Blessed Are the Peacemakers

March 1, 2026 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

We all woke up Saturday to learn that we Americans have begun another Middle Eastern war based on dubious intelligence claims. This morning we learned that Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed 3 U.S. service members, at least 9 people in Israel, and 4 people in other countries in the region. In Iran, the U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed at least 133 civilians, including, reportedly, dozens of school children, and wounded 200 others, according to HRANA, the media agency of an Iranian rights group based in Washington.

War is deadly. That’s the point. I grieve for the civilians who died, and I grieve, as well, for the members of the military who were killed. Maybe all soldiers are aware they could die in combat, but soldiers don’t make policy or decide when to go to war. Did these soldiers or their grieving loved ones have a personal stake in this particular conflict? I doubt it.

When I was a teenager during the Vietnam War, I was certain I was a pacifist. I find the question of pure pacifism more complicated now than I did then, and I look forward to reading a book on the topic written by my colleague Ben Daniel, to be published later this year. Ben’s book, Grace Over Guns: Pursuing Peace in a Militarized World, should be released by the end of this summer.

What I am certain about is that Christians are called to be peacemakers. In 1980 (practically ancient history at this point), my denomination’s General Assembly adopted a report entitled, “Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling.” Based on Matthew 5:9 as well as the rest of the rich scriptural heritage of peace and justice in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, and based also in the Reformed tradition that historically has been committed to world-transforming action, the forty-plus page report states, among other things, “we believe that these times, so full of peril and tragedy for the human family, present a special call for obedience to our Lord, the Prince of Peace. The Spirit is calling us to life out of death. … We are at a turning point. We are faced with the decision either to serve the Rule of God or to side with the powers of death through our complacency and silence.”

We are faced with a decision either to serve the Rule of God, or to side with the powers of death through our complacency and silence. So, what does it mean to be a peacemaker? I’m grateful for some excellent exegetical work done by April Hoelke Simpson, who writes, “One way to answer this question is to pay attention to how the term eirēnopoios [the Greek word translated as “peacemakers”] was used in the ancient world.” The word occurs in the New Testament only in this verse, but outside the New Testament, it’s used by Xenophon and Plutarch to refer to “those who are committed to peace rather than to war.”

Another clue is that Jesus, a devout Jew, certainly would have been shaped by the rich meaning of the Hebrew word for peace, shalom, which includes not only lack of conflict but also safety, welfare, prosperity, and completeness on an individual and group level. “Peacemaking,” therefore, is the active pursuit of wellbeing for all, especially those for whom such wellbeing has been denied. As “The Believer’s Calling” puts it, “We know there can be no national security without global security, and there can be no global security without political and economic justice.”

Jesus says that peacemakers will be called huioi theou; literally, “sons of God,” or, in more contemporary and inclusive language, “children of God.” While I celebrate that all God’s people are “children of God,” the way Jesus uses this phrase here may point to something more. Simpson writes, “[I]n the context of the first-century Roman Empire, when Matthew was written, the term ‘son of [a] god’ was politically significant. Multiple emperors – not least Rome’s first emperor, Augustus – were granted the title ‘son of god.’ … In texts about Augustus, we find repeated reference to the idea that he was an agent of peace for the whole Roman Empire.” This means Jesus’ choice of words here, naming his peacemaking followers “sons of God,” is subversive. Simpson writes, “Whereas Roman rhetoric portrayed its rulers as those who had the divine right to rule and establish peace, Jesus tells his followers something different: true peace comes not through Rome but through you. You are agents of peace in the world, agents who bring reconciliation and genuine wellbeing to those who need it. By being thus, you will be rightfully called the heirs of God. … The point is that Christians are called to be agents of peace in the world, and they are emphatically not to do so through a model of domination that conquers and suppresses in the name of ‘peace.’”

Are some wars necessary? I’m not sure. I am sure, however, that this war is a choice. There were diplomatic options for most of the stated aims of this armed conflict, a conflict not approved by Congress, a conflict that does not make Americans or the rest of the world safer. I turn again and again to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wisdom:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, 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. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Resources:
Ben Daniel, Grace Over Guns: Pursuing Peace in a Militarized World (Harvey, ND: Herald Press, 2026
Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling, https://www.pcusa.org/sites/default/files/8-peacemaking-believers-calling-1980.pdf
April Hoelke Simpson, “Commentary of Matthew 5:1-20,” January 22, 2023,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/beatitudes/commentary-on-matthew-51-20-3
Nicholas Kristof and Stephanie Shen, “A War of Choice Does Not Make Us Safer,” February 28, 2026, video:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010744432/a-war-of-choice-does-not-make-us-safer.html?searchResultPosition=2
Nicholas Kristoff, “The Folly of Attacking Iran,” February 28, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/opinion/trump-iran-war.html
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010)

How Does God “Keep” Us?

