love

Interpreting the Present

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Luke 12:49-56

   With what’s going on in our world, it seems the last thing we need is a gospel text that encourages more division.  This is not a reading that offers comfort.  But hang with me here.  Jesus did not have an evil twin or suddenly get a personality transplant.  This is the same Jesus who reminded us that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

   Jesus is frustrated, and he says as much, and if nothing else, this passage shows Jesus responding to stress in a very human way.  He says he has work to do and he’s under incredible stress to complete it in the time he has left.  Does that mean Jesus knew for sure he was going to be arrested and crucified?  Maybe, or maybe it just means he knew the risks of putting love of God and love of neighbor first.

   Which is Jesus’ point, here.  Relentlessly loving God and neighbor is risky.  In his words and actions, Jesus shows us that when he says love your neighbor, he means not just the neighbor who’s easy to love, but the neighbor who’s very hard to love.  The one you’d rather not sit next to on the bus, or in the classroom.  The one you don’t want for a colleague.  The one you avoid at the family reunion.  The one you hope won’t go to the polls in a presidential election.  The one who sees the world entirely differently from the way you do, who believes different truths than you do.  Love that neighbor, which includes working toward his well-being, even if it looks to you as though he’s doing everything he can to work against your well-being.  Jesus shows us that loving your neighbor means questioning the religious, social, and economic status quo that undermines your neighbor’s safety and security.  It means speaking the truth in love to that neighbor and doing the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation with that neighbor.  When Jesus talked about love and modeled it in his actions, that’s what love looks like. 

   That kind of love is risky.  It doesn’t make people popular.  We all can rattle off a long list of peacemakers and justice-lovers who loved their neighbors just this way and were killed or jailed for their efforts: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Bobby Kennedy, Oscar Romero, Anwar al Sadat, Nelson Mandela, Harvey Milk, Yitzhak Rabin, Rachel Corrie, environmentalist Tim DeChristopher; and others whose names we’ll never know who resisted the Holocaust, fought for civil rights and thought women ought to have the vote.

   Jesus wasn’t saying that he wants people to turn against each other.  He’s saying that if people follow him, really follow him, they can count on offending someone, even someone close, even someone they love.  This was certainly true for Jesus’ original audience.  I wonder: Is it any less true for us?  How would our family and friends and co-workers react if we really acted like Jesus did?  How would our government act; how would ICE agents or the National Guard act?  What Jesus is concerned with here is the persecution, if you will, not of people who choose one faith over another but of people who strive to love God and neighbor. 

   Sometimes when people see someone committed to doing what’s right, they feel critiqued, even if that’s not the point at all.  What concerns Jesus is this: When anyone has the nerve to look at the way things are and say, “This isn’t right,” it divides people.  “This isn’t right” challenges the status quo.  Those who benefit from the status quo will fight tooth and nail to oppose anyone who tries to change things.  Jesus sums up his frustration by noting that people can look at the clouds and predict the weather, but they can’t see the way things are here and now.  They can’t look at what’s going on around them and “interpret the present.”  Why?  Because they are satisfied with the way things are right now and don’t want to change. 

   What are we to do, then, in order to interpret the present faithfully? 

   It is hard to look at the broken and hurting world around us and see in the hurt and the brokenness a call that something has to change – that we might just have to change.  It can seem overwhelming but maybe we just start by mending a little corner of the world, our tiny corner.  Anne Lamott uses the metaphor of stitching: “You start wherever you can. You see a great need, so you thread a needle, you tie a knot in your thread. You find one place in the cloth through which to take one stitch, one simple stitch, nothing fancy, just one that’s strong and true.”

   We mend what we can.  If households are not to be divided, mother against daughter, father against son, it will be because, through the grace of God, we reach across those divides instead of accepting them as insurmountable, and take small steps, make small stitches. 

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).

By This Everyone Will Know

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John 13:31-35 

    A few weeks ago, I spoke at a California State Senate committee hearing in Sacramento, advocating for a bill that would prohibit discrimination in healthcare on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.  I stood in line at the mic after the bill’s author made her introduction, and we were instructed to give only our names and affiliation, and voice our support.  The person who invited me to this hearing asked me to wear my clergy collar, which I rarely do.  I realize the collar announces loud and clear what I am, but I find that when I wear one in public, people tend to avert their eyes.  This was the case that day in Sacramento.  I’m glad I spoke up, I’m glad I claimed the affiliation of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and I’m even glad I wore the collar because it makes me look more official. But on elevators and in corridors, it felt as though people thought I might have something contagious.

   It makes me wonder what they think about clergy, but also, about Christians.  I ran across a short video called, “What Are Christians Known For?” An interviewer asked this very question of random people in random settings.  It wasn’t a scientific poll, but it had the feel of being pretty much where people are about Christians these days.  You may watch the video here:

   About half of the people responded the way I’d hoped: Forgiveness, compassion, loving our neighbors.  The other half responded with what I feared they might: Fanaticism, hypocrisy, killing off non-Christians.  I’m deeply grateful that at least some of the people interviewed mentioned Jesus, and even echoed his words in this passage in John’s Gospel.  These verses take place shortly before Jesus’ arrest. Jesus has just washed the disciples’ feet, a vivid demonstration of servanthood, hospitality, and love.  Then Jesus announces that one among them will betray him.  After Judas leaves, Jesus speaks the words in today’s lesson. 

   Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  He’s asking them to care for each other as he has cared for them.  It doesn’t end there, within the community of disciples, but it does start there and that’s hard enough.  We’ve just seen Judas, a disciple, turn on Jesus and the other disciples, for crying out loud.  John wrote his gospel in the context of the early church, which experienced conflict from without and within.  All of Paul’s letters to the ancient churches were about how to get along, how to treat each other within the community of faith.  Paul’s most famous words, that gorgeous chapter 13 from First Corinthians that practically everyone including me has read at their wedding is not about marriage; it’s about church.  It’s about telling people how to love each other in the church.

   In order to bring the good news of Christ to the rest of the world, the followers of Christ needed to take care of one another.  They need to love each other.  Note what Jesus doesn’t say.  He doesn’t say: “You will know them by their exacting adherence to correct doctrine.”  He doesn’t say, “You will know them by the way they read the Bible literally,” or “You will know them by who it is they condemn as sinners.”  Jesus doesn’t say, “You will know them by their lack of doubts, or by their lack of questions.”

   “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”   

   As the little video shows, people are watching us.  They may not be watching closely enough to know the difference between a Pentecostal, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. But they’re watching to see how we act.  They’re watching to see if we love each other.  And of course, they’re watching to see if we extend that love beyond the doors of our churches.  But it has to start with the community.  The church’s purpose is love, not condemnation.  The church’s purpose is love, not judgment.  William Barclay writes, “More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all of the theological arguments in the world, and more people have been driven from church by the hardness and ugliness of so-called Christianity than by all of the doubts in the world.”

   It has to start with the community, but to end there is to miss the point.  The church does not exist to preserve or maintain itself, but rather, to be Body of Christ in the world, to go into the world to do the work God calls us to do. Amy Allen writes, “For John’s Jesus, this was showing the world the Light, to show what it meant to be a follower of Christ.  For Luke’s Jesus, this was showing the world aid and concern, helping the victims, eating with those different from you, and baptizing whole households, even slaves, women, and children. Being a disciple of Jesus in these circumstances meant loving into community the whole people of God – not simply loving those with whom one was already in communion.”

   “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  David Lose points out that these words “are simultaneously ridiculously easy to understand and ridiculously hard to do.”  And yet, Jesus would not have given us this new commandment if it had not been possible.  We gather in communities, in churches, precisely to figure out how it’s possible. 

 © Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved

Resources:

Amy Allen, http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-beloved-community-read-through-acts-111-18-and-john-1331-35/

David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=2542 

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).

Sir, We Wish to See Jesus

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John 12:20-33

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

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

The Whole World

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John 3:14-21

Some of us are old enough to remember the man known as “Rainbow Man,” who held up signs that said, “John 3:16” at sporting events during the 1970’s and ‘80’s. You can find the verse on bumper stickers and neckties, and there’s even a John 3:16 Nascar, a bright yellow racing car emblazoned with “John 3:16” on the doors and the phrase “Victory in Jesus” on the hood. Obviously, John 3:16 is a big deal. But what does it mean? There is a traditional interpretation of this verse that most people believe is a literal interpretation: if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and our Savior, you will go to heaven and not to hell when you die. This is a source of great comfort to many people, but a source of anguish to many others.

The problem with a so-called literal translation of these verses is that it really can’t be done. What does “condemned” mean? Condemned to what? By whom? What does “perish” mean? What does “eternal life” mean? Is it something that happens now, or after we die? Does “eternal” refer to time or quality? What does “believe” mean? Is it intellectual assent, or is it more like “trust” or “follow”? You can’t read this passage without answering these and many other questions and as soon as you attempt to answer them you’ve quit being literal and started to interpret. You’ve started to put a spin on it. The typical spin answers all these questions as though Jesus is referring to life after death, as though “believing” means what you think about something, and as though Jesus is intending by his words to create a small circle of insiders who are “saved” while the rest of the world can go to hell, literally. That interpretation works only if you define those crucial words in a way that plays fast and loose with the original Greek, the context of these verses, and much of what we know about Jesus and God from the rest of Scripture.

The context is a conversation between Jesus and the Pharisee Nicodemus. Nicodemus visits Jesus in the middle of the night, plagued with questions about who Jesus is. Nicodemus is so concrete that he’s confused by Jesus’ metaphors. When Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be “born again,” Nicodemus says, “Can one enter a second time the mother’s womb?” And so Jesus pushes him gently: This is about newness, Nicodemus. This is about letting go of old truths, old definitions, old traditions, old theological certainties, and allowing God to lead you into a new and open-ended, hope-filled future.

