christianity

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).

Ash Wednesday 2025

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Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

What you think about Lent has everything to do with what you think about God. For me, Lent is a reset button, but because I believe that the most important thing about God is that God loves the whole world unconditionally, that reset button isn’t like a switch that turns me into someone who, during Lent, believes God thinks we’re all miserable sinners. Lent is associated with penitence; penitence is regret or sorrow for something you’ve done. There are times when penitence is not only reasonable but appropriate, but setting aside a whole season for regret and sorrow seems a little excessive.

I like the word repentance better than penitence because it’s less about feeling guilty or ashamed, and more about deciding to turn around and go in a different direction. Depending on what your life looks like, maybe it isn’t so much of an about face as it is a course correction, maybe even a subtle one. We all tend to drift. We adopt good habits and they slowly fall by the wayside. This doesn’t make us bad people; as far as I can tell it just makes us people. Still, we know there are ways of being in the world that are better for us and better for God’s world. Lent is a good season for getting ourselves back on track.

“On track with what?” might be the next logical question. Matthew tells us God doesn’t want shows of piety. Joel tells us we are to rend our hearts, to break open our hearts, not our clothing. Isn’t that the perfect way to describe loving the world the way Jesus loved it? Break open your hearts. Break open your hearts to each other, to the stranger, to the suffering in God’s world, to the healing God offers, to hope and possibility, and especially, to the hope of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

In this angry, polarized, us-against-them world, that kind of love, vulnerable love, feels especially risky. It is risky. There are no guarantees of a result that anyone would call success. And so loving as Jesus loved takes courage. As Brené Brown reminds us, courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor, the Latin word for heart.

The willingness to show up with love in this world, in 2025, takes courage. Showing up with love changes us. It makes us a little braver each time we do it. And it changes those around us. Maybe even the world. And some things are worth doing, even if we fail.

Jan Richardson’s poem, “Rend Your Heart,” is the perfect Ash Wednesday invitation to Lent:

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you

to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Transformation Is the Essence of Hope

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Luke 9:28-36

   When my father was 12, his family moved from Columbia, California in the Sierra foothills to Stockton in the Central Valley.  His family was poor and he hadn’t had much moral guidance.  His future looked pretty grim when he stumbled into the Stockton YMCA.  There, a Christian youth leader named Woody got to know my dad, and let him know he was valued in a way no one had done before.  Woody arranged for scholarships so my dad could go to Y camp at Lake Alpine in the High Sierras, and eventually invited him into leadership roles.  In a leadership initiation ritual on a High Sierra mountaintop, each boy chose a tree that represented his life.  My dad found a tree that was gnarled close to the ground.  It was probably stunted by heavy snow in its early years.  About four feet above the forest floor, the tree shot straight and tall into the sky.  My dad was 14 years old, and in choosing that tree, he was making a decision about his life, a decision that was made possible by Woody’s love.  It was a decision to love others in that same way.  It was a mountaintop experience for my dad.  It changed my dad’s life, and, I daresay, the lives of the family he’d have one day, including my life. 

   The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.  My dad wasn’t stuck with the way things had been.  We aren’t stuck with the way things are.  Our nation isn’t stuck with the way things are.  Things can change, the world can change, we can change, and this is the very purpose of the life of faith.  Transfiguration – change, transformation – is both an event in the life of Christ and a process in the life of the world.   

   The event in the life of Christ that we call the Transfiguration is described in this passage in Luke’s gospel; it’s a story we find in Mark and Matthew as well.  We hear it every year on Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent.  It’s one of those stories drenched with meaning and truth, and we aren’t supposed to get distracted by whether it’s a factual account of an historical event.  It’s called the Transfiguration because Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, but it isn’t just Jesus who is changed.  The disciples are given an utterly transforming glimpse.  They understand who Jesus is in a whole new way, and it changes everything.  It is, indeed, a mountaintop experience. 

   Encounters with the real Jesus are always transforming.  One pastor writes, “The person who knows Jesus becomes a different person.  A person who has not changed has not met Jesus.  It is that simple.  Christianity is not an intellectual belief, an acceptance of a creed or a doctrine or the particular beliefs of some particular denomination.  Christianity is a personal encounter with God, a personal contact with Jesus that makes life different.  It is a life that is transformed in the home, at the office, at school, and in … personal conduct.”

   But in what way are we to be transformed by an encounter with the real Jesus?  We see vastly different answers to that question in our culture right now.  I believe Brian D. McLaren is on the right track when he writes, “Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all.  Love was the greatest commandment, he said.  It was his new commandment, his prime directive – love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled.  …  Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else – everything.”

