Salt and Light

February 4, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Matthew 5:13-20

It’s appropriate that on Super Bowl Sunday, we hear Jesus giving the disciples a pep talk. In Matthew 5:1-2, the two verses preceding what we call the Sermon on the Mount, we’re told that Jesus has seen a crowd, but he goes up the mountainside to teach his disciples. These words of encouragement are meant for Jesus’ disciples – his disciples then, and his disciples now.

When we hear Jesus tell the disciples they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, what we often hear, instead, is “you should be…;” you should be the salt of the earth; you should be the light of the world. But that isn’t what he says. He says “You are…” You are, already. Rather than telling us we ought to be doing something we’re not, or setting an unreachable standard that we’ll only feel guilty about, Jesus says, “You are salt. You are light.”

These ordinary images don’t point to huge, dramatic acts. It only takes a pinch of salt to turn a bland dish into a tasty meal. Even a single candle destroys the darkness. With both salt and light, a little bit makes a big difference.

We’re living in difficult, challenging times. Perhaps these are not “the worst of times,” as Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, but it can certainly feel that way some days. In the United States, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community are under siege, American citizens who protest this have been shot and killed, the rule of law is under threat, it’s unclear that we’ll have free and fair elections in the fall, and many folks are struggling to pay their bills. Today the Washington Post lost a third of its staff, further jeopardizing trustworthy reporting following budget cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Department of Justice seems to have been relegated to the role of personal attorneys of the Administration. I could go on and on. So could you.

What difference can a pinch of salt and a small flashlight make in all this?

I recently finished a book by author Sharon McMahon, who is known as “America’s history teacher.” The book, The Small and the Mighty, is about ordinary American citizens who didn’t make it into our textbooks but who, through small acts of courage, determination, and commitment to the ideals we claim we value as Americans, brought about more justice, more equality, more freedom, more peace. As one review puts it, “Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers.”

McMahon’s book is a corrective to our assumption that things change for the better only when the rich and powerful act. Each of the people she describes simply does “the next needed thing.”

That is the salt and light Jesus has in mind. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your God in heaven.” (Mathew 5:16) When we have compassion for people – our families, our co-workers, the person who mows your lawn, the person who cleans your office – their lives improve. When we serve, the world improves. When we do the next needed thing in our own corner of the world, we heal that corner. We gather in community so that we can get encouragement and support in figuring out what that next needed thing is. But we are salt. We are light. Where we are, loving our neighbors as Jesus loves, we change the world around us.

What Does God Want?

January 26, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Lesson: Micah 6:1-8

Those of us who preach regularly, who interact with Scripture regularly, usually end up with some favorite passages, touchstones that shape our faith. Micah 6:1-8 is one of mine, and in particular Micah 6:8:

God has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

If you’ve ever wondered what God wants, there it is. Right there in black and white. One simple yet powerful verse. Bam!

In earlier chapters, the prophet Micah explains that God is unhappy with the way God’s people have been living. Micah spoke to the Southern Kingdom of Israel, called Judah, in the 8th century B.C.E. Micah saw that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. More than that: the rich were getting richer because the poor were getting poorer. Those with land and power foreclosed on the small plots of land held by farmers. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, while many others were driven into poverty. Compassion and mercy were in short supply, but pious people just went on “worshiping” as though nothing important was happening around them. People went through the right motions, but their hearts were hard and their faces turned away from the suffering of those around them.

Sound familiar?

So, in Chapter 6, the prophet envisions a gigantic courtroom where the people are being called on the cosmic carpet. The prophet calls upon the mountains, the ancient witnesses to all of Israel’s history, to serve as the jury and listen to the case against Judah. The people have become “wearied” by God, which probably means that they’ve become tired of following God’s moral demands. God reminds them of the exodus from Egypt and the deliverance from the hands of the Moabite Balak as evidence that God has delivered on all the divine promises. Judah has no grounds for defense.

Judah doesn’t admit guilt or ask for forgiveness but rushes quickly to “Okay, okay; how can I fix this?” “What do I have to do, God? Just tell me. I’ll do whatever it takes. Burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, tens of thousands of rivers of oil?” The defendant can tell that all this still isn’t enough and in desperation, offers his first-born child. “Will that take care of it? Is that what you want?”

But of course, that is not what God wants.

The people of Judah want to fix their relationship with God by doing things that show on the outside but don’t necessarily change them on the inside into people who care about the person standing right in front of them. Is Micah saying worship isn’t important? No. The people are already worshiping. What Micah is saying is something along the lines of that old adage: Sitting in a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car. He’s saying that our faith should show in our lives, every day, in every encounter, not only in how we spend Sunday morning.

Micah tells the people they’ve missed the point. God wants and requires nothing less than that they live into their covenant with God. In other words, God wants them to become decent human beings. Micah boils this down to three basics: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

I worked with an associate pastor who used to say, “It’s all that simple, and it’s all that hard.” That certainly applies here.

“Love kindness” might seem like the easiest of the three but it’s more than being “nice.” The Hebrew word which most Bibles translate as kindness is hesed, and it can mean mercy, charity, or compassion. Walter Brueggemann wrote that there is a covenantal and community element here that the word “kindness” doesn’t capture. Christine Pohl writes, “Kindness is far more than a single or random action; it is part of a way of life characterized by moral attentiveness that is both respectful of – and helpful to – others. Kindness involves a recognition of our common humanity and frailty that leads us to care about each person’s particular well-being and to treat him or her as deserving of generous response and respect.” I would summarize this, “Treat everyone you meet as though they are a child of God – because they are.”

