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Toxic Influence

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Proverbs 8:1-31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

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

Dream Dreams

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Acts 2:1-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Aftershock

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Lesson: Acts 16:16-34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

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

Do You Want to Be Made Well?

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John 5:1-9

   A man who has been ill for thirty-eight years lies by a pool that is believed to have healing powers.  He’s been trying to make his way to the healing waters of the pool, but he can’t do it without help, and he has no help.  Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?” 

   “Well, duh!” seems to be the obvious answer.  Of course he wants to be made well.  The question seems almost cruel.  Is Jesus implying that the man isn’t well because he doesn’t want it enough?  In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-sided, she described her battle with breast cancer and the unrelenting message that you won’t recover unless you have a sufficiently positive attitude.  It was made clear to her, she said, that “If I don’t get better, it’s my fault. … It’s a clever blame-the-victim sort of thing.”  Given this message, we might wonder if the man’s response is defensive: “Sir, I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” 

   Some alternative Greek manuscripts for John’s Gospel explain that it was believed that these waters had healing powers only when they were moving, mysteriously stirred up, and only the first person in the pool when the water begins to move would be healed.  This means every ailing person is competing with every other ailing person for a very limited opportunity.  Not the best system, but it’s the only system the man knows.  Of course he wants to be made well; otherwise he wouldn’t keep making regular trips to the pool.

   Jesus is not telling the man that he just needs a sunnier outlook or that he needs to pray a little harder.  It is cruel to tell people who are sick, or jobless, or unhoused, or refugees that they just aren’t thinking positively enough, they just aren’t trying hard enough, that whatever they are experiencing is their own fault.  And one thing we can say for certain about Jesus is that he wasn’t cruel.  Why, then, does he ask, “Do you want to be made well”? 

   Jesus spoke to people as though they could think, decide, make judgments.  He knows the man wants to be made well, so in essence, he’s asking, “Is this working for you?  Is sitting by this pool getting you what you want and need?”  And if that’s what Jesus is asking, then the man’s answer makes more sense; it sounds less like a bundle of excuses and more like a thoughtful, if exasperated reply.  I’m imagining he’s saying something like, “Does it work?  Just listen to how much it doesn’t work,” and then he describes the tedious process he’s endured for years.

  Jesus asks, “Is this really working for you?  Or are you ready to try something else?”  The closing verse of this passage points to this: “Now that day was a Sabbath.”  The story continues beyond this passage to explain why that’s a problem.  At this point in Christian history, it’s likely that both Jewish Christians and the traditional Jewish community intended to keep the Sabbath.  The struggle was over how to apply this – what did it mean to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy?  So part of Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be made well?” includes, “Is this system working for you?”  Not only the system that’s kept him coming back to this pool for years with no change in his condition, but the system that would prevent Jesus from healing him on the Sabbath, as well as preventing the man from carrying his bed away from the pool once he’s healed.

   Is this really working for you?  Ask anyone who’s been in a twelve-step group and they will tell you that Step 1 is honesty – honesty about your condition, honesty about the fact that what you’ve tried in the past isn’t working.  It is the question that every one of us, every group and every institution needs to answer in the negative before we can begin to change.  “Is this really working?”  If you can’t say, “Well, no, now that you mention it, it isn’t working,” there’s no reason to try something else.

   I believe we are to hear, first and foremost, Jesus asking us the question.  “Do you want to be made well?  Is what you are doing really working?  Is it working to give you health and wholeness?  Or are you ready to try something else?”  Not so we can heal ourselves with the power of positive thinking but so we can let go of whatever system or whatever beliefs or whatever we’ve been doing that is not working.  In our relationships.  In our work.  In our national life, in our economy, in our churches, in our care of creation and the climate, in our care of our fellow human beings.  In our relationships with other nations.  And in our health, and certainly in our health care delivery system, which is not so different from what existed back then in that it lets one person be pushed aside while another receives care.  Maybe this story isn’t so much about one man as it is about a system of healing out of whack. 

   Jesus offers us another way.  Let go of what isn’t working.  Try something else.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005).
Patricia Cohen, “Author’s Personal Forecast: Not Always Sunny, But Pleasantly Skeptical,” October 10, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/books/10ehrenreich.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print.
Gerard Sloyan, Interpretation: John (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988).

