Luke 10:25-37

In seminary, I learned that while myths and fables “build worlds,” in other words, create a framework for why the world around us makes sense, parables “explode worlds.” A parable is supposed to turn our current understanding of the way things work on its head. We’re not supposed to read it, nod agreeably, and walk away comforted.

What is it about the well-known and well-loved parable of the Good Samaritan that explodes worlds? A man asks Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He’s saying, “Show me the path to the life of God.” Jesus knows the man is a lawyer, so he asks, “What’s written in the Law?” The lawyer gives Jesus an A+ answer, quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus congratulates him for giving the correct answer. “Do this, and you will live,” he says. But the man isn’t satisfied. He wants specifics. “Just who, exactly, is my neighbor?” When you think about it, that’s the same as asking “Who is not my neighbor?” This lawyer wants to know where to draw the line.

Jesus tells the parable of two important people who walk past a bloodied man by the side of the road, followed by the Samaritan, who stops to help him. Then he asks, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of bandits?” Our clue about how the parable explodes worlds is when the lawyer answers Jesus’ question. He says, “The one who showed him mercy.” He can’t even make his lips form the words, “The Samaritan.” Samaria was the next province over from Judea. The Samaritans were ethnically related to Judeans and practiced a similar but not identical religion. By the time Jesus told this parable, they hated each others’ guts.

And yet Jesus chooses a Samaritan as the hero. The man who stopped to help could have been anybody, and the point could have been, “Anybody can be your neighbor.” That’s a nice, broad principle, and even if it doesn’t specifically say that a Samaritan can be a Judean’s neighbor, it includes it, right? Then we could call it the Parable of the Good Person. But this is a story intended to upset our categories of good and bad. It’s intended as a sharp rebuke to the lawyer’s question, “Just exactly who is my neighbor?”

Note that Jesus doesn’t answer that question. He doesn’t say, “Your neighbor is the faceless, nameless guy in the ditch.” He turns the question on its head, basically saying, “You want to know precisely how the Law defines the word ‘neighbor’? Never mind that. Here is how to be a neighbor.” When you’re being a neighbor, then the question, “Just who is my neighbor?” is irrelevant.

Who is the last person on earth you’d ever want to think of as a good guy? Whom do you have the hardest time imagining God working through? Think of a group of people that scares or angers you. That’s what the Samaritan represents. If that group or person makes you feel uncomfortable, you know you’re on the right track.

The Samaritan teaches us several important lessons. First, God comes where we least expect God to be, because God comes for all and to all. Second, “loving” looks like helping those in need. And third, the Samaritan, the one who acted as a neighbor, crossed a boundary. The hatred between Samaritans and Judeans went both ways, and yet this Samaritan stepped outside of his national and ethnic loyalty. He did not say, “I save my compassion for my own people.” He crossed a boundary that was a hard and fast line to Jesus’ listeners. When Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” that boundary crossing is part of what he’s telling us to do.

“Anybody can be my neighbor” is an abstract feel-good idea. It doesn’t raise any of our specific prejudices. That’s why the church I served for many years hung a “Black Lives Matter” banner on the front of the church building. It wasn’t meant to say, “Black lives matter more than white lives” or “Black lives matter more than police lives,” any more than Jesus was trying to say that Samaritans are more important or better than Judeans. The point of saying “Black lives matter” is that Black lives are in danger and at the same time, unfortunately, the phrase “Black lives matter” still sticks in the throat of a lot of white Americans. Recently, the large yellow “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street one block from the White House was ordered removed.

When we say, “Lives matter” or “All lives matter,” we can think about generic people, who we just might picture as white. As William Sloan Coffin said, “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.” That’s why Jesus chose a Samaritan for this story: To preach love of neighbor, unity with neighbors, and togetherness with neighbors, even when that means challenging the structures of society that would tell us specific people are not our neighbors, not worthy of our love.

Do this, and live, says Jesus.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Deuteronomy 6:5
Leviticus 19:18
Debie Thomas, “Go and Do Likewise,” July 3, 2016, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1023-go-and-do-likewise
William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2004)
Doug Muder, https://weeklysift.com/2015/11/02/samaritan-lives-matter/.