“Doing justice” is tough for a couple of reasons. For starters, people have a hard time agreeing what justice is. Our politically polarized nation is dramatic proof of this. And besides that, it is so easy to feel overwhelmed. Brueggemann wrote that to “do justice” means to be actively engaged in the redistribution of power in the world, to correct the systemic inequalities that marginalize some for the excessive enhancement of others.” Yikes. That is a big, big job. Can any of us do enough?

Which points us to the third on Micah’s list of requirements: Walk humbly with your God. To “walk humbly with God” means to abandon our sense of self-sufficiency; to understand we can’t do what we need to do alone; we need other people and more importantly, we need God. Walking humbly can be a means to doing justice. By acknowledging that our views are a partial expression of gospel truth – as are the views of those who disagree with us – we make room for the other in our midst. Walking humbly also means understanding that we really can do only so much. When you bang your head against institutional inertia long enough you figure out that systemic change doesn’t happen without the personal transformation of others within the system, and sometimes we can’t just make that happen. Sometimes we have to trust in the grace of a merciful God. So walking humbly with God might mean saying the Serenity Prayer and asking ourselves the question, “What’s worth doing even if we fail?”

That is where many of us find ourselves these days. It helps to have a North Star, an orientation to keep us putting one foot in front of the other: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. It’s all that simple. And it’s all that hard.

Resources:
Walter Brueggemann, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly Gaventa and James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year A, James D. Newsome, ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).
Christine Pohl, “Recovering Kindness: An Urgent Virtue in a Ruthless World, in The Christian Century, October 18, 2012, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-10/recovering-kindness.
Scott D. Anderson, “Living By the Word,” in The Christian Century, January 30, 2011, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-01/sunday-january-30-2011.
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly (New York: Gotham Books, 2012).

What’s Really Awful

January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

This morning the New York Times reports, “After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/us/politics/white-women-conservatives.html?searchResultPosition=1). The term, an acronym, is AWFUL, which stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Okay, first let’s note that demonizing someone who was killed, regardless of whether you agree with her politics, is despicable. In fact, despicable doesn’t capture this; I really can’t find a word strong enough to express my dismay at this kind of heartlessness. Really, people: The children are watching.

But the other matter to note is that once again, women who speak up, show up, and expect to be taken seriously are being targeted with a derisive term. Women who speak up are called AWFUL, Libtard, Feminista, just to name a few of the insults listed on Wikipedia’s 57 pages worth of pejorative terms for women. Significantly, this isn’t a solely right-wing problem; not long ago a conservative woman couldn’t speak her mind without being labeled a “Karen.” These derisive names communicate, “Women need to shut up. Women who do speak up are worthy of contempt and scorn.”

I claimed the label “feminist” when I was a teenager in the late 1960’s. I continue to claim the term whether it’s intended as a compliment or an insult. I agree with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that we should all be feminists. Feminism merely advocates for equity between men and women. It does not seek to reverse gender roles or make men inferior. So, it disheartens me that our society persists in a blind and nearly unconscious demeaning of women who want to be heard, who have something to say, who ought to be taken as seriously as their male counterparts – regardless of whether you agree with them. No wonder we haven’t been able to elect a woman as U.S. President. Something deep in the core of our culture tells us women should remain silent, and if they do speak up, they should be ridiculed.

By the way, in contrast, Wikipedia offers 30 pages of pejorative terms for men. Most of them attack a man’s masculinity, which is equally tragic given that cultural norms of masculinity haven’t really proven to be helpful in recent decades, or, perhaps, centuries. As far as I can tell, however, few if any of these derisive terms for men are intended to silence them.

How long, O Lord?

Come and See

January 15, 2026 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

John 1:29-42

“Come and see,” Jesus says to Andrew and another disciple of John the Baptist. The two men hear John say that Jesus is the Lamb of God. They begin to follow him, probably watching him as he teaches, heals, and goes about his ministry. When Jesus notices them, he asks, “What are you looking for?” Instead of answering his question, they ask their own: “Teacher, where are you staying?” What they mean is, “Where can we find you?” Not only do they want to follow Jesus today; they want to be able to find him tomorrow. In response, Jesus invites them to “Come and see.” A better translation might be, “Keep on coming and you will see!” This is an invitation to the two disciples, but it’s also an invitation to the later readers and hearers of John’s Gospel. It’s an invitation to continue to read and interact with the story in order to see, in order to experience and understand and be touched by God through Jesus. It’s an invitation to us, and to anyone else who encounters Jesus, in the Gospel or in the church.

“Come and see.” The invitation is open and welcoming. At this point, Jesus doesn’t say, “Who do you think that I am?” He doesn’t say, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” He doesn’t say, “Are you really ready to accept me as your Lord and Savior?” He doesn’t even say, “Wait a minute; you didn’t answer my question. I asked what you’re looking for.” He certainly doesn’t try to sign them up to work on a committee (you’ll understand this reference if you’re Presbyterian). He says, “Come and see.” He doesn’t tell them that they should already know anything or that they should already be something before they become his disciples. He accepts them where they are and invites them to go from there.

