Uncategorized

Jesus’ Mission Statement (and ours)

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Luke 4:14-21

It is exceedingly rare for a sermon – an actual sermon preached by a clergy person in a worship service – to make the news, not to mention go viral.  But that happened Tuesday of this week, January 21st.  You can view that sermon here on the NPR website:

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270031/bishop-mariann-edgar-budde-confronts-trump-in-sermon

   The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., preached the sermon.  Her text was the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew 7:24-27.  Budde explored what it might take for a group, a people, or a nation to have a foundation so firm that storms and floods cannot destroy it.  Unity, she said, is what we as a nation need in order to be “founded on a rock.”  She listed three foundations for unity:

  1. Honoring the inherent dignity of every human being
  2. Honesty
  3. Humility

   The sermon made news because sitting in the front pew of the National Cathedral were the newly inaugurated President of the United States and his wife.  At the close of her sermon, Budde addressed the President directly, asking for mercy for those who are frightened, those who fear for their lives or their livelihood or their human dignity.  She specifically listed the LGBTQ+ community, the undocumented people who work in our fields and a myriad of other jobs and who are not criminals but are good, tax-paying neighbors, and the children who fear their parents will be whisked away.  Later, the new President responded in social media with several diatribes about Budde’s qualifications and demeaner.  Both of which are impeccable, by the way.

   Budde did not select as her text Luke 4:14-21, this coming Sunday’s lectionary gospel passage.  However, she relied on it; she lived it.  In that passage, Jesus is fresh from his time of discernment and temptation in the wilderness.  He enters the synagogue in his hometown, Nazareth, and someone hands him the Isaiah scroll.  He reads from it:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

   There are a handful of Scripture passages which, in my humble opinion, are central, crucial, definitive in revealing who and what Jesus was about. That means they also tell those of us who claim to be his followers what we are to be about.  At the top of my list are the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29), the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), and this passage, Luke 4:14-21.  More clearly and explicitly than any other passage, these verses in Luke 4 define Jesus’ purpose and set forth his mission statement.

   Jesus doesn’t leave much ambiguity about this mission statement.  Certainly, we could quibble about what exactly he means by the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed.  We could argue whether it’s just the economically impoverished that will receive the good news, or the poor in spirit as well.  Captives would certainly include slaves and political prisoners, but does it also include prisoners of depression, or addiction, or lost hope?  Or prisoners of their pursuit of what our culture defines as success?  Does the oppressed mean those denied political power, or does it include those struggling with wounds to the soul?  Does blindness include the failure to comprehend, whether or not you have 20/20 vision?

   I’m inclined to believe Jesus had in mind every sort of blindness, captivity, oppression and poverty we can imagine, and then some.  The text in Isaiah refers to “the year of the Lord’s favor,” God’s jubilee, when according to ancient Jewish tradition, all debts are wiped out and the people and the land are set free to start over.  The year of the Lord’s favor – jubilee – is when everyone gets to start on a level playing field, in every way: personally, politically, economically, physically.

   So here’s the million dollar question: If we who are the church are the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12-31a), then who, now, is being sent to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free?  Who, now, is anointed? 

   If you claim to follow Jesus, then you are.  Your church is.  The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde took up that calling on Tuesday and went viral.  Now it’s our turn.      

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved. 

God at Work

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Lesson: John 2:1-11

I love officiating at weddings, and I work hard to make sure at least my part goes smoothly. In my experience, however, sometimes things happen at weddings that good planning won’t solve. There was the limo driver who forgot to go back and pick up the bride after he dropped the bridesmaids at the church. There was the best man who got sloppily drunk before the ceremony. At an outdoor wedding officiated by a friend, there was the duck who landed right between my friend and the couple, and then sat there quacking through the entire ceremony.

What happened at the wedding at Cana? Poor planning, or bad luck? Jesus’ mother says, “They have no wine,” but what she really means is, “They have no wine. Fix it, Jesus.” Despite his reluctance, Jesus tells the servants to fill six large stone jars with water, and to draw some of that water, now turned to wine, and take it to the chief steward. The chief steward doesn’t know what Jesus has done, but he does know wine, and he’s amazed at the quality. Most hosts would serve the best wine up front, wanting to make a good impression. They’d save the cheap wine for later when the guests are less likely to recognize the drop in quality. But this host, the steward assumes, has ignored the traditional timing, and saved the best wine for last.

Last week, Jesus’ baptism showed us how he took his place among the ordinary folks. Today’s passage is intended to show us this is no ordinary guy. John tells us this is a sign, a sign that revealed Jesus’ glory. Because of this sign, his disciples “believed in him.” The point of this miracle, this sign, is not, “Wow! How did that happen?” It’s “Wow! Who did that?”

