This Fellow Welcomes Sinners and Eats with Them

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Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

The Pharisees and scribes complain when they see Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. In Jesus’ time, “sinners” fell into several categories. There were the people in unacceptable occupations, including tax collectors because they worked for the Romans and profited from graft and corruption. There were people who did immoral things; okay, fair enough. But you could also be a “sinner” just by being born into the wrong group; both Samaritans and Gentiles were “sinners.” Finally, there were people who didn’t keep the law to the rigorous standards of the religious elites, which included many ordinary folks who couldn’t sit around debating the finer points of religious law. The question for us is this: Putting aside these first century definitions of who was a sinner, who would you be scandalized to see having breakfast with Jesus at Denny’s? An ex-convict? Your ex-spouse? A terrorist? Someone in human trafficking? Someone currently holding elected office in the United States? The relative who made off with Grandma’s silver tea service an hour after she died, the guy who bullied you every day all through middle school? Whose name is crossed off your guest list forever? That’s who’s at the table. If you aren’t scandalized by the thought of Jesus eating with that person, then that’s not who was eating with Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t argue. He tells a story about a man with two sons. The younger son essentially tells his father he can’t wait for him to die. He wants his share of the estate now. That’s a big slap in the face even today, but even more so given the huge honor owed the patriarch of a family and the elaborate code for keeping that honor in place. The father divides the property between the two sons, no questions asked. The younger son takes the money and runs to a distant country where he spends it all on what Jesus delicately calls dissolute living. This means the older son has to support the rest of the family on two-thirds of the family resources, their mother is more vulnerable because now she only has one son, and the family is dishonored.

When he’s broke, the younger son takes a job working for Gentiles feeding hogs, which, for a Jew, is hitting bottom and then some. He “comes to himself,” but we don’t know if he’s contrite or repentant; maybe he just remembers where there are clean sheets and three meals a day. On the road home he rehearses his speech: “Just treat me like a hired hand but let me come home.” His father sees him coming. Has he been out there every day, scanning the horizon, hoping? The father runs down the road, which an honorable patriarch wouldn’t do, and before the son can spit out his speech his father has his arms around him. The son finally blurts out, “I have sinned; I am not worthy,” but the father is busy planning a celebration. He orders his servants to kill the fatted calf, a sign that the celebration is a feast for the entire village. It’s a feast to restore the family’s honor as well as a feast to restore the family’s son.

As one of my preaching students put it, if the story ended there, it would be a happy ending. But it doesn’t. We typically call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son but there’s that other son, the elder son. He’s done everything right; in his mind, he’s earned his father’s love, and he isn’t about to sit at the same table with that self-centered brat who caused his family so much grief. Right there in front of everyone, he refuses to come in the house. The father could ignore his elder’s son conspicuous absence until his guests leave, but as we’ve seen, honor doesn’t matter to this man; keeping his family together does. He goes to talk to the elder son.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that both sons have their father’s love not because they earned it, but because loving is what their father does. That is what we call grace. But if that were the end of the story, if God’s grace were the single point of the parable, then it would be the theological equivalent of both brothers’ saying, “We like to sin. God likes to forgive. What could be better?” Which, by the way, is not the gospel.

“Sin” is a loaded word, a word that has been used to label and hurt people, but sin is not a check in the demerit column made by a cranky scorekeeper God. Sin is whatever hurts our relationship with God and with each other. That’s why God hates sin: because God loves us. What the younger brother did caused serious harm to the family, even to the community. And so did what the older brother did. The older brother is just as self-interested as the younger brother when it comes right down to it. And just as lost. Both are forgiven because forgiveness means the past doesn’t have all the power in this relationship. The father is saying to the older son, “We have a different future than anything the past has led us to expect. This is the reason for the party.”