In his book about the post-modern church, Jim Kitchens writes, “More and more of the people who are coming into our churches today either have never been to church before or haven’t been to worship since they were first able at age 13 or so to resist their parents’ demand that they attend.” When I began seminary, a close friend who’d never had anything to do with church asked me, “So, will you keep practicing law during the week since church is only on Sundays?” I guess she thought sermons are extemporaneous (they are not; at least not for me). She had no clue that being part of a church community means being visited when you’re ill, comforted when you’re grieving, and counseled when you’re confused, or that, all week long, congregations offer fellowship that builds community and service that extends God’s love beyond the doors of the church building. We can’t assume that people who find their way to our sanctuaries on Sunday morning know any of this. Just as Jesus didn’t tell the two men that they were asking the wrong question or try to bring them back to his question, a gentle, “Come and see” will encourage questions and provide ways of working out answers.

A woman I’ll call Sharon told me her “Come and see” story. She’d attended church and Sunday school as a child, but it had been years since she’d had anything to do with organized religion. She was in a choir at her community college, and the choir director kept inviting her to his church. He said, “The people are really nice; you’d really like them.” Sharon said to me, “I thought, ‘Whoop-dee-do.’ Lots of people are really nice. People at the Rotary, in the P.T.A.; you don’t have to go to church to find really nice people.”

Sharon’s college choir was scheduled to give a joint concert with another campus choral group, and one week before the concert, the other group flaked out. It looked as though the concert would have to be cancelled, but the choir director, the one from the church with really nice people, invited the choir from his church to fill in for the missing choral group. Sharon said they learned the music quickly and performed cheerfully. And they were good. And they were nice.

Sharon decided to check out the church but instead of attending worship she took part in the church’s ministry of providing meals to homeless people. Sharon said, “These were people who were walking the walk.” She got to know some of these people better, working alongside them. She remembers that one evening as she was putting sandwiches on trays, a passage from Matthew’s Gospel came to her – the one that says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). It hit her – that was what she was doing. She was serving Christ as she was serving the homeless people.

Then the choir director invited the college choir to sing at his church’s Good Friday service. Sharon sang with the choir and then stayed for the service. She’d never been to a Good Friday service. She was surprised at how moving it was; somehow, in the message of the cross, God’s love and faithfulness became real to her in a new way. Two days later, of course, was Easter. It just seemed natural to go to worship on Easter after Good Friday. And the rest, Sharon said, is history. She started attending worship regularly. It made it easier that she already knew people through the choir and through the homeless ministry. She became more and more active and pretty soon it was “her” church.

Is a story like Sharon’s still possible in 2026? We live not just in a post-modern era, but in a post-Christian era. For many good reasons, people mistrust religious institutions and are suspect of Scripture. As Mark Glanville writes, “terms such as evangelical and biblical have been co-opted by racist and nationalistic expressions of Christianity.” People wonder whether organized religion makes any rational sense and whether any Christian church could reflect their own values of justice and compassion. At the same time, people long for community. They long for acceptance, and hope – they long for communities that nourish hope.

If we in the church say, “Come and see,” what will we show people? Will their curiosity be encouraged? Will their doubts be met with humility and grace? Will they see the tenderness, the acceptance, the passion for justice and the love of Christ?

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, “The Second Sunday After Epiphany/The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time,” in New Proclamation, Year A (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
Jim Kitchens, The Postmodern Parish (Herndon, VA:2003).
Mark Glanville, Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Communities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2025).

Baptism of the Lord

January 8, 2026 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Matthew 3:13-17

Many commentators argue that this passage about Jesus’ baptism in Matthew is exactly that: it’s about Jesus’ baptism, not baptism in general, not our baptism. The point of the passage, they say, is Jesus’ identity, and God’s affirmation of that identity. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

John the Baptizer looks and sounds like an Old Testament prophet. He does what all the Old Testament prophets did: he reminds the people of God who God is and what God expects of them. The reason he’s doing this out in the wilderness is because his message is countercultural; it’s basically a protest against the religious establishment. Ritual cleansing wasn’t anything new, but it always happened in Jerusalem, in holy baths near the Temple. By baptizing ordinary folks out in the wilderness, John is saying that traveling to a fancy building in the big city isn’t what makes people holy. The message accompanying his baptism is, “Repent!” which isn’t as scary as it sounds. It simply meant “rethink everything,” or “turn completely around in your thinking and your values.” As protest so often is, John’s message was both a warning and a ray of hope. He confronted the powerful with their hypocrisy at the same time that he said to ordinary folks, “Look, things don’t have to be this way. God doesn’t want them to be this way for you, the 99%.”

Jesus shows up at the river and that all by itself tells us a couple of things. Jesus identifies with John’s countercultural protest, and he identifies with these ordinary folks. John objects that Jesus is the one who should be baptizing him, and the early church struggled with the questions John raises: Why would Jesus need a baptism for forgiveness of sin? Why would he submit to baptism by a merely human prophet and teacher? Matthew links Jesus’ baptism to the fulfillment of righteousness (Matthew 3:15). In the Old Testament, “righteousness” isn’t limited to moral uprightness; it’s relational. Abraham was considered righteous not because he was morally flawless, but because he trusted God (Genesis 15:6). John’s baptism with its call to repentance is a step toward restoring a person’s relationship with God; that is, a step towards becoming “righteous” again. Jesus is “fulfilling all righteousness” by coming to be baptized in solidarity with the folks God sent him to heal, to feed, to serve, to save. He gets right into that muddy water along with everybody else.