All the signs and miracles in John’s gospel point to who Jesus is. That’s the purpose of John’s gospel, as the narrator explains in the closing verses of the book. As one commentator puts it, biblical miracles are signs that say, “God at Work!” The wedding at Cana not only shows us that God is at work, but something of what God is like, what God is about, and therefore, what Jesus is like, and what Jesus is about.

The stone jars held water used for the rite of purification. They represent the purity code and its distinctions between who and what is “clean,” and who and what is “unclean.” Jesus turns that water into wine, and these concerns about clean and unclean give way to joy and celebration. Jesus provides this celebration with the very best wine, in abundant quantity. The jars are filled to the brim. The God that Jesus reveals isn’t obsessed with what’s clean or unclean but is characterized by lavish generosity and extravagance. That the good wine had been saved “until now” is a symbolic way of saying that in God’s own timing, the Messiah had come.

If these biblical miracles are like a sign that says, “God at Work,” how can we see God at work now? One way to look at it, as C. S. Lewis and others have pointed out, is that many of Jesus’ miracles are small, fast examples of the big, slow acts that God performs all the time. Every harvest God feeds the multitudes with many loaves multiplied from a few grains. Every summer, along sunny hillsides not far from where I live, God turns water into wine. Jesus does the same thing fast and on a small scale.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we honor this coming Monday with a national holiday, wrote: “At the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and history.” The miracle, the sign at the wedding at Cana connects Jesus to this God – our God who is able, as King puts it. God is able to create and sustain the world. God is able to work through human history to save that world. King described how one event followed another to bring a gradual end to the system of desegregation. He concludes, “These changes are not mere political and sociological shifts. … When in future generations men look back … they will see God working through history for the salvation of man. They will know that God was working through those men [and women] who had the vision to perceive that no nation could survive half slave and half free. … The forces of evil may temporarily conquer truth, but truth ultimately will conquer its conqueror. Our God is able.” God is able; and the miracles of Jesus show that he, God’s son, is also able.

Turning water into wine at a wedding might seem like a trivial way to announce that Jesus is “God at Work,” given all the weighty concerns of the world: racial inequality, economic injustice, climate change and the L.A. wildfires, terrorism, war, and on and on. It was only a private party, after all. Only Jesus’ mother, the servants, and the disciples ever did know where all that great wine came from. Oh, and of course, we do. We, the readers of John’s gospel, know, as well.

At the wedding at Cana, Jesus supplies what is needed so that the celebration can continue. He does it quietly. It isn’t a flashy show of divine power. Most miracles aren’t. There are miracles of love and justice and hope taking place all around us: extreme acts of generosity, gracious acts of forgiveness; people overcoming their fears and standing up for what is right; people healing what seem to be unbridgeable divides. All these miracles point to the sign that says, “God at Work,” the sign that says God’s promise to the least and the last, to the lost and the lonely, is there in fullness, in abundance, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. So that the celebration can continue.

© Joanne Whitt 2025

Resources:

Cornelius Plantings Jr., Beyond Doubt (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002).

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our God Is Able,” in Strength to Love, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

David Ewart, http://www.holytextures.com/2009/12/john-2-1-11-year-c-epiphany-2-january-14-january-20-sermon.html. 

Blending in with the Crowd

/ cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

   Luke’s version of Jesus’ baptism is remarkable for a couple of reasons.  First, Luke hurries to get John the Baptizer out of the picture.  Even before Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan, John tells the crowd that he, John, is definitely not the messiah, and then Luke explains that John has been arrested and imprisoned.  The point of telling this story out of order is to get John out of the way so we can focus on Jesus.     

   Second, the description of Jesus’ baptism is fleeting.  “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized …” – that’s it. 

   Why was Jesus, the messiah, baptized by John, not the messiah?  John’s baptism is described earlier in the chapter as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  (Luke 3:2).  Did Jesus need to repent of his sins?  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is clearly the Son of God even before he’s born (remember the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary back in Chapter 1?), so he doesn’t need the baptism to tell him that, and neither do we.  So why was he baptized?  The phrase, “Now, when all the people were baptized…” gives us a clue.      

   I listened to much of the state funeral for Jimmy Carter this past week.  Again and again, people told stories about how Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States, rode on the bus with the other Habitat workers, slept on church floors like other Habitat workers, and hammered nails along with everyone else.  I couldn’t find the exact quotation, but someone explained that when Carter was instructing a new volunteer for Habitat, he’d say something like, “It’s probably been a while since you’ve done work like this,” as a way of respecting whatever past experience people brought, and not demeaning anyone who might actually be a complete novice at construction. 

   Like Jimmy Carter, Jesus was removing the distinctions between himself and “all the people.”  All the people are getting baptized.  And so Jesus is baptized as well.  It wasn’t literally all the people, of course; you can bet King Herod wasn’t out there waiting in line to be dunked.  But all the people who are longing for the good news that their present situation isn’t the way life has to be, that God has something else, something better in mind – those are the people who come to be baptized. 