The older brother, having heard his father’s pleas, stands in the yard. Fade to black. No happy ending. Now, remember who is listening to the story. The Pharisees, and the sinners and outcasts around the table, and, of course, Christians down through the centuries. So it isn’t so much a parable without an ending as it is a parable in which the ending is left to us. Will we come home, like the younger brother? Will we come in, as the older brother was invited to do? Will we get over being scandalized by Jesus’ dinner companions, and imagine a future in which God’s love counts more than someone’s past or our own self-righteous conviction that we are the ones who are right? As Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” in The Christian Century, March 11, 1998
Gary Inrig, The Parables (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Press, 1991).
Leviticus 11:7
Isaiah 65:4, 66:17.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” March 18, 2007, http://www.fourthchurch.org/031807sermon.html.
Mary Hinkle, “Wherever you Are,” March 16, 2004, http://maryhinkle.typepad.com/pilgrim_preaching/2004/03/wherever_you_ar.html.

The Parable of the Fig Tree

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Luke 13:1-9

This passage in Luke begins with Jesus’ thoughts about “karma,” the belief that nothing either good or bad happens to a person that he does not deserve. In a nutshell, Jesus thinks karma is hogwash. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares unambiguously that God “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Here, where people are speculating about what victims of a couple of tragedies did to deserve their ill fate, his answer is “Nothing.” Tragedy is not a punishment for sin. Which is good news. Sort of.

Sort of, because Jesus uses the occasion to talk about another kind of human tragedy that could happen unless things change. He shifts the conversation: “Enough about those other guys,” he says; “what about you?” Verses 3 and 5 are particularly scary: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” We really don’t know for certain what Jesus means here, but given that he’s just dismissed the notion of karma, I believe he means that bad behavior has consequences. There are consequences to our individual and collective bad behavior, and those consequences could destroy us. In fact, they will destroy us, if we do not change.

Jesus’ “you” here is plural: “unless [you all] repent, you will all perish.” He’s speaking to the community. He follows with a parable: A landowner had a fig tree that didn’t produce and so he wants to cut it down. He complains to his gardener, “Three years, and nothing! Get rid of it!” The gardener pleads for the tree, saying, “Let me try one more year; I’ll tend it and see if I can get it to bear fruit.”

Some assume the landowner is God and the gardener is Jesus, but nowhere in Luke do we find an angry or impatient God who needs to be placated by a merciful Jesus. In Luke, God is the father waiting for his prodigal son to return; God is the woman searching all night for her lost coin and throwing a party when she finds it. So perhaps God is the gardener who is partial to unyielding fig trees, willing to loosen the soil and spread fertilizer in the hope that we may bear fruit. This parable describes a God who doesn’t give up on us, who gives us another chance, who loves us and wants the best for us.

When the gardener asks for just one more year, I don’t believe it’s a threat. It is reality. We do not have unlimited time to come to our senses, to turn and move in a new direction, to turn in God’s direction, which is all Jesus means by “repent.” I’ve sat with many grieving people who told me that their parent, sibling, or offspring died before they could make things right with the person; before they could reconcile, before they could set the record straight, before they could come to their senses. We can be so stuck on what’s happened in the past, who did what to whom and how angry or hurt we are about it, that we forget, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

As individuals, as a culture, and, yes, even as a nation and a species, we do in fact run out of time to turn things around. We really can destroy our economy, our democracy, our planet, ourselves. And yet here we are, today, not cut down. We have a little more time. We can choose fruitfulness: an act of love, an act of mercy, a work of justice, speaking up for the marginalized, caring for creation, extending time into another season. It requires a turning. A turning of the soil. A turning of the soul. Looking to the future and saying, “Wow!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Yvette Schock, http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-02/grace-or-judgment
David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=671
Nancy Rockwell, http://biteintheapple.com/siloam-and-the-fig-tree/.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973; rev’d 1993).