2 Kings 5:1-14

This is a “Once upon a time….” story, part of a series of stories in the Hebrew Scriptures legitimating royal succession and describing the holy men, in this case, the prophet Elisha, through whom God speaks and legitimates rulers. In the process, these stories also tell us something about Israel’s God.

Naaman is a powerful general of the Aramean army who has led his country to many victories, including over Israel – thanks to God. In the ancient worldview, it made sense that God granted an enemy victory. Given that Israel confessed their God as the one true God, supreme over all other gods, the only way to explain a defeat like the one suffered at the hands of the Arameans (1 Kings 22) was to interpret it as God’s will.

Naaman’s life should be a bed of roses except for the fact that he has leprosy, which in biblical terms could have been any number of skin diseases, not just Hansen’s disease. What matters is that because of his disease, he is considered unclean. This was a serious issue, not just physically, but also vocationally and socially; it’s likely he’s unable to do his job. Skin disease stands between Naaman and full honor.

General Naaman owned a slave girl captured in a battle with Israel. Though pivotal to the story, the girl is not named. She tells Naaman’s wife (also unnamed) that there is a prophet in Samaria (the southern portion of what would later be called Israel) who could help Naaman. The wife passes this information along to Naaman. Naaman figures it’s worth a try; nothing else has worked. He takes it up with his own king, who gives him the green light. The king probably wants his general fully functional. The king offers to write a letter of introduction to the king of Israel. Kings talk to other kings, not to prophets and certainly not to slave girls or wives.

The king’s letter of introduction says, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” Letter in hand, Naaman and an entire entourage head out to meet with the king of Samaria with what Frederick Buechner summarizes as “a suitcase full of cash”: gold, silver, lots of clothes (no idea why), chariots, horses.

Before arriving at the Samarian court, Naaman has his king’s letter of introduction delivered to the king of Israel/Samaria. Upon reading it, however, the Samarian king is beside himself with fear and anger. He tears his clothes (a sign of mourning) because he believes the general has concocted this impossible request as an excuse to provoke war. He says, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me” (2 Kings 5:7).

Somehow the prophet Elisha gets wind of the king’s concern. He sends word to his king to calm down and just send Naaman to him, “that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel” (2 Kings 5:8). Naaman shifts gears and drags his whole entourage and all that treasure to Elisha’s house. I believe that we, the audience, are supposed to be giggling at this point.

Elisha is home, but instead of coming to greet the general himself, he sends one of his messengers. Through the unnamed messenger, Elisha tells Naaman he should go wash himself seven times in the river Jordan. That’s it.

The general is furious. He came all this way, with all these fabulous gifts, with his entire entourage, expecting to be treated like the important man he is, and not only does this guy tell him to degrade himself by dipping into a local river, which he could have done back home, but Elisha doesn’t even have the courtesy to come out and greet him and tell him this himself. He turns around to head home.

But then an unnamed aid stops him and says, “If the prophet had given you a hard task you would have done it. Why not do it when it’s something easy.” So Naaman returns to the Jordan River and after immersing himself seven times, he is miraculously cured.

The lectionary doesn’t include the verses that follow, in which Naaman goes back to Elisha’s house to thank him and offers to pay him a princely sum, which Elisha refuses because it was God who made it happen, not Elisha.

This compelling little story offers us a handful of lessons:

• Naaman had a lot of things working against him. He was a foreigner, pledged allegiance to a foreign king, and most likely had defeated Israel in battle. He was ritually unclean. He worshiped a foreign God. And yet, Elisha heals him. God heals him. The scandal of this story is the reason Jesus mentions it centuries later (Luke 4:27). God’s healing, favor, and blessing are not limited to “our side” – our tribe, our religion, our ethnicity, our nation.

• While this story features two kings, a general, and a prophet, it is the unnamed, ordinary, “less than” people who make things happen. The slave girl, the wife, the messenger, Naaman’s aid; these people have the compassion, the wisdom, and perhaps the vulnerable creativity to think outside the box, to see that things don’t have to work the way we might expect them to work, or even the way we might think we deserve to have them work. The slave girl, in particular, a spoil of war and likely separated from her family, showed Naaman unexpected compassion. God can work through anyone, of course, but this isn’t the only place in Scripture where it seems God prefers ordinary folks. Don’t be surprised if God accomplishes God’s goals through someone you might not expect, including you.