   It is into these waters, the waters of the longing of all the downtrodden people, that Jesus steps and begins his ministry.  Jesus’ baptism announces that the Son of God identifies with “all the people.”  It announces to us that he is not only among us, he is one of us. 

After his baptism, Jesus hears words from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Is God pleased because Jesus decided to be baptized, or just pleased with him, generally, or both?  We don’t know but we do know these words are not unique to Jesus.  They echo the prophet Isaiah: “…you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” So these words Jesus hears from heaven don’t set him apart from us, either.  Like his wading into the Jordan in the first place, they lump him in with the rest of us.  As the letter of First John tells us, “God has loved us so much that we are called children of God.  And we really are God’s children.”  We are God’s children – sons, daughters, offspring.  We are God’s beloveds.  If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. 

    Jesus was baptized, and it made him part of the crowd, the crowd of broken and hurting people longing for wholeness, longing for life to be just and peaceful and safe.  Our crowd.  When we are baptized, and when we reaffirm our baptism, we join in his crowd, rooting our identities in his, as God’s beloveds.

© Joanne Whitt 2025

Which Story?

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

Our traditional notion of who belongs in the Christmas nativity scene comes from a blending of two different Christmas stories. In Luke’s Christmas story you’ll find Joseph and Mary traveling to Bethlehem, no room at the inn, the stable, the sky filled with angels, the amazed shepherds, but no kings. You have to go to Matthew’s gospel for the kings, except they aren’t kings, they’re Persian astrologers, “magi.” What’s more, it doesn’t tell us there are three of them, only that they brought three gifts. There could be 2 or 20, for all we know. And they don’t find Jesus in a stable; they find him in a house.

Part of Matthew’s inspiration for his Christmas story is Isaiah 60, a poem recited to Jews who had been in exile but returned to find the city of Jerusalem in ruins. Isaiah invites his discouraged community to look up, to hope, and to expect everything to change. Yes, he says, darkness will cover the earth. But there will be a shaft of light breaking through the gloom: “Rise, shine, for your light has come. … Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” That’s where we get the kings.

Matthew’s magi have seen a special star. They know about Isaiah 60, so they go to Jerusalem and take gold, frankincense, and myrrh, apparently appropriate gifts to give to a baby in those days, or at least, a baby king. But when the current king in Jerusalem hears about this, he’s not at all happy. Herod the Great, a vassal of Rome, built his kingdom on political tribute and bloodshed. A new king would mean a new political rival, and as with his other rivals, including his own family members, Herod makes plans to eliminate him.

Matthew’s Christmas story makes Luke’s overcrowded inn seem pretty tame. In his panic, Herod gathers the experts on the law and the prophets, and asks, “Just what does Isaiah 60 say? What’s all this business about camels and gold and frankincense and myrrh?” The scholars tell him: “You’re looking at the wrong story. And so are the magi who just scared the pants off you by telling you they’re looking for a new king.” “Okay, then,” asks Herod, “what’s the right story?” The scholars don’t want to be next on Herod’s hit list so they tell him the right story is Micah 5:2 with a little bit of Second Samuel thrown in for good measure: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” Not Jerusalem, but Bethlehem. Not Isaiah, but Micah.

Micah was a prophet who was not impressed with wealth and power. He’s the one who said, “God has told you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?” Micah imagined a different future for the people; he imagined they’d be able to organize and resist rulers like Herod. Micah’s story is about the well-being of the people, not of the empire.

Herod tells the magi about Bethlehem because he wants them to do his reconnaissance for him. He tells them to find this newborn king, and then come back and give him the details so he, too, can go pay homage. We, the audience, are supposed to be imagining Herod twirling his mustache like Snidely Whiplash. What Herod plans, of course, is something more deadly than homage.

The magi travel the nine miles from Jerusalem and Herod, from what is corrupt and deadly, to Bethlehem, to what is humble, loving, and world-changing. Matthew’s Christmas story is the story of two different human communities: Jerusalem, the center of the elite, and Bethlehem, with its rural peasants. In 2025, you don’t have to be from the country to be marginalized, and you don’t have to be from a big city to be arrogant. For us, it’s not about urban verses rural; it’s more about world view. But it is still a choice between two stories. A choice between the story that leads to death and darkness, and a story that leads to light and life.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Walter Brueggemann, “Off by Nine Miles,” in The Christian Century, December 19-26, 2001.

Jona Lendering, “King Herod the Great,” http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodians/herod_the_great02.html.

Didn’t You Know Where I’d Be?

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Luke 2:41-52

To read about Jesus’ childhood, we can turn to this passage in Luke 2, or we can choose from a handful of apocryphal stories: Jesus makes birds out of clay and sends them flying; Jesus resuscitates a childhood playmate who fell from the roof, and so on. There are good reasons these more magical stories were not made part of the canon of Scripture. They were written too long after the events they describe by people who couldn’t have been there to see them; they describe a Jesus who doesn’t sound fully human.