We don’t know what it means that “the heavens were opened to him” except that it’s far from ordinary. Something like a dove – not like a lion or an eagle or a hawk or a viper – a dove, representing God’s Spirit, lands on him, and a heavenly voice, presumably God’s, announces, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

In each of the four gospels, the story of Jesus’ baptism includes the giving of the Spirit, and in three of them there is this voice from heaven pronouncing that Jesus is God’s beloved Son, a child with whom God is most pleased. Whatever else Jesus’ baptism may mean, it’s certainly the place where he learns who he is and whose he is. At his baptism, Jesus is given the intertwined gifts of identity and affirmation.

Which is why even though this passage is about Jesus’ baptism, it is also about our baptism. Today, the world tries to identify us by political party, race or ethnicity, gender identity, immigration status, or even by the products we buy and the brand labels we wear on our clothing. But those who follow Jesus are baptized into him, into his life. We get into the muddy river with him, and this means that somehow, some way we share his identity, or maybe a better way to put it is that when we are in Christ, we discover who we really are. We may not see a descending dove, but what’s declared in baptism is our true identity: You are my child. You are beloved, and well-pleasing to God. You are worthy. That is our primary identity.

Further, Jesus is baptized before he begins his public ministry. This gift of identity precedes mission, and this is true for us as well. It’s when we know who we are, how worthy we are, whose we are, that we are able to make good choices, to resist what we know isn’t really good for us, or what isn’t good for the world God has given us.

This message has never been more timely. We live in a culture that promises acceptance only if we are (fill in the blank here) skinny enough, smart enough, strong enough, successful enough, rich enough, popular enough, beautiful enough, young enough, and so on. But the message of baptism is that God has declared that we are enough, that God accepts us just as we are, and that God desires to do wonderful things for us and through us.

It isn’t that we’re worthy because we’ve been baptized. One of the reasons Presbyterians practice infant baptism is that it expresses that before we can do anything, God claims us. We don’t have to believe something, recite any creeds, accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior – we don’t have to do anything at all to be declared worthy of God’s love. We’re worthy because we belong to God. The unbaptized also belong to and are loved by God, but they haven’t had a public opportunity to announce and celebrate that fact, or to be reminded of its implications by a community. We all need a community that knows that we are worthy for no other reason than that we belong to God. It’s so easy for us to forget or doubt these claims when we’re hounded by messages of “not enough.”

Remember your baptism. It tells you who you are.

The Word Became Flesh

December 31, 2025January 1, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

John 1:1-18

This time last year I blogged about the traditional Epiphany passage in Matthew’s gospel (https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/12/30/which-story/). This year I’m drawn to Sunday’s lectionary passage from John’s gospel, commonly referred to as the Prologue to John’s Gospel. What I’m writing here is a work in progress for me because I’m still developing my thinking around this, but what fascinates me is, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

John’s gospel begins with, “In the beginning…,” reminding us of verse 1 of Genesis Chapter 1, the first creation story and the very first words in Scripture. John intends for us to make this connection but then changes it up: “In the beginning was the Word,” or in the Greek, the Logos. The Logos is God’s creating and speaking power, always with God, through which God created everything. Remember in Genesis where God speaks, and it is so? That’s the Logos, the Word of God. When John tells us that this Word of God became flesh and lived among us, he is describing the Incarnation, the belief that the Word of God existed with God from the beginning and became a human being, Jesus Christ, who lived among us, giving us the best picture of who God is and what humankind can be.

I am drawn to this text because of some reading I’ve been doing (as well as reading I continue to do and plan to do; thus the work in progress) about the Christian faith and anthropocentrism or “human supremacy.” On the recommendation of a dear friend, I read Daniel Quinn’s 1992 book, Ishmael, a philosophical novel exploring our cultural biases that Earth was created for humanity, and that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. Once you’ve noticed this bias, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the catastrophic consequences for humankind, other species, and the environment that follow. Quinn posits that at one time, humans were just one of the many creatures inhabiting Earth, living as part of Creation, but we’ve stepped outside of the natural order of things. We’ve given ourselves the power to decide what is right and wrong for all life, and what is “right” generally means what we human beings want or believe we need, without regard for other species or the sustainability of the planet. In a nutshell, we behave as though the Earth belongs to us, and this has led to the problems we face such as global warming, mass species extinctions, food shortages, and overpopulation.

Quinn is not alone in this concern. Among other writers, Christian author Thomas Berry discusses this issue in his book, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth (2009). Ecologist Derrick Jensen tackles this concern head on in his book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016).

What does this have to do with John’s prologue? Verse 5 states, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” Cody J. Sanders challenges us to take this verse seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation. He writes, “This may very well open our perspective – as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing – to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.” He notes that Margaret Daly-Denton reminds us that the Word becomes flesh, not man. Daly-Denton writes, “’The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’” In a similar vein, Mary Coloe writes, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.” Sanders continues, “While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.”

It’s heavy stuff, right? But what we have been doing – treating Creation as though it belongs to humanity as opposed to treating humanity as though it is part of Creation – isn’t working. In Genesis 1:28, God tells the as-yet-unnamed first human beings, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” One could argue that a literal reading of this verse supports a conclusion that humankind is supposed to be in charge of all life on the planet. The simple fact that this hasn’t worked well for humanity or any other part of Creation weighs against such a literal reading; could anyone believe that God wants environmental degradation or catastrophe?

So what if, instead, we take Psalm 24:1 literally?
“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it.”

And what if the Word became flesh, “a far broader reality than humanity”?

