christianity

A Prayer for Those Sent

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John 17:6-19

   I’m not a big fan of the Farewell Discourse, the long pep talk that Jesus gives the disciples in John’s Gospel the night before his arrest.  John’s Jesus is mystical and prescient; I much prefer Mark’s down to earth Jesus.  The Farewell Discourse showcases this mystical Jesus, and besides that, it repeats many variations of “I’m in God, and God is in me, and I’m in you, and you’re in me, and God is in you …” to which one of my fellow seminarians responded under his breath, “Goo goo a’joob.”  If you don’t get the reference, go ask a baby boomer.

   John 17:6-19 is the prayer that follows the Farewell Discourse.  The repetition continues with Jesus using the word “world” over and over.  The Greek word is κόσμος, or cosmos, which we probably think of as the universe, but in Greek it implies a system, an order, and especially in John’s gospel, the human system that creates alienation from God.  The cosmos is the social construction of reality that divides people, that creates systems of who is in and who is out, who is at the top of the heap and who is at the bottom.  This is the system that would oppose a reality with God’s love at the center.  In John 3:16, we’re told it’s this very cosmos that God loves; it’s this cosmos that God intends to save.

   Some read this passage and conclude that because the disciples “do not belong to the world, just as I [Jesus] do not belong to the world” (vs. 14), Christians should turn their backs on the world.  Some Christians separate themselves from the secular world; they won’t vote, take up arms, take oaths, or hold public office.  But Jesus is sending his disciples into the world, into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  As a Presbyterian, part of the Reformed tradition, I have inherited a long-held belief in living our faith in the world: whatever concerns humanity and its welfare is the concern of Christians.  There is nothing that is not God’s business.

   Jesus sends his disciples into the cosmos, into the social construction of reality, in order to transform it.  Thus, the Reformed Tradition has a long history of political activism aimed at helping God transform the world to look more like God’s Kingdom; going upstream, as it were, to address discrimination, poverty, disease, war; advocating for the marginalized and oppressed.  Presbyterians have a big fat book of social witness policies adopted by our General Assembly on everything from gun violence to racism to abortion to capital punishment to LGBTQ+ rights.

   A brief cul-de-saq: In any discussion of churches and activism, someone inevitably wonders about the “separation of church and state.”  The First Amendment to the Constitution restricts governments, not churches.  It says Congress can’t establish a religion; it can’t make any religion the official religion the way the Anglican Church is the Church of England.  The courts have interpreted this to mean the government can’t do anything to promote any particular religion or religion in general.  So you can’t require prayer in public schools, or put a nativity scene on public property.  The First Amendment also says Congress can’t get in the way of religious practices.  The government can’t require Jews to work on Saturdays or Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, and it can’t stop any student in any school, public or private, from praying before an exam.  Essentially, the government can step in only if a religious practice is dangerous to health or safety. 

   This point is crucial in our current political climate: The First Amendment allows churches to advocate for political change, but not to replace the secular government with a faith-based one.  My Presbyterian ancestors fought for this.  Simply put, if someone says, “I can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” that’s perfectly fine.  That’s religious freedom.  But if someone tries to say, “You can’t do that.  It’s against my religion,” the First Amendment should put a stop to it. 

    But back to the Farewell Discourse.  Like Jesus, all good leaders, teachers, pastors, mentors, and parents know that you do your best to prepare folks and then you send them out into the world.  You pray you’ve done enough to get them ready for what they’ll face, and you pray that what they’ll face won’t hurt or destroy them.  In this season of graduations, Jesus’ prayer is particularly poignant. 

   At the end of the War of Independence, General George Washington had fulfilled his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the army. He sent his own farewell letter to the governors of the thirteen states, closing with a prayer that echoes Jesus’ prayer for his disciples and all our prayers for those whom we send:

    “Almighty God; We make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy Holy protection; and Thou wilt incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government; and entertain an affection and love for one another and for all Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for those who have served in the Field.  And finally that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility, and pacific tempter of mind which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.  Grant our supplication, we beseech Thee, in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

   We are sent into the world.  And Jesus continues to pray for us.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved. 