Is this story in Luke about the twelve-year-old Jesus any more reliable than those other stories? It made it into the canon, after all, but it is the one and only story about Jesus’ childhood in the four gospels. Mark and John don’t even need a birth narrative; in both those gospels, Jesus bursts onto the scene as an adult. So perhaps a better question is, “What is Luke trying to tell us with this story about the twelve-year-old Jesus?” In other words, what does this story mean?

It’s easy to get distracted by the fact that it takes Mary and Joseph a whole day after they leave Jerusalem before they notice Jesus isn’t with their caravan, and another couple of days to find him. We can’t imagine parents heading out on a several-day journey without knowing exactly where their child is, and with whom. Commentators point out that life in ancient times wasn’t nearly as individualistic as it is today. The “nuclear family” we take for granted was invented centuries later. Extended families, distant relatives, and members of the local village would have taken this pilgrimage to Jerusalem together. It’s possible that in this kind of setting, every child had multiple parents and every adult looked after whatever children were nearby.

When they finally find him, Jesus responds to his parents’ concerns like many a preteen before and since.  He asserts his identity and independence apart from his (human) parents. From his perspective, he was never lost. He was where they should have expected him to be: accomplishing God’s interests. While the NRSV translation says, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” there is a footnote providing an alternate translation: “…I must be about my Father’s interests.” This better captures the sense of the Greek, because the Greek doesn’t actually use the word for “house.” Although Jesus is in the Temple, God’s “house,” so to speak, Jesus’ point is that, as God’s Son, he must tend to God’s affairs, not those of his human parents who are eager to return to their lives in Galilee.

Luke wants us to notice a handful of important points:

1) Jesus is twelve years old. By the time Jewish boys were five, they would have begun to read the Scriptures aloud.  By the age of 12, they knew the Psalms and were instructed in the basics of Hebrew law and history. So at 12, Jesus is old enough to study Scripture, and on the verge of adulthood. But he is still a child. He will become an adult at thirteen. Luke is telling us that Jesus claimed his calling and purpose as God’s son even as a child.

2) His family’s annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem and his conversation with the teachers tell us Jesus was raised in a faithful Jewish atmosphere. He speaks to his audience of contemporaries, to the readers of the gospels, and to us, as a Jew. Luke assures readers that Jesus and the church do not reject Judaism. Rather, Jesus interprets Jewish traditions and laws through the lens of what he later described as the Kingdom of God, through the lens of God’s hopes for all of Creation.

3) When we search for Jesus, we can find him doing God’s will, concerning himself with God’s interests. The King James Version translates this, “about my Father’s business.” What that looks like is found in the rest of Luke’s gospel, especially in Jesus’ first sermon in Chapter 4: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor … Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:18–19, 21).

4) As Craig Satterlee writes, “Mary and Joseph find Jesus alive and well after three days in a place they didn’t expect. This sounds like Easter.” Likewise, our searching will come to an end in new life, meaningful life, the life God intends, but perhaps not the life we expect.

  It’s a hard text to preach because it is so deeply symbolic, and the lesson is highly christological.  But one angle might be to ask, “Where are we looking for Jesus?”  On the Sunday after Christmas, are we still looking for Jesus in the sentimental glow of a nativity scene?  Would we prefer that he remain an infant?  The baby Jesus is certainly less challenging than the adult who tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Do we prefer that Jesus conform to our images and expectations, perhaps because of the way we have understood or related to Jesus in the past?  Do we give our own faith room to grow, or to surprise us? Or are we looking for Jesus in the justice work, the “Kingdom work,” God’s interests as he describes them later in Chapter 4 and in the rest of his adult ministry?  And are we, like Mary and Joseph, surprised to find him there? 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Magnificat

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Luke 1:39-55

   Historically, Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been held up as a role model for women.  In order for her to be the role model that suited the purposes of culture, however, she’s been reinvented as meek, mild, and passive.  The flowing, modest blue robe, downcast eyes, covered head.  That Mary bears very little resemblance to the Mary in Luke.

   The angel Gabriel has told Mary that she will bear a child.  Gabriel then explains that Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, is also expecting.  Elizabeth is “getting on in years,” so this, too, is extraordinary news.  “In haste,” Luke says, Mary goes to see her.  When Elizabeth greets Mary, her unborn child recognizes Mary’s unborn child, and turns a joyful somersault.  In Luke’s gospel, Elizabeth’s unborn son will grow up to be John the Baptist.  The message we’re to take from this is that even before they were born, John the Baptist, as well as his mother Elizabeth, heralded the coming of Jesus.  Elizabeth exclaims that Mary and her unborn child are blessed, and then Mary begins to sing.  We know her song as the Magnificat, named after the first word of the song in Latin.  Biblical scholars tell us that these words are not original with Mary.  The song is remarkably similar to Hannah’s song in the Old Testament – Hannah was the mother of the prophet Samuel.

