Friday, December 11, 2015

Letter to President Obama Regarding Accountability for Torturers

Letter to President Obama Regarding Accountability for Torturers

11 December 2015

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

As a person of faith working toward humanized society and the diminishing of barbarity, allow me to recommend to you and your administration to act for and promote accountability per the findings of the Senate Select Committee’s Report on Torture. It has been one year since the report’s release, and the Torture Report has been reported to remain unread in its entirety, while the designers and practitioners of illegal torture have escaped legal and historical accounting for their actions. History teaches us that in such an environment of unaccountability, torture and associated illegalities done by US bureaucracies are almost certain to recur.

I stand fully in agreement with the Physicians for Human Rights conclusions (page 15 at https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/truth-matters.pdf) regarding responses to the infamy of torture done by and in the name of US Government personnel. Specifically, per PHR, I request the following four actions by the United States Administration under your direction and leadership:

1.       Based on a thorough investigation, the Department of Justice should bring charges against those individuals who designed the torture program, implemented the torture program, and/or ordered torture be used.

2.       The U.S. government should release the entire Senate torture report and allow investigators access to other documents relevant to the investigation into the use of torture.

3.       Detainees subjected to torture should be provided the means to seek redress against the government and individuals who tortured them.

4.       Detainees subjected to torture by agents of the U.S. government – regardless of where the crime was committed – should be provided with a full range of reparations for their suffering and rehabilitation.

I thank you for your addressing the ongoing need for thorough accountability in this area of depravity and illegality. I stand ready to assist you in any way toward this goal.

Very truly yours in Christ,



Rev. Douglas Olds, Presbyterian Church (USA)

Monday, November 16, 2015

Leading from Our Joy


Leading from Our Joy
Rev. Douglas Olds
Fisherman’s Chapel by the Bay
Bodega Bay, CA
November 15, 2015

1 SAMUEL 1.4-20
 On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters; 5 but to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the LORD had closed her womb. 6 Her rival used to provoke her severely, to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. 7 So it went on year by year; as often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. 8 Her husband Elkanah said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”
9 After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before the LORD. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the LORD. 10 She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD, and wept bitterly. 11 She made this vow: “O LORD of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.”
12 As she continued praying before the LORD, Eli observed her mouth. 13 Hannah was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought she was drunk. 14 So Eli said to her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.” 15 But Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD. 16 Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” 17 Then Eli answered, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” 18 And she said, “Let your servant find favor in your sight.” Then the woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was sad no longer.
19 They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the LORD; then they went back to their house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the LORD remembered her. 20 In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, “I have asked him of the LORD.”

1 Samuel 2.1-10 The Song or Prayer of Hannah
 Hannah prayed and said,
    “My heart exults in the LORD;
    my strength is exalted in my God.
    My mouth derides my enemies,
    because I rejoice in my victory.

    2      “There is no Holy One like the LORD,
    no one besides you;
    there is no Rock like our God.
    3      Talk no more so very proudly,
    let not arrogance come from your mouth;
    for the LORD is a God of knowledge,
    and by him actions are weighed.
    4      The bows of the mighty are broken,
    but the feeble gird on strength.
    5      Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    but those who were hungry are fat with spoil.
    The barren has borne seven,
    but she who has many children is forlorn.
    6      The LORD kills and brings to life;
    he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
    7      The LORD makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low, he also exalts.
    8      He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
    to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
    For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s,
    and on them he has set the world.

    9      “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones,
    but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness;
    for not by might does one prevail.
    10      The LORD! His adversaries shall be shattered;
    the Most High will thunder in heaven.
    The LORD will judge the ends of the earth;
    he will give strength to his king,
    and exalt the power of his anointed.”




Distant is the past,
Deep, so deep:
Who can discover it?

The Bible is a thick book.
Not only does it have a lot of pages, each story and account is thick with background and foreground.  The background of a biblical story includes how it fits together with the historical and theological themes of each book of scripture. 
In our stories this morning of Hannah, the background theme of the Book of 1 Samuel moves the center of Israel’s worship from Shilo, where the Ark of the Covenant  had come to rest, to Jerusalem, which requires David to become king.
In our readings this morning, we encounter the mother and the birth of Samuel, who is to anoint David king of Israel—after which David brings the Ark to Jerusalem and centralizes worship there. Old cult centers like Shilo and its priests of Eli are disestablished in favor of David’s son’s Solomon’s temple and other priests. 
This is the historical arc and background to this mornings’ readings.
“Hannah occupies a space not unlike other women in Scripture who are raised out of the crowd for naming and narrative. She gestates and births a prophetic leader, and so attention is [directed] to her. Her story is [the background] for the construction of identity for Israel’s monarchy. It is a monarchy that finds its roots in despair, in barrenness, and in humble prayer. Because this story is of great importance for the character of Israel’s identity, [there are] [thick] metaphorical connections between Hannah’s barrenness and despair and the emotions of a nation that was looking for a leader, for a way to feel secure and hopeful in turbulent times.”[1]

In addition to these stories having thick backgrounds, they have thick foregrounds. 
The foreground to Biblical stories involves their theological interpretations and references through history. 
Preaching thickens these stories. 
In Hannah’s Song, we hear a foreshadowing of Mary’s Magnificat, where she sings out her joy at feeling the baby Jesus leap in her womb:
Luke 1. 46-53:
And Mary said,
    “My soul magnifies the Lord,
    47      and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
    48      for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
    Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
    49      for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
    and holy is his name.
    50      His mercy is for those who fear him
    from generation to generation.
    51      He has shown strength with his arm;
    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
    52      He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
    and lifted up the lowly;
    53      he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and sent the rich away empty.

