Author: cjwhitt

A Rash Promise

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Mark 6:14-29

This is one of many stories in the Bible that make you wonder whether the folks who insist that the Bible be taught to school children have read the Bible.

The passage begins with people wondering who this Jesus is. His fame is spreading. Some speculate that he is John the Baptist returned from the dead. But what happened; why is John dead? Because Herod had John executed, and the story of how that came about is the rest of the passage.

The Herod in this story is Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and one of eight Herods in the Herodian dynasty. He has married Herodias, the former wife of his younger brother, yet another Herod. Like George Foreman, I guess Herod the Great figured there wasn’t a better name than his own to pass on to both (all?) his sons.

John the Baptist wasn’t the only person to criticize Herod for marrying his sister-in-law. We don’t know if he was the only person punished for it. John was well-known and respected; maybe that made it especially important to muzzle him. But Herod fears John; he knows John is “a righteous and holy man,” so while he sends John to prison, he doesn’t have him killed, not at first.

The story continues with Herod’s stepdaughter Herodias (yes, the same name as her mother, the sister-in-law that Herod scandalously married) dancing for guests at a party. We don’t know how old Herodias is at this point. The Greek calls her a κορασίῳ, korasion, which could be young girl or maiden. Is she a child who has made her stepdad proud? Is she an attractive young woman? We also don’t know anything about the dance. Was it as chaste as Judy Garland tapdancing with Mickey Rooney? Or was it provocative, which would make this story truly creepy? All we know is that it must have been some dance. Herod is in such high spirits that he makes a rash promise, so rash that although the text says nothing about it, I wonder if Herod wasn’t drunk as well as impressed. He promises Herodias anything she wants, even half his kingdom, the kind of fairytale promise that you know is going to backfire. The girl asks her mother, who has no warm feelings for John at all, and the mother tells her to ask for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. The king apparently made an oath to keep his promise and so John is executed in prison, and grizzly paintings ever since remind us how brutal this wish was, and that power really can corrupt.

What is the moral of this story? What’s the lesson? I quote David Lose: “The rich and powerful are used to getting what they want; are willing to do most anything to keep or advance what they have; and those who stand up to them, advocate for the oppressed, or dare to inspire people to imagine that life can be different usually get trampled.”

Is this a lesson we want to teach our children? I doubt that those arguing that the Bible should be taught in schools would think so. But maybe that’s exactly what we should be teaching people in today’s political climate. It’s certainly a good reminder for adults, if we include along with it the lesson that God still stands with the oppressed, and whatever the cost, so should we. Isn’t that what Jesus did?

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:
David Lose, https://www.davidlose.net/2012/06/mark-614-29/

The Kindness of Strangers

/ cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Mark 6:1-13

The most famous line in Tennessee Williams’ play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” is delivered by Blanche DuBois as she’s being led away to a mental institution following a breakdown: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” She’s always relied on others and given up some control over her life, because she’s always been out of touch with reality. Which makes relying on the kindness of strangers sound like not such a good thing, maybe even out of touch with reality. And yet in today’s passage in Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells his twelve disciples that’s exactly what they must do. He’s given them authority to heal, and they are to proclaim that all should “repent;” in other words, change the direction of their lives. He instructs them to take nothing with them so they have to rely entirely upon the hospitality and generosity of others for their meals, for a place to stay, for everything.

Being dependent on others feels vulnerable, especially to people with some privilege. We don’t like giving up control. Most church folks put a lot of effort into figuring out how to be welcoming, not just on Sunday mornings but all the time. But being the gracious host means we’re the ones in control, right? Our turf, our food, our rules, no surprises. And yet Jesus says, “Leave all that behind. Be a gracious guest.” Become the stranger who needs to be welcomed as a guest, with all the vulnerability that implies. Eat what’s put in front of you, listen to your host’s conversation and concerns, enter into your host’s reality.

And here we get to the nut of why Jesus wanted the twelve to rely on the kindness of strangers. Offering hospitality is important and always will be, but there is something about accepting hospitality that changes us profoundly, that opens us to new perspectives in a way that being a host does not. It means being open to what God is doing in someone else, on their turf. It means recognizing that everyone has something to offer, and every conversation is two-sided. As one writer quips, “We might have to reconsider some of the hymns we take along with us.” Instead of “We’ve a Story to Tell All the Nations,” “We’ve a Story to Hear from the Nations.” Or “Go, Listen on the Mountain!” or “Onward, Christian Guests!”