   And what a song it is!  William Willimon tells the story of a college student explaining to him that the virgin birth is just too incredible to believe.  Willimon responded, “You think that’s incredible, come back next week.  Then, we will tell you that ‘God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.’  We’ll talk about the hungry having enough to eat and the rich being sent away empty.  The virgin birth?  If you think you have trouble with the Christian faith now, just wait.  The virgin birth is just a little miracle; the really incredible stuff is coming next week.”  Martin Luther said that the Magnificat “comforts the lowly and terrifies the rich.”  William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 19th century, warned his missionaries to India never to read the Magnificat in public; the verses are too inflammatory.  Several biblical commentaries use the same word to describe the Magnificat.  That word is revolutionary.    

   I wonder, if they really gave it some attention, whether more American Christians, or Christians generally, would have a harder time with the story of the virgin birth, or with this song of Mary’s.  Mary’s song blesses God for the victory won over the proud, powerful, and rich for the sake of the lowly and the hungry.  This is not a sweet soprano solo.  One commentator says it’s more like Janis Joplin.  But it’s all about God keeping God’s promises.  God moves, and the people at the top who have organized reality for their benefit but at the cost of others come under siege.  God keeps the covenant, and a teenager, a nobody from nowhere, testifies to wealth redistribution for the sake of the hungry.  The fact that she sings means God does exalt the lowly; that this happened to her means that the overturning of the inhumane order has begun.  She is lowly, and she is lifted up.

   Now, this is a good news, bad news proposition, isn’t it?  Revolution sounds pretty scary to many of us.  Cornelius Plantinga writes, “When our own kingdom has had a good year we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s kingdom.”  At first blush, Mary’s Magnificat might sound even a bit vengeful. But biblical scholar Sharon Ringe notes that a leveling, rather than reversal, is what Luke intends here, as God’s action moves us to a common middle ground, to a world where winner takes all is transformed into one in which all have a place at the table.

   So that is the question for us on the Fourth Sunday in Advent: Can we hear Mary’s song as good news for all people, not just for some, but for all?  Can we truly hear that lifting up the lowly and bringing down the powerful is good news, even for us?

   If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the little video, “An Unexpected Christmas,” produced in 2012 by St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand, a church with a ministry called St. Paul’s Arts and Kids.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY.  This video captures precisely what Luke intended in the first two chapters of his gospel, in the story of Elizabeth and Mary, and in the Christmas story as well.  “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting that!”  Although, to be fair, Luke’s version is edgier.  Luke gives center stage to these two women, ordinary women chosen by God and unhindered by men. 

   If you go to church, you hear the Magnificat and the Christmas story every year.  In the sentimental glow of the season, it’s easy to forget that when the angels sang about good news of great joy for all people, what they meant is this: God wants justice, peace, and well-being – shalom – for everybody, and so God comes to us in a vulnerable baby born to non-white, non-English-speaking, non-Christian, nobody parents in a backwater village in the Middle East, 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. 

   Which means that God can reach everyone; anywhere at any level, even when things are messy, or all messed up; even when our best laid plans go awry; even when we find ourselves at the bottom of the heap, whatever heap we’re in.  It means it is just like God to be at work in uncelebrated or unexpected ways in other times and places, too.

   Even in us.  Which, my friends, is truly brilliant.  They won’t be expecting that!

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Turn Around and Do Something Different

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Luke 3:7-18

I don’t blame any preacher for choosing the Philippians passage over the Luke passage this week. “Rejoice!” feels so much more Christmas-y than “You brood of vipers!” But it’s Advent; it’s not Christmas yet, and John the Baptizer is all about preparing the way. In spite of his harsh and scolding tone, there are some great Advent messages in what John tells the crowd.

The word “repentance” feels like a reprimand even without John’s brood of vipers indictment. As I wrote last week, to repent just means “turn around.” Go in a different direction. There is good news in recognizing and accepting that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. There is good news in making the decision to turn around and do something different. This good news is the beginning of healing, for ourselves and for our society.

What we’ve been doing isn’t working, or at least, it isn’t working for a large portion of the population of our world, and it certainly isn’t working for our planet. When the people ask John, “Okay, so what do we do?” his blunt and fairly simple instruction is to stop acting as though they live in a world in which their actions don’t impact others. Stop being greedy and dishonest; start sharing the wealth.

John seems to threaten that when the Messiah comes, just as in the song, “Santa Claus is coming to Town,” you’d better watch out. We learn when we encounter Jesus that he doesn’t wield a winnowing fork or threaten anyone with unquenchable fire. But like John, Jesus preaches that a life realigned with God’s purposes is good news. Luke is known for “good news to the poor,” and certainly this realignment is good news for the poor. But Jesus proclaims that it is good news for everyone. Years ago, author Barbara Ehrenreich was asked in an interview what she would give up to live in a more human world. She answered, “I think we shouldn’t think of what we would give up to have a more human world; we should think of what we would gain.”