• It would be unfair and cruel and to say that one must be humble in order to be healed. That puts the responsibility for healing on the person in need of healing, in a “blame the victim” sort of way. However, there are situations in which pride and power get in the way of learning, growing, and discovering. Here, Naaman was able to set aside his assumptions about the treatment he deserved. Disease is indeed the great leveler. But it was a near miss. We do well to keep an open heart and mind to the movement of God’s Spirit.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Brian C. Jones, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-14-3/commentary-on-2-kings-51-14-7
Stephen B. Reid, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-14-3/commentary-on-2-kings-51-14-5
Dennis Sanders, “In 2 Kings 5, the VIP Characters Aren’t the Ones Who Make a Difference,” https://www.christiancentury.org/sunday-s-coming/ordinary-people-2-kings-5-1-3-7-15c
W. Dennis Tucker, Jr., https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-after-epiphany-2/commentary-on-2-kings-51-14-4
Robert B. Coote and Mary P. Coote, Power, Politics, and the Making of the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1990).

Luke 9:51-62

This passage begins, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The phrase “set his face” is unique to Luke and signals Jesus’ single-minded intention to face what is waiting for him in Jerusalem. This passage is peculiar to Luke, describing first an encounter with hostile Samaritans, and then interactions with three potential disciples whom Jesus dismisses as insufficiently committed to costly discipleship. Together, they focus on what it means to live a Christian life, to live as a follower of Jesus.

Messengers have gone ahead of Jesus and the disciples to arrange for lodging and food, but this Samaritan village does not welcome them. Luke explains this is “because his face was set toward Jerusalem” (verse 53). Although Jews and Samaritans worshiped the same God and claimed the same ancestors, they were divided over other aspects of their religion. While Jerusalem was the only proper location for Jewish worship, Samaritans worshiped at Mount Gerizim. The fact that Jesus was headed to Jerusalem for Passover meant he was planning to keep the feast in the wrong place.

His disciples suggest taking revenge on the inhospitable Samaritans by raining fire down on them. Whether or not they believed they had the power to do this, Jesus rebukes them. Vengeance is not the way of discipleship; restoration is. He moves on to another village, which may also be Samaritan, but perhaps more hospitable. Certainly, this is not Jesus’ last word about Samaritans.

In the three interactions with wannabe disciples that follow, it sure sounds as though Jesus is saying, “If you can’t be all in right now, don’t bother.” With Jerusalem on his mind and in his future, undoubtedly he knows discipleship will become more dangerous, if not deadly. Part of what’s going on might be that he needs those who follow him to know that they may face the same danger, or even the same death.

But he also wants to convey the urgency of the Kingdom of God and the total commitment required by the revolution of hope that he’s leading. This passage is about the Kingdom of God. Jesus mentions it twice in these verses. The Kingdom of God is the metaphor Jesus used to describe what our world would look like if God were the ruler of all of our hearts and minds, rather than the current rulers of this world. In Jesus’ context, the current rulers included Caesar and his lackeys, men like Herod, who had colonized the whole Mediterranean world through force and domination. They were motivated by greed and power over others, and did whatever it took – corruption, violence, exploitation – to stay in power. It also included the religious elite who had created a caste system from the law. There were the privileged few who had the time and means, not to mention the right gender and ethnicity, to follow the law meticulously so they could be insiders, and there was everybody else, who ended up “less than.” These kingdoms or systems kept people poor and powerless. People were not free to determine their own lives or their own future. And they were stuck in that way of looking at the world.

There is an alternative: the Kingdom of God, and Jesus says again and again that the Kingdom of God is here, now, among us. The prophet Micah describes the Kingdom of God this way: “[T]hey shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Brian McLaren puts it like this: “At the center of the beloved community is good news – a framing story that calls humanity to creativity, harmony, reconciliation, justice, virtue, integrity, and peace, because these values reflect the character of the Creator whose world is our home and in whose presence we live and move and have our being. In short: we are all part of one kingdom, one beautiful whole, with one caring Creator, who is faithful to us even in our stupidity and sin. God calls us to reconcile with God, one another, and creation, to defect from the false stories that divide and destroy us, and to join God in the healing of the world through love and the pursuit of justice and the common good.”

