christianity

Where Two or Three Are Gathered

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Matthew 18:15-20

   If you’ve been around churches even a little bit, you’re probably familiar with verse 20 of this passage, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  It’s usually trotted out when attendance at a church event is sparse.  You can almost guarantee someone will say, “There aren’t many of us here, but ‘Where two or three are gathered …” Usually, they don’t even need to finish the verse.  People know the rest.

   This is a fine way to use this verse, but there’s more to this passage.  The verses leading up to verse 20, including the formula for handling church disputes, are more challenging.  Confrontation doesn’t come naturally to many church folks, including me.  It’s easier to think something controversial is none of our business, or that we should bear everything in silence and turn the other cheek; we should just focus on God’s love and move on, and if you have to talk about it, then talk with folks who already agree with you, maybe over in the parking lot.

   When I read the passage carefully, what emerges is Matthew’s deep concern for community – honest-to-goodness, authentic Christian community.  Community is one of those feel-good words we tend to idealize, but community is made up of people, and people can be difficult, challenging, selfish, and unreliable.  They can have startlingly different perspectives and experiences. Community is messy. Wherever two or three human beings gather, Christ may indeed be among them but there’s also the potential for disagreement, hurt feelings, misunderstanding, or miscommunication.

   Authentic community takes work.  That is the point of this passage.  Authentic community takes commitment, honesty, humility, cooperation, compromise, collaboration and even courage: sometimes the courage to tell someone you’ve been hurt, sometimes to hear that you’ve hurt someone else and then, the courage to apologize.  It take the courage to listen as well as to speak up. In my congregations and in my work, I’d rather someone tell me to my face that they disagree with me, that something I did bothered or hurt them, than that they keep it to themself or worse yet, talk behind my back.  I don’t pretend to be perfect, but I can’t address a hurt or a concern if I don’t know about it.

   Another crucial piece of the work of authentic community is deceptively simple but vital: showing up.  If you go to church, you do not go to church just for yourself.  You go to church for each other.  If this is a surprise to you, you’re not alone.  We tend to think we go to church for our own personal reasons, because we get something out of it, because it’s where we reconnect with God, because it’s a good start to the week.  There’s nothing wrong with these reasons, and everyone else at church needs you.  The other families need your child so their children feel more at home.  The adults need the hope that your presence, and only your presence, conveys.  There are many reasons folks can’t make it to church on a given Sunday, and I’m grateful that COVID taught us how to include people in worship when they really cannot be in the sanctuary.  Still, something is lost when we aren’t in the same room together. Maybe it’s that the Body of Christ really is about human bodies. 

   Every morning when I tune into the news on my car radio, I’m tempted to quote humorist Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell can this be?”  The challenges we face in the culture, the climate, the economy, and world geo-politics are difficult to deal with and even to think about.  That’s why we need community.  Community is where we contribute just by showing up, and by showing care for the others who show up.  Community is where we can find our voice.  Community is where we can feel supported, build resilience that helps us adapt to changes, recover from setbacks, and find the strength and hope to move toward the future to which we trust God is calling us because Jesus has us pointed the way. 

   Many churches will celebrate something they might call “Homecoming Sunday,” “Kick-off Sunday,” or “Back-to-Church Sunday” in early September.  It’s a good time to ask, “Just what kind of community do we want to be?”  There are plenty of other communities: social-media communities, work- and school-centered communities, fitness groups, and political action groups just to name a few.  How is a worshiping community different from those other communities?  How should it be different? Maybe it’s a good to ask: Do we want a community that’s largely social, like a club, which is certainly safe?  Or something more meaningful, where people are more vulnerable, which is riskier and harder?  Do we want a place that can encourage us but also hold us accountable?  Do we need everyone to agree about everything?  Are we looking for a place where we can be honest about our hopes and dreams, doubts, fears, and anxieties?  Do we want somewhere we can just blend in or are we looking for a place we can make a difference?  And what does it take from each person in the community to help create the community for which we long?

    There’s a story about an odd, old woman who lives on the outskirts of town.  Some children decide to trick her.  A boy holds a small bird behind his back where the old woman can’t see it.  The children ask her if the bird is alive or dead.  The trick is that if she says it’s alive, the boy will crush the bird, and show her she’s wrong.  If she says it’s dead, he’ll let it fly off – and again, she’ll be wrong.  The woman is silent for a long time.  Finally, she whispers, “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.  It is in your hands.”

   Authentic Christian community is work.  And, my friends, it is in our hands. 

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.  

Walking on Water

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Matthew 14:22-33

   “He’s so full of himself he thinks he can walk on water.” “Hey, look, I’m really trying but don’t expect me to walk on water.”  Even someone who has never opened the New Testament or heard a sermon knows that “walking on water” is an idiomatic way of describing super-human or God-like abilities.  More often than not, we use the expression to knock someone down a notch.  We rarely hear it as a compliment, probably because we’ve never met anyone we’d agree is God-like. 

   We meet that person in this story in Matthew’s Gospel; that is what this passage is about. 

   The disciples’ fear is perfectly justified.  This isn’t a story condemning baseless fear; the storm is violent and the disciples could perish.  As Debie Thomas writes, “Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to prove our faith, or test God’s character, by taking pointless risks that threaten our lives. … Whether we’re talking about respecting the power of the sea during a vicious storm or heeding expert medical advice during a global pandemic, the same caution applies: recklessness is not faith, stupidity is not courage.”[i] 

   Why doesn’t Jesus just calm this storm?  The disciples witnessed Jesus perform that very miracle a few chapters back (Matthew 8:23-27), and their response was to marvel, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”  Here, instead, Matthew states that Jesus “went (elthen) to them, walking upon the sea (peripaton epi tes thālassa)” (14:25).  These very words appear in the Book of Job when God questions Job about the cosmos.  According to the Greek translation of Job, God asks Job if he ever “went upon (elthes… epi) the springs of the sea (thalāsses) or walked (periepātesas) in the recesses of the deep” (Job 38:16 Septuagint).  Earlier in the book, Job affirms that the Creator had traversed the oceans before the dawn of humanity, saying that God “stretched out the heavens and trampled on the waves of the sea” (Job 9:8).[ii]  The Gospel highlights Jesus’ choice to walk on the waves as a deliberate recollection of what God did at creation.[iii]

   Jesus hears the disciples cry out in fear when they see him, ghost-like, crossing the turbulent sea without aid of a boat.  He says to them, “Take heart.  I AM.  Do not be afraid.”  “I AM.”  Jesus does not say “I am the bread,” “I am the way,” or “I am the light of the world.”  He says the same words God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, “the bare, unfinished, unqualified I AM, the name that needs no completion because it contains everything.”[iv]  If walking on water weren’t enough to reveal who he is, Matthew’s Jesus repeats the very words of God.[v]   

   Curiously, when Peter hears Jesus’ assurances, he challenges him; he tests him.  “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water” (Matthew 14:28).  “If it is you …”  These words are eerily similar to the tempter’s during Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11).  But Jesus doesn’t need to prove anything, and Peter is not, “I AM.”  As much as Peter may want to emulate his teacher, he sinks beneath the waves.  He cries out, “Lord, save me!” and Jesus does.  Jesus does.

