done. While certainly ALL lives matter, it has been the sin of our country that black lives have not been included in the word ALL, and so, it is necessary that we raise the banner, Black Lives Matter. There is a particularity to the story of black lives in our nation that demands our careful attention so we can hear the pain and the outrage of lives that have been treated as if they mattered not at all.
An now Father’s Day: You may recall that Mother’s Day had its beginning when Julia Ward Howe in 1870 issued a proclamation, calling on women to refuse to send their sons and husbands to war to kill the sons and husbands of women in other countries. So, death was very much on the minds of women who understood Mother’s Day as a protest against war. And death was also on the minds of people who gathered on July 5, 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia for a service remembering the fathers killed in a mining accident in December 1907 in the town of Monongah. 361 men died that day, 250 of them fathers, which left over 1000 children fatherless. Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the death of her own father, when the accident occurred, and she suggested to the minister of her church that particular attention be paid to the fathers, who were killed, and so she chose the Sunday nearest to her father’s birthday as the day for the service.
Clayton was a shy and retiring woman, and she did not push the event outside her immediate home, but she may have been influenced by Anna Jarvis’s crusade to establish an official Mother’s Day. Two months prior Jarvis had held a celebration for her dead mother in Grafton, West Virginia, a town about 15 miles away from Fairmont, and it is very possible that Clayton knew of that event.
The first real celebration of Father’s Day occurred in Spokane, Washington in 1910, when Sonora Smart Dodd pushed her own pastor to honor fathers. Dodd’s father, William Jackson Smart, was a Civil War veteran and a single parent, who raised his six children alone. Dodd had apparently heard a sermon about Anna Jarvis’ Mother’s Day, and so she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar day of celebration. She initially chose June 5, her father’s birthday, but the pastors in the area did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, so the date was moved to the third Sunday of June.
Dodd worked intermittently to get Father’s Day officially recognized, but during the 20’s she lived in Chicago, studying at The Art Institute and did very little to promote Father’s Day. But when she returned to Spokane in the 30’s, she took up the cause again, this time with the support of manufacturers, who could see the economic advantage of the day. In fact, the economic advantage was one of the main reasons there was strong resistance to the idea of a Father’s Day. Some people feared fathers would be lost in a pile of presents, pushed by people, eager to make money.
There were a number of other earlier attempts to recognize fathers. The famous reformer, Jane Addams, tried to get the City of Chicago to recognize fathers in 1911, but she was turned down. Harry Meek, a member of the Lions Club International, claimed he had an idea for Father’s Day in 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson tried to get Congress to honor fathers, but his idea was ignored. President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed, but he never made an official proclamation about it. In 1957 Margaret Chase Smith, senator from Maine, accused Congress of ignoring fathers while honoring mothers, but Congress simply ignored Senator Smith’s accusation. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day. Six years later President Richard Nixon made it a permanent national holiday.
So, here we have two important days to note and celebrate. Juneteenth is not officially recognized by the federal government, though NOW (with all that has been happening) there are many people pushing for such recognition. And Father’s Day, well, we recognize and celebrate it, but while President Wilson succeeded in making Mother’s Day official in 1914, it was not until 1972 that President Nixon was able to achieve the same for fathers. I wonder why it took so long! And while we are on the subject of certain things taking so long to be recognized, consider that most Americans have not even heard of Juneteenth! Perhaps this year it will be different.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
There are two special days approaching, which we should note and celebrate. The first one is June 19th, known as Juneteenth and the second is Father’s Day, celebrated this year on June 21st. Many of you are probably unaware of Juneteenth; I only learned about it quite recently, though its first celebrations actually go back to June 19, 1865, when newly freed African-Americans celebrated their emancipation from the curse of slavery.
On January 1, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in only those states in rebellion against the Union. Enslavers were supposed to inform their slaves they were free but SURPRISE, most never said a word, so the good news of emancipation travelled via other routes! On June 19, 1865 Major General Gordan Granger announced in Galveston, Texas to a resistant and shocked crowd that President Lincoln had actually freed the slaves 2.5 years earlier! Texas, by the way, was the last state to make the announcement. So, Juneteenth, a combination of the words June and nineteenth, became a day to celebrate emancipation, though actually it was the 13th Amendment that officially ended slavery in all states. Today there are forty seven states, which recognize Juneteenth as a day of celebration, usually accompanied with marches, dinners and speeches, reminding all of us of the long walk and struggle to freedom, which continue even now. We are still walking, struggling, pushing, pulling, moaning and groaning as we try to make actual what was promised over a century ago. Given all that has been going on in our country lately, we should realize how much more work needs to be done. While certainly ALL lives matter, it has been the sin of our country that black lives have not been included in the word ALL, and so, it is necessary that we raise the banner, Black Lives Matter. There is a particularity to the story of black lives in our nation that demands our careful attention so we can hear the pain and the outrage of lives that have been treated as if they mattered not at all.
An now Father’s Day: You may recall that Mother’s Day had its beginning when Julia Ward Howe in 1870 issued a proclamation, calling on women to refuse to send their sons and husbands to war to kill the sons and husbands of women in other countries. So, death was very much on the minds of women who understood Mother’s Day as a protest against war. And death was also on the minds of people who gathered on July 5, 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia for a service remembering the fathers killed in a mining accident in December 1907 in the town of Monongah. 361 men died that day, 250 of them fathers, which left over 1000 children fatherless. Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the death of her own father, when the accident occurred, and she suggested to the minister of her church that particular attention be paid to the fathers, who were killed, and so she chose the Sunday nearest to her father’s birthday as the day for the service.
Clayton was a shy and retiring woman, and she did not push the event outside her immediate home, but she may have been influenced by Anna Jarvis’s crusade to establish an official Mother’s Day. Two months prior Jarvis had held a celebration for her dead mother in Grafton, West Virginia, a town about 15 miles away from Fairmont, and it is very possible that Clayton knew of that event.
The first real celebration of Father’s Day occurred in Spokane, Washington in 1910, when Sonora Smart Dodd pushed her own pastor to honor fathers. Dodd’s father, William Jackson Smart, was a Civil War veteran and a single parent, who raised his six children alone. Dodd had apparently heard a sermon about Anna Jarvis’ Mother’s Day, and so she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar day of celebration. She initially chose June 5, her father’s birthday, but the pastors in the area did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, so the date was moved to the third Sunday of June.
Dodd worked intermittently to get Father’s Day officially recognized, but during the 20’s she lived in Chicago, studying at The Art Institute and did very little to promote Father’s Day. But when she returned to Spokane in the 30’s, she took up the cause again, this time with the support of manufacturers, who could see the economic advantage of the day. In fact, the economic advantage was one of the main reasons there was strong resistance to the idea of a Father’s Day. Some people feared fathers would be lost in a pile of presents, pushed by people, eager to make money.
There were a number of other earlier attempts to recognize fathers. The famous reformer, Jane Addams, tried to get the City of Chicago to recognize fathers in 1911, but she was turned down. Harry Meek, a member of the Lions Club International, claimed he had an idea for Father’s Day in 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson tried to get Congress to honor fathers, but his idea was ignored. President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed, but he never made an official proclamation about it. In 1957 Margaret Chase Smith, senator from Maine, accused Congress of ignoring fathers while honoring mothers, but Congress simply ignored Senator Smith’s accusation. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day. Six years later President Richard Nixon made it a permanent national holiday.
So, here we have two important days to note and celebrate. Juneteenth is not officially recognized by the federal government, though NOW (with all that has been happening) there are many people pushing for such recognition. And Father’s Day, well, we recognize and celebrate it, but while President Wilson succeeded in making Mother’s Day official in 1914, it was not until 1972 that President Nixon was able to achieve the same for fathers. I wonder why it took so long! And while we are on the subject of certain things taking so long to be recognized, consider that most Americans have not even heard of Juneteenth! Perhaps this year it will be different.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHAT THEN ARE WE TO SAY? by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 6/21/2020
Genesis 21: 8-21
Romans 5: 18- 6: 4
What then are we to say? The 6th chapter of Romans begins with that question, and there are many situations in life, when suddenly that becomes the primary question, before anything else comes to mind. Did we not feel that way, when horrified by witnessing the killing of George Floyd, who among us really had the appropriate words to utter. What could we say? What are we to say about 116,000 American deaths from Covid-19, or God knows how many deaths in Syria’s civil war or the war in Yemen---both of them primarily targeted against civilians. What then are we to say?
What are we to say on this Father’s Day, when the lectionary gives us a story about a father, who does not go out of his way to protect his first born son from his spiteful wife, who now that she has given birth to Isaac, is concerned that Ishmael will try to supplant her son. Let me refresh your memory, or perhaps your new knowledge of the story. Last week you heard how Sarah laughed when she learned she would be a mother at her advanced age. She did not believe it; she had borne the curse of barrenness for so long. And make no mistake about it: being barren was experienced as a curse; the fault was always assigned to the woman. And so, Sarah had this plan. She told Abraham to sleep with her Egyptian slave, Hagar, because the child born to the slave would by rights be Sarah’s. And so, Abraham with no protest at all, I might add, did as his wife commanded, and Hagar conceived. Of course, no one asked Hagar, the slave, what she thought of this plan. She was treated as an object to be used as others saw fit. And once Hagar was pregnant, she suddenly had some power, and she lorded it over Sarah, treating her mistress with contempt. So, Sarah responded harshly, and Hagar ran away. She returned only after God promised her that her son, Ishmael, would one day be head of a great nation. Hagar, by the way, is the only biblical matriarch whom God promises to make of her descendants a great nation, becoming the nation of Islam.
So, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, whose name means, the one who brings laughter, and I guess we should not be surprised that the two boys are pitted against each other by Sarah. She sees them playing together, and something in that scene disturbs her, so she tells Abraham to cast both Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness. And that is a death sentence for both mother and child. Oh, the text tells us that Abraham was distressed, but he did not stand up to his wife, apparently because God reassured him that all would be well, since God had a plan for both sons. At least this is what is written many centuries after Abraham lived. Perhaps the biblical writers wanted to let Abraham and Sarah off the hook, so she did not seem quite so cruel and he did not seem quite so cowardly. And so Hagar and Ishmael were cast out into the wilderness. Abraham gave them some bread and water, which quickly ran out. And poor, distraught Hagar. Remember some of those famous paintings you saw---how completely beside herself Hagar was. And why wouldn’t she be? Would not any mother worthy of the name mother be distraught? She lays her son down, and moves away, so she cannot see him die.
I have known some mothers like that; I have seen them in hospitals, their children dying of leukemia or some other dreaded disease. I even recall one mother, whose son was dying of a gunshot wound, inflicted by a gang member. Some of them could not bear to be there when their child died. “I heard his first cry,” one mother said to me. “I saw him take his first breath. God, forgive, me but I cannot watch him take his last. I don’t have the strength; I cannot do it. God, forgive me.” God has nothing to forgive, I answered, because we cannot do what is impossible for us to do. And watching her son die was impossible for Hagar. So, she moves away, and that is when the angel hears. Hagar lifted up her voice and wept, and the angel also heard the voice of Ishmael. God heard, and they were saved, saved by the angel of God. The name Ishmael, by the way, means God hears. Hagar, who could not bear to look at her son, then looks up and sees the water that will save both their lives.
This is a very tough story, a story of abuse really, because Hagar and Ishmael had no agency at all. She was a slave, a pawn in someone else’s story. And Ishmael was a child, and children in ancient Israel had no rights at all. Though God had promised Abraham that Ishmael would become a great nation, Hagar was not included in that conversation. Perhaps she remembered what God had promised her when she was pregnant, but that was some years ago. Had God changed God’s mind? Surely, she must have wondered, as her son and she faced death.
Slaves had and have no rights and make no mistakes about this: there are still slaves today: an estimated 40.3 million in the world, over 400,000 of them in the United States today. Some of them in our country live with their slaveholder, caring for their children, keeping house for them, but they have no freedom and no money. A few years ago, in the June, 2017 edition of The Atlantic, Alex Tizon wrote an essay about the slave his family owned. It took him years to understand that the woman who lived with his family and loved them was a slave.
Slavery, we all understand, is part of our national legacy. Some say it is the original sin of our nation’s founding, which has spawned the racism that yet infects our nation today. All men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson had written in The Declaration of Independence, but neither women nor persons of color were included. “I tremble for my country,” Jefferson also wrote, “when I consider that God is just.” He knew what he was saying, just as he knew what he was doing.
When Jefferson’s wife lay dying, she extracted from him a promise that he would not remarry, and he kept that promise by making his slave, Sally Hemings, his concubine, fathering six children with her. Hemings, by the way, was his wife’s half-sister. Jefferson was in Paris as an American representative to the French government, and Hemings came to Paris as his slave. And it was in Paris that the relationship began. When he was getting ready to return to the United States in 1789 to become Secretary of State, he wanted Hemings to return with him, and all she had to do was go to Paris City Hall and say, “I’m a slave being held here,” and she would be free. Her brother was there, and he could have helped her. But this is not what Hemings did. She negotiated with Jefferson, promising she would return with him, if he promised to free any children they had together, when the children came of age. Their relationship was maintained for another 40 years, though she never came to live with him in Washington, when he was President. Jefferson was embarrassed about the relationship, which did make the news---though he denied it. But when he died, the only slaves he freed in his will, were descendants of Hemings and him.
Don’t we wonder where God is in all of this? What was God doing in the midst of all this slavery? We never hear God commanding Abraham and Sarah to free Hagar. Neither Jesus nor the Apostle Paul ever once spoke against the institution of slavery. God works in history, we say, but history often moves slowly, and God does not seem to push it faster or farther than human beings are ready to move and to go. But sometimes there are these shifts, turning points, where suddenly something different appears, when the old ways of doing and understanding just don’t work in the same way. Remember, November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall suddenly came down. None of us was expecting that. Change comes, and when we look back, we sometimes see that God is in the change, helping people to move toward a new future.
The Bible was not written as the events occurred. Some stories were written not simply decades later (as is often the case in the gospels) but centuries later (as in some of the Old Testament stories). They were written as people looked back, reconsidering what it was they had been through and what it all meant. And that is when they saw God’s hand and heard God’s voice, understanding that God had been with them all the time, even if they did not know it. And where is God now for us as we as a people and a nation face hard questions and the heart wrenching cry for a new beginning?
Genesis 21: 8-21
Romans 5: 18- 6: 4
What then are we to say? The 6th chapter of Romans begins with that question, and there are many situations in life, when suddenly that becomes the primary question, before anything else comes to mind. Did we not feel that way, when horrified by witnessing the killing of George Floyd, who among us really had the appropriate words to utter. What could we say? What are we to say about 116,000 American deaths from Covid-19, or God knows how many deaths in Syria’s civil war or the war in Yemen---both of them primarily targeted against civilians. What then are we to say?
What are we to say on this Father’s Day, when the lectionary gives us a story about a father, who does not go out of his way to protect his first born son from his spiteful wife, who now that she has given birth to Isaac, is concerned that Ishmael will try to supplant her son. Let me refresh your memory, or perhaps your new knowledge of the story. Last week you heard how Sarah laughed when she learned she would be a mother at her advanced age. She did not believe it; she had borne the curse of barrenness for so long. And make no mistake about it: being barren was experienced as a curse; the fault was always assigned to the woman. And so, Sarah had this plan. She told Abraham to sleep with her Egyptian slave, Hagar, because the child born to the slave would by rights be Sarah’s. And so, Abraham with no protest at all, I might add, did as his wife commanded, and Hagar conceived. Of course, no one asked Hagar, the slave, what she thought of this plan. She was treated as an object to be used as others saw fit. And once Hagar was pregnant, she suddenly had some power, and she lorded it over Sarah, treating her mistress with contempt. So, Sarah responded harshly, and Hagar ran away. She returned only after God promised her that her son, Ishmael, would one day be head of a great nation. Hagar, by the way, is the only biblical matriarch whom God promises to make of her descendants a great nation, becoming the nation of Islam.
So, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, whose name means, the one who brings laughter, and I guess we should not be surprised that the two boys are pitted against each other by Sarah. She sees them playing together, and something in that scene disturbs her, so she tells Abraham to cast both Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness. And that is a death sentence for both mother and child. Oh, the text tells us that Abraham was distressed, but he did not stand up to his wife, apparently because God reassured him that all would be well, since God had a plan for both sons. At least this is what is written many centuries after Abraham lived. Perhaps the biblical writers wanted to let Abraham and Sarah off the hook, so she did not seem quite so cruel and he did not seem quite so cowardly. And so Hagar and Ishmael were cast out into the wilderness. Abraham gave them some bread and water, which quickly ran out. And poor, distraught Hagar. Remember some of those famous paintings you saw---how completely beside herself Hagar was. And why wouldn’t she be? Would not any mother worthy of the name mother be distraught? She lays her son down, and moves away, so she cannot see him die.
I have known some mothers like that; I have seen them in hospitals, their children dying of leukemia or some other dreaded disease. I even recall one mother, whose son was dying of a gunshot wound, inflicted by a gang member. Some of them could not bear to be there when their child died. “I heard his first cry,” one mother said to me. “I saw him take his first breath. God, forgive, me but I cannot watch him take his last. I don’t have the strength; I cannot do it. God, forgive me.” God has nothing to forgive, I answered, because we cannot do what is impossible for us to do. And watching her son die was impossible for Hagar. So, she moves away, and that is when the angel hears. Hagar lifted up her voice and wept, and the angel also heard the voice of Ishmael. God heard, and they were saved, saved by the angel of God. The name Ishmael, by the way, means God hears. Hagar, who could not bear to look at her son, then looks up and sees the water that will save both their lives.
This is a very tough story, a story of abuse really, because Hagar and Ishmael had no agency at all. She was a slave, a pawn in someone else’s story. And Ishmael was a child, and children in ancient Israel had no rights at all. Though God had promised Abraham that Ishmael would become a great nation, Hagar was not included in that conversation. Perhaps she remembered what God had promised her when she was pregnant, but that was some years ago. Had God changed God’s mind? Surely, she must have wondered, as her son and she faced death.
Slaves had and have no rights and make no mistakes about this: there are still slaves today: an estimated 40.3 million in the world, over 400,000 of them in the United States today. Some of them in our country live with their slaveholder, caring for their children, keeping house for them, but they have no freedom and no money. A few years ago, in the June, 2017 edition of The Atlantic, Alex Tizon wrote an essay about the slave his family owned. It took him years to understand that the woman who lived with his family and loved them was a slave.
Slavery, we all understand, is part of our national legacy. Some say it is the original sin of our nation’s founding, which has spawned the racism that yet infects our nation today. All men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson had written in The Declaration of Independence, but neither women nor persons of color were included. “I tremble for my country,” Jefferson also wrote, “when I consider that God is just.” He knew what he was saying, just as he knew what he was doing.
When Jefferson’s wife lay dying, she extracted from him a promise that he would not remarry, and he kept that promise by making his slave, Sally Hemings, his concubine, fathering six children with her. Hemings, by the way, was his wife’s half-sister. Jefferson was in Paris as an American representative to the French government, and Hemings came to Paris as his slave. And it was in Paris that the relationship began. When he was getting ready to return to the United States in 1789 to become Secretary of State, he wanted Hemings to return with him, and all she had to do was go to Paris City Hall and say, “I’m a slave being held here,” and she would be free. Her brother was there, and he could have helped her. But this is not what Hemings did. She negotiated with Jefferson, promising she would return with him, if he promised to free any children they had together, when the children came of age. Their relationship was maintained for another 40 years, though she never came to live with him in Washington, when he was President. Jefferson was embarrassed about the relationship, which did make the news---though he denied it. But when he died, the only slaves he freed in his will, were descendants of Hemings and him.
Don’t we wonder where God is in all of this? What was God doing in the midst of all this slavery? We never hear God commanding Abraham and Sarah to free Hagar. Neither Jesus nor the Apostle Paul ever once spoke against the institution of slavery. God works in history, we say, but history often moves slowly, and God does not seem to push it faster or farther than human beings are ready to move and to go. But sometimes there are these shifts, turning points, where suddenly something different appears, when the old ways of doing and understanding just don’t work in the same way. Remember, November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall suddenly came down. None of us was expecting that. Change comes, and when we look back, we sometimes see that God is in the change, helping people to move toward a new future.
The Bible was not written as the events occurred. Some stories were written not simply decades later (as is often the case in the gospels) but centuries later (as in some of the Old Testament stories). They were written as people looked back, reconsidering what it was they had been through and what it all meant. And that is when they saw God’s hand and heard God’s voice, understanding that God had been with them all the time, even if they did not know it. And where is God now for us as we as a people and a nation face hard questions and the heart wrenching cry for a new beginning?
June 10, 2020
Dear Friends,
“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, the novel, Anna Karenina. It is the story of passionate love gone awry, leading to the death of the heroine, a tale of the search for meaning with the theme of forgiveness intruding to have its say. So, it is with greats interest that I came across an article in The Christian Science Monitor about how the pandemic has spurred reconciliation and forgiveness, particularly among families.
Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, discovered that in a random study of 1300 people nearly a quarter of them was living an active estrangement from at least one family member. And true to Tolstoy’s words, the estrangement took many different forms. Some adults, for example, were estranged from parents who did not approve of their choice of a spouse. For others, it is because parents were critical of their adult children’s parenting style, sexuality or a very big one, values. One daughter had not spoken to her father in over two years, because of political differences, which translated into a painful conflict in values. But sometimes the estrangement came because the family was too close with the parents trying to assert control over their adult child. And so, independence had to be claimed. Sometimes the conflict was among siblings, who had not spoken to each other for maybe a few years or even as long as decades. But then the pandemic hit, and one estranged brother suddenly sent his sister a package of masks with a $100 bill tucked inside.
Why has the pandemic made a difference? For one thing, death no longer seemed so remote. One woman said he had thought she was reconciled to never speaking to her brother again. She used to say to herself, “Well, what if he suddenly died, would I feel terrible that I had not spoken to him? And she thought she was o.k. with that. But it proved to be all theoretical. Death was out there someplace, but when the virus hit, the theory just crumbled. She realized that if her brother suddenly died from the virus without her ever speaking to him again, she would be very upset. And so, she took the first step and called him. After talking for a long time, they concluded that the reason for their estrangement was “silly.”
Taking the first step is the hardest one to take, because there is a big fear of rejection. “What if I reach out, and I’m slapped down?” Sometimes that does happen. A woman approached her parents and tried to talk about the cruelty she felt she had endured as a child. Their response was one of anger and rejection, and so she had to work at forgiveness in a different way. For now, at least, she did not think a relationship was possible, but she still realized she had a lot of work to do forgiving them. Her hurt and anger were harming her, and so she dug deeply into books about forgiveness. One day, while “mindfully walking,” she said she felt a tremendous release. She let it go both physically and mentally, and she said she actually felt lighter as a great weight was lifted. She said she forgave her parents for not being able to give her what she needed, and she also forgave herself for needing more than they could give her.
It helps if people can allow themselves to see the situation from the other side. Relationships cut both ways, and though children and adults have unequal power, still the adult child can sometimes allow herself to see what life was like for the parent. Understanding does not remove all pain, and it does not make abuse and cruelty o.k., but it can soften some of the bluntness, helping one to let go and move on. And moving on to live one’s life in a satisfying way is what most people want to do.
People often note that when they reconcile and/or forgive, it has an impact on other areas of their life. Often, we fail to recognize how negative energy in one area negatively works in other places. And it is not only other relationships that feel the impact. One woman, after forgiving and reconciling with her father, overcame a fear of spiders that was so strong she would not allow herself to go out into the backyard with her children to play. Suddenly she found that she was no longer so terrified of spiders!
People who are working on forgiveness and reconciliation are often helped if they can recognize if they are working from a position of strength or from one of weakness. How much do you require the reconciliation, and if it is rejected, can you still forgive? This pandemic has raised many questions about relationships and what truly matters. And it has allowed some people to take chances, making themselves vulnerable in a new and different way, blessing them with an emotional and spiritual strength they had not previously imagined was possible.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, the novel, Anna Karenina. It is the story of passionate love gone awry, leading to the death of the heroine, a tale of the search for meaning with the theme of forgiveness intruding to have its say. So, it is with greats interest that I came across an article in The Christian Science Monitor about how the pandemic has spurred reconciliation and forgiveness, particularly among families.
Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, discovered that in a random study of 1300 people nearly a quarter of them was living an active estrangement from at least one family member. And true to Tolstoy’s words, the estrangement took many different forms. Some adults, for example, were estranged from parents who did not approve of their choice of a spouse. For others, it is because parents were critical of their adult children’s parenting style, sexuality or a very big one, values. One daughter had not spoken to her father in over two years, because of political differences, which translated into a painful conflict in values. But sometimes the estrangement came because the family was too close with the parents trying to assert control over their adult child. And so, independence had to be claimed. Sometimes the conflict was among siblings, who had not spoken to each other for maybe a few years or even as long as decades. But then the pandemic hit, and one estranged brother suddenly sent his sister a package of masks with a $100 bill tucked inside.
Why has the pandemic made a difference? For one thing, death no longer seemed so remote. One woman said he had thought she was reconciled to never speaking to her brother again. She used to say to herself, “Well, what if he suddenly died, would I feel terrible that I had not spoken to him? And she thought she was o.k. with that. But it proved to be all theoretical. Death was out there someplace, but when the virus hit, the theory just crumbled. She realized that if her brother suddenly died from the virus without her ever speaking to him again, she would be very upset. And so, she took the first step and called him. After talking for a long time, they concluded that the reason for their estrangement was “silly.”
Taking the first step is the hardest one to take, because there is a big fear of rejection. “What if I reach out, and I’m slapped down?” Sometimes that does happen. A woman approached her parents and tried to talk about the cruelty she felt she had endured as a child. Their response was one of anger and rejection, and so she had to work at forgiveness in a different way. For now, at least, she did not think a relationship was possible, but she still realized she had a lot of work to do forgiving them. Her hurt and anger were harming her, and so she dug deeply into books about forgiveness. One day, while “mindfully walking,” she said she felt a tremendous release. She let it go both physically and mentally, and she said she actually felt lighter as a great weight was lifted. She said she forgave her parents for not being able to give her what she needed, and she also forgave herself for needing more than they could give her.
It helps if people can allow themselves to see the situation from the other side. Relationships cut both ways, and though children and adults have unequal power, still the adult child can sometimes allow herself to see what life was like for the parent. Understanding does not remove all pain, and it does not make abuse and cruelty o.k., but it can soften some of the bluntness, helping one to let go and move on. And moving on to live one’s life in a satisfying way is what most people want to do.
People often note that when they reconcile and/or forgive, it has an impact on other areas of their life. Often, we fail to recognize how negative energy in one area negatively works in other places. And it is not only other relationships that feel the impact. One woman, after forgiving and reconciling with her father, overcame a fear of spiders that was so strong she would not allow herself to go out into the backyard with her children to play. Suddenly she found that she was no longer so terrified of spiders!
People who are working on forgiveness and reconciliation are often helped if they can recognize if they are working from a position of strength or from one of weakness. How much do you require the reconciliation, and if it is rejected, can you still forgive? This pandemic has raised many questions about relationships and what truly matters. And it has allowed some people to take chances, making themselves vulnerable in a new and different way, blessing them with an emotional and spiritual strength they had not previously imagined was possible.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE GIFT OF HUMOR by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 6/14/2020
Genesis 18: 1-15
Romans 5: 1-8
Some time ago I was reading about famous last words, and I came across a story about a bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, who, some decades ago, lay dying, surrounded by his beloved family and friends. His breathing was barely perceptible, and at least a half dozen times people thought he had breathed his last. After a few minutes of silence and no apparent movement of the chest, his grandson said, “I think he is dead.” The son, feeling his father’s feet, responded, “His feet are still warm. He can’t be dead.” At which point the dying man opened his eyes, and said, “That’s how Joan of Arc died.!” Then closing his eyes, within a few minutes he breathed his last. His family, still trying to recover from the shock of his final words, could do nothing but laugh!
My father would have loved that story, because he was someone who tried very hard to find the humor in almost all situations. When I was growing up one of his favorite quotes was,” Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.” (Comedy in the classical sense means an upward movement and tragedy a downward one, so Christianity is finally comedy, since the final movement is redemption.) Of course, what most of us mean by comedy is something that makes us laugh, and who among us can deny what a marvelous gift laughter is. How would we survive without it? Doctors tell us laughter is good for the body, and a Harvard University study on ageing, which has been going on for over 60 years, claims that humor is among the most important qualities in helping people grow old gracefully. So, if laughter is so good for us, why has the church paid so little mind to its cultivation? Could it be because we have so few examples of humor and laughter in the Bible, especially in the New Testament? Jesus may be clever and shrewd, his words ironic, but who would ever call him funny? We never hear him laugh. Instead we hear other people laughing at him. For example, when he tells a father that his daughter is not dead, but only sleeping, people laugh because he appears absurd, out of touch with reality. And in Luke’s version of the beatitudes we hear Jesus bless those who weep now with the assurance that later they will laugh.
Laughter in the Old Testament may get a wider review, but it is a mixed one. When God laughs, as he does, three times in the Psalms (2:4, 37:13, 59:8) and once in Proverbs, (1:26) God fills the entire cosmos with dread. God’s laughter in these cases is not joyful, but scornful and derisive, the expression of God’s absolute power to punish those who reject His rule. It is certainly not the kind of laughter any of us wish to hear.
And then there is the case of Abraham and Sarah’s laughter, when they learn they are about to become parents at very advanced ages. In chapter 17, the one before today’s lesson, God tells Abraham that he will have a son, and Abraham splits his side laughing. He is 100 and Sarah is 90. I recall a bible study on this story some years ago, when one of the women said, “If we can get pregnant at 90, that puts new meaning into the term, the fear of God. We all laughed, because she certainly was right. Sarah laughs too---later in the next chapter, our text for today. The text says she laughed to herself, but apparently God heard it and asked Abraham why Sarah laughed. Apparently, God did not bother to ask Sarah directly, and perhaps that annoyed her. Sarah denies she laughed, out of fear I guess for not believing God, and God will not let her get away with her denial. “Oh yes, you did laugh,” God insists and then leaves, but not without assuring the elderly couple that He will return in the spring. And God does return, through the gift of Isaac whose name means “He who laughs.” When Sarah finally gives birth she says, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And this is a new covenant, one consecrated in laughter for the benefit of all who hear and laugh.
Abraham and Sarah’s laughter became the occasion for a great blessing, and indeed, Jewish thought has tended to interpret laughter as a blessing. Laughter, said the Jewish rabbis, cannot be initiated on earth by human beings, but rather it is a gift of God, like breath itself. This is what God teaches Abraham and Sarah, as God converts their laugh of disbelief into one of joy, and so everyone who hears the laughter of that miracle is also converted and transformed. Jewish commentators say that while the breath, which gives life, is the first miracle God grants in creation, the second miracle is laughter. Laughter comes even before speech, which anyone knows who has ever had a baby. Babies laugh long before they ever speak.
As a child of a World War II veteran, I grew up hearing war stories. But they were almost never serious---even when the subject matter was. I recall my father telling us about the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans were pushing back hard against the Allied troops after the Normandy invasion, and taking no prisoners. My father’s company, responsible for the ordering and coordination of supplies for the First Army, had to break camp and flee for their lives, and my father as the Master Sergeant was put in charge of about two dozen men, all of whom were Jewish intellectuals from New York City, except for one of my father’s friends, who like my father hailed from a Scandinavian heritage. The last time any of them, including my father, had handled a gun, was in basic training in North Carolina. “What did you do, Daddy?” we all wanted to know. “Well,” my father said, “the first thing I told them was to get a shovel to bury the machine gun we were given. None of us knew how to use it, and we didn’t want the Germans to use it on us. Secondly, I told them to bury the Stars of David they were wearing around their necks. And thirdly, I suggested they remember the funniest thing that ever happened to them. Humor and memory were the best things we had going for us that night.”
When one of my father’s former army buddies visited us, I remember the two men laughing until the tears rolled down their checks about how my father lied to his colonel about why he needed a shovel. “There we were,” his friend said, “out in the pitch of night, scared to death that the Germans would find us, and what were we doing: digging a hole to hide a machine gun and Stars of David, while we all cracked jokes.” It was a night the men never would forget! Surely, they learned of the intimate connection between terror and the ludicrous, what Shakespeare’s Hamlet meant when he said, “The laugh is rendered by nature itself: the language of extremes, even as tears are.” And so, laughter and tears often come, when words have done all they can. Then, we laugh or cry.
But if that is true, why didn’t the church follow the wisdom of the rabbis, who taught that laughter was the second gift of creation? I suspect it comes down to the doctrine of original sin, taught by Christians, but not by Jews. The church said that after the fall of Adam and Eve words and deeds could not be trusted. What is said is not necessarily what is truly intended. For example, the serpent, who spoke to Eve in the Garden, inviting her to eat the luscious fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, meant something else by his words, and though his words did not issue in laughter, the church fathers saw laughter as emerging from the same duplicitous process. The serpent’s words were like laughter, they said, with some other meaning lurking just beneath the surface.
And what Eve saw could also not be trusted. She saw the fruit from the tree, and it appeared good to eat. But it was not so. Eve saw what she thought was real---good fruit to eat, and she ate because of what she saw with her own eyes and heard from the serpent with her own ears. So, after the story of Adam and Eve, seeing and hearing became problems, because we cannot always trust what we see and hear. Word and deed are sometimes torn asunder, and this is not only the source of tragedy, but also the source of comedy. We often laugh when word and deed do not fit together.
The Apostle Paul sometimes preaches words of creative brilliance, inspiring and reminding us that “suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” But Paul offers no humor, so it is quite interesting that the early church fathers said the resurrection fills heaven with laughter. And when the Italian writer, Dante, wrote his great masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about a journey beginning in hell, moving into purgatory and finally into heaven, what is heard as the final ascent is made and the celestial realm finally attained: laughter. And so, laughter comes. It comes as a blessing, the second gift of creation, and sometimes it is the very thing, the very gift, which gets us through. We laugh, and we hope that God hears us, because sometimes laughter is also our prayer.
Genesis 18: 1-15
Romans 5: 1-8
Some time ago I was reading about famous last words, and I came across a story about a bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, who, some decades ago, lay dying, surrounded by his beloved family and friends. His breathing was barely perceptible, and at least a half dozen times people thought he had breathed his last. After a few minutes of silence and no apparent movement of the chest, his grandson said, “I think he is dead.” The son, feeling his father’s feet, responded, “His feet are still warm. He can’t be dead.” At which point the dying man opened his eyes, and said, “That’s how Joan of Arc died.!” Then closing his eyes, within a few minutes he breathed his last. His family, still trying to recover from the shock of his final words, could do nothing but laugh!
My father would have loved that story, because he was someone who tried very hard to find the humor in almost all situations. When I was growing up one of his favorite quotes was,” Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.” (Comedy in the classical sense means an upward movement and tragedy a downward one, so Christianity is finally comedy, since the final movement is redemption.) Of course, what most of us mean by comedy is something that makes us laugh, and who among us can deny what a marvelous gift laughter is. How would we survive without it? Doctors tell us laughter is good for the body, and a Harvard University study on ageing, which has been going on for over 60 years, claims that humor is among the most important qualities in helping people grow old gracefully. So, if laughter is so good for us, why has the church paid so little mind to its cultivation? Could it be because we have so few examples of humor and laughter in the Bible, especially in the New Testament? Jesus may be clever and shrewd, his words ironic, but who would ever call him funny? We never hear him laugh. Instead we hear other people laughing at him. For example, when he tells a father that his daughter is not dead, but only sleeping, people laugh because he appears absurd, out of touch with reality. And in Luke’s version of the beatitudes we hear Jesus bless those who weep now with the assurance that later they will laugh.