By This Everyone Will Know

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John 13:31-35 

    A few weeks ago, I spoke at a California State Senate committee hearing in Sacramento, advocating for a bill that would prohibit discrimination in healthcare on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.  I stood in line at the mic after the bill’s author made her introduction, and we were instructed to give only our names and affiliation, and voice our support.  The person who invited me to this hearing asked me to wear my clergy collar, which I rarely do.  I realize the collar announces loud and clear what I am, but I find that when I wear one in public, people tend to avert their eyes.  This was the case that day in Sacramento.  I’m glad I spoke up, I’m glad I claimed the affiliation of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and I’m even glad I wore the collar because it makes me look more official. But on elevators and in corridors, it felt as though people thought I might have something contagious.

   It makes me wonder what they think about clergy, but also, about Christians.  I ran across a short video called, “What Are Christians Known For?” An interviewer asked this very question of random people in random settings.  It wasn’t a scientific poll, but it had the feel of being pretty much where people are about Christians these days.  You may watch the video here:

   About half of the people responded the way I’d hoped: Forgiveness, compassion, loving our neighbors.  The other half responded with what I feared they might: Fanaticism, hypocrisy, killing off non-Christians.  I’m deeply grateful that at least some of the people interviewed mentioned Jesus, and even echoed his words in this passage in John’s Gospel.  These verses take place shortly before Jesus’ arrest. Jesus has just washed the disciples’ feet, a vivid demonstration of servanthood, hospitality, and love.  Then Jesus announces that one among them will betray him.  After Judas leaves, Jesus speaks the words in today’s lesson. 

   Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  He’s asking them to care for each other as he has cared for them.  It doesn’t end there, within the community of disciples, but it does start there and that’s hard enough.  We’ve just seen Judas, a disciple, turn on Jesus and the other disciples, for crying out loud.  John wrote his gospel in the context of the early church, which experienced conflict from without and within.  All of Paul’s letters to the ancient churches were about how to get along, how to treat each other within the community of faith.  Paul’s most famous words, that gorgeous chapter 13 from First Corinthians that practically everyone including me has read at their wedding is not about marriage; it’s about church.  It’s about telling people how to love each other in the church.

   In order to bring the good news of Christ to the rest of the world, the followers of Christ needed to take care of one another.  They need to love each other.  Note what Jesus doesn’t say.  He doesn’t say: “You will know them by their exacting adherence to correct doctrine.”  He doesn’t say, “You will know them by the way they read the Bible literally,” or “You will know them by who it is they condemn as sinners.”  Jesus doesn’t say, “You will know them by their lack of doubts, or by their lack of questions.”

   “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”   

   As the little video shows, people are watching us.  They may not be watching closely enough to know the difference between a Pentecostal, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. But they’re watching to see how we act.  They’re watching to see if we love each other.  And of course, they’re watching to see if we extend that love beyond the doors of our churches.  But it has to start with the community.  The church’s purpose is love, not condemnation.  The church’s purpose is love, not judgment.  William Barclay writes, “More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all of the theological arguments in the world, and more people have been driven from church by the hardness and ugliness of so-called Christianity than by all of the doubts in the world.”

   It has to start with the community, but to end there is to miss the point.  The church does not exist to preserve or maintain itself, but rather, to be Body of Christ in the world, to go into the world to do the work God calls us to do. Amy Allen writes, “For John’s Jesus, this was showing the world the Light, to show what it meant to be a follower of Christ.  For Luke’s Jesus, this was showing the world aid and concern, helping the victims, eating with those different from you, and baptizing whole households, even slaves, women, and children. Being a disciple of Jesus in these circumstances meant loving into community the whole people of God – not simply loving those with whom one was already in communion.”

   “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  David Lose points out that these words “are simultaneously ridiculously easy to understand and ridiculously hard to do.”  And yet, Jesus would not have given us this new commandment if it had not been possible.  We gather in communities, in churches, precisely to figure out how it’s possible. 

 © Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved

Resources:

Amy Allen, http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-beloved-community-read-through-acts-111-18-and-john-1331-35/

David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=2542 

Tabitha, Get Up

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Acts 9:36-43

Today’s story in Acts reminds me of a Billy Collins poem. Collins, who teaches poetry as well as writing it, wrote these lines about his students in his poem, “Introduction to Poetry”:
“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
…
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.” …

“But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”

The account of the raising of Tabitha is short but enigmatic and challenging. For starters, someone is brought back to life after having died, and not even by Jesus, but rather, by Peter. It’s a tough miracle to swallow, but the biblical writers weren’t worried about science the way we are. They cared about what they remembered, and they cared what God was saying to them. So how do we determine what God is saying through this story, the story the community remembered, without tying it to a chair and beating a confession out of it?

Tabitha is described as a disciple. We’re told she is devoted to good works and acts of charity. It appears that she cared for the needy widows in Joppa, out of her own resources and in a very practical way: she made clothing for them. When Tabitha dies, the community fears that her life-giving work dies with her.

We aren’t told why Peter is called, or what’s expected of him. Tabitha is dead; her friends have already washed her body. When he arrives, he’s ushered to the upstairs room, and he asks everyone to leave. He kneels and prays and then speaks. The text emphasizes that he’s speaking to “the body,” not to an aware, alive person. He says, “Tabitha, get up.” And she does. The news gets around, and we’re told, “many believed in the Lord.” Well, yeah. If Christians today started raising the dead, churches would have no trouble meeting their budgets.

Every bible story is set in the midst of other stories. Behind this story about Tabitha is a story from Mark’s gospel that was retold by Luke, who was also the author of the book of Acts. The story in Mark is about Jairus and his daughter. Jairus, a leader of a Galilee synagogue, asks Jesus to heal his 12-year-old daughter, who is dying. On his way to Jairus’ house, Jesus heals the woman who touches his cloak in a crowd. Moments later, a messenger arrives with the news that Jairus’ daughter has died. But Jesus responds, “Do not fear, only believe.” Jesus continues to the house, where he tells all those present that the girl is not dead but asleep. He then goes upstairs and restores the little girl to life. In Mark’s account, Jesus speaks the Aramaic phrase “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!”

Talitha, get up. Tabitha, get up. The words are meant to sound the same, to be an echo. Tabitha’s upstairs room is meant to be an echo of that earlier upstairs room. And then there’s Peter, who had been called Simon but of whom Jesus said, “You are Peter, and on this rock” – because that’s what “Peter” means – it means “rock” – “on this rock I will build my church.” Peter in this story is meant to be an epitome of the authority, capacity, and mission of the church. He is the embodiment of the church, if you will. He enters the room where there is a smell of death and prays. He says, “Get up,” just the way Jesus did. And life is given, just the way it was when Jesus did it.

This story is a startling and dramatic announcement that Peter – that is, the Church – is to carry on the work of Jesus, and is entrusted with his resurrection power, the power of new life. Paul used the phrase, “the Body of Christ,” to capture this idea. The Church is the Body of Christ, given Christ’s life-giving work to do, and the power to do it.

We can’t really explain what happened in this miraculous story, and we shouldn’t try, but we can say that, at its core, it is subversive. It is subversive because every culture and community, every family, every congregation assumes things have to be a certain way. Who is powerful, who is weak; who thrives, who struggles; who lives, who dies. Tabitha, for example, is supposed to stay home and let the men come up with a way to care for vulnerable widows. Peter is to stay with his fishing nets and leave theology to the scholars and preaching to the charismatic. This story turns that upside down. Death is not the final word, and so reality is not bound to what has been. Flipping over the old assumptions is what the Church is to be about.

The Church tells and retells Tabitha’s story as a reminder that the Church is entrusted with the power to bring new life … bodily, concretely, locally. And not only life, but life for those who are on the bottom rung of the ladder, people who normally have no one to represent or protect them. Tabitha’s story tells us widows will not be abandoned. God will not allow it. That might impact how the Church responds to proposed reductions in Social Security benefits. It might impact what the Church teaches daughters and granddaughters, as well as sons, about choosing a career that will sustain them. It might impact a congregation’s decision to offer sanctuary to refugees in spite of the current war on immigrants.

William Willimon writes about Tabitha’s story: “Every time a couple of little stories like these are faithfully told by the church, the social system is rendered null and void. The church comes out and [says] … ‘Rise!’ and nothing is ever quite the same again.”