We celebrate Independence Day this week, and maybe that’s a good time to remember we are a nation of strangers, alternately called to receive and be received. In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower put it this way: “We are a people born of many peoples. Our culture, our skills, our very aspirations have been shaped by immigrants – and their sons and daughters – from all the earth. Sam Gompers from England, Andrew Carnegie from Scotland, Albert Einstein from Germany – and Booker T. Washington and Al Smith – Marconi and Caruso – men of all nations and races and estates – they have made us what we are.” I suspect if he’d said this today, he’d have said, “men and women of all nations,” and he’d have added Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Tan, and Kamala Harris. I hope he’d also have noticed that the original inhabitants of this land are still here among us.

An English video that went viral a while back gives some perspective on all this.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaEQEmt5ls

We Americans are proud of claiming the term “melting pot” but the fact is each one of us, all over the globe, is a melting pot of sorts; each of us is an immigrant, an alien, a stranger. Whether it’s us or our parents or grandparents or “back and back and back” as the video puts it, our people have been strangers in strange lands. We all have needed and will continue to need to be welcomed. And we all have the opportunity to welcome. Sometimes, we will be the stranger who brings truth and peace; sometimes others will be that to us. “Go, Listen on the Mountain!”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Kelly Belcher, “Go,” July 3, 2016, http://nextsundayworship.com/july-3-2016/.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address in Convention Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1956, https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/education/bsa/citizenship_merit_badge/speeches/address_convention_hall.pdf

Out of the Depths

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Psalm 130

   Once you reach a certain age, you realize that into everyone’s life come times of crisis, times when it seems the bottom has fallen out.  Psalm 130 begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”  We don’t know what happened to the psalmist.  Tradition says this prayer reflects King David’s anguish at the death of his son Absalom.  Absalom led an insurrection against his father, which must have been horrible enough.  David sent word to his army to spare the life of his son, but in spite of that, Absalom’s life came to a violent end.

   I’m glad the psalmist isn’t specific about Absalom or anything else because that way we can insert our own experience of what has caused the bottom to fall out.  When I served a congregation, I could look out at the folks in the pews on a Sunday morning and know that many people’s lives were going very well, at least that morning.  But sitting two pews up from these happy worshipers, or right behind them, or maybe even right next to them, chances are there was someone who was either in the midst of a crisis or whose memory of a crisis was very fresh.  Someone who had been out of work for months.  Someone dealing with dementia.  Someone who had just received a frightening diagnosis.  Someone whose child wouldn’t call them, or whose marriage had grown cold. 

   For many people in crisis, God seems not only distant but absent; it can feel as though God has abandoned you.  Notice that in Psalm 130, the psalmist assumes that Someone is already there to hear the cry.  “Let your ears, O God, be attentive to my need.”  The simple, unadorned cry for God to hear and to help is a prayer, and any prayer puts us squarely in front of God and opens our hearts to what God can do in us and through us.  Our prayers don’t need to be pretty or full of churchy words.  Joanna Adams writes, “If you ever find yourself in a valley so dark it makes the bottom of the well look like sunshine, remember this.  You do not have to outline the situation with appropriate sentence structure for the Almighty.  You do not have to compose perfect paragraphs.  You just have to know your need and know that God knows your need before you even put words to it.  God’s love is steadfast.  God’s love is plenteous enough for any terrible situation.  A cry in the dark suffices.”    

   Note also that the psalmist doesn’t blame God for whatever happened.  On a rainy night in 1983, William Sloane Coffin’s son Alex died in a car accident. Coffin, a minister and civil rights activist, was at his sister’s house the next day when one of her friends came by to offer comfort and a stack of quiches.  When the woman saw Coffin, she shook her head and said, “I just don’t understand the will of God when something like this happens.”  Coffin says instantly he was up and in hot pursuit.  “I’ll say you don’t, lady!”  He knew the anger would do him good, so he continued: “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his?  Do you think it was the will of God that Alex was driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of [beers] too many?  Do you think it is God’s will that there [is] … no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves in Boston harbor closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” 

   Out of the depths we cry to God and discover that God is there ahead of us.