Laughter in the Old Testament may get a wider review, but it is a mixed one. When God laughs, as he does, three times in the Psalms (2:4, 37:13, 59:8) and once in Proverbs, (1:26) God fills the entire cosmos with dread. God’s laughter in these cases is not joyful, but scornful and derisive, the expression of God’s absolute power to punish those who reject His rule. It is certainly not the kind of laughter any of us wish to hear.
And then there is the case of Abraham and Sarah’s laughter, when they learn they are about to become parents at very advanced ages. In chapter 17, the one before today’s lesson, God tells Abraham that he will have a son, and Abraham splits his side laughing. He is 100 and Sarah is 90. I recall a bible study on this story some years ago, when one of the women said, “If we can get pregnant at 90, that puts new meaning into the term, the fear of God. We all laughed, because she certainly was right. Sarah laughs too---later in the next chapter, our text for today. The text says she laughed to herself, but apparently God heard it and asked Abraham why Sarah laughed. Apparently, God did not bother to ask Sarah directly, and perhaps that annoyed her. Sarah denies she laughed, out of fear I guess for not believing God, and God will not let her get away with her denial. “Oh yes, you did laugh,” God insists and then leaves, but not without assuring the elderly couple that He will return in the spring. And God does return, through the gift of Isaac whose name means “He who laughs.” When Sarah finally gives birth she says, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And this is a new covenant, one consecrated in laughter for the benefit of all who hear and laugh.
Abraham and Sarah’s laughter became the occasion for a great blessing, and indeed, Jewish thought has tended to interpret laughter as a blessing. Laughter, said the Jewish rabbis, cannot be initiated on earth by human beings, but rather it is a gift of God, like breath itself. This is what God teaches Abraham and Sarah, as God converts their laugh of disbelief into one of joy, and so everyone who hears the laughter of that miracle is also converted and transformed. Jewish commentators say that while the breath, which gives life, is the first miracle God grants in creation, the second miracle is laughter. Laughter comes even before speech, which anyone knows who has ever had a baby. Babies laugh long before they ever speak.
As a child of a World War II veteran, I grew up hearing war stories. But they were almost never serious---even when the subject matter was. I recall my father telling us about the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans were pushing back hard against the Allied troops after the Normandy invasion, and taking no prisoners. My father’s company, responsible for the ordering and coordination of supplies for the First Army, had to break camp and flee for their lives, and my father as the Master Sergeant was put in charge of about two dozen men, all of whom were Jewish intellectuals from New York City, except for one of my father’s friends, who like my father hailed from a Scandinavian heritage. The last time any of them, including my father, had handled a gun, was in basic training in North Carolina. “What did you do, Daddy?” we all wanted to know. “Well,” my father said, “the first thing I told them was to get a shovel to bury the machine gun we were given. None of us knew how to use it, and we didn’t want the Germans to use it on us. Secondly, I told them to bury the Stars of David they were wearing around their necks. And thirdly, I suggested they remember the funniest thing that ever happened to them. Humor and memory were the best things we had going for us that night.”
When one of my father’s former army buddies visited us, I remember the two men laughing until the tears rolled down their checks about how my father lied to his colonel about why he needed a shovel. “There we were,” his friend said, “out in the pitch of night, scared to death that the Germans would find us, and what were we doing: digging a hole to hide a machine gun and Stars of David, while we all cracked jokes.” It was a night the men never would forget! Surely, they learned of the intimate connection between terror and the ludicrous, what Shakespeare’s Hamlet meant when he said, “The laugh is rendered by nature itself: the language of extremes, even as tears are.” And so, laughter and tears often come, when words have done all they can. Then, we laugh or cry.
But if that is true, why didn’t the church follow the wisdom of the rabbis, who taught that laughter was the second gift of creation? I suspect it comes down to the doctrine of original sin, taught by Christians, but not by Jews. The church said that after the fall of Adam and Eve words and deeds could not be trusted. What is said is not necessarily what is truly intended. For example, the serpent, who spoke to Eve in the Garden, inviting her to eat the luscious fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, meant something else by his words, and though his words did not issue in laughter, the church fathers saw laughter as emerging from the same duplicitous process. The serpent’s words were like laughter, they said, with some other meaning lurking just beneath the surface.
And what Eve saw could also not be trusted. She saw the fruit from the tree, and it appeared good to eat. But it was not so. Eve saw what she thought was real---good fruit to eat, and she ate because of what she saw with her own eyes and heard from the serpent with her own ears. So, after the story of Adam and Eve, seeing and hearing became problems, because we cannot always trust what we see and hear. Word and deed are sometimes torn asunder, and this is not only the source of tragedy, but also the source of comedy. We often laugh when word and deed do not fit together.
The Apostle Paul sometimes preaches words of creative brilliance, inspiring and reminding us that “suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” But Paul offers no humor, so it is quite interesting that the early church fathers said the resurrection fills heaven with laughter. And when the Italian writer, Dante, wrote his great masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about a journey beginning in hell, moving into purgatory and finally into heaven, what is heard as the final ascent is made and the celestial realm finally attained: laughter. And so, laughter comes. It comes as a blessing, the second gift of creation, and sometimes it is the very thing, the very gift, which gets us through. We laugh, and we hope that God hears us, because sometimes laughter is also our prayer.
June 3, 2020
Dear Friends,
It is now June and though not yet officially summer, June is the month we embrace as summer’s beginning. In normal times the traffic picks up as people head to the beach, week end getaways and the celebrated two week family vacation. We see SUV’s with car carriers on top and bicycles hugging the car’s rear. But this year the scene just might be very different. I recently read that 2/3 of vacations have been scrapped—airplane flights, hotels, cottage and house rentals, etc. The prediction is that more and more people will be taking day trips as they find enjoyable things to do closer to home.
Do you remember the end of the wonderful movie, The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy was asked what she had learned? And what did she say? Something like this, “If I ever go searching after my heart’s desire again, I don’t need to look any further than my own backyard.” The Straw Man said he should have been able to figure that out with his new brain, and the Tim Man said he should have felt it with his new heart, but “No,” the Good Witch, Glinda, insisted, “Dorothy had to figure it out herself.”
Indeed, there are many things we have to learn on our own, but perhaps this summer families and friends will be learning together just how many treasures there are near home. “It is the summer of the car and the local,” a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Hopkins, recently wrote. The Monitor, by the way, is stationed in Boston, so Mr. Hopkins drove to Walden Pond in Concord, MA, less than an hour from the city. This is a trip any of us could take from our homes, and if you have not been there, or if you have not been there in a number of years, why not go? In these months of enforced seclusion, it might be a good thing to look at the place where Thoreau lived for a time and ponder what he had to say. “A man (person) must generally get away some hundreds or thousands of miles from home before he can be said to begin his travels. Why not begin his travels at home?” Thoreau wondered. An excellent question in these days of cancelled vacations.
I imagine that some of you were assigned to read Walden in high school. I was not, so I never read the book in its entirety, just snippets of it here and there. I came to love Thoreau not so much for his solitude at Walden Pond as his protest, his famous “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” which anyone, who is a child of the late 60’s, surely read. He was vehemently opposed to the Mexican War, and so he refused to pay his poll tax, which landed him in jail. When his good friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, passed by the jail, he called out, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau reportedly answered, “Ralph, at times like this, what are you doing out there?” He did have a way with words!
And Walden is filled with wonderful words. He wrote about his stay on Walden Pond, which began on July 4, 1845, and he remained there for two years, two months and two days. Though he lived alone in the small cabin, which was 10 by 15 feet, he was not solitary. He would walk into the center of Concord, where he would meet friends and socialize. Not only was Ralph Waldo Emerson counted among his friends, but Emerson’s wife was also very fond of Thoreau. He was part of an intellectually elite group of Transcendentalists, who would discuss the big ideas of the day, but he did like his solitude at times, and so he could not always be counted on to regularly participate.
Why did he do what he did? Nine years after he left his cabin, he wrote about his experiences in the woods, writing that he wanted to “live deliberately.” Only 27 when he began his experiment, he had no attachments and no idea what the future held for him. He had lived in New York for a time, trying to pursue a writing career, but he returned home, homesick and discouraged. He began a school with his brother, John, but John died from an infected finger, and that ended not only John’s life, but also the school’s.
There are lines from the book so familiar that posters of them abound: “The mass of humanity leads lives of quiet desperation.” Or “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” It isn’t clear what Thoreau actually discovered in his two years at Walden. He was never one to be pinned down, and since he never married or had children to raise, his financial obligations beyond himself were few. He was a man of great contradictions: He hated work but at times loved it. He embraced solitude, but he also said how much he enjoyed the company of other people. Perhaps he was a man, who needed everything on his own terms, hardly an ideal trait for marriage and a family.
I don’t know what Thoreau ever really discovered at Walden or even in his life. He died relatively young, at age 44. He seemed to be someone who thought that life was more about searching than finding. He also believed that we would be far better off if we practiced the art of keen observation, both of the natural world and other human beings. Perhaps then we would make less mistakes. And to observe carefully, you don’t have to go far away from home. So, Thoreau did not wander far away. There are novelties all around us, he would say, even in the most ordinary environments. But we have to take the time to look. When Thoreau finally left his cabin the woods behind, he said, “At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” And so, he was, and so are we.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
It is now June and though not yet officially summer, June is the month we embrace as summer’s beginning. In normal times the traffic picks up as people head to the beach, week end getaways and the celebrated two week family vacation. We see SUV’s with car carriers on top and bicycles hugging the car’s rear. But this year the scene just might be very different. I recently read that 2/3 of vacations have been scrapped—airplane flights, hotels, cottage and house rentals, etc. The prediction is that more and more people will be taking day trips as they find enjoyable things to do closer to home.
Do you remember the end of the wonderful movie, The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy was asked what she had learned? And what did she say? Something like this, “If I ever go searching after my heart’s desire again, I don’t need to look any further than my own backyard.” The Straw Man said he should have been able to figure that out with his new brain, and the Tim Man said he should have felt it with his new heart, but “No,” the Good Witch, Glinda, insisted, “Dorothy had to figure it out herself.”
Indeed, there are many things we have to learn on our own, but perhaps this summer families and friends will be learning together just how many treasures there are near home. “It is the summer of the car and the local,” a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Hopkins, recently wrote. The Monitor, by the way, is stationed in Boston, so Mr. Hopkins drove to Walden Pond in Concord, MA, less than an hour from the city. This is a trip any of us could take from our homes, and if you have not been there, or if you have not been there in a number of years, why not go? In these months of enforced seclusion, it might be a good thing to look at the place where Thoreau lived for a time and ponder what he had to say. “A man (person) must generally get away some hundreds or thousands of miles from home before he can be said to begin his travels. Why not begin his travels at home?” Thoreau wondered. An excellent question in these days of cancelled vacations.
I imagine that some of you were assigned to read Walden in high school. I was not, so I never read the book in its entirety, just snippets of it here and there. I came to love Thoreau not so much for his solitude at Walden Pond as his protest, his famous “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” which anyone, who is a child of the late 60’s, surely read. He was vehemently opposed to the Mexican War, and so he refused to pay his poll tax, which landed him in jail. When his good friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, passed by the jail, he called out, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau reportedly answered, “Ralph, at times like this, what are you doing out there?” He did have a way with words!
And Walden is filled with wonderful words. He wrote about his stay on Walden Pond, which began on July 4, 1845, and he remained there for two years, two months and two days. Though he lived alone in the small cabin, which was 10 by 15 feet, he was not solitary. He would walk into the center of Concord, where he would meet friends and socialize. Not only was Ralph Waldo Emerson counted among his friends, but Emerson’s wife was also very fond of Thoreau. He was part of an intellectually elite group of Transcendentalists, who would discuss the big ideas of the day, but he did like his solitude at times, and so he could not always be counted on to regularly participate.
Why did he do what he did? Nine years after he left his cabin, he wrote about his experiences in the woods, writing that he wanted to “live deliberately.” Only 27 when he began his experiment, he had no attachments and no idea what the future held for him. He had lived in New York for a time, trying to pursue a writing career, but he returned home, homesick and discouraged. He began a school with his brother, John, but John died from an infected finger, and that ended not only John’s life, but also the school’s.
There are lines from the book so familiar that posters of them abound: “The mass of humanity leads lives of quiet desperation.” Or “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” It isn’t clear what Thoreau actually discovered in his two years at Walden. He was never one to be pinned down, and since he never married or had children to raise, his financial obligations beyond himself were few. He was a man of great contradictions: He hated work but at times loved it. He embraced solitude, but he also said how much he enjoyed the company of other people. Perhaps he was a man, who needed everything on his own terms, hardly an ideal trait for marriage and a family.
I don’t know what Thoreau ever really discovered at Walden or even in his life. He died relatively young, at age 44. He seemed to be someone who thought that life was more about searching than finding. He also believed that we would be far better off if we practiced the art of keen observation, both of the natural world and other human beings. Perhaps then we would make less mistakes. And to observe carefully, you don’t have to go far away from home. So, Thoreau did not wander far away. There are novelties all around us, he would say, even in the most ordinary environments. But we have to take the time to look. When Thoreau finally left his cabin the woods behind, he said, “At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” And so, he was, and so are we.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
THE TRINITY: IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIP by Rev. Sandra Olsen 6/7/2020
Matthew 28: 16-20
Sister Claire was an unforgettable character. A member of the sisters of St. Joseph with whom I became acquainted while doing clinical training at a psychiatric hospital, she was a brilliant woman with a sad biography. Her life had been books, and her dream was to teach in a catholic college or university. Sister Claire had entered the Order at age 18, after having spent all her life in convent schools, and by the time she was 26 she had earned a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University. She expected her career to blossom, and so did her professors, but her Order had other plans for Sister Claire. She was prideful, they told her, and so she was assigned to teach English to junior high school girls. Frustrated, bored, alienated, angry, she began to manifest serious psychological problems by her mid 40's, and suffered a full blown psychosis in her 50's. For five years she was hospitalized in a private psychiatric hospital in New York, and then was transferred to a state facility. And there she lived.
Claire spent most of her day in her room reading the pile of books another nun would faithfully bring to her, and if you tried to coax out of the room, she would first verbally assault you before resorting to a kick, punch or in my case, scratch. And so, she was often left alone to read her Jane Austen or Tolstoy. One day, quietly coming out of her room, she motioned to me with her finger to come in. “Sit here,” she said, pointing to a chair. Picking up her copy of Mary Gordon's novel, The Company of Women, she said, “This part is about Muriel, a housekeeper for one of the priests. Muriel is a bitter, spiteful, cynical woman, and this is what she says about herself. This is the part I want you to hear. And then she read:
"My death will be a relief to everyone. There is nothing more lonely than to look among live faces for the face of one who will live after oneself and mourn, the face that, after one's death, will be changed by grief, and to find contempt or an undifferentiated kindness. I wait for a face to meet my face; I wait for the singular gaze, the gaze of permanent choosing, the glance of absolute preferment. This I have always waited for and never found, have hungered for and never tasted. I wait here to be looked upon with favor, to be chosen above others, knowing I will die the first beloved of no living soul."
Claire looked up from her book and closed it. "At age 18,” she said, “I became the bride of Christ. Now I would give Christ away, if someone would only call me friend."
Friend: such a simple one syllable word it is, and yet it is essential to our identity as social and spiritual beings, so central in fact, we can die for want of it; yet in the Gospel of Matthew the word is not mentioned at all; in Mark, only once, in Luke, 10 times, and in John only 3, all in the three chapter farewell discourse from Jesus, when he moves from calling his disciples servants to calling them his friends.
Friendship was a very important concept in the ancient world---especially among the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, who thought long and hard about the various kinds of friendship. Christianity, on the other hand, did not expend much effort thinking about friendship. But it did think about relationship, which is, according to Christianity, what the divine identity is all about. And so over time the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. Matthew was written around the year 80, but even by the end of the first century, when John’s Gospel is believed to have been written, the Trinity was not yet fully developed. It would take the arguments of later councils in the third and fourth centuries to hammer out the doctrine, which although distinctive to Christianity, is one many Christians today ignore.
Oh, we know the words. Matthew, in what is called the Great Commission, shows Jesus commissioning his disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If you ask the average parishioner to explain what the Trinity means he or she will most likely say that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and leave it at that. Someone might recall the popular hymn, Holy, Holy, Holy; God in three persons, blessed Trinity, but beyond that most Christians would not know what to say. Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th century, said that most Christians, if you told them the doctrine of the Trinity was being dropped, would hardly care, let alone notice.
But if something is true, at least according to good ole American pragmatism, it has to make a difference to someone at sometime in some place. So, what difference does the doctrine make? Consider what the doctrine says: the very essence of God’s identity is relationship. The very being of God is dynamic movement among these three “persons”. There is give and take, a mutuality of giving and receiving in love. We use the language of person hood, and of course, all human language limps and is inadequate to explain God, but this is what we have to use. It is the best we can do, or else we would be condemned to silence. Now maybe some people or religions prefer the silence. A recent convert to Buddhism noted that what she likes about the Buddha is how he is pictured: a solid figure, sitting calming and silently and wisely in a lotus position. That is not the Christian God. God is not silent. In the beginning was the Word.
So, if the very essence of God is dynamic relationship, what does that mean for us humans, made as we are in the image of God? We too are called to be in relationship, and indeed, that is what the church is supposed to be: a community of believers, who in relationship with one another share a vision of the new creation, which moves them forward. It is often true that churches can be more like a collection of solitary individuals, who happen to be in the same space on Sunday mornings. This is not what Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples, “Go, go out the world and make disciples of others, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” To make disciples and to baptize means to be in relationship.
And this is exactly what Sister Claire did not have. She did not have relationship, and she knew what a loss that was. She would give up Christ, she had said, to have someone call her friend. I visited her, because I had case studies to present, and as unappealing and aggressive as Claire sometimes was, she was interesting and incredibly smart. And so, in the beginning, I confess, that's what Claire was to me: interesting, smart material.
But something happened along the way. She and I actually developed a relationship, and one day, depressed and overcome by the immensity of the suffering I daily witnessed in that state facility, I blurted out to Claire. “I hate these cement walls; I hate the sound of locking doors and clanging keys. I hate the stare of vacant eyes, the sound of hideous laughter, the sight of broken lives. I walk around here repeating Isaiah's words, "Oh truly, you are a God who hides yourself!" Why in such desperate need do we only have a hidden God on whom to rely? Why?"
Claire didn't answer me. She reached out her hand---the same hand that had scratched my arm hard enough to draw blood, but instead of hurting me, she gently took my hand and put it against her cheek, upon which rivulets of tears now flowed. The two of us just sat there, saying nothing, but realizing that that in that moment we shared something significant---the same question that protested the silence that did not yield an answer. After this Claire considered me her spiritual confidant. And when I left the hospital she gave me her beloved copy of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility with these words, written on the front page: “It’s All About Relationship.”
Indeed, it is. Sometimes we find ourselves thrown together in situations, which draw something out of us we did not necessarily know was there. Sometimes we choose our relationships, but at other times they are chosen for us. They are gifts, and we find them not so much when we seek, but when we are found, found by a God in whose image we are made, a God who calls us to live in relationship. We are living in difficult and trying days, when all kinds of relationships are threatened, when Americans are torn as they see ideals of justice, compassion and fairness denied. Who are we and whom do we desire to become? That is the question before us, put to us not only by our history, but also by our God in Jesus Christ.
Presenting our Gifts:
Let us now bring forth our offering, recognizing that the obligation to give is most profoundly the privilege to give.
Prayer of Dedication:
O God, accept these our gifts to our church as well as to the One Great Hour of Sharing, and teach us in wisdom to use them to the glory of your love. Amen
Prayers:
Oh God,
You give us people with whom to walk in our life journeys, and for this, in spite of all the discomfort and unease of our relationships, we are grateful. We ask that you open our ears and our eyes and our hearts that we might hear and see the gifts our relationships are. Teach us to be better friends to one another; teach us to befriend you in the neighbor and even in the enemy. Teach us that whenever we return good for evil, truth for lies, and forgiveness for hurt, we become friends to Christ, who would call us servants no longer, but friends.
Benediction:
Be still and know that God is.
Be still and know that God loves you.
Be still and know that even if you cannot find God, God will and can find you.
Matthew 28: 16-20
Sister Claire was an unforgettable character. A member of the sisters of St. Joseph with whom I became acquainted while doing clinical training at a psychiatric hospital, she was a brilliant woman with a sad biography. Her life had been books, and her dream was to teach in a catholic college or university. Sister Claire had entered the Order at age 18, after having spent all her life in convent schools, and by the time she was 26 she had earned a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University. She expected her career to blossom, and so did her professors, but her Order had other plans for Sister Claire. She was prideful, they told her, and so she was assigned to teach English to junior high school girls. Frustrated, bored, alienated, angry, she began to manifest serious psychological problems by her mid 40's, and suffered a full blown psychosis in her 50's. For five years she was hospitalized in a private psychiatric hospital in New York, and then was transferred to a state facility. And there she lived.
Claire spent most of her day in her room reading the pile of books another nun would faithfully bring to her, and if you tried to coax out of the room, she would first verbally assault you before resorting to a kick, punch or in my case, scratch. And so, she was often left alone to read her Jane Austen or Tolstoy. One day, quietly coming out of her room, she motioned to me with her finger to come in. “Sit here,” she said, pointing to a chair. Picking up her copy of Mary Gordon's novel, The Company of Women, she said, “This part is about Muriel, a housekeeper for one of the priests. Muriel is a bitter, spiteful, cynical woman, and this is what she says about herself. This is the part I want you to hear. And then she read:
"My death will be a relief to everyone. There is nothing more lonely than to look among live faces for the face of one who will live after oneself and mourn, the face that, after one's death, will be changed by grief, and to find contempt or an undifferentiated kindness. I wait for a face to meet my face; I wait for the singular gaze, the gaze of permanent choosing, the glance of absolute preferment. This I have always waited for and never found, have hungered for and never tasted. I wait here to be looked upon with favor, to be chosen above others, knowing I will die the first beloved of no living soul."
Claire looked up from her book and closed it. "At age 18,” she said, “I became the bride of Christ. Now I would give Christ away, if someone would only call me friend."
Friend: such a simple one syllable word it is, and yet it is essential to our identity as social and spiritual beings, so central in fact, we can die for want of it; yet in the Gospel of Matthew the word is not mentioned at all; in Mark, only once, in Luke, 10 times, and in John only 3, all in the three chapter farewell discourse from Jesus, when he moves from calling his disciples servants to calling them his friends.
Friendship was a very important concept in the ancient world---especially among the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, who thought long and hard about the various kinds of friendship. Christianity, on the other hand, did not expend much effort thinking about friendship. But it did think about relationship, which is, according to Christianity, what the divine identity is all about. And so over time the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. Matthew was written around the year 80, but even by the end of the first century, when John’s Gospel is believed to have been written, the Trinity was not yet fully developed. It would take the arguments of later councils in the third and fourth centuries to hammer out the doctrine, which although distinctive to Christianity, is one many Christians today ignore.
Oh, we know the words. Matthew, in what is called the Great Commission, shows Jesus commissioning his disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If you ask the average parishioner to explain what the Trinity means he or she will most likely say that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and leave it at that. Someone might recall the popular hymn, Holy, Holy, Holy; God in three persons, blessed Trinity, but beyond that most Christians would not know what to say. Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th century, said that most Christians, if you told them the doctrine of the Trinity was being dropped, would hardly care, let alone notice.
But if something is true, at least according to good ole American pragmatism, it has to make a difference to someone at sometime in some place. So, what difference does the doctrine make? Consider what the doctrine says: the very essence of God’s identity is relationship. The very being of God is dynamic movement among these three “persons”. There is give and take, a mutuality of giving and receiving in love. We use the language of person hood, and of course, all human language limps and is inadequate to explain God, but this is what we have to use. It is the best we can do, or else we would be condemned to silence. Now maybe some people or religions prefer the silence. A recent convert to Buddhism noted that what she likes about the Buddha is how he is pictured: a solid figure, sitting calming and silently and wisely in a lotus position. That is not the Christian God. God is not silent. In the beginning was the Word.
So, if the very essence of God is dynamic relationship, what does that mean for us humans, made as we are in the image of God? We too are called to be in relationship, and indeed, that is what the church is supposed to be: a community of believers, who in relationship with one another share a vision of the new creation, which moves them forward. It is often true that churches can be more like a collection of solitary individuals, who happen to be in the same space on Sunday mornings. This is not what Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples, “Go, go out the world and make disciples of others, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” To make disciples and to baptize means to be in relationship.
And this is exactly what Sister Claire did not have. She did not have relationship, and she knew what a loss that was. She would give up Christ, she had said, to have someone call her friend. I visited her, because I had case studies to present, and as unappealing and aggressive as Claire sometimes was, she was interesting and incredibly smart. And so, in the beginning, I confess, that's what Claire was to me: interesting, smart material.
But something happened along the way. She and I actually developed a relationship, and one day, depressed and overcome by the immensity of the suffering I daily witnessed in that state facility, I blurted out to Claire. “I hate these cement walls; I hate the sound of locking doors and clanging keys. I hate the stare of vacant eyes, the sound of hideous laughter, the sight of broken lives. I walk around here repeating Isaiah's words, "Oh truly, you are a God who hides yourself!" Why in such desperate need do we only have a hidden God on whom to rely? Why?"
Claire didn't answer me. She reached out her hand---the same hand that had scratched my arm hard enough to draw blood, but instead of hurting me, she gently took my hand and put it against her cheek, upon which rivulets of tears now flowed. The two of us just sat there, saying nothing, but realizing that that in that moment we shared something significant---the same question that protested the silence that did not yield an answer. After this Claire considered me her spiritual confidant. And when I left the hospital she gave me her beloved copy of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility with these words, written on the front page: “It’s All About Relationship.”
Indeed, it is. Sometimes we find ourselves thrown together in situations, which draw something out of us we did not necessarily know was there. Sometimes we choose our relationships, but at other times they are chosen for us. They are gifts, and we find them not so much when we seek, but when we are found, found by a God in whose image we are made, a God who calls us to live in relationship. We are living in difficult and trying days, when all kinds of relationships are threatened, when Americans are torn as they see ideals of justice, compassion and fairness denied. Who are we and whom do we desire to become? That is the question before us, put to us not only by our history, but also by our God in Jesus Christ.
Presenting our Gifts:
Let us now bring forth our offering, recognizing that the obligation to give is most profoundly the privilege to give.
Prayer of Dedication:
O God, accept these our gifts to our church as well as to the One Great Hour of Sharing, and teach us in wisdom to use them to the glory of your love. Amen
Prayers:
Oh God,
You give us people with whom to walk in our life journeys, and for this, in spite of all the discomfort and unease of our relationships, we are grateful. We ask that you open our ears and our eyes and our hearts that we might hear and see the gifts our relationships are. Teach us to be better friends to one another; teach us to befriend you in the neighbor and even in the enemy. Teach us that whenever we return good for evil, truth for lies, and forgiveness for hurt, we become friends to Christ, who would call us servants no longer, but friends.
Benediction:
Be still and know that God is.
Be still and know that God loves you.
Be still and know that even if you cannot find God, God will and can find you.
May 27, 2020
Dear Friends,
For the two thousand years plus of the Church’s history, it is been a supporter of the arts. Music, sculpture, stained glass and painting have been an important part of the Church’s story. During the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond the Church was a great patron of the arts, commissioning artists and musicians to create and compose. Beauty, it was believed, was a pathway to the Divine. Of course, wealthy individuals also commissioned works for the church (sometimes) in the hopes that this would buy them a ticket into heaven, and the medieval guilds would do the same, hoping that people would notice their generosity and thus employ their skills for more mundane needs and tasks.
The Reformation brought some pretty substantial changes, when Protestant theologians and preachers began to fear that the beauty of the created objects became idolatrous, drawing the people away from God to the created object and its maker. During the Reformation bands of rampaging Protestants would sometimes smash the gorgeous stained glass and statues and rip paintings down from the walls, ceilings and even the altars in a radical show of disdain for the artistic beauty of the various objects in the churches. But still, beauty had its say, and though the visual arts suffered under Protestant hegemony, music did not. J.S. Bach was a devout and faithful Lutheran, whose music was often composed for worship.
Music certainly has a spiritual dimension, and one does not have to be a church goer to know and understand this. When the New York Times asked people what they missed during the lock down some noted the lack of concerts. One can listen to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart on a CD player and even with the most exquisite speakers, it is simply not the same as being in a live concert hall, watching the musicians, surrounded by an admiring audience. And now as the summer months approach, we are learning that more and more concerts are being cancelled. Tanglewood, the summer residence of the Boston Symphony, has cancelled its concerts for the summer as has the Norfolk Music Festival in Norfolk, CT, the summer residence of the Yale School of Music. All across the country and the world, music festivals and concerts are saying, No Go, leaving people discouraged and even depressed. It is a major loss, and people are mourning.
So, it is with interest that I read about concerts being played in German airports, gardens and museums. They are rather “strange affairs,” because there is usually only one musician and one person in the audience, though some performances have allowed more people to attend---like four! People buy tickets online and then show up for a what is usually a very short performance. There is to be no talking between the musician and the audience, but they do sometimes gaze into each other’s eyes. One concert goer said he had never felt such a deep connection between himself and the musician. And the musician, who was a cellist, agreed.
“I cannot wait,” he said, “to return to the large concert hall and play complicated, loud works in front of one or two thousand people. But the emotions with these small concerts are completely different,” he admitted. “I connected with people in the airport in a way I never would have imagined is possible. Maybe we should continue this even when life and concerts return to normal.”
There is certainly something deeply spiritual about how music works on the brain. Music can offer uplift and inspiration. Many would see it as a civilizing force. And yet, we should recall that in the concentration camps during World War ll, populated as they were with many talented and even famous musicians, orchestras were formed and played some of the most hauntingly beautiful music ever composed. And the German officers would listen to the music and weep because its beauty stirred the soul. And yet they were in the business of murdering people! Clearly, there was some kind of deep disconnect. How can we possibly understand such phenomena? Indeed, we human beings are complicated creatures, and music (like all the arts) enter into our complications. And so, while beauty can indeed be a pathway, pointing toward God, there is no guarantee of the direction a person will take. We hope that the arts will civilize us, and when they fail to do so, the fault lies not in the art but in ourselves and in the conditions into which we force other people to live.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
For the two thousand years plus of the Church’s history, it is been a supporter of the arts. Music, sculpture, stained glass and painting have been an important part of the Church’s story. During the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond the Church was a great patron of the arts, commissioning artists and musicians to create and compose. Beauty, it was believed, was a pathway to the Divine. Of course, wealthy individuals also commissioned works for the church (sometimes) in the hopes that this would buy them a ticket into heaven, and the medieval guilds would do the same, hoping that people would notice their generosity and thus employ their skills for more mundane needs and tasks.
The Reformation brought some pretty substantial changes, when Protestant theologians and preachers began to fear that the beauty of the created objects became idolatrous, drawing the people away from God to the created object and its maker. During the Reformation bands of rampaging Protestants would sometimes smash the gorgeous stained glass and statues and rip paintings down from the walls, ceilings and even the altars in a radical show of disdain for the artistic beauty of the various objects in the churches. But still, beauty had its say, and though the visual arts suffered under Protestant hegemony, music did not. J.S. Bach was a devout and faithful Lutheran, whose music was often composed for worship.
Music certainly has a spiritual dimension, and one does not have to be a church goer to know and understand this. When the New York Times asked people what they missed during the lock down some noted the lack of concerts. One can listen to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart on a CD player and even with the most exquisite speakers, it is simply not the same as being in a live concert hall, watching the musicians, surrounded by an admiring audience. And now as the summer months approach, we are learning that more and more concerts are being cancelled. Tanglewood, the summer residence of the Boston Symphony, has cancelled its concerts for the summer as has the Norfolk Music Festival in Norfolk, CT, the summer residence of the Yale School of Music. All across the country and the world, music festivals and concerts are saying, No Go, leaving people discouraged and even depressed. It is a major loss, and people are mourning.
So, it is with interest that I read about concerts being played in German airports, gardens and museums. They are rather “strange affairs,” because there is usually only one musician and one person in the audience, though some performances have allowed more people to attend---like four! People buy tickets online and then show up for a what is usually a very short performance. There is to be no talking between the musician and the audience, but they do sometimes gaze into each other’s eyes. One concert goer said he had never felt such a deep connection between himself and the musician. And the musician, who was a cellist, agreed.
“I cannot wait,” he said, “to return to the large concert hall and play complicated, loud works in front of one or two thousand people. But the emotions with these small concerts are completely different,” he admitted. “I connected with people in the airport in a way I never would have imagined is possible. Maybe we should continue this even when life and concerts return to normal.”
There is certainly something deeply spiritual about how music works on the brain. Music can offer uplift and inspiration. Many would see it as a civilizing force. And yet, we should recall that in the concentration camps during World War ll, populated as they were with many talented and even famous musicians, orchestras were formed and played some of the most hauntingly beautiful music ever composed. And the German officers would listen to the music and weep because its beauty stirred the soul. And yet they were in the business of murdering people! Clearly, there was some kind of deep disconnect. How can we possibly understand such phenomena? Indeed, we human beings are complicated creatures, and music (like all the arts) enter into our complications. And so, while beauty can indeed be a pathway, pointing toward God, there is no guarantee of the direction a person will take. We hope that the arts will civilize us, and when they fail to do so, the fault lies not in the art but in ourselves and in the conditions into which we force other people to live.
Yours in Christ,
Sandra
WHEN THE SPIRIT BLOWS by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 5/31/2020
Galatians 5: 22-26
Acts 2: 1-21
On May 27, 1999 Darrell Scott, the father of Rachel Scott, one of the victims of the Columbine High School shooting, spoke before a small subcommittee of House members, convened in an office building. Eight other people offered testimony, including a mother, whose son, like Rachel, died that awful morning, now more than 20 years ago. While that mother pleaded for stricter gun control laws, this was not Darrell Scott’s intention. It wasn’t that he opposed such laws, but he had something else he wanted to say. Here, in part, are his words.
Since the dawn of creation there has been both good and evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy; it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies. Men and women are three part beings. We all consist of body, mind and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. …. The real villain lies within our own hearts. We do not need more religion. We do not need more gaudy television evangelists spewing out verbal religious garbage. We do not need more million dollar church buildings built while people with basic needs are being ignored. We do need a change of heart and a humble acknowledgment that this nation was founded on the principle of simple trust in God!
We have all heard the distinction made between spiritual and religious. How many times have we heard people say, I am spiritual, but not religious as a way of explaining their disinterest in church? Darrell Scott inherently made the distinction when he said it is not more religion we need. But we do need something, and our present culture apparently cannot decide on what that something is, or how to go about getting and expressing it.
Now I am a Baby Boomer, which means I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, and I attended, I am convinced, one of the most progressive elementary schools in the nation, Windermere Boulevard Elementary School in Eggertsville, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. Its physical structure was impressive, boasting a swimming pool, where swimming was taught, beginning in the third grade, a gymnasium, gorgeous art and music rooms. Elaborate musicals and plays were performed every year, and the Windermere World was published annually, a collection of art work, stories, poems, all written or drawn by students from K through the 6th grade. No homework was allowed until the 4th grade, because the principal, Arthur York, fervently believed it was imperative for children to play after school.