The framing story that currently dominates the world has no power over the Kingdom of God framing story except the power people give it by believing it. Believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do. But believing takes commitment. It takes keeping your hands on the plow. So Jesus tells the would-be disciples to drop everything and get on board with the Kingdom of God. Does he really mean we shouldn’t take care of our beloved family members’ funeral arrangements, or even say goodbye? I don’t believe he does. I think he’s reacting to his own disciples’ cluelessness in seeking revenge against the Samaritans. They are showing him they still don’t get it.

I hardly need to list the ways humankind is self-destructive and world-destructive; I hardly need to catalogue what we’re doing to ourselves by buying into, believing in, clinging to the old way: We’ve threatened the very survival of creation with an economy that doesn’t respect the limits of the planet; there’s a growing gap between rich and poor, triggering resentment, blaming, and hatred; people continue to solve these and other problems with violence and retribution; and the world’s religions, including our own, not only fail to address all this this but often make it worse, and to a large degree would rather focus on what happens to us after we die.

Broken, broken, and broken. The only way out is believing with all your heart – all our hearts – that God wants something better for us and offers it to us – now. Of course we need to care for our families – bury our loved ones, say goodbye when we leave – but the disciples’ reaction to the Samaritans reminds Jesus how our preoccupation with our own families, our own tribe, can get in the way of seeing ourselves as citizens of the kingdom of God. This is the same Jesus who welcomed little children and healed lepers, who included outcasts and spoke with women and Gentiles. He’s not opposed to caring for families. There are times when dealing lovingly with our families is the kindest, most compassionate, most faithful thing to do; the problem is when we get stuck in thinking only about “me and mine.”

Jesus leads us away from the fanatic extremism that elevates one tribe, one belief system, one country over all others. Jesus is saying, “Drop everything” – drop the tribal, me-and-mine, us-versus-them way of seeing the world. Fanaticism – ethnic, religious, national, whatever – is the old way, the old framing story that gets us in trouble.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007)
Jeannine K. Brown, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-13-3/commentary-on-luke-951-62-8

Proverbs 8:1-31

There’s nothing wrong with preaching the Trinity on Trinity Sunday, but this week I was drawn to the Proverbs lectionary passage, a poem that personifies Wisdom as a woman. Biblical scholars posit that perhaps this reflects an ancient time when male-centered, strict monotheism didn’t necessarily characterize Israel’s religion. That’s a fascinating possibility, but maybe a more fruitful conversation for us is not how Wisdom ended up in Proverbs, but what she has to say to us today.

This beautiful poem begins with Wisdom posted at the crossroads in the middle of the daily life of ordinary people. She calls to all who pass, offering her instruction to “all that live.” The lectionary skips Proverbs 8:5, in which she mentions simpletons or fools specifically; it is these people who most need to heed her call.

Wisdom’s call in Proverbs 8 is part of a larger dialogue of voices in the book of Proverbs. Those simpletons and fools might be tempted to listen, instead, to the voice of the Strange Woman, who embodies foolishness and danger. In Chapter 7, this “loud and wayward” woman also stands at the crossroads and entices “a young man without sense” with her sweet, smooth words, yet her ways lead to destruction (7:10-27). So, then, Proverbs 8 offers an alternative. Wisdom’s beauty is grounded in virtue; her desirability is found in her strength and sense of justice,

The voices of the women in Proverbs 7 and Proverbs 8 are in many ways alike. They both appeal directly to the hypothetical student of Proverbs. They speak in the first-person, and their call is attractive. However, the consequences of following their voices are radically different. The appeal of the Strange Woman ends in death, while Wisdom offers life. Side by side, the student is offered a choice between these competing voices and must decide which instruction will help humans to flourish and thrive.

These are the same skills required of contemporary readers navigating a world in which we are constantly confronted by competing visions of flourishing. Through the media and entertainment, in the comments of friends and neighbors, and by the advertising we just can’t escape, we are barraged daily with voices that appeal to our desires and seek to shape our habits, choices, and character.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, looks at the consequences of listening to the wrong voices. He writes, “In the summer of 2022, I was working on a book project … about how smartphones and social media rewired many societies in the 2010s, creating conditions that amplify the long-known weaknesses of democracy. The first chapter was about the impact of social media on kids, who were the ‘canaries in the coal mine,’ revealing early signs that something was going wrong. When adolescents’ social lives moved onto smartphones and social media platforms, anxiety and depression surged among them. …. I quickly realized that the rapid decline of adolescent mental health could not be explained in one chapter—it needed a book of its own.”