John tells the people who come to be baptized by him, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Those with enough, and particularly those with more than enough, should share with those who do not have enough. As simple as this is, it is countercultural in our society, especially at Christmas. Even with Santas ringing bells on street corners and “Giving Tuesday,” most of our Christmas celebrations are shaped more by our consumption-driven culture than by the nativity story. The forces behind our patterns of consumption are complex and entrenched, and we will not solve anything by scolding people in the pews. The way we consume is a systemic issue, built into our economy and culture. However, systems are created and supported by individuals. We can go along, or we can turn around and try something different. So we might hint that we are challenged, or perhaps even called, to figure out what is “enough.” We might suggest that the reason some people want more and more stuff could be because they don’t think that they, themselves, are enough. We might assure them that our things are not what make us enough, or good, or important, or valuable. Every one of us is precious – just because we are who we are, the way God made us. And we might point out that this planet on which all of us – ALL of us – depend, is suffering from our consumption patterns.

A handful of resources you might use for a gentle but critical delivery of this good news:

1) An excellent 20-minute video entitled, “The Story of Stuff,” a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
2) A terrific children’s picture book by Kaethe Zemach that isn’t just for kids, entitled, Just Enough and Not Too Much (New York: Scholastic Press, 2003).
3) An oldie but a goodie: Jo Robinson and Jean C Staeheli, Unplug the Christmas Machine: A Complete Guide to Putting Love and Joy Back into the Season (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1991).
4) John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas Naylor, Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us – and How to Fight Back (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014).

The Word of God Came to a Nobody

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Luke 3:1-6

   After listing seven of the powers that be of the time, Luke concludes with “the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.”  Compared with the seven names mentioned just before, John is a nobody.  He’s in the wilderness, where no sensible person wants to be found, so he’s a nobody who’s nowhere.  Yet this is precisely where the Word of God went.  Not Jerusalem, or Athens, or Rome, or any of the other centers of culture and power, but to the margins.  And maybe that’s often where the Word of God shows up: just where we’d least expect it.

   This isn’t our first introduction to John in Luke’s gospel.  Mary’s cousin Elizabeth is miraculously pregnant beyond the normal years of childbearing.  When Mary visits Elizabeth with the news of her own miraculous pregnancy, Elizabeth’s child, John, does a cartwheel in the womb.  From the beginning, Luke’s gospel tells us that God is working to change the world through the weak and small – babies and barren women and unwed teenage mothers and wild-eyed prophets and itinerant preachers and executed criminals.  During Advent, we look not to Christmas but beyond, to the time when God’s work on this earth will be completed.  We just have to look around to know God isn’t done yet.  John reminds us that even today, God continues to work through unlikely characters to announce God’s good news of shalom, the Hebrew word that includes not only peace but justice, healing, love, and hope. 

   When you’re a minister, you end up telling your “faith journey” over and over, in seminary and to ordination and church calling committees and so on. When I tell my story, I always mention Bill Anderson.  I’d quit going to church in college.  My father’s rule was, “As long as I go to church, you go to church.”  That pretty much guaranteed that my sister, brother, and I would quit going to church when we moved away from home.  Even more than an expression of adolescent rebellion, however, it seemed to me that Christianity was all about who was getting into heaven and who was not.  I found this focus absurdly speculative, but even worse, it is mostly used to divide people, to manipulate people, to create insiders and outsiders; not to heal or bring people together. 

   When my older daughter was four, out of the blue she announced that she wanted to go to Sunday school.  I think she’d figured out that Sunday school was a chance to play with other kids one more day of the week, with the bonus that she could wear her Mary Janes.  I’d been raised Presbyterian, and a little church near the Marin County suburb where I lived at the time was the closest Presbyterian church.  I figured I could take her to church once, she’d get it out of her system and that would be that.  Sunday school was before the worship service and I wasn’t willing to leave my 4-year-old while I headed for a nearby coffee shop, so I stuck around for adult ed., which was held at the same time.  Adult ed. was a series on exploring things the church could do to help change the world.  That, by itself, was a surprise, but the guy who set the hook and reeled me in was Bill Anderson.  He was older than my dad, and he said Christianity was a social reform movement, a way to change the world – this world – to make it more just, more loving, more peaceful, more like God intends it.  Today I’d say, yes, it is that and so much more, but back then I’d never heard it put that way and it was exactly what I needed to hear. 

   During World War II Bill had been a military engineer who led troops onto Omaha Beach the day before D-Day.  His company was to secure the beaches to the extent possible before the actual invasion.  Bill wouldn’t talk about that day.  He’d get just so far into the story and then stop.  But it wasn’t Omaha Beach that caused him “to grow up fast and hard,” as he put it.  What really changed his life was being part of the military team that liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 and 1946.  It spurred him into the work of resettling refugees, which he did on and off, including after the Vietnam War.  He also served as a Witness for Peace in Nicaragua.  He went on three walks for peace in the Soviet Union, making connections with ordinary people who wanted peace and did not want to continue living under the threat of nuclear annihilation just because the Tiberiuses and Pilates and Herods of the world couldn’t let go of a grudge.