February 24, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Psalm 121

Psalm 121 is “A Song of Ascents.” Eugene Peterson (The Message) calls it “A Pilgrim Song.” It is a psalm sung by the people of God as they made their way to the temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built on a plateau; no matter how you approach it, you’re traveling uphill. The temple was located on the highest part of the city of Jerusalem, so the entire journey was a journey uphill. The psalms were not just about the worship life of the people of God, however. The psalms were about all of life, every aspect, all goings and comings. The psalms remind us that our whole life is about how we worship God and how we abide in God’s presence, not just on holy days or on Sunday mornings, but at all times and in all places. As Wendell Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

A form of the Hebrew word for “keep,” shamar, appears six times in the eight verses of Psalm 121. Clearly, God’s “keeping” is the psalm’s focus. What does it mean for God to “keep” God’s people? We might be tempted by the facile notion that if we trust in God, nothing bad will ever happen to us. “[God] will not let your foot be moved” sounds as though that may be the case. But we know that bad things happen to good people (and to bad people, and to all people) all the time. So, what does this “keeping” mean for us today? What does it mean for us to commit ourselves to God’s keeping, to trust in God’s keeping?

Verse 2 of the psalm gives us a clue:
“My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.”

It is central to this psalm that God is the author of Creation; as Psalm 24:1 puts it, “The earth is the LORD’s, and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” We are part of Creation; we are of nature, not in it. The world God created sustains us with all we need to survive and thrive: food, water, clean air, rest, companions, our rational judgment, our compassion, and so much more. God’s creation “keeps” us; it is the “help” that God provides to every single one of us.

You might argue that not everyone has sufficient food and water, sufficient rest, sufficient companionship, and so on. God’s intention to “keep” us is threatened, not by anything God has done, but by human choice and action. The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development notes, “’The foundational moral experience is reverence for the human person, and her/his environment.’ For centuries, Christian moralists have focused almost exclusively on the first part of this statement – ‘the person.’ The current environmental crisis extending from the later 20th Century to the present raises numerous challenges to that focus and other traditional approaches to Christian Ethics.”

It is impossible to have reverence for “the person” or any other creature without reverence for the Creation that sustains them. We always assume God cares that we stay within moral and spiritual boundaries. What about the moral and spiritual boundaries that preserve and care for God’s Creation? In an interview with Krista Tippett, biblical scholar and professor Ellen Davis said, “[T]he best index in the Bible of the health of the relationship between God and Israel or between God and humankind is the health of the land of Israel or the earth as a whole, its fertility. And I think at the root of it is the notion that we are a part of an intricate web of physical relations, which are at the same time moral relations.”

Our relations with the rest of Creation are moral relations. So doesn’t trusting God to “keep” us include reverence for God’s Creation? Doesn’t it mean committing ourselves to those boundaries that allow God to continue to sustain us, to “keep” us? Boundaries that value our fellow creatures, rather than driving them to extinction? Boundaries that ensure that our own species will survive and thrive? The question becomes not, “How does God ‘keep’ us?” but “Will we allow God to continue to ‘keep’ us?”

In the psalm, when the pilgrim lifts his eyes, he is making a choice (Psalm 121:1). He is choosing to look towards God, to worship God. There is no definition of worshiping God that does not include reverence for God’s Creation. We, like the pilgrim, are faced with a choice, a choice to live as though there are no unsacred places.

In this vein, the United Church of Christ reworked Psalm 121 as a Lenten prayer:

Living Psalm 121—Second Sunday of Lent

I lift up my eyes to the snow-capped mountains-
The green-sloped fields and the cliffs by the bay.
Oh, beautiful world!
Where will our help come? I cry to the skies.
Our guidance comes from God, our Co-Creator of heaven and earth.

Even as we sleep, our Maker will not rest.
Even when we turn our face away from creation’s needs,
God will continue to call us.

God who molds and carries the lands of
Israel and Palestine, United States and Mexico,
Russia, Botswana, Bhutan, Ecuador, and Australia
will neither slumber nor sleep-
Not as human walls are crafted, as sea levels rise, as land burns.

Our Maker offers us shade and tools
when temperatures climb and as hate surges.
Even as Creation burns with fevers,
we’re gifted the sun’s comfort and the moon’s compassion
to accompany us around the clock.

God our Maker will call us from all evil.
“Children, care for one another.
See this world as an extension of me and you,”
God will beg us.