What Haidt saw in the mental health statistics for adolescents is alarming:
A 72% increase in ADHD since 2010
A 57% increase in bipolar disorder since 2010
A 100% increase in anorexia since 2010
A 33% increase in substance abuse since 2010
A 67% increase in schizophrenia since 2010
A 139% increase in anxiety and depression since 2012

Haidt asked, “What happened to young people in the early 2010s that triggered the surge of anxiety and depression around 2012?” He points out that the sudden increase wasn’t merely due to a heightened willingness to talk about mental illness. The rise was showing up in behavior as well, including self-harm and suicide. It showed up internationally in Northern European countries. Gen Z (those born after 1995) has been hit hardest, although Millennials (born 1981-1995) haven’t been entirely spared.

What happened? Haidt offers two explanations. First, the decline of the play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the ‘90s. “All mammals need free play, and lots of it, to wire up their brains during childhood to prepare them for adulthood. But many parents in Anglo countries began to reduce children’s access to unsupervised outdoor free play out of media-fueled fears for their safety, even though the ‘real world’ was becoming increasingly safe in the 1990s.”

The second explanation is the rise of the phone-based childhood, which began in the late 2000s and accelerated in the early 2010s. This was precisely the period during which adolescents traded in their flip phones for smartphones, which were loaded with social media platforms.

These statistics impact girls more than boys. I invite you to watch a couple of Dove videos for a graphic explanation of why that might be:
“The Selfie Talk” https://www.dove.com/us/en/campaigns/purpose/theselfietalk.html
“Toxic Influence” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF3iRZtkyAQ

The phrase “toxic influence” pretty well sums up what Haidt is talking about.

Wisdom beckons. Will we listen to her? Will parents listen to her?

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Timothy J. Sandoval, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-3/commentary-on-proverbs-81-4-22-31-6
Anne Stewart, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-3/commentary-on-proverbs-81-4-22-31-4
Jonathan Haidt, https://jonathanhaidt.com/anxious-generation/

Acts 2:1-21

   Pentecost is the “birthday of the Church,” the day, according to the Acts passage, that the Holy Spirit filled the disciples, changing them, changing the course of history, even changing the world.  Based on the power of that experience, Peter gets up and gives a sermon, and at the heart of it he quotes the prophet Joel’s promise that God’s Spirit plants dreams in all of us – young and old, male and female, slave and free.  All Christians, through the power of the Holy Spirit, have been commissioned to be dreamers.  Peter is saying that even though the people listening to him thought the time of the prophets was over, in fact, God gives the power of the prophet to everyone, to “all flesh.”  The power of the prophet is not foretelling the future, not reading crystal balls and tea leaves as we sometimes think, but speaking truth to power, and dreaming, holding up the dream of what could be, what is actually possible even though all the voices of fear and scarcity and cynicism say it is not.  That’s a pretty astounding power, when you think about it, and it’s given by the Spirit to every one of us.

   It’s interesting that being called a dreamer isn’t necessarily a compliment these days.  Often it means someone has lost touch with reality. But a dream powered by the Holy Spirit has a firm handle on reality, although that gets tricky: what is real, and what isn’t? Let me explain what I mean with something near and dear to me: The state of the American Church.  Lately church leaders are inundated with articles, blogs, books, and social media posts with titles like, “Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore,” “The Death of the Church,” “The Five Ways the Church Shot Itself in the Foot,” “The Fifteen Ways the Church Is Going to Hell in a Hand Basket,” “The 257 Million Things Millennials and Gen-Z’ers Would Rather Do Than Go to Church,” “Why No One in His Right Mind Under Age 90 Will Ever Walk into Your Church,” and “How COVID Destroyed Your Church.” Okay, I made up some of those titles, but not all of them.

