jesus

Couraging

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Luke 13:31-35

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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

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

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

Ash Wednesday 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Transformation Is the Essence of Hope

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Luke 9:28-36

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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

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

“Mom, Why Shouldn’t I Hit Back?”

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Luke 6:27-38

A mom in a congregation I served told me that she’d stopped one of her preteen kids from hitting her sister back. She was pretty sure that’s what Jesus would want. The girl’s response was frank disbelief, something along the lines of, “What, are you nuts? Why wouldn’t I hit back? If you don’t hit back, you’re a wimp.”

Is this our culture’s approach to problem-solving and violence in a nutshell? The mom was stumped because what the kid said kind of made sense. Hitting back, and hitting in the first place, just feel reflexive. Yet in the face of that reflex, we have Jesus’ words in this Luke passage: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” Most of us remember the translation, “Turn the other cheek.” These are perhaps some of Jesus’ most quoted but also most misunderstood words. Generally they have been understood as teaching non-resistance. In other words, be a wimp. If they hit you on one cheek, turn the other and let them batter you there too, which has been bad advice for battered women and oppressed people generally, and good news for bullies.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Biblical scholars explain that the reference to the right cheek means Jesus is saying that turning your face deprives your attacker of a second opportunity to hit you with a backhanded slap with his right hand. One reason we know this is that no ancient Middle Eastern person would strike a person with his left hand, which was used only for “unclean” activities. The backhanded slap was a sign of the hitter’s superiority and intended to humiliate the victim. As Gandhi said, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”

These cultural specifics aren’t as obvious in Luke’s version, which doesn’t mention a right cheek, only a cheek. But regardless, as Walter Wink writes, “Jesus resisted evil with every fiber of his being.” What Jesus means here is “don’t turn into the very thing you hate. Don’t become what you oppose.” As Paul put it, “Do not return evil for evil.”

It is Black History Month. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and ‘60’s was successful not because of a lack of resistance, not because the people in the movement were wimps, but because their resistance was nonviolent. It is seldom lifted up that Martin Luther King Jr. based his nonviolence on his Christian faith and Scripture, on Jesus. King said, “Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Those of us who remember the Civil Rights Movement can testify that nonviolent resistance is not the way of wimps. It requires enormous dedication, courage, and hard work, all of which may culminate in failure, including injury to or even the death of resistors.

In the 1986 movie, “The Mission,” the new Portuguese rulers of eighteenth-century South America order an attack on a local tribe and the Jesuits protecting them. It becomes a massacre. The pope’s messenger confronts a government official, saying, “You have the effrontery to tell me this slaughter was necessary?” The governor says he had no alternative. He did what he had to do. He says, “We must work in the world. The world is thus.” The papal envoy replies, “No, Señor Hontar. Thus we have made the world. Thus I have made it.”

“Mom, why shouldn’t I hit back?” Maybe the way to answer is with another question: “What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to make?”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Blessed Are the Ubuntu

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Luke 6:17-26

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

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

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

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

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

Loving and raising your children.

Taking care of your aging parents.

Standing up for someone who is being bullied.

Including someone who is being left out.

Hugging someone who needs a hug.

Serving a meal to someone who is hungry.

Building homes with Habitat for Humanity.

Sitting next to someone who is lonely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

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

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

So That They Might Live

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Luke 5:1-11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   So that they might live.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

The Hometown Crowd

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Luke 4:21-30

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

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

Jesus’ Mission Statement (and ours)

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Luke 4:14-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved. 

God at Work

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Lesson: John 2:1-11

I love officiating at weddings, and I work hard to make sure at least my part goes smoothly. In my experience, however, sometimes things happen at weddings that good planning won’t solve. There was the limo driver who forgot to go back and pick up the bride after he dropped the bridesmaids at the church. There was the best man who got sloppily drunk before the ceremony. At an outdoor wedding officiated by a friend, there was the duck who landed right between my friend and the couple, and then sat there quacking through the entire ceremony.

What happened at the wedding at Cana? Poor planning, or bad luck? Jesus’ mother says, “They have no wine,” but what she really means is, “They have no wine. Fix it, Jesus.” Despite his reluctance, Jesus tells the servants to fill six large stone jars with water, and to draw some of that water, now turned to wine, and take it to the chief steward. The chief steward doesn’t know what Jesus has done, but he does know wine, and he’s amazed at the quality. Most hosts would serve the best wine up front, wanting to make a good impression. They’d save the cheap wine for later when the guests are less likely to recognize the drop in quality. But this host, the steward assumes, has ignored the traditional timing, and saved the best wine for last.

Last week, Jesus’ baptism showed us how he took his place among the ordinary folks. Today’s passage is intended to show us this is no ordinary guy. John tells us this is a sign, a sign that revealed Jesus’ glory. Because of this sign, his disciples “believed in him.” The point of this miracle, this sign, is not, “Wow! How did that happen?” It’s “Wow! Who did that?”

All the signs and miracles in John’s gospel point to who Jesus is. That’s the purpose of John’s gospel, as the narrator explains in the closing verses of the book. As one commentator puts it, biblical miracles are signs that say, “God at Work!” The wedding at Cana not only shows us that God is at work, but something of what God is like, what God is about, and therefore, what Jesus is like, and what Jesus is about.