Perhaps Tabitha, sewing clothes for widows, also already knew what Mother Teresa said, that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. Anne Lamott writes, “[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people’s laundry, if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries.”

The Church proclaims, “Tabitha, get up.” Widows and the vulnerable of our world, get up. You, who are surprised to discover that even you have been named as a disciple, get up. Get up, choose the good action, the decent, the valuable, and give witness to the resurrection to new life here and now.

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry,” from The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006).
Mitzi Smith, “Commentary on Acts 9:36-43,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2814.
William H. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988).
Walter Brueggemann, “Blogging toward Sunday: Acts 9:36-43,” in The Christian Century, April 24, 2007, http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2007-04/blogging-toward-sunday-0.
Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).

Blessed Are Those Who Come to Believe

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John 20:19-31

Just as we get the Resurrection every year on Easter, we get Thomas every year on the Sunday after Easter. I couldn’t find anything definitive about exactly when Thomas became known as “Doubting Thomas,” but Merriam Webster says the first known use is about 1883. It’s interesting to me that Thomas’ doubt may have become a cliché after the Scientific Revolution, when people may already be demanding proof of religious claims. Why was Thomas castigated for his doubts, rather than praised or at least respected as an example of healthy and even scientific skepticism? After all, Thomas wasn’t the only disciple who needed eye-witness proof of the Resurrection. According to John, all the other disciples were there when Jesus first appeared; they got to see him. Thomas is singled out merely for asking for the same proof they had.

But the point of the story isn’t Thomas. It’s us. Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That would be us, the readers of John’s gospel a couple of thousand years later, and the Church. John leans heavily on “believing” throughout his gospel, although as I have written here before, John didn’t mean what we usually mean when we say we “believe” in the context of religions. The Greek word for “believe” might better be translated as “trust,” or “to give one’s heart to.” Again and again in John’s gospel, when Jesus says, “believe,” he means rely on, trust in, live as though your life depends on it. Someone reminded me recently that Civil Rights activist John Lewis said, “If you believe in something, you have to go for it.” That’s what believing means in John’s gospel.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Our cultural assumptions about Christianity or perhaps our Sunday school indoctrination might tempt us to conclude this means we are blessed if we can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing our fingers. In my opinion, that is a very low bar. Rather, “If you believe in something, you have to go for it.”

What does it look like to “go for it” because we believe in Christ? It depends on who you ask. As for me, I’ll quote Melissa Bane Sevier:
“We do what we know is right. We follow Jesus.
We remember that truth is our currency. We speak, share, and write the truth. Once we shrink from telling the truth, what do we have?
We honor those who are most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the very young and very old, those with disabilities.
We welcome the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger as if we were welcoming Jesus himself.
We work for fairness and justice. We lift up people of all races, nationalities, religions, people of different genders.
We live in hope.
We are always listening, always aware that we may be wrong, always looking for the best in those with whom we disagree.
We say – not just to those like us, but especially to those different from us – “we have your back.”
This is what Jesus did. This is what Jesus taught.”

“If you believe in something, you have to go for it.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
https://melissabanesevier.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/be-the-light-2/

Ongoing Easter

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John 20:1-18

Back in 1984, everybody was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. A dear friend said I should read it and it would change my life. I did; it didn’t; and I don’t remember much of it, but I appreciated Persig’s explanation of the Buddhist concept of “mu,” which means “un-ask.” If someone asks a question that limits the way you can look at things, or that can only produce an unhelpful answer, you can answer, “mu,” which says there may be a better question.

The celebration of the Resurrection tends to raise the kind of questions that make me want to answer, “Mu.” Did the Resurrection really happen? Do you “believe” in the Resurrection? Do you need to believe in a literal, bodily Resurrection to be a good Christian, or to be any kind of Christian? At the risk of sounding like the Easter cow instead of the Easter bunny, “Mu, mu, mu.”