And as we extend our hands to our neighbors,
to the grass below and sun above, we will see that God our Maker will keep our going out and our coming in
from this time on and until Heaven and Earth pass away.

Amen.

Resources:
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship-planning/selah-life-in-a-minor-key/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-lectionary-planning-notes/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-preaching-notes
Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,” in Given (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005).
https://interfaithsustain.com/to-care-for-the-earth-ethics-and-the-environment/
Ellen Davis, in an interview with Krista Tippett, https://www.dailygood.org/story/2497/the-art-of-being-creatures-krista-tippett/
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/living_psalm_121_creation_justice_lent_2/

We’ve Been Telling This Story Poorly

February 16, 2026 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

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.

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

February 10, 2026February 10, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

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.

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).

Salt and Light

February 4, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Matthew 5:13-20

It’s appropriate that on Super Bowl Sunday, we hear Jesus giving the disciples a pep talk. In Matthew 5:1-2, the two verses preceding what we call the Sermon on the Mount, we’re told that Jesus has seen a crowd, but he goes up the mountainside to teach his disciples. These words of encouragement are meant for Jesus’ disciples – his disciples then, and his disciples now.

When we hear Jesus tell the disciples they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, what we often hear, instead, is “you should be…;” you should be the salt of the earth; you should be the light of the world. But that isn’t what he says. He says “You are…” You are, already. Rather than telling us we ought to be doing something we’re not, or setting an unreachable standard that we’ll only feel guilty about, Jesus says, “You are salt. You are light.”

These ordinary images don’t point to huge, dramatic acts. It only takes a pinch of salt to turn a bland dish into a tasty meal. Even a single candle destroys the darkness. With both salt and light, a little bit makes a big difference.

We’re living in difficult, challenging times. Perhaps these are not “the worst of times,” as Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, but it can certainly feel that way some days. In the United States, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community are under siege, American citizens who protest this have been shot and killed, the rule of law is under threat, it’s unclear that we’ll have free and fair elections in the fall, and many folks are struggling to pay their bills. Today the Washington Post lost a third of its staff, further jeopardizing trustworthy reporting following budget cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Department of Justice seems to have been relegated to the role of personal attorneys of the Administration. I could go on and on. So could you.

What difference can a pinch of salt and a small flashlight make in all this?

I recently finished a book by author Sharon McMahon, who is known as “America’s history teacher.” The book, The Small and the Mighty, is about ordinary American citizens who didn’t make it into our textbooks but who, through small acts of courage, determination, and commitment to the ideals we claim we value as Americans, brought about more justice, more equality, more freedom, more peace. As one review puts it, “Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers.”

McMahon’s book is a corrective to our assumption that things change for the better only when the rich and powerful act. Each of the people she describes simply does “the next needed thing.”

That is the salt and light Jesus has in mind. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your God in heaven.” (Mathew 5:16) When we have compassion for people – our families, our co-workers, the person who mows your lawn, the person who cleans your office – their lives improve. When we serve, the world improves. When we do the next needed thing in our own corner of the world, we heal that corner. We gather in community so that we can get encouragement and support in figuring out what that next needed thing is. But we are salt. We are light. Where we are, loving our neighbors as Jesus loves, we change the world around us.

What Does God Want?

January 26, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

Lesson: Micah 6:1-8

Those of us who preach regularly, who interact with Scripture regularly, usually end up with some favorite passages, touchstones that shape our faith. Micah 6:1-8 is one of mine, and in particular Micah 6:8:

God has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

If you’ve ever wondered what God wants, there it is. Right there in black and white. One simple yet powerful verse. Bam!

In earlier chapters, the prophet Micah explains that God is unhappy with the way God’s people have been living. Micah spoke to the Southern Kingdom of Israel, called Judah, in the 8th century B.C.E. Micah saw that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. More than that: the rich were getting richer because the poor were getting poorer. Those with land and power foreclosed on the small plots of land held by farmers. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, while many others were driven into poverty. Compassion and mercy were in short supply, but pious people just went on “worshiping” as though nothing important was happening around them. People went through the right motions, but their hearts were hard and their faces turned away from the suffering of those around them.

Sound familiar?

So, in Chapter 6, the prophet envisions a gigantic courtroom where the people are being called on the cosmic carpet. The prophet calls upon the mountains, the ancient witnesses to all of Israel’s history, to serve as the jury and listen to the case against Judah. The people have become “wearied” by God, which probably means that they’ve become tired of following God’s moral demands. God reminds them of the exodus from Egypt and the deliverance from the hands of the Moabite Balak as evidence that God has delivered on all the divine promises. Judah has no grounds for defense.