Hannah 1000 years earlier sang,
    “My heart exults in the LORD;
    my strength is exalted in my God….7      The LORD makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low, he also exalts.
    8      He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
    to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
How alike these two songs of joy are. 
The 4th Century Saint John Chrysostom foregrounds Hannah’s tiny request for a baby by contrasting it with more worldly inducements: those politically ambitious men “suing and grasping for a kingdom” should be “ashamed” to remember Hannah, “praying and weeping for a little child:” A mother’s soft petition contrasted with the metaphors of warrior kingdoms.
As I’ve been claiming, there are thin descriptions and thick descriptions.
I can say to you, My name is Doug Olds, I am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church who drove over from southern Marin to be with you this morning at your leader’s kind invitation. 
Or I can say to you another short description: I am Doug Olds, the oldest of three boys who grew up in one of the few liberal households in my very conservative and religious hometown. 
The second description is thicker: it gives more psychological background, my probable family dynamics, and it allows you the choice to make foreground judgments about me, thickening my story with you in all that follows.

Our song from Hannah this morning speaks of her exultation עָלַ֤ץ and joy שׂמח
“My heart exults עָלַ֤ץ in the LORD;
    my strength  קֶ֫רֶן is exalted רָ֥מָה in my God.” 
Hannah’s strength is enabled by her joy. Hannah is singing that her joy enables her strength through God. Like Mary, Hannah is laying down a principle of spiritual joy: that it follows that while God is infinite, that our joy may only increase in our relationship with God.
A joyous future awaits. 
That is both our hope and our source of gratitude for the initial “down payment” of joy we have received as Christians.
And as that joy enables Hannah’s strength, Hannah is leading from her joy in God’s grace.  She is not only leading from her personal story, regardless of how thick that story is.  Hannah is instead moving firmly and resolutely from the thickness of her joy.  She instead leads from her spirit—from the thickness of her joy in our relationship with God who has given her the victory.
Who has given us the victory to let us lead like Hannah led the Virgin Mary, providing her with a model of gratitude and joy—her expression of magnifying by her spirit the new incarnation of creation.

“In the Bible and in Christian teaching the word “God” is a power word. God [and God’s agents] are active, present and powerful in the world. …The Christian confessions speak of God as the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, the source and renewer of everything that exists. They speak of God as almighty ruler of the universe and of human history within it…, whose glory fills the whole earth, and whose saving purposes shall ultimately triumph in a divine consummation of all things. In any imaginable situation, God’s power is the transcending power by which the course of history is decided.”[2]
By contrast, Jonathan Sacks describes the false depth of 21st Century life as “the maximum of choice [mixed with] the minimum of meaning.” 
Joy gives power—a thickness of meaning to our future, and thus empowering our present. The energizing power of God comes to others through our joy and courage.
Such a thick text concerns a thick subject of joy from God’s enabling power leads off Hannah’s song.  As Miroslav Volf notes, “Joy is thicker than happiness, …Happiness is momentary, a fleeting feeling that is almost detached from our lived lives. Joy [on the other hand] involves judgment about the state of affairs that is somehow destined for the good.”
As Hannah’s Song links her joy with her strength, Joy becomes a principle of leadership.
    “My heart exults in the LORD;
    my strength is exalted in my God….
Hannah’s language of victory … celebrate[s] and magnif[ies] what this birth means for the whole community:
God stands for those who are excluded and oppressed.
The victory, in Hannah’s song, does not go to the one with the most military might.
The victory goes to God, who stands with and lifts up the people who are most marginal and left out of society.
God’s gift of a son for Hannah is not only a cause for Hannah’s personal celebration.
 Samuel’s birth has become a cause for all of Israel to celebrate, because, as Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes,
“The birth is not a private wonder but a gift of possibility for all of Israel.”[3]//