People have obsessed about these questions for centuries. We want the facts, right? But even the four gospels tell the story four different ways. How many women went to the tomb: one, two or three? How many angels? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Galilee or Jerusalem or both? All of which is glorious affirmation that neither the precise facts about the Resurrection nor the truth it reveals depends on what we believe. Easter isn’t like the musical “Peter Pan,” where the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies to save Tinkerbell’s life. We don’t change anything by our belief, our unbelief, or by telling the story with conflicting details.

Besides, as Frederick Buechner pointed out, “…even if somebody had been there with a television camera and taken a picture of Jesus walking out of the tomb, what would that be except, for many people, an interesting historical fact, just as it’s interesting to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? But what difference does that make to me? So what if a Jew in the year 30 A.D. was brought back from the dead? In other words, what’s important is not so much what happened in the half-light of daybreak on that day in 30 A.D., but what happens now. What matters is not what happened on Easter Sunday, but what happens in my life. Is there any sense that, for you and for me, Jesus exists, or the power that was in Jesus, the power that led people to see him as kind of transparency to holiness itself, to the mystery itself? If that is alive, that’s all that matters, and what happened on that day is of little consequence except in a minor historical way.”

We tell this enigmatic story with conflicting details every year not because Easter is the anniversary of something that happened 2,000 years ago. Easter is not over. It is ongoing. We see this in John’s Easter story. It’s Sunday morning and still dark. Mary Magdalene goes to tomb where she knows the body of the crucified Jesus was laid on Friday. She sees the tomb is empty and concludes someone has stolen the body. She runs to tell Peter and the other disciple, and they run to the tomb. The unnamed disciple “believes,” but we aren’t told what he believes. The disciples don’t yet understand; in any event, they turn around and head home.

Mary remains there, weeping. She sees a man she thinks is the gardener. He calls her by name, and something illogical, something impossible happens. The One who was certified dead greets her. Stunned, she can only say, “Rabbouni!” which is something like “Teacher!” She reaches for him, but Jesus says, “Don’t cling to me.” This seems harsh, but rather than a rebuke, try imagining it as a teaching moment. “Mary, you can’t cling to ‘Rabbouni,’ to what I was on Friday. You can’t hold on to what is dead and gone.” Jesus refers to “your father and my father; your God and my God.” He’s describing a new horizontal relationship, a new union with God that means new life. The point of Easter is not to believe something about the past, but to awaken to the gift of new life here. God is making us new, here, and now.

What does “new” look like? To the disciples, it looked like an uprising of hope. Brian D. McLaren imagines their conversation: “Do you realize what this means? Jesus was right after all!” “Not only that, but we never have to fear death again. And if that’s true, we never need to fear Caesar again.” “That means we can stand tall and speak the truth, just like Jesus did.” We see this awakening realization in all the post-resurrection accounts. Everything had changed. It’s not just that Jesus was resurrected. It felt as though they’d arisen, too. They’d been in a tomb of defeat and despair, but they were truly alive again, and a force to be reckoned with. But a force of hope, not hate.

“New” is for us, as well, but like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage not to mention I was right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming – never even hoped for – but ends up being what we needed all along.”

The God who is love, who so loved the whole world, as John’s gospel put it, does not limit new life to people who can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers. “Do not cling to me,” said Jesus. God is free, and perhaps “new” includes recognizing the ways we have persuaded ourselves that God can be controlled by our own rules, creeds, and religious practices. John’s first witness to the Resurrection was a woman. It’s hard for us to appreciate how radical that is, but it affirms everything Jesus did in his earthly ministry to cross barriers and include outsiders. So not only can we no longer think of God as Protestant or Catholic, or white, Black or brown; we can no longer think God is more like nice middle-class folks or imagine that God prefers Christians to Muslims or vice versa. “New” means waking up to the fact that God is not on “our” side any more than God is on “their” side.

Easter – new life – is God’s ongoing work. It’s not just once a year and it’s not about church, although the church is the fellowship of Easter people. When Jesus sent Mary to go tell the disciples, in the Greek it says, “Continue to tell them.” Her never-ending mission, and ours, is to share her Easter experience and the things he taught. So while we do not corner the market on new life, we are the people who look for, celebrate and point to signs of Resurrection; signs that, as Desmond Tutu put it, goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. When the Church gathers, it is to rise again, to believe again, to hope again, to live again. It is ongoing. We do not proclaim on Easter morning, “Christ was risen.” We proclaim, “Christ is risen!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
William Placher, quoting Herman Samuel Reimarus, in Jesus the Savior (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IKaLF4Fqc
Frederick Buechner, from an extended interview, by Kim Laughton, April 18, 2003, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2003/04/18/april-18-2003-frederick-buechner-extended-interview/8658/.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005).
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York: Jericho Books, 2013).
John 3:16.
Ruth Burgess and Chris Pohill, Eggs and Ashes (Glasgow, Scotland: Wild Goose Publications, 2004).

