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5/28/2018 0 Comments

Thomas Speakings: Loving the Questions More than the Answers ~ Rev. Sandra Olsen, 4/8/18

​John 20: 19-29
 
Well, here I am, the Sunday after Easter, though I tried very hard to argue with the Lord, suggesting to him that I should be sent here on Easter, rather than on Low Sunday, when church attendance is well, low. Lord, I said, it would be far more amusing if I showed up on Easter, when least expected.  I’d come in right after the people have sung the joyous resurrection hymn:  Christ the Lord is Risen Today.  Have you seen him? I would ask.  Have you touched the wound in his side and felt the imprint of the nails in his hands?  Unless you see for yourselves, how can you believe? But the Lord would hear none of it. “Thomas, he said, you may be a most engaging character, but I think you enjoy far too much riling people up. You are going to the Unionville Church the Sunday after Easter.
 
So here I am, Thomas, Doubrting Thomas, the disciple who likes to rile people up, but only because I want people to think.  Religion, after all, is not only a matter of the heart; it also concerns the head.  Religion is also about how we think and what we think.  I want people to understand that doubt can be the handmaiden of faith---not faith’s enemy.  Doubt can help us to think, to ask questions, deep, penetrating questions.
 
And I have always loved the questions more than the answers.  That is the way I am made, the way my mind works, and Jesus understood that about me, which is why he never tried to make me into someone I was not.  He knew I am one of those people for whom questions never go away.  We can begin with the most basic question of all: Why? Why is there a world?  Why is there suffering? Why do some people do wicked things, while others do the good? Where does that goodness and wickedness come from?  The questions go on and on; they never go away, because they can never be fully answered, at least while we live on this earth. You find an answer to one question, and it only leads you deeper into another question, and so on and so on.                     
 
So where to begin my story of Easter and its aftermath?  Not with the questions, and not even with the doubt, but I shall begin with the fear.  Fear is stronger than doubt, and let me tell you this, we were all afraid---afraid that the Jewish leaders would betray us to the Romans and make of us rebels against Rome.  And we knew what Rome did to rebels.  So yes, we were afraid and for good reason.   But you can limit fear with reason, and that’s what annoyed me so much that day about the other disciples---they weren’t thinking, only emoting.  There they were, huddled in a room in a house known to the Jewish authorities, sitting there, shivering with fear, waiting to be arrested.  The doors were securely locked, as if locked doors could stop Roman soldiers. “Look,” I said, this is ridiculous, just sitting here waiting to be arrested.   We should all go home.  It’s over; he’s dead.  We’ve got to defeat our enemies by scattering, by returning to our old lives.  They won’t bother us if we go fishing.  Let’s go back to what we knew before he ever came into our lives. 
 
Peter stood up and eye balled me, straight on. We can’t go back, he said.  There is no going back, because everything has changed.  Everything is different, because we have known him, because we have heard his words and tried for a while to live his truth.  You are right about that, Peter, I said.  Everything is different now.  He is dead. We have to make our own way.
 
Peter and I never got along.  He never used his head; he was all heart, and the heart is no infallible guide.  It is, as the Psalms say, deceitful above everything else.  When Peter and I would argue about such matters, Jesus would never interfere.  He would listen to us exchange our barbs, knowing that no resolution would ever come, and Jesus never tried to provide a resolution.  But one time he did ask me if I thought the mind was an infallible guide.  Surely you know me better than that, I said.  Nothing is infalliable when it comes to human beings, but I do find that my head is a more reliable guide than my heart. And so for you, Thomas, Jesus said, it is.  But it may not be so for everyone.  And that is all he would say on the matter.
 
So when Peter first told me the story of the empty tomb, I concluded that it proved nothing----only that the body was not there!  And Mary Magdalene’s story about seeing Jesus, I thought it all hysteria.  And I was disgusted, so disgusted and angry that I left the house.  I went home. Home:  Where else do you go when your heart is broken, but home.  I had not been home for a very long time, but when I walked through the door and saw my family, no one asked me for an explanation.  They just looked at me, and I realized that although they did not understand all I had been through, they accepted and loved me.  Maybe that’s what home is:  the place that accepts and loves you even when they do not understand you.  I went to bed that night and slept as I had not slept in days. 
 
Early the next morning, Peter and John came breathlessly running to my house.  Pounding frantically at the door, they commanded me to open it. Have there been more arrests? I nervously asked.  No arrests, they said.  We come with great news.  We have seen Jesus!  We have seen the Lord!  At that moment I felt such anger welling up in me. When are you going to stop this nonsense? I yelled.  When are you going to face the hard cold facts?  He is dead!  Don’t you understand?  He is dead.  We saw him nailed to the cross, and if we had not all been such craven cowards, we would have seen him die.  But, did we not see him laid in the tomb? He is dead, I tell you.  He is dead.  Shut up, Peter shouted, and his hand swung through the air so quickly that I was sure I was about to be hit.  But instead, his hand found its place over my mouth, and very calmly he said,  “He is alive, I tell you.  We saw him.  We all saw him.”  My anger began to cool; there was such conviction in his voice that I began to wonder.  Unless I see the mark of the nails on his hands;  unless I touch the wound in his side, I will not believe, I calmly said. 
 
A week later I returned to the house. The doors were all shut, and suddenly with no warning, there he was.  Jesus was among us.  Peace be with you, he said.  Looking me in the eyes, he gave a command, “Put your finger here and see my hands.  Reach out your hand and put it in my side.  Do not doubt, but believe.  I don’t think I ever touched him, at least I don’t remember doing so.  I just looked at him and said, My Lord and my God!  He looked at me and asked, Have you believed because you have seen me?  And when I did not answer, he simply said, Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe. 
 
It is true, I only believed because I saw.  I needed proof; that’s just who I am and how I am, the same way that Peter was the way he was, and you are who you are. Oh, we change and we grow, but we are ourselves.  And so you skeptics out there, you doubters, you, who are full of questions, just know that God has a place for you in the story. You are needed; your questions are needed and so are your doubts.  And one last thought:  Jesus came to me not when I was alone, but when I was in the company of others.  You see, faith is never simply a private affair.  The church is needed, because it reminds us that we are interdependent. We need one another to help each other be witnesses, and we need one another to help each other believe. 
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    About Our Pastor:

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

    ​Yours in Christ, Sandra Olsen

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