It is how we lead ourselves and others, through judgement, on how and where the source of our joy would have us go.  That source of our joy, if we are Christians, is God.
Wendell Berry says, "Be joyful, though you have considered the facts." Berry, like Hannah, would have us prioritize the experience and source of our joy in all things.
Our joy is an unconditional gift, so that it is more firmly established than the endangerment of the life on earth around us.  When we discern the infinite and trustworthy source of our joy, we trust it more than the happiness we derive from changeable nature. 
Our bodies degrade, or nature decays around us, but we have been given the gift—the grace—of joy that enables us to know that something better awaits us in the future.
 Let us lead from that joy, not from the thick stories of our decay and disappointments of aging.  Let us lead from the joy that Hannah and Mary knew: there is even a greater joy that comes from the infinite that will never end.  Let us lead from that gift of joyous knowledge.
Joy is the taste of future grace.
One thin way to look at this might be good things come to those who wait.  For Chrysostom, the moral of the story is patience and providence.
The God who can bring a child to a woman who has been unable to conceive also “raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”
Here the thickness of the history of interpretation and reference to these stories comes into view.  Joy, that thickest of emotions, provokes the thickest of historical concentration.  Joy is a taste of the future in the present and can only provoke discussion and speculation.  These are the thickest of texts, as joy is a thick emotion.  They lead us from the joy that these stories foretell.
One such story of thick joy smeared over the faithful countering the thickest moment of death, one’s life flashing before one’s eyes, were 4 naval chaplains who served the converted gunboat Dorchester in the northern Atlantic during WWII.
Methodist minister Reverend George L. Fox,
Reform Rabbi Alexander D. Goode (Ph.D.),
Roman Catholic priest Reverend John P. Washington,
 and Reformed Church in America minister Reverend Clark V. Poling.
During the early morning hours of February 3, 1943, at 12:55 a.m., the vessel was torpedoed by a German submarine. The 4 chaplains removed their own life jackets and gave them to others. They helped as many men as they could into lifeboats, and then linked arms and, saying prayers and singing hymns, went down with the ship.
Grady Clark, survivor:
As I swam away from the ship, I looked back. The flares had lighted everything. The bow came up high and she slid under. The last thing I saw, the Four Chaplains were up there praying for the safety of the men. They had done everything they could. I did not see them again. They themselves did not have a chance without their life jackets.
According to some reports, survivors could hear different languages mixed in the prayers of the chaplains, including Jewish prayers in Hebrew and Catholic prayers in Latin.[4]
They led frantic men from a joy in God’s living future, not from that thickest moment of death’s despair. Rather than focusing on their lives flashing before their eyes, they sang hymns and doxologies of joy.  They led from joy.
At crisis and death and the challenges of life, may it be so for you and me.  AMEN.



[1] Shoop, M. M. (2009). Theological Perspective on 1 Samuel 1:4–20. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 4, p. 290). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
[2] Parker, T. D. (2009). Theological Perspective on 1 Samuel 2:1–10 (The Song of Hannah). In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 4, p. 298). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
[3] Connors, K. F. (2009). Pastoral Perspective on 1 Samuel 2:1–10 (The Song of Hannah). In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 4, p. 298). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Chaplains accessed on 12 November 2015.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

”Refugees’ Dream”

SERMON               ”Refugees’ Dream”

Rev. Douglas Olds
Church of the Redwoods (PC[USA])
27 September 2015

OLD TESTAMENT READING   Genesis 28:10-22    
        10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladderb set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the LORD stood beside himc and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” 17 And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
18 So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel;e but the name of the city was Luz at the first. 20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God, 22 and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.”

As a Hospital Chaplain, I visited mentally ill patients in the Behavioral Health unit.  In those visits, I heard stories of hallucinations, dreams, and fearful stories of persecution.
Having myself struggled with depression, I try to divert the patients with fears toward a focus on what is good rather than what is dark and fearful--on what is hopeful rather than what brings dread.
In that effort, I believe I am engaging the spiritual in the person, by reinterpreting extreme tensions inside the individual into meaningful challenges to serve something greater than ourselves.
One spiritually-immobilized patient I met with admitted to seeing waking visions of animals in cages moving along a railroad track.  After some give and take, I learned that the patient was concerned with environmental destruction where animals lost their habitat to human use. We discussed some opportunities for the patient to work in conservation. The vision, which terrified the patient, was instead reinterpreted into a commitment for more profound engagement with the world.
We never discussed God.
But I believe ours was a religious exchange because it took the symbols of the unconscious and interpreted them for wholeness and earthly betterment.
Today’s reading from scripture details the most famous dream of the Bible, Jacob’s dream of the ladder between heaven and earth with messenger-angels ascending and descending from heaven at its apex. 
It isn’t an expected view of how heaven and earth are connected. We humans expect that earth climbs to heaven from our own achievements—that we earn a relationship with heaven and God through our own efforts.
The symbolism of Jacob’s dream suggests the reverse, that heaven is linked with earth through God’s initiative—that that initiative engages humans with a choice: to convert to the One God and engage with living history, or to maintain one’s prior life in the form of self-serving denial and avoidance of purpose.