But there was something else that the school did, which really was spiritual. Each month the principal chose a virtue, like honesty, courage, compassion, intelligence, creativity and yes, even faith and an historical figure, who instantiated that virtue. He introduced the virtue and the character over the loud speaker at the beginning of the month, and then it was the teacher’s job to come up with age appropriate lessons on this character and his or her virtue. In this way I learned about Dr. Tom Dooley, a man of faith, who as a devout Roman Catholic and a medical doctor, went to Laos to establish a hospital and clinic there. Names like Albert Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michelangelo, Jackie Robinson were all held up as people of virtue. They were not presented as perfect human beings; but we were taught to see a particular virtue in them. And those virtues, we were told, mattered deeply, adding to the depth and meaning of life.
Virtues like honesty, creativity, compassion, joy, self-control are spiritual values, not attached to any particular religion, though all the world’s religions do embrace such virtues. And so, do atheists and agnostics. These are virtues worth teaching and proclaiming, and they are deeply spiritual without being overtly religious. Of course, one’s particular religious perspective enters into these virtues, and if one is a Christian, for example, it is not theologically possible to deny the centrality of compassion and generosity, and if you do, there is something deeply skewed about your Christian faith.
I remember, when I was in seminary, and learned that John Calvin, a genius as a theologian with a photographic memory, burned Miguel Servetus at the stake for denying the Trinity.
Servetus was a Unitarian, who begged to be beheaded rather than burned. But no, the City of Geneva with Calvin’s blessing burned the man to death. As much as I intellectually admire Calvin, I have to conclude that there was something so out of sync, something so deeply and sinfully skewed in his heart and spirit that would permit him to preside over such a horror. The Spirit blows where it wills, but where was it blowing in John Calvin? If he honestly believed that this is what Jesus Christ would have him do, there was something deeply twisted in his faith. And such is the tragedy of the human condition. We can be great in one area and pathetically small and misshapen in another.
We are spiritual beings, and there are many things beyond religion, which can nurture the spirit, including art, music, literature, movies, wherever the good, the true and the beautiful find expression. “The Spirit blows where it will and it often wills to blow beyond the boundaries of the religious world. And for this we should be grateful. But still the primary job of the church is to nurture our spirits that we might live full and abundant lives. As Christians we follow certain practices, like prayer, meditation, the singing of hymns, the reading and pondering of scripture, reflection on the life, death and destiny of Jesus Christ, none of which we should expect the secular world to embrace. But no matter how we in this culture might define a full and abundant life, we should be able to agree that certain behaviors and attitudes are destructive of our spirits. Cruelty, self-centeredness, disregard for our natural world, a contempt for goodness, decency and truth, ---this will always lead away from a humane and a spiritually rich life. We all do not agree that prayer should be in our classrooms, but why cannot we all agree that civility should rule, and cruel and disrespectful words and behavior should neither be modeled nor tolerated. Is it that we cannot even agree on what civility and cruelty are? Are our voices nothing more than a cacophony of sound, a confusion of noise with little understanding of what we human beings require to be truly human?
Some ago there was this chalking problem at Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches. During the night some students were going around campus chalking all kinds of inappropriate things, including pornographic words and images. They would be washed away by the janitorial staff in the morning but would reappear during the night. The President was in. my opinion rightly outraged and sent out an all campus email saying such behavior was unacceptable and would not be tolerated. Suspension might result, he suggested. Well, believe it or not, some faculty members defended the students’ “free speech.” The faculty meeting was quite lively, my husband said, with some defending free speech, while others insisted it had nothing to do with free speech, because free speech always involves the willingness to take responsibility for what is said. Well, finally a faculty member, annoyed at the bickering, stood up and said, “Look, I am a parent of two college age kids, and if I discovered that either of them was behaving this way, I would immediately tell them in no uncertain terms that their behavior is unacceptable and must stop. This is a university, whose mission is to pursue knowledge and truth in a rational, disciplined and civilized way. Such behavior on the part of our students does not serve the mission. In fact, it insults it.”
So, what does all this have to do with today, with Pentecost, when we remember and celebrate the sending of the Spirit? The Spirit gave birth to the church, just as the Spirit gives life and hope and renewal, wherever it blows. And it still blows---where it wills----in the church, outside the church, beyond the church. Yes, it is true that over the centuries the church’s influence has lessened. In our lifetime our denomination has gone from mainline to sideline. But no matter our size or our influence the church still has something significant to say, something significant to teach and yes, something significant to model. The Spirit comes and it blows where it wills, leaving it its wake fruits, virtues, which are meant for all people: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. When is the last time you have heard a politician, obsessing about the coming election, or a school administrator, obsessing about test scores, talk about the development of such virtues? And if they fail to do so, should not we, as the church, as the body, mind and spirit of Jesus Christ, help to raise the conservation to a new and different level?
The church does not make us good, but it can and should help us to want to be good---even if we so often fail. And we do fail, both individually and collectively, but the church as the body of Christ, the whole body, made up of various members, is still a place which holds fast to the vision of people struggling together to be faithful to a God who desires us not only to be faithful but also to be virtuous.
Galatians 5: 22-26
Acts 2: 1-21
On May 27, 1999 Darrell Scott, the father of Rachel Scott, one of the victims of the Columbine High School shooting, spoke before a small subcommittee of House members, convened in an office building. Eight other people offered testimony, including a mother, whose son, like Rachel, died that awful morning, now more than 20 years ago. While that mother pleaded for stricter gun control laws, this was not Darrell Scott’s intention. It wasn’t that he opposed such laws, but he had something else he wanted to say. Here, in part, are his words.
Since the dawn of creation there has been both good and evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy; it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies. Men and women are three part beings. We all consist of body, mind and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. …. The real villain lies within our own hearts. We do not need more religion. We do not need more gaudy television evangelists spewing out verbal religious garbage. We do not need more million dollar church buildings built while people with basic needs are being ignored. We do need a change of heart and a humble acknowledgment that this nation was founded on the principle of simple trust in God!
We have all heard the distinction made between spiritual and religious. How many times have we heard people say, I am spiritual, but not religious as a way of explaining their disinterest in church? Darrell Scott inherently made the distinction when he said it is not more religion we need. But we do need something, and our present culture apparently cannot decide on what that something is, or how to go about getting and expressing it.
Now I am a Baby Boomer, which means I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, and I attended, I am convinced, one of the most progressive elementary schools in the nation, Windermere Boulevard Elementary School in Eggertsville, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. Its physical structure was impressive, boasting a swimming pool, where swimming was taught, beginning in the third grade, a gymnasium, gorgeous art and music rooms. Elaborate musicals and plays were performed every year, and the Windermere World was published annually, a collection of art work, stories, poems, all written or drawn by students from K through the 6th grade. No homework was allowed until the 4th grade, because the principal, Arthur York, fervently believed it was imperative for children to play after school.
But there was something else that the school did, which really was spiritual. Each month the principal chose a virtue, like honesty, courage, compassion, intelligence, creativity and yes, even faith and an historical figure, who instantiated that virtue. He introduced the virtue and the character over the loud speaker at the beginning of the month, and then it was the teacher’s job to come up with age appropriate lessons on this character and his or her virtue. In this way I learned about Dr. Tom Dooley, a man of faith, who as a devout Roman Catholic and a medical doctor, went to Laos to establish a hospital and clinic there. Names like Albert Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michelangelo, Jackie Robinson were all held up as people of virtue. They were not presented as perfect human beings; but we were taught to see a particular virtue in them. And those virtues, we were told, mattered deeply, adding to the depth and meaning of life.
Virtues like honesty, creativity, compassion, joy, self-control are spiritual values, not attached to any particular religion, though all the world’s religions do embrace such virtues. And so, do atheists and agnostics. These are virtues worth teaching and proclaiming, and they are deeply spiritual without being overtly religious. Of course, one’s particular religious perspective enters into these virtues, and if one is a Christian, for example, it is not theologically possible to deny the centrality of compassion and generosity, and if you do, there is something deeply skewed about your Christian faith.
I remember, when I was in seminary, and learned that John Calvin, a genius as a theologian with a photographic memory, burned Miguel Servetus at the stake for denying the Trinity.
Servetus was a Unitarian, who begged to be beheaded rather than burned. But no, the City of Geneva with Calvin’s blessing burned the man to death. As much as I intellectually admire Calvin, I have to conclude that there was something so out of sync, something so deeply and sinfully skewed in his heart and spirit that would permit him to preside over such a horror. The Spirit blows where it wills, but where was it blowing in John Calvin? If he honestly believed that this is what Jesus Christ would have him do, there was something deeply twisted in his faith. And such is the tragedy of the human condition. We can be great in one area and pathetically small and misshapen in another.
We are spiritual beings, and there are many things beyond religion, which can nurture the spirit, including art, music, literature, movies, wherever the good, the true and the beautiful find expression. “The Spirit blows where it will and it often wills to blow beyond the boundaries of the religious world. And for this we should be grateful. But still the primary job of the church is to nurture our spirits that we might live full and abundant lives. As Christians we follow certain practices, like prayer, meditation, the singing of hymns, the reading and pondering of scripture, reflection on the life, death and destiny of Jesus Christ, none of which we should expect the secular world to embrace. But no matter how we in this culture might define a full and abundant life, we should be able to agree that certain behaviors and attitudes are destructive of our spirits. Cruelty, self-centeredness, disregard for our natural world, a contempt for goodness, decency and truth, ---this will always lead away from a humane and a spiritually rich life. We all do not agree that prayer should be in our classrooms, but why cannot we all agree that civility should rule, and cruel and disrespectful words and behavior should neither be modeled nor tolerated. Is it that we cannot even agree on what civility and cruelty are? Are our voices nothing more than a cacophony of sound, a confusion of noise with little understanding of what we human beings require to be truly human?
Some ago there was this chalking problem at Wesleyan University, where my husband teaches. During the night some students were going around campus chalking all kinds of inappropriate things, including pornographic words and images. They would be washed away by the janitorial staff in the morning but would reappear during the night. The President was in. my opinion rightly outraged and sent out an all campus email saying such behavior was unacceptable and would not be tolerated. Suspension might result, he suggested. Well, believe it or not, some faculty members defended the students’ “free speech.” The faculty meeting was quite lively, my husband said, with some defending free speech, while others insisted it had nothing to do with free speech, because free speech always involves the willingness to take responsibility for what is said. Well, finally a faculty member, annoyed at the bickering, stood up and said, “Look, I am a parent of two college age kids, and if I discovered that either of them was behaving this way, I would immediately tell them in no uncertain terms that their behavior is unacceptable and must stop. This is a university, whose mission is to pursue knowledge and truth in a rational, disciplined and civilized way. Such behavior on the part of our students does not serve the mission. In fact, it insults it.”
So, what does all this have to do with today, with Pentecost, when we remember and celebrate the sending of the Spirit? The Spirit gave birth to the church, just as the Spirit gives life and hope and renewal, wherever it blows. And it still blows---where it wills----in the church, outside the church, beyond the church. Yes, it is true that over the centuries the church’s influence has lessened. In our lifetime our denomination has gone from mainline to sideline. But no matter our size or our influence the church still has something significant to say, something significant to teach and yes, something significant to model. The Spirit comes and it blows where it wills, leaving it its wake fruits, virtues, which are meant for all people: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. When is the last time you have heard a politician, obsessing about the coming election, or a school administrator, obsessing about test scores, talk about the development of such virtues? And if they fail to do so, should not we, as the church, as the body, mind and spirit of Jesus Christ, help to raise the conservation to a new and different level?
The church does not make us good, but it can and should help us to want to be good---even if we so often fail. And we do fail, both individually and collectively, but the church as the body of Christ, the whole body, made up of various members, is still a place which holds fast to the vision of people struggling together to be faithful to a God who desires us not only to be faithful but also to be virtuous.
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May 15, 2020
Dear Friends,
Carmella Parry is 94 years old, and she lives alone in a fourth floor walk up studio apartment in Gramercy Park, New York. She has lived there since age 24, when she moved in with her husband, who died in 1987. Though she has two sisters, living just a few blocks away, she rarely gets to see them, because they all have a hard time climbing up and down stairs. But she does speak to them every day on the phone.
Carmella is one of the many New York residents, who receive meals through Citymeals, a program that supplements the regular New York food delivery system. Citymeals delivers meals to the elderly even on Sundays and holidays, something that programs like Meals on Wheels do not do. And there is something else that Citymeals delivers—poetry. In each box of food, there is a poetry card by a number of different poets, including Langston Hughes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. The idea for this came from Kimiko Hahn, a poet and a professor at Queens College, who came across elementary school students making cards to put in Meals on Wheels food boxes. Ms. Hahn was a past President of the Poetry Society of America, and she thought it was a grand idea to uplift seniors by giving them poetry to read. Citymeals thought the idea grand too, and so it all began. The idea is to nourish both the body and the soul.
The Poetry Society of America had been placing poetry in New York City’s subway cars since 1992, and over the years the idea has spread to 30 other American cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Salt Lake City. Both Citymeals and the Poetry Society of America believe that poetry is not something for the elite; poetry is for everyone, helping them to get in touch with deep feelings, thoughts and emotions, too often denied or ignored. One of the included poem, Luck, written by Langston Hughes, goes like this:
Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy.
Sometimes a bone is flung
To some people
Love is given
To others
Only heaven.
Carmella Parry is grateful for the poetry, and she carefully tapes the poem cards to her refrigerator. On another sheet of paper, she wrote in beautiful cursive a line from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems, “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know when it will be too late.” She wrote it down because she thought it was too important to forget, and she did not want that particular line to be lost in the rest of the poem. So, there it sits on her refrigerator.
There is more to the story, however. The former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, read an article about Poems on Wheels, and he was so touched by Ms. Parry that he sent her a copy of his most recent book, The Rain in Portugal. He thought her life of confinement now mirrors what so many other people in New York and elsewhere are experiencing. He also noted that the great English poet, William Wordsworth, had hoped and written that our personal lives should and would be marked by “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” Collins said, “The unremembered ingredient is the key, because the idea is to forget your good deeds, and that is done when your kind acts come so naturally you do not remember them.”
Blessings,
Sandra
Dear Friends,
Carmella Parry is 94 years old, and she lives alone in a fourth floor walk up studio apartment in Gramercy Park, New York. She has lived there since age 24, when she moved in with her husband, who died in 1987. Though she has two sisters, living just a few blocks away, she rarely gets to see them, because they all have a hard time climbing up and down stairs. But she does speak to them every day on the phone.
Carmella is one of the many New York residents, who receive meals through Citymeals, a program that supplements the regular New York food delivery system. Citymeals delivers meals to the elderly even on Sundays and holidays, something that programs like Meals on Wheels do not do. And there is something else that Citymeals delivers—poetry. In each box of food, there is a poetry card by a number of different poets, including Langston Hughes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. The idea for this came from Kimiko Hahn, a poet and a professor at Queens College, who came across elementary school students making cards to put in Meals on Wheels food boxes. Ms. Hahn was a past President of the Poetry Society of America, and she thought it was a grand idea to uplift seniors by giving them poetry to read. Citymeals thought the idea grand too, and so it all began. The idea is to nourish both the body and the soul.
The Poetry Society of America had been placing poetry in New York City’s subway cars since 1992, and over the years the idea has spread to 30 other American cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Salt Lake City. Both Citymeals and the Poetry Society of America believe that poetry is not something for the elite; poetry is for everyone, helping them to get in touch with deep feelings, thoughts and emotions, too often denied or ignored. One of the included poem, Luck, written by Langston Hughes, goes like this:
Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy.
Sometimes a bone is flung
To some people
Love is given
To others
Only heaven.
Carmella Parry is grateful for the poetry, and she carefully tapes the poem cards to her refrigerator. On another sheet of paper, she wrote in beautiful cursive a line from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems, “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know when it will be too late.” She wrote it down because she thought it was too important to forget, and she did not want that particular line to be lost in the rest of the poem. So, there it sits on her refrigerator.
There is more to the story, however. The former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, read an article about Poems on Wheels, and he was so touched by Ms. Parry that he sent her a copy of his most recent book, The Rain in Portugal. He thought her life of confinement now mirrors what so many other people in New York and elsewhere are experiencing. He also noted that the great English poet, William Wordsworth, had hoped and written that our personal lives should and would be marked by “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” Collins said, “The unremembered ingredient is the key, because the idea is to forget your good deeds, and that is done when your kind acts come so naturally you do not remember them.”
Blessings,
Sandra
SAYING GOOD-BYE by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 5/17/2020
John 14: 15-21
I once read somewhere that one of the most important tasks in human life is learning to say goodbye. We have to learn to separate ourselves from so many people, places and things, and it is a diminished personality, who never learns how to say good-bye. You have heard me say before that the bible is a lens through which we can view the human condition. We interpret scripture that we might see and find the truth to help us live lives that are full and abundant. And learning how to say good-bye, which is really a learning to let go, is part of living a full and abundant life.
Our scripture reading from the Gospel of John is a continuation of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples. It’s right before he goes to Jerusalem where he will die, and as I mentioned in the introduction, Jesus takes three chapters to say goodbye. He does a lot of teaching here; this is his final lecture or sermon to his disciples. And so today I want you to consider not only how Jesus said goodbye, but also how you say good bye.
This is an issue that has become quite critical in our present circumstances, because so many of the hospitalized persons with Covid-19 have died with no family member or friend with them. Doctors and nurses have said that one of the hardest parts of their jobs has been holding up cell phones and tablets, so loved ones could say good bye, telling the dying person how much she or he is loved. Of course, I have also read that sometimes staff feel badly when the person on the other end is in denial, and is not ready to let go, and so rather than saying good-bye, tells the dying person, “Fight, fight, fight. We need you. Please don’t die.”
Think back, if you can, to the first significant good bye in your life. I know someone who is now 21, whose mother left the family when she was 11 and her sister was 8. Her mother had fallen in love with someone online and was flying halfway around the world to be with him. She had told her children months before that she would be leaving, divorcing their father with whom they would continue to live. “I remember,” the young woman recently told me, “when she first told us she would be leaving, but that did not make the same impression as when she actually left, when the van came to the house to pick her up to take her to the airport. I remember my mother kissing me and telling me this was not really a good-bye. “I will call you every week,” she insisted. I will still be your mother, she promised, but that promise meant nothing to me. I knew that with her leaving our relationship would never be the same again. I knew that, and I was only 11, and I remember thinking, “How can you not know what I know, when I am only a child and you are supposed to be an adult?”
Perhaps deep down inside the mother did know, but just could not bear to admit it to herself, and indeed, that is why sometimes people refuse to say good-bye. They refuse to admit the truth to themselves. Ten years have passed since that mother left, and though she has dutifully called over those years, she has not been functioning as a mother---not doing the things that mothers normally do, and so in time the daughter began to call her mother by her first name rather than mom.
Sometimes we prefer to live with the myth that our refusal to acknowledge something means that it does not really have to come to pass. It is one way we try to exercise control in situations where we feel we have no real control to speak of. In my last church there was this man, dying of congestive heart failure in the hospital, and when his wife bent down to kiss him, she said. “Good night, my darling.” “You mean goodbye, don’t you?” he whispered. “No”, she insisted. “I mean good night”. She was not ready to say goodbye, though he was. He died early the next morning before she arrived at the hospital, and she deeply regretted that she had not said goodbye.
There are many different kinds of good-byes, and our culture, like all cultures, has evolved rituals to bring situations to closure. Graduations, weddings, funerals, and memorial services are all ways we say good-bye, while moving toward a new beginning. They are acknowledgements that life will now be lived a bit differently from how it was lived before. Last March as the virus began to take hold of the country and colleges and universities were shutting down and sending students home, I happened to be walking across the Wesleyan campus, where two young women were crying and embracing. Clearly, they were saying good-bye. I heard one of them say through her sobs, “I can’t believe it’s all over,” she said. We have been best friends for these past four years, and now we won’t see each other every day. Life is going to be so different, and I don’t want it to be.”
And that is really the question in many good byes, isn’t it? How will we manage the change? How will life be? Oh, when our good byes are finished sentences; when we are really done and ready to move on, a good bye feels like a completion. But so often that is not the case. Sometimes our good byes are retreats, like some lines in an Emily Dickinson poem:
We learn in the retreating
How vast a One
Was recently among us
A perished sun.
Not all our perished suns are people. Sometimes we say goodbye to hopes and dreams, to youth, vitality and energy, and finally even to life itself. We have all been beaten by certain circumstances. There are among us failed marriages, broken relationships with siblings or children, which we may never heal. Some of us have spent large expanses of our life living toward a dream that we may have to confess may never be actualized. It hurts to put dreams away, and yet sometimes that is what we must do. I am not sure from where the wisdom comes to know when to retreat or give up, but sometimes it comes, maybe even in spite of ourselves. We reach limits of strength and stamina. We retreat, not because our goal is unworthy, but because we no longer know how to work towards its birth. And when we close that door, when we stammer the words good-bye, we do so with a haunting feeling that yes, a sun indeed has perished from our lives. And yet, as Emily Dickinson said, “We learn in the retreating.”
I remember years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a hospital, there was this woman, who could not maintain a pregnancy. Over and over again, she miscarried, and each loss was more devastating than the last. Finally, she said, "No more.” This one young doctor, greatly impressed by his training in the most prestigious medical schools and hospitals in the country, was convinced that he could help her. "It may take a few more tries," he said, "but I know I can get your body to work.” The husband supported the doctor, but the wife was adamant. "No,” she said. “It's over. I am burying the dream of being a biological mother." The doctor wanted me to talk to her, to convince her to try again. I refused, recalling Emily Dickinson's line: We learn in the retreating. It was not the time to try to resurrect what was becoming for her a dead dream. We learn in the retreating.
And indeed, Jesus’ disciples had to learn in the retreating. Consider what it was they had once expected: a king, not unlike David, who united the northern and southern kingdoms and became a conquering hero. In Jesus’ day Rome had its boot on the Jews’ necks, and they wanted it off. They wanted what they once had---that dream of being a sovereign and powerful nation. Isn’t this what the Messiah was supposed to accomplish? And then along came Jesus, who overturned the conventional expectations.
He did not lead the way they thought he should lead. He taught them strange things about the first being last and the last being first. And now in this protracted farewell discourse, he is saying goodbye to what they had known, to what had been so familiar, if not always comfortable. He would be leaving them, but they would not be abandoned; they would not be left as orphans. They would not have him as they once did, but he would ask God to send them the Spirit. Did they understand? No; they were grief stricken and afraid, because he was leaving them, and they could not yet see or imagine what would lie ahead. They would have to trust that there would be a new beginning, waiting for them. And so, do we all have to trust. We trust in a future we cannot see, a future that God promises will not leave us orphaned. There is always change; nothing stays the same. People come into our lives and people go out of our lives, but God goes with us and is with us through all that coming and going, through all that retreating. On this we can rely.
John 14: 15-21
I once read somewhere that one of the most important tasks in human life is learning to say goodbye. We have to learn to separate ourselves from so many people, places and things, and it is a diminished personality, who never learns how to say good-bye. You have heard me say before that the bible is a lens through which we can view the human condition. We interpret scripture that we might see and find the truth to help us live lives that are full and abundant. And learning how to say good-bye, which is really a learning to let go, is part of living a full and abundant life.
Our scripture reading from the Gospel of John is a continuation of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples. It’s right before he goes to Jerusalem where he will die, and as I mentioned in the introduction, Jesus takes three chapters to say goodbye. He does a lot of teaching here; this is his final lecture or sermon to his disciples. And so today I want you to consider not only how Jesus said goodbye, but also how you say good bye.
This is an issue that has become quite critical in our present circumstances, because so many of the hospitalized persons with Covid-19 have died with no family member or friend with them. Doctors and nurses have said that one of the hardest parts of their jobs has been holding up cell phones and tablets, so loved ones could say good bye, telling the dying person how much she or he is loved. Of course, I have also read that sometimes staff feel badly when the person on the other end is in denial, and is not ready to let go, and so rather than saying good-bye, tells the dying person, “Fight, fight, fight. We need you. Please don’t die.”
Think back, if you can, to the first significant good bye in your life. I know someone who is now 21, whose mother left the family when she was 11 and her sister was 8. Her mother had fallen in love with someone online and was flying halfway around the world to be with him. She had told her children months before that she would be leaving, divorcing their father with whom they would continue to live. “I remember,” the young woman recently told me, “when she first told us she would be leaving, but that did not make the same impression as when she actually left, when the van came to the house to pick her up to take her to the airport. I remember my mother kissing me and telling me this was not really a good-bye. “I will call you every week,” she insisted. I will still be your mother, she promised, but that promise meant nothing to me. I knew that with her leaving our relationship would never be the same again. I knew that, and I was only 11, and I remember thinking, “How can you not know what I know, when I am only a child and you are supposed to be an adult?”
Perhaps deep down inside the mother did know, but just could not bear to admit it to herself, and indeed, that is why sometimes people refuse to say good-bye. They refuse to admit the truth to themselves. Ten years have passed since that mother left, and though she has dutifully called over those years, she has not been functioning as a mother---not doing the things that mothers normally do, and so in time the daughter began to call her mother by her first name rather than mom.
Sometimes we prefer to live with the myth that our refusal to acknowledge something means that it does not really have to come to pass. It is one way we try to exercise control in situations where we feel we have no real control to speak of. In my last church there was this man, dying of congestive heart failure in the hospital, and when his wife bent down to kiss him, she said. “Good night, my darling.” “You mean goodbye, don’t you?” he whispered. “No”, she insisted. “I mean good night”. She was not ready to say goodbye, though he was. He died early the next morning before she arrived at the hospital, and she deeply regretted that she had not said goodbye.
There are many different kinds of good-byes, and our culture, like all cultures, has evolved rituals to bring situations to closure. Graduations, weddings, funerals, and memorial services are all ways we say good-bye, while moving toward a new beginning. They are acknowledgements that life will now be lived a bit differently from how it was lived before. Last March as the virus began to take hold of the country and colleges and universities were shutting down and sending students home, I happened to be walking across the Wesleyan campus, where two young women were crying and embracing. Clearly, they were saying good-bye. I heard one of them say through her sobs, “I can’t believe it’s all over,” she said. We have been best friends for these past four years, and now we won’t see each other every day. Life is going to be so different, and I don’t want it to be.”
And that is really the question in many good byes, isn’t it? How will we manage the change? How will life be? Oh, when our good byes are finished sentences; when we are really done and ready to move on, a good bye feels like a completion. But so often that is not the case. Sometimes our good byes are retreats, like some lines in an Emily Dickinson poem:
We learn in the retreating
How vast a One
Was recently among us
A perished sun.
Not all our perished suns are people. Sometimes we say goodbye to hopes and dreams, to youth, vitality and energy, and finally even to life itself. We have all been beaten by certain circumstances. There are among us failed marriages, broken relationships with siblings or children, which we may never heal. Some of us have spent large expanses of our life living toward a dream that we may have to confess may never be actualized. It hurts to put dreams away, and yet sometimes that is what we must do. I am not sure from where the wisdom comes to know when to retreat or give up, but sometimes it comes, maybe even in spite of ourselves. We reach limits of strength and stamina. We retreat, not because our goal is unworthy, but because we no longer know how to work towards its birth. And when we close that door, when we stammer the words good-bye, we do so with a haunting feeling that yes, a sun indeed has perished from our lives. And yet, as Emily Dickinson said, “We learn in the retreating.”
I remember years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a hospital, there was this woman, who could not maintain a pregnancy. Over and over again, she miscarried, and each loss was more devastating than the last. Finally, she said, "No more.” This one young doctor, greatly impressed by his training in the most prestigious medical schools and hospitals in the country, was convinced that he could help her. "It may take a few more tries," he said, "but I know I can get your body to work.” The husband supported the doctor, but the wife was adamant. "No,” she said. “It's over. I am burying the dream of being a biological mother." The doctor wanted me to talk to her, to convince her to try again. I refused, recalling Emily Dickinson's line: We learn in the retreating. It was not the time to try to resurrect what was becoming for her a dead dream. We learn in the retreating.
And indeed, Jesus’ disciples had to learn in the retreating. Consider what it was they had once expected: a king, not unlike David, who united the northern and southern kingdoms and became a conquering hero. In Jesus’ day Rome had its boot on the Jews’ necks, and they wanted it off. They wanted what they once had---that dream of being a sovereign and powerful nation. Isn’t this what the Messiah was supposed to accomplish? And then along came Jesus, who overturned the conventional expectations.
He did not lead the way they thought he should lead. He taught them strange things about the first being last and the last being first. And now in this protracted farewell discourse, he is saying goodbye to what they had known, to what had been so familiar, if not always comfortable. He would be leaving them, but they would not be abandoned; they would not be left as orphans. They would not have him as they once did, but he would ask God to send them the Spirit. Did they understand? No; they were grief stricken and afraid, because he was leaving them, and they could not yet see or imagine what would lie ahead. They would have to trust that there would be a new beginning, waiting for them. And so, do we all have to trust. We trust in a future we cannot see, a future that God promises will not leave us orphaned. There is always change; nothing stays the same. People come into our lives and people go out of our lives, but God goes with us and is with us through all that coming and going, through all that retreating. On this we can rely.
A Mother's Day Letter by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen
May 10, 2020
Dear Friends,
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and whether our mothers are alive or dead, whether we are mothers or not, this is a day, which invites us to reflect on and remember mothers. Mother’s Day can be very difficult for many people. For some it is because they lost their mothers at a very young age, and so they have no memory of their own, just the memories of others to fall back on. For others, who were adopted, the birth mother can be a sad, unknown absence, even when grateful for the mother who has raised and loved them. And then there are those whose mothers were abusive and cruel. Some people can forgive, while others, for a variety of reasons, cannot. And then there are the rest of us, who have and had good mothers, but not perfect ones. We can be grateful for our mothers without blaming them for failing to be perfect or saintly.
In the year 1907 a woman by the name of Anna Jarvis from Philadelphia held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had died in 1905, and Anna thought it important to honor not only her mother, but also all mothers. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil Wari and founded Work Clubs to address public health issues as well as care for the graves of fallen soldiers. Anna Jarvis wanted to honor her mother by continuing her mother’s work and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world."
Ann Reeves Jarvis was not the only woman whose peace activism made an impact on Mother’s Day. Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and poet, best known for the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, called on mothers to oppose war. She wanted to have a Mother’s Peace Day and in 1870 wrote this Proclamation:
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
Whether this history of peace activism and opposition to war had anything to do with Congress’ initial reluctance to make Mother’s Day an official holiday, in 1908 the United States Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. Some Senators joked they would also have to make a Mother in Law’s Day. Nonetheless, Anna Jarvis would not give up, and by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation making Mother’s Day an official national holiday on the second Sunday in May to honor mothers.
Anna Jarvis was proud that Mother’s Day became an official holiday, but she resented its commercialization. In the 1920’s Hallmark had the ingenious idea of selling Mother’s Day cards and soon other card companies followed. She disliked the profit motive behind the selling of the cards, and so she began to organize boycotts of Mother’s Day, and even threatened to sue the companies involved. She argued that people should write hand written notes to their mothers rather than buying gifts and pre-printed cards. In 1923 she organized a protest at a candy makers’ convention in Philadelphia and in 1925 staged a protest at a meeting of American War Mothers in 1925, who were selling carnations to raise money. Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace!
Neither Anna Jarvis nor Julia Ward Howe would recognize their original ideas in today’s celebration of Mother’s Day. They would lament the forgetting of the peace initiative and the commercialization of the celebration. Last year nearly $25 billion was spent on Mother’s Day (compared to $18 billion for Father’s Day), but this year with the virus still mandating lock downs and so many persons out of work, we would expect spending to be much less. Capitalism will take a hit this year but let us hope that mothers and motherhood will not!
Dear Friends,
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and whether our mothers are alive or dead, whether we are mothers or not, this is a day, which invites us to reflect on and remember mothers. Mother’s Day can be very difficult for many people. For some it is because they lost their mothers at a very young age, and so they have no memory of their own, just the memories of others to fall back on. For others, who were adopted, the birth mother can be a sad, unknown absence, even when grateful for the mother who has raised and loved them. And then there are those whose mothers were abusive and cruel. Some people can forgive, while others, for a variety of reasons, cannot. And then there are the rest of us, who have and had good mothers, but not perfect ones. We can be grateful for our mothers without blaming them for failing to be perfect or saintly.
In the year 1907 a woman by the name of Anna Jarvis from Philadelphia held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had died in 1905, and Anna thought it important to honor not only her mother, but also all mothers. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil Wari and founded Work Clubs to address public health issues as well as care for the graves of fallen soldiers. Anna Jarvis wanted to honor her mother by continuing her mother’s work and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world."
Ann Reeves Jarvis was not the only woman whose peace activism made an impact on Mother’s Day. Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and poet, best known for the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, called on mothers to oppose war. She wanted to have a Mother’s Peace Day and in 1870 wrote this Proclamation:
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
Whether this history of peace activism and opposition to war had anything to do with Congress’ initial reluctance to make Mother’s Day an official holiday, in 1908 the United States Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. Some Senators joked they would also have to make a Mother in Law’s Day. Nonetheless, Anna Jarvis would not give up, and by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation making Mother’s Day an official national holiday on the second Sunday in May to honor mothers.
Anna Jarvis was proud that Mother’s Day became an official holiday, but she resented its commercialization. In the 1920’s Hallmark had the ingenious idea of selling Mother’s Day cards and soon other card companies followed. She disliked the profit motive behind the selling of the cards, and so she began to organize boycotts of Mother’s Day, and even threatened to sue the companies involved. She argued that people should write hand written notes to their mothers rather than buying gifts and pre-printed cards. In 1923 she organized a protest at a candy makers’ convention in Philadelphia and in 1925 staged a protest at a meeting of American War Mothers in 1925, who were selling carnations to raise money. Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace!
Neither Anna Jarvis nor Julia Ward Howe would recognize their original ideas in today’s celebration of Mother’s Day. They would lament the forgetting of the peace initiative and the commercialization of the celebration. Last year nearly $25 billion was spent on Mother’s Day (compared to $18 billion for Father’s Day), but this year with the virus still mandating lock downs and so many persons out of work, we would expect spending to be much less. Capitalism will take a hit this year but let us hope that mothers and motherhood will not!
Recent Sermons
VOICES OF AUTHORITY by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 5/10/2020
Isaiah 35: 1-7
John 14: 1-14
In both of today’s readings we hear voices of authority. Isaiah, as you heard in the introduction, was speaking to exiles in Babylon, and his words were designed to give hope to people, who were on the edge of hopelessness. They had lost almost everything. As the elite in Israelite society, they were accustomed to calling the shots, accustomed to a certain degree of wealth and comfort. Precisely because they were the educated and the skilled, they were the ones taken into exile, where they were expected to work on behalf of the Babylonian society. Now understand that these exiles were not slaves. They were allowed to build and maintain their own homes, work at trades and professions, allowed to worship their God in this strange, new land. But from a psychological and spiritual perspective, we can imagine their anxiety and depression--- though as the years went by, some adjusted to their new reality as new generations were born, and many would later elect to remain in Babylon, when the elapse of 50 years brought the Persians to power, who allowed the Jews, who so desired, to return home.