Judah doesn’t admit guilt or ask for forgiveness but rushes quickly to “Okay, okay; how can I fix this?” “What do I have to do, God? Just tell me. I’ll do whatever it takes. Burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, tens of thousands of rivers of oil?” The defendant can tell that all this still isn’t enough and in desperation, offers his first-born child. “Will that take care of it? Is that what you want?”

But of course, that is not what God wants.

The people of Judah want to fix their relationship with God by doing things that show on the outside but don’t necessarily change them on the inside into people who care about the person standing right in front of them. Is Micah saying worship isn’t important? No. The people are already worshiping. What Micah is saying is something along the lines of that old adage: Sitting in a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car. He’s saying that our faith should show in our lives, every day, in every encounter, not only in how we spend Sunday morning.

Micah tells the people they’ve missed the point. God wants and requires nothing less than that they live into their covenant with God. In other words, God wants them to become decent human beings. Micah boils this down to three basics: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

I worked with an associate pastor who used to say, “It’s all that simple, and it’s all that hard.” That certainly applies here.

“Love kindness” might seem like the easiest of the three but it’s more than being “nice.” The Hebrew word which most Bibles translate as kindness is hesed, and it can mean mercy, charity, or compassion. Walter Brueggemann wrote that there is a covenantal and community element here that the word “kindness” doesn’t capture. Christine Pohl writes, “Kindness is far more than a single or random action; it is part of a way of life characterized by moral attentiveness that is both respectful of – and helpful to – others. Kindness involves a recognition of our common humanity and frailty that leads us to care about each person’s particular well-being and to treat him or her as deserving of generous response and respect.” I would summarize this, “Treat everyone you meet as though they are a child of God – because they are.”

“Doing justice” is tough for a couple of reasons. For starters, people have a hard time agreeing what justice is. Our politically polarized nation is dramatic proof of this. And besides that, it is so easy to feel overwhelmed. Brueggemann wrote that to “do justice” means to be actively engaged in the redistribution of power in the world, to correct the systemic inequalities that marginalize some for the excessive enhancement of others.” Yikes. That is a big, big job. Can any of us do enough?

Which points us to the third on Micah’s list of requirements: Walk humbly with your God. To “walk humbly with God” means to abandon our sense of self-sufficiency; to understand we can’t do what we need to do alone; we need other people and more importantly, we need God. Walking humbly can be a means to doing justice. By acknowledging that our views are a partial expression of gospel truth – as are the views of those who disagree with us – we make room for the other in our midst. Walking humbly also means understanding that we really can do only so much. When you bang your head against institutional inertia long enough you figure out that systemic change doesn’t happen without the personal transformation of others within the system, and sometimes we can’t just make that happen. Sometimes we have to trust in the grace of a merciful God. So walking humbly with God might mean saying the Serenity Prayer and asking ourselves the question, “What’s worth doing even if we fail?”

That is where many of us find ourselves these days. It helps to have a North Star, an orientation to keep us putting one foot in front of the other: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. It’s all that simple. And it’s all that hard.

Resources:
Walter Brueggemann, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly Gaventa and James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year A, James D. Newsome, ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).
Christine Pohl, “Recovering Kindness: An Urgent Virtue in a Ruthless World, in The Christian Century, October 18, 2012, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-10/recovering-kindness.
Scott D. Anderson, “Living By the Word,” in The Christian Century, January 30, 2011, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-01/sunday-january-30-2011.
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly (New York: Gotham Books, 2012).

Come and See

January 15, 2026 / cjwhitt / Leave a comment

John 1:29-42

“Come and see,” Jesus says to Andrew and another disciple of John the Baptist. The two men hear John say that Jesus is the Lamb of God. They begin to follow him, probably watching him as he teaches, heals, and goes about his ministry. When Jesus notices them, he asks, “What are you looking for?” Instead of answering his question, they ask their own: “Teacher, where are you staying?” What they mean is, “Where can we find you?” Not only do they want to follow Jesus today; they want to be able to find him tomorrow. In response, Jesus invites them to “Come and see.” A better translation might be, “Keep on coming and you will see!” This is an invitation to the two disciples, but it’s also an invitation to the later readers and hearers of John’s Gospel. It’s an invitation to continue to read and interact with the story in order to see, in order to experience and understand and be touched by God through Jesus. It’s an invitation to us, and to anyone else who encounters Jesus, in the Gospel or in the church.