   In verse 3, the psalmist refers to his wrongdoings, his “iniquities.”  It’s very common for people in the depths to wonder, “Why is this happening to me?  Is God punishing me?”  Certainly actions can have consequences and bad actions can have bad consequences.  But the psalmist is correcting a wrong belief that God is a God of retribution.  He is denying the image of an angry God pacing back and forth up in heaven with a rolled up newspaper just ready to swat someone.  The psalmist tells us that he knows he has sinned but so has everyone else, and he knows that’s not why he’s stuck in the depths.  If that were the case, there would be no hope for anyone; the depths would be the only possibility.  But that is not God’s way, says the psalmist.  Forgiveness is the way of the Lord.  God’s way is reconciliation, not punishment. 

   The psalmist’s prescription is waiting and hoping, which is very, very hard when physical, emotional, or spiritual pain is severe.  That’s where the rest of us come in, those of us who are not in crisis, who are not in the depths – for now.  When church folks said to me, “I don’t have any hope left,” that’s when I’d say, “Then you’ll have to let those of us who love you hope for you.  You are carrying enough.  We will carry the hope for now.”

   Anne Lamott wrote in Traveling Mercies, “Our preacher … said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet.  She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes.  You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and crackers.”

   That, my friends, is what church should be. 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Faith in the Face of Fear

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Mark 4:35-41

There’s plenty going on right now to make me afraid: How do we respond to the climate crisis? How do we address economic inequality? How do we deal with entrenched racism and privilege, and how much will white nationalism impact the upcoming election? What will happen to women’s rights, reproductive rights, human rights, the freedom of the press and freedoms, generally, if the authoritarian Project 2025 is realized?

Scary stuff. So, what moves people from fear to faith? That’s the question raised by the story in Mark in which the disciples wake Jesus to calm the stormy sea. This is the kind of story that gives some people fits because they don’t believe it really happened. But “Did it really happen?” isn’t the question. The question is, “What does it mean?”

Both fear and faith make sense in relation to something that’s unknown or threatening. Those are the kinds of things that make us afraid, right? Yet it’s those same things that summon us to have the faith to face them. Faith doesn’t so much overcome fear as make it possible to cope with it. Maybe that’s the issue here: Not whether you’re afraid, but how you respond when you’re afraid. So, what allows us, even if we’re afraid, to act in faith rather than to be paralyzed by fear?

It’s interesting that the miracle itself doesn’t rid the disciples of their fear. We might think a miracle would help us find our faith when things are scary, but here, the disciples seem more afraid after the miracle. Still, something shifts for them. Instead of “Don’t you care?” they’re asking, “Who is this?” Pastor and professor David Lose points out that this shift might mean the answer to the question, “What moves us from fear to faith?” is relationship. It’s the move from what to who, from event to person, from ambiguous miracle to the actual person of Jesus.

Faith is a relationship. Contrary to popular belief, faith is not believing in certain doctrines or reading the Bible literally; in fact, trust is a much better translation of the Greek word that most Bibles translate as faith because trust implies an action – it’s a verb – and a relationship. Christian faith is about a relationship with the God revealed by the teachings and actions of Jesus. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus points to a God who cares passionately for the welfare of all God’s people. He does this by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outcast, even overcoming death. Jesus invites people to trust in that God. Trust, in the end, is the only thing that overcomes fear.

The most frequently repeated command in the Bible is “Do not be afraid.” These words are spoken by angels, prophets, and apostles, and now, they are to be spoken by communities of faith. We are to say to one another, “Do not be afraid.” “Do not be afraid, because God loves you. God cares what happens to you. God loves and cares about everybody, and God has ways of making the impossible possible. God continues to call us, to call you, to imagine, hope for and create new possibilities. God calls you to remember, even in this scary world, that, as Edward Everett Hale put it, ‘I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can.’ Do not be afraid.”

Resources:
David Lose, http://www.davidlose.net/2018/06/pentecost-5-b-moving-from-fear-to-faith/.