Resources:
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (New York: Orbis Books, 2009)
Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016)
Cody J. Sanders,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-11

Christmas in the Days of King Herod

December 24, 2025December 18, 2025 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Matthew 2:13-23

On the Sunday after Christmas, we hear the story of how King Herod was so threatened by an infant who was supposed to be the King of the Jews that he took the drastic and horrific step of murdering children he knew had to be innocent. Even though I know this story is coming up in the lectionary, I agree with David Lose, who writes, “I feel just a little cheated, that Christmas has been abruptly shortened and that we have been shortchanged.” Couldn’t we have one more Sunday of carols and angels – angels who aren’t warning of impending disaster?

Each gospel has its own character, and scholars have found all sorts of clues that point to Matthew’s gospel having been written for Jewish Christians. Much of what we read in Matthew is there to support the ancient prophecies and connect Jesus with the lineage of King David. This passage not only shows how Jesus fulfilled the ancient prophecies, it also ties Jesus’ birth and life into the defining story for the Jews and their relationship with God: the Exodus.

In the Exodus story, Pharaoh ordered the death of all the baby boys born to the Hebrew slaves, because the Hebrews were becoming so numerous that they threatened the security of the kingdom, much as Herod felt threatened. Moses, like Jesus, was spared the fate of his generation when he was left in the basket among the bulrushes to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter (Exodus 2:1-10). Moses, like Jesus, grew to be the savior and liberator of his people; they were not only “saved from,” they were “saved for.” They were saved so that they could save their people.

After killing a man who was overseeing enslaved Hebrews, Moses escapes with his life. God instructs him to, “Go back to Egypt, for those who were seeking your life are dead” (Exodus 4:19). This is almost word for word the same as the passage in Matthew. After King Herod dies, an angel appears to Joseph, saying, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead” (Matthew 2:20).

But there’s a reversal. In the Exodus story, Moses and the Hebrews escape from Egypt to the promised land of Israel, while in this story, Jesus and his parents escape from Israel to Egypt. This signals a more important reversal, which is what all these parallels are pointing to in the first place: In the Matthew story, the cycle of retaliation and violence is broken.

Violence is a cycle. How many of you have told your child to quit hitting her sister only to hear, “But she hit me first!”? You hit me so I hit you. You hurt me, so I hurt you. It is the oldest, most primitive approach to justice: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The only problem is, as someone has observed, pretty soon the whole world is blind and toothless. Violence begets violence. Hurt people hurt people. A child from a violent home beats up the neighborhood kids. A bullied teenager takes an automatic weapon to school. A tyrant who rules with violence must fear he will be violently overthrown.

This story in Matthew shows us a new way. In the Exodus story, God retaliated for the violence against the Hebrews by sending the angel of death to methodically kill each firstborn son in each Egyptian household. But here in Matthew, God does not retaliate against Herod, but rather, offers us a new way. God resists the evil of retaliation by taking human form, and joining in solidarity with suffering creation as Jesus, the Christ, who brings with him the good news that the chain of retaliation is not inevitable; the cycle of violence can end. In his teaching, and in his very life, Jesus taught that the law of limited retaliation, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, doesn’t go far enough, because what the kingdom of God calls for is the law of unlimited love. This is the Savior who says love not only your neighbor, but also your enemy (Matthew 5:44). This is the Savior who challenges us to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:38-39). This is the Savior who refused to abandon this radical approach to love and even died for it as a way of showing us that the most important thing we need to know about God is that God loves the whole world and every one of us that much.

Besides the reversal of retaliation and the fulfillment of prophecies, there may be another reason Matthew messed up the Christmas story with dread, pain, and horrific loss. December may be a time of festive celebration, but it is also a time when students at Brown University and Jews celebrating Hanukkah on a beach in Australia were killed by gunmen. A beloved movie director and his wife were tragically murdered, apparently by their drug-addicted son. In addition to the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Israel-Palestine, the website World Population Review lists 37 other nations embroiled in violence caused by civil war, terrorist insurgencies, drug wars, or ethnic conflict. Non-white immigrants in this country are being terrorized by ICE. About one in seven U.S. households – 47.4 Americans – is food insecure, and food insecurity rose sharply in November of this year. The climate crisis is accelerating at a dizzying pace, and the planet is losing species at a rate between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.

We are a long, long way from peace on earth, goodwill to all. Whether or not the events in this story took place, and many scholars doubt that they did, the story reminds us of what we already know because we have seen it in real life: the most vulnerable suffer when the most powerful are irresponsible. We live in a time when all is not yet well, and we know it. Shannon Kershner writes that Matthew “must have felt it would be important for us to see and realize that Christmas, the birth of Jesus, is not just about God coming to be with us in the middle of joyful celebrations. Rather, by inserting ‘the days of King Herod’ into Jesus’ birth narrative every chance he got, Matthew wanted to make sure we would see and realize that Christmas is also about God coming into the midst of the worst places, into the most dangerous of times, and into the most painful circumstances of life in order to share in the suffering, to share in the tragedy, to share in the sorrows with us, beside us.” Maybe God becoming flesh is not “I have come to save you from suffering and pain,” but rather, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”

Matthew invites us to lean into, live toward God’s love for all of God’s creation, and lean away from the days of King Herod. And to trust that “Emmanuel,” God with us, means God is with us even in the darkest days we might face.

Resources:
Diane G. Chen, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-matthew-213-23-7
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-matthew-213-23-6
Shannon Kershner, https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2015/010415.html
David Lose, https://www.davidlose.net/2016/12/christmas-1-a-just-in-time/
Eugene Park, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-matthew-213-23-8
Purdue Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability, https://ag.purdue.edu/cfdas/data/food-insecurity-in-the-united-states-increased-in-2025/
Herman C. Waetjen, The Origin and Destiny of Humanness (San Rafael, CA: Crystal Press, 1976)
World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-currently-at-war.