“Come and see.” The invitation is open and welcoming. At this point, Jesus doesn’t say, “Who do you think that I am?” He doesn’t say, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” He doesn’t say, “Are you really ready to accept me as your Lord and Savior?” He doesn’t even say, “Wait a minute; you didn’t answer my question. I asked what you’re looking for.” He certainly doesn’t try to sign them up to work on a committee (you’ll understand this reference if you’re Presbyterian). He says, “Come and see.” He doesn’t tell them that they should already know anything or that they should already be something before they become his disciples. He accepts them where they are and invites them to go from there.

In his book about the post-modern church, Jim Kitchens writes, “More and more of the people who are coming into our churches today either have never been to church before or haven’t been to worship since they were first able at age 13 or so to resist their parents’ demand that they attend.” When I began seminary, a close friend who’d never had anything to do with church asked me, “So, will you keep practicing law during the week since church is only on Sundays?” I guess she thought sermons are extemporaneous (they are not; at least not for me). She had no clue that being part of a church community means being visited when you’re ill, comforted when you’re grieving, and counseled when you’re confused, or that, all week long, congregations offer fellowship that builds community and service that extends God’s love beyond the doors of the church building. We can’t assume that people who find their way to our sanctuaries on Sunday morning know any of this. Just as Jesus didn’t tell the two men that they were asking the wrong question or try to bring them back to his question, a gentle, “Come and see” will encourage questions and provide ways of working out answers.

A woman I’ll call Sharon told me her “Come and see” story. She’d attended church and Sunday school as a child, but it had been years since she’d had anything to do with organized religion. She was in a choir at her community college, and the choir director kept inviting her to his church. He said, “The people are really nice; you’d really like them.” Sharon said to me, “I thought, ‘Whoop-dee-do.’ Lots of people are really nice. People at the Rotary, in the P.T.A.; you don’t have to go to church to find really nice people.”

Sharon’s college choir was scheduled to give a joint concert with another campus choral group, and one week before the concert, the other group flaked out. It looked as though the concert would have to be cancelled, but the choir director, the one from the church with really nice people, invited the choir from his church to fill in for the missing choral group. Sharon said they learned the music quickly and performed cheerfully. And they were good. And they were nice.

Sharon decided to check out the church but instead of attending worship she took part in the church’s ministry of providing meals to homeless people. Sharon said, “These were people who were walking the walk.” She got to know some of these people better, working alongside them. She remembers that one evening as she was putting sandwiches on trays, a passage from Matthew’s Gospel came to her – the one that says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). It hit her – that was what she was doing. She was serving Christ as she was serving the homeless people.

Then the choir director invited the college choir to sing at his church’s Good Friday service. Sharon sang with the choir and then stayed for the service. She’d never been to a Good Friday service. She was surprised at how moving it was; somehow, in the message of the cross, God’s love and faithfulness became real to her in a new way. Two days later, of course, was Easter. It just seemed natural to go to worship on Easter after Good Friday. And the rest, Sharon said, is history. She started attending worship regularly. It made it easier that she already knew people through the choir and through the homeless ministry. She became more and more active and pretty soon it was “her” church.

Is a story like Sharon’s still possible in 2026? We live not just in a post-modern era, but in a post-Christian era. For many good reasons, people mistrust religious institutions and are suspect of Scripture. As Mark Glanville writes, “terms such as evangelical and biblical have been co-opted by racist and nationalistic expressions of Christianity.” People wonder whether organized religion makes any rational sense and whether any Christian church could reflect their own values of justice and compassion. At the same time, people long for community. They long for acceptance, and hope – they long for communities that nourish hope.

If we in the church say, “Come and see,” what will we show people? Will their curiosity be encouraged? Will their doubts be met with humility and grace? Will they see the tenderness, the acceptance, the passion for justice and the love of Christ?

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, “The Second Sunday After Epiphany/The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time,” in New Proclamation, Year A (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
Jim Kitchens, The Postmodern Parish (Herndon, VA:2003).
Mark Glanville, Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Communities (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2025).

The Word Became Flesh

December 31, 2025January 1, 2026 / cjwhitt / 1 Comment

John 1:1-18

This time last year I blogged about the traditional Epiphany passage in Matthew’s gospel (https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/12/30/which-story/). This year I’m drawn to Sunday’s lectionary passage from John’s gospel, commonly referred to as the Prologue to John’s Gospel. What I’m writing here is a work in progress for me because I’m still developing my thinking around this, but what fascinates me is, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

John’s gospel begins with, “In the beginning…,” reminding us of verse 1 of Genesis Chapter 1, the first creation story and the very first words in Scripture. John intends for us to make this connection but then changes it up: “In the beginning was the Word,” or in the Greek, the Logos. The Logos is God’s creating and speaking power, always with God, through which God created everything. Remember in Genesis where God speaks, and it is so? That’s the Logos, the Word of God. When John tells us that this Word of God became flesh and lived among us, he is describing the Incarnation, the belief that the Word of God existed with God from the beginning and became a human being, Jesus Christ, who lived among us, giving us the best picture of who God is and what humankind can be.