The Talmud of the ancient Jewish rabbis states that “A dream uninterpreted is a letter unread,” and I intend to read this letter from God to us in the form of the Biblical Dream of Jacob at Bethel. I believe that we can discover even in this archaic religiosity of dream interpretation a spirituality of commitment and personal and social action to how God is dealing with Jacob the nomad, Israel the refugee.
The nomad spirituality of the Bedouin Jacob included the interpretation of dreams as a way that God communicates with God’s people. God speaks in this dream of Jacob symbolically because God speaks and acts consistently, using imagery in the message God intends for us.
God says to Jacob, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land.”
These words of God must agree with the imagery and the symbolism of the ladder of ascending and descending angels. God speaks of human history, the offspring of the earth west, east, north and south, so that the movement of the angels corresponds to historical movements, in a code of movements.  God stands beside Jacob so as to describe his future as a nomad, Israel as a diaspora refugee. The book of Daniel details an angel of the Persians and an angel of the Greeks. These angels are spiritual epitomes of the social structure and social organization of peoples.
In other words, the active laddering of the national angels is the historical dynamism of ethnic peoples as they ebb and flow upon the face of the lands. This is my interpretation of the dream’s symbolism—as a believer in Providence’s grand dynamic reorientation of ethnic power on the earth. I believe that the text speaks of all of human history bound up in Israel’s coming and going. 
Historical Palestine is a migratory melting pot, with nomadic and military comings and goings, the code of movement specially signified at its ritual heart, Bethel in Jacob’s day even before Jerusalem at the time of David.
Jacob’s travel speaks to a near universal human condition,that of the refugee. The travelogue of Jacob is both national and personal. It speaks of Jacob’s fleeing from his father Isaac and brother Esau at the counsel of his mother Rebekkah, while it also speaks of Israel’s national exile from the Promised Land in Egypt and Babylon. 
This personal and national character of the refugee’s flight in both the archaic dream narrative and travel narrative of Israel suggest that there is something characteristic in God’s action on the earth—an action of God that meets the fugitive and the refugee on their flight and brings on a task for those meeting them.
I believe that this story of Jacob’s dream shows something essential about God Godself: that God reaches out to the refugee because it is in God’s nature to rescue the fugitive, especially the refugee from human politics and human injustice. God is a helper–a guide of fugitives from human perversions of peace and justice.
For Jacob to flee the tents into the wilderness for safety, we can presume that Jacob’s worldview has come crashing down. What he believed mattered most—cunning, intelligence, domesticity—has instead been shown by events to be dangerous. As Jacob settles down to a hardscrabble bed that third night out from the tents in the wilderness at Luz—making a pillow of stone for his head—his is a broken grandiosity; He is a broken man, ready for the purifying action of conversion to another way.
I believe that the narrative of Jacob suggests that God reaches out to the refugee in a way that demands a response. That response is conversion in both word and deed.
And Jacob does indeed convert. He wakes up from his dream with a holy fear and acknowledges that even in this Godforsaken place, God is.
 Jacob’s first words on awakening startle him into a new consciousness—“Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.” It was the beginning of a new life. Fear followed on surprise. Yet Jacob had the renewable stuff of a man in him. Jacob converts by his words, and then he undertakes two actions, one stereotyped and the other existential.
Jacob anoints the stone of his bedding-down with oil and sets it up as a memorial to his astonishment that God is even in this place; that God is present outside of civilization in wilderness! Jacob calls the stone Beth-El, the House of God. This act is stereotyped in that any pagan of that age might have done this. But then Jacob does something that suggests that his character is developing. He makes the first recorded vow in the Bible: to tithe from all that God will give him going forward.

Jacob’s conversion is thus existential: it signals a change in his character from being self-concerned to being focused on God and concerned with others’ welfare. It is the beginning of a long, purifying conversion and growth in character whereby Jacob learns patience, humility, courage, gratitude and commitment to family. 
Jacob allows himself to act as a Patriarch to the whole of human history concerned with virtue: he commits to family creation, social generosity, and divine veneration. Jacob has begun to set aside his peculiar blend of self-love and nihilism in the desert at Beth-El.

In this personal narrative of the refugee, we discover a model of conversion and purification.  Refugees in their movement undergo constant reorientations to civil and earthly power that is terrifying, but in their committed sojourning, they are purified by trust in a higher power and a higher ground.  
God reaches out to the distressed and the displaced and presents the opportunity to convert to God and commit to a future destiny, all in the crucible of changing ethnic and national grids of power. 
Migration is a fountain of humiliation. Lawrence Mala Ali, a refugee Syrian engineer who recently arrived in Norway said, “Lebanon is the capital of humiliation. I chose Europe because it’s the only possible place that makes me feel that I am a man again.”[1]

As we look to the 45-50 million refugees in the contemporary world stage—Four million have fled Syria since 2011—we might note that they are fleeing hard conditions at home, like Jacob’s flight from Esau, and that they face exploitation in their temporary camps as they seek to eke out a living.
It seems to me that the refugees’ plight is one of forsakenness and exploitation as they undergo the rigors of alienation, as Jacob’s refugee story suggests.  The ongoing reorientation to power may indeed make refugees humble and purified, making them perhaps the favored of God.

Almost 1% of the world’s population is made up of refugees, and with forecasts that the world will grow by 3 billion more people in the next 40 years, to 9 billion, there will be economic, political, and environmental instability that likely brings a growth in the both the number of refugees and the severity of their traumas.  If we take the old, old story and its message seriously, we should conclude that God favors the refugee and goes forth to meet them on the road.  In one example of that, our Presbyterian denomination participates in relief work through its Church World Service to relieve humanitarian crises in the camps, and a refugee crisis in Europe unknown for the last 70 years.