Now these words of Isaiah were written before that return, during a time of national crisis, when people were feeling the pain of their defeat and exile. And Isaiah spoke with great authority. This is what prophets do; they speak with authority without a hint of ambiguity or uncertainty. “Thus said the Lord,” and then the prophet would tell the people what God said and what God would do--- in this case, God would make the desert bloom, open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. Waters would break forth in the wilderness, and streams would run in the desert. Now we don’t know if Isaiah’s words were universally believed by the exiled Jews, but we do know these words were memorable enough to have been preserved, memorable enough to be deemed sacred scripture.
Now consider the words from the 14th chapter of John. This is part of a long farewell discourse by Jesus, going on for many chapters. Jesus here is saying good-bye to his disciples as he prepares to go to the cross, where he will die. And unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, there is no hint of fear here ---no begging for the cup to pass. In John we have the resurrected Christ speaking from the very beginning of the gospel. Most likely the historical Jesus did not sound like this. But what may not be historically true, may indeed be existentially true, meaning that there is deep and abiding truth here concerning God and human beings. And human beings are anxious, troubled creatures, so is it any wonder we hear Jesus command, “Do not let your hearts be troubled?”
But their hearts were troubled. They did not understand what Jesus was talking about. He told them he was going to prepare a place for them in God’s realm, where there would be many different dwelling places, but they had no idea what he meant by that. Thomas directly admitted that they did not know where he was going; they did not know the way. And then Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” Philip then wanted to know the way to the Father, and Jesus told him that if they have seen him (Jesus) they have also seen the Father. Have you been with me all this time, and still you do not know, Jesus asked?
No, they still did not know; they still did not understand, and though Jesus spoke with great authority, as Isaiah did, such authority does not necessarily create understanding, especially when the issues are complex and difficult to grasp. Yet even when understanding is weak, authority can still create trust. And sometimes trust can be more important than understanding. We are seeing this right now in our own nation. One of the most trusted persons is Dr. Fauci, who talks to the nation about Covid-19. He is trusted not because Americans understand all the complexities of the disease, but he is trusted because he speaks plainly and honestly without claiming unlimited authority, and if he does not know something, he is not afraid to admit it. In his case authority and trust go together.
When I was a hospital chaplain, I saw issues of authority and trust played out all the time. I learned very quickly that there were some patients, who simply could not tolerate any ambiguity from their physician. Unless the doctor spoke with an unambiguous voice of authority, they would become panic-stricken. But, of course, many of us understand that medicine requires interpretation, and sometimes the path ahead is not so unambiguously clear. There were patients, who could not accept that this is the way medicine sometimes is. And so, the doctor would not only suffer a loss of authority but also a loss of trust.
And in religion the same is also true. Some people insist their religion give them definite, unambiguous answers to complex questions. I remember a hospital patient asking me once, if I believed in hell. Well, I asked, what do you mean by hell? What do you mean, what do I mean she asked? Hell, you know what that means. But when I said the word suggests different things to different people, she could not grasp that. And so, I lost all authority with her. She had no place for nuanced thinking in her religious life.
The Bible is sacred scripture, but it is not a direct recording of the voice of God or Jesus. Some words and stories are the products of collective memories, interpreted through the lens of time and experience, emerging from particular communities with particular perspectives. Biblical materials can be imaginative, yet deeply true, because they effectively help us to orient ourselves in what can be a very unsettling world. We may not be able to say with absolute certainty that Jesus said this or that, but we can trust that what is being offered truly reflects something deeply true about the human condition and the world as well as God. Does it really matter, for example, if the story of the Good Samaritan actually happened, or is the truth of the story something far deeper than a mere historical occurrence? Do we trust Jesus because we think that everything he is recorded as saying in the bible actually came out of his mouth, or do we trust him because the overall arc of his life, death and destiny ring true to us in the very smithy of our souls?
I recently came across something, written by a journalist, who decades ago, had a terrifying experience in Cambodia. It was a time when civil rule was weak, with bands of marauding thugs administering their own brand of justice. Well, one afternoon the journalist saw a man, being beaten to death by some thugs, surrounded by a crowd of people, doing nothing to intervene. The victim was already unconscious, and if the beating continued, he would die. And so, without much forethought, the journalist raced to the scene, and screamed at the men to stop while pulling one man away, who was kicking the victim in the head. He was sure he was going to be beaten next. But no one did a thing. The surrounding crowds just stared at him, while those doing the beating, began to move away. For an hour the reporter remained by the victim’s side, until an ambulance finally came to take him to the hospital, where he miraculously recovered.
The journalist said this experience had taught him something significant about authority, something he had not known before. So much of the time in his work as a foreign correspondent he was writing about complex issues, where truth seemed ambiguous, at best. And so, he felt his authority as a journalist was also ambiguous, and yet, he said that when he rushed to that man’s side, he knew that he had the authority to do the right thing. He had no doubts at all, and even if he would die, it was for the good and the right. Never had he felt such authority flow over him, and he said that he felt the authority came from God. “Though I am not a very religious man,” he wrote, “I do believe God desires us to pursue the good and the right. And I still believe after two decades of hindsight that in that instance, I had the authority of God on my side.
Both Isaiah and Jesus spoke with authority. They spoke of God, of God’s actions in human life and history. And now millennia later, we trust and believe them, not because history confirms all they said and did. We know history is filled with vagaries and ambiguities, but we trust them because in them and through them we see hints and promises of the new creation. And
that is enough to lead us forward. That is enough authority for us to trust what they say.
Isaiah 35: 1-7
John 14: 1-14
In both of today’s readings we hear voices of authority. Isaiah, as you heard in the introduction, was speaking to exiles in Babylon, and his words were designed to give hope to people, who were on the edge of hopelessness. They had lost almost everything. As the elite in Israelite society, they were accustomed to calling the shots, accustomed to a certain degree of wealth and comfort. Precisely because they were the educated and the skilled, they were the ones taken into exile, where they were expected to work on behalf of the Babylonian society. Now understand that these exiles were not slaves. They were allowed to build and maintain their own homes, work at trades and professions, allowed to worship their God in this strange, new land. But from a psychological and spiritual perspective, we can imagine their anxiety and depression--- though as the years went by, some adjusted to their new reality as new generations were born, and many would later elect to remain in Babylon, when the elapse of 50 years brought the Persians to power, who allowed the Jews, who so desired, to return home.
Now these words of Isaiah were written before that return, during a time of national crisis, when people were feeling the pain of their defeat and exile. And Isaiah spoke with great authority. This is what prophets do; they speak with authority without a hint of ambiguity or uncertainty. “Thus said the Lord,” and then the prophet would tell the people what God said and what God would do--- in this case, God would make the desert bloom, open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. Waters would break forth in the wilderness, and streams would run in the desert. Now we don’t know if Isaiah’s words were universally believed by the exiled Jews, but we do know these words were memorable enough to have been preserved, memorable enough to be deemed sacred scripture.
Now consider the words from the 14th chapter of John. This is part of a long farewell discourse by Jesus, going on for many chapters. Jesus here is saying good-bye to his disciples as he prepares to go to the cross, where he will die. And unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, there is no hint of fear here ---no begging for the cup to pass. In John we have the resurrected Christ speaking from the very beginning of the gospel. Most likely the historical Jesus did not sound like this. But what may not be historically true, may indeed be existentially true, meaning that there is deep and abiding truth here concerning God and human beings. And human beings are anxious, troubled creatures, so is it any wonder we hear Jesus command, “Do not let your hearts be troubled?”
But their hearts were troubled. They did not understand what Jesus was talking about. He told them he was going to prepare a place for them in God’s realm, where there would be many different dwelling places, but they had no idea what he meant by that. Thomas directly admitted that they did not know where he was going; they did not know the way. And then Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” Philip then wanted to know the way to the Father, and Jesus told him that if they have seen him (Jesus) they have also seen the Father. Have you been with me all this time, and still you do not know, Jesus asked?
No, they still did not know; they still did not understand, and though Jesus spoke with great authority, as Isaiah did, such authority does not necessarily create understanding, especially when the issues are complex and difficult to grasp. Yet even when understanding is weak, authority can still create trust. And sometimes trust can be more important than understanding. We are seeing this right now in our own nation. One of the most trusted persons is Dr. Fauci, who talks to the nation about Covid-19. He is trusted not because Americans understand all the complexities of the disease, but he is trusted because he speaks plainly and honestly without claiming unlimited authority, and if he does not know something, he is not afraid to admit it. In his case authority and trust go together.
When I was a hospital chaplain, I saw issues of authority and trust played out all the time. I learned very quickly that there were some patients, who simply could not tolerate any ambiguity from their physician. Unless the doctor spoke with an unambiguous voice of authority, they would become panic-stricken. But, of course, many of us understand that medicine requires interpretation, and sometimes the path ahead is not so unambiguously clear. There were patients, who could not accept that this is the way medicine sometimes is. And so, the doctor would not only suffer a loss of authority but also a loss of trust.
And in religion the same is also true. Some people insist their religion give them definite, unambiguous answers to complex questions. I remember a hospital patient asking me once, if I believed in hell. Well, I asked, what do you mean by hell? What do you mean, what do I mean she asked? Hell, you know what that means. But when I said the word suggests different things to different people, she could not grasp that. And so, I lost all authority with her. She had no place for nuanced thinking in her religious life.
The Bible is sacred scripture, but it is not a direct recording of the voice of God or Jesus. Some words and stories are the products of collective memories, interpreted through the lens of time and experience, emerging from particular communities with particular perspectives. Biblical materials can be imaginative, yet deeply true, because they effectively help us to orient ourselves in what can be a very unsettling world. We may not be able to say with absolute certainty that Jesus said this or that, but we can trust that what is being offered truly reflects something deeply true about the human condition and the world as well as God. Does it really matter, for example, if the story of the Good Samaritan actually happened, or is the truth of the story something far deeper than a mere historical occurrence? Do we trust Jesus because we think that everything he is recorded as saying in the bible actually came out of his mouth, or do we trust him because the overall arc of his life, death and destiny ring true to us in the very smithy of our souls?
I recently came across something, written by a journalist, who decades ago, had a terrifying experience in Cambodia. It was a time when civil rule was weak, with bands of marauding thugs administering their own brand of justice. Well, one afternoon the journalist saw a man, being beaten to death by some thugs, surrounded by a crowd of people, doing nothing to intervene. The victim was already unconscious, and if the beating continued, he would die. And so, without much forethought, the journalist raced to the scene, and screamed at the men to stop while pulling one man away, who was kicking the victim in the head. He was sure he was going to be beaten next. But no one did a thing. The surrounding crowds just stared at him, while those doing the beating, began to move away. For an hour the reporter remained by the victim’s side, until an ambulance finally came to take him to the hospital, where he miraculously recovered.
The journalist said this experience had taught him something significant about authority, something he had not known before. So much of the time in his work as a foreign correspondent he was writing about complex issues, where truth seemed ambiguous, at best. And so, he felt his authority as a journalist was also ambiguous, and yet, he said that when he rushed to that man’s side, he knew that he had the authority to do the right thing. He had no doubts at all, and even if he would die, it was for the good and the right. Never had he felt such authority flow over him, and he said that he felt the authority came from God. “Though I am not a very religious man,” he wrote, “I do believe God desires us to pursue the good and the right. And I still believe after two decades of hindsight that in that instance, I had the authority of God on my side.
Both Isaiah and Jesus spoke with authority. They spoke of God, of God’s actions in human life and history. And now millennia later, we trust and believe them, not because history confirms all they said and did. We know history is filled with vagaries and ambiguities, but we trust them because in them and through them we see hints and promises of the new creation. And
that is enough to lead us forward. That is enough authority for us to trust what they say.
GATES AND GATEKEEPERSby Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 5/3/2020
Psalm 23
John 10: 1-10
Most of us are pretty familiar with the image of Jesus as the good shepherd, just as most of us recognize the 23rd Psalm. In fact, even non-religious people tend to know that psalm; it is probably the most common request at funerals---for both church and unchurched people alike. But while the shepherd image for God and Jesus is a familiar one, it is important to understand that a shepherd was about as low status as you could get---just a mark above a tax collector or a prostitute. No self-respecting Jew would aspire to become a shepherd, because it was considered an unclean job, requiring ritual purification if one wanted to enter the Temple or undertake some other religious responsibility. Yet it is ironically fitting that we call Jesus a shepherd, because not only did he care for his dumb sheep, but he also was especially inclusive of the least of these. He associated with and defended those of no status or low status, so their status was applied to him. He became one of them, despised and rejected, a person of no value, crucified as a criminal between two thieves.
Though we know the image of Jesus as shepherd, we never hear people call him the gate. And yet, it is one of the 15 I AM statements, unique to John’s gospel: I am the way, the truth the life; I am the vine; I am the light of the world, and here in John 10, we hear Jesus calling himself the gate through which the sheep enter. There is no other legitimate way to get in except through this gate. You can gain entrance by climbing over the wall of the sheep’s enclosure, but if you do, you are called a thief and a robber.
Now from the perspective of our post-modern culture, this exclusivity sounds harsh, and indeed it is. But, it is essential to our understanding of the text to note that today’s passage comes directly after a serious controversy Jesus had with the Pharisees, after he had healed a blind man on the Sabbath. The Pharisees accused Jesus of ignoring the Law by working on the Sabbath, and so John’s gospel intends to draw a sharp distinction between Jesus and those who continue to follow the letter of the Jewish Law. Remember, this gospel was written around the year 100, during a time a high tension between Jews, loyal to the synagogue and Jews, following Jesus. The followers of Jesus were being expelled from the synagogues, and so the backlash against those who remained within Judaism was the claim that there is no salvation except through Christ. The Jewish Law as a means of salvation was declared dead by the new Christians, and so, if you failed to enter through the gate that is Jesus Christ, you are lost. So said the community that produced this gospel, but there is no proof that Jesus ever said anything of the kind.
Let’s be honest: this theme of exclusivity is a far too common one in religion, which should make us all suspicious. Our own Puritan forebears thought they were the elect or at least among the elect, and the rest of humanity, especially the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans, be damned. But does not such a position say more about the people making the claim that it does about God or Christ? After all, what human being can see as God sees? Is it not more likely that God’s compassion and love are far wider and deeper and more inclusive than ours? And if it were not so, would God then truly be God, someone worthy of our deepest love and devotion?
Now to turn to this image of the gate, through which the sheep enter. In Jesus’ day the gate into the sheep’s enclosure was not like the gates we have today. When the shepherd led his flack back to their home, after grazing during the day, he led them through a space into a defined enclosure, surrounded by a wall. What prevented the sheep from getting out---they could not climb over the wall--- was quite literally the body of the shepherd, who would place himself across the opening. At night he would sleep there. So his body is what kept the sheep safely inside. But in the morning, the shepherd would lead his sheep out. In fact, the Greek word, translated here in verse 4 as brought out---When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them---would more accurately be translated as cast or drive, the same verb John uses to describe Jesus casting out demons or driving out the money changers from the Temple. In other words, the sheep cannot securely stay in the enclosure. Jesus pushes them, casts them, drives them out of the safe enclosure into a wider and bigger world where they are fed. This is a symbolic way of telling us that while the familiar feels safe and comfortable, this is not where God in Jesus Christ is asking us to remain.
Can you think of a time in your life when you were cast and driven out, when you had to walk through a door or open a gate, leading you into an unfamiliar nd frightening world. I remember very well when I first began working, now more than 30 years ago, at Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island. That massive hospital in the 80’s had shrunken in size to accommodate only the most mentally ill people---persons who had been hospitalized for forty years or so, some lobotomized in a time before psychotropic medication. When I went on the wards, I had to unlock these huge heavy doors, and when they shut behind me, I could hear this loud bang and click, notifying me that I too was locked in along with the patients. Unnerved, yes; frightened, a little. What did I really know or understand of mental illness? I used to walk those wards, repeating over and over again a line from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, Oh truly you are a God who hides yourself. And yet, in time the hidden God would sometimes be made known to me. Looking back, I believe I was driven there, pushed there, cast out of my comfort zone by a God who had something to teach me, something I would never have learned had I remained where I was.
I remember so well this patient, Clara, whose voices 40 years before had commanded her to stab to death her three young children, because she was convinced that Satan had taken residence in them. According to the chart, Clara had showed no schizophrenic behaviors until a year after her husband had died in a grizzly work accident, and depressed and alone with three children she began to be assaulted by voices---first only at night, then during the day and then all the time. Clara had been hospitalized for nearly 40 years and with improved psychotropic medication, she was improved---improved enough to know what she had done. And now her struggle had become a religious one as she was sure God hated her.
Clara was Roman Catholic, and she absolutely convinced she was unworthy to take the body and blood and Christ, but one day, when my Presbyterian colleague and I were celebrating the sacrament, we were NOT using those little white, round flattened, tasteless wafers, and instead had a loaf of bread. And when the words were spoken, This is my body, given for you, and my colleague literally ripped the bread apart, Clara took it for the first time in many decades. I have often wondered if seeing the bread ripped and broken apart became for her an appropriate symbol for her own brokenness.
None of us likes going to places far outside our comfort zones. Who really wants to enter a prison, or go into the intensive care unit, or visit someone on hospice? And people are very clever at making all kinds of excuses. “I can’t stand seeing them that way; it isn’t how I want to remember them.” But what if it is not all about what we want? What if it is really about something else---what God in Christ calls us, pushes us, casts us and drives us out to do? We all walk through many gates and doors, and some of them are hard and heavy to open and some shut hard against us. We may not want to be there, but sometimes we are where we are, not because of our desire, but because of need, a need of someone else’s, or so we think, until we go and realize that the need was also ours---a need to learn, a need to change, a need to be more than we really are.
Psalm 23
John 10: 1-10
Most of us are pretty familiar with the image of Jesus as the good shepherd, just as most of us recognize the 23rd Psalm. In fact, even non-religious people tend to know that psalm; it is probably the most common request at funerals---for both church and unchurched people alike. But while the shepherd image for God and Jesus is a familiar one, it is important to understand that a shepherd was about as low status as you could get---just a mark above a tax collector or a prostitute. No self-respecting Jew would aspire to become a shepherd, because it was considered an unclean job, requiring ritual purification if one wanted to enter the Temple or undertake some other religious responsibility. Yet it is ironically fitting that we call Jesus a shepherd, because not only did he care for his dumb sheep, but he also was especially inclusive of the least of these. He associated with and defended those of no status or low status, so their status was applied to him. He became one of them, despised and rejected, a person of no value, crucified as a criminal between two thieves.
Though we know the image of Jesus as shepherd, we never hear people call him the gate. And yet, it is one of the 15 I AM statements, unique to John’s gospel: I am the way, the truth the life; I am the vine; I am the light of the world, and here in John 10, we hear Jesus calling himself the gate through which the sheep enter. There is no other legitimate way to get in except through this gate. You can gain entrance by climbing over the wall of the sheep’s enclosure, but if you do, you are called a thief and a robber.
Now from the perspective of our post-modern culture, this exclusivity sounds harsh, and indeed it is. But, it is essential to our understanding of the text to note that today’s passage comes directly after a serious controversy Jesus had with the Pharisees, after he had healed a blind man on the Sabbath. The Pharisees accused Jesus of ignoring the Law by working on the Sabbath, and so John’s gospel intends to draw a sharp distinction between Jesus and those who continue to follow the letter of the Jewish Law. Remember, this gospel was written around the year 100, during a time a high tension between Jews, loyal to the synagogue and Jews, following Jesus. The followers of Jesus were being expelled from the synagogues, and so the backlash against those who remained within Judaism was the claim that there is no salvation except through Christ. The Jewish Law as a means of salvation was declared dead by the new Christians, and so, if you failed to enter through the gate that is Jesus Christ, you are lost. So said the community that produced this gospel, but there is no proof that Jesus ever said anything of the kind.
Let’s be honest: this theme of exclusivity is a far too common one in religion, which should make us all suspicious. Our own Puritan forebears thought they were the elect or at least among the elect, and the rest of humanity, especially the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans, be damned. But does not such a position say more about the people making the claim that it does about God or Christ? After all, what human being can see as God sees? Is it not more likely that God’s compassion and love are far wider and deeper and more inclusive than ours? And if it were not so, would God then truly be God, someone worthy of our deepest love and devotion?
Now to turn to this image of the gate, through which the sheep enter. In Jesus’ day the gate into the sheep’s enclosure was not like the gates we have today. When the shepherd led his flack back to their home, after grazing during the day, he led them through a space into a defined enclosure, surrounded by a wall. What prevented the sheep from getting out---they could not climb over the wall--- was quite literally the body of the shepherd, who would place himself across the opening. At night he would sleep there. So his body is what kept the sheep safely inside. But in the morning, the shepherd would lead his sheep out. In fact, the Greek word, translated here in verse 4 as brought out---When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them---would more accurately be translated as cast or drive, the same verb John uses to describe Jesus casting out demons or driving out the money changers from the Temple. In other words, the sheep cannot securely stay in the enclosure. Jesus pushes them, casts them, drives them out of the safe enclosure into a wider and bigger world where they are fed. This is a symbolic way of telling us that while the familiar feels safe and comfortable, this is not where God in Jesus Christ is asking us to remain.
Can you think of a time in your life when you were cast and driven out, when you had to walk through a door or open a gate, leading you into an unfamiliar nd frightening world. I remember very well when I first began working, now more than 30 years ago, at Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island. That massive hospital in the 80’s had shrunken in size to accommodate only the most mentally ill people---persons who had been hospitalized for forty years or so, some lobotomized in a time before psychotropic medication. When I went on the wards, I had to unlock these huge heavy doors, and when they shut behind me, I could hear this loud bang and click, notifying me that I too was locked in along with the patients. Unnerved, yes; frightened, a little. What did I really know or understand of mental illness? I used to walk those wards, repeating over and over again a line from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, Oh truly you are a God who hides yourself. And yet, in time the hidden God would sometimes be made known to me. Looking back, I believe I was driven there, pushed there, cast out of my comfort zone by a God who had something to teach me, something I would never have learned had I remained where I was.
I remember so well this patient, Clara, whose voices 40 years before had commanded her to stab to death her three young children, because she was convinced that Satan had taken residence in them. According to the chart, Clara had showed no schizophrenic behaviors until a year after her husband had died in a grizzly work accident, and depressed and alone with three children she began to be assaulted by voices---first only at night, then during the day and then all the time. Clara had been hospitalized for nearly 40 years and with improved psychotropic medication, she was improved---improved enough to know what she had done. And now her struggle had become a religious one as she was sure God hated her.
Clara was Roman Catholic, and she absolutely convinced she was unworthy to take the body and blood and Christ, but one day, when my Presbyterian colleague and I were celebrating the sacrament, we were NOT using those little white, round flattened, tasteless wafers, and instead had a loaf of bread. And when the words were spoken, This is my body, given for you, and my colleague literally ripped the bread apart, Clara took it for the first time in many decades. I have often wondered if seeing the bread ripped and broken apart became for her an appropriate symbol for her own brokenness.
None of us likes going to places far outside our comfort zones. Who really wants to enter a prison, or go into the intensive care unit, or visit someone on hospice? And people are very clever at making all kinds of excuses. “I can’t stand seeing them that way; it isn’t how I want to remember them.” But what if it is not all about what we want? What if it is really about something else---what God in Christ calls us, pushes us, casts us and drives us out to do? We all walk through many gates and doors, and some of them are hard and heavy to open and some shut hard against us. We may not want to be there, but sometimes we are where we are, not because of our desire, but because of need, a need of someone else’s, or so we think, until we go and realize that the need was also ours---a need to learn, a need to change, a need to be more than we really are.
THE ROAD TO EMMAUS by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 4/26/20
Luke 24: 13-35
The road to Emmaus: It’s a story, unique to Luke, about a meeting and a recognition that came not immediately but later, in the breaking of the bread. It is a story painted and drawn time and time again by many of the world’s greatest artist, including my two favorites, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, which I just showed you. So, what is it about this story that is so engaging?
First of all, it is mysterious. We do not know the identity of the two disciples. We might initially think they were among the original group, but verse 18 identifies one as Cleopas, who is not mentioned again. At the story’s end we are told that the two rush to report to the eleven what had happened, so we know that the second one was not part of the original group. Jesus, of course, had many followers, including women, but the emphasis in this story is upon Jesus and how he is or is not known and recognized.
These two disciples clearly had expectations of Jesus. They described him to their traveling companion as a prophet mighty in word and deed, and they had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel. But he was brutally murdered, they told the stranger, and now those precious hopes were dashed. They then told him about the Easter event, how women had gone to the tomb and were told that Jesus is alive. The stranger’s response was to tell them in so many words that they were foolish, and so he interpreted for them scripture, beginning with Moses, going all the way through the prophets. Did the Messiah, he asked, not have to suffer and die? But still, they did not understand; still they did not recognize who this stranger was. Now at this point we might be tempted to say, “How dumb can they be?” But notice what the text at the beginning of the story tells us: their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
Now that sounds strange, doesn’t it? But there are these places in scripture where people are prevented from doing or understanding, Pharaoh, for example, whose heart was hardened by God, which meant that he would not let the Israelites go. So, the disciples were not completely responsible for their failure to recognize Jesus, and it is true that throughout Christian history, especially in the days of the Reformation, reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, would insist that faith was a gift, something coming from God. It was not a work or an achievement one could make on one’s own.
But finally, these disciples did recognize Jesus. And if God permitted or caused the recognition, it happened when they gathered around a table, where food was shared. It was in the blessing and the breaking of the bread that they recognized Jesus. Now something very critical is being said here. It was not a solitary recognition that came in the privacy of one’s own room. There is a gathering, though a small one, but as Jesus would say to us, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, lo, I am with you.” So, community matters, coming together matters, and we certainly know this now. Being in our homes in front of our computer screens or on our phones may be better than nothing, but it is not the same as being together in church. It is not enough. And people are learning all across the nation and the globe that there are radical limits to what technology can offer and achieve. There is something powerful, something even revelatory about the physicality of being together that cannot be fully imitated by a computer.
Because the Y in my town in closed, I get my exercise by walking. I have a particular path I take, which involves walking downtown, then up to Wesleyan University and then to Indian Hill Cemetery, where I walk around three times. Well, last week I happened to be in the cemetery when I noticed a graveside service. On my second time around I saw about 25 people, gathered in a circle, with some of the older members seated in chairs.
While they were socially distancing, they were nonetheless trying to create an intimacy by holding a rope that encompassed the entire circle. Since they could not hold hands, I guess they felt some connection through their mutual holding of the rope. But I noticed this one old man, who was standing apart from the group, but on my next time around, he was now included. Two days later I happened to see the director of the funeral home, and since I knew him quite well, I commented that I had seen the funeral and the rope. Oh, he said, that was interesting, but the most interesting thing about that funeral was the old man, the father of the deceased, who had abandoned the family 60 years ago. He was only 25, when he left a wife and three boys behind, the youngest only 5 months old. And for all those years he never had any contact with them. But when his youngest son died, a man of 60 now, he suddenly showed up. No one seemed to recognize him, no one said a word, until one of his granddaughters, approached him and said, “Grandpa, I assume.” And she gathered him into the circle as she handed him the rope. We are all together in this, she said.
There is something about gathering together, especially in tough times, that helps us to see, to recognize who is among us. And now in the midst of this pandemic whom we will notice? Will we recognize Jesus when he shows up---shows up among the people and the places so easy to ignore and overlook? What we are now seeing in our nation is a great divide that reveals the tremendous wealth inequality that has been expanding for decades. It is no accident; it is the result of deliberate policy decisions, including taxation, that have decimated our public institutions and infrastructure and worked against the common good. Today there are 25% fewer public health care workers than there were 14 years ago. Today there are 1 million fewer people covered by health insurance than there were 3 years ago. Today the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 80% of the nation. In 2016 the median American household had 30% lower net worth than it did in 2007, and the median net worth of Americans age 35 and under is 40% less than it was in 2004. But between 2007 and 2016 the top 10% saw their wealth grow by 13%. And if you just look at income rather than total wealth, since 1980, after adjusting for inflation and growth, the bottom 50% of workers have seen their income rise by 20% while the top 10% have expanded their income by 420%.
But if statistics do not grab you, perhaps some personal stories will. A high school principal in Phoenix recently came upon three students huddled under a blanket on a rainy day right outside the school building using the school’s wireless network to do schoolwork, because they did not have internet connections at home. In Las Vegas a parking lot where homeless people have been sleeping was suddenly painted with rectangles six feet apart, showing them how they should socially distance in their homelessness. And a bus driver in St. Louis, who took his clothes off in the front entrance to his home, and then rushed into the shower so as not to infect his wife and children, died two weeks ago of Covid 19. He had no option of working at home; he had to work to support his family, and now his family has lost him, his income and the health insurance his work provided.
The road to Emmaus: It is a meeting and a recognition, a road and a town where Jesus showed up. It was 7 miles from Jerusalem, but it is closer to us than that. The question is: will we, will our country notice who is on that road? Jesus has this habit of showing up among the poor and the dislocated, and you do not have to be a Christian to notice them. You simply need eyes and the desire to see. When the First Letter of Peter was written, the writer realized that Christians lived among non-Christians, and he wrote with the belief and understanding that there was something that drew people together---a common ethic of human decency, what we today would call the Common Good. While we Christians recognize Christ in the common good, not all will recognize the Christ, and we do not need to insist that they do. But we can hope and pray that all can and will recognize the GOOD to and for which we are responsible. And whenever or wherever such recognition occurs, surely Christ is among us, smiling.
Luke 24: 13-35
The road to Emmaus: It’s a story, unique to Luke, about a meeting and a recognition that came not immediately but later, in the breaking of the bread. It is a story painted and drawn time and time again by many of the world’s greatest artist, including my two favorites, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, which I just showed you. So, what is it about this story that is so engaging?
First of all, it is mysterious. We do not know the identity of the two disciples. We might initially think they were among the original group, but verse 18 identifies one as Cleopas, who is not mentioned again. At the story’s end we are told that the two rush to report to the eleven what had happened, so we know that the second one was not part of the original group. Jesus, of course, had many followers, including women, but the emphasis in this story is upon Jesus and how he is or is not known and recognized.
These two disciples clearly had expectations of Jesus. They described him to their traveling companion as a prophet mighty in word and deed, and they had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel. But he was brutally murdered, they told the stranger, and now those precious hopes were dashed. They then told him about the Easter event, how women had gone to the tomb and were told that Jesus is alive. The stranger’s response was to tell them in so many words that they were foolish, and so he interpreted for them scripture, beginning with Moses, going all the way through the prophets. Did the Messiah, he asked, not have to suffer and die? But still, they did not understand; still they did not recognize who this stranger was. Now at this point we might be tempted to say, “How dumb can they be?” But notice what the text at the beginning of the story tells us: their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
Now that sounds strange, doesn’t it? But there are these places in scripture where people are prevented from doing or understanding, Pharaoh, for example, whose heart was hardened by God, which meant that he would not let the Israelites go. So, the disciples were not completely responsible for their failure to recognize Jesus, and it is true that throughout Christian history, especially in the days of the Reformation, reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, would insist that faith was a gift, something coming from God. It was not a work or an achievement one could make on one’s own.
But finally, these disciples did recognize Jesus. And if God permitted or caused the recognition, it happened when they gathered around a table, where food was shared. It was in the blessing and the breaking of the bread that they recognized Jesus. Now something very critical is being said here. It was not a solitary recognition that came in the privacy of one’s own room. There is a gathering, though a small one, but as Jesus would say to us, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, lo, I am with you.” So, community matters, coming together matters, and we certainly know this now. Being in our homes in front of our computer screens or on our phones may be better than nothing, but it is not the same as being together in church. It is not enough. And people are learning all across the nation and the globe that there are radical limits to what technology can offer and achieve. There is something powerful, something even revelatory about the physicality of being together that cannot be fully imitated by a computer.
Because the Y in my town in closed, I get my exercise by walking. I have a particular path I take, which involves walking downtown, then up to Wesleyan University and then to Indian Hill Cemetery, where I walk around three times. Well, last week I happened to be in the cemetery when I noticed a graveside service. On my second time around I saw about 25 people, gathered in a circle, with some of the older members seated in chairs.
While they were socially distancing, they were nonetheless trying to create an intimacy by holding a rope that encompassed the entire circle. Since they could not hold hands, I guess they felt some connection through their mutual holding of the rope. But I noticed this one old man, who was standing apart from the group, but on my next time around, he was now included. Two days later I happened to see the director of the funeral home, and since I knew him quite well, I commented that I had seen the funeral and the rope. Oh, he said, that was interesting, but the most interesting thing about that funeral was the old man, the father of the deceased, who had abandoned the family 60 years ago. He was only 25, when he left a wife and three boys behind, the youngest only 5 months old. And for all those years he never had any contact with them. But when his youngest son died, a man of 60 now, he suddenly showed up. No one seemed to recognize him, no one said a word, until one of his granddaughters, approached him and said, “Grandpa, I assume.” And she gathered him into the circle as she handed him the rope. We are all together in this, she said.
There is something about gathering together, especially in tough times, that helps us to see, to recognize who is among us. And now in the midst of this pandemic whom we will notice? Will we recognize Jesus when he shows up---shows up among the people and the places so easy to ignore and overlook? What we are now seeing in our nation is a great divide that reveals the tremendous wealth inequality that has been expanding for decades. It is no accident; it is the result of deliberate policy decisions, including taxation, that have decimated our public institutions and infrastructure and worked against the common good. Today there are 25% fewer public health care workers than there were 14 years ago. Today there are 1 million fewer people covered by health insurance than there were 3 years ago. Today the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 80% of the nation. In 2016 the median American household had 30% lower net worth than it did in 2007, and the median net worth of Americans age 35 and under is 40% less than it was in 2004. But between 2007 and 2016 the top 10% saw their wealth grow by 13%. And if you just look at income rather than total wealth, since 1980, after adjusting for inflation and growth, the bottom 50% of workers have seen their income rise by 20% while the top 10% have expanded their income by 420%.
But if statistics do not grab you, perhaps some personal stories will. A high school principal in Phoenix recently came upon three students huddled under a blanket on a rainy day right outside the school building using the school’s wireless network to do schoolwork, because they did not have internet connections at home. In Las Vegas a parking lot where homeless people have been sleeping was suddenly painted with rectangles six feet apart, showing them how they should socially distance in their homelessness. And a bus driver in St. Louis, who took his clothes off in the front entrance to his home, and then rushed into the shower so as not to infect his wife and children, died two weeks ago of Covid 19. He had no option of working at home; he had to work to support his family, and now his family has lost him, his income and the health insurance his work provided.
The road to Emmaus: It is a meeting and a recognition, a road and a town where Jesus showed up. It was 7 miles from Jerusalem, but it is closer to us than that. The question is: will we, will our country notice who is on that road? Jesus has this habit of showing up among the poor and the dislocated, and you do not have to be a Christian to notice them. You simply need eyes and the desire to see. When the First Letter of Peter was written, the writer realized that Christians lived among non-Christians, and he wrote with the belief and understanding that there was something that drew people together---a common ethic of human decency, what we today would call the Common Good. While we Christians recognize Christ in the common good, not all will recognize the Christ, and we do not need to insist that they do. But we can hope and pray that all can and will recognize the GOOD to and for which we are responsible. And whenever or wherever such recognition occurs, surely Christ is among us, smiling.