I am drawn to this text because of some reading I’ve been doing (as well as reading I continue to do and plan to do; thus the work in progress) about the Christian faith and anthropocentrism or “human supremacy.” On the recommendation of a dear friend, I read Daniel Quinn’s 1992 book, Ishmael, a philosophical novel exploring our cultural biases that Earth was created for humanity, and that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. Once you’ve noticed this bias, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the catastrophic consequences for humankind, other species, and the environment that follow. Quinn posits that at one time, humans were just one of the many creatures inhabiting Earth, living as part of Creation, but we’ve stepped outside of the natural order of things. We’ve given ourselves the power to decide what is right and wrong for all life, and what is “right” generally means what we human beings want or believe we need, without regard for other species or the sustainability of the planet. In a nutshell, we behave as though the Earth belongs to us, and this has led to the problems we face such as global warming, mass species extinctions, food shortages, and overpopulation.

Quinn is not alone in this concern. Among other writers, Christian author Thomas Berry discusses this issue in his book, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth (2009). Ecologist Derrick Jensen tackles this concern head on in his book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016).

What does this have to do with John’s prologue? Verse 5 states, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” Cody J. Sanders challenges us to take this verse seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation. He writes, “This may very well open our perspective – as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing – to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.” He notes that Margaret Daly-Denton reminds us that the Word becomes flesh, not man. Daly-Denton writes, “’The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’” In a similar vein, Mary Coloe writes, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.” Sanders continues, “While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.”

It’s heavy stuff, right? But what we have been doing – treating Creation as though it belongs to humanity as opposed to treating humanity as though it is part of Creation – isn’t working. In Genesis 1:28, God tells the as-yet-unnamed first human beings, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” One could argue that a literal reading of this verse supports a conclusion that humankind is supposed to be in charge of all life on the planet. The simple fact that this hasn’t worked well for humanity or any other part of Creation weighs against such a literal reading; could anyone believe that God wants environmental degradation or catastrophe?

So what if, instead, we take Psalm 24:1 literally?
“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it.”

And what if the Word became flesh, “a far broader reality than humanity”?

Resources:
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (New York: Orbis Books, 2009)
Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016)
Cody J. Sanders,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-11

We Need a Little Christmas

December 19, 2025 / cjwhitt / 2 Comments

Luke 2:1-20

This Advent my earworm has been, “We Need a Little Christmas,” from the musical, “Mame.” I don’t actually like the musical “Mame,” although I love the 1958 movie, “Auntie Mame,” starring Rosalind Russell. Mame loses her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and tries her hand at a variety of jobs for which she’s hilariously ill-suited. She maintains her good humor and sense of style but finally seems to be coming to the end of her options, and that’s when she suggests they go ahead and start celebrating Christmas even though it’s weeks away. In the musical version, Mame sings:

“Haul out the holly;
Put up the tree before my spirit falls again.
Fill up the stocking,
I may be rushing things, but deck the halls again now.
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute …”

This year more than many other years, I’ve had that same impulse. We need a little Christmas. Something cozy and familiar and reassuring. The distraction and gaiety of decorations and parties and all the preparations, but even more, the warmth of family and friends, the comfort of home. Not just the daily news, not only recent tragedies but life in general wears us out. We’ve had enough realism. We need a little Christmas, now.

So, we read the old story, the gorgeous poetry of Luke’s gospel; I choose to read from the King James. The archaic words work as a kind of salve: “And they were sore afraid.” The thing is, as beautiful and familiar as the words of this story are, Luke didn’t intend for his readers to picture a tidy Hallmark card when they heard it. Cozy wasn’t his goal. He was actually going after something completely different, to quote Monty Python. He was going for unexpected.

I don’t know of a better illustration of this than the video entitled, “An Unexpected Christmas,” produced by St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand. All the roles are played by children, but it’s way too slick to call a pageant; great costumes, camera work, script, music, and their New Zealand accents are adorable, especially when they say “baby.”

The video begins as God looks down from heaven’s balcony, shaking his head at what he sees on earth. God says it’s time to step in. God’s warrior angels (there’s Biblical support for warrior angels) suggest sending an army but God says, no, maybe just one person. An angel in big round glasses says, “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!” The angels then say if it’s one person, it needs to be someone very powerful and strong. “No,” says God, “they’ll be going as a newborn baby.” “A newborn baby?” screech the warrior angels in disbelief. “Brilliant!” says the bespectacled angel again. “They won’t be expecting that.” And so it goes. This baby won’t be born to a great ruler or a mighty king, but to a peasant girl. And this won’t be just any baby, but God’s son. Born not in a palace, but in a stable, surrounded by animals and animal smells. The angels will be allowed to sing a welcome, but not to kings, only to some shepherds, the folks at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. At each decision, someone says, “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!”