Couraging

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Luke 13:31-35

I saw an article announcing 14 new superhero movies to be released this year. I get the attraction. So much feels beyond our control: our government seemingly collapsing before our eyes; old alliances broken and frightening ones forged; the economy at the mercy of capricious tariffs; immigrants and refugees in danger; global poverty and climate change. Why wouldn’t folks want to sit back with a $15 bag of popcorn and feel safe, knowing that the bad guys will lose? Maybe we can’t control what’s going on in the world, but the Avengers can, and they will.

What a contrast to this story in Luke in which Jesus displays a very different kind of heroism, a different kind of courage. The Pharisees warn Jesus to go into hiding because Herod kills the people he finds inconvenient. Jesus refuses to run. He’s very direct: Go and tell that fox I’m going to keep right on healing people until I finish on the third day. Luke’s readers would understand this as a reference to resurrection; his work won’t be done until then. In the meantime, Jesus is heading into Jerusalem, knowing that spells danger.

This kind of courage, meeting a daunting or risky challenge head on without superhuman strength but just because it is the next right thing, is sometimes called “moral courage.” It isn’t that movie superheroes necessarily lack moral courage; they just don’t have the real vulnerability that goes along with it. The real human risk, the risk we non-superheroes take when we stand up to a bully or go against the majority. Think of the teen who calls his parents for a ride home from a party where there are drugs or alcohol. Think of the person who points out a remark is racist or sexist. Think of the employee who speaks up about his company’s shady business practices. Think of the judge who rules against the current administration, the rector who asks for mercy for the marginalized with the newly elected President sitting in the front pew, or the New Mexico congresswoman who holds up a sign saying, “This is not normal” at a presidential speech. Courage is vulnerability. There is the risk of ridicule, punishment, retribution, maybe even loss of job, security, or social status when you stand up for what you know is right.

Jesus has an interesting way of illustrating this in today’s passage. Under the threat of Herod the fox, you’d think he’d choose to imagine himself as a lion or some other powerful beast, or maybe something that could fly away. Instead, Jesus chooses the image of a mother hen. Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.” If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand Jesus’ lament. Jesus shows us that it is in fact the vulnerability of love that gives us courage and strength to do the next right thing. We can and will do things for those we love that we simply would not or could not do for ourselves.

As theologian Mary Daly reminds us, “Courage is … a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.” Someone else said, “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” It takes courage to make tough decisions about parenting when you’re faced with “everybody’s doing it.” It takes courage to resist our “whatever you can get away with” culture. It takes courage to stay committed when commitments aren’t valued, and it takes courage to listen to people who see the world very differently. It takes courage to look around and say, “This isn’t normal,” and then take whatever small steps you can to move toward healing, reconciliation, compassion, empathy, peace – toward what the Scriptures call shalom. Shalom is God’s “normal.”

Jesus keeps on doing what he’s doing, fox or no fox, because no matter how dire circumstances seem, how impossible the odds, how inevitable an outcome appears, nothing we or anyone else can do will thwart the love of God that gathers us like a hen gathering a brood of chicks. Nothing. Jesus invites us to stay focused on his heart full of love even for those who reject him. Focus on love, and then keep on keeping on. That’s what “couraging” looks like.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” in The Christian Century, February 25, 1986.

Mary Anne Radmacher, Courage Doesn’t Always Roar (Newburyport, MA: Conari Press, 2009).

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Center City, MN: Hazeldon, 2010).

https://www.movieinsider.com/lists/upcoming-superhero-movies-with-official-release-dates#google_vignette

Tested

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Luke 4:1-13

   Life is full of tests, some of which are official, while others are informal.  Some involve a number 2 pencil and filling in those little bubbles completely.  Some tests prove that you know the material, while others are designed to prove that you are qualified for something: a job, a license, or admission to a school.  Sometimes the connection between the test and the actual skill being tested seems tenuous but other times it’s obvious.  A driver’s test, for example.  Imagine the roads filled with drivers who never had to pass a driver’s test.  A good test needs to measure something that matters, something that shows the person taking the test will be able to hack it in the real world, not just that he or she is a good test taker. 