   Luke’s outrageous claim is that the “Word of the Lord” comes to a nobody named John in that no-place called the wilderness, and that this is more important than all the important people and events of the day.  And what is truly startling is that this is still possible.  Bill Anderson was a nobody in the grand scheme of things.  And yet, during the eighth year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, while George Deukmejian was governor of California, and Diane Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, the word of God came to Bill Anderson in Larkspur, California, who shared it with me.  Bill would be the last person to describe himself as a prophet.  When I’d tell him that he was largely responsible for the path that led me to ministry, he’d say, “Don’t blame me!” 

   Unlike John, Bill wouldn’t have used the word, “repentance” to describe what we’re supposed to do in response to God’s love.  But repentance, as loaded a word as that is, is exactly what Bill Anderson lived and preached, although he would claim he never “preached” at all.  To repent means to turn around.  It means quit going the direction you’ve been going.  John is saying, “Stop doing the things that sew hatred and strife and injustice; stop moving away from God’s shalom; turn around and move toward it.”  Bill Anderson lived and taught this for everyone to see.  He lived the good news that God loves everybody, not just some of us; that a loving God wants shalom for everybody; and the way we are to respond is to pitch in where we can.  In other words, we are to repent. 

   God is still working through the nobodies in the nowheres of our congregations, neighborhoods, and communities.  I hear God’s word of shalom, regularly, from many people; in what they say, and in what they do, which is often so much louder than words. 

   Frederick Buechner wrote, “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.  Amen, and come, Lord Jesus.” 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

What Is Truth?

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

John 18:33-38

   Jesus faces Pontius Pilate.  The local religious authorities have hauled Jesus before the Roman prefect because the Romans can impose the death penalty for sedition, while the local authorities cannot.  Pilate questions Jesus.  “Are you the King of the Jews?”  Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world.  If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.  But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 

   Some bibles translate this as, “My kingdom is not of this world…” as though, somehow, we could withdraw from our world, or even to imply that Jesus isn’t concerned with this world.  But the Greek says that Jesus’ kingdom is not derived from this world – and a better translation of the phrase “this world” here might be “this system,” or “the version of reality that most people accept.”  What Jesus is saying is that were he and his followers from Pilate’s world, from that version of reality, then naturally they, too, would use violence to keep him out of Pilate’s clutches.  But at Gethsemane, Jesus told Peter to put away his sword. 

   Jesus tells Pilate he came to testify to the truth.  The lectionary leaves off verse 38, Pilate’s response: “What is truth?”  Pilate has worked his way up the loyalty ladder of an empire founded on domination, violence, and lies to become governor of Judea.  It makes sense that he doesn’t recognize truth, or perhaps even value it.  “Pax Romana,” they called it, the Roman Peace.  That “peace” was maintained through forced military occupation of people who feared and despised the Romans.  The Romans crushed revolts and imposed burdensome taxes, impoverishing the common people.  Whose “pax” was this, exactly?  Whose peace?  You can just imagine the lies: “We’ll protect you from the Goths, the Visigoths, and the Barbarians!  Your miserable little country will be great again!”  You can picture the sycophants like Herod who jumped on board and were awarded power and wealth for their loyalty.    

   We’re not told whether Jesus answered Pilate’s question, but it is Jesus himself, standing there, that is the answer: the humble, beat-up man from Nazareth, looking nothing like what the world expects from a king, in front of the governor with his guards and retinue and all the trappings of empire.  With or without words, Jesus is saying, “The truth is not what you think it is.” 

   Martin Luther King described the truth about violence this way: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.  …  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.”

   Jesus tells Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  He’s not creating insiders and outsiders here; he’s inviting all those who long for genuine truth to listen to him.  Listen to what he taught throughout his ministry about a loving God who longs for shalom for all of God’s creation.  Listen to his description of the alternate reality he called “the Kingdom of God,” a reality we can choose to inhabit here and now, in this world and this life, if we love our neighbors as ourselves.  Don’t listen to those who are willing to lie and resort to violence to get and keep power and wealth.  “My kingdom is not from here,” said Jesus.  It is not from here, but it is for here.  It lives in the world and confronts the violence and lies; not with more violence and lies, but with the truth that God is love.  Could there be a more timely message? 

   This Sunday is Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday in the church calendar.  Unlike the more traditional title, “Christ the King Sunday,” “Reign of Christ” points to Jesus’ kingdom as a state of being, a commitment to a particular way of seeing the world.  Those of us who are committed to living in this kingdom, however imperfectly we might do it, are called to witness to the truth.  We do not pretend to corner the market on truth or claim that any truth is pure and simple, because as someone put it, pure and simple truth is the luxury of the zealot.  But we trust the truth that God is love, and we do not abandon facts. 

