New creation

Thomas Kleinert

I had never heard of Bill Arlow until I read about him last week, and I suspect most of you aren’t familiar with him either. Bill Arlow was born in 1926 in County Down, in Northern Ireland, as a Protestant Ulsterman. In his late teens and early twenties he became an active church worker, helping to organize the first visit of Billy Graham to Northern Ireland in 1949. After a stint with Youth for Christ, he went to seminary in Edinburgh and was ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland. In 1970, as the Troubles were taking hold, he became rector of a parish in East Belfast, where he witnessed the impact of sectarian violence. One of his early experiences there was to minister to a youth shot in the head by a paramilitary, cradling the young man’s head as he breathed his last.

Arlow began to form relationships with paramilitaries on both sides. Eventually, he convened meetings between protestant clerics and lower-ranking leaders of the Irish Republican Army, and his efforts attracted considerable criticism from the protestant community. He received hate mail and death threats, and he and his family had to move house and live under police protection for some time; more civil critics dismissed him as naïve. And yet, the outcome of his efforts was a unilateral IRA ceasefire over Christmas 1974 and a bilateral truce that lasted until September ‘75.

Then the Troubles resumed, and Arlow continued to meet with the paramilitaries as well as with the families of their victims, who were dismayed by any talk of reconciliation. In radio programs Arlow insisted that it was not enough for his Christian listeners to pride themselves on not participating in political violence, but that it was their religious duty to work actively to end it. “It is better to fail,” he told them, “in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.” And he said this many years before the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed in 1998, marking the end of the violent conflict.[1]

It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail. I may not remember Bill Arlow’s name for very long – I’ve long been bad with names, and it’s not getting any better – but I hope we’ll all remember these words, or carry them deep in our bones: It is better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail. Everything depends, of course, on what we know or believe or hope the final outcome to be.

Paul once thought of Jesus as a violator of law and tradition. All he could see was a blasphemer and messianic pretender, rejected by God in his shameful death by crucifixion. But one day something big happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, a profound crisis triggered by a vision of the risen, living Christ, a crisis that slowly deflated several of Paul’s most closely held certainties. Now Jesus’ crucifixion was no longer proof of God’s rejection of the Galilean’s messianic claims and his teachings. Now the church’s proclamation of a crucified Messiah was no longer a foolish contradiction to God’s purpose, but the fullest expression of God’s love for sinners, Paul himself included.[2] Now he could no longer understand himself apart from Christ, but only as one whom Christ, in boundless love, had made his own. The compelling love of Christ had claimed him, laid hold of him, and sent him to proclaim the good news as an ambassador for Christ.

Some would say, “Wow, did you hear about Saul? Who would have thought, he really changed his mind, didn’t he?” Others would respond, “No, it’s bigger than that. He sees himself and the entire world in a whole new light – bathed in grace!” And Paul himself, what does he say? He writes, “If anyone is in Christ – new creation! Everything old has passed away; look, everything new has come into being!” To Paul himself, the transformation is not just a change of mind or a sudden sensibility to a new light in the old world – no, it’s a new creation! To him, the ancient promise declared by Isaiah has begun to take shape among him and his contemporaries and around them:[3]

I am about to create new heavens and a new earth, says the Lord; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord – and their descendants as well.

Paul finds himself and all people caught up in the renewal and consummation of all things through God’s redeeming act in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul knows, of course, that in countless ways “all is definitely not wondrously new.” And yet Paul proclaims that “in some vital way all things are new.”[4] The full depth of God’s love has been revealed in the cross of Christ, and Christ, the firstfruits, has been raised from the dead. Now all things will unfold from that moment. Christ’s death and resurrection brought the end of a world under the dominion of sin and the advent of another: a new creation, new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home.[5]

What the Corinthian believers must decide, according to Paul, and we along with them, is whether to orient our lives to the present that is on the way out, or the future that is already illuminating the present like the first rays of sunrise. And once we have decided, assuming we have decided to lean into the light of that dawn, we practice living no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and was raised for us,[6] and according to the pattern of his life.

Holly Hearon points out that the relationship between Paul and the Corinthian church was “tense … at the time of this correspondence.” The apostle apparently felt that a number of believers there regarded him from a point of view that was on the way out, from a human perspective that was out of sync with the newness of life in Christ. These Corinthians were disappointed because he didn’t have the powerful presence and demeanor that they expected in an apostle. And they were frustrated because he said he would come and visit, and then he didn’t show.

Paul, on the other hand, was pained that they were drawn to apostles other than him, and that may well be why he writes so emphatically about reconciliation in this passage of the letter – five times in three verses.

Hearon suspects that Paul recognized “that what goes on in human communities, how we relate to one another, has implications for how we relate to God” and vice versa.

It is not just about us; nor is it just about God. It is about how we understand ourselves to be in relationship with God and with one another, all in the same moment. The two are inextricably linked.[7]

Once we begin to grasp that God “in Christ” is reaching out to us, reconciling us, reconciling the world to God-self, not counting our trespasses against us – once we begin to grasp that God “in Christ” is re-establishing righteousness in our most fundamental relationship, once we begin to grasp that, and to the degree that we grasp that, we also begin to embrace the new-creation challenge to reach across the barriers and divisions that separate us, individually and as groups, whether due to old, ingrained injustice, or to the common daily missteps, misunderstandings, and misconceptions that get between us. We embrace the challenge and we practice. We practice reaching across in unsentimental love, seeking the healing of relationships fractured by our loveless ways.