WHAT ARE YOU DOUBTING FOR? by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 4/19/2020
John 20: 19-31
Let me begin by introducing myself; I’m Mary Magdalene. You’re surprised? Perhaps you were perhaps expecting someone else, like Thomas. After all, it is his story today. But then his story is all our stories, yours and mine, since none of us can have faith without doubt stalking us.
Last week you heard about my arrival at the tomb with another Mary, and how there was an earthquake with an angel descending from heaven to roll away the stone right before our eyes. That’s Matthew’s story, but this week we are in John’s Gospel, and he tells the story very differently. According to John, I was the only one to go to the tomb, and when I saw that it was empty, I was sure the body had been stolen. And I wept. That is when I saw the man I assumed to be the gardener, and I wanted to know where he had placed Jesus’ body. And then the man said my name, Mary, and suddenly I recognized Jesus, but he would not let me touch him. Do not cling to me, he commanded. And so I ran to tell Peter and John, and at top speed they both raced to the tomb to see for themselves. I mean why they have believed me anyway? that angel: Are you kidding? Why are these male disciples going to believe us? Women’s words meant nothing; we were not allowed to testify in court about anything at all. So that we were in all four of the the gospel accounts the first witnesses to the resurrection is really quite a startling occurrence. You would think in that day and time the announcement would have first come to the male disciples, that Jesus himself would have first appeared to them, but no, he showed himself to women first! The announcement came to us first. The irony of that should not be lost on any of you.
I often thought that the male disciples were a bit jealous of the fact that Jesus had close friends among women, and I was among those friends. As I just told you, women’s words meant nothing, so when Jesus actually listened to women and paid attention to what women said, the male disciples did not know what to make of this. It just was not the way things were done, not the way most men behaved toward most women.
But Thomas, well Thomas was different. Of all the disciples, he was the most accepting of me, the most accepting of women. You see Thomas was curious, and he asked a lot of questions. He lived by questions, and maybe that’s why he accepted me. He didn’t just accept the way things were; he wanted to know why, and although I never heard him question the position of women in society, I think he must have wondered about it, because that was the way he was. He wondered about everything. Such a contrast to Peter, who never seemed to think about anything. All heart and no head, I used to say to Jesus. Jesus would just smile and say, "Everyone has his or her place.” I guess so, but as far as I was concerned Peter’s place was the hole he used to jump into without first thinking.
Not Thomas; never Thomas. That cautious mind of his bordered on suspicion. He never believed anything easily, but then he was quite literally the thinker in the group. All groups need their thinkers, maybe their skeptics too. Isn’t that why the Bible made room for the books of Job and Ecclesiastes? They too were skeptics, questioning the assumptions that most people simply lived by and accepted. And so that’s why I think Jesus made room for Thomas. His questions always made a deep impression. But I want to remind you of something. In John’s Gospel he is the final voice that makes the confession Jesus is Lord and Savior. How about that? The doubter gets the last word!
Thomas told me once that doubts are like strainers; they catch things, keep some things from going through. And that’s an important task when it comes to faith, because some things need to be caught and carefully examined. You just can’t throw everything together in one mix. You have to consider things carefully, because as powerfully transforming as faith can be, it can also make a fool of you---if you believe too easily, without any struggle of the mind as well as the heart.
I would often notice Thomas standing apart from the other disciples, closely watching Jesus, listening carefully to his words, and studying his movements. Thomas said to me once, ”A man’s words must match his body.” ”What do you mean by that, Thomas?” I asked. ”I mean,” he said, ”that a man can deceive with his words, so watch what his body does. Especially note the eyes.” And so I did. I took Thomas’ advice, and I could see there was something to what Thomas said. I watched Judas the night he betrayed Jesus. I saw him right before he went upstairs to eat that final meal. He told Jesus he would get the wine and bring it upstairs. That is what his mouth said, but then I noticed how his hands shook a bit as he carried the wine up the stairs. Yes, Thomas was right about a lot of things.
I even think he was right to be suspicious about the resurrection. After all, he had not seen. And you know that saying---Seeing is believing. Oh, I know that you moderns think we were so naïve back then, prone to magical thinking and so believing in a resurrection was easy for us. How wrong you are. Why do you think the disciples were all huddled together in that room, filled with terrible fear? It wasn’t because they believed that Jesus had been raised. When I told them I had seen Jesus and he would see them in Galilee, their first thought was I must be crazy. But I really could not blame them for not believing me. I mean we all knew death. We knew what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like. We knew that the dead do not rise. We were all on very intimate terms with death---unlike many of you, who may never have seen death up close. Until the blood dries on your hands and causes your feet to stick to the ground; until you plunge your hand into the gaping hole in the side, you do not know death. At least you do not know it the way we did.
And so when I told the disciples that I had seen Jesus, and he would see them in Galilee, they were very suspicious and also afraid. They wanted to believe me, I think, except for Thomas. You see Thomas had worked out in his mind a certain picture of reality. He thought he knew what the world was like. I don’t mean that he believed he had an answer to everything; he was far too humble for that, but he did believe that there were certain fundamentals, and let’s face it, death is one of those fundamentals. He had seen Jesus’ dead body. Death is death, and life is life, and woe to those who confuse the two.
I remember seeing Thomas a few days after he had seen the Lord, after Jesus had invited him to put his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side. Notice, by the way, that your text never said that Thomas did put his finger there---only that he was invited to do so by Jesus. But to return to my point. After he saw Jesus he was different, puzzled and even troubled. ”This is just the beginning,” he told me, ”and this beginning will be even harder than the ending we have just lived through." Thomas was the only disciple, I think, who then really understood that the resurrection meant that the world was turned upside down. For Thomas the wound in Jesus’ side was the wound of knowledge, reminding him that what he thought he knew and understood was not final. There was more to life, more to death than he could even begin to imagine. And Thomas, who would have preferred to live by knowledge, began to learn to live by faith. What a journey that was and is.
Some weeks after Jesus’ appearance to Thomas, he and I were talking together. And Thomas was feeling just terrible, because Jesus’ words rang as condemnation in his ears: ”Do not doubt, but believe.” Thomas, I said, Jesus wanted you around for a reason; you are needed, your perspective is needed. And just maybe, Jesus meant for you to use your doubt in a certain way. in John’s Gospel, Jesus asked me a question when I first saw him and failed to recognize him. He asked,”Woman, why are you weeping?” I thought he was asking me the cause of my pain. But now I think perhaps he might have meant---what am I weeping for---what am I using my tears for? To what purpose do I offer my grief?
Perhaps Jesus meant for you to ask yourself the same question. What are you doubting for? In other words, do not doubt to keep belief out, but doubt (if you must) to build up your belief. I remember how you told me once that doubts are like a strainer, preventing everything from going through. So use your doubts to keep out what is not worthy of faith. Use doubt for faith. Faith not in place of doubt, but faith in spite of doubt. Oh Thomas, if you can do that, what a gift you will be to all the many doubters, who will surely come after you.
Well, I've said enough for one day. But before I go, I want to ask you to consider how and if Thomas is truly a gift to you, and if he is, what are you doubting for? For what purpose and end are you using your doubts?
John 20: 19-31
Let me begin by introducing myself; I’m Mary Magdalene. You’re surprised? Perhaps you were perhaps expecting someone else, like Thomas. After all, it is his story today. But then his story is all our stories, yours and mine, since none of us can have faith without doubt stalking us.
Last week you heard about my arrival at the tomb with another Mary, and how there was an earthquake with an angel descending from heaven to roll away the stone right before our eyes. That’s Matthew’s story, but this week we are in John’s Gospel, and he tells the story very differently. According to John, I was the only one to go to the tomb, and when I saw that it was empty, I was sure the body had been stolen. And I wept. That is when I saw the man I assumed to be the gardener, and I wanted to know where he had placed Jesus’ body. And then the man said my name, Mary, and suddenly I recognized Jesus, but he would not let me touch him. Do not cling to me, he commanded. And so I ran to tell Peter and John, and at top speed they both raced to the tomb to see for themselves. I mean why they have believed me anyway? that angel: Are you kidding? Why are these male disciples going to believe us? Women’s words meant nothing; we were not allowed to testify in court about anything at all. So that we were in all four of the the gospel accounts the first witnesses to the resurrection is really quite a startling occurrence. You would think in that day and time the announcement would have first come to the male disciples, that Jesus himself would have first appeared to them, but no, he showed himself to women first! The announcement came to us first. The irony of that should not be lost on any of you.
I often thought that the male disciples were a bit jealous of the fact that Jesus had close friends among women, and I was among those friends. As I just told you, women’s words meant nothing, so when Jesus actually listened to women and paid attention to what women said, the male disciples did not know what to make of this. It just was not the way things were done, not the way most men behaved toward most women.
But Thomas, well Thomas was different. Of all the disciples, he was the most accepting of me, the most accepting of women. You see Thomas was curious, and he asked a lot of questions. He lived by questions, and maybe that’s why he accepted me. He didn’t just accept the way things were; he wanted to know why, and although I never heard him question the position of women in society, I think he must have wondered about it, because that was the way he was. He wondered about everything. Such a contrast to Peter, who never seemed to think about anything. All heart and no head, I used to say to Jesus. Jesus would just smile and say, "Everyone has his or her place.” I guess so, but as far as I was concerned Peter’s place was the hole he used to jump into without first thinking.
Not Thomas; never Thomas. That cautious mind of his bordered on suspicion. He never believed anything easily, but then he was quite literally the thinker in the group. All groups need their thinkers, maybe their skeptics too. Isn’t that why the Bible made room for the books of Job and Ecclesiastes? They too were skeptics, questioning the assumptions that most people simply lived by and accepted. And so that’s why I think Jesus made room for Thomas. His questions always made a deep impression. But I want to remind you of something. In John’s Gospel he is the final voice that makes the confession Jesus is Lord and Savior. How about that? The doubter gets the last word!
Thomas told me once that doubts are like strainers; they catch things, keep some things from going through. And that’s an important task when it comes to faith, because some things need to be caught and carefully examined. You just can’t throw everything together in one mix. You have to consider things carefully, because as powerfully transforming as faith can be, it can also make a fool of you---if you believe too easily, without any struggle of the mind as well as the heart.
I would often notice Thomas standing apart from the other disciples, closely watching Jesus, listening carefully to his words, and studying his movements. Thomas said to me once, ”A man’s words must match his body.” ”What do you mean by that, Thomas?” I asked. ”I mean,” he said, ”that a man can deceive with his words, so watch what his body does. Especially note the eyes.” And so I did. I took Thomas’ advice, and I could see there was something to what Thomas said. I watched Judas the night he betrayed Jesus. I saw him right before he went upstairs to eat that final meal. He told Jesus he would get the wine and bring it upstairs. That is what his mouth said, but then I noticed how his hands shook a bit as he carried the wine up the stairs. Yes, Thomas was right about a lot of things.
I even think he was right to be suspicious about the resurrection. After all, he had not seen. And you know that saying---Seeing is believing. Oh, I know that you moderns think we were so naïve back then, prone to magical thinking and so believing in a resurrection was easy for us. How wrong you are. Why do you think the disciples were all huddled together in that room, filled with terrible fear? It wasn’t because they believed that Jesus had been raised. When I told them I had seen Jesus and he would see them in Galilee, their first thought was I must be crazy. But I really could not blame them for not believing me. I mean we all knew death. We knew what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like. We knew that the dead do not rise. We were all on very intimate terms with death---unlike many of you, who may never have seen death up close. Until the blood dries on your hands and causes your feet to stick to the ground; until you plunge your hand into the gaping hole in the side, you do not know death. At least you do not know it the way we did.
And so when I told the disciples that I had seen Jesus, and he would see them in Galilee, they were very suspicious and also afraid. They wanted to believe me, I think, except for Thomas. You see Thomas had worked out in his mind a certain picture of reality. He thought he knew what the world was like. I don’t mean that he believed he had an answer to everything; he was far too humble for that, but he did believe that there were certain fundamentals, and let’s face it, death is one of those fundamentals. He had seen Jesus’ dead body. Death is death, and life is life, and woe to those who confuse the two.
I remember seeing Thomas a few days after he had seen the Lord, after Jesus had invited him to put his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side. Notice, by the way, that your text never said that Thomas did put his finger there---only that he was invited to do so by Jesus. But to return to my point. After he saw Jesus he was different, puzzled and even troubled. ”This is just the beginning,” he told me, ”and this beginning will be even harder than the ending we have just lived through." Thomas was the only disciple, I think, who then really understood that the resurrection meant that the world was turned upside down. For Thomas the wound in Jesus’ side was the wound of knowledge, reminding him that what he thought he knew and understood was not final. There was more to life, more to death than he could even begin to imagine. And Thomas, who would have preferred to live by knowledge, began to learn to live by faith. What a journey that was and is.
Some weeks after Jesus’ appearance to Thomas, he and I were talking together. And Thomas was feeling just terrible, because Jesus’ words rang as condemnation in his ears: ”Do not doubt, but believe.” Thomas, I said, Jesus wanted you around for a reason; you are needed, your perspective is needed. And just maybe, Jesus meant for you to use your doubt in a certain way. in John’s Gospel, Jesus asked me a question when I first saw him and failed to recognize him. He asked,”Woman, why are you weeping?” I thought he was asking me the cause of my pain. But now I think perhaps he might have meant---what am I weeping for---what am I using my tears for? To what purpose do I offer my grief?
Perhaps Jesus meant for you to ask yourself the same question. What are you doubting for? In other words, do not doubt to keep belief out, but doubt (if you must) to build up your belief. I remember how you told me once that doubts are like a strainer, preventing everything from going through. So use your doubts to keep out what is not worthy of faith. Use doubt for faith. Faith not in place of doubt, but faith in spite of doubt. Oh Thomas, if you can do that, what a gift you will be to all the many doubters, who will surely come after you.
Well, I've said enough for one day. But before I go, I want to ask you to consider how and if Thomas is truly a gift to you, and if he is, what are you doubting for? For what purpose and end are you using your doubts?
POKING HOLES IN THE DARKNESS by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 4/12/2020
Easter Sunday
Matthew 28: 1-10
When the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson was a child, he was very sickly, and was forced to spend a lot of time in bed. One evening as the darkness began to descend, he climbed out of bed and pressed his face to the glass as he watched the lamplighter go from pole to pole, lighting each lamp. When his nurse entered the room, she was horrified to see him out of bed. Though she ordered him back in bed, he could not take his eyes off the lamplighter. Look, he said, how he is poking holes in the darkness. And in a sense, this is what God is doing at Easter. God is poking holes in the darkness.
Let’s face it: not all the pain and suffering in the world---what is often called darkness--- has been removed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We certainly knew this before, but now we know it even more intimately as the world battles against this terrible virus. Though faith tells us that all manner of things shall finally be made well, the complete victory has not yet been achieved. It is finished, Jesus announced from the cross, but for us on this earth, it is not completely over. God is still doing battle with the forces of evil, though the resurrection tells us victory is assured.
You know how at Christmas time we have these different stories of Jesus’ birth, which are really quite different from one another? In Luke Jesus is born in Bethlehem, in Matthew at home in Nazareth. Luke has the lowly shepherds, while Matthew gives us the wise men. In Luke we have the annunciation made to Mary; in Matthew it is Joseph who hears it first. Well, the same sort of thing is true of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. We simply cannot pretend they are all the same, because each one has its own perspective, born of a particular historical and cultural context. But they do agree on three things: (1) the resurrection occurs in the early morning hours, two days after the crucifixion; (2) Mary Magdalene is present at the tomb and (3) the tomb is empty.
And then come the dissimilarities. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the women arrive at the tomb, early, with the in-breaking of light, either at dawn or immediately after sunrise. John’s Gospel makes a point of telling us it was dark. There is also disagreement about the number and the names of the women, except for Mary Magdalene, who makes it into all four gospel accounts. Matthew names two women, Mary Magdalene and another Mary; Luke names three women and then adds that others accompanied them to the tomb. John has Mary Magdalene go to the tomb alone. Then there is a difference about the placement of the stone at the tomb’s doorway. In three of the gospels the stone has been rolled away before the women arrived. But Matthew is different. As we just heard there is a lot of drama here with an earthquake and an angel rolling away the stone after the women arrive. And with such a dramatic introduction, we might expect Jesus to suddenly be resurrected right before the women’s eyes. But that does not happen. The resurrection has already taken place, in the bleak darkness of the night while the tomb was sealed. Jesus has already left the tomb.
Notice then that the angel gives the women a direct order: Go and tell Jesus’ disciples of his resurrection as well as tell them they will see him not in the capital, the Holy City of Jerusalem, where he was executed, but in Galilee, the place where the whole Jesus enterprise had begun. Now Galilee in Matthew has pride of place. When Jesus began his ministry there, Matthew, quoting from Isaiah, calls it “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Galilee is right on the border, the border between the Jewish world and the gentile one. Isaiah and Matthew both stress that the light that shines in the darkness is a light for all the world. And so, it makes sense that Jesus would not linger in Jewish territory but would meet his disciples in a place that casts a universal message.
The two women who have just been told to go to the disciples with the message then suddenly meet the risen Christ, standing right before them as if to prevent their movement. They recognize him, worship him, even grabbing onto his feet—quite a contrast to the story as it is told in John’s Gospel, where Mary Magdalene who does not initially recognize Jesus, later is commanded not to touch him. Do not cling to me, Jesus warns. But in Matthew there is no such prohibition.
So, what do we make of this story, whose details we cannot harmonize? What truth can we garner? What do we hear from the angel and Jesus that have any relevance to our lives? We hear two words: Go! Tell! The women cannot remain outside the tomb, hanging on to Jesus’ feet. They are to go to the disciples and tell them of the resurrection and the coming meeting in Galilee. They have, in other words, something to do.
Easter then is not a passive believing. We are not exemplary Christians simply because we believe that Jesus was resurrected. No, there is something more, especially in the going and the telling. N.T. Wright, an Anglican priest and a renown biblical scholar, (whom some of us have read in our Sunday morning discussions) calls Easter “a launch pad.” He does not mean that Easter is a launch pad for going to heaven. Notice that Matthew’s story of the resurrection says nothing about life after death or going to heaven. It is the effect of the resurrection on the lives of Jesus’ followers that matters most to Matthew. Jesus is raised, the first fruits of the new creation have begun, and so the followers of Jesus have a job to do. The fullness of the new creation has not yet come. Death and sin still have their say, and so God calls Jesus’ followers to go and tell---proclaim that God in Jesus’ resurrection has poked holes in the darkness.
And we poke holes in many different ways. When we feed the hungry, we poke holes; when we forgo vindictiveness and forgive, another hole is poked, when we recognize our enemies and the harm and evil they do, yet still pray for them and desire full and abundant life for them, we help God poke holes in the darkness. Artists and composers also poke holes as Leonard Bernstein did in his
Mass, composed in memory of John F. Kennedy. The Mass is not only musical; it is also enacted. There is this section, when the priest, who has been lifted up as part of a human pyramid, suddenly falls to the ground, and in his fall the chalice he holds breaks. Staring at the chards of the broken chalice, he sings, “I never realized before that broken glass could shine so brightly.” Indeed, that is the message of Easter. The broken, wounded and dead body of Jesus is resurrected, and yet his wounds are still there. In the resurrection God poked a big hole in the darkness, and we now are called to continue to poke holes. It is God, not we, who will finally bring in the fullness of the new creation, but God is even now enlisting our help.
Easter Sunday
Matthew 28: 1-10
When the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson was a child, he was very sickly, and was forced to spend a lot of time in bed. One evening as the darkness began to descend, he climbed out of bed and pressed his face to the glass as he watched the lamplighter go from pole to pole, lighting each lamp. When his nurse entered the room, she was horrified to see him out of bed. Though she ordered him back in bed, he could not take his eyes off the lamplighter. Look, he said, how he is poking holes in the darkness. And in a sense, this is what God is doing at Easter. God is poking holes in the darkness.
Let’s face it: not all the pain and suffering in the world---what is often called darkness--- has been removed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We certainly knew this before, but now we know it even more intimately as the world battles against this terrible virus. Though faith tells us that all manner of things shall finally be made well, the complete victory has not yet been achieved. It is finished, Jesus announced from the cross, but for us on this earth, it is not completely over. God is still doing battle with the forces of evil, though the resurrection tells us victory is assured.
You know how at Christmas time we have these different stories of Jesus’ birth, which are really quite different from one another? In Luke Jesus is born in Bethlehem, in Matthew at home in Nazareth. Luke has the lowly shepherds, while Matthew gives us the wise men. In Luke we have the annunciation made to Mary; in Matthew it is Joseph who hears it first. Well, the same sort of thing is true of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. We simply cannot pretend they are all the same, because each one has its own perspective, born of a particular historical and cultural context. But they do agree on three things: (1) the resurrection occurs in the early morning hours, two days after the crucifixion; (2) Mary Magdalene is present at the tomb and (3) the tomb is empty.
And then come the dissimilarities. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the women arrive at the tomb, early, with the in-breaking of light, either at dawn or immediately after sunrise. John’s Gospel makes a point of telling us it was dark. There is also disagreement about the number and the names of the women, except for Mary Magdalene, who makes it into all four gospel accounts. Matthew names two women, Mary Magdalene and another Mary; Luke names three women and then adds that others accompanied them to the tomb. John has Mary Magdalene go to the tomb alone. Then there is a difference about the placement of the stone at the tomb’s doorway. In three of the gospels the stone has been rolled away before the women arrived. But Matthew is different. As we just heard there is a lot of drama here with an earthquake and an angel rolling away the stone after the women arrive. And with such a dramatic introduction, we might expect Jesus to suddenly be resurrected right before the women’s eyes. But that does not happen. The resurrection has already taken place, in the bleak darkness of the night while the tomb was sealed. Jesus has already left the tomb.
Notice then that the angel gives the women a direct order: Go and tell Jesus’ disciples of his resurrection as well as tell them they will see him not in the capital, the Holy City of Jerusalem, where he was executed, but in Galilee, the place where the whole Jesus enterprise had begun. Now Galilee in Matthew has pride of place. When Jesus began his ministry there, Matthew, quoting from Isaiah, calls it “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Galilee is right on the border, the border between the Jewish world and the gentile one. Isaiah and Matthew both stress that the light that shines in the darkness is a light for all the world. And so, it makes sense that Jesus would not linger in Jewish territory but would meet his disciples in a place that casts a universal message.
The two women who have just been told to go to the disciples with the message then suddenly meet the risen Christ, standing right before them as if to prevent their movement. They recognize him, worship him, even grabbing onto his feet—quite a contrast to the story as it is told in John’s Gospel, where Mary Magdalene who does not initially recognize Jesus, later is commanded not to touch him. Do not cling to me, Jesus warns. But in Matthew there is no such prohibition.
So, what do we make of this story, whose details we cannot harmonize? What truth can we garner? What do we hear from the angel and Jesus that have any relevance to our lives? We hear two words: Go! Tell! The women cannot remain outside the tomb, hanging on to Jesus’ feet. They are to go to the disciples and tell them of the resurrection and the coming meeting in Galilee. They have, in other words, something to do.
Easter then is not a passive believing. We are not exemplary Christians simply because we believe that Jesus was resurrected. No, there is something more, especially in the going and the telling. N.T. Wright, an Anglican priest and a renown biblical scholar, (whom some of us have read in our Sunday morning discussions) calls Easter “a launch pad.” He does not mean that Easter is a launch pad for going to heaven. Notice that Matthew’s story of the resurrection says nothing about life after death or going to heaven. It is the effect of the resurrection on the lives of Jesus’ followers that matters most to Matthew. Jesus is raised, the first fruits of the new creation have begun, and so the followers of Jesus have a job to do. The fullness of the new creation has not yet come. Death and sin still have their say, and so God calls Jesus’ followers to go and tell---proclaim that God in Jesus’ resurrection has poked holes in the darkness.
And we poke holes in many different ways. When we feed the hungry, we poke holes; when we forgo vindictiveness and forgive, another hole is poked, when we recognize our enemies and the harm and evil they do, yet still pray for them and desire full and abundant life for them, we help God poke holes in the darkness. Artists and composers also poke holes as Leonard Bernstein did in his
Mass, composed in memory of John F. Kennedy. The Mass is not only musical; it is also enacted. There is this section, when the priest, who has been lifted up as part of a human pyramid, suddenly falls to the ground, and in his fall the chalice he holds breaks. Staring at the chards of the broken chalice, he sings, “I never realized before that broken glass could shine so brightly.” Indeed, that is the message of Easter. The broken, wounded and dead body of Jesus is resurrected, and yet his wounds are still there. In the resurrection God poked a big hole in the darkness, and we now are called to continue to poke holes. It is God, not we, who will finally bring in the fullness of the new creation, but God is even now enlisting our help.
WHAT IS THAT TO US? by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 4/5/2020
Palm/Passion Sunday
Matthew 21: 1-11
Matthew 27: 1-5
This Sunday before Easter is known as both Palm and Passion Sunday, though it is true that often churches emphasize the palm part and ignore the passion, which means that for many people, who do not attend services on either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, they hear nothing of Jesus’ agony and death. They hear the joy and excitement of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and then the following Sunday the victory of the resurrection.
Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and it is those outside the city walls who welcomed him in joy and jubilation. Those inside the walls are in turmoil, and ask Who is this? It is the outsiders who identify Jesus as a prophet from Galilee. And finally, while Jesus entered Jerusalem through one gate, scholars believe that Pilate entered the city through an opposite gate along with Roman soldiers, riding magnificent war houses. So, we have this contrast not only between the insiders and the outsiders, but also between the donkey and the war horse, and that latter contrast suggests how things will go. Humility will meet power, and for a time it seems that power wins.
Notice what it is that power initially used: betrayal. Jesus is betrayed by one of his own, an insider, Judas Iscariot. And there is something fascinating about Judas, which is why throughout the centuries, artists of all kinds, painters, novelists, poets and film makers--- have let their imaginations run wild with this enigmatic man. In Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, Judas is one of three sinners, condemned to the lowest circle of hell, where he is chewed on for all eternity in the mouths of the triple headed Satan. Satan is immobilized in a block of ice, while also chewing on Brutus and Cassius, who plotted against and assassinated Julius Caesar. Betrayal for Dante was the ultimate sin, breaking apart the order of society and family.
When we arrive in the 20th century with the novel The Last Temptation of Christ by the Greek writer, Nikos Kazanedakis, we have a very different portrayal of Judas. Rather than being cast as the ultimate sinner, Judas is heroic, the only disciple strong and resolute enough to carry out the betrayal as part of God’s plan and shoulder the burden of being the man who betrayed Jesus. In Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus of Nazareth, Judas is portrayed not only as the keeper of the purse, but also as the intellectual, the one who could read and write Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Clearly there is something in this character that engages the human imagination.
Betrayal, after all, is a pretty juicy theme, and perhaps, because we really do not know Judas’ motivations, our imaginations are left wondering. Matthew’s Gospel says nothing about Judas’ character that would make us suspicious of him. He hardly mentions him at all until the betrayal. Was it all for money?
Thirty pieces of silver was a comfortable sum, but it certainly would not have brought Judas great wealth. Some scholars have tried to argue that Judas was a Zealot, calling for the violent overthrow of Rome, and so was greatly disappointed that Jesus did not embrace the same revolutionary fever. When Jesus predicted his betrayal to his disciples, Matthew tells us that one after another asked, “Is it I, Lord?” But Judas put the question this way. “Surely not I, rabbi?” Judas, in other words, recognized Jesus as teacher, but not as Lord, and this would certainly be consistent with one interested in political revolution rather than a spiritual one. But this is all conjecture; no one really knows.
This theme of betrayal by an intimate makes the story all the more tragic and poignant and yes, existentially real. Don’t most of us have some kind of experience with betrayal, starting when we were very young? A sibling betrayed us by tattling to our parents; a secret shared with a friend suddenly became public information. The divorce of parents and the uprooting of a home can leave us with the feeling of having been betrayed. And surely some in this congregation have lived through marital infidelity. I would wager that most of us have lived long enough to know something of betrayal. We have witnessed it; we have been the object of it, and chances are, we have also been the actors. We too have betrayed.
Yet there are times in life, though I think they are more rare than common, when the betrayer recognizes what he or she has done. The defenses and the self-justifications fall away, and the betrayer is left facing the naked truth, as Judas was when he saw that Jesus was condemned. Matthew says that Judas repented and returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” And he did by hanging himself.
Can you imagine what it is like to recognize the enormity of the betrayal and to have the response be: What is that to me? What is that to us? One of my clergy friends said to me that she thought these words were among the most despairing in the entire Bible. “What is that to us?” Imagine seeing the depths of the wrong you have done and the guilt that rightly is yours to bear and the only response you can get is a disdaining shrug: What is that to us?
You see the enormity of the sin cries out for an enormity of response---perhaps outraged condemnation or deep, compassionate forgiveness, but a cold shrug trivializes everyone, both the sinner and those sinned against. Some of us have been reading The Sunflower, a true story of a young German soldier, ordered to brutally murder Jews, and while dying, he confessed to a Jew, a prisoner in a camp, and be begged that Jewish man for forgiveness. All he received was silence. Perhaps at the time that was the best that could be offered---certainly preferable to What is that to me?
I cannot imagine that if Judas had confessed his sin to Jesus, he would have heard those words. And for Judas that is perhaps the saddest part of the story. He did not know or hear the forgiveness Jesus would announce from the cross, the forgiveness that is the repair of the world, a repair we cannot yet see, but one for which we are fervently called to hope and pray.
Palm/Passion Sunday
Matthew 21: 1-11
Matthew 27: 1-5
This Sunday before Easter is known as both Palm and Passion Sunday, though it is true that often churches emphasize the palm part and ignore the passion, which means that for many people, who do not attend services on either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, they hear nothing of Jesus’ agony and death. They hear the joy and excitement of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and then the following Sunday the victory of the resurrection.
Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and it is those outside the city walls who welcomed him in joy and jubilation. Those inside the walls are in turmoil, and ask Who is this? It is the outsiders who identify Jesus as a prophet from Galilee. And finally, while Jesus entered Jerusalem through one gate, scholars believe that Pilate entered the city through an opposite gate along with Roman soldiers, riding magnificent war houses. So, we have this contrast not only between the insiders and the outsiders, but also between the donkey and the war horse, and that latter contrast suggests how things will go. Humility will meet power, and for a time it seems that power wins.
Notice what it is that power initially used: betrayal. Jesus is betrayed by one of his own, an insider, Judas Iscariot. And there is something fascinating about Judas, which is why throughout the centuries, artists of all kinds, painters, novelists, poets and film makers--- have let their imaginations run wild with this enigmatic man. In Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, Judas is one of three sinners, condemned to the lowest circle of hell, where he is chewed on for all eternity in the mouths of the triple headed Satan. Satan is immobilized in a block of ice, while also chewing on Brutus and Cassius, who plotted against and assassinated Julius Caesar. Betrayal for Dante was the ultimate sin, breaking apart the order of society and family.
When we arrive in the 20th century with the novel The Last Temptation of Christ by the Greek writer, Nikos Kazanedakis, we have a very different portrayal of Judas. Rather than being cast as the ultimate sinner, Judas is heroic, the only disciple strong and resolute enough to carry out the betrayal as part of God’s plan and shoulder the burden of being the man who betrayed Jesus. In Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus of Nazareth, Judas is portrayed not only as the keeper of the purse, but also as the intellectual, the one who could read and write Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Clearly there is something in this character that engages the human imagination.
Betrayal, after all, is a pretty juicy theme, and perhaps, because we really do not know Judas’ motivations, our imaginations are left wondering. Matthew’s Gospel says nothing about Judas’ character that would make us suspicious of him. He hardly mentions him at all until the betrayal. Was it all for money?
Thirty pieces of silver was a comfortable sum, but it certainly would not have brought Judas great wealth. Some scholars have tried to argue that Judas was a Zealot, calling for the violent overthrow of Rome, and so was greatly disappointed that Jesus did not embrace the same revolutionary fever. When Jesus predicted his betrayal to his disciples, Matthew tells us that one after another asked, “Is it I, Lord?” But Judas put the question this way. “Surely not I, rabbi?” Judas, in other words, recognized Jesus as teacher, but not as Lord, and this would certainly be consistent with one interested in political revolution rather than a spiritual one. But this is all conjecture; no one really knows.
This theme of betrayal by an intimate makes the story all the more tragic and poignant and yes, existentially real. Don’t most of us have some kind of experience with betrayal, starting when we were very young? A sibling betrayed us by tattling to our parents; a secret shared with a friend suddenly became public information. The divorce of parents and the uprooting of a home can leave us with the feeling of having been betrayed. And surely some in this congregation have lived through marital infidelity. I would wager that most of us have lived long enough to know something of betrayal. We have witnessed it; we have been the object of it, and chances are, we have also been the actors. We too have betrayed.
Yet there are times in life, though I think they are more rare than common, when the betrayer recognizes what he or she has done. The defenses and the self-justifications fall away, and the betrayer is left facing the naked truth, as Judas was when he saw that Jesus was condemned. Matthew says that Judas repented and returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” And he did by hanging himself.
Can you imagine what it is like to recognize the enormity of the betrayal and to have the response be: What is that to me? What is that to us? One of my clergy friends said to me that she thought these words were among the most despairing in the entire Bible. “What is that to us?” Imagine seeing the depths of the wrong you have done and the guilt that rightly is yours to bear and the only response you can get is a disdaining shrug: What is that to us?
You see the enormity of the sin cries out for an enormity of response---perhaps outraged condemnation or deep, compassionate forgiveness, but a cold shrug trivializes everyone, both the sinner and those sinned against. Some of us have been reading The Sunflower, a true story of a young German soldier, ordered to brutally murder Jews, and while dying, he confessed to a Jew, a prisoner in a camp, and be begged that Jewish man for forgiveness. All he received was silence. Perhaps at the time that was the best that could be offered---certainly preferable to What is that to me?
I cannot imagine that if Judas had confessed his sin to Jesus, he would have heard those words. And for Judas that is perhaps the saddest part of the story. He did not know or hear the forgiveness Jesus would announce from the cross, the forgiveness that is the repair of the world, a repair we cannot yet see, but one for which we are fervently called to hope and pray.
CAN THESE DRY BONES LIVE? by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 3/29/20
Ezekiel 37: 1-14
When the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem, fell to the Babylonians in 587 B. C. E. the leaders, which included the educated and the wealthy, were forced into exile in Babylon. When they arrived, they were neither put in prisons nor refugee camps, nor were they forced into slavery. No, they were free to marry, build homes, work, plant crops and enter into commerce. Since these were among the most talented people in Judah, their talents transferred to Babylon, and so many of them became successful, even wealthy. They also had the freedom of assembly, were allowed them to elect leaders and worship as they pleased. But some had a very hard time worshiping in Babylon, because they could not get over the destruction of their holy city with its exquisite temple. They remembered, and they passed their memories down to the next generations.
But you know how it is: life does go on, and so as the exiled Jews made a new life for themselves in Babylon, many adjusted to their new situation. Most of the original exiles died, and there were those who probably thought they should just take their memories with them. Life in Babylon wasn’t really so bad, was it? So, there was this painful tension between the majority, who adjusted and a much smaller group, who remembered the covenant and what it was God called them to do. After about 53 years the Babylonian empire fell to the Assyrians, and the Jews were offered the chance to go home, back to Jerusalem. But most of them did not want to return. That old dream of being God’s chosen people, the light to the nations, well, for most of them that dream had died a long time ago. They had simply moved on. And so, a majority of the people remained in Babylon. But some, what came to be called “the faithful remnant,” would later return to Jerusalem. Perhaps among the returnees were those who had not been so successful, the inflexible ones, holding on to memories and dreams passed down by parents and grandparents and teachers and prophets and priests, like Ezekiel. And they would remember what Ezekiel had said. They would remember the hope he had tried to give them while they were living in exile in Babylon.