   Jesus accuses Peter of having little faith.  I don’t believe that this is because Peter failed at walking on water.  Rather, I believe it’s because Peter foolishly issued the challenge in the first place: “If it is you…”  But this story isn’t really about Peter and his faith or his lack of it.  It is about Jesus, and who he is.  As Debie Thomas notes, “Jesus never stops moving towards the ones he loves.  He never stops crossing the dark water to come to where we are.  Neither our fearfulness nor our faithlessness alters his steady approach, because we are the ones he’s bound for.”[vi]  Perhaps that becomes most obvious to us, most undeniably real to us, when we’re sinking, when we are surrounded by chaos, and most feel the need to cry out, “Lord, save me!”

    This time, “…those in the boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God’” (Matthew 14:33).    

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.      

[i]  Debie Thomas, “Out on the Water,” in Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories (Eugene Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022).

[ii]   Nicholas J. Schaser, “Commentary on Matthew 14:22-33,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-19/commentary-on-matthew-1422-33-6

[iii]  Zina Jacque, “Commentary on Matthew 14:22-33,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-19/commentary-on-matthew-1422-33-7

[iv]  Jacque, ibid.

[v]  Schaser, ibid.

[vi]  Thomas, ibid.

A Pearl of Great Price

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Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

   What is worth more than anything to you?  Jesus looks at that question in this passage in Matthew’s gospel.  He’s describing the kingdom of God, or the reign of God.  Matthew uses the phrase, “kingdom of heaven,” for his audience of Jewish Christians, but in all of these kingdom parables, Jesus assumes the kingdom of God is something that can be perceived and experienced as a present reality, not just something in the future. 

   Each of these little kingdom parables is worth its own sermon, but I’m focusing on two of them: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field which someone found and hid, and from his joy he goes and sells all as much as he has and he buys that field.  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a person on a journey seeking fine pearls, and finding one valuable pearl, he goes and sells all, as much as he has, and buys it.”

   The owner of the field has hidden a treasure and someone else has found it.  The person who found it wasn’t looking for it; he stumbled across it unexpectedly.  He is overcome by his good fortune and joyfully sells everything he has to buy the whole field and secure the treasure.  In the pearl parable, the person is deliberately searching far and wide for a fine pearl.  He finds it, and like the first man, he liquidates all his assets so he can buy the sought-after pearl.  The two characters make their discoveries as a result of entirely different circumstances, but once they’ve found the valuable object, they are all in.  Neither one of them pauses to calculate the risks, do a cost-benefit analysis, or consult with his investment advisor.

   This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like.  It is worth everything.  Many people will use these parables to talk about the cost of discipleship and that’s worth exploring, but only after we talk about something else: overwhelming joy, and the commitment that this kind of joy engenders.  This is not a parable about sacrifice; it’s a parable about joy.  These men give up everything because what they get is worth everything to them.

   What is it about the kingdom of God that is worth everything?

   Years ago, I stumbled onto Brené Brown’s TEDTalk about shame (https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame), which led me to her other TEDTalk and her books, nearly all of which I’ve read.  My interest led to my being sent to a national training along with other pastors from my presbytery where we learned to teach groups about Brown’s research.  On our return, we led a presbytery clergy retreat in the hope that Brown’s work would help us in adaptive leadership – leadership in these changing times. 

   That’s how I ended up in San Antonio studying shame, worthiness, courage, and vulnerability.  Brown began her research trying to understand what makes certain people more resilient and whole, a quality she calls “whole-heartedness.”[1]  She concluded that what most blocks whole-heartedness is shame.  Shame, at its heart, is a fear of disconnection.  We’re all hard-wired for connection and so we fear disconnection.  Shame whispers, “If you know the truth about me, you’ll reject me.”  It’s that feeling we are not enough – thin enough, rich enough, young enough, pretty enough, powerful enough, smart enough, perfect enough – you fill in the blank.  Shame is what we’re perpetuating whenever we communicate to others that they aren’t enough – which leads to all sorts of bad behavior – bullying, for example, which Brown says isn’t a school problem; it’s a national pastime.[2]  Another expert says there’s no record of a violent or cruel action committed other than as a reaction to shame or humiliation.[3]   

   We all have shame.  We all worry, now and then or maybe all the time, that, “I’m not good enough.”  So we hide who we really are.  But in order for connection to happen – true connection – we have to let ourselves be seen.  Brown discovered that what whole-hearted people have in common is courage; specifically, the ordinary courage to be seen, to show up, even though they’re imperfect.  Whole-hearted people believe that what makes them vulnerable makes them beautiful.  They don’t talk about vulnerability being easy or comfortable, just necessary.  They are kind to themselves, because they know that we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t first treat ourselves kindly.  They are willing to let go of who they think they should be in order to be who they are, which is essential for connection with others.  Real connection flows from authenticity.

   So, in their vulnerability, wholehearted people are willing to say I love you first.  They’re willing to do things where there are no guarantees.  They’re willing to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call with results from the mammogram.  They’re willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.  Wholehearted people, Brown found, also have a strong sense of love and belonging.  And this was the surprise: The one variable that separated people who have a strong sense of love and belonging from people who struggle for it, was that people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging.  That’s it.  They believe they’re worthy.