   You could start thinking that’s reality.  You could start thinking we just have to face the facts.  Okay, then, let’s face the facts but let’s face the real facts: Somebody does want to go to church.  I’m in church every Sunday, and I’m not sitting alone in a sanctuary. And I’m not 90, not yet, nor are many of the people sitting around me.

   Church leaders, church members, church goers: I invite you to remember, allow, and expect the power of the Holy Spirit, poured out on all flesh.  I invite you to dream.  All the assumptions, all the stories that people are telling themselves, the many things “everyone knows” about the future of the church need to be called into question by some active dreaming that invites the Spirit to help us see possibilities we hadn’t seen before.

   I invite you to dream, beginning with what you really do know.  We really do know that many people are busy on Sunday mornings.  Kids’ sports, dance classes, and birthday parties are on Sunday mornings.  People hike, visit relatives, and sleep in on Sunday mornings.  So why fixate on Sunday mornings?  I dream of a church that measures success by hearts transformed and lives touched, not by counting people in the pews on Sunday morning.  I dream of a church that isn’t defined by what members practice when they gather together, but by how they live when they’re apart. 

   We know that people used to participate in church because it was considered the respectable thing to do.  Which is ironic for two reasons: Jesus was pretty close to the opposite of respectable his whole life, and he saved his harshest critique for religious hypocrites.  I dream of a church that celebrates that the people who find their way into the church today aren’t there for show, or because they think they have to be there.  I dream of a church that rejoices that people are there because of a genuine desire to explore what it means to be disciples.  I dream of a church that welcomes people who are struggling with questions. 

   Another thing we know is that Jesus’ ministry was to heal, to transform the world one person at a time, one heart at a time.  I have a dream of a church that embraces healing, and that doesn’t care whether that healing happens through some other religious tradition or through secular practices such as Twelve Step groups, meditation, psychotherapy, or self-help, just as examples.  Healing of the individual leads to healing of relationships, and then to healing of families, and then schools, and then communities, and then economic structures, and then nations and then the planet – beginning with one person at a time.  I read an article in which a Christian blogger was receiving hate email telling her she isn’t a Christian because she meditates, which according to her detractors, isn’t Christian.  But Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  I dream of a church that joins hands and links arms with people of other faiths and of no faith, people doing the work of healing and justice.  I dream of a church that says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

   Do people want a church experience that’s something other than a one-way discussion?  What is possible that hasn’t occurred to your congregation because you’re so used to doing things the way you do them?  I’m not talking about organs versus guitars; that’s an old, worn-out argument.  I’m talking about more radical change.  I’m talking about aligning ourselves with like-minded people to accomplish God’s work.  I’m talking about changing our language and the way we tell stories so we don’t exclude people.  I dream of a church willing to hear God’s revelation to us through our culture and world, recognizing that the church doesn’t control the voice of God.

   There’s an old story about a shoe factory that sends two marketing scouts to an undeveloped region in the global south to study the prospects for expanding business.  One sends back a telegram saying, SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES.  The other writes back triumphantly, GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES.

   Which story are you telling yourself?  Are you allowing God to dream God’s unlimited possibilities through you? 

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Lesson: Acts 16:16-34

The Kentucky Derby was this month and as they do every year, racing fans at Churchill Downs broke into a passionate rendition of Kentucky’s state song, “My Old Kentucky Home.” It’s likely that the people who sang, “Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home” think it’s a nostalgic ode to missing the home we’ve left behind. But according to a report on NPR, Derby fans are disconnected from the song’s history. Stephen Foster wrote the song in 1852, before the Civil War. He was writing about people who were enslaved and had to leave their “happy home” in Kentucky because they’d been “sold down the river.” The phrase, “sold down the river,” has come to mean ultimate betrayal, but it comes from the slave trade. After slave importation was outlawed, people were sold from what were thought of as “slave-growing states” – yes, incredibly enough, that was a thing – like Kentucky to the cotton plantations down the Mississippi River. That was tantamount to a death sentence.

So “My Old Kentucky Home” isn’t a romantic song about home. But even Foster missed this crucial fact: There was no good place to be a slave. The sun never shines bright on slavery. Not even in Kentucky.

It’s a good reminder of how easy it is to miss something, not see something, because we don’t need to, and especially, because it might make us uncomfortable. This passage in Acts challenges us with what we might miss, what even the apostle Paul, or Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, might miss.