Now Ezekiel was not an easy man; in fact, he could be a real grouch. He had warned the people that they would be severely judged by God for their idolatry, their forgetting their roots and the covenant God had made with them. Ezekiel was no dope; he saw how things were going in Babylon; he saw how many people were adjusting to their new life there, and so his words were tough and pointed. No one who heard him would doubt that he was a man with a mission, a man on fire with a single minded purpose. He told them they were idol worshipers, and their corpses would soon lie beside their idols, and their bones would be scattered around the altars. Undoubtedly many saw Ezekiel as a fanatic, someone bent on a dream that no longer had validity in their new world. It was best to move on, many of them must have thought, because if they continued to cling to the past, they would live in a valley of dried bones. Worse than that they would become those dried up bones. All the flesh, all the meat, all the life giving force would be picked off by carrion birds. Death would swallow the last bit, leaving no scraps---nothing but dried up, bleached out, pure whitened bones.
And in that situation, when the possibility of anything new or vital or life giving looked completely dead, what did God do? God put forth a question. Before the act, there was the question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” And what was Ezekiel supposed to say? How could he possibly know? And so, he was clever enough to put the ball right back into God’s court. “Oh Lord, you know.” And then God told Ezekiel what to say. “Start preaching to these bones,” Ezekiel. “Tell them to hear the Word of the Lord. Tell them that I will cause breath to enter these bones, and they shall live and know that I am the Lord.”
Notice something here. Ezekiel was told to start talking, preaching to those bones before anything had happened to them. God did not first bring the bones back to life, and then have Ezekiel preach. No, the Word came first, because the Word is life; the Word gives life. God’s Word always makes room for hope, and hope has this capacity to bring us back to life. Hope rises up from our bones, and in spite of what looks absurdly impossible, something new comes to life.
You see hope does not bank on the current situation of today. Hope always questions today with the challenge that tomorrow can be different. And of course, if you are among the successful, perhaps like the people who remained behind in Babylon, you do not need or even want to imagine something completely new, because well, you are doing quite well, thank you, and you don’t need to hope for a new beginning. Perhaps in such situations hope is about hanging on to what you already have. It is not about a new beginning. And indeed, I recently read---well before the corona-virus hit--- that people in the upper middle class and beyond have a hard time with hope. Their biggest worry, the article said, is that they will lose ground tomorrow. They feel they are hanging on for dear life. But that is not hope; it’s anxiety. So, it is no surprise that the poor in the gospel always have a special place in God’s promised kingdom, because they are not afraid to hope for something new and radical. Indeed, their lives depend upon tomorrow not looking like today.
Some weeks ago I went to Yale New Haven Hospital to visit my former organist from Center Church in New Haven. Eleanor was in the Intensive Care Unit, and since they were doing a minor procedure I was asked to wait. And while in the waiting area, I met someone who told me in so many words that she felt she was in a valley of dried up bones. That wasn’t the language, she used, but it is what she meant. Her husband was in critical condition, and it was not at all clear he would make it. “When I graduated from college in 1963,” she told me, “I could not find my path. I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do. I knew I did not want to be a full time wife and mother, and so I did a lot of different jobs, but none of them satisfied. I was married at 32, old for my generation, a mother of two by the age of 36, and then in my forties in was all about struggling to do all the things middle age people have to do: pay the mortgage, raise kids, drive the kids around to this practice and that one, and then later there were the college bills, and by the time my husband and I were finished with all that, we had become strangers to one another. Nothing bad had happened; no affairs, no big financial mess, no disasters with children. We had shared this life together, and yet, we hardly knew each other. Now, here I am at the age of 78. My husband is probably dying, and what I feel is not this great sadness, but a great emptiness. I feel life has been drained out of me, and I cannot figure out why. I feel I missed something vital, but I don’t know what. And most of all, I do not know what I am supposed to do now.
Have you ever felt like that, as if life has been drained out of you? And then you think to yourself, what am I supposed to do now? We Americans always think we can or should do something. But maybe we can’t. Maybe there are these times when all we can do is hunker down and wait, wait for the question God put to Ezekiel and sometimes puts to us. Can these dry bones live? Can new life come? At times like that, perhaps the only answer we can honestly give is, “O God, you know; only you know.”
Ezekiel 37: 1-14
When the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem, fell to the Babylonians in 587 B. C. E. the leaders, which included the educated and the wealthy, were forced into exile in Babylon. When they arrived, they were neither put in prisons nor refugee camps, nor were they forced into slavery. No, they were free to marry, build homes, work, plant crops and enter into commerce. Since these were among the most talented people in Judah, their talents transferred to Babylon, and so many of them became successful, even wealthy. They also had the freedom of assembly, were allowed them to elect leaders and worship as they pleased. But some had a very hard time worshiping in Babylon, because they could not get over the destruction of their holy city with its exquisite temple. They remembered, and they passed their memories down to the next generations.
But you know how it is: life does go on, and so as the exiled Jews made a new life for themselves in Babylon, many adjusted to their new situation. Most of the original exiles died, and there were those who probably thought they should just take their memories with them. Life in Babylon wasn’t really so bad, was it? So, there was this painful tension between the majority, who adjusted and a much smaller group, who remembered the covenant and what it was God called them to do. After about 53 years the Babylonian empire fell to the Assyrians, and the Jews were offered the chance to go home, back to Jerusalem. But most of them did not want to return. That old dream of being God’s chosen people, the light to the nations, well, for most of them that dream had died a long time ago. They had simply moved on. And so, a majority of the people remained in Babylon. But some, what came to be called “the faithful remnant,” would later return to Jerusalem. Perhaps among the returnees were those who had not been so successful, the inflexible ones, holding on to memories and dreams passed down by parents and grandparents and teachers and prophets and priests, like Ezekiel. And they would remember what Ezekiel had said. They would remember the hope he had tried to give them while they were living in exile in Babylon.
Now Ezekiel was not an easy man; in fact, he could be a real grouch. He had warned the people that they would be severely judged by God for their idolatry, their forgetting their roots and the covenant God had made with them. Ezekiel was no dope; he saw how things were going in Babylon; he saw how many people were adjusting to their new life there, and so his words were tough and pointed. No one who heard him would doubt that he was a man with a mission, a man on fire with a single minded purpose. He told them they were idol worshipers, and their corpses would soon lie beside their idols, and their bones would be scattered around the altars. Undoubtedly many saw Ezekiel as a fanatic, someone bent on a dream that no longer had validity in their new world. It was best to move on, many of them must have thought, because if they continued to cling to the past, they would live in a valley of dried bones. Worse than that they would become those dried up bones. All the flesh, all the meat, all the life giving force would be picked off by carrion birds. Death would swallow the last bit, leaving no scraps---nothing but dried up, bleached out, pure whitened bones.
And in that situation, when the possibility of anything new or vital or life giving looked completely dead, what did God do? God put forth a question. Before the act, there was the question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” And what was Ezekiel supposed to say? How could he possibly know? And so, he was clever enough to put the ball right back into God’s court. “Oh Lord, you know.” And then God told Ezekiel what to say. “Start preaching to these bones,” Ezekiel. “Tell them to hear the Word of the Lord. Tell them that I will cause breath to enter these bones, and they shall live and know that I am the Lord.”
Notice something here. Ezekiel was told to start talking, preaching to those bones before anything had happened to them. God did not first bring the bones back to life, and then have Ezekiel preach. No, the Word came first, because the Word is life; the Word gives life. God’s Word always makes room for hope, and hope has this capacity to bring us back to life. Hope rises up from our bones, and in spite of what looks absurdly impossible, something new comes to life.
You see hope does not bank on the current situation of today. Hope always questions today with the challenge that tomorrow can be different. And of course, if you are among the successful, perhaps like the people who remained behind in Babylon, you do not need or even want to imagine something completely new, because well, you are doing quite well, thank you, and you don’t need to hope for a new beginning. Perhaps in such situations hope is about hanging on to what you already have. It is not about a new beginning. And indeed, I recently read---well before the corona-virus hit--- that people in the upper middle class and beyond have a hard time with hope. Their biggest worry, the article said, is that they will lose ground tomorrow. They feel they are hanging on for dear life. But that is not hope; it’s anxiety. So, it is no surprise that the poor in the gospel always have a special place in God’s promised kingdom, because they are not afraid to hope for something new and radical. Indeed, their lives depend upon tomorrow not looking like today.
Some weeks ago I went to Yale New Haven Hospital to visit my former organist from Center Church in New Haven. Eleanor was in the Intensive Care Unit, and since they were doing a minor procedure I was asked to wait. And while in the waiting area, I met someone who told me in so many words that she felt she was in a valley of dried up bones. That wasn’t the language, she used, but it is what she meant. Her husband was in critical condition, and it was not at all clear he would make it. “When I graduated from college in 1963,” she told me, “I could not find my path. I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do. I knew I did not want to be a full time wife and mother, and so I did a lot of different jobs, but none of them satisfied. I was married at 32, old for my generation, a mother of two by the age of 36, and then in my forties in was all about struggling to do all the things middle age people have to do: pay the mortgage, raise kids, drive the kids around to this practice and that one, and then later there were the college bills, and by the time my husband and I were finished with all that, we had become strangers to one another. Nothing bad had happened; no affairs, no big financial mess, no disasters with children. We had shared this life together, and yet, we hardly knew each other. Now, here I am at the age of 78. My husband is probably dying, and what I feel is not this great sadness, but a great emptiness. I feel life has been drained out of me, and I cannot figure out why. I feel I missed something vital, but I don’t know what. And most of all, I do not know what I am supposed to do now.
Have you ever felt like that, as if life has been drained out of you? And then you think to yourself, what am I supposed to do now? We Americans always think we can or should do something. But maybe we can’t. Maybe there are these times when all we can do is hunker down and wait, wait for the question God put to Ezekiel and sometimes puts to us. Can these dry bones live? Can new life come? At times like that, perhaps the only answer we can honestly give is, “O God, you know; only you know.”
“Sometimes All I Want Is Comfort" by Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 3/22/2020
Psalm 23
John 9: 1-41
“God judges creatures with love, while Satan judges them with hatred and envy.” So said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian, who was hanged by the personal order of Hitler on April 9, 1945 for his participation in an assassination plot against the Fuhrer. God judges with love, but human beings (turning to Satan rather than God) judge with hatred and envy. And so, are we really surprised that Jesus’ healing of a blind man on the Sabbath should lead to a debate about sin? Jesus sees the man; others see the sin. Jesus is the light of the world, but people are blind to that light. Jesus’ mission is to heal, while the disciples and especially the Pharisees look to assign guilt and blame.
Immediately after the healing the Pharisees name Jesus as a sinner, because he dared to heal (work) on the Sabbath. Sure, some of them had their doubts, wondering how a sinner could do such marvelous things, but their pondering did not carry much weight. It’s pathetic that no one (not even the man’s parents) is focused on the healing. They all have their own worries and concerns, some worrying about being expelled from the synagogue, others doubting the man’s blindness.
What is at stake here is a particular understanding of the kind of moral universe humans inhabit---a place where there is a direct relationship between sin and life circumstances. People think the sinful should suffer and the good should prosper but notice that Jesus refuses to get drawn into that debate. In fact, he refuses in this story to label anyone as a sinner. True, his harshest comments are reserved for the Pharisees, who think that as religious leaders they can clearly see the moral order. But they are the ones who are blind, spiritually blind, neither knowing nor seeing the light of the world, who stands right before them. Notice what they say and do to the healed man, when he fails to agree with them that Jesus is a sinner. “You were born entirely in sin and you are trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
These particular Pharisees were convinced that if someone is born blind, surely there must be a reason: someone, somehow, somewhere must have done something wrong. It’s tit for tat, and God keeps score. In the past week with the coronavirus beginning its ravages across the country, I have read that some preachers are insisting it is God’s punishment for this or that sin---abortion and homosexuality usually go to the top of the list, but they conveniently forget the sin of 100,000 homeless children in the New York City Public Schools, which we as a nation are apparently all too willing to tolerate. When any of us thinks we know how God judges, we fall into spiritual arrogance. And perhaps that arrogance is really a cover up for fear. People are afraid, desperate for comfort and certainty in a world that rarely yields either.
At my former church in New Haven I had a parishioner come to me and say, “Your sermons always give me much to ponder. You bring up so many questions, which cannot really be answered. And I find myself thinking, I don’t really expect answers from God, but I do want comfort, and now I am beginning to wonder, if that is too much for me to ask.”
No, it is not. Comfort is a human need, and perhaps this need has something to do with why the lectionary choices for this Sunday paired together the story from John with the 23rd Psalm. The Gospel is good news, but it does not always strike us as immediately comforting. Today’s story leaves us with the discomfort of considering our own blindness. And our questions about why bad things happen---why some suffer blindness or other calamities---are not answered. But then explanations are rarely comforting. Presence gives comfort, and this is what Psalm 23 offers.
Last month I conducted a graveside service, and when I first spoke with the daughter of the deceased man, she told me her father had left instructions that he wanted two readings read at his grave. The first was a short poem by Jane Kenyon called Otherwise, which ends with this line:
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know
It will be otherwise.
His second choice was the 23rd Psalm. “My father,” his Quaker daughter said, “was an agnostic. He always insisted he was too much of a realist to be a believer, but too humble to be an atheist, and so he lived between these two poles. “A man of great energy, he crammed in as much as he could before the clock ran down. He knew that one day “it would be otherwise.” And then she took out his handwritten note, which read, “Although I do not believe, I hope that goodness and mercy shall follow me into and beyond the grave, and that I shall dwell in that goodness and mercy forever.”
His two daughters and wife were shocked that he chose the psalm, but I told them I thought the psalm was indeed for realists as well as the faithful.” It presents life as a paradox; there is goodness, on the one hand, and yet we are challenged by the world’s evil. Yes, God restores the soul, but that means that something has happened which cries out for restoration. God is with us when we walk through the darkest valley of death’s shadow, but we still have to walk through that valley. A table is prepared for us, but it is prepared in the presence of our enemies, which means that enemies do not disappear.
The 23rd Psalm is a psalm of presence, and that is why people love it. People can’t prove the presence, but they have known it in the darkest valleys of life as the blind man knew it and saw it, when he was healed of his blindness. And when the presence is known, seen or felt, explanations and beliefs don’t matter as much as we think they do. What matters is that presence, which mysteriously holds us up even in the darkest valley.
Psalm 23
John 9: 1-41
“God judges creatures with love, while Satan judges them with hatred and envy.” So said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian, who was hanged by the personal order of Hitler on April 9, 1945 for his participation in an assassination plot against the Fuhrer. God judges with love, but human beings (turning to Satan rather than God) judge with hatred and envy. And so, are we really surprised that Jesus’ healing of a blind man on the Sabbath should lead to a debate about sin? Jesus sees the man; others see the sin. Jesus is the light of the world, but people are blind to that light. Jesus’ mission is to heal, while the disciples and especially the Pharisees look to assign guilt and blame.
Immediately after the healing the Pharisees name Jesus as a sinner, because he dared to heal (work) on the Sabbath. Sure, some of them had their doubts, wondering how a sinner could do such marvelous things, but their pondering did not carry much weight. It’s pathetic that no one (not even the man’s parents) is focused on the healing. They all have their own worries and concerns, some worrying about being expelled from the synagogue, others doubting the man’s blindness.
What is at stake here is a particular understanding of the kind of moral universe humans inhabit---a place where there is a direct relationship between sin and life circumstances. People think the sinful should suffer and the good should prosper but notice that Jesus refuses to get drawn into that debate. In fact, he refuses in this story to label anyone as a sinner. True, his harshest comments are reserved for the Pharisees, who think that as religious leaders they can clearly see the moral order. But they are the ones who are blind, spiritually blind, neither knowing nor seeing the light of the world, who stands right before them. Notice what they say and do to the healed man, when he fails to agree with them that Jesus is a sinner. “You were born entirely in sin and you are trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
These particular Pharisees were convinced that if someone is born blind, surely there must be a reason: someone, somehow, somewhere must have done something wrong. It’s tit for tat, and God keeps score. In the past week with the coronavirus beginning its ravages across the country, I have read that some preachers are insisting it is God’s punishment for this or that sin---abortion and homosexuality usually go to the top of the list, but they conveniently forget the sin of 100,000 homeless children in the New York City Public Schools, which we as a nation are apparently all too willing to tolerate. When any of us thinks we know how God judges, we fall into spiritual arrogance. And perhaps that arrogance is really a cover up for fear. People are afraid, desperate for comfort and certainty in a world that rarely yields either.
At my former church in New Haven I had a parishioner come to me and say, “Your sermons always give me much to ponder. You bring up so many questions, which cannot really be answered. And I find myself thinking, I don’t really expect answers from God, but I do want comfort, and now I am beginning to wonder, if that is too much for me to ask.”
No, it is not. Comfort is a human need, and perhaps this need has something to do with why the lectionary choices for this Sunday paired together the story from John with the 23rd Psalm. The Gospel is good news, but it does not always strike us as immediately comforting. Today’s story leaves us with the discomfort of considering our own blindness. And our questions about why bad things happen---why some suffer blindness or other calamities---are not answered. But then explanations are rarely comforting. Presence gives comfort, and this is what Psalm 23 offers.
Last month I conducted a graveside service, and when I first spoke with the daughter of the deceased man, she told me her father had left instructions that he wanted two readings read at his grave. The first was a short poem by Jane Kenyon called Otherwise, which ends with this line:
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know
It will be otherwise.
His second choice was the 23rd Psalm. “My father,” his Quaker daughter said, “was an agnostic. He always insisted he was too much of a realist to be a believer, but too humble to be an atheist, and so he lived between these two poles. “A man of great energy, he crammed in as much as he could before the clock ran down. He knew that one day “it would be otherwise.” And then she took out his handwritten note, which read, “Although I do not believe, I hope that goodness and mercy shall follow me into and beyond the grave, and that I shall dwell in that goodness and mercy forever.”
His two daughters and wife were shocked that he chose the psalm, but I told them I thought the psalm was indeed for realists as well as the faithful.” It presents life as a paradox; there is goodness, on the one hand, and yet we are challenged by the world’s evil. Yes, God restores the soul, but that means that something has happened which cries out for restoration. God is with us when we walk through the darkest valley of death’s shadow, but we still have to walk through that valley. A table is prepared for us, but it is prepared in the presence of our enemies, which means that enemies do not disappear.
The 23rd Psalm is a psalm of presence, and that is why people love it. People can’t prove the presence, but they have known it in the darkest valleys of life as the blind man knew it and saw it, when he was healed of his blindness. And when the presence is known, seen or felt, explanations and beliefs don’t matter as much as we think they do. What matters is that presence, which mysteriously holds us up even in the darkest valley.
THE MEETING: A SAMARITAN WOMAN SPEAKS by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 3/15/2020
John 4: 5-42
I understand that this is Women’s History Month, and last Sunday was International Women’s Day, when people were paying particular attention to women---their stories and aspirations. So with that in mind, it does make sense for me to be here---to tell you my story. Oh, it was such a long time ago, but how well I remember. And why shouldn’t I remember the details? It was, after all, completely unheard of for a Jewish man to speak to a Samaritan, and a woman, why that was even more outrageous. Jewish men did not even speak to Jewish women in public. That was just the way it was; still is, even today, in some parts of the Middle East.
But before I begin with the specifics of my story, I want you to understand something about the enmity between the Samaritans and the Jews. You probably realize that the two groups did not get along, and surely you all know and love the story from Luke’s gospel about the Good Samaritan, who helped the beaten and bleeding Jew, when so many other respectable Jewish leaders passed him by.
Well, memory goes back very far in the Middle East, and so the trouble began in 722 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, whose capital was Samaria. Samaritans became the people who intermarried with the pagan invaders, and though Samaritans and Jews both read the same scriptures and were waiting and hoping for the same Messiah, the Jews came to view us as impure, what some people might insultingly call, half breeds. Centuries later, after the Babylonian exile, when the Jews returned to Judah, the southern kingdom, the Samaritans of the northern kingdom did not welcome them home, and so to distinguish ourselves from the Jews, we Samaritans built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim. That is the holy mountain, we insisted, not Mount Sinai. Well, the Jews later destroyed our temple, which hardly made things easier between the two groups. And so, it has gone and continues to go. You can still find some Samaritans today living in Tel Aviv and Nablus, located in what is now the West Bank. But enough of history; now to my story.
It was noon, when I went to draw water from the well. The sun was already high in the sky, and it was hot, very hot. I knew I would be alone, since women always went to the well in the early morning hours before the heat of the day. They would go back and forth, usually a few times in the morning, and then later in the day, in the cool of the late afternoon, they would go again. I was careful to avoid those times, since I did not enjoy the stares and the nasty asides, usually uttered under the breath. Few would ever have the nerve to directly insult me.
It is true; my life hardly conformed to the pattern of womanhood laid down by either Samaritan or Jewish custom, and so it was simply easier for me to avoid potentially unpleasant situations. The man I was living with at the time was not my husband; I had already been married five times, but notice, Jesus said nothing about why I had been married five times. Women, you must remember, could not divorce on their own, so I was left widowed a few times and then men divorced me three times. And why was I divorced? Isn’t it interesting that whenever there is something unusual about a woman’s status, the assumption is made that she must be guilty of some kind of sexual impropriety? Mary Magdalene is a case in point. She is accused of being a prostitute; though nowhere in the scripture does it say that. It is an assumption, just as there is an assumption that I was guilty of some misdeed. My guilt, my crime was that I was barren, and in my day barrenness was always the woman’s fault, a curse pronounced by God. Well, after five husbands the last thing I thought I needed was another one, another man divorcing me because I was cursed.
So here I was at Jacob’s well, and this man, obviously a Jewish man, asked me for water. I thought it strange he was even here; most Jews traveling between Judah in the south and Galilee in the north would avoid going through Samaria by crossing the Jordan River to the east. But not this man. There he stood, looking hot and thirsty, requesting from me a drink of water. It’s strange, but as soon as he spoke, I felt this connecting spark. I mean here was a man, willing to break rules, and since I too was a rule breaker, my whole attention suddenly became focused, sharply focused. Though he asked me for water, he carried no cup. Did he expect me to give him one? But that would be another unclean act, and so, though shocked, I was also immensely curious. What is he really up to, I pondered? What does he really want, I wondered?
He said he wanted water, but do you realize that in your scriptures there are very few examples of Jesus asking anyone for anything. And so, I simply asked him how it was that he, a Jew, would ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water. But instead of answering my question, instead of taking water from me, he spoke to me in a kind of riddle, telling me that I would be wise to pay attention to his identity. If I only knew who he was, he said, I would ask him for living water. But what was that? I thought he meant fresh, flowing water as opposed to still water. And when he told me I would never be thirsty again, I thought he meant I would never have to return to the well to fill my jug. What a relief that would be. Do you have any idea how heavy water is? One pint weighs one pound, so a 5 gallon jug of water weighs a staggering 40 pounds, and most households would need two or three times that amount for one day.
At the time I did not understand that Jesus was offering to open me up to full and abundant life. I thought his offer was all about making my chores easier. Now, when I look back, I realize this is often how it is in human life. God offers us something big, something that can radically change the course of our lives, and we are ready to settle for far less, like lessening our chores. That’s what the temptation story was all about a few weeks ago. Jesus was offered some pretty big things by Satan, like turning stones into bread, but if he had fallen for that, he would have settled for far less than he was called to be. And he knew it; he knew it even then, while most of us just do not see and understand at the time. We are all like those Israelite's, moaning and complaining to Moses as they wondered, Is God with us or not? All they wanted was water to drink. They had no idea that God was with them on a journey toward living water.
So, they settled, and we settle, not unlike the poor alcoholic who settles for a bottle of booze rather than facing the pain of his life. Fear holds him or her back, just as fear often holds all of us in its nasty grip as we realize there is something to be gained, but also something to be lost. And it is that losing which is the fearful thing.
Oh, I eventually lost my place, a place I had made for myself as the outsider, looking down on people whom I thought were overly conventional and cowardly. But I came to understand that I too was playing it safe, always at a distance from everyone else, where no one could hurt me or make demands on me. I was so self-sufficient, until step by step, I moved outside the little box I had comfortably made into a wider and bigger world. And that is what living water is for; that is what eternal life is about. We cannot reduce eternity to a state after death. It is also about how we live now, how and what we choose to do and what and whom we choose to love. Eternal life is indeed about life, full and abundant life. That is what living water is; that is what it means to drink from the cup Jesus offers. And so, the offer is always being made. We can always begin again, always start over. And when fear would hold us back, we can reach out our hands and say, Jesus, give me your living water. And he does and he will---even if it does not always come in the form we want or expect.
John 4: 5-42
I understand that this is Women’s History Month, and last Sunday was International Women’s Day, when people were paying particular attention to women---their stories and aspirations. So with that in mind, it does make sense for me to be here---to tell you my story. Oh, it was such a long time ago, but how well I remember. And why shouldn’t I remember the details? It was, after all, completely unheard of for a Jewish man to speak to a Samaritan, and a woman, why that was even more outrageous. Jewish men did not even speak to Jewish women in public. That was just the way it was; still is, even today, in some parts of the Middle East.
But before I begin with the specifics of my story, I want you to understand something about the enmity between the Samaritans and the Jews. You probably realize that the two groups did not get along, and surely you all know and love the story from Luke’s gospel about the Good Samaritan, who helped the beaten and bleeding Jew, when so many other respectable Jewish leaders passed him by.
Well, memory goes back very far in the Middle East, and so the trouble began in 722 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, whose capital was Samaria. Samaritans became the people who intermarried with the pagan invaders, and though Samaritans and Jews both read the same scriptures and were waiting and hoping for the same Messiah, the Jews came to view us as impure, what some people might insultingly call, half breeds. Centuries later, after the Babylonian exile, when the Jews returned to Judah, the southern kingdom, the Samaritans of the northern kingdom did not welcome them home, and so to distinguish ourselves from the Jews, we Samaritans built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim. That is the holy mountain, we insisted, not Mount Sinai. Well, the Jews later destroyed our temple, which hardly made things easier between the two groups. And so, it has gone and continues to go. You can still find some Samaritans today living in Tel Aviv and Nablus, located in what is now the West Bank. But enough of history; now to my story.
It was noon, when I went to draw water from the well. The sun was already high in the sky, and it was hot, very hot. I knew I would be alone, since women always went to the well in the early morning hours before the heat of the day. They would go back and forth, usually a few times in the morning, and then later in the day, in the cool of the late afternoon, they would go again. I was careful to avoid those times, since I did not enjoy the stares and the nasty asides, usually uttered under the breath. Few would ever have the nerve to directly insult me.
It is true; my life hardly conformed to the pattern of womanhood laid down by either Samaritan or Jewish custom, and so it was simply easier for me to avoid potentially unpleasant situations. The man I was living with at the time was not my husband; I had already been married five times, but notice, Jesus said nothing about why I had been married five times. Women, you must remember, could not divorce on their own, so I was left widowed a few times and then men divorced me three times. And why was I divorced? Isn’t it interesting that whenever there is something unusual about a woman’s status, the assumption is made that she must be guilty of some kind of sexual impropriety? Mary Magdalene is a case in point. She is accused of being a prostitute; though nowhere in the scripture does it say that. It is an assumption, just as there is an assumption that I was guilty of some misdeed. My guilt, my crime was that I was barren, and in my day barrenness was always the woman’s fault, a curse pronounced by God. Well, after five husbands the last thing I thought I needed was another one, another man divorcing me because I was cursed.
So here I was at Jacob’s well, and this man, obviously a Jewish man, asked me for water. I thought it strange he was even here; most Jews traveling between Judah in the south and Galilee in the north would avoid going through Samaria by crossing the Jordan River to the east. But not this man. There he stood, looking hot and thirsty, requesting from me a drink of water. It’s strange, but as soon as he spoke, I felt this connecting spark. I mean here was a man, willing to break rules, and since I too was a rule breaker, my whole attention suddenly became focused, sharply focused. Though he asked me for water, he carried no cup. Did he expect me to give him one? But that would be another unclean act, and so, though shocked, I was also immensely curious. What is he really up to, I pondered? What does he really want, I wondered?
He said he wanted water, but do you realize that in your scriptures there are very few examples of Jesus asking anyone for anything. And so, I simply asked him how it was that he, a Jew, would ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water. But instead of answering my question, instead of taking water from me, he spoke to me in a kind of riddle, telling me that I would be wise to pay attention to his identity. If I only knew who he was, he said, I would ask him for living water. But what was that? I thought he meant fresh, flowing water as opposed to still water. And when he told me I would never be thirsty again, I thought he meant I would never have to return to the well to fill my jug. What a relief that would be. Do you have any idea how heavy water is? One pint weighs one pound, so a 5 gallon jug of water weighs a staggering 40 pounds, and most households would need two or three times that amount for one day.
At the time I did not understand that Jesus was offering to open me up to full and abundant life. I thought his offer was all about making my chores easier. Now, when I look back, I realize this is often how it is in human life. God offers us something big, something that can radically change the course of our lives, and we are ready to settle for far less, like lessening our chores. That’s what the temptation story was all about a few weeks ago. Jesus was offered some pretty big things by Satan, like turning stones into bread, but if he had fallen for that, he would have settled for far less than he was called to be. And he knew it; he knew it even then, while most of us just do not see and understand at the time. We are all like those Israelite's, moaning and complaining to Moses as they wondered, Is God with us or not? All they wanted was water to drink. They had no idea that God was with them on a journey toward living water.
So, they settled, and we settle, not unlike the poor alcoholic who settles for a bottle of booze rather than facing the pain of his life. Fear holds him or her back, just as fear often holds all of us in its nasty grip as we realize there is something to be gained, but also something to be lost. And it is that losing which is the fearful thing.
Oh, I eventually lost my place, a place I had made for myself as the outsider, looking down on people whom I thought were overly conventional and cowardly. But I came to understand that I too was playing it safe, always at a distance from everyone else, where no one could hurt me or make demands on me. I was so self-sufficient, until step by step, I moved outside the little box I had comfortably made into a wider and bigger world. And that is what living water is for; that is what eternal life is about. We cannot reduce eternity to a state after death. It is also about how we live now, how and what we choose to do and what and whom we choose to love. Eternal life is indeed about life, full and abundant life. That is what living water is; that is what it means to drink from the cup Jesus offers. And so, the offer is always being made. We can always begin again, always start over. And when fear would hold us back, we can reach out our hands and say, Jesus, give me your living water. And he does and he will---even if it does not always come in the form we want or expect.
COMING TO JESUS BY NIGHT by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 3/8/2020
Genesis 12: 1-4a
John 3: 1-17
Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. It’s dark, vision is impaired in these days long before electricity, and for the writer of this gospel night and dark symbolize blindness and misunderstanding. Yet this is when Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus. Though this is early in John’s gospel, (only chapter 3) already Jesus has created opposition. Unlike Mathew, Mark and Luke, who show Jesus throwing the money changers out of the Temple right before his arrest and execution, John puts that story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in chapter 2 in order to make clear Jesus’ identity. His authority, in other words, extends over and beyond the Temple. The temple can be destroyed, Jesus told the crowd, and in three days “I will rebuild it”---a reference to his resurrection on the third day.
Now Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee, would not have found it beneficial to be associated with such a radical. But he was curious, curious enough to come to Jesus by night. He had seen Jesus perform signs and wonders. In chapter two we are told that people believed in Jesus because of such signs, but it also says at the chapter’s end that Jesus would not entrust himself to those who believed in him because of signs. And then chapter three begins with Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.
Notice that Nicodemus immediately tells Jesus that he believes in him precisely because of those signs. No one can do these things apart from the presence of God, he told Jesus. But to be impressed by the signs is to be impressed by the wrong things; the signs are not the right reason for believing. If Nicodemus came with questions, he did not get the chance to ask them, because immediately Jesus launches into a theological declaration. He tells Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. The Greek word, translated as above, can also mean again or anew. Nicodemus takes it to mean again, which is why he asks the question about entering into his mother’s womb for a second birth. Jesus then tries to explain the difference between spirit and flesh, but still Nicodemus does not get it. How can these things be, Nicodemus ponders, and Jesus simply responds by asking, “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” And then Jesus declares what is perhaps the most memorized biblical verse in the New Testament: “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.”
We don’t hear anything more from Nicodemus until chapter 7, when he offers a defense of Jesus by reminding his fellow Pharisees that before they can condemn Jesus, their law demands he be fairly tried. Nicodemus appears again, when after Jesus’ death, he goes to his tomb with an excessive load of spices. So while he is a believer, he is an unsure and hesitant one, who is also impressed by the wrong things---not unlike many of us. We believe, but our reasons for believing may be no better than Nicodemus’ reasons. He, at least, witnessed signs and wonders. What do we offer as our reasons for believing in Jesus? Indeed, why are we here in church? Is it because we love the peaceful beauty of this place? Or the intimate trust that develops among members? Is it because we want to learn something new about the Bible, and see it applied to real life, so we can understand our own lives in a different way? Certainly not bad reasons to come to church, but how about the one that goes to the heart of the matter: Are we here, because we want to become disciples? Are we here to follow Jesus? I don’t mean follow perfectly, because perfection is not in our grasp, but do we want to follow more faithfully today than we did yesterday? Do we want to be changed by our encounter with the living Christ?
The gospel is really a kind of lens, and when we put it on, our vision, our view of the world does not look the same. Or at least it should not look the same, and if it does, then something is wrong. When we look through the lens of the gospel, we should not see our enemies the same way. Oh yes, we will still have enemies, but we can’t hate them and claim to be following Christ. We cannot put on the lens of the gospel and see a world, where torture and execution are acceptable. We can’t look at the addicted or the homeless, or the poor as if they deserve their lot in life, because some of them perhaps have made poor decisions. Oh, we can and we sometimes do these things, but we should not fool ourselves into believing that this is how Christ taught us to see. Jesus never once said, “God helps those who help themselves.” On the contrary, he taught, God so loved the world—the whole, inclusive world--- that he gave his Son for the world’s benefit that the world through him might be saved.
Some years ago, when I was at Princeton Theological Seminary for a course, I attended Sunday worship at Nassau Presbyterian Church. It is a lovely building with a strong membership, including many faculty and staff from the University and Seminary, and the preaching is, as you might expect, pretty intellectual. Well, after the service I was standing around in the social room, when this man began to speak with me. I told him the sermon gave me a lot to ponder. “Most likely,” he said, “but I have not understood a sermon here in 25 years. It seems that everyone here is either a professor or a lawyer, or some other highly educated professional, so the ministers tend to preach to them. I’m just a regular guy; I have a very successful house painting business, so I can afford to live in this upscale town, but I don’t have the education that most members have.
“Then why do you stay,” I asked? “What do you get out of it?”