Vines and Branches

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John 15:1-8

Jesus describes himself as the vine, while his disciples are the branches. One way to look at this is that the disciples get nourishment, fuel, even life from Jesus. His teachings inspire them, and will bear fruit in them.

But this metaphor also implies attachment. Branches are connected to the trunk. Jesus uses the word “abide.” “Abide in me as I abide in you.” Jesus is describing a closeness, a connection, an attachment that, frankly, makes me uncomfortable. It feels claustrophobic. Maybe that’s in part because as a woman born in the mid-20th century, I bristle at the thought of being subsumed by anyone, disappearing into someone else as most women have been required to do for much of history. Just who is “Mrs. John Smith” after all? We have no idea, right? She’s disappeared into Mr. John Smith.

There’s also that pruning metaphor. Hacking away branches so the plant can produce more fruit? And these branches are burned? There seems to be a warning or at least a scolding in here. What do we do with that?

Can these verses be understood in a way that does not give me the creeps?

It’s crucial to note these verses are part of the Farewell Discourse which, in John’s Gospel, Jesus delivers the night before the crucifixion. Jesus knows what’s coming and is saying goodbye. As Karoline Lewis writes, “‘I am the vine and you are the branches’ is both promise and possibility.” In this metaphor, the disciples are given a purpose: go bear fruit. Bear the fruit of the relationship, the lessons, the life they have witnessed in Jesus. The promise is that they won’t be alone. “Abide in me as I abide in you.” No matter what the days ahead bring, Jesus will be with them.

Further, if I step back from my initial claustrophobic reaction, I’m challenged to take seriously the questions, “What does it mean to be a branch on Jesus’ vine? How might this promise shape our actions?” In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in what’s called Christian nationalism, which, as someone put it, is “just plain old nationalism in which Jesus is trotted out as a mascot to endorse something that bears absolutely no resemblance to the Sermon on the Mount or apostolic Christianity.” What is glaringly missing from Christian nationalism are these very questions. I have seen no conversations from among Christian nationalists about what Jesus, the Jesus we meet in Scripture, actually wants for us or for our world, or about what he might actually do in the face of the issues with which people are concerned.

Perhaps we, as his followers, need to be reminding ourselves that Jesus is the vine, and ask how his branches ought to live.

Bearing fruit is a condition of being a disciple. Disciples are recognized by their fruits; that is, by their actions. Bearing fruit means loving our neighbors as ourselves and doing the work of spreading God’s love to all our neighbors. If we turn to Scripture, and we should, Jesus taught that our neighbors include everyone and most particularly, the lost, the least, the despised, the outcast; the people most folks really would rather not have as neighbors.

Which brings me full circle to my claustrophobic response. Jesus’ vine and branches metaphor is communal. It speaks of dependence, interdependence, and mutuality. The branches need the vine, but the vine also needs the branches. Not only are we not lone rangers or self-made in spite of our culture’s pretending otherwise, but, as Debie Thomas writes, “…the point of my Christian life is not me.”

In February I met one of my daughters for a weekend in Paso Robles (which, sadly or hilariously, locals pronounce păs´-ō rō´-bŭls), California. We toured a vineyard, and because it was February, there were no leaves on the vines. Without leaves, the grapevine’s branches were a bare, chaotic tangle growing out of the trunk. They reminded me of Muppet hair, maybe Beeker’s or Animal’s wild mane.

Debie Thomas again: “We are meant to be tangled up together. We are meant to live lives of profound interdependence, growing into, around, and out of each other. We cause pain and loss when we hold ourselves apart … in this metaphor, dependence is not a matter of personal morality or preference; it’s a matter of life and death.”

And in our world, today, it clearly is.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Karoline Lewis, , https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter-2/commentary-on-john-151-8-6
David Lose, https://www.davidlose.net/2021/04/easter-5-b-2021-vine-branch-questions/
Debie Thomas, Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2022).

Have You Anything to Eat?