   Here is the other surprise: While all of us struggle with vulnerability, it also appears that vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, and creativity, of belonging and love.  When we numb ourselves to our vulnerability, when we numb ourselves to grief, and shame, and disappointment, we also numb ourselves to joy, and gratitude, and happiness.  We live in a culture that does a lot of numbing.[4]  The problem is, Brown says, we can’t selectively numb emotions.  She says, “We cannot say, ‘Here’s the bad stuff. Here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s disappointment.  I don’t want to feel these.  I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana-nut muffin.  I don’t want to feel these.’  You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other … emotions.”[5]

   This is not a commercial for Brené Brown; it actually is about the kingdom of God.  What I figured out in San Antonio is that Brown’s research is a secular repackaging of the good news of the Gospel.  Her hardcore research just restates what Jesus said, again and again, and especially what Jesus said about life lived in the kingdom of God.  In a wonderful conversation my colleague and I had with Brown at the San Antonio airport while we were waiting for our flight to San Francisco, she told us that her friends in the Episcopal Church tell her, “Brené didn’t say that.  Jesus said that.”   

   Jesus said that.  Jesus said, and modeled, and taught: “Love each other, even when it’s hard, even when it makes you vulnerable, even when it’s a risk.  Include people, connect with people, even when they aren’t like you, even when they scare you.  Practice empathy and compassion even when your first impulse is fight or flight, even when revenge is more attractive than understanding.  Treat everyone you encounter like the children of God they are.  Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Know in your bones that you are enough; that God knows you, loves you, and created you to be worthy, to be enough.  Live as though you are enough, and as though everybody else is, too.  Stick to your values even when it’s hard, even when it gets you in trouble.  Not to earn God’s love or prove you’re perfect – that’s the folly of the Pharisees – but in response to the gracious and unconditional love of God you already have.  You’ll be afraid.  It will be hard.  You will be hurt.  But this life, this wholehearted life and the world you will help create by living it are so much better, so much truer, so much holier, that it will be worth it. 

   It will be worth it.  It will be worth everything, says Jesus.  It will be worth the extravagant investment of your heart and soul and everything else, all you possess.  And the result is not a moaning and groaning sense of sacrifice, but joy.  Joy, and authenticity.  Connection.  Creativity.  Peace.  And freedom.  Freedom from the bondage of shame, perfectionism, and numbing.  For you.  And for everyone else. 

   What would you give for that?  It wouldn’t be easy.  It wouldn’t be pain-free.  It’d be more of a journey than a destination.  It’d be more of a practice and a path than an accomplishment.  The early Christians called it, “the Way” (Acts 9:2).

   What would that be worth to you?  

 © Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

[1]  This summary of Brown’s research is gleaned from three of her books: Daring Greatly (New York: Gotham Books, 2012), I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) (New York: Gotham Books, 2007); The Gifts of Imperfection, (Center City, Minnesota: Hazaeldon, 2010); and Brown’s TEDTalk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” TEDxHuston, June 2010, https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability. 

[2]  Brown, “The Cruelty Crisis: Bullying Isn’t a School Problem, It’s a National Pastime,” Psychology Today, October 31, 2010,  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ordinary-courage/201010/the-cruelty-crisis-bullying-isnt-school-problem-its-national-pastime. 

[3]  Donald I. Nathanson, M.D., http://psychcentral.com/lib/shame-the-quintessential-emotion/000730/2. 

[4]  Brown reports that we’re most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. Brown, “The Power of Vulnerability,” ibid. 

[5]  Brown, ibid.

Next on My Path of Faith: Seminary Education

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   If you have looked forward to or even in some way depended on my blogposts interpreting the lectionary Scripture passages, I’m sorry to have gone missing for a bit.  I write today to explain why I’ll be going missing a while longer.  This blog has been a joyful spiritual discipline for me; my beloved husband claims I’m a “scholastic” in the manner of the medieval thinkers who centered their theology on a “disputed question.”  Maybe he’s right.  What I know for certain is that wrestling with Scripture is one way I wrestle with God and follow Christ. 

   However, I’m returning to full time work after about six years of, well, not “retirement,” exactly, because in addition to this blog, I’ve been preaching two or three times a month as a guest preacher, teaching preaching as an adjunct at San Francisco Theological Seminary, and serving as a spiritual director.  But I have not been working full time, and as joyful as this spiritual practice of blogging is, I won’t have time to keep it going on any sort of regular basis when I’m working full time.

   Beginning July 6, I will be serving as the Dean of San Francisco Theological Seminary.  I follow a line of deans to whom I’m grateful and for whom I have tremendous respect: the current Dean, the Rev. Dr. Laurie Garrett-Cobbina, the amazingly gifted holder of the Shaw Family Chair for Clinical Pastoral Education, Director of the Clinical Pastoral Education Program, and Shaw Chaplaincy Institute for Spiritual Care and Compassionate Leadership; Dr. Christopher Ocker, my intrepid church history professor and the current Dean of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; and the Rev. Dr. Jana Childers, my homiletics professor, fellow Bonhoofer, and the courageous, hard-working, and eminently savvy Dean of SFTS for 16 years, including during some of the seminary’s most tumultuous times.

   I love San Francisco Theological Seminary.  I received my M.Div., D.Min., and the Diploma in the Art of Spiritual Direction from SFTS.  I served on the Board of Trustees for 10 years, participating in faculty searches and on the Lloyd Center Board.  As I mentioned, I’m adjunct faculty.  I was pastor of the church across the street, First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo, for nearly 15 years, during which time I supervised 15 SFTS student interns, was pastor to many students, and counted about a dozen active or retired faculty and their families as church members, several of whom I buried.  There’s hardly anyone around who has had the long, varied, and ongoing relationship with the seminary that I have.  If you’ve ever been on the SFTS campus, you know what a glorious place, what a holy place it is.  I am honored to be taking this step; it feels like a call.

   I am taking this step at a time when seminary education, like the American Christian church, is changing.  If you’re a pastor or a church member, you’ve witnessed this change firsthand.  It’s tempting to conclude that the church and seminary education are “in decline;” it’s tempting to long for the good old days.  First, whenever someone talks about the good old days, you have to ask, “Good for whom?”  But more importantly, human systems, cultures, traditions, and institutions come and go, evolve and change, and God is still at work.  God is still present.  God is still writing the story.  I heard a sermon suggesting that we’re all “pencils in the hand of a writing God.”  The UCC has a marvelous slogan that “God is still speaking.”  God is not finished with us.

    There’s a compelling series of books published by a project called, “Theological Education Between the Times” (and I intend to read every single book).  That is where we are.  Between the time when one set of assumptions functioned but those assumptions are now eroding, and the next time, which God has not revealed.  I step into this new responsibility during this in-between time with humility, curiosity, courage, and hope.  I will continue putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith.  I ask for your prayers.