Small, Hidden, Ordinary

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Mark 4:26-34

Eugene Peterson calls parables “narrative time bombs.” Parables are meant to undermine our assumptions, challenge cultural myths, and offer us a vision of something different. These two agricultural mini-parables in Mark’s Gospel offer an alternative vision for the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is a phrase that deserves explanation pretty much every time we use it. First of all, and let’s just get this out of the way, it isn’t about the afterlife. Second, many people prefer not to use the term “kingdom” because it’s patriarchal and monarchical. Both patriarchy and monarchy made sense to Jesus’ audience, but neither are necessary to understand that this phrase was Jesus’ primary metaphor for describing the world, this world, our world, as it would be if we made God the ruler of our hearts and minds. If you don’t like the word “ruler,” we could just say the phrase describes what this world would be if we made God’s priorities – love, justice, and compassion – our consistent priorities. I’m fine with the term “the Kingdom of God,” but I’m also fine with newer phrases that make it easier for people to digest the metaphor: the Reign of God, the Kin-dom of God, or creative alternatives such as these suggested by Brian D. McLaren: the dream of God, the revolution of God, the mission of God, the party of God, the network of God, and the dance of God. Whatever phrase you choose, the central point is that the Kingdom of God is both now and not yet. It is among us now, at hand, as Jesus put it, when we live as though God’s love and compassion are our priorities, but it is so very obviously not fully here, as we can see when we read the news or just look around us. It is both present choice and future goal.

The “narrative time bomb” in both these little parables emerges in the hiddenness, ordinariness, and inevitability of the beginnings of the Kingdom. The sower doesn’t make the seeds sprout and grow; the sower doesn’t even water or weed. Likewise, the tiny mustard seed is “sown,” but we aren’t told that it is sown by anyone in particular. It may just spring up organically the way it does in our Northern California fields and on our hillsides, where it’s a beautiful wildflower that spreads quickly and widely but, for the most part, is a weed.

That weediness is an interesting quality, as well. The cultural bias of first century Palestine identified order with holiness and disorder with uncleanness. There were strict rules about what you planted and where. The images in these little parables may point to something vaguely unclean and somewhat disorderly, perhaps not welcomed and perhaps not recognized as valuable by everyone. Nevertheless, the birds make their nests in the shade of the wild mustard, an image of welcome, safety, even gentleness and beauty.

Tiny, hidden, ordinary, weed-like, disorderly, uncontrollable, unrecognized, and perhaps even unwelcome, but spreading inevitably and a welcoming home to the vulnerable. These images are the starting point for the Kingdom of God.

What does this mean for us, for the present choice and future goal of the Kingdom of God? For one thing, achieving it isn’t up to us. It is God’s project. Certainly, we may participate by choosing to be aligned with God’s purposes. One of our own cultural myths is that big problems must be tackled in big ways. These Kingdom parables challenge that myth. Many people throughout the world have found not only that some of the best and bravest ideas come from people outside the traditional corridors of power, but often large problems are best tackled in small ways, at least in the beginning, at least until the mustard spreads, so to speak.

The parables further invite us to notice that God is already at work, in small, perhaps even hidden ways, in our lives, in our communities, and in the world. In time, God will complete the work God has started. It can be hard to trust this promise when we look at the world around us, but these parables give us hope in small, inevitable changes. Maybe even enough hope to inspire us to join in God’s project.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Give Us a King

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

1 Samuel 8:4-20

As they settled into the Promised Land after escaping from bondage in Egypt, judges led the Israelites. These judges were wise men and women who helped the people follow the law that God gave them at Sinai. Samuel is such a judge, a good judge, but he’s old. The people fear his sons might be his successors; unfortunately, Samuel’s sons didn’t inherit his sterling character. The people tell Samuel, “Give us a king.”

Samuel knows the people are right about his sons, but he isn’t happy about their demand for a king. He brings all this to God. God says, “It’s not about you. They haven’t rejected you. They’ve rejected me.” Why is this a rejection of God? We get a hint in the long warning that God tells Samuel to deliver to the people, the most scathing diatribe against monarchy and maybe one of the most political passages in the Bible. Again and again, Samuel says, “He will take…” The king will take your sons, your daughters, your fields, your produce, your servants, your herds, your flocks – and ultimately, says Samuel, “you shall be his slaves.” I picture that last statement punctuated with a clap of thunder.