The stone jars held water used for the rite of purification. They represent the purity code and its distinctions between who and what is “clean,” and who and what is “unclean.” Jesus turns that water into wine, and these concerns about clean and unclean give way to joy and celebration. Jesus provides this celebration with the very best wine, in abundant quantity. The jars are filled to the brim. The God that Jesus reveals isn’t obsessed with what’s clean or unclean but is characterized by lavish generosity and extravagance. That the good wine had been saved “until now” is a symbolic way of saying that in God’s own timing, the Messiah had come.

If these biblical miracles are like a sign that says, “God at Work,” how can we see God at work now? One way to look at it, as C. S. Lewis and others have pointed out, is that many of Jesus’ miracles are small, fast examples of the big, slow acts that God performs all the time. Every harvest God feeds the multitudes with many loaves multiplied from a few grains. Every summer, along sunny hillsides not far from where I live, God turns water into wine. Jesus does the same thing fast and on a small scale.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we honor this coming Monday with a national holiday, wrote: “At the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and history.” The miracle, the sign at the wedding at Cana connects Jesus to this God – our God who is able, as King puts it. God is able to create and sustain the world. God is able to work through human history to save that world. King described how one event followed another to bring a gradual end to the system of desegregation. He concludes, “These changes are not mere political and sociological shifts. … When in future generations men look back … they will see God working through history for the salvation of man. They will know that God was working through those men [and women] who had the vision to perceive that no nation could survive half slave and half free. … The forces of evil may temporarily conquer truth, but truth ultimately will conquer its conqueror. Our God is able.” God is able; and the miracles of Jesus show that he, God’s son, is also able.

Turning water into wine at a wedding might seem like a trivial way to announce that Jesus is “God at Work,” given all the weighty concerns of the world: racial inequality, economic injustice, climate change and the L.A. wildfires, terrorism, war, and on and on. It was only a private party, after all. Only Jesus’ mother, the servants, and the disciples ever did know where all that great wine came from. Oh, and of course, we do. We, the readers of John’s gospel, know, as well.

At the wedding at Cana, Jesus supplies what is needed so that the celebration can continue. He does it quietly. It isn’t a flashy show of divine power. Most miracles aren’t. There are miracles of love and justice and hope taking place all around us: extreme acts of generosity, gracious acts of forgiveness; people overcoming their fears and standing up for what is right; people healing what seem to be unbridgeable divides. All these miracles point to the sign that says, “God at Work,” the sign that says God’s promise to the least and the last, to the lost and the lonely, is there in fullness, in abundance, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. So that the celebration can continue.

© Joanne Whitt 2025

Resources:

Cornelius Plantings Jr., Beyond Doubt (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002).

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our God Is Able,” in Strength to Love, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

David Ewart, http://www.holytextures.com/2009/12/john-2-1-11-year-c-epiphany-2-january-14-january-20-sermon.html. 

Blending in with the Crowd

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Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

   Luke’s version of Jesus’ baptism is remarkable for a couple of reasons.  First, Luke hurries to get John the Baptizer out of the picture.  Even before Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan, John tells the crowd that he, John, is definitely not the messiah, and then Luke explains that John has been arrested and imprisoned.  The point of telling this story out of order is to get John out of the way so we can focus on Jesus.     

   Second, the description of Jesus’ baptism is fleeting.  “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized …” – that’s it. 

   Why was Jesus, the messiah, baptized by John, not the messiah?  John’s baptism is described earlier in the chapter as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  (Luke 3:2).  Did Jesus need to repent of his sins?  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is clearly the Son of God even before he’s born (remember the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary back in Chapter 1?), so he doesn’t need the baptism to tell him that, and neither do we.  So why was he baptized?  The phrase, “Now, when all the people were baptized…” gives us a clue.      

   I listened to much of the state funeral for Jimmy Carter this past week.  Again and again, people told stories about how Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States, rode on the bus with the other Habitat workers, slept on church floors like other Habitat workers, and hammered nails along with everyone else.  I couldn’t find the exact quotation, but someone explained that when Carter was instructing a new volunteer for Habitat, he’d say something like, “It’s probably been a while since you’ve done work like this,” as a way of respecting whatever past experience people brought, and not demeaning anyone who might actually be a complete novice at construction. 

   Like Jimmy Carter, Jesus was removing the distinctions between himself and “all the people.”  All the people are getting baptized.  And so Jesus is baptized as well.  It wasn’t literally all the people, of course; you can bet King Herod wasn’t out there waiting in line to be dunked.  But all the people who are longing for the good news that their present situation isn’t the way life has to be, that God has something else, something better in mind – those are the people who come to be baptized. 

   It is into these waters, the waters of the longing of all the downtrodden people, that Jesus steps and begins his ministry.  Jesus’ baptism announces that the Son of God identifies with “all the people.”  It announces to us that he is not only among us, he is one of us. 

After his baptism, Jesus hears words from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Is God pleased because Jesus decided to be baptized, or just pleased with him, generally, or both?  We don’t know but we do know these words are not unique to Jesus.  They echo the prophet Isaiah: “…you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” So these words Jesus hears from heaven don’t set him apart from us, either.  Like his wading into the Jordan in the first place, they lump him in with the rest of us.  As the letter of First John tells us, “God has loved us so much that we are called children of God.  And we really are God’s children.”  We are God’s children – sons, daughters, offspring.  We are God’s beloveds.  If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. 

    Jesus was baptized, and it made him part of the crowd, the crowd of broken and hurting people longing for wholeness, longing for life to be just and peaceful and safe.  Our crowd.  When we are baptized, and when we reaffirm our baptism, we join in his crowd, rooting our identities in his, as God’s beloveds.

© Joanne Whitt 2025