The Power to Love

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John 14:15-21

This passage from Jesus’ Farewell Discourse begins and ends with love. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” says Jesus. “What commandments?” you might ask? In John’s gospel, Jesus gives only a single commandment, and it occurs in the chapter just before this one: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:14-35). He repeats this in the chapter that follows this one: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:12-13). 

“Love, love, love,” as Lennon and McCartney wrote; “All you need is love.” What does this love look like?  Jesus shows us: It looks like serving others humbly without concern for status or station (John 13:1-17). It looks like healing the sick (John 4:43-54, 5:1-14), giving sight to the blind (John 9:1-41), raising the dead (John 11:1-43), conversing with outcasts in a way that grants them dignity as God’s children (John 4:1-28), standing up for what is right in the face of power (John 2:13-19), feeding the hungry (John 6:1-14), and laying down his life for those he loves.     

Love one another.  If Jesus is our model, that’s a tall order. No one can hope to love others as Jesus did without help, and so Jesus promises that help. He will not leave his disciples orphaned (John 14:18). He will send the Spirit.  John uses the Greek word parakletos, or, in English, Paraclete. The word literally means one who comes along side you. It has been translated as comforter, helper, counselor, and encourager; the New Revised Standard Version translates it as “advocate,” the one who pleads your case, who takes your side, who intercedes for you, and who stands up for you. Note that Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit not as “the Paraclete,” but as “Another Paraclete.” Jesus was the first, which explains why this Paraclete will come only after Jesus himself departs. 

There have been Christian traditions that interpreted the Spirit’s advocacy role as interceding for us before God like a lawyer in a courtroom before a judge. In this interpretation, the Spirit is one who pleads our case that, though we have sinned, because of Jesus and his sacrifice we deserve to be forgiven. The picture of God that this implies – God as needing to be persuaded to love and forgive us – doesn’t fit with John’s confession that “God so loved the world that God gave the only Son…” (John 3:16).  David Lose writes, “So perhaps it’s actually the other way around. Perhaps it is the Spirit who intercedes on God’s behalf before us. That is, perhaps the Spirit is the one who comes to remind us of our identity as children of God, as sheep who recognize the voice of our shepherd, those for whom the good shepherd lays down his life. Because, Lord knows, that can be a hard identity to hold onto, a hard identity to believe is really ours, especially when we are stressed or frightened, unsure about our future and it feels like everything has been turned upside down.”

It is that very advocacy, that comfort, that encouragement that we need in order to keep Jesus’ commandments – in order to love one another. “We love because [God] first loved us” (1 John 4:19).  Jaime Clark-Soles writes, “What appeared to be bad news to the disciples, namely Jesus’ departure from them, turned out to be the best of news for both them and us. While Jesus walked the earth, his ministry was limited to one locale and one person, himself. Upon his departure, his disciples are given the Spirit and moved from apprentices to full, mature revealers of God’s love. And this happens not just to the first disciples, but all those who would come later, those who never saw the historical Jesus. You see, the evangelist [that is, the author of the Gospel of John] insists that present believers have no disadvantage in comparison to the first believers. Everything they were taught and they experienced is available to the same degree and with equally rich texture to us.”

Available to the same degree.  This is stunning, when you think about it. Jesus says, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:18-19). Wrap your head around that: Jesus is in God, and we are in him, and he is in us. We are included in him and in his ministry. Clark-Soles coined the word “Quattrinity” to describe John’s view of Christ’s believers: “In John, Jesus insists that the intimate relationship that exists between him, God, and the Spirit also includes believers. The believer does not stand close by admiring the majesty of the Trinity; rather, she is an equal part of it. John tries to push at this by grabbing hold of a number of terms and repeating them: abide, love, the language of being “in” (14:17 and 20), and later in the Discourse, an emphasis on “one-ness” (cf. 17:21-23). Johannine believers don’t ‘imitate’ Jesus; they participate in him wholly.”

In a couple of weeks, on Pentecost Sunday, the Church celebrates the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, our Helper, the one who helps us love by assuring us that we are fully loved.  In the Book of Acts, the Spirit comes after Jesus has ascended to God (Acts 2).  In John’s Gospel, the disciples receive the Holy Spirit directly from Jesus that first Easter night (John 20:21).  What matters is not how or when but our experience that the power of God’s love for us in turn empowers us to love.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

David Lose, https://www.davidlose.net/2020/05/easter-6-a-spirit-work/   

Jaime Clark-Soles, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-1415-21-2

Abundant Life

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John 10:1-10

It’s an occupational hazard of being a Christian that there are other Christians who think you don’t measure up. One of my favorite cartoons is one of Wiley Miller’s “Non Sequitur” strips in which a man and woman are standing in front of a church, looking at the church sign. The sign says, “The Church of We’re Absolutely Right and Everyone Else Is Wrong.” The man says to the woman, “…And ironically, it’s non-denominational.”

This narrow view of who owns the truth – of who’s in and who’s out with God – has driven many people away from organized religion all together. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a precocious child named Adah muses, “According to my … Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly… This was a sticking point in my own little march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age of five I raised my … hand in Sunday school to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Savior as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? … Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God.”

This passage from Chapter 10 of John’s Gospel seems at first glance to be one of those “I am the only way” texts that people have relied upon to set Jesus up as a hit-or-miss savior. “I am the gate,” says Jesus. “If anyone enters through me, he shall be saved and shall find pasture.” This is pretty unequivocal. Christ is the gate. I think what’s important about this statement, and all of Jesus’ statements to this effect in the Gospels, is just that: HE is the gate. Christ is the gate. We, on the other hand, are not the gate, nor are we the gatekeepers. Back in the ‘80’s there was a nightclub in Manhattan called Studio 54. It was famous in part because bouncers stood by the door with a clipboard, looking over the crowd outside to decide who looked cool enough to be admitted. When it comes to salvation, we are not like the bouncers at Studio 54. It is Christ’s job to decide who is saved and on what basis, and for what reasons. It is not our job. If you don’t remember anything else about this passage, remember that it isn’t our job, it isn’t the job of any human being or group of human beings, to decide or even to worry about who is or isn’t saved.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Jesus doesn’t say what he means by “saved.” The traditional assumption, like Adah’s assumption in The Poisonwood Bible, is that he’s referring to an afterlife; that those who are “saved” go to heaven after they die, and those who are not, well, something else happens. But Jesus isn’t talking about heaven here. In Greek and Roman politics of Jesus’ day, kings and emperors were described as “good shepherds” who promote and provide a life of security and abundance for the empire’s subjects. John consistently presents Jesus as an opponent to imperial rule, so much so that he is killed for his opposition to Caesar. Biblical scholar Warren Carter writes that this description of Jesus in John 10 mirrors the role of the emperor as a ruler who keeps secure borders, a warrior who saves the people from attack or economic harm, and a benefactor who offers provision and even abundance. But unlike the emperor, Jesus is a true good shepherd, one who genuinely seeks to protect human lives from the thieves and bandits in imperial leadership. In the Roman world where 70 to 80 percent of the population was food insecure, protection from theft and the image of a green pasture was a poignant promise. So John’s Jesus offers not heaven in an afterlife, but a critique of the Roman Empire, which claimed (as reported in the writings of Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, and others) to bring wholeness and wellbeing to society, while its structures actually brought sickness and poverty to most of its subjects.