   If Jesus were to take a test that truly showed he could hack it as the Son of God, what would be on the test?  That’s what we find out in Luke’s version of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, a story that appears in Matthew and Mark as well.  In Luke, when Jesus was baptized, he heard the voice of God calling him God’s beloved son.  Then “filled with the Holy Spirit,” he’s led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he’s tempted “by the devil.”  There’s no explanation of who or what that means, and in our 21st century mindset, it’s easy to dismiss the whole story because of that one word, “devil.”  Scripture characterizes evil in different ways: sometimes as tendencies within us, sometimes personified as forces outside us.  When our experience is that whatever is evil is coming at us from the outside, people often have used the word “devil” as the metaphor to describe that outside force.  That is what Luke is doing here.

   So, the devil, the personification of evil as a force outside of us, tempts Jesus.  These temptations are his test.  All the devil’s temptations address the fears Jesus faces as he begins his ministry; evil gets its foothold by playing on our fears.  The first temptation is not only personal but social.  Will Jesus’ ministry be one of turning stones to bread?  He could solve world hunger!  Now, that’s tempting.  But that is not what God does. 

   The second temptation is an offer to take power over all the nations of the earth.  In this temptation, the devil is claiming he has dominion over what belongs to God alone.  So part of the test is: Whom will you serve?  Whom will you worship?  But it’s also a temptation to take political control.  Wouldn’t that solve all the world’s problems, if Jesus just took over and saved the world?  But that is not what God does.

   The third temptation is religious: Will Jesus use supernatural power to prove he is who he is, and to prove who God is?  Wouldn’t it make everything easier if God just did something so unambiguous and flashy that no one could ignore it and everyone would have to believe it?  But that is not what God does.

   In each case Jesus answers the devil with Scripture.  At the heart of each reply is Jesus’ absolute trust in – and dependence on – God for his identity and future.  God does not coerce or threaten people into believing or becoming what God intends for us to be.  God does not solve the world’s problems with magic, snap-your-finger solutions.  God changes reality through persuasion, by inviting us to love the world the way God loves us.  Jesus’ responses show us that this is the way he understands God; this is the God that Jesus trusts.

   It’s a good test, and Jesus passes.  This story is followed by Jesus’ announcement in the Nazareth synagogue about what his ministry will look like: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  Jesus will do these things not with flashy shows of power but with transforming love.  That is what God does.  That is what it takes to be the Son of God.

   This story tells us about the God Jesus trusts, as well as why Jesus doesn’t magically fix everything.  It tells us something about ourselves, too.  We, too, are invited to trust this God.  We, too, are invited to withstand the temptation to doubt that God has claimed us as God’s beloveds.  Recovering, remembering, and trusting our identity as God’s beloveds is the work of the season of Lent.  Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God.  When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force” – something like the devil described in the Luke passage – “seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life.  And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, … ‘I am God’s,’ because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.”

   We belong to God.  We are God’s beloveds.  Nothing else gets to tell you who you are. 

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Ash Wednesday 2025

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Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

What you think about Lent has everything to do with what you think about God. For me, Lent is a reset button, but because I believe that the most important thing about God is that God loves the whole world unconditionally, that reset button isn’t like a switch that turns me into someone who, during Lent, believes God thinks we’re all miserable sinners. Lent is associated with penitence; penitence is regret or sorrow for something you’ve done. There are times when penitence is not only reasonable but appropriate, but setting aside a whole season for regret and sorrow seems a little excessive.

I like the word repentance better than penitence because it’s less about feeling guilty or ashamed, and more about deciding to turn around and go in a different direction. Depending on what your life looks like, maybe it isn’t so much of an about face as it is a course correction, maybe even a subtle one. We all tend to drift. We adopt good habits and they slowly fall by the wayside. This doesn’t make us bad people; as far as I can tell it just makes us people. Still, we know there are ways of being in the world that are better for us and better for God’s world. Lent is a good season for getting ourselves back on track.