What God intends for God’s people is freedom. In the conversation with Samuel, God brings up the Exodus, the defining story about who God is and what God wants for God’s people. And now they want to go back to slavery? Sigmund Freud said, “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” In the chapters to come, we see all God’s warnings coming true.

Is this story just a reminder that power corrupts or that people will always choose slavery over freedom? There are a handful of more hopeful lessons here. First, we see what happens when people act out of fear. John Steinbeck wrote, “Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” We see this again and again in our own time and culture in schoolyards, intimate relationships, governments, terrorism of all kinds, and pretty much anywhere there are people. If you want to control people, make them feel afraid.

The Israelites say they want to be like the nations that have military might, but the Israelites were supposed to be different. God had given them the Law, a guidebook for shalom based on justice and compassion. This was radically different and radically free – justice and compassion are the only way that anybody can be truly free. The people fear for their security and say they want a leader who will take them into battle. I picture God shaking God’s head. So the first lesson might be to take care that we are not choosing our leaders out of fear. History confirms that fearful choices lead to loss of freedom.

God has a very different idea of what makes a good leader, and that’s a second lesson. God’s idea of a leader is Moses, a shepherd who overcame his lack of self-confidence to lead his people to freedom. God’s idea of a leader is most evident in Jesus, the servant leader. We might ask of all our leaders: Is your priority the needs of the people, or the desire for your own self-preservation as a leader? Do you lead in a way that values everyone? Do you give voice to the voiceless, or listen primarily to those who already have power, wealth, or status? Do you lead in a way that says, “join me” rather than “watch me”?

Maybe a third lesson here is, “Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.”

God is with the people throughout the very human stories of Israel’s kings that follow this passage. God often speaks to them through the challenging voices of prophets like Samuel. Through it all, God remains the God of freedom. The prophet Micah describes that freedom in a passage you might recognize if you’re a fan of the musical, “Hamilton.” George Washington sings it when he’s telling Hamilton he plans to retire. Micah echoes the familiar words of Isaiah, saying,
“…they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;”

… but then Micah adds this verse:
“but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.”

They shall sit under their own vines, their own fig trees – not the king’s vines, not pharaoh’s vines, not the emperor’s vines; their own vines, their own fig trees. And no one shall make them afraid. They will have the freedom to flourish, the freedom made possible when God’s justice and God’s compassion reign.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Order or Neighbor?

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Mark 2:23-3:6

In this passage, Jesus has a run-in with the Pharisees about Sabbath rules. There are a couple of things we should not do with this passage. First, we shouldn’t demonize the Pharisees. The Pharisees were serious about their beliefs and serious about trying to do the right thing. They gave their time, talent, and energy to their faith, which sounds a lot like faithful church folks, right? David Lose suggests that when we come across a story involving the Pharisees, perhaps we should start by imagining ourselves in their role.

Second, we shouldn’t assume that Jesus thinks the Sabbath rules are trivial. Jesus isn’t making a novel argument here. Both the Hebrew Scriptures and the rabbinic tradition were clear that the Sabbath was created for human beings and not vice versa. Perhaps what’s going on here is that Jesus seems to think he has the authority to issue these legal opinions. Maybe the Pharisees didn’t like the fact that he compared himself to King David.

When Jesus encounters the man with the withered hand in the synagogue, he asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” The crowd is silent, and Jesus is angry; why don’t they get it that healing the man actually honors the Sabbath? Certainly, the man could be cured tomorrow without any kerfuffle. But Jesus is making the argument that the very purpose of the Sabbath is to promote life and well-being, to increase human delight, and to worship God as a liberator (the introduction to the Ten Commandments is “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;”). It’s likely that the man with the withered hand has been kept from working and supporting a family. A healed hand will restore him to community and dignity. The man isn’t literally dying, but Jesus has saved his life. This honors the Sabbath.

This passage isn’t just about the Sabbath; it’s about laws and rules, generally. David Lose reminds us that the purpose of laws in the Hebrew Scriptures is to help us get more out of life by directing us to help our neighbor: “First, law establishes order, and order makes it easier to flourish in life. Think of the Ten Commandments – it’s really hard to flourish if it’s okay to lie, steal, and murder. But, second, law works best – it achieves its intended purpose – only when it’s directed to the need of our neighbor.”