In other words, Jesus means it quite literally when he says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). When imagining Jesus as “the gate” (John 10:7, 9), it’s easy to think of the gate as penning in the sheep and restricting their movements. However, the purpose of the gate is to protect the sheep from those death-dealing forces in the Roman world, and to provides access for the sheep to the pasture (John 10:9). Rather than a hit-or-miss savior obsessed with our eternal souls, this passage shows us a savior concerned with our well-being: our health, our wholeness, our shalom. Not after we die, but here and now, in this life.

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Wiley Miller, “Non Sequitur,” in the San Francisco Chronicle, March 15 (year unknown).
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperPerenniel, 1998).
Warren Carter, “Jesus the Good Shepherd: John 10 as Political Rhetoric,” in Come and Read: Interpretive Approaches to the Gospel of John, ed. Alicia Myers and Lindsey S. Jodrey (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2020).
Laura Holmes, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-101-10-7
Lindsey Scott, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-101-10-5

Cut to the Heart

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Acts 2:14a, 36-41

    This passage in Acts reports that three thousand people joined the Christian movement as a result of one sermon – a very humbling statistic for any preacher.  In contrast, where I live, if you confess to being a Christian you’re likely to get funny looks.  Recently I learned there are people describing themselves as Christians who say empathy is toxic, a means of manipulating people’s emotions to accomplish a “liberal” agenda. Yikes. No wonder we get funny looks.

    At first blush, it seems that the words of Peter’s Pentecost sermon would be the last thing we’d say to people who already think we Christians are curiosities at best, loathsome at worst.  “Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven … Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” preaches Peter.  It isn’t only our un-churched friends and neighbors who are uncomfortable with that kind of language. A pastoral intern I worked with called words like these – repent, sins, save – “stained-glass words.”  They are churchy words, words that have been trivialized in our culture, shrunken into something simple and even punitive when they have a deeper, richer, more life-affirming and more hopeful meaning than most people outside the faith, and many within it, assume.

    Sin might be the scariest of these words.  Maybe it’s easiest to think about sin in the context of another of these stained-glass words, repent.  In Scripture, repent is not feeling really sorry for what you’ve done, nor is it feeling ashamed of the horrible person you are.  In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means to return to God, to reconnect with God.  According to this definition of repent, sin is being disconnected from God.  This disconnection happens when, individually and corporately, we ignore God, turn from God, don’t take God into account.  Which we all do, at least some of the time. 

    Repent has the same meaning in the New Testament, with one nuance.  The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.”  Go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you have in Christ.  In the New Testament, repentance is the path of reconnection, the path of transformation.

    Salvation simply means to be saved from our predicament.  What is our predicament?  Peter says we need to be saved from this corrupt or crooked generation.  These words have a hellfire and brimstone sound to them, but what they require us to do is look at sin as something that surrounds us.  Sin isn’t just personal peccadillos but is pervasive in the structures and systems of society.  When Peter says to the crowd, “this Jesus whom you crucified,” he isn’t talking to the people who hammered the nails into Jesus’ hands, or even to the crowd who shouted, “Crucify him!”  He’s not looking for particular people to blame.  He’s referring to this systemic aspect of sin.  We are not all equally blameworthy for the systems of violence, injustice, and death that surround our personal lives, our society, and our world.  But we are all caught up in vicious cycles of violence and injustice, whether as victims or victimizers or some of both.

    That is our predicament.  This predicament looks different for different people.  We can look around us and see victims of obvious violence and oppression: victims of war, punitive immigration policies, racism or sexism or homophobia, and we can say, yes, those people are in a predicament.  Those people need to be saved.  But for others, the predicament might feel like something’s missing or wrong or broken.  Your daughter is getting a divorce.  Your son is trapped in an addiction.  You’re in debt, you hate your job, your relationships give you more pain than joy.  You can’t get off the hamster wheel of getting ahead or spending or worrying.  You’re afraid that this is all there is.

    Peter’s listeners are “cut to the heart.”  Perhaps the story of the crucifixion has opened their eyes to their predicament and to their need for rescue from all that led to the crucifixion: empire, domination, injustice, the fear of losing privilege and power.  Or perhaps they’re overwhelmed with the good news of great joy that God is willing to die at the hands of God’s people and then come back again, not to make them pay, but to give them more love. 

    It turns out it isn’t Peter’s preaching that saves three thousand people.  What saves them, what saves all of us, is the story itself.  A better translation of “save yourselves” is “let yourselves be saved.”  Salvation is an experience more than a doctrine; it is that moment when you feel cut to the heart, and you have a clarity about God’s love that both reveals your predicament and empowers you to address it.  When the people ask Peter what they should do next, it isn’t to get step-by-step instructions for salvation – it’s to respond to what they have already received by the grace of God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.  Peter says, “Be baptized.”  Baptism is just the symbol of that new power and new life.

    Grace, baptism, the power of the Holy Spirit.  More stained-glass words.  This story in Acts is about God’s mission in Christ to us as well as to Peter’s First Century audience.  We are included in the promise he proclaims: “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls.”  But it is also about God’s mission through us. As Christ’s disciples, we are given the task of spreading the Good News of the promise we have received – the promise, as Frederick Buechner put it, “that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments [of baptism and the Lord’s Supper] but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.” 

