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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