This is precisely what Luke intended. “Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that!” Although Luke’s version is much edgier. Luke dares to mention the secular rulers of the time, Augustus Caesar and Cyrenius, for a reason. Luke wants us to see the contrast between the power of the Roman Empire and the power of God through Christ. What people wanted was a king who would unify the nation, rally the troops, and drive out the occupying forces. That’s what a Messiah is supposed to do, right? But the power of God does not look like the power of Rome. When the angels sing of peace on earth, they’re raising a question: Is it the Emperor in Rome and his Pax Romana who will bring you peace, or is it God? Is it human power – power that is external and coercive – or is it God’s power – the power of vulnerable love?

Frederick Buechner describes the difference between God’s power and human power this way: “By applying external pressure, I can make a person do what I want him to do. This is [human] power. But as for making him be what I want him to be, without at the same time destroying his freedom, only love can make this happen. And love makes it happen not coercively, but by creating a situation in which, of our own free will, we want to be what love wants us to be. And because God’s love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom … we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this the greatest of all powers, God’s power, is itself powerless.”

That takes us out of comfy-cozy into alarming territory, doesn’t it? It is downright scary to be told by God, “This is the way to achieve real peace: by being as vulnerable with each other, as dependent on each other as an infant; by treasuring each other the way a newborn is treasured. By loving each other the way I love you.” But what’s scarier still are the consequences of our refusal to love each other, which we can see all around us. And when I say “love” I’m talking about the way we act toward each other, not some fuzzy feeling.

We need a little Christmas. Right this very minute. We need the message that God comes to us in a vulnerable baby born to nobody parents in a backwater village, in a stable surrounded by mess and bad smells, with “no crib for a bed,” and the first people to hear about it, those shepherds out on a hillside, are the kind of people you’d never invite to dinner and you’d pray your daughter wouldn’t marry.

John Harvey, one of the poets at the Iona Community, came up with the best description I’ve found of the Christmas we all need. Harvey wrote:

On this night of the year, a voice is speaking – can we hear it?

‘I know the cares and the anxious thoughts of your hearts.
I know the hard time you often give yourselves.
I know the hopes and ambitions that you have for yourselves and for others.
I know your doubts, too – even while you seek to express your belief.
On this night, I want to find a way of saying to you:
You are deeply, deeply loved,
just as you are, forgiven, loved
and challenged to be the very best you can be.
So I’m speaking to you the only way I know how –

from a stable,
in a child born into poverty
soon to grow to maturity,
born to show you
in a human life,
the love of God.’

Brilliant! They won’t be expecting that.
Merry Christmas, everyone.

Resources:
“We Need a Little Christmas,” from, “Mame,” music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, (1966).
“An Unexpected Christmas,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY
Frederick Buechner, “The Power of God, the Power of Man,” in The Magnificent Defeat (New York: HarperCollins, 1966).
John Harvey, “You Are Deeply, Deeply Loved,” in Candles and Conifers, Ruth Burgess, ed. (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2005).
Re: Warrior angels: Michael the archangel seems to be a warrior angel (Revelation. 12:7) who does battle (Daniel 10:13, 21; 12:1).

The Other Christmas Story

December 16, 2025December 16, 2025 / cjwhitt / 2 Comments

Matthew 1:18-25

This Sunday we hear Matthew’s Christmas story. The trip to Bethlehem for the census, no room at the inn, the manger, the angels and shepherds – most of what we associate with Christmas pageants is found in Luke’s gospel, and Mary is definitely the star of that show. In Matthew’s gospel, however, the spotlight is on Joseph. It’s a more adult story, not easily translated into to a pageant script.

However, to get there, we need to get past a controversial doctrine that jumps out at us in verse 18. Some people struggle with the notion of a virgin birth; others struggle with the fact that there are Christians who don’t believe in it. I’ll say three things about the virgin birth: First, esteemed Biblical scholars and theologians disagree about it. They do agree it serves to tie Jesus’ birth to the Isaiah passage quoted in Matthew 1:23 (Isaiah 7:14), or at least to the Greek translation of that passage. The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) translates the Hebrew word for “young woman” in Isaiah as “virgin.” Second, I agree with the angel in Luke’s Christmas story that nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37). And third, whether you believe the virgin birth is fact or myth isn’t nearly as important as understanding the point, which is that in Jesus, God was doing something completely new. Neither Mark nor John’s gospel nor the apostle Paul in all his letters thought it was important enough to mention the virgin birth, or any birth, for that matter, and this tells us that different communities of believers were able to preach and write about Jesus without making the virgin birth an article of faith about him.