We Need a Little Christmas

December 19, 2025 / cjwhitt / 2 Comments

Luke 2:1-20

This Advent my earworm has been, “We Need a Little Christmas,” from the musical, “Mame.” I don’t actually like the musical “Mame,” although I love the 1958 movie, “Auntie Mame,” starring Rosalind Russell. Mame loses her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and tries her hand at a variety of jobs for which she’s hilariously ill-suited. She maintains her good humor and sense of style but finally seems to be coming to the end of her options, and that’s when she suggests they go ahead and start celebrating Christmas even though it’s weeks away. In the musical version, Mame sings:

“Haul out the holly;
Put up the tree before my spirit falls again.
Fill up the stocking,
I may be rushing things, but deck the halls again now.
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute …”

This year more than many other years, I’ve had that same impulse. We need a little Christmas. Something cozy and familiar and reassuring. The distraction and gaiety of decorations and parties and all the preparations, but even more, the warmth of family and friends, the comfort of home. Not just the daily news, not only recent tragedies but life in general wears us out. We’ve had enough realism. We need a little Christmas, now.

So, we read the old story, the gorgeous poetry of Luke’s gospel; I choose to read from the King James. The archaic words work as a kind of salve: “And they were sore afraid.” The thing is, as beautiful and familiar as the words of this story are, Luke didn’t intend for his readers to picture a tidy Hallmark card when they heard it. Cozy wasn’t his goal. He was actually going after something completely different, to quote Monty Python. He was going for unexpected.

I don’t know of a better illustration of this than the video entitled, “An Unexpected Christmas,” produced by St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand. All the roles are played by children, but it’s way too slick to call a pageant; great costumes, camera work, script, music, and their New Zealand accents are adorable, especially when they say “baby.”

The video begins as God looks down from heaven’s balcony, shaking his head at what he sees on earth. God says it’s time to step in. God’s warrior angels (there’s Biblical support for warrior angels) suggest sending an army but God says, no, maybe just one person. An angel in big round glasses says, “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!” The angels then say if it’s one person, it needs to be someone very powerful and strong. “No,” says God, “they’ll be going as a newborn baby.” “A newborn baby?” screech the warrior angels in disbelief. “Brilliant!” says the bespectacled angel again. “They won’t be expecting that.” And so it goes. This baby won’t be born to a great ruler or a mighty king, but to a peasant girl. And this won’t be just any baby, but God’s son. Born not in a palace, but in a stable, surrounded by animals and animal smells. The angels will be allowed to sing a welcome, but not to kings, only to some shepherds, the folks at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. At each decision, someone says, “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!”

This is precisely what Luke intended. “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!” Although Luke’s version is much edgier. Luke dares to mention the secular rulers of the time, Augustus Caesar and Cyrenius, for a reason. Luke wants us to see the contrast between the power of the Roman Empire and the power of God through Christ. What people wanted was a king who would unify the nation, rally the troops, and drive out the occupying forces. That’s what a Messiah is supposed to do, right? But the power of God does not look like the power of Rome. When the angels sing of peace on earth, they’re raising a question: Is it the Emperor in Rome and his Pax Romana who will bring you peace, or is it God? Is it human power – power that is external and coercive – or is it God’s power – the power of vulnerable love?

Frederick Buechner describes the difference between God’s power and human power this way: “By applying external pressure, I can make a person do what I want him to do. This is [human] power. But as for making him be what I want him to be, without at the same time destroying his freedom, only love can make this happen. And love makes it happen not coercively, but by creating a situation in which, of our own free will, we want to be what love wants us to be. And because God’s love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom … we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this the greatest of all powers, God’s power, is itself powerless.”

That takes us out of comfy-cozy into alarming territory, doesn’t it? It is downright scary to be told by God, “This is the way to achieve real peace: by being as vulnerable with each other, as dependent on each other as an infant; by treasuring each other the way a newborn is treasured. By loving each other the way I love you.” But what’s scarier still are the consequences of our refusal to love each other, which we can see all around us. And when I say “love” I’m talking about the way we act toward each other, not some fuzzy feeling.

We need a little Christmas. Right this very minute. We need the message that God comes to us in a vulnerable baby born to nobody parents in a backwater village, in a stable surrounded by mess and bad smells, with “no crib for a bed,” and the first people to hear about it, those shepherds out on a hillside, are the kind of people you’d never invite to dinner and you’d pray your daughter wouldn’t marry.

John Harvey, one of the poets at the Iona Community, came up with the best description I’ve found of the Christmas we all need. Harvey wrote:

On this night of the year, a voice is speaking – can we hear it?

‘I know the cares and the anxious thoughts of your hearts.
I know the hard time you often give yourselves.
I know the hopes and ambitions that you have for yourselves and for others.
I know your doubts, too – even while you seek to express your belief.
On this night, I want to find a way of saying to you:
You are deeply, deeply loved,
just as you are, forgiven, loved
and challenged to be the very best you can be.
So I’m speaking to you the only way I know how –

from a stable,
in a child born into poverty
soon to grow to maturity,
born to show you
in a human life,
the love of God.’

Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that.
Merry Christmas, everyone.