    That is the Good News.  How do we spread it?  How do we do that in a culture that not only doesn’t like the word salvation, but much of the time, is oblivious to any predicament calling for it?  A culture that often seems to be actively working to maintain our predicament, even to the extent of treating empathy as toxic – unless, of course, that empathy is directed toward people in their own group, and toward efforts that support the structures that privilege that group and deny the humanity of other groups?

    At a church I served, carved into the wood on the inside of the pulpit where no one but the preacher could see it was a verse from John’s gospel: “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21).  That reminder is not just for preachers.  It is for all of us.  Individually but even more, as the church, the body of Christ in the world, it is our job to show people Jesus. To show them the loving, empathetic, compassionate Jesus who relentlessly sided with outsiders and the downtrodden, who forgave sinners and preached peace, who stood up to empire rather than collaborating with it, whose cross tells us how far God’s love will go to bring us back to God. Who “lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working … in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.”   

    When George Buttrick was the chaplain at Harvard, a student came to his office and announced that he didn’t believe in God.  Buttrick responded, “Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in.  I probably don’t believe in that God either.”  I wonder what I’d hear if I asked one of my neighbors who is likely to give me a funny look, “Tell me what it is you think Christians believe and do that is so threatening.  I probably don’t believe those things either.  Tell me what kind of church you mistrust.  I’m willing to bet that I don’t go to that kind of church.  Tell me.”

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.   

Resources:

Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancico, 2003).

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991).

Debbie Blue, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” in The Christian Century, March 25, 2008.

William H. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988).

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (New York: Walker and Co., 1995).

We Rise

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Matthew 28:1-10

I heard a true story about a priest at an Easter morning mass. He went to the pulpit and said, “You’ve heard the story. Think about it.” And then he sat down.

It’s tempting. How do you explain a story that defies explanation? The question on many minds Easter morning is, “Did the resurrection really happen?” I get it. Even though we shout, “Christ is risen!” in our calls to worship and sing, “Jesus Christ is Risen today…”, if I had asked my congregation to be as honest as possible in answering the question, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” I’d have heard about 250 different answers on a spectrum ranging from, “Yes, absolutely,” to “No way.”

Of all the Gospels, Matthew’s version might win the prize for “least believable.” Only Matthew describes an earthquake, a bookend to the earthquake at the time of Jesus’ death (Matthew 27:50-54). The earthquake announces the angel, whose appearance is “like lightening” – I picture him sort of sizzling and popping with power, radiating danger; I’d cast Chris Hemsworth in the role, so just picture Thor in dazzling white clothing. In the other gospels, the tomb was already open when the women arrive, but this buff angel rolls back the stone as the women look on. Jesus is gone; apparently, the stone was no obstacle. The angel sits on the stone, crossing his angelic arms, and glances over at the security guards – only Matthew mentions these guards (Matthew 27:62-66) – who are in some sort of terror-induced coma. You see the irony: the living look dead and the dead are alive? The angel doesn’t speak to the guards. His assurances are only for the women: “You don’t need to be afraid.”

The angel says Jesus has been raised, just as he said he would. Jesus predicted his resurrection three times in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 16:21, 17:9, 20:17-19). The angel then says, “Go tell the disciples. Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee.” The women take off and run headlong into Jesus. In awe and surprise, they grab onto him and Jesus echoes the angel: “You have nothing to fear. Go tell my brothers I’ll meet them in Galilee.” Matthew doesn’t explain how all this works, or even what it all means. Like the priest, he tells the story and sits down.

The Gospels don’t spell out what resurrection means. They do show us a lot about the person who was raised – about Jesus. As a child, he was a refugee (Matthew 2:13-15). As an adult, he had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). He broke the rules about holiness. He spoke out against the government (Matthew 22:15-22). He insisted that mercy triumphs over judgment (Matthew 5:7, 9:13). He chose to love and live among religious and political outcasts and called them beloved children of God – and that made him an outcast, as well (Matthew 9:10-13). He called proper, upstanding people hypocrites (Matthew 23:1-36) and said that love was more important than money, power, status, everything (Matthew 22:36-40) – so important that we need to love even our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48) – our enemies, for God’s sake. That’s why he was killed. As someone put it, Good Friday is not a celebration of religion; it’s a warning to religion.

That’s who Jesus was and that’s who was raised. That’s who God chose to raise. It wasn’t just shocking; it was positively scandalous. So what does that tell us about God? What does it tell us about us?

The New Testament has an unusual way of describing Jesus after the resurrection. He’s “the firstborn of the dead” (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5), or the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15); the firstborn “of many brothers [and sisters]’ (Romans 8:29); the pioneer of faith (Hebrews 12:2), leading the way into a new day, a new era, a new way of life, a new creation. So it makes sense that the risen Jesus calls the disciples his brothers.

Easter doesn’t celebrate that one man rose from the dead. Easter celebrates new resurrection life for all of us. For all of us, now. Jesus was just the first, but all humanity can rise from what is deadly – deadly to us, and deadly to our whole world. Not sometime in the future, but now. The Gospel writers call Jesus “the son of man,” an enigmatic title that one of my seminary professors translated as the “the new human being.” We tend to skip over this “son of man” talk because it’s confusing, but maybe the gospel writers used it all the time because it matters. Maybe what they’re trying to tell us is that Jesus is the first of a new generation of humanity; Humanity 2.0, we might say. Resurrection invites us to join him in Humanity 2.0, in “resurrection life.” Resurrection life says, “You don’t have to wait for some distant future to start practicing compassion, nonviolence, reconciliation, reverence, joy, hope, and peace. You can leave the old humanity behind and start practicing Humanity 2.0 now.” We can join the resurrection, now. We can rise. Now.

“Did it happen?” is the wrong question. The right question is, “Is it happening?” The promise of the resurrection is not simply what God has done, but what God is still doing. Brian McLaren writes, “As the sun rises Easter morning, everything changes. The emphasis shifts from what lies behind to what lies ahead of us, from what we have done to what God is doing, from what we have been to what we shall become.”

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, The Origin and Destiny of Humanness (San Rafael, CA: Crystal Press, 1976).
Brian D. McLaren, “Joining the Resurrection,” April 8, 2012, http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Joining-the-Resurrection-Brian-McLaren-04-09-2012

We’ve Been Telling This Story Poorly

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Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Why were these verses in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 selected for the Hebrew Scripture lectionary on the First Sunday in Lent?