A couple of weeks ago, I heard human rights activist Michael Steven Wilson speak at a commencement where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. Wilson served as lay pastor for an indigenous congregation in the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. Migrants from Mexico and Central America cross the desert that covers much of that reservation, hoping to escape violence, oppression, and dire poverty. Every year, hundreds of them die on the journey; many die of thirst. When Wilson’s faith and ethical convictions led him to set up water stations in the desert, both the U.S. Border Patrol and Wilson’s own congregation objected. Wilson said he reminded his congregation about Matthew 25, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…,” but they worried that breaking the rules would get them all in trouble with the U.S. Government. And the thing is, that wasn’t an unreasonable fear, based on their history and experience.

Is it fair to say most of us tend to privilege order over neighbor? I can think of easy-to-condemn situations where care of neighbor clearly trumps order, but more often than not, we face tough calls that can be argued either way, and that people will argue either way. Order is good, but according to Jesus, if it’s not helping our neighbor, it’s neither lawful nor holy. We who follow him must choose; we must discern when order and the demands of laws or rules ought to be set aside in favor of greater values or greater needs. Not an easy task, but a holy one, best done in community, with community wisdom, community prayer, and community support.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resource:
David Lose, “In the Meantime,” https://www.davidlose.net/2012/05/mark-2-23-28/.

Why I Bother with the Trinity

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

John 3:1-17

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the only Christian holy day that celebrates a doctrine. Most of our holy days have a good story attached to them. At Christmas, we have the baby and no room at the inn; at Easter, we have the Last Supper, the arrest and crucifixion, and the empty tomb. Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, with the rush of wind, tongues of fire, and the apostles able to be understood in many languages. Even our non-biblical holy days have stories: Reformation Sunday has Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a good story.

A good story gets a point across in a way that captures our imaginations and speaks to our hearts. That’s why Jesus used stories. The story the lectionary gives us for Trinity Sunday is the story of the Pharisee Nicodemus and his late-night visit to Jesus, but don’t look for that story to solve the puzzle of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus talks to Nicodemus about God and Spirit, and so all three members of the Trinity appear in the passage. But while Nicodemus asks concrete questions, Jesus answers with imagery and metaphor, helplessly confusing poor Nicodemus

But maybe that’s the lesson. There have always been ideas, thoughts, and experiences that are hard to put into words. That’s when people turn to poetry. By poetry, I don’t mean verse or rhyme; I mean language that uses vivid imagery, that relies on metaphor, that contains a meaning and a message beyond the words themselves; words that stir the imagination, that have a quality of spontaneity and grace.

The Trinity is poetry. Whenever we speak about God, we are limited to metaphors and analogies. Most of us carry around a picture of God in our imaginations, and that probably helps us have a more personal relationship with God. Jesus called God “Abba,” which is like papa or daddy; many people are still very attached to the metaphor of father in their language about God. I heard an indigenous lay pastor speak this past weekend; he prefers to speak of God as a wise grandmother. But we can never claim that any one image of God captures the fullness of the Divine. We can never claim any of the words we use to describe God are literal. God is ultimately unknowable, a mystery. We trust our experiences of God and the biblical witness of God, but part of what they show us is that God is more than we can know.

The Trinity is the poetry hammered out by the Church long ago to describe God in a way that is faithful to scripture and to the experience of Christians over the centuries. The Trinity gives words to our very personal encounter with God the Creator, the One who is mindful of each one of us and by whom we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). Scripture declares we are made in God’s image; therefore, we who are made in the image of God are called to be mindful of one another, to love one another, as God loves us. We describe the power to do that as the power of the Holy Spirit. This is a power we feel and know, the power to keep on keeping on when we’re pretty sure we don’t have it in us to keep on keeping on.

At the heart of our Christian faith is a more radical, even scandalous trust that God also suffers with us. The cross planted at the center of our faith declares that God descends with us to the depths of life: “There is no pain that you can bear that I have not embraced,” God tells us from the cross, “there is no darkness that can overtake you that I have not seen; there is no fear that might grip you that I have not known. I have passed through it, and when you pass through it, I am with you.”

But why bother? Why try to explain the Trinity, or even to accept the Trinity as a mystery beyond understanding? The answer is that the way we talk about God and envision God profoundly influences everything else that we say about Christian life and faith. As my theology professor used to say, “Theology matters.”