“On track with what?” might be the next logical question. Matthew tells us God doesn’t want shows of piety. Joel tells us we are to rend our hearts, to break open our hearts, not our clothing. Isn’t that the perfect way to describe loving the world the way Jesus loved it? Break open your hearts. Break open your hearts to each other, to the stranger, to the suffering in God’s world, to the healing God offers, to hope and possibility, and especially, to the hope of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

In this angry, polarized, us-against-them world, that kind of love, vulnerable love, feels especially risky. It is risky. There are no guarantees of a result that anyone would call success. And so loving as Jesus loved takes courage. As Brené Brown reminds us, courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor, the Latin word for heart.

The willingness to show up with love in this world, in 2025, takes courage. Showing up with love changes us. It makes us a little braver each time we do it. And it changes those around us. Maybe even the world. And some things are worth doing, even if we fail.

Jan Richardson’s poem, “Rend Your Heart,” is the perfect Ash Wednesday invitation to Lent:

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you

to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Transformation Is the Essence of Hope

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Luke 9:28-36

   When my father was 12, his family moved from Columbia, California in the Sierra foothills to Stockton in the Central Valley.  His family was poor and he hadn’t had much moral guidance.  His future looked pretty grim when he stumbled into the Stockton YMCA.  There, a Christian youth leader named Woody got to know my dad, and let him know he was valued in a way no one had done before.  Woody arranged for scholarships so my dad could go to Y camp at Lake Alpine in the High Sierras, and eventually invited him into leadership roles.  In a leadership initiation ritual on a High Sierra mountaintop, each boy chose a tree that represented his life.  My dad found a tree that was gnarled close to the ground.  It was probably stunted by heavy snow in its early years.  About four feet above the forest floor, the tree shot straight and tall into the sky.  My dad was 14 years old, and in choosing that tree, he was making a decision about his life, a decision that was made possible by Woody’s love.  It was a decision to love others in that same way.  It was a mountaintop experience for my dad.  It changed my dad’s life, and, I daresay, the lives of the family he’d have one day, including my life. 

   The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.  My dad wasn’t stuck with the way things had been.  We aren’t stuck with the way things are.  Our nation isn’t stuck with the way things are.  Things can change, the world can change, we can change, and this is the very purpose of the life of faith.  Transfiguration – change, transformation – is both an event in the life of Christ and a process in the life of the world.   

   The event in the life of Christ that we call the Transfiguration is described in this passage in Luke’s gospel; it’s a story we find in Mark and Matthew as well.  We hear it every year on Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent.  It’s one of those stories drenched with meaning and truth, and we aren’t supposed to get distracted by whether it’s a factual account of an historical event.  It’s called the Transfiguration because Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, but it isn’t just Jesus who is changed.  The disciples are given an utterly transforming glimpse.  They understand who Jesus is in a whole new way, and it changes everything.  It is, indeed, a mountaintop experience. 

   Encounters with the real Jesus are always transforming.  One pastor writes, “The person who knows Jesus becomes a different person.  A person who has not changed has not met Jesus.  It is that simple.  Christianity is not an intellectual belief, an acceptance of a creed or a doctrine or the particular beliefs of some particular denomination.  Christianity is a personal encounter with God, a personal contact with Jesus that makes life different.  It is a life that is transformed in the home, at the office, at school, and in … personal conduct.”

   But in what way are we to be transformed by an encounter with the real Jesus?  We see vastly different answers to that question in our culture right now.  I believe Brian D. McLaren is on the right track when he writes, “Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all.  Love was the greatest commandment, he said.  It was his new commandment, his prime directive – love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled.  …  Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else – everything.”