   Yale historian Tim Snyder writes, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

   To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  Pilate would have been familiar with, and probably adept at, delivering the occupied Judeans “bread and circuses,” the phrase a late first century Roman poet used to describe pacifying the populace with food and entertainment.  Bread and circuses are not truth.  The truth, as Jesus said elsewhere, will set you free.   

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967).

Kathy Gill, “Tim Snyder: On Fascism and Fear,” July 8, 2024, The Moderate Voice, https://themoderatevoice.com/timothy-snyder-on-fascism-and-fear/

Don’t Be Alarmed

/ cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Mark 13:1-8

   It’s the Tuesday before the crucifixion, and Jesus has just watched a destitute widow put all she has in the Temple coffers, while the scribes are living the high life.  He leaves the Temple never to return.  The wealthy scribes contrasted against the desperate widow convince him the Temple is no longer serving the purpose God intended.  So when a disciple admires the large stones of the Temple, Jesus’ first response is that the Temple will be destroyed. 

   His four closest disciples ask Jesus privately: “Just when is all this going to happen?”  And perhaps even more anxiously, they ask, “Will this be a sign of the end of time?”  What follows is what’s called Mark’s “Little Apocalypse.”  It was written after Christians had been persecuted for a generation, and when the Temple had already been destroyed by the Romans in 71 A.D.

   Apocalyptic literature is born out of times when things are so bad that it seems the only possible way out is a cataclysmic intervention.  When you’re oppressed or despairing or persecuted, you think to yourself, “Surely God has a plan to even the score.”  The early church hoped that God would even the score when Jesus returned, and they expected that to happen any time.  Depending on what your life looks like right now, or how you perceive the recent election results, it may or may not be hard to put yourself into their shoes.

   The early church had seen the Temple fall.  What more could happen?  Jesus tells them that events like wars, earthquakes, and famines, while reminding us that things are not the way they are supposed to be in this world, also serve to remind us that everything is very right because everything is happening just as Jesus said it would.  We need to be cautious with such claims.  This doesn’t mean that when war is declared we merely shrug our shoulders and go back to our crossword puzzles.  This doesn’t mean that when a hurricane wipes out Asheville and we see the horrific pictures on CNN, we say “ho-hum” and flip the channel over to “Suits.”  Just because Jesus says that such things are going to happen does not mean that we as his followers do not seek to relieve suffering and promote peace and justice.  The gospels teach us that.  

   Whenever we read apocalyptic literature in the Bible, it’s tempting to read into it that God is behind it all; that God will somehow change from the God of love we see in Jesus and start to bully us.  Jesus tells the disciples to beware of false prophets, but he doesn’t tell them to beware of God.  Our God is the God who says, “Do not be afraid.  I am with you.  I will help you.”  So when the awful things happen, Jesus says that we, as followers of Jesus Christ, are not to be alarmed.  This is why when wars and rumors of wars circle the globe, and earthquakes or wildfires or hurricanes flatten parts of the world, or a pandemic changes life as we know it, it is the disciples of Jesus who are the first to push back.  We are the ones who protest for peace and justice; we are the ones who volunteer to rebuild.  We are not the ones to insist that getting a vaccine means you don’t trust God enough.  We are not the ones to pretend that the pain of people half a world away does not matter. 

   But is it time for Jesus to return?  With all that’s going on around us – increasing income disparity, climate change causing storms and fires, inflation, a global rise in fascism – you can see why people wonder.  Every generation of believers has asked whether the end is here, or at least near, yet the answer has been “No” over and over and over again.  The danger of focusing on the end of the world is that it keeps people from responding to human need and suffering, and it leads to isolated individual survival.  People shore up their own “salvation” and forget about community.

   Winston Churchill offered this advice in the darkest days of World War II: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Jesus tells us simply, “Don’t be led astray; don’t be alarmed.”  And then he says, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”   “Birth pangs” point to joy; that wonders have not ceased; that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen.  Hope is an authentic stance. 

   I recommend a TikTok video by Brian D. McLaren who argues that, globally, something is dying.  “A world of white supremacy is dying.  A world of dominating, angry, greedy men without empathy is dying.  A world without concern for planet earth itself – that world is dying.  … A world that measures value by wealth not health – that kind of world is dying.  … And like a dying cornered animal, that kind of world bears its teeth and its claws and it will destroy as much as it can before its done.  If you only look at what is dying, you’ll feel despair.  But something else is trying to be born. … It’s not as loud and angry as what is dying, but it’s far more important.  What is being born is beautiful, and you know because you feel it; it’s being born in you.  The pain of these moments – they might feel like death pains.  But they’re really labor pains.” 

   For the complete video: https://www.facebook.com/651042029/videos/1079652193679063/

   Don’t be alarmed.  Possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen.  Hope is an authentic stance.  These birth pangs will end in joy. 

© Joanne Whitt 2024