So, with that messy question moved aside, let’s turn to Joseph and his mess. Elsewhere in Scripture, people refer to Jesus as Joseph’s son (John 6:42). This relationship is important to Matthew, who wrote his gospel primarily for Jewish Christians. It is through Joseph that Jesus is a descendent of King David. The way Matthew tells it, Joseph chooses to be Jesus’ father; that is the focus of his Christmas story.

Nazareth was a small town. Joseph probably noticed Mary among the marriageable girls and asked her parents for her hand in marriage. It’s likely that they all went to see a rabbi and made a contract. Mary and Joseph were betrothed, or engaged, or espoused, depending on your translation; they were legally married but hadn’t moved in together. They’d begin living together after the wedding, which would be a major event in the life of the community, a week-long party of eating, drinking, and dancing.

Then Mary turns up pregnant. A contract has been violated; a law has been broken. This was serious not only for Mary but for everyone around her. The first century Mediterranean world was an “honor-shame culture.” Honor had to do with your value in the society; it had nothing to do with wealth but rather with reputation, with your ability to do what you need to do to belong, to interact with others in a way that brings you and your group honor. Keeping your honor was like an ongoing contest. You could lose your honor in any social interaction. And to lose your honor was to be shamed.

If Joseph accepts Mary, that will cause him shame. If he pretends the child is his, that, too, is shameful because Mary is pregnant before the wedding. Mary’s news is a huge threat to Joseph’s honor. Matthew says Joseph is a righteous man, which means he is a man who follows Jewish law. Joseph decides to divorce Mary quietly rather than subject her to public humiliation. God’s whole daring plan is suddenly at risk. All pretty adult stuff, right? Marriage contracts, shame, what you can and can’t do before the wedding?

Then Joseph has a dream. “Do not be afraid, Joseph, to take Mary for your wife, for the child is from the Holy Spirit.” William Willimon quips that while there’s a lot art depicting the angel announcing to a serene Mary that she is with child, there is little art focused on Joseph’s dream: “Joseph bolting upright in bed, in a cold sweat after being told his fiancée is pregnant, and not by him, and he should marry her anyway.”

“Do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife,” said the angel. I don’t think it’s possible not to be afraid in a situation like this. I think we make too little of this story and don’t give Joseph enough credit if we simply hold him up as a model of what faithful obedience looks like, as though there’s a simple formula: God speaks; humans are supposed to respond in faith the way Joseph did; now everything is hunky dory. It just isn’t that simple. I don’t believe we’re supposed to think of Joseph and Mary as figures in a stained-glass window. The whole point of the Christmas story – that God is with us as one of us – is that God is with real people in their real, complicated, messy lives. I can’t hear this story without identifying with the sense of betrayal, the disappointment, the shame and a host of other emotions that Joseph must have experienced, and the fear and hurt that Mary would have felt as they sorted out their complex relationship.

One of the quiet miracles in the Christmas story is that on the basis of that dream, Joseph works through it all to make a decision. He lays aside his sense of right and wrong under the law and his offended pride, his shame, and chooses to marry his pregnant fiancée. Trust in God is not a given here, it is a choice. God’s plan is saved because Joseph chose to take a risk, to brave uncertainty.

Joseph, an ordinary man, worked through his cold sweat, took a risk, and Jesus grew up with Joseph as his dad. Where did Jesus come up with the idea that people are more important than the laws you’ve been taught your whole life? That our worth is measured by God’s extravagant loves for us, not by other people’s opinions? Who was his male role model for the vulnerability and courage we see again and again in Jesus’ ministry? Joseph couldn’t know that some of Jesus’ best teaching would be shaped by his own experience of an earthly, loving father. He didn’t have any idea that his son would tell his disciples to talk about God with the tender, personal address of “abba,” which is best translated as “daddy.”

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, New Proclamation, https://members.newproclamation.com/commentary.php?d8m=12&d8d=22&d8y=2013&event_id=4&cycle=A&atom_id=19018.
Mary Hinkle Shore, “Fourth Sunday of Advent,” in New Proclamation, Year A, 2007-2008 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
Nancy Rockwell, December 14, 2013, http://biteintheapple.com/joseph-praise/.
Janet H. Hunt, “Just What a Dad Does…”, December 15, 2013, http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/2013/12/just-what-dad-does.html

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

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