   Over the centuries, Christianity has been defined by a list of unchanging beliefs, beliefs that denominations fought over, and Christians killed and died for.  How utterly tragic, and how utterly ironic, when an encounter with the real Jesus reveals a life centered on love.  Many followers of Jesus are in the process of shifting from correct beliefs to practicing the ways of love that Jesus taught.  Lent is a season for practicing, training, shifting, even repentance, which simply means to turn and go in a different direction.  Lent, then, is the perfect time for practicing the way of love, trying our best to love our fellow human beings as Jesus loved.  Will we get it perfectly right?  No.  Will we be transformed by it?  Count on it.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).

Howard E. Butt, Jr., “Confessions of a Skeptic,” in The Library of Distinctive Sermons, Vol. 8 (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishing, 1998).

Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).

“Mom, Why Shouldn’t I Hit Back?”

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Luke 6:27-38

A mom in a congregation I served told me that she’d stopped one of her preteen kids from hitting her sister back. She was pretty sure that’s what Jesus would want. The girl’s response was frank disbelief, something along the lines of, “What, are you nuts? Why wouldn’t I hit back? If you don’t hit back, you’re a wimp.”

Is this our culture’s approach to problem-solving and violence in a nutshell? The mom was stumped because what the kid said kind of made sense. Hitting back, and hitting in the first place, just feel reflexive. Yet in the face of that reflex, we have Jesus’ words in this Luke passage: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” Most of us remember the translation, “Turn the other cheek.” These are perhaps some of Jesus’ most quoted but also most misunderstood words. Generally they have been understood as teaching non-resistance. In other words, be a wimp. If they hit you on one cheek, turn the other and let them batter you there too, which has been bad advice for battered women and oppressed people generally, and good news for bullies.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Biblical scholars explain that the reference to the right cheek means Jesus is saying that turning your face deprives your attacker of a second opportunity to hit you with a backhanded slap with his right hand. One reason we know this is that no ancient Middle Eastern person would strike a person with his left hand, which was used only for “unclean” activities. The backhanded slap was a sign of the hitter’s superiority and intended to humiliate the victim. As Gandhi said, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”

These cultural specifics aren’t as obvious in Luke’s version, which doesn’t mention a right cheek, only a cheek. But regardless, as Walter Wink writes, “Jesus resisted evil with every fiber of his being.” What Jesus means here is “don’t turn into the very thing you hate. Don’t become what you oppose.” As Paul put it, “Do not return evil for evil.”

It is Black History Month. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and ‘60’s was successful not because of a lack of resistance, not because the people in the movement were wimps, but because their resistance was nonviolent. It is seldom lifted up that Martin Luther King Jr. based his nonviolence on his Christian faith and Scripture, on Jesus. King said, “Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Those of us who remember the Civil Rights Movement can testify that nonviolent resistance is not the way of wimps. It requires enormous dedication, courage, and hard work, all of which may culminate in failure, including injury to or even the death of resistors.

In the 1986 movie, “The Mission,” the new Portuguese rulers of eighteenth-century South America order an attack on a local tribe and the Jesuits protecting them. It becomes a massacre. The pope’s messenger confronts a government official, saying, “You have the effrontery to tell me this slaughter was necessary?” The governor says he had no alternative. He did what he had to do. He says, “We must work in the world. The world is thus.” The papal envoy replies, “No, Señor Hontar. Thus we have made the world. Thus I have made it.”

“Mom, why shouldn’t I hit back?” Maybe the way to answer is with another question: “What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to make?”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Blessed Are the Ubuntu

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Luke 6:17-26

   A great crowd comes to Jesus to be healed of their diseases and “unclean spirits,” both of which would make these people outcasts to one degree or another.  Then Jesus turns to his disciples and describes people who are “blessed” in Luke’s version of Matthew’s Beatitudes.  Malina and Rohrbaugh explain that the underlying Greek words that are translated as “blessed” and “woe” are better understood as “How honorable …” and “How shameless ….”  To say someone was “blessed” or “honorable” in Jesus’ time was to say, “Pay attention to these people, because these are the people you should try to be like.  This is the group you want to belong to.”  This is the opposite of saying, “Woe to these people,” which means, “Pay attention: You definitely do not want to be like these people, or part of this group.” 