There are refugees in all world regions. I have visited refugee camps in Bangladesh. The observations I’ve made of these camps include my surprise that they may become permanent. Geneva Camp in Dhaka houses refugees from the 1971 war of Bangladeshi independence.
There is in Bangladesh little sign that these refugees either assimilate into their host societies or return home.  Many are aware that the Palestinian refugees in Jordan have been displaced since the 1948 and 1967 conflicts. Refugees tend to become permanent aliens in their host societies.
Haven’t we been haunted by the picture of Alyan Kurdi, the 3 year old Syrian toddler washed up face down on the shore of Mediterranean Turkey?  The refugee camps I’ve visited is surprising in how young the population skews: there are large numbers of young children and grandchildren of the original settlers wandering all about the camps.
In America, we are confronted with economic refugees, most these days from this hemisphere, but now in the face of Middle Eastern tensions, more refugees are showing up as casualties of American empire.  Yet since 1950, there have been more deportations of immigrants than new certifications of citizenship. 
America forcibly evicts more people than it allows to settle, and various state laws in South Carolina, Arizona and elsewhere are more harshly defining economic refugees as illegal residents, with all the potential for their exploitation.

The old, old Jacob story can have much to say about this age-old epic of refugees. Like Jacob, the refugee knows that he or she has lost most of what was once most dearly held: family life, economic liberty and self-sufficiency, self-respect, self actualization of talents.
Like Jacob, the refugee may encounter the purifying hand of God, and we as potential hosts are confronted with the choice to convert to their sustenance and give refuge. Both the refugee and the potential host are to consider the great faithfulness of God.
 Jacob encountered the faithful help of God in the form of his dream and converted to a new way of life. The modern refugee, if fortunate, meets the helping hand of God in charitable relief and the opportunity to convert to a new way of life in a host country. If we were to more mindfully recognize the refugee as the purified of God, then how could we neglect to reach out to them with settlement and opportunity for dignified existence?
Western claims to stand for human dignity and human rights usually look pretty hollow whenever a major refugee crisis hits. That seems to be what is happening now, as millions of refugees seek asylum in Europe — and mainly run into closed doors and cold shoulder.
Refugees are dying in rickety boats, sealed trucks and squalid refugee dumping grounds. They are not wanted where they come from and not wanted where they are going.
Article 14 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."
Articles 15 says: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality."

Fine words, but they provoke our assertion: Not in my backyard. Not my problem. After all, the U.S. under a President Trump promises to deport the 11 million "illegals" we already have on our hands, right?
Nobody can make others, or us, do the right thing. Nobody can make us overcome our indifference and inertia and nativism.
 Pope Francis has demanded that every parish in Europe's Catholic Church offer refuge. World Relief leader Stephan Bauman was saying when calling for the U.S. to offer welcome to 200,000 refugees right now.
       That makes the global refugee crisis a stern moral test for us, our country and for the entire world. I believe the old, old story of Jacob is a story of reorientation of ethnic power by God that has wisdom for meeting the challenge of meeting the stranger in our midst—the increasing refugees that we may expect from globalization, political unrest and climate change.
Jacob, that old man Israel, speaks to the human condition here and now, and his dream demonstrates that the coming and going way to heaven is in God’s hands and not in our own. When we meet a refugee, we meet a person purified and protected on the hard road by the one God.
We may not ignore these fugitives from injustice.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

“Silences of an Elusive God”

Sermon:  “Silences of an Elusive God”
Rev. Douglas Olds
Stinson Beach Community Presbyterian Church
Calvary Presbyterian Church of Bolinas
August 9, 2015

Scripture 1:  Ecclesiastes 1:12-18                   
I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

Scripture 2:  1 Kings 19: 1-18
19 Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.
4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7 The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 14 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 15 Then the LORD said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. 16 Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. 17 Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. 18 Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