It matters how we imagine God. One meaning and message in the poetry of the Trinity is that the glory of the triune God consists in sharing life with others. The Trinity describes God’s power not as coercive but as creative, sacrificial, and empowering love. Within the Trinity, the eternal life of God is life in relationship. God exists in community.

Our creating, saving, and empowering God created us for community that saves and empowers. In Wendell Berry’s novel, The Wild Birds, one of the characters quotes the apostle Paul in an argument with his friend. “The way we are,” he says, “we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

The Ongoing Pentecost

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21

The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is an origin myth, the kind of myth that explains how something came to be.  The Tower of Babel explained to the ancient Hebrews why there are many languages, but the story goes much deeper than a “how the tiger got its stripes” kind of story.  The Tower of Babel deals with the consequences of human hubris.  Hubris is more than pride in doing things well.  Hubris is arrogance, an over-confidence usually due in part to a failure to recognize that we have limitations; that we don’t know and understand everything.

The hubris of the people who decide to build the tower includes the conviction that this tower is the right way to reach God – the right way for everyone.  Usually, what we think is good we are likely to think is good for everybody.  What we think is bad we are likely to think is bad for everybody.  It’s hard to get outside our own perspective to see the way things look to others.  The tower builders in Genesis are so sure of their perspective that their stairway to heaven becomes a monument to their conviction that they’re right, a colossal stone sign that says, “My way or the highway.”  The problem is that “My way or the highway” always leads to violence; it leads to forcing something on someone else, against that person’s will.  Three times in the Genesis passage the people say, “Let us” – let us make bricks, let us build, let us make a name.  But the “us” doesn’t really include everyone because not everyone has a voice in this; I suspect the enslaved people carrying the bricks didn’t.  “Us” also doesn’t include God.  My way or the highway is not God’s way.  In the story, mid-way through the tower’s construction, God confuses the people’s speech, bringing the entire project to a halt. 

The Acts passage tells the story of Pentecost.  It’s a story that doesn’t see different languages as a threat.  The disciples were scattered in fear after Jesus’ crucifixion.  On Easter, they were amazed when the risen Jesus appeared to them, but in the first chapter of Acts, Jesus abandons them again.  He promises that they will receive the Holy Spirit, which will give them the power to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.  Until then, he says, they are to wait in Jerusalem.  And then he’s gone. 

They’re waiting in Jerusalem, gathered in one place, when suddenly there is the sound of the rush of a mighty wind.  Flames appear above each of the disciples.  Without warning, these Galilean fishermen begin speaking languages that every Jew gathered from the Diaspora can understand.  The message they hear, each in their own native tongue, is the good news of God’s deeds of power.  The skeptics in the crowd believe the disciples might just be drunk, but Peter stands before the crowd and quotes from the prophet Joel.  Joel says God’s Spirit will be poured out on all flesh – all people – men and women, slave and free.  All people will have the power to tell the truth, to reveal God’s truth on God’s behalf.

   Marcus Borg writes, “The coming of the Spirit is the reversal of Babel, the beginning of the reunion of the human community.”  We are in the middle of the ongoing Pentecost; the wind of Pentecost is pushing us even now to speak and listen to new languages.  The different languages in Acts are a metaphor for being able to reach across the chasms of difference that can divide us, but our reaching across the divide has less to do with what we say and everything to do with the way we say it.  In our increasingly polarized culture, our reach across the divide must begin with a rejection of hubris, a reclaiming of Christ-like humility, and time spent learning about each other, learning to understand each other. 

   Perhaps the Spirit is blowing us toward a deeper understanding and respect for what it means to be “spiritual but not religious,” or what it means to be suspicious of organized religion, or even what it means to believe nothing at all.  The Church doesn’t own or control the Holy Spirit.  As Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”  The world in which we live is a world of many languages and perspectives, many ways of being, but it is a world in which God is already at work, and not just through people who believe what we believe or who want what we want; not just in the Church but far beyond it. 

   Perhaps the Holy Spirit is blowing us towards reinventing the church, and I don’t just mean what kind of music we listen to on Sunday mornings.  Pentecost is a never-ending story, and the Spirit surprises us all.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved. 