   Luke’s beatitudes are statements consoling and supporting the socially disadvantaged.  They’re also a reversal of who was considered honorable and shameless at the time of Jesus, and in most circles, in our time as well.  Jesus proclaims that our heroes should be the poor, the hungry, the sad and grieving, and those who stand up for what is right even if people threaten them, mock them, or exclude them.  Our heroes should not be the aggressive, the rich, those who toughen themselves against feelings of loss, those who strike back when others strike them or guard their images so they’re always popular.

   How can this make any sense to us in 2025?  In our culture right now, the poor, those working for justice and equity, those trying to exercise compassion, and those insisting that mercy is more important than wealth or power appear anything but “blessed.”

   Jesus knew a couple of things.  First, he knew that the people he described as blessed are the people who understand that we need each other.  They understand this because they have no choice but to rely on others.  God designed us to need each other; God made us to live and thrive in community.  We are blessed when we know that and live it.

   Jesus also knew that the times when we’re truly the happiest are when we help or heal people.  True happiness comes from things that don’t make people rich and famous.  For example:

Loving and raising your children.

Taking care of your aging parents.

Standing up for someone who is being bullied.

Including someone who is being left out.

Hugging someone who needs a hug.

Serving a meal to someone who is hungry.

Building homes with Habitat for Humanity.

Sitting next to someone who is lonely.

Telling the truth when other people think that lying is acceptable.

Sharing what you have with people who don’t have enough.

   An anthropologist had been studying the habits and customs of an African tribe.  When he’d concluded his research, he waited for transportation to take him to the airport for the return trip home.  To help pass the time as he waited, he proposed a game for the children who constantly followed him around during his stay with the tribe.  He filled a basket with candy and placed it under a tree, and then called the kids together.  He drew a starting line on the ground and told them that when he said “Go!” they should run to the basket.  The first to arrive there would win all the candy.

   But when he said “Go!” they all held each other’s hands and ran to the tree as a group.  When they reached the basket, they shared it.  Every child enjoyed the candy.  The anthropologist was surprised.  One of them could have won all the candy.  A little girl explained it to him: “How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?”

   The child’s wisdom reflects the African notion of “ubuntu.”  In the Xhosa culture, ubuntu means, “I am because we are.”   Archbishop Desmond Tutu described it this way: “Africans have a thing called ubuntu.  It is about the essence of being human; it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world.  It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the extra mile for the sake of another.  We believe that a person is a person through other persons, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours.  When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself.  The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.  Therefore, you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”

   Ubuntu is what Jesus is talking about in this passage.  What really makes us truly happy is helping other people be happy.  What really makes us successful is helping all people to live happy, safe, healthy lives, because “I am because we are.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).

So That They Might Live

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Luke 5:1-11

   Traditionally, this passage in which Jesus tells Simon Peter that henceforth, he will be “catching people” has been interpreted as being about evangelism.   And traditionally, evangelism has been interpreted as being about conversion to Christianity, about convincing people to become believers, and most often, specifically believers in the particular form or brand of Christianity endorsed by the evangelist.   

   I don’t believe that’s what Jesus ever meant by “catching people.”

   Let’s take a few steps back in Luke’s gospel.  In Chapter 4, Jesus announces his mission statement: to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19).  He infuriates the hometown crowd by explaining that God intends these blessings to flow to foreigners, outsiders, non-believers.  (Luke 4:21-30).  Then he heals a man who was an outcast because he was considered “unclean,” and follows that with healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.  He says he needs to keep moving, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God to other towns.  (Luke 4:30-44).  Not one word about believing the right beliefs, or believing anything for that matter. 