   Over the centuries, Christianity has been defined by a list of unchanging beliefs, beliefs that denominations fought over, and Christians killed and died for.  How utterly tragic, and how utterly ironic, when an encounter with the real Jesus reveals a life centered on love.  Many followers of Jesus are in the process of shifting from correct beliefs to practicing the ways of love that Jesus taught.  Lent is a season for practicing, training, shifting, even repentance, which simply means to turn and go in a different direction.  Lent, then, is the perfect time for practicing the way of love, trying our best to love our fellow human beings as Jesus loved.  Will we get it perfectly right?  No.  Will we be transformed by it?  Count on it.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).

Howard E. Butt, Jr., “Confessions of a Skeptic,” in The Library of Distinctive Sermons, Vol. 8 (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishing, 1998).

Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).

Blessed Are the Ubuntu

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Luke 6:17-26

   A great crowd comes to Jesus to be healed of their diseases and “unclean spirits,” both of which would make these people outcasts to one degree or another.  Then Jesus turns to his disciples and describes people who are “blessed” in Luke’s version of Matthew’s Beatitudes.  Malina and Rohrbaugh explain that the underlying Greek words that are translated as “blessed” and “woe” are better understood as “How honorable …” and “How shameless ….”  To say someone was “blessed” or “honorable” in Jesus’ time was to say, “Pay attention to these people, because these are the people you should try to be like.  This is the group you want to belong to.”  This is the opposite of saying, “Woe to these people,” which means, “Pay attention: You definitely do not want to be like these people, or part of this group.” 

   Luke’s beatitudes are statements consoling and supporting the socially disadvantaged.  They’re also a reversal of who was considered honorable and shameless at the time of Jesus, and in most circles, in our time as well.  Jesus proclaims that our heroes should be the poor, the hungry, the sad and grieving, and those who stand up for what is right even if people threaten them, mock them, or exclude them.  Our heroes should not be the aggressive, the rich, those who toughen themselves against feelings of loss, those who strike back when others strike them or guard their images so they’re always popular.

   How can this make any sense to us in 2025?  In our culture right now, the poor, those working for justice and equity, those trying to exercise compassion, and those insisting that mercy is more important than wealth or power appear anything but “blessed.”

   Jesus knew a couple of things.  First, he knew that the people he described as blessed are the people who understand that we need each other.  They understand this because they have no choice but to rely on others.  God designed us to need each other; God made us to live and thrive in community.  We are blessed when we know that and live it.

   Jesus also knew that the times when we’re truly the happiest are when we help or heal people.  True happiness comes from things that don’t make people rich and famous.  For example:

Loving and raising your children.

Taking care of your aging parents.

Standing up for someone who is being bullied.

Including someone who is being left out.

Hugging someone who needs a hug.

Serving a meal to someone who is hungry.

Building homes with Habitat for Humanity.

Sitting next to someone who is lonely.

Telling the truth when other people think that lying is acceptable.

Sharing what you have with people who don’t have enough.

   An anthropologist had been studying the habits and customs of an African tribe.  When he’d concluded his research, he waited for transportation to take him to the airport for the return trip home.  To help pass the time as he waited, he proposed a game for the children who constantly followed him around during his stay with the tribe.  He filled a basket with candy and placed it under a tree, and then called the kids together.  He drew a starting line on the ground and told them that when he said “Go!” they should run to the basket.  The first to arrive there would win all the candy.

   But when he said “Go!” they all held each other’s hands and ran to the tree as a group.  When they reached the basket, they shared it.  Every child enjoyed the candy.  The anthropologist was surprised.  One of them could have won all the candy.  A little girl explained it to him: “How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?”

   The child’s wisdom reflects the African notion of “ubuntu.”  In the Xhosa culture, ubuntu means, “I am because we are.”   Archbishop Desmond Tutu described it this way: “Africans have a thing called ubuntu.  It is about the essence of being human; it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world.  It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the extra mile for the sake of another.  We believe that a person is a person through other persons, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours.  When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself.  The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.  Therefore, you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”

   Ubuntu is what Jesus is talking about in this passage.  What really makes us truly happy is helping other people be happy.  What really makes us successful is helping all people to live happy, safe, healthy lives, because “I am because we are.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).

So That They Might Live

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Luke 5:1-11

   Traditionally, this passage in which Jesus tells Simon Peter that henceforth, he will be “catching people” has been interpreted as being about evangelism.   And traditionally, evangelism has been interpreted as being about conversion to Christianity, about convincing people to become believers, and most often, specifically believers in the particular form or brand of Christianity endorsed by the evangelist.   

   I don’t believe that’s what Jesus ever meant by “catching people.”

