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The Sound of Sheer Silence

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1 Kings 19:1-15a

Once again, this week I’m looking at the Hebrew Scripture passage, where we find Elijah, the prophet of God, tired, discouraged, and suicidal. And yet, God is with the prophet.

The story begins with King Ahab reporting to his wife Jezebel that Elijah not only trounced the prophets of Baal in a contest of “Whose God is the Real God?” but followed this up by slaughtering them all. Yikes. This is why we preach the New Testament, right? Jezebel responds by threatening Elijah, which means Elijah must run for his life. He heads for the wilderness, which as one commentator notes is less like Vermont or Oregon and more like an Arizona desert. He’s on foot but he keeps running, fearing Jezebel’s men are in pursuit. Finally, utterly exhausted and spent as well as terrified, he sits down under a tree and prays, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life.” (verse 4).

Maybe most of us never had to run for our lives, but I know few people who haven’t at some point been so tired, so exhausted, so emotionally spent and dejected, so completely discouraged and maybe hungry as well that they haven’t wondered whether there was a reason to continue.

God sends an angel who tells Elijah to get up and eat. Drink some water. Such great advice, and besides, the angel provides the picnic. Strengthened, Elijah heads to Mount Horeb, known elsewhere in Scripture as Mount Sinai. It’s the mountain of God; Elijah wants to meet with God. Elijah ducks into a cave and God asks him an excellent spiritual direction question, an invitation to take stock and reflect: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah recites his complaint: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away” (verse 10). It sounds as though Elijah is feeling sorry for himself, but really, who can blame him? He’d done all the right things: he humiliated the prophets of Baal and their sponsor, Jezebel; he’d proven the Lord God is the Lord God. Instead of glory and gratitude, however, he’s running for his life.

God tells Elijah to stand before the mountain because God is about to pass by. There at the mouth of the cave, Elijah witnesses a mountain-shattering wind, an earthquake, and a raging fire. But the passage tells us God is not in the wind, earthquake, or fire. After the fire is “the sound of sheer silence” (NRSV), translated elsewhere as a “gentle whisper” (NIV), or a “still small voice” (KJV) (verse 12). This is when Elijah wraps his face in his mantle, presumably to protect himself from the face-to-face encounter with God. God is revealed not in the dramatic forces of nature but in silence, in a still, small voice.

God repeats the question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (verse 13). The prophet gives the exact same response, word for word. Did he learn nothing from the encounter with God? Is he still feeling sorry for himself? Or, perhaps, something is different. Perhaps the prophet is no longer afraid. Perhaps he’s ready to listen when God gives him his marching orders to go to Damascus. Go, continue the work God has given you. Elijah isn’t alone. In fact, there are at least 7,000 others faithful to God, some of whom will be anointed as God’s prophets (verses 15-18).

The story describes God’s chief prophet hitting his lowest point. One lesson might be that success doesn’t always lead to victory, vindication, and glory. As Peter Gomes put it, “failure is often the price of success.” But perhaps at rock bottom, Elijah is able to recognize that the work to which he is called is God’s work, not his own. Like the wind, earthquake, and fire, the work is God’s doing. At the mouth of the cave, he experienced the strength of God. It is God’s strength he needs to rely on, not his own strength. Relying on God’s strength, he can go do the new tasks God gives him, including anointing his successor.

The themes of reversal, disappointment, and exhaustion may feel current to congregations (and pastors) worn down by political polarization, threats to democracy, immigrants in peril, economic hardship, deferred dreams, dislocated populations, and the specter of global war. Or where ministry itself feels like a desert. Elijah’s story assures us that God provides food for the journey as we wander through our metaphorical deserts, remembering what we have left but not knowing where we will end up. Daniel Hawk writes, “It removes the burden of pursuing the spectacular, the exciting, and the dramatic, resets our focus on the unspectacular, quiet voice of God that animates ministry within the mundane, and tells us that neither we nor God are finished yet. There is more yet to do and more yet to be disclosed, in a new and unfamiliar desert.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
L. Daniel Hawk, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-12-3/commentary-on-1-kings-191-4-5-7-8-15a
Peter J. Gomes, Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998).
Roger Nam, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-12-3/commentary-on-1-kings-191-45-78-15a-3

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).

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

This Fellow Welcomes Sinners and Eats with Them

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Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

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

The Parable of the Fig Tree

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Luke 13:1-9

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

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

Couraging

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Luke 13:31-35

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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

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

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