Resources:

Chapter 2, “The Tower of Babel,” Reinhold Niebuhr’s Beyond Tragedy.

Robert Coote and Robert Ord, The Bible’s First History.

A Prayer for Those Sent

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

John 17:6-19

   I’m not a big fan of the Farewell Discourse, the long pep talk that Jesus gives the disciples in John’s Gospel the night before his arrest.  John’s Jesus is mystical and prescient; I much prefer Mark’s down to earth Jesus.  The Farewell Discourse showcases this mystical Jesus, and besides that, it repeats many variations of “I’m in God, and God is in me, and I’m in you, and you’re in me, and God is in you …” to which one of my fellow seminarians responded under his breath, “Goo goo a’joob.”  If you don’t get the reference, go ask a baby boomer.

   John 17:6-19 is the prayer that follows the Farewell Discourse.  The repetition continues with Jesus using the word “world” over and over.  The Greek word is κόσμος, or cosmos, which we probably think of as the universe, but in Greek it implies a system, an order, and especially in John’s gospel, the human system that creates alienation from God.  The cosmos is the social construction of reality that divides people, that creates systems of who is in and who is out, who is at the top of the heap and who is at the bottom.  This is the system that would oppose a reality with God’s love at the center.  In John 3:16, we’re told it’s this very cosmos that God loves; it’s this cosmos that God intends to save.

   Some read this passage and conclude that because the disciples “do not belong to the world, just as I [Jesus] do not belong to the world” (vs. 14), Christians should turn their backs on the world.  Some Christians separate themselves from the secular world; they won’t vote, take up arms, take oaths, or hold public office.  But Jesus is sending his disciples into the world, into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  As a Presbyterian, part of the Reformed tradition, I have inherited a long-held belief in living our faith in the world: whatever concerns humanity and its welfare is the concern of Christians.  There is nothing that is not God’s business.

   Jesus sends his disciples into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality, in order to transform it.  Thus, the Reformed Tradition has a long history of political activism aimed at helping God transform the world to look more like God’s Kingdom; going upstream, as it were, to address discrimination, poverty, disease, war; advocating for the marginalized and oppressed.  Presbyterians have a big fat book of social witness policies adopted by our General Assembly on everything from gun violence to racism to abortion to capital punishment to LGBTQ+ rights.

   A brief cul-de-saq: In any discussion of churches and activism, someone inevitably wonders about the “separation of church and state.”  The First Amendment to the Constitution restricts governments, not churches.  It says Congress can’t establish a religion; it can’t make any religion the official religion the way the Anglican Church is the Church of England.  The courts have interpreted this to mean the government can’t do anything to promote any particular religion or religion in general.  So you can’t require prayer in public schools, or put a nativity scene on public property.  The First Amendment also says Congress can’t get in the way of religious practices.  The government can’t require Jews to work on Saturdays or Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, and it can’t stop any student in any school, public or private, from praying before an exam.  Essentially, the government can step in only if a religious practice is dangerous to health or safety. 

   This point is crucial in our current political climate: The First Amendment allows churches to advocate for political change, but not to replace the secular government with a faith-based one.  My Presbyterian ancestors fought for this.  Simply put, if someone says, “I can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” that’s perfectly fine.  That’s religious freedom.  But if someone tries to say, “You can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” the First Amendment should put a stop to it. 

    But back to the Farewell Discourse.  Like Jesus, all good leaders, teachers, pastors, mentors, and parents know that you do your best to prepare folks and then you send them out into the world.  You pray you’ve done enough to get them ready for what they’ll face, and you pray that what they’ll face won’t hurt or destroy them.  In this season of graduations, Jesus’ prayer is particularly poignant. 

   At the end of the War of Independence, General George Washington had fulfilled his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the army. He sent his own farewell letter to the governors of the thirteen states, closing with a prayer that echoes Jesus’ prayer for his disciples and all our prayers for those whom we send:

    “Almighty God; We make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy Holy protection; and Thou wilt incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government; and entertain an affection and love for one another and for all Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for those who have served in the Field.  And finally that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility, and pacific tempter of mind which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.  Grant our supplication, we beseech Thee, in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

   We are sent into the world.  And Jesus continues to pray for us.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.