   Let’s take a few steps back in Luke’s gospel.  In Chapter 4, Jesus announces his mission statement: to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19).  He infuriates the hometown crowd by explaining that God intends these blessings to flow to foreigners, outsiders, non-believers.  (Luke 4:21-30).  Then he heals a man who was an outcast because he was considered “unclean,” and follows that with healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.  He says he needs to keep moving, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God to other towns.  (Luke 4:30-44).  Not one word about believing the right beliefs, or believing anything for that matter. 

   In this passage in Chapter 5, Jesus has been teaching a crowd so big that he gets into a boat so there’s more room for people on the beach.  He notices that the fishermen are cleaning up after an unsuccessful night.  They’d been fishing all night, Simon tells us, and brought back nothing.  No fish, no income.  No income, the family is hungry, the breadwinner is a failure.  So when he finishes teaching, Jesus tells Simon, who will be called Peter, to go into the deep water and try again.  And they do, and their catch is so big it breaks their nets and rocks their small boats.  Jesus addresses the real needs of the real lives of these fishermen.  Their families will eat tonight.  Certainly, that got their attention. 

   And then Luke uses a Greek verb rarely used in the New Testament that means, “to catch alive.”  Fishing with nets is always a matter of catching fish alive, but those live fish will soon be dead.  By using this different verb, this “catch alive” verb, Jesus is calling Simon Peter and his partners to something different, to a new vocation of catching people so that they might live.

   So that they might live.  So that they might not go hungry.  So that they might be healed.  So that they might no longer be perceived as outcasts.  So that the poor might have good news, the oppressed go free, and everyone be on an equal footing as happens in a jubilee year (“the year of the Lord’s favor,” Luke 4:19), regardless of whether people are “believers” or religious insiders.

   In 2025, catching people so that they might live sounds more like rescue than what we think of as evangelism.  Rescue from hunger, poverty, exclusion, prejudice, and oppression through domination politics, domination religion, or any other means.

   So that they might live.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

The Hometown Crowd

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Luke 4:21-30

This passage in Luke picks up with the last verse of last week’s reading. Jesus has announced the beginning of his ministry with a reading from Isaiah promising healing for those who have been cast off by the world. At first, his audience seems pleased, even proud of the hometown boy made good. But maybe that’s why Jesus presses on. “No, you don’t get it,” it’s as if he’s saying. “When I talk about God coming to free the oppressed and bless the poor, I’m talking about God’s blessing the people you can’t stand, the people you think are your enemies.” And so he reminds them of a couple of stories where God blessed not Israel, but Israel’s enemies: the widow from Sidon, Naaman the Syrian. After that, they’re so boiling mad that they’re ready to throw him over a cliff.

Why are they so angry? Could it be that Jesus told them the truth about their own prejudices, their fear, their shame? Nobody else had the guts to tell them what Jesus told them, and us: “You won’t be able to claim God’s blessings for your life unless you claim them for other people’s lives at the same time.”

If there’s one line that sums up the Jesus we encounter in Luke’s gospel, it’s this: God came to redeem everyone. When we focus on “redeem,” it’s good news, right? When we focus on “everyone,” and call to mind those we believe have done us wrong, who frighten us, whose lives or “lifestyles” we just can’t understand, or who voted for the other candidate, that same line can be terrifying.

On the one hand, many of us would nod approvingly at the message that the grace of God is not confined to one people, one religion, or one set of creeds or doctrines. We’ve seen the destruction caused when religions and religious people become exclusive and build barriers to protect insiders and keep out the others. Christians have a long history of condemning one another to hell, excommunicating each other for heresy, and basically reading one another out of the kingdom because of our disagreements on this and that doctrine. Sadly, that history is ongoing.

On the other hand, even if it isn’t about religion, we all draw our lines somewhere. We all tend to have our ways of thinking about who’s an insider and who’s an outsider, who deserves justice, healing, and well-being, and who does not. One of the most consistent themes of Jesus’ ministry is the message that God’s love is not just for a few favorites. It starts here in the Nazareth synagogue and continues right through to the end as he persists in proclaiming and demonstrating God’s welcoming grace to the unclean, the marginalized, the foreigner – precisely those people his culture excluded. Jesus’ main concern is not who we’re letting in, but who is being left out.

It’s the kind of message that can get a guy thrown off a cliff. The hard, uncomfortable thing about the God we know in Jesus is that whenever you and I draw a line between who’s in and who’s out, we will find Jesus on the other side.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
David Lose, http://www.davidlose.net/2016/01/epiphany-4-c-moving-beyond-mending-our-walls/.

Jesus’ Mission Statement (and ours)

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Luke 4:14-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved. 

Which Story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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

The Word of God Came to a Nobody

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Luke 3:1-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

What Is Truth?

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John 18:33-38

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

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

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

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

   Martin Luther King described the truth about violence this way: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.  …  Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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