Many people would answer this question from the perspective of church history and tradition: these verses describe “the Fall;” they describe how “Original Sin” became a part of the human condition. For those of you from traditions that do not emphasize “Original Sin,” it’s the Christian doctrine that describes the state of sinfulness “inherited,” literally and physically, by all humans from Adam and Eve because of their disobedience to God in this very story. This doctrine insists that all people are born with a tendency to sin; we can’t help it any more than we can help the fact that we have blue eyes or curly hair. The connection with Lent is that, in many traditions, Lent is a “penitential season,” a time for renewed focus on our sins and our sinful nature, and therefore our need for remission of those sins through Christ’s death and resurrection. (Don’t get me started on atonement theory.)

Instead, notice that neither the word “fall,” nor the word “sin,” original or otherwise, appears in these verses. What we are dealing with are many layers of interpretation by men (yes, I do mean men) over many centuries, from the Apostle Paul to Tertullian to Augustine to Ambrose and on through the ages to Luther and Calvin; men who recognized their own inability to conform their behavior to God’s will for the world (i.e., love, justice, mercy, fairness, peace, generosity), and needed an explanation for it. Or perhaps an excuse. Certainly, there are snippets of scripture implying that we just can’t help sinning. The psalmist laments, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). But as Cameron B. R. Howard writes, “The Bible is not the place to go if you want, like Joe Friday in the old TV show ‘Dragnet,’ ‘just the facts, ma’am.’ The Bible is not a collection of facts. It is a collection of stories, poems, songs, prayers, and remembrances.” The poetry of Psalm 51 describes the sorrow and regret of recognizing your faults and limits – which we all have. The etiological story of Adam and Eve helps to explain important questions about certain realities in life – why there is pain in childbirth, why the ground is hard to work, why snakes crawl upon the earth. Neither Psalm 51 nor Genesis 2 was intended to provide us with facts, either historical or biological.

As Marci Glass puts it, “We’ve been telling this story poorly for a long time.” Recent biblical scholarship has reframed the Genesis 2-3 creation story:

• The human has work and responsibility from the very beginning. God places the man in the garden “to till it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Eden wasn’t a work-free vacation.

• The traditional reading of the story assumes the first couple was perfect, without sin. The text doesn’t say that. The creation story in Genesis 1 describes the world as “good,” and an ancient Israelite wouldn’t have assumed that meant either perfect or sinless.

• The scene is usually portrayed with the woman alone as she’s tempted by the serpent, but a careful reading suggests that the man was present. The scene is of one piece: the serpent and the woman engage in conversation, she takes and eats the fruit, and she gives the fruit to “her husband, who was with her” all along! (Genesis 3:6). Why does this matter? Historically, Eve – and through her, all women – have been blamed for bringing sin into the world. This has been used as an excuse to keep women silent and prevent them from leadership in the Christian church (1 Timothy 2 :11-14). Dennis Olson writes, “The man failed to speak up, to speak out, and to join the woman in an alliance against the serpent’s attempt to appeal to the suspicions and yearnings that somehow were already within the humans’ heart” (emphasis added).

• The serpent is a very clever and talkative animal “that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). In other words, the serpent is one of God’s own creatures, not a satanic being from outside of creation. At any point, the humans could have told the serpent he was wasting his time, but as Olson noted (supra), there was something already in the human – before the bite of the apple – that was drawn to the alternative explanations the serpent offered them.

• If we decide to read this story as a “Fall,” we must see human curiosity and knowledge as a problem. Frank Yamada writes that the idiom, “good and evil,” which describes the forbidden fruit, means that the tree contains complete knowledge or knowledge from A to Z. Wouldn’t full knowledge be essential for human life? Isn’t curiosity not only desirable, but necessary for human thriving? Feminist biblical scholars have emphasized the theme of maturity in these verses. Even if acquired through disobedience, this exciting, if potentially dangerous, maturity is vital for human flourishing.

Following that line of thought – that what we see in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is not the introduction of sin into the world but a necessary if painful maturing to the realities of the human existence, Marci Glass compares the Adam and Eve story to the recent movie, “Barbie” (2023). After reading Glass’s insightful sermon, I wonder whether filmmaker Greta Gerwig had Adam and Eve in mind.

Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land, although in this tale, the women – the Barbies – run everything. Ken, on the other hand, is a helper, the secondary creation, an accessory to the main creation.

Things begin to sour for Barbie. Besides thoughts of mortality, her feet are no longer permanently curved for those tiny Barbie high heels. She faces a crisis similar to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Does she choose to stay ignorant of complex emotions and the reality of death by staying in Barbie Land? Or does she choose to step into the real world, with all its nuances, pain, beauty, and death? At first, she wants to return to the Eden of ignorance and bliss, but she recognizes that Reality is where she’ll figure out what’s happening to her.

Barbie encounters the person who invented her, played by Rhea Perlman. Glass writes that her creator “doesn’t control Barbie. She’s curious and even surprised to see the choices Barbie is making as she grows up and decides to become fully human, complex emotions and thoughts of death included.” She also warns Barbie of the consequences of the choice to become human: “Being a human can be uncomfortable. Humans only have one ending,” says the creator. Barbie weighs the consequences. Writes Glass, “She’s realized that she wants the complexities, and even the thoughts of death, that come with being fully alive. Because the real world is also where the magic happens. Where humans surprise us with kindness and beauty. Where we find community and love. And Barbie also wants creativity, which is a gift of the complexity of human existence. She wants to be ‘part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.’”

We have indeed been telling the Adam and Eve story poorly for a long time. Perhaps it is less about the origins of sin than the reality of what it means to be human, including our tendencies to rebel, explore, question, and yearn for more than what we currently see and experience, some of which leads to pain and destruction, but some of which leads us to wonder, fulfillment, beauty, and truth. The serpent is simply one of God’s creatures; the yearnings and suspicions of the humans about God’s motivations are somehow already embedded within the human heart from the beginning – from the moment of creation. They simply needed the encouragement of the serpent to bring them out and convert them into action.

Humans continue to rebel against God, to resist the gracious boundaries that God has set for us, often to our own peril or to the peril of others. I’m not arguing there is no such thing as sin. However, I am arguing that this story doesn’t explain how sin entered the world. I don’t believe humans ever existed in a state of perfection. What this means is that Lent is not a path back to some mythic perfection. Rather, it is a reset, yet again. It is starting over, again and again, as we reflect on our relationship and our responsibilities to God’s boundaries, trusting, as Anne Lamott put it, that God loves all of us more than we can possibly imagine, exactly the way we are. And God loves us too much to let us stay like this.