When I was a chaplain at Marin General Hospital, the parents of a 5 year old brought him to the emergency room, where he died in front of my eyes as the ER staff worked furiously to revive him.
The cause of death was respiratory complications of H1N1 flu.  
As the doctors were working to revive the boy, I found myself looking to see the face of my own 5 year old, Evan, on that table. I knew it wasn't Evan, but there I was closely focused on the face of that boy wondering how it would feel if it were. I felt sick.
I looked to the parents whom I would have to try to offer words of spiritual care and consolation.  The boy's mother was sobbing and flushed.
The father was ashen, his face drained of blood, mostly keeping his arms folded and often turning away from watching the drama of resuscitation. 
I felt so wretched for those parents and in doubt about my abilities.
As often happened to me in the ER, adrenaline took hold as I struggled to slow my breathing to calm myself. I don't know if my being a father helped or not, but I did my best. I did my job. I stood vigil with the parents as they tried to understand, to accept. It was that moment when I hated my job. 
The death of children made me question why God had created this moment, or created the way God did, and why God left me holding the bag to cover for Him/Her. God was silent to the questions posed by this death: 
Is God unable to prevent these deaths? 
Does God have that power but just does not choose in this case to apply it?   
Why does God hold his followers up to the anger and ridicule of grieving people: you mean you believe your god could have helped our child but didn't? 
I had to admit that God is silent on these questions, and God leaves it up to us God’s followers to struggle to make meaning of the senselessness.
            The reality is that people as they feel the gamut of emotions and anguish at death of children turn to the church for answers, and yet we can give them little but our prayers.  The Talmud of the old Rabbis notes, "The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.”  And perhaps this is an implication of God’s silence: God is grieving with us. 
So is God powerless over these deaths, too?
I believe our first reading this morning, from Ecclesiastes, does not allow us to make definitive pronouncements about what God can and cannot do.   Its writer, Qoheleth the Teacher, notes that all is hebel, better translated as enigma or elusiveness than the traditional “vanity.”  Quoheleth means for us to see the wisdom available to humans in this fallen design of God’s good world is an enigmatic and elusive wisdom. It is a wisdom cognizant of God’s action and mercies, but a wisdom that does not profit us or allow us to elude grief or gain an advantage over the next battle.  Qoheleth’s wisdom is the wisdom that recognizes that often we cannot make meaning of historical and personal events, and that God alone holds meaning.  The inscrutability and elusiveness of articulating a meaning to these tragedies is our human maturity and humility. That silence accepts that God is cleaning up after us, and that we just don’t have anything else to offer. 
We keep silent in God’s care-- that is our wisdom of recollection.
Our second text this morning from 1 Kings 19 is part of the stories about Elijah the Tishbite, the great prophet of Israel.
He is on the run after winning a great victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah had taunted the prophets of Baal to prove that their god was real. They ranted and injured themselves to incite Baal to act, but nothing happened. Then Elijah built an altar and prepared a sacrifice. Then he prayed to the Lord. Immediately the fire fell from heaven and consumed everything. When the Israelites saw it, they fell on their faces and shouted, “The LORD indeed is God” (1 Kgs. 18:39). [1]
The prophets of Baal were seized, and Elijah’s bold actions are  enscriptured as a model of piety and righteous zeal for the Lord. When King Ahab reported this event to his wife Jezebel, she promised to kill Elijah.   Elijah escapes into the wilderness and sits down to die. He has developed a depression and foolishly waits to be martyred for the wrong reasons. 
It is in the wilderness that so many theophanies—physical manifestations of God—occur.  Earlier, Moses had gone into the wilderness and encountered God on Mt. Horeb in the firey bush and the thundering voice of the Law giving God. Yet in this remarkable wilderness flight, Elijah encounters God not in the earthquake, the thunder, and the fire.  The earthquake, the thunder, and the fire are noted in the text as part of God’s passing, but God was not in them. 
Remarkably, our translation states that God was in the “sheer silence” after the earthquake, thunder, and fire.  The Hebrew better translated is that God was in the “soft, whispery voice:”  דַקָּֽה דְּמָמָ֥ה ק֖וֹל
the text asserts after the fire and thunder and earthquake passed.  And yet the voice was so faint that no meaning or content is recounted.  Elijah could only discern that God was a voice bordering on silence when it comes to interpreting the macro-disasters of fire, whirlwind, and earthquake. 
This enigmatic and elusive voice bordering on silence does not invite dialogue but instead invites self-reflection by Elijah. This soft silence of God expresses a wide range of attitudes. It is an open silence, a pregnant silence. Its soft whisper seems to me to suggest to Elijah, “look, I your Lord can make the earth shake and the whirlwind of fire rage, and yet you are sitting down here to die in abject fear of mere mortals, the henchmen of Jezebel?”  The soft whisper of God after such an awesome display of God’s passing by invites attentiveness by Elijah to his future course of action, but it is an attentiveness that requires Elijah’s maturity to discern that God is giving him freedom to go forth and choose to live life fully in whatever way he sees fit, knowing he has enemies but also knowing he has a relationship with the awesome power AND LOYALTY that flows from God. 
Where is fear? the still voice might be asking, though Elijah cannot quite hear.
Where is God to protect? the still voice might be asking, though Elijah is not sure.
This whisper is soft.
This elusiveness of knowledge, this enigma of Elijah’s functioning relationship with the God of power and softness is part of Teacher Qoheleth’s wisdom:
we humans can’t discern our future, even with our relationship with and knowing of the Lord God.
We strain every fiber of our being to make sure we are right with God in order to ensure our profitable safety.
Yet our two readings teach us that there is for us no profit in understanding how fire, earthquake, and storm function in society and in our personal destiny. We only may trust the enigma of an elusive God who has brought us through fire and storm in the past and thus we hope will act steadfastly again—until finally God doesn’t, and our fate is set and our control of destiny and humanity slips from us. 
But that’s on God, and that’s God’s prerogatives over God’s creatures.
This elusiveness of our destiny in God’s silence is our fate as creatures of the infinite God, and we need make our peace with it. We make our peace with it by silencing our inner rebellion as God teaches us in the soft whisper after God’s mute demonstration of incomprehensible power.
Elijah’s recognition that God resides in the soft silence and not in the earthquake and the fire is the beginning of wisdom, a wisdom that understands that natural catastrophes may reflect God’s action, but those catastrophes do not reflect any human comprehensibility of God’s will or judgment. 
The philosophers of the 18th Century concluded the same.  Voltaire concluded that the great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 demonstrated that the old view of seeing God’s complete determination of history through natural disasters was perverse.  Soon, the philosophes began to conclude that a belief in God’s existence itself was perverse based on the fact that killing fire, earthquake, and storm exist.  In this, the atheists mistake the open silences of an elusive God for God’s non-existence.
Elijah does not make that mistake. 
Silence in the demonstration of natural power allows for humans to carve out a place for individual dignity and self-determination within the context of a personal relationship with the divine softness.  Such is the openness of silence that challenges our faith.
We daily need to reconceive of God’s silence in a way that endorses our acceptance of our humility as limited creatures subject to the will of our Creator Lord.
But I submit that what Elijah does make of God’s silences is that God’s servants are enabled to act with a maturity—an integrity that takes into account our free will alongside a fervent desire to do God’s bidding. In this desire, God’s silences serve to cement the relationship of Elijah with his God.
Elijah scours his consciousness for the voice of God, discards the coarse and the loud naysaying, and seeks to consider God’s will in what he in a sense independently arrives at through conscience.  This is Christian self-reflection, the scouring of our conscience for memory of God’s previous acts and encounters with the word that act out in mature self-determination and gratitude. It is this operation of consciousness and memory that embodies the Christian virtue of recollection. 
The silences of God encountered in conscientious Christian recollection and maturity can spur us to greater relationship both with our God and with our neighbor. Silence communicates, and we must often interpret the silence of others.   
It is God’s intention, I believe, that we are to grow to understand how to humbly interpret any given divine silence or set of silences without flying off the handle and adopting foolish doctrines of atheism. Elijah interprets God’s silent voice to move from what Brueggemann calls “a letdown of depression to a revival of purpose.”
Elijah’s seeks God’s assurance in the fire and the storm, only instead to find God’s resurrecting companionship come what may.
Christian maturity, I suggest from our readings this morning, thus is skeptical of grand claims of knowing God’s historical will in natural phenomena of destruction, but maturity speaks in the individual voice of God in our inner lives, based on our lived experiences and shared knowledge of the Creator who is fully God self in Creation and Creating, not in destroying. 
Hearing God’s soft voice in our inner being while not fully understanding cements a personal connection both to God and to ourselves as loved creatures of God.  Listening for God’s soft whispers in our conscience is a form of respect to our Creator as Lord and to our humility as God’s puny creatures, though deeply loved. From this knowledge, Elijah can arise from his depression to recommit to living life with energy and authenticity. 
May we also arise from our depressions by discarding that loudmouth voice inside us that condemns us to self-loathing based on hurtful things, and instead let us listen respectfully for the softness of our Sovereign lord.
What we sometimes see around us in the more conservative Christian churches is of a harsh and condemning rage that mistakes the path of Elijah in the wilderness.  These churches find the lord in the demonstration of lethal and condemning power.  These church folk mistake God for the fire and earthquake and storm and so live in fear of that lord. Living in fear, they may mistake the internal condemning voice for the soft whisper of love that allows us to move through life developing neighborliness.
Having a condemning lord in the fire and storm does not lead easily into neighborliness.  It is a fearful and suspicious state of psychological agitation, a readiness to pull out a weapon or to lock the doors against the immigrant and stranger. 
Having yet a lord of softness, given to silence that allows us to trust ourselves to come up with the authentic course of action for ourselves—that seems to me to be a more mature spirituality that reflects Christ’s own self-determination to plan for peace on earth.
It is in the construction of our consciences out of both the lived experience and the inner silences that create the authenticity of neighborly personhood.  Neighborliness recognizes that the dangers of fires, storms, and earthquakes need to be attended and prepared for, not because of psychological fretfulness, but because there is a theological ambivalence, elusiveness, enigma, and awareness of lack of predictability or escapability from tragedy in this life. Neighborliness accepts the open silences of history, society, and nature that shape us into personalities with integrity to make our meaning.  As we make our meaning in partnership with the elusive silences of God, we construct neighborhoods of meaning. 
Come!  we say to others, come visit my neighborhood of meaning and grace! 
I hope you’ll find a God of softness and preparedness here. 