Resources:
“We Need a Little Christmas,” from, “Mame,” music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, (1966).
“An Unexpected Christmas,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY
Frederick Buechner, “The Power of God, the Power of Man,” in The Magnificent Defeat (New York: HarperCollins, 1966).
John Harvey, “You Are Deeply, Deeply Loved,” in Candles and Conifers, Ruth Burgess, ed. (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2005).
Re: Warrior angels: Michael the archangel seems to be a warrior angel (Revelation. 12:7) who does battle (Daniel 10:13, 21; 12:1).

The Other Christmas Story

December 16, 2025December 16, 2025 / cjwhitt / 2 Comments

Matthew 1:18-25

This Sunday we hear Matthew’s Christmas story. The trip to Bethlehem for the census, no room at the inn, the manger, the angels and shepherds – most of what we associate with Christmas pageants is found in Luke’s gospel, and Mary is definitely the star of that show. In Matthew’s gospel, however, the spotlight is on Joseph. It’s a more adult story, not easily translated into to a pageant script.

However, to get there, we need to get past a controversial doctrine that jumps out at us in verse 18. Some people struggle with the notion of a virgin birth; others struggle with the fact that there are Christians who don’t believe in it. I’ll say three things about the virgin birth: First, esteemed Biblical scholars and theologians disagree about it. They do agree it serves to tie Jesus’ birth to the Isaiah passage quoted in Matthew 1:23 (Isaiah 7:14), or at least to the Greek translation of that passage. The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) translates the Hebrew word for “young woman” in Isaiah as “virgin.” Second, I agree with the angel in Luke’s Christmas story that nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37). And third, whether you believe the virgin birth is fact or myth isn’t nearly as important as understanding the point, which is that in Jesus, God was doing something completely new. Neither Mark nor John’s gospel nor the apostle Paul in all his letters thought it was important enough to mention the virgin birth, or any birth, for that matter, and this tells us that different communities of believers were able to preach and write about Jesus without making the virgin birth an article of faith about him.

So, with that messy question moved aside, let’s turn to Joseph and his mess. Elsewhere in Scripture, people refer to Jesus as Joseph’s son (John 6:42). This relationship is important to Matthew, who wrote his gospel primarily for Jewish Christians. It is through Joseph that Jesus is a descendent of King David. The way Matthew tells it, Joseph chooses to be Jesus’ father; that is the focus of his Christmas story.

Nazareth was a small town. Joseph probably noticed Mary among the marriageable girls and asked her parents for her hand in marriage. It’s likely that they all went to see a rabbi and made a contract. Mary and Joseph were betrothed, or engaged, or espoused, depending on your translation; they were legally married but hadn’t moved in together. They’d begin living together after the wedding, which would be a major event in the life of the community, a week-long party of eating, drinking, and dancing.

Then Mary turns up pregnant. A contract has been violated; a law has been broken. This was serious not only for Mary but for everyone around her. The first century Mediterranean world was an “honor-shame culture.” Honor had to do with your value in the society; it had nothing to do with wealth but rather with reputation, with your ability to do what you need to do to belong, to interact with others in a way that brings you and your group honor. Keeping your honor was like an ongoing contest. You could lose your honor in any social interaction. And to lose your honor was to be shamed.

If Joseph accepts Mary, that will cause him shame. If he pretends the child is his, that, too, is shameful because Mary is pregnant before the wedding. Mary’s news is a huge threat to Joseph’s honor. Matthew says Joseph is a righteous man, which means he is a man who follows Jewish law. Joseph decides to divorce Mary quietly rather than subject her to public humiliation. God’s whole daring plan is suddenly at risk. All pretty adult stuff, right? Marriage contracts, shame, what you can and can’t do before the wedding?

Then Joseph has a dream. “Do not be afraid, Joseph, to take Mary for your wife, for the child is from the Holy Spirit.” William Willimon quips that while there’s a lot art depicting the angel announcing to a serene Mary that she is with child, there is little art focused on Joseph’s dream: “Joseph bolting upright in bed, in a cold sweat after being told his fiancée is pregnant, and not by him, and he should marry her anyway.”

“Do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife,” said the angel. I don’t think it’s possible not to be afraid in a situation like this. I think we make too little of this story and don’t give Joseph enough credit if we simply hold him up as a model of what faithful obedience looks like, as though there’s a simple formula: God speaks; humans are supposed to respond in faith the way Joseph did; now everything is hunky dory. It just isn’t that simple. I don’t believe we’re supposed to think of Joseph and Mary as figures in a stained-glass window. The whole point of the Christmas story – that God is with us as one of us – is that God is with real people in their real, complicated, messy lives. I can’t hear this story without identifying with the sense of betrayal, the disappointment, the shame and a host of other emotions that Joseph must have experienced, and the fear and hurt that Mary would have felt as they sorted out their complex relationship.

One of the quiet miracles in the Christmas story is that on the basis of that dream, Joseph works through it all to make a decision. He lays aside his sense of right and wrong under the law and his offended pride, his shame, and chooses to marry his pregnant fiancée. Trust in God is not a given here, it is a choice. God’s plan is saved because Joseph chose to take a risk, to brave uncertainty.

Joseph, an ordinary man, worked through his cold sweat, took a risk, and Jesus grew up with Joseph as his dad. Where did Jesus come up with the idea that people are more important than the laws you’ve been taught your whole life? That our worth is measured by God’s extravagant loves for us, not by other people’s opinions? Who was his male role model for the vulnerability and courage we see again and again in Jesus’ ministry? Joseph couldn’t know that some of Jesus’ best teaching would be shaped by his own experience of an earthly, loving father. He didn’t have any idea that his son would tell his disciples to talk about God with the tender, personal address of “abba,” which is best translated as “daddy.”