   In this passage in Chapter 5, Jesus has been teaching a crowd so big that he gets into a boat so there’s more room for people on the beach.  He notices that the fishermen are cleaning up after an unsuccessful night.  They’d been fishing all night, Simon tells us, and brought back nothing.  No fish, no income.  No income, the family is hungry, the breadwinner is a failure.  So when he finishes teaching, Jesus tells Simon, who will be called Peter, to go into the deep water and try again.  And they do, and their catch is so big it breaks their nets and rocks their small boats.  Jesus addresses the real needs of the real lives of these fishermen.  Their families will eat tonight.  Certainly, that got their attention. 

   And then Luke uses a Greek verb rarely used in the New Testament that means, “to catch alive.”  Fishing with nets is always a matter of catching fish alive, but those live fish will soon be dead.  By using this different verb, this “catch alive” verb, Jesus is calling Simon Peter and his partners to something different, to a new vocation of catching people so that they might live.

   So that they might live.  So that they might not go hungry.  So that they might be healed.  So that they might no longer be perceived as outcasts.  So that the poor might have good news, the oppressed go free, and everyone be on an equal footing as happens in a jubilee year (“the year of the Lord’s favor,” Luke 4:19), regardless of whether people are “believers” or religious insiders.

   In 2025, catching people so that they might live sounds more like rescue than what we think of as evangelism.  Rescue from hunger, poverty, exclusion, prejudice, and oppression through domination politics, domination religion, or any other means.

   So that they might live.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

The Hometown Crowd

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Luke 4:21-30

This passage in Luke picks up with the last verse of last week’s reading. Jesus has announced the beginning of his ministry with a reading from Isaiah promising healing for those who have been cast off by the world. At first, his audience seems pleased, even proud of the hometown boy made good. But maybe that’s why Jesus presses on. “No, you don’t get it,” it’s as if he’s saying. “When I talk about God coming to free the oppressed and bless the poor, I’m talking about God’s blessing the people you can’t stand, the people you think are your enemies.” And so he reminds them of a couple of stories where God blessed not Israel, but Israel’s enemies: the widow from Sidon, Naaman the Syrian. After that, they’re so boiling mad that they’re ready to throw him over a cliff.

Why are they so angry? Could it be that Jesus told them the truth about their own prejudices, their fear, their shame? Nobody else had the guts to tell them what Jesus told them, and us: “You won’t be able to claim God’s blessings for your life unless you claim them for other people’s lives at the same time.”

If there’s one line that sums up the Jesus we encounter in Luke’s gospel, it’s this: God came to redeem everyone. When we focus on “redeem,” it’s good news, right? When we focus on “everyone,” and call to mind those we believe have done us wrong, who frighten us, whose lives or “lifestyles” we just can’t understand, or who voted for the other candidate, that same line can be terrifying.

On the one hand, many of us would nod approvingly at the message that the grace of God is not confined to one people, one religion, or one set of creeds or doctrines. We’ve seen the destruction caused when religions and religious people become exclusive and build barriers to protect insiders and keep out the others. Christians have a long history of condemning one another to hell, excommunicating each other for heresy, and basically reading one another out of the kingdom because of our disagreements on this and that doctrine. Sadly, that history is ongoing.

On the other hand, even if it isn’t about religion, we all draw our lines somewhere. We all tend to have our ways of thinking about who’s an insider and who’s an outsider, who deserves justice, healing, and well-being, and who does not. One of the most consistent themes of Jesus’ ministry is the message that God’s love is not just for a few favorites. It starts here in the Nazareth synagogue and continues right through to the end as he persists in proclaiming and demonstrating God’s welcoming grace to the unclean, the marginalized, the foreigner – precisely those people his culture excluded. Jesus’ main concern is not who we’re letting in, but who is being left out.

It’s the kind of message that can get a guy thrown off a cliff. The hard, uncomfortable thing about the God we know in Jesus is that whenever you and I draw a line between who’s in and who’s out, we will find Jesus on the other side.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
David Lose, http://www.davidlose.net/2016/01/epiphany-4-c-moving-beyond-mending-our-walls/.