“Oh, I will never leave this church,” he continued, “because it’s the place where I learned to be a better Christian. You see, some years ago, we started these visits to the prison, and so I thought, well, this is something Jesus said we should do, so I will try it. I really wasn’t that enthusiastic, but they needed someone with a van to drive and, so I volunteered. I started visiting people I could have so easily hated---like this rapist. Hey, I have three daughters. What was I doing talking to a man like this? But in time after listening to his story as well as the stories of other prisoners, I began to see them differently from the way the world sees them. And slowly it dawned on me that the gospel is true--- whatever we do to the least of these we do to Christ. I even gave some ex-prisoners jobs. There was this one tough guy, who disappointed me, when he stole money from a home we were painting, but you know something, against reason, I didn’t fire him. I prayed about it, and asked God to help me make the right decision. If I fired him, what would he do? Would he be able to get another job, or would he choose crime? So, I told him I would pay back the money, and I wanted him to continue working for me. I expect you to pay me back, I told him. He was shocked; he thought I had lost my mind. Well, so did my wife. But I felt this is what Jesus would have me do. That was 15 years ago, and that guy is my best worker. No, I may not understand the sermons here, but I have begun to understand what Christ would have me do. That’s why I am here. That’s why I stay.”
The Church is the body of Christ, and we are called to be part of that body. And we might be attracted to a particular church for all kinds of reasons—like my former church in New Haven, which boasted a stunning sanctuary, an exquisite hand built Fisk organ, a talented paid choir and a long and proud history, all of which were wonderful gifts. But none of that should be the main reason for the church. We are in church to be transformed into disciples, to help one another practice Christian faith, which means learning to see differently and act differently from how the world sees and acts. The world does not set the standards. Christ does, and we are called to follow him---although we sometimes stumble after him, or like Nicodemus, impressed by the wrong things, we come to Jesus by night. But at least we come, and that is a beginning.
Genesis 12: 1-4a
John 3: 1-17
Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. It’s dark, vision is impaired in these days long before electricity, and for the writer of this gospel night and dark symbolize blindness and misunderstanding. Yet this is when Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus. Though this is early in John’s gospel, (only chapter 3) already Jesus has created opposition. Unlike Mathew, Mark and Luke, who show Jesus throwing the money changers out of the Temple right before his arrest and execution, John puts that story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in chapter 2 in order to make clear Jesus’ identity. His authority, in other words, extends over and beyond the Temple. The temple can be destroyed, Jesus told the crowd, and in three days “I will rebuild it”---a reference to his resurrection on the third day.
Now Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee, would not have found it beneficial to be associated with such a radical. But he was curious, curious enough to come to Jesus by night. He had seen Jesus perform signs and wonders. In chapter two we are told that people believed in Jesus because of such signs, but it also says at the chapter’s end that Jesus would not entrust himself to those who believed in him because of signs. And then chapter three begins with Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.
Notice that Nicodemus immediately tells Jesus that he believes in him precisely because of those signs. No one can do these things apart from the presence of God, he told Jesus. But to be impressed by the signs is to be impressed by the wrong things; the signs are not the right reason for believing. If Nicodemus came with questions, he did not get the chance to ask them, because immediately Jesus launches into a theological declaration. He tells Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. The Greek word, translated as above, can also mean again or anew. Nicodemus takes it to mean again, which is why he asks the question about entering into his mother’s womb for a second birth. Jesus then tries to explain the difference between spirit and flesh, but still Nicodemus does not get it. How can these things be, Nicodemus ponders, and Jesus simply responds by asking, “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” And then Jesus declares what is perhaps the most memorized biblical verse in the New Testament: “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.”
We don’t hear anything more from Nicodemus until chapter 7, when he offers a defense of Jesus by reminding his fellow Pharisees that before they can condemn Jesus, their law demands he be fairly tried. Nicodemus appears again, when after Jesus’ death, he goes to his tomb with an excessive load of spices. So while he is a believer, he is an unsure and hesitant one, who is also impressed by the wrong things---not unlike many of us. We believe, but our reasons for believing may be no better than Nicodemus’ reasons. He, at least, witnessed signs and wonders. What do we offer as our reasons for believing in Jesus? Indeed, why are we here in church? Is it because we love the peaceful beauty of this place? Or the intimate trust that develops among members? Is it because we want to learn something new about the Bible, and see it applied to real life, so we can understand our own lives in a different way? Certainly not bad reasons to come to church, but how about the one that goes to the heart of the matter: Are we here, because we want to become disciples? Are we here to follow Jesus? I don’t mean follow perfectly, because perfection is not in our grasp, but do we want to follow more faithfully today than we did yesterday? Do we want to be changed by our encounter with the living Christ?
The gospel is really a kind of lens, and when we put it on, our vision, our view of the world does not look the same. Or at least it should not look the same, and if it does, then something is wrong. When we look through the lens of the gospel, we should not see our enemies the same way. Oh yes, we will still have enemies, but we can’t hate them and claim to be following Christ. We cannot put on the lens of the gospel and see a world, where torture and execution are acceptable. We can’t look at the addicted or the homeless, or the poor as if they deserve their lot in life, because some of them perhaps have made poor decisions. Oh, we can and we sometimes do these things, but we should not fool ourselves into believing that this is how Christ taught us to see. Jesus never once said, “God helps those who help themselves.” On the contrary, he taught, God so loved the world—the whole, inclusive world--- that he gave his Son for the world’s benefit that the world through him might be saved.
Some years ago, when I was at Princeton Theological Seminary for a course, I attended Sunday worship at Nassau Presbyterian Church. It is a lovely building with a strong membership, including many faculty and staff from the University and Seminary, and the preaching is, as you might expect, pretty intellectual. Well, after the service I was standing around in the social room, when this man began to speak with me. I told him the sermon gave me a lot to ponder. “Most likely,” he said, “but I have not understood a sermon here in 25 years. It seems that everyone here is either a professor or a lawyer, or some other highly educated professional, so the ministers tend to preach to them. I’m just a regular guy; I have a very successful house painting business, so I can afford to live in this upscale town, but I don’t have the education that most members have.
“Then why do you stay,” I asked? “What do you get out of it?”
“Oh, I will never leave this church,” he continued, “because it’s the place where I learned to be a better Christian. You see, some years ago, we started these visits to the prison, and so I thought, well, this is something Jesus said we should do, so I will try it. I really wasn’t that enthusiastic, but they needed someone with a van to drive and, so I volunteered. I started visiting people I could have so easily hated---like this rapist. Hey, I have three daughters. What was I doing talking to a man like this? But in time after listening to his story as well as the stories of other prisoners, I began to see them differently from the way the world sees them. And slowly it dawned on me that the gospel is true--- whatever we do to the least of these we do to Christ. I even gave some ex-prisoners jobs. There was this one tough guy, who disappointed me, when he stole money from a home we were painting, but you know something, against reason, I didn’t fire him. I prayed about it, and asked God to help me make the right decision. If I fired him, what would he do? Would he be able to get another job, or would he choose crime? So, I told him I would pay back the money, and I wanted him to continue working for me. I expect you to pay me back, I told him. He was shocked; he thought I had lost my mind. Well, so did my wife. But I felt this is what Jesus would have me do. That was 15 years ago, and that guy is my best worker. No, I may not understand the sermons here, but I have begun to understand what Christ would have me do. That’s why I am here. That’s why I stay.”
The Church is the body of Christ, and we are called to be part of that body. And we might be attracted to a particular church for all kinds of reasons—like my former church in New Haven, which boasted a stunning sanctuary, an exquisite hand built Fisk organ, a talented paid choir and a long and proud history, all of which were wonderful gifts. But none of that should be the main reason for the church. We are in church to be transformed into disciples, to help one another practice Christian faith, which means learning to see differently and act differently from how the world sees and acts. The world does not set the standards. Christ does, and we are called to follow him---although we sometimes stumble after him, or like Nicodemus, impressed by the wrong things, we come to Jesus by night. But at least we come, and that is a beginning.
The Temptation of Pride by: Rev. Sandra L. Olsen 3/1/2020
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7
Matthew 4: 1-11
No sooner was Jesus baptized than he was led out into the wilderness by the Spirit, where for forty days and nights he was tempted by the devil. Matthew’s version tells us that at his baptism the heavens opened, and the Spirit alighted on Jesus, while a voice claimed him as the Beloved Son. And immediately after that---the next verse, in fact, we are told that the same Spirit led him to the place where he would face the tempter. In other words, it is impossible to be the chosen one, the beloved one, without being tested. There is no spiritual maturity or depth without wrestling with temptation, or as the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, would say centuries later, “The worst temptation of all is to have no temptation.”
And so, the Church, throughout its 2000 years of history, has paid great attention to the subject of temptation and its companion, sin. And, according to the Church, the crowning glory of all the sins is Pride. By the Middle Ages the Church had catalogued seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. Pride was always considered the linchpin, the major sin, which allowed and encouraged all the other sins. Now we understand that a certain amount of pride is necessary if one is to grow confidence and learn responsibility. It is important to take pride in one’s work and achievements. But this kind of self worth and confidence is not the kind of pride condemned as sinful, and when it is so condemned, it is a terrible injustice. I remember many years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a state mental hospital, I met Sister Claire, a brilliant woman, who had received her PhD in literature from Columbia University sometime in the mid 1950’s. Her dream had been to teach at St. Mary’s College---at that time the sister college to Indiana’s Notre Dame. St. Mary’s hired her, and she was all set to go, until her Order decided she was too full of pride for her intellectual gifts, and to break her of that pride, she was assigned to teach junior high age girls. But that was not her call, not her gift, and in time she became rebellious, frustrated, angry and finally sick. When I met her, she had already spent over 25 years in the mental hospital.
The desire to use our gifts is not sinful pride. Pride becomes sin when it is excessive self-love, the tendency to elevate the self to the place of God. Adam and Eve became the prototypes of the prideful human, because when Satan told Eve that she could eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was attracted by the idea that she would be like God. The desire to be more than human is sin. And this is what makes the story of Jesus’ temptation so profoundly revelatory of the human condition. Jesus was not so full of pride that he thought he should be spared the full experience of his humanity, including temptation. Do you recall last week a child’s letter to God that asked, How did you know you are God? Well, Jesus would learn who he was by living fully and facing fully what it is human beings have to face: temptation, suffering and finally death.
In what is surely one of the great masterpieces of western literature, Milton’s Paradise Lost, we have an extraordinary psychological portrayal of pride in the character of Satan. Like the story of Adam and Eve, the truth of Paradise Lost does not depend upon an actual historical occurrence. Its truth lies in its power to reveal something significantly true about the human condition. Milton’s Satan, too proud to pay homage to God, led a rebellion of angels, and then when he was thrown into hell, he claimed it was better to rule there than to serve in heaven. Satan had this warped idea that God’s greatness depended upon submission, and so if he refused to submit to God, he thought he would then replace God. Pride blinded Satan to what truly made God great and attractive. It was not God’s raw power to demand submission, but rather God’s power to love. But pride blinds, allowing the excessively proud to see only a very small portion of reality. They see only the self, a self which sometimes tries to take all the credit.
Some time ago I read an article about the brilliantly talented violinist, Joshua Bell, who claims he is an atheist. Greatly annoyed when a believer told Bell how fortunate he was that God had blessed him with such a wonderful gift, Bell took offense, saying he felt giving God credit diminished his (Bell’s) hard work in becoming a great violinist. Now there is no doubt that hard work and discipline played a major role in Bell’s success, and yes Bell deserves great admiration for all he has achieved. Yet it strikes me as excessively prideful to fail to acknowledge that his ability is not completely self-generated. There was a gift, a potential to begin with, something in his DNA, which Bell then acted upon and worked hard to develop. The strategy of pride is always to attack not at our weakest point, but at our strongest. Remember, Satan was known as Lucifer, the brightest shining star of all the angels, and yet he was the first to fall.
All three temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness involved the self, his identity, what kind of messiah he would be, and in conquering them and living fully, Jesus would become became the man for others. Satan challenged him, “If you are the Son of God, do this: turn these stones into bread; if you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for surely God will lift you up, and in the third temptation he promised Jesus that all the kingdoms of the world would be his, if he would fall down and worship Satan. Jesus did not fall for the bait. As much as the temptations were about Jesus, he also realized they were about God, about what God wanted, which is why Matthew has Jesus answer each temptation with a quote from Deuteronomy, The Old Testament book, which shows us the Jewish people finally ending their wanderings in the wilderness and moving into the Promised Land. While Moses would not reach the Promised Land with them, he reminds the people, Remember the covenant God has made with you. Remember, it is not all about you, but it is all about God and human beings, who are called to faithfulness even as they (and we) face the temptation to run away from that call. And as difficult and trying as that temptation is, it is worse, said Luther, to have no temptation at all, because then our spirituality remains infantile.
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7
Matthew 4: 1-11
No sooner was Jesus baptized than he was led out into the wilderness by the Spirit, where for forty days and nights he was tempted by the devil. Matthew’s version tells us that at his baptism the heavens opened, and the Spirit alighted on Jesus, while a voice claimed him as the Beloved Son. And immediately after that---the next verse, in fact, we are told that the same Spirit led him to the place where he would face the tempter. In other words, it is impossible to be the chosen one, the beloved one, without being tested. There is no spiritual maturity or depth without wrestling with temptation, or as the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, would say centuries later, “The worst temptation of all is to have no temptation.”
And so, the Church, throughout its 2000 years of history, has paid great attention to the subject of temptation and its companion, sin. And, according to the Church, the crowning glory of all the sins is Pride. By the Middle Ages the Church had catalogued seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. Pride was always considered the linchpin, the major sin, which allowed and encouraged all the other sins. Now we understand that a certain amount of pride is necessary if one is to grow confidence and learn responsibility. It is important to take pride in one’s work and achievements. But this kind of self worth and confidence is not the kind of pride condemned as sinful, and when it is so condemned, it is a terrible injustice. I remember many years ago, when I worked as a chaplain in a state mental hospital, I met Sister Claire, a brilliant woman, who had received her PhD in literature from Columbia University sometime in the mid 1950’s. Her dream had been to teach at St. Mary’s College---at that time the sister college to Indiana’s Notre Dame. St. Mary’s hired her, and she was all set to go, until her Order decided she was too full of pride for her intellectual gifts, and to break her of that pride, she was assigned to teach junior high age girls. But that was not her call, not her gift, and in time she became rebellious, frustrated, angry and finally sick. When I met her, she had already spent over 25 years in the mental hospital.
The desire to use our gifts is not sinful pride. Pride becomes sin when it is excessive self-love, the tendency to elevate the self to the place of God. Adam and Eve became the prototypes of the prideful human, because when Satan told Eve that she could eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was attracted by the idea that she would be like God. The desire to be more than human is sin. And this is what makes the story of Jesus’ temptation so profoundly revelatory of the human condition. Jesus was not so full of pride that he thought he should be spared the full experience of his humanity, including temptation. Do you recall last week a child’s letter to God that asked, How did you know you are God? Well, Jesus would learn who he was by living fully and facing fully what it is human beings have to face: temptation, suffering and finally death.
In what is surely one of the great masterpieces of western literature, Milton’s Paradise Lost, we have an extraordinary psychological portrayal of pride in the character of Satan. Like the story of Adam and Eve, the truth of Paradise Lost does not depend upon an actual historical occurrence. Its truth lies in its power to reveal something significantly true about the human condition. Milton’s Satan, too proud to pay homage to God, led a rebellion of angels, and then when he was thrown into hell, he claimed it was better to rule there than to serve in heaven. Satan had this warped idea that God’s greatness depended upon submission, and so if he refused to submit to God, he thought he would then replace God. Pride blinded Satan to what truly made God great and attractive. It was not God’s raw power to demand submission, but rather God’s power to love. But pride blinds, allowing the excessively proud to see only a very small portion of reality. They see only the self, a self which sometimes tries to take all the credit.
Some time ago I read an article about the brilliantly talented violinist, Joshua Bell, who claims he is an atheist. Greatly annoyed when a believer told Bell how fortunate he was that God had blessed him with such a wonderful gift, Bell took offense, saying he felt giving God credit diminished his (Bell’s) hard work in becoming a great violinist. Now there is no doubt that hard work and discipline played a major role in Bell’s success, and yes Bell deserves great admiration for all he has achieved. Yet it strikes me as excessively prideful to fail to acknowledge that his ability is not completely self-generated. There was a gift, a potential to begin with, something in his DNA, which Bell then acted upon and worked hard to develop. The strategy of pride is always to attack not at our weakest point, but at our strongest. Remember, Satan was known as Lucifer, the brightest shining star of all the angels, and yet he was the first to fall.
All three temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness involved the self, his identity, what kind of messiah he would be, and in conquering them and living fully, Jesus would become became the man for others. Satan challenged him, “If you are the Son of God, do this: turn these stones into bread; if you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for surely God will lift you up, and in the third temptation he promised Jesus that all the kingdoms of the world would be his, if he would fall down and worship Satan. Jesus did not fall for the bait. As much as the temptations were about Jesus, he also realized they were about God, about what God wanted, which is why Matthew has Jesus answer each temptation with a quote from Deuteronomy, The Old Testament book, which shows us the Jewish people finally ending their wanderings in the wilderness and moving into the Promised Land. While Moses would not reach the Promised Land with them, he reminds the people, Remember the covenant God has made with you. Remember, it is not all about you, but it is all about God and human beings, who are called to faithfulness even as they (and we) face the temptation to run away from that call. And as difficult and trying as that temptation is, it is worse, said Luther, to have no temptation at all, because then our spirituality remains infantile.
Ash Wednesday Preached by: Sandra Olsen 2/26/2020
The song wafted into the hospital hallway, and that music, my favorite aria from my favorite opera, Puccini’s La Boheme, was my introduction to Elizabeth. Now I want you to imagine being in a hospital on the floor of a critical care unit, approaching a room and hearing this: Aria played. La Boheme, by the way, is a love story that turns tragic, because the heroine, Mimi, dies from tuberculosis at the opera’s conclusion.
Elizabeth was 37 years old, a gifted neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins, afflicted with a fatal brain tumor. She was the mother of two children, a girl age 6 and a boy, age 4. She came to University Hospital to die after her husband, who himself was a general surgeon, also at Johns Hopkins, lost courage and ran. I cannot bear to see the love of my life die, he said. God help me; God forgive me. I cannot do it. I cannot face my children with my failure to save their mother. And so he ran, and Elizabeth came with her children to the place where her parents lived and where her father had been a professor of medicine.
Since Elizabeth and I were both lovers of Puccini operas, we had this immediate bond, and she and I grew very close. We had long talks about life and death, and I came to admire greatly her courage and dignity. And I came to admire something else as well: her ability to forgive someone whom she deeply loved and who had broken her heart.
Elizabeth insisted that understanding helps one to forgive, and she did understand her husband. They met in medical school, and they fell deeply in love. Both of them were passionate about medicine, she the intricacies of the human brain, and he the complexities and interrelationship of individual body parts. He did not like to concentrate on one part of the body as she did; he liked the challenge of honing his skills on various body parts---thus, his specialty in general surgery.
Elizabeth told me that her husband’s great enemy was death, and he fought against it with all the determination and skill he could muster. He could not stand to lose a patient, and when he did, he would descend into a deep depression for days on end. He even tried therapy, she said, because he realized his reactions were outside the normal curve. Many surgeons fight death, Elizabeth said, but not to the same degree my husband did. And now, because he knows this is a battle death will finally win, he cannot bear it. I am afraid he is a coward, she said. I know that, and worst of all, he knows it.
Elizabeth was not consumed by anger or bitterness, just a wrenching hurt and also a deep forgiveness, born of love and understanding. She hoped against hope that he would return toward the end, and even on her last day, she would move in and out of consciousness, calling his name, still hoping that he would come. But he never did. When she died her service boasted beautiful voices singing some of Puccini’s most stirring arias as well as the most beautiful arrangement of flowers I have ever seen, ribboned with these words, My love, forgive me. She already had. He did not even have to ask.
There is something about mortality that connects with the theme of forgiveness. Since we do not have an unlimited time, how we bear our hurts, defeats and disappointments matter. If you read the stories of the Greek and Roman myths, especially the stories of the gods and goddesses, the issue of forgiveness never arises. No god or goddess ever says to another god or goddess, I’m sorry; no god or goddess ever offers forgiveness to another divine one. Repentance and forgiveness are not big issues, when time never runs out, because there is an infinite amount of time to redo and remake reality. But we humans do not have infinite time, and so what we do with the finite time we have does matter. We cannot redo our past and outlive our sins. And that is where forgiveness enters.
Today we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We also are reminded that the piety and faithfulness God would ask of us cannot be reduced to a list of rules that can be easily checked off. We are called to cultivate a disposition of the inner heart and spirit, a generosity of judgment that opens itself up wide to others and the world. This is, as Isaiah reminds us, a repairing of the walls or the translation I prefer: the repairing of the breach. Of course, in opening up wide, we open ourselves to great pain and disappointment, as Elizabeth did. She loved her husband to the very end, and though she died with a broken heart, it was not a bitter one. It was a forgiving heart. And that was and is a spiritual victory, which Elizabeth offered to God.
We all have sins to be sorry for, sins to repent of just as we also bear the stinging hurts and betrayals with which others have afflicted us. And how we bear all that says something about the kind of spiritual life we lead and leave behind, when our time on this earth is over. And yet the final consolation and victory are not ours to claim, because in the end it is not all about us, but all about God, our God in Jesus Christ, who assures us that when we fail, there is yet mercy and love. And that is the great spiritual victory, offered by God to all of us.
The song wafted into the hospital hallway, and that music, my favorite aria from my favorite opera, Puccini’s La Boheme, was my introduction to Elizabeth. Now I want you to imagine being in a hospital on the floor of a critical care unit, approaching a room and hearing this: Aria played. La Boheme, by the way, is a love story that turns tragic, because the heroine, Mimi, dies from tuberculosis at the opera’s conclusion.
Elizabeth was 37 years old, a gifted neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins, afflicted with a fatal brain tumor. She was the mother of two children, a girl age 6 and a boy, age 4. She came to University Hospital to die after her husband, who himself was a general surgeon, also at Johns Hopkins, lost courage and ran. I cannot bear to see the love of my life die, he said. God help me; God forgive me. I cannot do it. I cannot face my children with my failure to save their mother. And so he ran, and Elizabeth came with her children to the place where her parents lived and where her father had been a professor of medicine.
Since Elizabeth and I were both lovers of Puccini operas, we had this immediate bond, and she and I grew very close. We had long talks about life and death, and I came to admire greatly her courage and dignity. And I came to admire something else as well: her ability to forgive someone whom she deeply loved and who had broken her heart.
Elizabeth insisted that understanding helps one to forgive, and she did understand her husband. They met in medical school, and they fell deeply in love. Both of them were passionate about medicine, she the intricacies of the human brain, and he the complexities and interrelationship of individual body parts. He did not like to concentrate on one part of the body as she did; he liked the challenge of honing his skills on various body parts---thus, his specialty in general surgery.
Elizabeth told me that her husband’s great enemy was death, and he fought against it with all the determination and skill he could muster. He could not stand to lose a patient, and when he did, he would descend into a deep depression for days on end. He even tried therapy, she said, because he realized his reactions were outside the normal curve. Many surgeons fight death, Elizabeth said, but not to the same degree my husband did. And now, because he knows this is a battle death will finally win, he cannot bear it. I am afraid he is a coward, she said. I know that, and worst of all, he knows it.
Elizabeth was not consumed by anger or bitterness, just a wrenching hurt and also a deep forgiveness, born of love and understanding. She hoped against hope that he would return toward the end, and even on her last day, she would move in and out of consciousness, calling his name, still hoping that he would come. But he never did. When she died her service boasted beautiful voices singing some of Puccini’s most stirring arias as well as the most beautiful arrangement of flowers I have ever seen, ribboned with these words, My love, forgive me. She already had. He did not even have to ask.
There is something about mortality that connects with the theme of forgiveness. Since we do not have an unlimited time, how we bear our hurts, defeats and disappointments matter. If you read the stories of the Greek and Roman myths, especially the stories of the gods and goddesses, the issue of forgiveness never arises. No god or goddess ever says to another god or goddess, I’m sorry; no god or goddess ever offers forgiveness to another divine one. Repentance and forgiveness are not big issues, when time never runs out, because there is an infinite amount of time to redo and remake reality. But we humans do not have infinite time, and so what we do with the finite time we have does matter. We cannot redo our past and outlive our sins. And that is where forgiveness enters.
Today we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We also are reminded that the piety and faithfulness God would ask of us cannot be reduced to a list of rules that can be easily checked off. We are called to cultivate a disposition of the inner heart and spirit, a generosity of judgment that opens itself up wide to others and the world. This is, as Isaiah reminds us, a repairing of the walls or the translation I prefer: the repairing of the breach. Of course, in opening up wide, we open ourselves to great pain and disappointment, as Elizabeth did. She loved her husband to the very end, and though she died with a broken heart, it was not a bitter one. It was a forgiving heart. And that was and is a spiritual victory, which Elizabeth offered to God.
We all have sins to be sorry for, sins to repent of just as we also bear the stinging hurts and betrayals with which others have afflicted us. And how we bear all that says something about the kind of spiritual life we lead and leave behind, when our time on this earth is over. And yet the final consolation and victory are not ours to claim, because in the end it is not all about us, but all about God, our God in Jesus Christ, who assures us that when we fail, there is yet mercy and love. And that is the great spiritual victory, offered by God to all of us.
LETTERS TO GOD WRITTEN BY CHILDREN, READ BY SANDRA AT THE SERVICE: 2/23/2020
These are the letters from a book called, Letters to God, which Sandra read during the worship service on February 23, 2020.
We plan to print the, Letters to God, written by our congregation and will send it out at a later date.
Letters to God
In Sunday School they told us what you do. Who does it when you are on vacation? Jane
How did you know you were God? Charlene
I read the Bible. What does begat mean? Nobody will tell me. Love Alison
Dear God, Are you really invisible, or is that one of your tricks? Lucy
Dear God, Did you mean for the giraffe to look like that, or was it an accident? I have accidents all the time, so don’t feel bad. Norma
Dear God, Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you already have? Jane
Dear God, Do animals use you, or is there somebody else for them? Nancy
Dear God, I like the Lord’s Prayer the best of all. Did you have to write it a lot, or did you get it right the first time? I have to write everything I ever write over again. Lois
Dear God, It’s ok that you made different religions, but don’t you get mixed up sometimes? Arnold
Dear God, What does it mean that you are a jealous God? I thought you had everything. Jane
Dear God, Is Reverent Coe a friend of yours, or do you just know him through business? Donny
Dear God, Did you really mean do unto others as they do unto you, because if you did, then I’m going to fix my brother? Darla
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. Joyce
Dear God, Please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. Ginny
Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother. Larry
Dear God, I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family, and I can never do it. Nan
Dear God, My brother told me about being born, but it doesn’t sound right. I think you can do better than this. Marsha
Dear God, In school we learned that Thomas Edison made light, but in Sunday School they said you did it. So I bet he stole your idea. Donna
Dear God, I told my Sunday School teacher that you are made of all kinds of people and all kinds of colors. She told me I was wrong. You ought to be more careful about the people you hire to teach your stuff. Jeff.
Dear God,
I know this is a question that arises again and again, but the pain, evil and suffering in the world are the most significant reasons people offer for not believing in you. And it is neither a trivial question nor a trivial accusation against you. It is perhaps the biggest question we can ponder. And quite frankly, there are no good answers. We can bring our best minds and spirits to this question, and still we come up short. Still there is no answer. And that defense about free will: That just does not cut it, because there is disease that has nothing to do with free will. A young mother dies a terrible death after a valiant fight against cancer. There is no reason for that, nothing that can justify her suffering and the loss her child must bear. It is just the way life is; it is not a perfect world, though some philosophers have argued it is the best of all possible worlds. But that is hard to believe given the massive wrongs history has witnessed---6 million Jews slaughtered for no other reason than their identity as Jews. Why would the free will of the evil doers count more than the free will of the victims? It is no consolation to be told that one day we will understand---one day we shall see face to face as Paul says. That does not really help, because the problems we face and the questions we have are for this life and this earth---not for some beyond. You have given us keen intelligence, and you expect us to use it. And so I conclude that the power you have comes down to love, the power that love has to persuade, but not to force.
These are the letters from a book called, Letters to God, which Sandra read during the worship service on February 23, 2020.
We plan to print the, Letters to God, written by our congregation and will send it out at a later date.
Letters to God
In Sunday School they told us what you do. Who does it when you are on vacation? Jane
How did you know you were God? Charlene
I read the Bible. What does begat mean? Nobody will tell me. Love Alison
Dear God, Are you really invisible, or is that one of your tricks? Lucy
Dear God, Did you mean for the giraffe to look like that, or was it an accident? I have accidents all the time, so don’t feel bad. Norma
Dear God, Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you already have? Jane
Dear God, Do animals use you, or is there somebody else for them? Nancy
Dear God, I like the Lord’s Prayer the best of all. Did you have to write it a lot, or did you get it right the first time? I have to write everything I ever write over again. Lois
Dear God, It’s ok that you made different religions, but don’t you get mixed up sometimes? Arnold
Dear God, What does it mean that you are a jealous God? I thought you had everything. Jane
Dear God, Is Reverent Coe a friend of yours, or do you just know him through business? Donny
Dear God, Did you really mean do unto others as they do unto you, because if you did, then I’m going to fix my brother? Darla
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. Joyce
Dear God, Please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. Ginny
Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother. Larry
Dear God, I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family, and I can never do it. Nan
Dear God, My brother told me about being born, but it doesn’t sound right. I think you can do better than this. Marsha
Dear God, In school we learned that Thomas Edison made light, but in Sunday School they said you did it. So I bet he stole your idea. Donna
Dear God, I told my Sunday School teacher that you are made of all kinds of people and all kinds of colors. She told me I was wrong. You ought to be more careful about the people you hire to teach your stuff. Jeff.
Dear God,
I know this is a question that arises again and again, but the pain, evil and suffering in the world are the most significant reasons people offer for not believing in you. And it is neither a trivial question nor a trivial accusation against you. It is perhaps the biggest question we can ponder. And quite frankly, there are no good answers. We can bring our best minds and spirits to this question, and still we come up short. Still there is no answer. And that defense about free will: That just does not cut it, because there is disease that has nothing to do with free will. A young mother dies a terrible death after a valiant fight against cancer. There is no reason for that, nothing that can justify her suffering and the loss her child must bear. It is just the way life is; it is not a perfect world, though some philosophers have argued it is the best of all possible worlds. But that is hard to believe given the massive wrongs history has witnessed---6 million Jews slaughtered for no other reason than their identity as Jews. Why would the free will of the evil doers count more than the free will of the victims? It is no consolation to be told that one day we will understand---one day we shall see face to face as Paul says. That does not really help, because the problems we face and the questions we have are for this life and this earth---not for some beyond. You have given us keen intelligence, and you expect us to use it. And so I conclude that the power you have comes down to love, the power that love has to persuade, but not to force.
THE LOVE OF LAW OR THE LAW OF LOVE ~ Preached by Sandra Olsen 2/16/2020
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Matthew 5: 21-37
A few years ago, a woman, who exercised at the same place I did, came in one morning all upset, because her husband had decided to work at home that morning, when she was planning to get together with a friend to organize a surprise birthday party for her husband. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “Well, he wanted to know where I was going.” So why didn’t you just make something up, I asked. Oh no, she said. That would have been a lie, and it’s a sin to lie. Now I knew this woman to be a member of a fundamentalist church, and I never discussed religion with her, because I knew we would not agree on much. But since I was already involved in the conversation, I continued. No, that is not really a lie; it’s not about deceit or taking advantage or doing harm. You are simply planning a party. Well, she said. A lie is a lie.
I suppose I should have dropped it, but I didn’t. OK, I continued, what would you do if you had been living in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and you were hiding Jews? Let’s say the Nazis came and asked you if you knew where any Jewish people were hiding. The Nazis in this case would not have the right to the truth, because they would use the truth to do harm. Your moral obligation would be to keep the truth from them. At this point, the woman was clearly upset. I’m not sure; I never thought about something like that. I have always tried to follow the rules of my religion. At which point, I simply said, Religion is not always about following rules. Sometimes you have to think.
The 5th chapter of Matthew, what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, is very much concerned with laws and rules. Matthew was a Jew and standing in that tradition he had a particular notion of law. It was supposed to be life giving, grace filled, as we heard in Deuteronomy, when God puts before the people the choice between life or death.
Now Matthew understood Jesus to be the new Moses, the new lawgiver, who fulfills the law by bringing a new and higher righteousness---the law of love. Now this law of love---this higher righteousness--- can be pretty tricky, because it is demanding and uncomfortable and against the ordinary wisdom of the world. You are not only judged by your actions, hard enough, but also Matthew has Jesus talking about our inner feelings and dispositions, where emotions like anger, greed, jealousy and lust reside.
But the other tricky thing about the law of love is that it is not always a rational rule to follow. Matthew does make a valiant attempt to put it in the form of rules as he shows Jesus setting the bar higher and higher by saying: You have heard it said, but I say to you. And yet this attempt to make love a rule or law hardly exhausts the meaning and conditions of love, because sometimes, as you ask yourself what it means to do the loving thing in a particular situation, you do not always come up with an obvious answer. If you are like the woman whose story I began my sermon with this morning, and you want a list of rules to follow so you don’t have to think things through, the gospel probably will not give you what you want. It casts a very wide net, and though it encompasses rules and laws, sometimes it is also beyond rules and laws.
A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues, a minister in the Presbyterian Church with whom I have a pretty intellectual relationship, called me to discuss Matthew’s idea of higher righteousness and to tell me a story he recently learned from one of his parishioners. Born in 1935, Caroline had grown up in Virginia, the daughter of wealth, whose ancestors were slave holders. Now her parents, she said, were highly educated persons, and they never, ever used the N word, but they were racists through and through, and they had no desire to learn or to change. Well, in 1953, Caroline did what most young southern women did not do: she went North to college, Barnard in New York. And during her senior year in college, she met this young lawyer, fresh out of law school, working on behalf of tenants’ rights. And Carson was committed and brilliant and black, and they fell in love. Well, you can imagine how this was received back in Virginia, where interracial marriage was against the law. But Caroline and Carson did not care what anyone in Virginia thought, and they planned to marry right after Caroline’s graduation--- until Carson suddenly disappeared---gone without a trace. No one knew a thing, and even more outrageous, no one cared to do anything. The police told her, “He got cold feet and ran away,” realizing such a marriage could never work out, at least not in 1957. That was just the way it was.
But Caroline never believed that was the way it was. She suspected her family was involved in Carson’s disappearance, and so she just stopped going home---until 1991, when her father was dying. She had not been home in 35 years, had not spoken to her family, but like the prodigal, they thought she was, she returned. Her mother kissed her on my cheek, but it was clear, Caroline thought, she did not want her there. And so alone Caroline entered her father’s room. Caroline, her father uttered her name, and then he said, Carrie, his affectionate name for her. You have come.
Caroline sat down on the bed and took his hand. It has been a long time, she said, and we both know why. But we will not speak of that now. Oh, but we will, her father insisted. We must speak of it, and then he told her the whole ugly story---how Carson himself was threatened and his family too, his 22 year old brother, run off the road and seriously hurt. Only the first accident, Carson was warned and others would follow. And because Carson was black and it was 1957, the same year the Little Rock Nine tried to integrate Central High, he disappeared--- with financial help from Caroline’s family for him and his family.
Now imagine what you would do or say in such a situation. Imagine hearing what your family had done to the man you were about to marry. But Caroline said nothing; she simply sat there, holding her father’s hand without saying a word about the past. For two days and nights she sat with him until he died. No words of regret were ever spoken by either of them. It was what it was.