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, New Proclamation, https://members.newproclamation.com/commentary.php?d8m=12&d8d=22&d8y=2013&event_id=4&cycle=A&atom_id=19018.
Mary Hinkle Shore, “Fourth Sunday of Advent,” in New Proclamation, Year A, 2007-2008 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
Nancy Rockwell, December 14, 2013, http://biteintheapple.com/joseph-praise/.
Janet H. Hunt, “Just What a Dad Does…”, December 15, 2013, http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/2013/12/just-what-dad-does.html

How Do You Recognize the Messiah?

December 9, 2025 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Matthew 11:2-11

Early one Friday morning a while back, a street musician took a spot by a trashcan in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station in Washington, D.C. He was nondescript – youngish, jeans, baseball cap. He took out his violin and threw a few dollars in the case so people would get the point. For the next 43 minutes he played six classical pieces while over a thousand people passed by on their way to work. Only seven people stopped. Twenty-seven people dropped change in the violin case, mostly on the run. So that morning, if you count the twenty-dollar bill dropped in by the one person that recognized him, Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, made $59 for a 43-minute concert on his three-and-a-half million-dollar Stradivarius.

Why didn’t people recognize Bell? They would have recognized him at Carnegie Hall or Kennedy Center. They would have recognized him if they’d paid $200 for a ticket. But playing for free in a Metro Station isn’t what a world-famous violinist does. It wasn’t what they were expecting.

This Matthew passage raises the question: How do you recognize the one sent from God to save God’s people and God’s world? How do you recognize the Messiah? Once again, we meet John the Baptist. In last week’s lectionary passage when Jesus came forward to be baptized, John seemed to recognize him as the one for whom they had all been waiting. But now John is in prison where he’s had some time to think about it, and he’s not sure Jesus fits the mold. He likely wonders why that Roman puppet and tyrant Herod is still on his throne. He likely wonders why he, John, is still in prison.

This Sunday is just eleven days until Christmas, and this passage tells us not of angels or shepherds or mangers but of John the Baptist and his doubts and disappointment. “You aren’t who I was expecting. You don’t look like a Messiah.” But the thing is, if John could ask such things, we can, too. “If you are the one who is to come, why is my friend dying of cancer? Why does every generation seem to need to go to war? Why are so many kids hungry, neglected, abused? Why are there still people all over the world, like John the Baptist, unjustly held in prisons?” Many of us have friends who have asked, “How can you believe in a just, merciful, all-powerful God when the world is such a mess? If God exists, and if Jesus is as important as you claim, shouldn’t things be better by now? Why are there still diseases, wars, earthquakes, greed?” Wouldn’t the Messiah clean up this mess?

Many of us have asked those questions ourselves. We still wait for the fulfillment of the Christmas promise: peace on earth and goodwill among all. That very promise is the reason Christmas can be so difficult. The headlines and sometimes our own lives make it clear that peace and goodwill seem as scarce today as they were a couple of millennia ago.

Quoting Isaiah 35 and 61, Jesus tells John’s disciples, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard . . . that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is seen a New Creation.” Jesus says more is going on than John has noticed. Yes, John is still in prison. But Jesus is saying, “Listen. Look. God is at work here, maybe not with the ‘unquenchable fire’ that you were expecting (Matthew 3:12), but God is at work just the same,” here and there in the world, and now and then in ourselves. Jesus is both the fulfillment of the people’s hopes and something altogether different. Something no one was expecting.

This means a couple of things. First, Jesus hasn’t fixed everything. We don’t have any better answer for our non-Christian friends than, “You’re right. The world is still a mess. We aren’t claiming that everything is ‘all better’ since the advent of Jesus as God with us, only that now we have a clearer idea of how to spot that new creation, a concrete hope for its fulfillment, and a fervent prayer for the present time: ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’”

But it also means something bigger. When Jesus tells John, “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than [John]” (Matthew 11:11), he’s talking about us. The only example of power Jesus will give us – serving, feeding, healing, giving himself away – is the same power that we have. It is because of that power that here and there in the world, and now and then in ourselves is seen a new creation. I know people who don’t want to have anything to do with a God who doesn’t solve all the world’s problems in a blinding flash of light or with fiery judgment. But what we celebrate this season, the coming of God into our world, this world, the real, human world is more along the lines of what Thich Nhat Hanh has said: “The miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth.”

Still, during this season of festive excess, even that miracle can seem unattainable, unavailable, or simply not enough, to those who have experienced loss, trauma, ill health, economic setback, or fear what the future might hold. Some congregations offer a “Blue Christmas” or “Longest Night” service, a celebration of Christ’s incarnation and birth a few days ahead of December 25 and designed particularly for those who are dealing with loss, disappointment, grief, or depression. This reading, revealing that even intrepid John the Baptist had doubts and fears, might be an appropriate text for such a service. Doubt and grief are not unfaithful. Those of us who are feeling festive can stand in solidarity with those who long, who wait, who hope for something better; to assure them through our presence that God is with them, even if not in the way they might wish. It’s an opportunity to sing what David Lose describes as “that most honest of Advent hymns,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

Resources:

You can see a short YouTube video of Bell’s subway performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw.
Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner, 1955); http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=375&C=15.
Mary Hinkle Shore, https://members.newproclamation.com/commentary.php?d8m=12&d8d=15&d8y=2013&atom_id=19021.

Walter Brueggeman, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly Gaventa, James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: Year A (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

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