I met Jan Karski and his wife in the early 1980s. He had been a member of the Polish Resistance during World War 2, and by the time I knew him, he was an old-world, courtly figure who taught history at Georgetown University. He was married to Pola Nireska, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust as a popular modern dancer residing in London. Her whole family disappeared in the Holocaust.
In January 1940 Karski began to organize courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish Government in Exile, then based in Paris. As a courier, Karski made several secret trips between France, Britain and Poland. During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia. Severely tortured, he managed to escape. After a short period of rehabilitation, he returned to active service in the Polish Home Army.
In 1942 Karski was selected to contact …Polish politicians and inform them about Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland. In order to gather evidence, Karski was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of directly observing what was happening to Polish Jews. Also, disguised as an Estonian camp guard, he visited a sorting and transit point for the Bełżec death camp.
Karski then met with Polish politicians in exile and the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec. In 1943 he traveled to the United States, meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust.
He also described the holocaust to [a mostly silent] Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter, skeptical of Karski's report, said later "I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference."[2]
If FDR had not been silent--if he had acted immediately to stem the atrocity by bombing the gas and incineration complexes in the death camps--perhaps 2 Million Jews could have been saved from destruction.  By the tardy time the American and British government did act, Karski’s efforts were estimated to have saved ¼ million Jews,  making Karski the most effective savior of European Jewry during the war.
Yet Karski lived with the knowledge that perhaps 10 times more could have been saved, IF ONLY. If only FDR  acted immediately. 
Karski regretted to me that he had failed in his efforts to convince FDR, while there were deeper levels of military strategy that may have led FDR to demure quick action against the death camps. 
Karski, who had trained for the diplomatic corps, strained every diplomatic muscle he had in trying to persuade the Brits and Americans, even going so far as obsequiously and gratuitously addressing his appeal to FDR with the title, “Lord of Humanity.”
In 1985, the French Film Director Claude Lanzmann released his 9-1/2 hour documentary Shoah. I committed 4 afternoons of a winter week in 1986 to seeing the four parts of Shoah at the Key Theater in Washington, DC.  During the second installment, Karski appeared discussing the conditions of the Jews confined in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he wept. I was moved to tears by his descriptions. Later, he discussed the conditions in Bełżec. 
I left the theater that Tuesday very emotional and got on the bus. It was raining. I sat down and was focused internally on my memories of the witness to the Holocaust in the documentary. I then became aware of a disturbance at the front of the bus. It was Karski, who was having difficulty putting away his umbrella while trying to secure his senior citizen bus discount.  The bus passengers were surly at the slight delay and hurling their anger frontward at him: “Down in Front!” “Go Back to where you came from!”
Carried by instinct and empathy, I got up from my seat and went to the front and embraced Karski and gave him my arm for support as I almost carried him to a seat.  At our seat, I told him of my emotion at just now seeing him in Shoah.  “Yes,” he said, “an important document of the time.”  I sat mostly a silent vigil with him during the bus ride back to Maryland.
I’ve thought often of that bus ride and have wondered if I should have addressed the surly passengers on the bus, shamed them with words, “this is a great man, people!” But what I’ve concluded after reading our texts this morning of the interpreted silences and elusive wisdom of God holds like with the parents of the dead boy in the Emergency Room: silent compassion and vigilant companionship was the better course that Tuesday on the bus in rainy Georgetown.
Don’t try to explain what would not be understandable without the context of faith and history. 
As the Book of Ecclesiastes’ Teacher Qoheleth might say, “To every thing, there is a season. A time to speak out, a Time to be silent.” 