Paul and Silas are in Philippi where Paul is increasingly irritated by an enslaved girl who follows them everywhere. She’s possessed by “a spirit of divination,” which allowed her to tell people’s fortunes. She shows us she’s clairvoyant by shouting at Paul and Silas: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” After a few days, she gets on Paul’s nerves. He puts a stop to it by curing her. You’d think that would be a happy ending, but now Paul is in hot water. The girl’s owners were making money from her fortunetelling, and she’s no longer profitable. They have Paul and Silas arrested. They don’t come right out and say that Paul interfered with their financial self-interest; they say that their nation is threatened; their culture is threatened. “These foreigners are disturbing our city,” they argue. “They’re messing with our traditional way of life.” But what’s really at stake is their business. This is about greed. The two apostles end up badly beaten and in jail.

Locked in chains, Paul and Silas hold a late-night revival meeting, praying and singing for the other prisoners. A powerful earthquake knocks the prison off its foundations and everyone’s chains fall away. The jailer decides that taking his own life would be preferable to what the Romans will do to him, so Paul calls out to him in the darkness that all the prisoners are still there. The jailer falls to the ground, asking what he must do to be saved. He and his whole family are baptized.

This story has a tidy ending with our heroes miraculously preserved. The story serves as something of a parable. Everyone in Paul’s world knows how the Roman Empire works, which is how all empires work. Empires exploit people out of greed. They discard people they don’t believe have value. Whenever possible, they scapegoat: they find some outsider, someone different, someone of another ethnicity or religion to blame for everything that’s going wrong and turn the crowds against them. When that doesn’t work to control so-called troublemakers, they turn to violence, incarceration, or deportation.

But all that’s turned upside down with the earthquake. The prison doors burst open, and the God of Paul and Silas proves to be more powerful than any political force. The purpose of this story wasn’t to convince its readers that there’s a miraculous solution to every hardship, but to give them courage and hope that God will not be overwhelmed by empire. The story has an almost vaudevillian quality. It’s supposed to delight an audience that knows the hardship of life in the Roman Empire, people who need reminding that even in the face of that, God makes other realities possible.

This is good news. But those of us who live in earthquake country know that one earthquake isn’t always the end of the story. We’ve learned to expect aftershocks. There are a couple of aftershocks in this story, and both have to do with what’s missing, what we might not notice.

Like the way the girl who was enslaved just disappeared. Once she was no longer profitable as a fortuneteller, did her owners let her go? Did she return home? If so, was she welcomed there? Was she able to return to any semblance of a normal life? Or was she forever damaged by the experience of having been sold into slavery, living as a commodity, as property, for who knows how long? Or – was she sold down the river? We don’t know. Paul merely silenced her; he didn’t convert her. What’s going on with that; wasn’t this girl worth his time and attention? We never even learn her name. Even apostles, apparently, sometimes fail to see what their culture has taught them not to see.

The other aftershock is that although the Acts passage strongly criticizes imperial abuses, it doesn’t take the next step to offer an alternative. That is just missing. But given Jesus’ clear teaching about loving our neighbors – “Go and do likewise” – I can’t believe we’re supposed to sit around and wait for an earthquake.

This passage points to at least one timely “Go and do likewise” step: Some in government are attempting to rewrite U.S. history so that we can go on singing, “My Old Kentucky Home” unaware of the tragedy behind it, and with no motivation to change the culture that produced it. Some in government would have us pretend we don’t know about – no, have us lie about – the inequity our culture has wrought. It is only in facing these injustices that we can undo them.

I am convinced that although these apostles failed to see what their culture taught them not to see, Jesus would have seen the formerly enslaved girl. And perhaps he would have said something like, “If you abide in my word,” that is, if you love your neighbor as yourself, “you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32).

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Lakshmi Gandhi, “What Does ‘Sold Down The River’ Really Mean? The Answer Isn’t Pretty,” January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/27/265421504/what-does-sold-down-the-river-really-mean-the-answer-isnt-pretty.
NPR Staff, “Churchill Downer: The Forgotten Racial History Of Kentucky’s State Song,” May 6, 2016,
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/06/476890004/churchill-downer-the-forgotten-racial-history-of-kentuckys-state-song