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  Luke 24:36b-48

Luke offers the most detailed account of the news of Jesus’ resurrection and his encounters with the disciples on the first Easter.  In Luke’s story, the women at the empty tomb hear from not one but two men in “dazzling” clothing that Jesus has risen.  I’m picturing Steve Martin’s mirrored jacket in “Leap of Faith,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_of_Faith_%28film%29.  Jesus himself catches up to two more disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they don’t recognize him at first.  Which is puzzling, right?  They realize who he is when he takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it, as he did the night before his arrest.  In this Sunday’s lectionary passage, he meets the rest of the disciples back in Jerusalem.  Luke’s gospel was written some 50 or 60 years after the events it describes, and Luke, it appears, is striving mightily to explain how Jesus’ death and resurrection fulfill the promises of the Old Testament; it also seems he’s trying very hard to convince his readers, including us, that it really, truly happened.  That’s a tough job.  And yet, Jesus says his disciples – and that includes his present-day followers – his disciples are to be witnesses of this good news.  This is not information to be tucked away like a fond memory.  A witness is someone who testifies to the truth, but in our post-modern, skeptical, you’re-gonna-have-to-prove-it-to-me world, what on earth does that mean?  How do we make the Easter story real?

   Tom Long tells a story about scanning his car radio dial and landing on a Christian radio station.  The talk show host was taking calls from listeners, and a woman named Barbara had called with a long list of problems at work, at home, and with depression.  The talk show host interrupted her.  “Barbara,” he said, “Are you a believer?  You know, you’ll never solve any of these problems unless you’re a believer.”  Barbara hesitated.  “I don’t know,” she said.  The host told her either she was a believer or she wasn’t, and Barbara said she would like to be, but at the moment she felt a bit agnostic.  The talk show host said he’d written a book that he was going to send her that proved Jesus was who he said he was and that he was raised from the dead.  He pressed her to say she’d be a believer after reading this irrefutable proof, and Barbara grew frustrated, saying trusting people was a challenge for her at the moment.  Finally she said she’d read the book; I suspect she just wanted to end this creepy conversation. 

   Tom Long points out that the talk show host had it all wrong about being a witness.  First, he doesn’t have irrefutable proof of the resurrection.  There isn’t any.  There are no videos on YouTube or anywhere else of Jesus vacating the tomb.  Second, what the talk show host gave Barbara was a sales pitch, not witness.  Christian witness is about telling the truth of our experience the best we can, in such a way that both we and the people who hear us grow in the love of God and neighbor.  The purpose is not to get people to believe something in their heads, but to transform their lives – to transform our real lives and our real world. 

   This is why I love the fact that Jesus says he’s hungry and eats that piece of broiled fish.  It’s kind of goofy and maybe a little desperate on Luke’s part; I picture Luke saying, “See?  He even eats!”  But it’s so real, so human.  It reminds us that real, human bodies matter to God.  God makes them, sustains them, and resurrects them.  Our real lives matter.  What happens to us everyday matters.  It matters to God that people are killed by guns way too often in our country.  It matters to God that more than one in six children in our wealthy nation lives in a home facing food insecurity.  It matters to God when people grieve, get sick, struggle with addictions, can’t find work, or can’t find shelter.  Frederick Buechner put it this way: “…the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense.  In other words, the Truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it’s to be found at all, not in the Bible, or the Church, or Theology – the best they can do is point to the Truth – but in our own stories.”   

   The truth is to be found in our own stories.  If this is so, then what does a real life- and real body-affirming Christian witness to the resurrection look like?  If we follow Jesus’ example in the Luke passage, first we show; then we tell.  We show our own wounds: our vulnerabilities, our hurts, our hard-learned lessons.  We share table fellowship.  We extend exceptional compassion.   We live as though all bodies matter.  We listen to other people’s stories and we pay attention to our own, because they matter; because God is present in those stories. 