And yet my colleague wondered if in that encounter there was a hint of higher righteousness--- higher not in the sense that differences were overcome and healed and forgiveness offered, but higher in the sense that for two days and nights love was the bond that held them together. My colleague had just learned this story; Caroline only told him a few weeks ago, because she wanted to talk to him about forgiveness. My father was still a racist in 1991, when he died, Caroline told her minister. There was no apology for what he had done, and yet she realized that she loved him, just as her father had realized he still loved her. And the question Caroline put to my colleague was this: Can you really love someone when you do not forgive him?
We all know that change is never easy, and sometimes people whom we deeply love do not change in the way we would want or even need. There is a choice between life and death, and tragically, some might choose death, symbolically as well as literally. But perhaps this is when Jesus as the Christ is most helpful, because he teaches us something about being on the side of love, especially when we have been profoundly hurt and betrayed, especially when someone we love does not choose full and abundant life. We can force no one to do what we are convinced is the right thing; we can force no one to change, but we can still be on the side of love, as Caroline and her father realized. And figuring out how to do that---how to be on the side of love is why we are here, why we believe church matters, because it can help us to embrace the higher righteousness, which is the law of love.
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Matthew 5: 21-37
A few years ago, a woman, who exercised at the same place I did, came in one morning all upset, because her husband had decided to work at home that morning, when she was planning to get together with a friend to organize a surprise birthday party for her husband. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “Well, he wanted to know where I was going.” So why didn’t you just make something up, I asked. Oh no, she said. That would have been a lie, and it’s a sin to lie. Now I knew this woman to be a member of a fundamentalist church, and I never discussed religion with her, because I knew we would not agree on much. But since I was already involved in the conversation, I continued. No, that is not really a lie; it’s not about deceit or taking advantage or doing harm. You are simply planning a party. Well, she said. A lie is a lie.
I suppose I should have dropped it, but I didn’t. OK, I continued, what would you do if you had been living in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and you were hiding Jews? Let’s say the Nazis came and asked you if you knew where any Jewish people were hiding. The Nazis in this case would not have the right to the truth, because they would use the truth to do harm. Your moral obligation would be to keep the truth from them. At this point, the woman was clearly upset. I’m not sure; I never thought about something like that. I have always tried to follow the rules of my religion. At which point, I simply said, Religion is not always about following rules. Sometimes you have to think.
The 5th chapter of Matthew, what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, is very much concerned with laws and rules. Matthew was a Jew and standing in that tradition he had a particular notion of law. It was supposed to be life giving, grace filled, as we heard in Deuteronomy, when God puts before the people the choice between life or death.
Now Matthew understood Jesus to be the new Moses, the new lawgiver, who fulfills the law by bringing a new and higher righteousness---the law of love. Now this law of love---this higher righteousness--- can be pretty tricky, because it is demanding and uncomfortable and against the ordinary wisdom of the world. You are not only judged by your actions, hard enough, but also Matthew has Jesus talking about our inner feelings and dispositions, where emotions like anger, greed, jealousy and lust reside.
But the other tricky thing about the law of love is that it is not always a rational rule to follow. Matthew does make a valiant attempt to put it in the form of rules as he shows Jesus setting the bar higher and higher by saying: You have heard it said, but I say to you. And yet this attempt to make love a rule or law hardly exhausts the meaning and conditions of love, because sometimes, as you ask yourself what it means to do the loving thing in a particular situation, you do not always come up with an obvious answer. If you are like the woman whose story I began my sermon with this morning, and you want a list of rules to follow so you don’t have to think things through, the gospel probably will not give you what you want. It casts a very wide net, and though it encompasses rules and laws, sometimes it is also beyond rules and laws.
A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues, a minister in the Presbyterian Church with whom I have a pretty intellectual relationship, called me to discuss Matthew’s idea of higher righteousness and to tell me a story he recently learned from one of his parishioners. Born in 1935, Caroline had grown up in Virginia, the daughter of wealth, whose ancestors were slave holders. Now her parents, she said, were highly educated persons, and they never, ever used the N word, but they were racists through and through, and they had no desire to learn or to change. Well, in 1953, Caroline did what most young southern women did not do: she went North to college, Barnard in New York. And during her senior year in college, she met this young lawyer, fresh out of law school, working on behalf of tenants’ rights. And Carson was committed and brilliant and black, and they fell in love. Well, you can imagine how this was received back in Virginia, where interracial marriage was against the law. But Caroline and Carson did not care what anyone in Virginia thought, and they planned to marry right after Caroline’s graduation--- until Carson suddenly disappeared---gone without a trace. No one knew a thing, and even more outrageous, no one cared to do anything. The police told her, “He got cold feet and ran away,” realizing such a marriage could never work out, at least not in 1957. That was just the way it was.
But Caroline never believed that was the way it was. She suspected her family was involved in Carson’s disappearance, and so she just stopped going home---until 1991, when her father was dying. She had not been home in 35 years, had not spoken to her family, but like the prodigal, they thought she was, she returned. Her mother kissed her on my cheek, but it was clear, Caroline thought, she did not want her there. And so alone Caroline entered her father’s room. Caroline, her father uttered her name, and then he said, Carrie, his affectionate name for her. You have come.
Caroline sat down on the bed and took his hand. It has been a long time, she said, and we both know why. But we will not speak of that now. Oh, but we will, her father insisted. We must speak of it, and then he told her the whole ugly story---how Carson himself was threatened and his family too, his 22 year old brother, run off the road and seriously hurt. Only the first accident, Carson was warned and others would follow. And because Carson was black and it was 1957, the same year the Little Rock Nine tried to integrate Central High, he disappeared--- with financial help from Caroline’s family for him and his family.
Now imagine what you would do or say in such a situation. Imagine hearing what your family had done to the man you were about to marry. But Caroline said nothing; she simply sat there, holding her father’s hand without saying a word about the past. For two days and nights she sat with him until he died. No words of regret were ever spoken by either of them. It was what it was.
And yet my colleague wondered if in that encounter there was a hint of higher righteousness--- higher not in the sense that differences were overcome and healed and forgiveness offered, but higher in the sense that for two days and nights love was the bond that held them together. My colleague had just learned this story; Caroline only told him a few weeks ago, because she wanted to talk to him about forgiveness. My father was still a racist in 1991, when he died, Caroline told her minister. There was no apology for what he had done, and yet she realized that she loved him, just as her father had realized he still loved her. And the question Caroline put to my colleague was this: Can you really love someone when you do not forgive him?
We all know that change is never easy, and sometimes people whom we deeply love do not change in the way we would want or even need. There is a choice between life and death, and tragically, some might choose death, symbolically as well as literally. But perhaps this is when Jesus as the Christ is most helpful, because he teaches us something about being on the side of love, especially when we have been profoundly hurt and betrayed, especially when someone we love does not choose full and abundant life. We can force no one to do what we are convinced is the right thing; we can force no one to change, but we can still be on the side of love, as Caroline and her father realized. And figuring out how to do that---how to be on the side of love is why we are here, why we believe church matters, because it can help us to embrace the higher righteousness, which is the law of love.
When Righteousness Calls ~ Preached by Sandra Olsen 2/9/2020
Matthew 5: 13-20
The Gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish sounding gospel of all, presents Jesus as the giver of the new law, the law of higher righteousness. Jesus is not only the fulfillment of the Jewish law, he also moves beyond it, by bringing a law that is far more demanding than the old law as enshrined in the 10 Commandments. Last Sunday we heard Jesus pronounce the Beatitudes, God’s blessings on the poor in spirit, the mournful, the peacemakers, the meek, the persecuted, all kinds of people, struggling with difficult issues. And now in today’s gospel, we hear him beginning to make demands on his listeners. While they are named the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are reminded to keep their saltiness and to shine forth their light. In other words, they have to obey the fullness of the Law, the law of the prophets and the 10 Commandments, but obedience demands more than following the example of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus demands a higher righteousness, and what that consists of will be laid out throughout Matthew’s gospel.
So how is this new law to be applied? Now part of the law did consist of cultic rules and regulations about religious sacrifice and cleanliness, but justice was also important, which included embracing the foreigner, helping the widow and the orphan, treating workers fairly. The Jewish law was always understood to have implications for the wider community and world. And Christianity has followed that teaching, even as it also understands the challenge of applying Jesus’ law of higher righteousness to the social and political realms.
Now one way Christian thinkers have dealt with this challenge is by pointing out that we inhabit two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of earth. Jesus recognized that difference when he said, render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. But we still have to ponder what exactly is due each realm. The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, insisted that the law of love cannot be enacted politically because nations contain criminals and sinners, who must be restrained and sometimes punished. And so justice is the best the earthly kingdom can hope for. Justice is the political expression of the law of love.
If justice is the best we can hope for in the political world, how does justice make room for repentance and forgiveness? Repentance and forgiveness were huge themes in the prophet Isaiah, as you heard this morning, and they were also a major theme in Jesus’ teaching. While we often have this tendency to reduce repentance and forgiveness to the private, personal realm, notice that in Isaiah, the issue was national repentance. And that is a theme we rarely hear in actual history. Of course, there have been exceptions---Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, when he recognized the sin of slavery and the Civil War as an expression of God’s wrath against that terrible sin. Then there was Mikhail Gorbachev in speaking about the end of the Soviet Empire and the oppression it had wrought, and Jimmy Carter, who spoke of our greed for more and more oil. In all of these instances there was recognition of wrong doing and a call to turn away from the errors of the past. But in all of these instances there was great resistance to the idea that there was anything to repent of. So is it any wonder that few political leaders in any nation call for national repentance?
But there is one extraordinary example from recent history, which happened on May 8, 1985, when one of the most important political speeches of the 20th century was made by the then president of Germany’s Bundestag, Richard Freiherr von Weizsacker. Before the German legislature, he gave an unflinching, excuse less enumeration of Nazi crimes and the many degrees of association with those horrors that ordinary Germans had. This was the first time a senior Western German leader publicly challenged the widely heard justification, “I did not know.”
Hitler, he said, did not keep his hatred from the public, but rather used the entire nation as a tool of his hatred. Every German, he said, could witness what Jewish fellow citizens had to suffer. Who could remain innocent, he asked, after the burning of the synagogues, the looting, the withdrawal of rights, the unceasing violation of human worth? It all added up, he said, to “a mountain of human suffering, suffering through death and destruction, suffering through the loss of all that one had mistakenly believed in and for which one had mistakenly fought and worked for.” Now that last reference would have included the president himself, who in 1939 was a 19 year old second lieutenant in the German army invading Poland. Later this same young man would sit as a defending attorney at the Nuremberg trials. My God, he must have asked himself, what had I fought for and defended?
While the speech made headlines all across Europe, it was ignored in the American press. Why? Is it because we as Americans shun the idea of national repentance? Do American Christians think that what Jesus taught has no relationship beyond the personal and private? When this past September I made a trip to Montgomery, Alabama concerning the project of retired clergy visitation, I also visited the Museum of Peace and Justice, known as the lynching museum, because it catalogues the names and places where black people in this country were cruelly lynched---sometimes for the crime of asking a white person for a drink of water. And there is another museum as well---the Legacy Museum, which tells the story of slavery and the fight for civil rights and justice. Yet both museums were erected with private funds; they are not national or even state museums. Is this because as a people, as a nation, we shun national repentance?
Now let’s return to that May 8, 1985 speech by the German President, which was a call for national repentance. That call seeped into the personal and private consciences of people in a little German village, prompting them to walk their own path toward repentance. The story began on March 17, 1945 when five British airmen, flying an American plane, were forced to parachute into a German village. Three weeks earlier American fire bombing had killed 4000 people in the area. On the orders of a town official the Hitler Youth executed the five men on the spot. These executions were a secret the town lived with---until 1989 when a retired Roman Catholic priest learned the truth and began talking publicly about what had happened. His words were neither appreciated nor welcomed. You should keep out of politics, he was told. That is Caesar’s world, not yours. But the priest reminded the village of the 1985 presidential speech, and said, “These are our sins; we must repent and seek forgiveness. There is no more hiding.” Soon others joined his voice, and eventually a memorial to the five airmen was built.
In 1992 a 74 year old Englishwoman, Mrs. Taylor, finally learned the truth about how her airman husband had died. Traveling to Germany for the dedication of the memorial, she stood near the place where her husband had been shot. “Father forgive,” the plaque read, “But let the living be warned.” One of the men who arrived late to the dedication---after Mrs. Taylor had departed--- was a sobbing old man, who confessed that he was among the Hitler Youth who shot the airmen. I did not have the strength to even look at her, he said. I wonder if she could ever forgive me?
Repentance and forgiveness: do they have any place in Caesar’s world? If our answer is no, then why do so many churches, including our own, fly the nation’s flag in the sanctuary? If the answer is no, then why don’t we remove it right now! But if the answer is Yes, if the call to higher righteousness, does have a place in Caesar’s world, then the hard work really begins, the hard word of trying to figure out what is the relationship between God’s kingdom and the kingdom of this world. What does one have to say to the other? How does the law of love challenge the earthly realm? Jesus said, Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. And so there we have it: the two kingdoms, yet one God in Jesus Christ who stands over both. And we are left to struggle with the question of how to live faithfully in those two realms.
At the offering:
If you would be a person of faith, then begin by practicing generosity. Where you find generosity, you will find faith, and where faith grows, so too does generosity.
Prayer: Oh God, we thank you for the blessings in our lives, and now we bring this offering as a sign of our gratitude. Make us wise stewards that in all our giving and receiving we will do your will in Jesus Christ. Amen
Matthew 5: 13-20
The Gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish sounding gospel of all, presents Jesus as the giver of the new law, the law of higher righteousness. Jesus is not only the fulfillment of the Jewish law, he also moves beyond it, by bringing a law that is far more demanding than the old law as enshrined in the 10 Commandments. Last Sunday we heard Jesus pronounce the Beatitudes, God’s blessings on the poor in spirit, the mournful, the peacemakers, the meek, the persecuted, all kinds of people, struggling with difficult issues. And now in today’s gospel, we hear him beginning to make demands on his listeners. While they are named the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are reminded to keep their saltiness and to shine forth their light. In other words, they have to obey the fullness of the Law, the law of the prophets and the 10 Commandments, but obedience demands more than following the example of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus demands a higher righteousness, and what that consists of will be laid out throughout Matthew’s gospel.
So how is this new law to be applied? Now part of the law did consist of cultic rules and regulations about religious sacrifice and cleanliness, but justice was also important, which included embracing the foreigner, helping the widow and the orphan, treating workers fairly. The Jewish law was always understood to have implications for the wider community and world. And Christianity has followed that teaching, even as it also understands the challenge of applying Jesus’ law of higher righteousness to the social and political realms.
Now one way Christian thinkers have dealt with this challenge is by pointing out that we inhabit two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of earth. Jesus recognized that difference when he said, render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. But we still have to ponder what exactly is due each realm. The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, insisted that the law of love cannot be enacted politically because nations contain criminals and sinners, who must be restrained and sometimes punished. And so justice is the best the earthly kingdom can hope for. Justice is the political expression of the law of love.
If justice is the best we can hope for in the political world, how does justice make room for repentance and forgiveness? Repentance and forgiveness were huge themes in the prophet Isaiah, as you heard this morning, and they were also a major theme in Jesus’ teaching. While we often have this tendency to reduce repentance and forgiveness to the private, personal realm, notice that in Isaiah, the issue was national repentance. And that is a theme we rarely hear in actual history. Of course, there have been exceptions---Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, when he recognized the sin of slavery and the Civil War as an expression of God’s wrath against that terrible sin. Then there was Mikhail Gorbachev in speaking about the end of the Soviet Empire and the oppression it had wrought, and Jimmy Carter, who spoke of our greed for more and more oil. In all of these instances there was recognition of wrong doing and a call to turn away from the errors of the past. But in all of these instances there was great resistance to the idea that there was anything to repent of. So is it any wonder that few political leaders in any nation call for national repentance?
But there is one extraordinary example from recent history, which happened on May 8, 1985, when one of the most important political speeches of the 20th century was made by the then president of Germany’s Bundestag, Richard Freiherr von Weizsacker. Before the German legislature, he gave an unflinching, excuse less enumeration of Nazi crimes and the many degrees of association with those horrors that ordinary Germans had. This was the first time a senior Western German leader publicly challenged the widely heard justification, “I did not know.”
Hitler, he said, did not keep his hatred from the public, but rather used the entire nation as a tool of his hatred. Every German, he said, could witness what Jewish fellow citizens had to suffer. Who could remain innocent, he asked, after the burning of the synagogues, the looting, the withdrawal of rights, the unceasing violation of human worth? It all added up, he said, to “a mountain of human suffering, suffering through death and destruction, suffering through the loss of all that one had mistakenly believed in and for which one had mistakenly fought and worked for.” Now that last reference would have included the president himself, who in 1939 was a 19 year old second lieutenant in the German army invading Poland. Later this same young man would sit as a defending attorney at the Nuremberg trials. My God, he must have asked himself, what had I fought for and defended?
While the speech made headlines all across Europe, it was ignored in the American press. Why? Is it because we as Americans shun the idea of national repentance? Do American Christians think that what Jesus taught has no relationship beyond the personal and private? When this past September I made a trip to Montgomery, Alabama concerning the project of retired clergy visitation, I also visited the Museum of Peace and Justice, known as the lynching museum, because it catalogues the names and places where black people in this country were cruelly lynched---sometimes for the crime of asking a white person for a drink of water. And there is another museum as well---the Legacy Museum, which tells the story of slavery and the fight for civil rights and justice. Yet both museums were erected with private funds; they are not national or even state museums. Is this because as a people, as a nation, we shun national repentance?
Now let’s return to that May 8, 1985 speech by the German President, which was a call for national repentance. That call seeped into the personal and private consciences of people in a little German village, prompting them to walk their own path toward repentance. The story began on March 17, 1945 when five British airmen, flying an American plane, were forced to parachute into a German village. Three weeks earlier American fire bombing had killed 4000 people in the area. On the orders of a town official the Hitler Youth executed the five men on the spot. These executions were a secret the town lived with---until 1989 when a retired Roman Catholic priest learned the truth and began talking publicly about what had happened. His words were neither appreciated nor welcomed. You should keep out of politics, he was told. That is Caesar’s world, not yours. But the priest reminded the village of the 1985 presidential speech, and said, “These are our sins; we must repent and seek forgiveness. There is no more hiding.” Soon others joined his voice, and eventually a memorial to the five airmen was built.
In 1992 a 74 year old Englishwoman, Mrs. Taylor, finally learned the truth about how her airman husband had died. Traveling to Germany for the dedication of the memorial, she stood near the place where her husband had been shot. “Father forgive,” the plaque read, “But let the living be warned.” One of the men who arrived late to the dedication---after Mrs. Taylor had departed--- was a sobbing old man, who confessed that he was among the Hitler Youth who shot the airmen. I did not have the strength to even look at her, he said. I wonder if she could ever forgive me?
Repentance and forgiveness: do they have any place in Caesar’s world? If our answer is no, then why do so many churches, including our own, fly the nation’s flag in the sanctuary? If the answer is no, then why don’t we remove it right now! But if the answer is Yes, if the call to higher righteousness, does have a place in Caesar’s world, then the hard work really begins, the hard word of trying to figure out what is the relationship between God’s kingdom and the kingdom of this world. What does one have to say to the other? How does the law of love challenge the earthly realm? Jesus said, Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. And so there we have it: the two kingdoms, yet one God in Jesus Christ who stands over both. And we are left to struggle with the question of how to live faithfully in those two realms.
At the offering:
If you would be a person of faith, then begin by practicing generosity. Where you find generosity, you will find faith, and where faith grows, so too does generosity.
Prayer: Oh God, we thank you for the blessings in our lives, and now we bring this offering as a sign of our gratitude. Make us wise stewards that in all our giving and receiving we will do your will in Jesus Christ. Amen
Blessings Abound ~Rev. Sandra Olsen 2/2/2020
Matthew 5: 1-12
In the last decade or so the subject of happiness has been the focus of numerous books and talk shows. Even serious academics---philosophers, psychologists and historians--- have turned their attention to the subject. Neurobiologists are trying to explain the anatomy of happiness—what neurotransmitters work under what conditions to make us feel happy. Americans in particular think they have a right to be happy, and well, if they are not, it must be the fault of something or someone---their job, their marriage, their diet, their religion, their government, and should they discover that changing these things does not lead to increased happiness, they wonder what went wrong. The pursuit of happiness is a national past time, enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
While so many people are obsessed with their happiness, it should give us pause that this word hardly ever appears in the bible, and it is never on Jesus’ lips. Instead there is this word blessed, and somehow, though we are not really sure exactly what it means, we have this sense that blessedness embraces happiness while also being more than happiness. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus has just begun his public ministry. Last week we heard him call his first disciples, and now in the 5th chapter, Matthew shows Jesus ascending the mountain, where like Moses he gives the law, the new law, which begins not with a series of commands, but with a list of blessings. Jesus does not promise the people happiness, but he does promise them blessings.
The Greek word makarios, which is translated here as blessed, has a wide range of meanings that includes fortunate, happy, even privileged. But when Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, the persecuted, those hungering for righteousness and working for peace as blessed, we wonder what he has in mind, because happy and privileged and fortunate are not the words that immediately come to our mind for such people. So what does Jesus mean by calling them blessed?
The blessedness Jesus refers to here stands in relationship to the kingdom of God, which he claims has already come near in him. The Kingdom is already present, but not yet fully so. The old world with its old rules is passing away, and the blessings that come through and in Jesus are made for the new reality, which Jesus names the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. In God’s reign blessedness does not depend upon wealth or power or intelligence or success. It is a gift, given by God. You don’t earn it; you simply receive it, which is why Jesus uses the examples he does. The people he refers to are struggling with some kind of pain or loss or difficult task. In our world such persons might appear as underachievers, and even the peacemakers, whom we do admire, sometimes carry the burden of seeing their own blood spilt. None of these conditions are comfortable or easy places to be. Yet Jesus calls these people blessed, not because of their achievements---perhaps they failed miserably--- but they are blessed because this is what God’s does; God blesses them. It is God’s nature to bless. And it is supposed to be our nature to receive the blessings, but we often have a hard time doing so, because we can be so full of ourselves, so full of our activities and our self-importance that we are not open to receive.
This is the reason Jesus is so hard on the rich, the powerful and the successful. It isn’t that success is bad, or that it is preferable to be a failure or a loser or abjectly poor. The problem is what humans make of these things. If we are puffed up with our own sense of importance; if our strength and success block our compassion for others, who are neither so fortunate nor talented, then there is something spiritually malformed in us, something which prevents us from receiving God’s blessings.
Jesus called the poor in spirit blessed precisely because they are not so full of themselves; they don’t spend their time trying to prove to others how much they know and can do. They are empty, and their emptiness waits to be filled with what God has to give. Of course, the poor in spirit, the meek, and the mournful can have their own issues; they can descend into deep depression, where their emptiness becomes so debilitating that even the desire to receive is extinguished. No one is immune to spiritual malformation. Anyone can be spiritually malformed, just as anyone can be blessed---the rich, the poor, the successful, the failures. And when we are blessed, we feel God’s unconditional love; we feel we are not alone, because as the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, If God is with us, who can be against us. And it is in this sense that blessedness can be understood as a form of happiness.
Now February is Black History Month, and last month was The Rev. Martin Luther King’s birthday. I want to point to him, because April, 1968 when he was assassinated, stands out in my memory. I remember it quite well, because parts of the city of Chicago went up in flames, which I could see from my dormitory window. It did not take very long before the National Guard tanks were on the U. of Chicago campus, because as the second largest landowner in the city of Chicago, after the R. C. Church, this elite private University would be protected. I remember all of that, but I also remember how Dr. King’s speech right before his death was played over and over again. He said in his speech to the striking garbage collectors that he was happy; he had no fear of any man. And I remember thinking at the time, how could he be happy. I mean there were so many problems, so much that was not right with the country. What could he mean by being happy? At 18 I did not know, but now, after all these decades, I think I understand what he meant.
The kind of happiness he was referring to was the blessedness of which Jesus spoke. King felt that God was with him; he was surrounded by God’s love, God’s mercy and yes, God’s forgiveness. And that was blessing enough. It did not protect him from the assassin’s bullet, but Jesus was not protected from the cross. Jesus never promised protection. He promised blessings, and King felt and knew that God gave him abundant blessings. And those blessings would continue to pour down on other people, who would lead the movement toward justice long after King was gone. And that is why King could be happy, surrounded as he was by so many apparent defeats and disappointments. And yet those disappointments and defeats could not destroy the blessings, which still continue to flow, not always in the form we might want---worldly success or comfort---but in the form that God gives, if only we have the eyes and the spirit to see and accept.
In the last decade or so the subject of happiness has been the focus of numerous books and talk shows. Even serious academics---philosophers, psychologists and historians--- have turned their attention to the subject. Neurobiologists are trying to explain the anatomy of happiness—what neurotransmitters work under what conditions to make us feel happy. Americans in particular think they have a right to be happy, and well, if they are not, it must be the fault of something or someone---their job, their marriage, their diet, their religion, their government, and should they discover that changing these things does not lead to increased happiness, they wonder what went wrong. The pursuit of happiness is a national past time, enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
While so many people are obsessed with their happiness, it should give us pause that this word hardly ever appears in the bible, and it is never on Jesus’ lips. Instead there is this word blessed, and somehow, though we are not really sure exactly what it means, we have this sense that blessedness embraces happiness while also being more than happiness. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus has just begun his public ministry. Last week we heard him call his first disciples, and now in the 5th chapter, Matthew shows Jesus ascending the mountain, where like Moses he gives the law, the new law, which begins not with a series of commands, but with a list of blessings. Jesus does not promise the people happiness, but he does promise them blessings.
The Greek word makarios, which is translated here as blessed, has a wide range of meanings that includes fortunate, happy, even privileged. But when Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, the persecuted, those hungering for righteousness and working for peace as blessed, we wonder what he has in mind, because happy and privileged and fortunate are not the words that immediately come to our mind for such people. So what does Jesus mean by calling them blessed?
The blessedness Jesus refers to here stands in relationship to the kingdom of God, which he claims has already come near in him. The Kingdom is already present, but not yet fully so. The old world with its old rules is passing away, and the blessings that come through and in Jesus are made for the new reality, which Jesus names the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. In God’s reign blessedness does not depend upon wealth or power or intelligence or success. It is a gift, given by God. You don’t earn it; you simply receive it, which is why Jesus uses the examples he does. The people he refers to are struggling with some kind of pain or loss or difficult task. In our world such persons might appear as underachievers, and even the peacemakers, whom we do admire, sometimes carry the burden of seeing their own blood spilt. None of these conditions are comfortable or easy places to be. Yet Jesus calls these people blessed, not because of their achievements---perhaps they failed miserably--- but they are blessed because this is what God’s does; God blesses them. It is God’s nature to bless. And it is supposed to be our nature to receive the blessings, but we often have a hard time doing so, because we can be so full of ourselves, so full of our activities and our self-importance that we are not open to receive.
This is the reason Jesus is so hard on the rich, the powerful and the successful. It isn’t that success is bad, or that it is preferable to be a failure or a loser or abjectly poor. The problem is what humans make of these things. If we are puffed up with our own sense of importance; if our strength and success block our compassion for others, who are neither so fortunate nor talented, then there is something spiritually malformed in us, something which prevents us from receiving God’s blessings.
Jesus called the poor in spirit blessed precisely because they are not so full of themselves; they don’t spend their time trying to prove to others how much they know and can do. They are empty, and their emptiness waits to be filled with what God has to give. Of course, the poor in spirit, the meek, and the mournful can have their own issues; they can descend into deep depression, where their emptiness becomes so debilitating that even the desire to receive is extinguished. No one is immune to spiritual malformation. Anyone can be spiritually malformed, just as anyone can be blessed---the rich, the poor, the successful, the failures. And when we are blessed, we feel God’s unconditional love; we feel we are not alone, because as the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, If God is with us, who can be against us. And it is in this sense that blessedness can be understood as a form of happiness.
Now February is Black History Month, and last month was The Rev. Martin Luther King’s birthday. I want to point to him, because April, 1968 when he was assassinated, stands out in my memory. I remember it quite well, because parts of the city of Chicago went up in flames, which I could see from my dormitory window. It did not take very long before the National Guard tanks were on the U. of Chicago campus, because as the second largest landowner in the city of Chicago, after the R. C. Church, this elite private University would be protected. I remember all of that, but I also remember how Dr. King’s speech right before his death was played over and over again. He said in his speech to the striking garbage collectors that he was happy; he had no fear of any man. And I remember thinking at the time, how could he be happy. I mean there were so many problems, so much that was not right with the country. What could he mean by being happy? At 18 I did not know, but now, after all these decades, I think I understand what he meant.
The kind of happiness he was referring to was the blessedness of which Jesus spoke. King felt that God was with him; he was surrounded by God’s love, God’s mercy and yes, God’s forgiveness. And that was blessing enough. It did not protect him from the assassin’s bullet, but Jesus was not protected from the cross. Jesus never promised protection. He promised blessings, and King felt and knew that God gave him abundant blessings. And those blessings would continue to pour down on other people, who would lead the movement toward justice long after King was gone. And that is why King could be happy, surrounded as he was by so many apparent defeats and disappointments. And yet those disappointments and defeats could not destroy the blessings, which still continue to flow, not always in the form we might want---worldly success or comfort---but in the form that God gives, if only we have the eyes and the spirit to see and accept.
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he Prayer
Preached by: Sandra Olsen First Church of Christ in Unionville, CT July 24, 2022 Luke 11: 1-13 Most of you know the name of The Rev. Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican bishop and anti-apartheid leader. Many considered him a modern saint. He died on December 26 of last year, and after his death all kinds of stories and remembrances were published. I read one about his visit to Harvard University some years ago, when he addressed a crowd of people, filled with activists of different ages. Expecting inspiration for their own struggles against poverty, war, and racism, many were disappointed when he spoke about prayer---about the power and potency of prayer, about how it had helped him and others in the struggle to bring change to South Africa. “Prayer,” he said, “was a teacher of patience and a daily reminder that God is working in history, that God’s justice would neither be mocked nor defeated and that finally God was the God of all, both the victims and the oppressors.” Some in the crowd grumbled, “What’s he talking about? “As long as the slaves prayed on their knees rather than fight on their feet, nothing much changed”’ Someone else said, “It was only when people came out of the church and started marching that Civil Rights got its due.” Tutu calmly replied by quoting Abraham Lincoln, “Many times I have been driven to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.” “Yes,” continued Tutu, “it takes strength and courage to move from your knees to your feet and act, but don’t underestimate the courage and strength it takes to move from your feet to your knees”. Prayer: there is probably nothing in the religious life that confuses and unnerves us more than prayer. Many church goers openly admit they are not much good at prayer, and if you ask them to lead prayer, say at a church meeting or some other gathering, they often recoil in embarrassment, hoping that the clergy will do the praying. Public speaking is hard for many people, but public praying is even harder. Part of what makes prayer difficult for us is that we are not exactly sure what prayer is and what we can or should expect from prayer. Oh sure, we think of prayer as talking to God, bringing our needs and desires, our wants and our fears before the divine majesty and mystery. When we pray, we often want God to do something, to fix something, though we are not sure what God is going to do with all the needs and requests. Some years ago, at a well-known medical school, there was a prayer study done among heart patients, and the results showed that people who were prayed over, whether they knew they were being prayed for or not, actually did considerably better in their recovery. On the other hand, many of us here can point to instances where we felt prayer did not work, at least in the way we were hoping. The person afflicted with cancer died despite our prayers; the needed job did not come through, the marriage collapsed despite our work and our prayers. So yes, we do sometimes wonder what good prayer really is. I remember years ago, when I was in seminary a minister about to retire told me that he had come to the conclusion that prayer was a kind of therapy, changing the one doing the praying, but doing little to alter the outward circumstances. On the other hand, I knew a nun, who had spent 15 years, cloistered, praying for the world. Prayer, she told me, was like storming the gates of heaven with our pleas. She fervently believed that prayer does change things. Jesus told us to persist, to knock, to plead and never give up. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther used to say that one of our mistakes with prayer is that we tend to think of it as a one way conversation---we do the talking (or the whining or complaining, as Luther was fond of saying) and God is supposed to do the listening and then the acting, changing life for the better. Now there is nothing wrong with asking God for things---that is certainly part of the tradition, and when we examine the Lord’s Prayer, as it is presented in Luke’s gospel, we find there are a number of petitions---the asking for daily bread, the request for the forgiveness of sin, and the avoidance of times of trial or temptation. But note: petition is not where the prayer begins. Rather it begins with an acknowledgment of God: Our Father, who art in heaven. Now God in this first century culture was imagined as Father, but God can also be Mother, the Divine Parent, loving and caring for us, who although is concerned with earthly matters is also beyond earth, beyond our cares and concerns---in heaven. And this God is holy---that is what the word hallowed means, holy. With the acknowledgment of God’s identity as holy parent, the declaration is made that God’s kingdom, God’s rule, God’s will are to be accomplished on earth as they are in heaven. So, Jesus taught that before any human request or need is brought to God in prayer, the first step is an acknowledgment of God---God’s care for us as a parent and God’s rule in heaven and on earth. Luther thought that if we could began prayer with such an acknowledgment, we would be helped to temper our insistence on getting our needs met. Our needs, wants and desires do not suddenly disappear, and indeed, they may be completely worthy and humanly very important. Jesus told us that God realizes we have needs, but the needs are to be viewed in relationship to God. This is what Desmond Tutu meant to communicate about the importance of prayer to him and to those who struggled with him for justice in South Africa. Tutu was a tireless worker for justice, and he fervently believed that God was with him in this struggle, but he began with God and not with the struggle, and for him this made all the difference. Prayer helped him to move from his knees to his feet and struggle for what he believed was right and good and just. Prayer for Bishop Tutu was more than talking to God, more than laying out human needs and crying out for justice: How long, O Lord, how long? Prayer also means listening to and for God. As the Psalmist sang so long ago, “Be still and know that I am God”. Prayer is also about that stillness. When my husband and I visited Poland six Julys ago, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the notorious concentration camps. There in one of the buildings was a rabbi, who was silently praying. I will tell you that one of the things that struck me was how quiet everyone was. People dare not speak above a whisper. I told the rabbi I was a Christian clergywoman, and I was not too sure what it meant to pray in a place like this. “Yes,” he acknowledged, there were many desperate prayers prayed here, many of them unanswered. Yet I believe that in such a place as this prayer can become God’s truth--- the certainty that pain is not empty; the world is not a void, and the soul is not alone. Your Jesus said to pray without ceasing, and when he prayed, Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven---that is a call to action—God’s action as well as our own.” Putting his hands in his pocket, he pulled out some sheets of paper, and gave me one. “Here,” he said, “I carry copies of this, and I give it to people I meet whom I think would be interested.” What he gave me was a prayer, written by an unknown prisoner in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, and placed by the body of a dead child: O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will here, but remember also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart, which has grown out of this, and when they come to judgment let all the fruits, which we have borne be their forgiveness. What good does prayer do? Jesus never once explained prayer; he never said how it worked, or why it is that some prayers seem to be answered, while others are not. He told us simply, “When you pray, say this.” Our call as Christians is to pray, and what God does with our prayers, how God uses our prayers, we leave all that to God. We cannot know what we cannot know, but we can hope that there are prayers, which God uses to heal the world of its brokenness. |
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