Nonviolent Protest

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Luke 19:28-40

This past Saturday, demonstrators gathered in cities and towns across the United States energized by different concerns but united in opposition to many of the measures taken by the current administration since taking office in January. The message was, “Hands Off!” those rights, values, institutions, and services that Americans agree are essential to a fair and thriving economy and a compassionate and equitable society. Hands off Social Security, hands off veterans’ services, hands off climate initiatives. Hands off Medicare, the Department of Education, universities, women’s healthcare, USAID, DEI initiatives, our personal data, and ultimately, hands off our democracy. Organizers reported that more than 1,400 nonpartisan rallies took place, in all 50 states, all of them nonviolent, ranging in size from over 100,000 people in Washington, D.C., to perhaps 250 people at the event I attended in El Sobrante, California, a small Bay Area town. London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere around the globe supported these protests with rallies of their own. Estimates of the total participants vary, some projecting as many as 5.2 million people.

So, on Saturday night, everyone was talking about the research of Harvard political scientist Erica Chenowith. After learning about the benefits of nonviolent protest, Dr. Chenoweth conducted a study of violent protests and nonviolent protests, comparing their success rate. After looking at hundreds of protests across the world, Chenoweth found that protests are twice as likely to succeed if they are nonviolent and that around 3.5% of the population must participate to create serious change. Chenoweth said, “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event.” Successful revolutions that were nonviolent and reached the 3.5% threshold include those in Estonia, Georgia, the Philippines and dozens more. What will it take, people asked last Saturday, to get 3.5% of Americans on the streets?

Which made me wonder: Did 3.5% of the population of Jerusalem turn out to watch Jesus enter the city in the procession we celebrate on Palm Sunday?

No doubt about it: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a nonviolent protest. Luke reports that the people spread their cloaks on the road before Jesus, shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” Yikes! Blessed is the king?! These are people who already have a king. They have King Herod, Herod Antipas, the puppet of the Roman Emperor Caesar. Which means these ancient Judeans have both a king (puppet or not) and an emperor. “Blessed is the king”? Throwing cloaks on the road, as one does for a king? This is a call for regime change.

“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” This helps explain why Jesus was arrested and crucified. He entered Jerusalem just before the Passover celebration, and even without his kingly procession, Passover was tricky for the Romans. The Passover festival is all about deliverance from slavery and freedom from oppression. Passover wasn’t good for the Empire. And so Jesus didn’t merely offend the religious authorities. He proclaimed another kingdom – the kingdom not of Herod or Caesar but of God – and called people to give their allegiance to God’s kingdom first. In other words, he was a real threat. He was a threat to the way the Romans and their puppet king led, ruled, and lived.

For that matter, he is still a threat. He threatens systems that dominate with intimidation, violence, coercion, and manipulation. He threatens our obsession with defining ourselves over and against others. He threatens the way in which we seek to secure our future by hording wealth and power. He threatens our habit of drawing lines and making rules about who is acceptable and who is not. He threatens all these things and more.

The authorities think they can eliminate this threat by violence. They are wrong. As Dr. King put it, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. … 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.”

It reminds me of a short poem by Michael Leunig:
There are only two feelings,
Love and fear.
There are only two languages,
Love and fear.
There are only two activities,
Love and fear.
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results,
Love and fear,
Love and fear.