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Valerie Bridgeman, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-7
Justin Michael Reed, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-6
Cameron B.R. Howard, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-3
Dennis Olson, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7
Frank M. Yamada, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-2
Marci Glass, “Leaving the Garden,” September 10, 2023, ttps://marciglass.com/2023/09/10/leaving-the-garden/
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).

Christ for Today

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2 Peter 1:16-21, Matthew 17:1-9

Most people have an, “I was there” story. “My mom took me to Woodstock” or, “I was in Milan when Ilia Malinin was the first person in 50 years to land a backflip in figure skating at the Winter Olympics.” The Second Peter passage is an, “I was there” story with a purpose, but also a couple of thorny challenges.

Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday, and both Second Peter and the gospel lectionary passage, Matthew 17:1-9, describe the event called the Transfiguration. Matthew’s version is part of his larger story of the life and ministry of Jesus. The author of Second Peter refers to the Transfiguration in a letter written sometime later. In this letter, the author has written the letter to a Christian community because he’s concerned that they are being misled by teachings he considers to be “false.” The letter is an attempt to get the church back on track. To bolster his authority and convince the church that it should listen to him rather than to these other “false” teachers, he says, essentially, “Trust me. I was there. I was there at that amazing and holy moment when Jesus was transfigured on the mountainside, and we heard the voice of God claiming him as God’s beloved son.”

The first of the thorny problems is that this writer wasn’t there. This letter is written in the name of the apostle Peter but biblical scholars as far back as the third century have been nearly unanimous in agreeing it could not have been written by Peter. It wasn’t uncommon in that era to write under the name of someone famous to borrow the authority of that more famous person. That sounds nothing short of fraudulent to us today, but this borrowed identity authorship was an accepted practice.

The next challenge is that the problematic teaching concerns the Second Coming of Jesus. In the early years of the Christian church, people were certain that Jesus would return at any minute. When he did not, some people adjusted their clocks and started making predictions about when it would happen sometime in the future, but others said it just isn’t going to happen. There are still parts of the Christian church that focus heavily on Christ’s return at end of the world and God’s concomitant judgment. In my tradition, the Reformed Tradition, we continue to use the language of the traditional belief in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, for example, but emphasize that Christians are called to transform society and enjoy the goodness of the creation here and now, not wait or even hope for it to be destroyed.

So we have this writer who thinks the church is going to hell in a hand basket because people have quit believing in a doctrine that isn’t central to many of us, and he lies about what he saw in order to impress his readers. You might be wondering, about now, whether the main lesson from this text is: “Don’t preach from Second Peter.”

But there is a better lesson. The author sees that the church in his time is losing life and hope; its viability and purpose are being threatened. What does he do? He returns to the Jesus story – to the life and teachings of Jesus. He returns to the roots, to the foundations, and in particular, to a story that describes an eyewitness account of a dramatic and mysterious event that speaks to Jesus’ uniqueness and to God’s power and presence. He is saying that the gospel, the good news, the Jesus story, is the source of his authority. He challenges his readers to confront those teachings that do not give life and hope for his time. The way he does that is to call on the memory of the eyewitnesses of Christ, glorified, to bring people back to what was foundational. He returns to the Jesus story.

Just like the author of Second Peter, we need to figure out how the Jesus story speaks in our time.

There are plenty of folks who don’t think much of that story, who don’t believe that Scripture or the Christian Church speaks very eloquently to our time. Is it fair to say that many if not most folks outside the church believe Jesus is irrelevant to the very real human social problems that we face; that his message is about the soul, its guilt before God, and the afterlife, rather than our world and its current crises? Is it fair to say that the conventional view of the Bible is that its purpose is to explain how to go to heaven, to legitimize certain religious institutions, and to serve as a timeless rulebook for certain aspects of moral living? People are longing for ways to respond to the big problems – violence, injustice, poverty, hunger, disease, the degradation of the planet – and they look at the conventional Christian Church and do not see that it offers any life or hope in our time.

In his book, Christ of the Celts, John Philip Newell raises the question, “Who is Christ for us today?” That is the question that German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked in the midst of the terrible wrongs that were being done in Nazi Germany. The question, Bonhoeffer believed, was not “Who has Christ always been?” but “Who is Christ now?” We too live at a time of transition as well as a time of deep wrong, including the destruction of the very creation that sustains us. On the one hand, never before has humanity been more aware of the oneness of the earth: that we are an interdependent living organism. On the other hand, that awareness is being opposed by some of the world’s mightiest political, economic, and religious forces. So who is Christ for us now? What is it we are to bring from the great treasure trove of our Christian household to the most urgent problems facing not just humanity but all of God’s creation? Can we be a part of leading this new consciousness instead of opposing it or being unrelated to it?

Second Peter challenges us: What doctrines or teaching of the Church, in our time, do not offer life and hope? Which of the teachings of the Church feed discord, separation, exceptionalism, discrimination, and human supremacy? When we return to the Jesus story, which of his teachings show us that compassion, empathy, and our connection to God’s creation matter more than legalism or “correct” doctrine?

It is time to ask:
• What doctrines or teachings of the Church permit us to exploit matter and dominate creation? On the other hand, what teachings of Jesus show us that matter matters, and domination of others is never okay?
• What doctrines or teachings of the Church create the impression that vengeance and judgment are what fuel the universe? What teachings of Jesus reveal that God’s self-giving love is at the heart of everything?
• What doctrines and teachings of the Church encourage the idea that my well-being is separate and unrelated to your well-being? What teachings of Jesus point to a salvation that comes only with one another, not in separation from one another?


Twentieth Century theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “No particular religion matters, neither ours nor yours. But I want to tell you something has happened that matters, … A New Creation has occurred, a New Being has appeared; and we are all asked to participate in it. …We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard … that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation, usually hidden, but sometimes manifest, and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ.”

Here and there. Now and then. In our time. In the Jesus stories, and in ourselves, may our hurting world see glimpses of the glory, the hope, the love, and the healing that our world so desperately needs.

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Herman Waetjen in New Proclamation for Sunday, March 2, 2014, https://members.newproclamation.com/commentary.php?d8m=3&d8d=2&d8y=2014&event_id=19&cycle=A&atom_id=19694.
Pheme Perkins, Interpretation: First and Second Peter, James and Jude (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1995).
J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change (Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2007).
Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955).