[Jan Karski statue at Warsaw Museum of Jewish History. Photo Credit: Thomas Kennelly]

For Karski, there was the season of speaking out: a time of moral revival and assertion.  For us sometimes in the church confronted with the ugliness of depression and the letdown of humanity in our fellow man, there is a season of silence for reaching out.  In those times, connection isn’t in the thundering words we offer, but in the soft companionship of standing firm next to someone until they are ready to go their own way.
The church is an institution from our Lord Jesus Christ to offer testimony to the truth of God's entering our lives for the better, and the difficult, though that sometimes entails struggle and pain. If we offer our testimony to our own heroic struggles with God’s silence and our debilitating struggles with depression and letdown, followed by our coming out the other side in softness and stillness, we speak authentically and deeply to those who look to us for guidance in times of senseless crisis.
It is not our role to provide easy answers, but to tell our stories of our enduring wonder with the mystery of God and the enigma of faith.
Telling our story and living life to the fullest requires risk.
But risk is the price for social peace and wholeness, the change that we all crave. 
While perhaps God can burn and bomb God’s way to peace and softness, we as creatures of memory and pain cannot. 
Come, let us make neighborhood together in shadow of God’s awesome power, in the softness of God’s tender voice. 
Come, let us live without fear. -
Let us lean on the everlasting arm.
Even amidst the rage, fire, and storm of modern life: 
Come let us live with the whispering softness of a gift-giving Lord.
Let us be changed in our inner being by our glimpse into and recollection of the abyss of natural disaster yet let us thrive in the ongoing springs of divine whispers that tells us that we are friends of the Lord of Life and the Living.
May it be so for you and for me.  AMEN.




[1] Mitchem, S. Y. (2011). Theological Perspective on 1 Kings 19:9–18. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A (Vol. 3, p. 314). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
[2]   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski accessed on 6 August 2015.