All tyrants fear those they tyrannize. Otherwise, they would not resort to tyranny.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord: in the name of compassion, in the name of mercy, in the name of truth and freedom, in the name of love. It could change the world.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/organizers-say-millions-turn-out-for-anti-trump-hands-off-rallies-nationwide/ar-AA1Cm7u2
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/05/nx-s1-5353388/hands-off-protests-washington-dc
https://www.karunanews.org/story/1596/3-5-rule-how-a-small-minority-can-change-the-world
https://www.leunig.com.au/works/prayers
David Lose, “Dear Partner: Palm/Passion Sunday A,” April 5, 2017, http://www.davidlose.net/2017/04/palmpassion-sunday-a/.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (Harper and Row, 1963; reprinted as a gift edition by Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

Extravagant Compassion

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Lesson: John 12:1-8

The Lazarus story just before this chapter is a turning point. When the news about Lazarus gets around, people will think Jesus is some sort of savior, and the Romans will wreak havoc on everyone. The authorities decide “better to have one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). They plan to grab Jesus when he shows up in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus’ days are numbered, and he knows it.

With this backdrop, Jesus is just outside of Jerusalem, having dinner with friends: Lazarus, his sisters Mary and Martha, and a few disciples. Without explanation, Mary breaks open a bottle of nard, an incredibly expensive perfumed ointment. Mary lets her hair down in a room full of men, which an honorable woman never does. Normally you’d anoint someone’s head, but Mary pours the nard on Jesus’ feet, and then she, a single woman, touches him, a single man; also just not done. Then in the oddest move of all she wipes off the perfume with her hair.

Just exactly what’s going on isn’t clear, but Mary has stepped far outside the bounds of convention, teetering on the edge of scandal. That’s why Judas reacts so strongly. He attacks Mary for wasting 300 denarii on nard. A typical worker earned 300 denarii in an entire year. Doesn’t Judas have a point? But Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Jim Wallis writes that somehow this verse has been translated, “There is nothing we can do about poverty, the poor will always be there, so why bother?” But what Jesus meant was, “You’ll always have the poor with you because you’re my disciples. You know who we spend time with. You’ll always be near the poor.” Jesus is quoting the Torah here, and the context is important. In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward those of your people who are poor and needy in your land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

We’re told Judas isn’t being altruistic. The gospel writer is telling us to keep our eyes on this guy. But Jesus says, “Let it go, because my time is running out.” Whatever Mary’s original motivations, Jesus knows what waits for him in Jerusalem. He says she’s saved the nard for the day of his burial. In other words, he’s as good as dead, right now.

So, leave her alone, Jesus says, because her kind of love is what Jesus needs, and what the world needs. Mid-twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich sums up the story: “[Mary] has performed an act of holy waste growing out of the abundance of her heart. . . . Jesus (alone) knows that without the abundance of heart nothing great can happen … . He knows that calculating love is not love at all.” “The history of humankind,” Tillich continues, “is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear to waste themselves in the service of a new creation. They wasted out of the fullness of their hearts.”

The only other time we encounter Mary in John’s gospel is right after Lazarus has died. When Jesus saw her and the others weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The Greek words are unusually powerful; Jesus is really bent out of shape by the sorrow he witnesses. His extravagantly compassionate response is to bring Lazarus back from the dead. Maybe he can’t heal every leper and paralytic; maybe he can’t bring back every friend from the dead, but it doesn’t stop him from helping this time. It ended up getting him in hot water with the authorities, but he did not fear to waste himself in service of a new creation.

In today’s passage, Mary echoes Jesus’ “holy waste,” his extravagant compassion, by anointing him with costly perfume. Perhaps what this story is reminding us is that extravagant compassion is what Jesus offered and it’s exactly what this world needs. We can’t right every injustice; we can’t heal every hatred, but that shouldn’t stop us from stepping in with extravagant compassion, with radical love and acceptance, when and where we can.

The extravagant, radical compassion approved and exhibited by Jesus himself stands in opposition to a growing movement among some conservatives, including Christians, pushing back against traditional Christian notions of empathy and compassion. In a New York Times op-ed, David French writes, “These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.” But as French points out, “So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.”

Jesus chooses empathy. Jesus choose compassion. He chooses them because they are in fact what can save us, save our civilization, save our species, save our planet, save the world that God so loves.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Prophet Mary,” http://day1.org/1760-the_prophet_mary.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark, 2005).
Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Paul Tillich, “Holy Waste,” in The New Being: Existential Sermons (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, originally published in 1955; 2005 paperback edition).
David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times, February 13, 2025