And then Jesus says the most remarkable thing. John 3:16: “For God so loved the world…”. The single most important thing to notice about this verse is that God loved the world. God deeply loved the world that God created, and God longs for this creation to live; this whole world, this whole creation. And this is the way God loved the world: God loved by giving the son that the world might be saved. God wants to save the world; not individuals, not souls, this entire world.

All of John’s gospel has an urgency that often comes across in either/or terms. John draws sharp divisions between believers and non-believers, saved and condemned, those who do evil and those who do good. This either/or approach made sense for John’s minority community, which was trying to define itself not only against non-Christians but against other Christians. It doesn’t make sense for us today, when Christianity has been the dominant religion in the Western world for centuries, and we have the power to marginalize, exclude, and persecute. If we ignore this part of the context, then, in our hands, the gospel of John, and John 3:16 in particular, could do serious harm. And they have.

We don’t throw out this passage, however, because life can feel black and white at times. You take that drink or not, put the needle in your arm or not, walk out on the abuse or not, despair or hope, lie or speak the truth. No shades of gray. Some people come to faith because of a crisis, and John 3:16 feels like a lifeline. I once was lost. Now I’m found. I was blind. Now I see.

We also don’t throw out this passage because even those who have never felt driven to their knees before God are included in the rescue God intends for the whole world. What we know is that “God so loved the world . . .” The whole world. These familiar words are at odds with any interpretation of this verse that would exclude, demean, or minimize any part of the world, or any person in it, regardless of what they believe.

Frederick Buechner wrote, “The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.”

The love of God for God’s world has no limits. No limits. How else are we to respond, but to cherish the world and every creature in it? And to live that love by throwing out a lifeline, to rescue, in very real, literal ways, whatever and whomever God so loves – which is everyone, and everything?

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

Resources:
John Stendahl, “The Beginner’s Gospel,” in The Christian Century, March 19, 2009, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2009-03/beginners-gospel.
Marilyn Salmon, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=3/18/2012

Listen

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Mark 9:2-9

The event in the life of Christ that we call the Transfiguration is 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 moment. If you get stuck on that question, you’ll miss the good stuff.

We hear the story every Transfiguration Sunday. Jesus leads Peter, John, and James up on a mountain by themselves. There, he is “transfigured,” but Mark doesn’t tell us what that looks like except that his clothes become dazzling white. Two other figures appear – Moses the lawgiver and the prophet Elijah. Peter’s response is, “Let’s build houses! Let’s stay here!” That’s often our inclination when we’ve had a spiritual high, a mountaintop experience. But we see Jesus leave the mountain to pick up his everyday life and his ministry of healing.

There are, indeed, mountaintop experiences that change us forever. Besides those momentary spiritual highs, however, there is the long and sometimes difficult climb of the life of faith. Most people realize marriage is work; experts describe it as a daily commitment, not just a one-time decision. As one writer says, “Every day you wake up you must decide to commit to your spouse for better or for worse.” It’s the same with the daily decision to follow Jesus, the decision to put one foot in front of the other on the path of faith.

There’s a reason Transfiguration Sunday is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. I’ve often thought of Lent as a reset button. You lose focus, you lose your way on the path, you find yourself more distant from God than you want to be. Time for a reset. For centuries, Lent has been the season when we focus with new energy on the process of transfiguration that happens over the lifetime of a person of faith; it’s a season of practice, of training. Maybe “training” doesn’t have the sparkle of a mountaintop moment but as Cornelius Plantinga writes, “Spiritual exercise is like jogging. You often do it gladly. But you are no hypocrite if you jog even when you don’t feel like it.”

Just before Jesus heads down the hill, we hear the voice of God. God says, “Listen to him.” Listen to Jesus. I like the fact that God doesn’t say, “Become exactly like Jesus,” or “Take up your cross.” Just, “Listen to him.” That’s probably something I can do. Listening to Jesus in Scripture seems like an obvious place to start. When we listen to Jesus in Scripture, we’ll hear, “Peace be with you.” “I will give you rest.” “Take heart … do not be afraid.” We’ll hear that we will keep our heart only by giving our heart away, that we will find ourselves only by losing ourselves in love, and that we will be saved together, not in separation. We’ll hear that loving our neighbors as ourselves is the most important way we can love God.

And if we strive to love our neighbors as Jesus tells us, we will listen to our neighbors, as well. The 14th century Persian poet Hafiz wrote:
Everyone
Is God speaking
Why not be polite and
Listen to
Him?

God speaks to us again and again through the stories of other people, through our loved ones, through the person whose life is utterly different from yours or mine, and through people whose stories and experiences we might prefer not to hear. Some say that listening is the first duty of love; others say that listening is love. Listening tells someone that he or she matters, and that we are willing to risk being changed by what they say. One definition of communication is “opening yourself to change,” because if you really hear the other person, it means that you are allowing what the person says to impact you, to touch you, to change the way you think and feel and act. In other words, listening transfigures us.

The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope. We aren’t stuck with the way things are. You aren’t stuck with the way things are. Things can change, the world can change, we can change. This is the very purpose of the life of faith.

I think I just chose my focus, my training and practice for Lent this year: listen.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.