   Charles Hoffacker writes, “Jesus wants us as witnesses.  Not airy spirits or pious ghosts, but bodies like his own with wounds to show, bodies that witness to resurrection, threatening the world with life.  For the only Easter some people may ever see is the Easter they see in us.”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.  

Resources:

Thomas G. Long, Testimony (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

Charles Hoffacker, “A Guy with a Body,” 2003, http://www.lectionary.org/Sermons/Hoff/Luke/Luke%2024.36b-48,%20GuyBody.htm.

David Lose, https://www.davidlose.net/2021/04/easter-3-b-a-flesh-and-bone-resurrection/

Go Ahead into Galilee

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Mark 16:1-8

The women who came to the tomb early Sunday morning had been at the cross on Friday, watching from a distance. They knew Jesus was dead. Two of them followed Joseph of Arimathea and saw where his lifeless body was laid. They would have prepared the body for burial on Friday, but they were interrupted by the Sabbath. At first light on Sunday, they go to the tomb, preoccupied with how they’ll roll the stone away by themselves.

When the women arrive at the tomb, they encounter something they aren’t expecting. In fact, in Mark’s version of the story, we all encounter something we’re not expecting on Easter morning. We expect the stone to be rolled away; we expect to find someone who announces the astonishing news of the resurrection. We don’t expect the story to end right there. The other gospels, Matthew, Luke, and John, tell a much longer story, with Jesus appearing to the women and later to the disciples, showing his wounds and breaking bread with them. Mark leaves us hanging. The original Greek is, “The women went out from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; they said nothing to anyone, they were afraid for…” The English translation solves this awkward sentence by moving the preposition, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the gospel. The early church was so uncomfortable with Mark’s non-ending that later writers tacked on three separate, carefully packaged, churchy-sounding endings. Two of them appear in most Bibles; all of them take away the ambiguity of the resurrection story by adding accounts of post-resurrection appearances of the risen Christ. The oldest manuscripts of Mark’s gospel don’t include them, so most scholars conclude that the original account in Mark ends right here, with the women running scared.

It’s not like the Easter story isn’t already difficult enough, right? Apparently, the great 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr always turned down invitations to preach on Easter. Instead, he chose to sit in the pews of one of the more liturgical churches because there, the worship would focus on stirring music and festive sacraments, with not much in the way of a sermon. After all, Niebuhr said, he didn’t want “to be subjected to some preacher making a fool of himself trying to explain the resurrection.”

Like the women at the tomb in Mark’s gospel, we get the news of the resurrection second hand. We don’t have Jesus standing right in front of us, showing us his scars. Instead, we read about it in Scripture. We hear it proclaimed, sing it in hymns, and recite it in creeds. Then the mysterious young man goes on to tell the women, “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Just before his arrest, Jesus predicted that the disciples would scatter in the confusion and anguish that awaited them all. Then he said, “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”

Where will the women find Jesus? In Galilee. Galilee, where these women and the disciples lived and worked and led their ordinary lives. “Galilee of the nations,” or “Galilee of the Gentiles,” the prophet Isaiah called it, meaning someplace less than perfectly holy, less than perfectly anything, someplace where we’ll meet people different from us, but then again, the same as us; people struggling, trying to get by. Galilee means out in the world, the ordinary world of which every tiny crevice and corner needs to know God’s love expressed in human compassion and forgiveness.

And “Go ahead to Galilee” is what we are told, as well.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our news of the resurrection starts off as second hand. Because the more you “practice resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry puts it, the more it becomes a firsthand experience. We find our own Galilees in different places. In the kitchen and the classroom, in the boardroom, the court room, the sidewalk, the city, the farm, in our own country and across the border and across the sea. Galilee is where ordinary people do extraordinary things with their lives. We may not always see it right away; we may not always understand it; the saving action of God in the world is often hidden, usually ambiguous, and never easily explained. It probably won’t look like success the way the world defines success; but it will make love more possible rather than less possible and it will most certainly involve community. Resurrection is the Christian equivalent of revolution, a life that says there is hope where others see only despair, there is life where others see only death.

Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. Where charity and love prevail over injustice and violence, there is the risen Christ. Where compassion and hope replace cynicism and despair, there is the risen Christ. Where peace and love take root in lives that are empty and lost, there is the risen Christ. Where human beings know joy and justice, dignity and delight, there is the risen Christ, beckoning us into Galilee.

The story didn’t end 2000 years ago. It doesn’t end on Easter morning. Now it is our story. He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Sir, We Wish to See Jesus

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John 12:20-33

By the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus has become something of a celebrity, and so some Greeks approach his disciples and ask to see him. They approach Philip, who, although he’s Galilean, has a Greek name. Maybe he’s more accustomed to Gentiles. The Greeks say to Philip, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” When Philip relays their request, Jesus answers with a response that seems unrelated to what they asked, typical in John’s Gospel. If the Greeks are actually right there, eavesdropping, and if they do hear Jesus’ answer, I’ll bet they’re confused.

The Greeks said they wanted to “see” Jesus, and in John “seeing” is code for understanding. They want to see Jesus, and perhaps, to follow him. This seems to be a sign for Jesus: the fact that people outside Judaism are looking for him means his hour has come. He says a grain of wheat will remain just that, a single grain, unless it falls into the earth and dies, and then it produces much fruit. And then he teaches that those who love their lives, who maintain the status quo, protect and conserve their lives, will lose them. But those who reject their lives – elsewhere he says, “lose their lives for my sake” – will find them, will have real life, a full life, a wholehearted life. I wonder if the Greeks were looking for that.

What does Jesus mean? Barbara Brown Taylor offers this possibility: “[T]he hardest spiritual work in the world is to love your neighbor as yourself – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. All you have to do,” she says, “is recognize another you ‘out there’ – your other self in the world – for whom you may care as instinctively as you care for yourself. To become that person, even for a moment, is to understand what it means to die to your self.”

Loving others, really loving others, is to understand what it means to die to self. Don’t we experience the truth of this in our lives; don’t we see for ourselves that sacrificing for love, letting our hearts break open for love like a seed that breaks open, leads to more life? We see it in families where parents give up time, money, old dreams, and personal ambition so that their children might flourish. We see it where spouses set aside their own wants or needs to help their partner become who they are meant to be. We see it when someone cares for a frail parent, or a spouse with dementia; we see it when people show up for each other in a crisis. We see it when people stand up to injustice that doesn’t impact them personally. In a thousand places and ways we know this to be true. These may not sound like big deaths. They are the small deaths we experience throughout our lives when we love in big ways. But through them we live out the truth of Jesus’ words over and over again. Our “dying” multiplies, grows, spreads, and results in life.

If you want to see Jesus, it helps to know what you’re looking for. We see Jesus when we see profound love, love for another or for many others that is powerful enough that some part of the self must die, the part that gets in the way of love. We see Jesus when we recognize that this kind of death leads to more life. And so based on what Jesus taught, we see Jesus …
• … when someone dies to refusing to forgive.
• … when someone dies to arrogance and self-righteousness.
• … when someone dies to greed.
• … when someone dies to revenge.
• … when someone dies to violence as a solution.
• … when someone dies to the need to control or manipulate.
• … when someone dies to the need for power, privilege, and prestige.
• … when someone dies to hate.

“Sir, we would see Jesus.” In many older church sanctuaries, this Bible verse is carved into the interior of the pulpit, where only the preacher can see it. Of course, this reflects a time when the person reading the verse, the person standing in the pulpit, was invariably addressed as “Sir,” never “Miss” or “Madam.” Still, the idea is to remind the person who occupies the pulpit that this is the desire of everyone sitting in the pews: to see Jesus; to encounter Jesus, the one in whom we best encounter the love of God. But here’s the thing: This is great advice, but not just for preachers. It is also our calling as the church, as those who call ourselves the body of Christ in the world: to let the world see Jesus, in us.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (New York, HarperCollins: 2009).
Janet H. Hunt, “When Dying Means Living,” March 18, 2012, http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/2012/03/when-dying-means-living.html