“Were Paul and the Corinthians reconciled?” Hearon asks. “We do not know.”[8] We don’t have a Third Letter to the Corinthians telling us how things went after Paul’s urgent plea. His efforts may have failed – but better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail, as Bill Arlow reminded himself and his listeners.

Many of us wonder every day how to practice the kind of reconciliation that is not afraid to face the truth about ourselves. Many of us struggle with what to do when greed, retribution and chaos dim the horizon like heavy, gray clouds. What do we do? We practice – better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.

For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which God’s whole purpose not only for God’s people but for all of God’s creation turns.[9] And while we may turn every which way, forgetful as we are, self-absorbed, status-obsessed, and loveless as we can be, God’s mercy doesn’t swing back and forth, or turn like some mad whirligig.

The sun’s still rising. God has turned all things toward life’s fulfillment in justice and in peace. And that’s where we orient our lives.

[1] See Samuel Wells, Christian Century March 2025, 34 and https://www.dib.ie/biography/arlow-william-james-bill-a9451

[2] See James Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 577.

[3] See Isaiah 65:17ff.

[4] William Greenway, Connections, Year C, Volume 2, 84.

[5] 2 Peter 3:13

[6] See 2 Corinthians 5:15

[7] Holly Hearon https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-2-corinthians-516-21-2

[8] Holly Hearon; see note above

[9] See James Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 578.

Press on

Thomas Kleinert

Philippi was a Macedonian city in north-eastern Greece that became a Roman colony under Octavian, on his rise to becoming Emperor Augustus. Philippi was also the first city in Europe where followers of Jesus gathered to worship God and break bread in remembrance of the risen Lord. Paul and his missionary team played a significant role in the initial formation of the community of believers, and the brothers and sisters in Philippi held a special place in the Apostle’s heart.

“I thank my God every time I remember you,” he writes in the opening of his letter, “constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.”[1] Joy and gratitude infuse his writing from beginning to end. In the brief passage we heard this morning, he tells them how he longs for them, calling them beloved twice, in addition to referring to them as my joy and my crown—and all in a single sentence. That’s remarkable, and even more so when you consider that Paul was in prison when he wrote the letter.

Joy and gratitude and love—clearly Paul won’t let circumstances drive his mental and emotional state. He may not be able to see past the prison walls, but his vision extends far beyond them, far beyond any circumstance: Paul has his eyes on Jesus, wants to be found in him, seeks the righteousness that comes through faith in him, desires to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings—Not that I have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

Paul has his eyes on the finish line, the ultimate horizon beyond every horizon: “Beloved,” he writes, “I do not consider that I have made it my own; but … I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”[2]

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, he sings from his prison cell. Press on, don’t let circumstances distract you from the heavenly call. Oh I know, beloved, the world can be a cold and hostile place, but press on. And I know, sometimes, beloved, your rage and your fear feel like they’re at least twice the size of your faith and hope, but press on. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Things were difficult in Philippi for followers of Jesus, as they’re bound to be whenever and wherever the church stays true to our heavenly call. And while we don’t know what pressures exactly the church in Philippi was facing, Paul’s teaching points beyond the circumstances anyway: “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel, in no way intimidated by your opponents.”[3] Press on.

Paul tells his readers, “join in imitating me”—and at first that didn’t sound right to me: Is he presenting himself as a model of discipleship here, or perhaps even the model? Does he want to see a community built on the pattern of Paul? I don’t think so, and part of my reaction may be due to the rise of personality cults around the globe, and my deep aversion to their disturbing popularity.

Paul, I believe, has something else altogether on his mind. He invites his readers to take a good look at him and notice where his life and ministry rhyme with the life and ministry of Christ. Those rhymes are not mere illustrations, but manifestations, of the power of the gospel to transform lives. And lives renewed and fulfilled in Christlikeness are the sole point of anything Paul says, writes, does, or suffers. Christ is the pattern. Paul wants his readers to imitate him imitating Christ and press on, so they too begin living lives that rhyme with the life of Christ.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul urges—and it’s not just a matter of a new set of ideas, it’s a matter of lived life, new commitments, new priorities, new habits. All of it inspired and empowered by the way of Christ who did not cling to divine privilege, however we might define that, but humbled himself, choosing a life in service to the kingdom of God. Anything we might consider divine privilege disappeared in the public humiliation of his crucifixion, when divine presence could only be perceived as utter absence, and the body of the Messiah became indistinguishable from any human body destroyed in the name of proper power, proper religion, proper order, you name it. Over generations, our deep rejection of God’s reign of love has found countless expressions, many of them brutal and violent, culminating in the crucifixion of the Son of God, but that didn’t stop God from raising Jesus from the dead and highly exalting him and giving him the name that is above every name.[4] Chasing privilege, chasing advantage, chasing supremacy and domination are all too common, but God went the other way. God chose the way of the cross. God chose the way of Jesus. God chose the humble, obedient, compassionate, wounded life of Jesus.

Philippi was a Roman colony and many of its residents were citizens of Rome. I imagine that Paul’s little church included at least some of them, men and women proud of their connection to the most powerful dominion in the known world. No doubt, the church in Philippi also included men and women with no status whatsoever, enslaved persons whose names had been taken away by their human masters who owned and controlled their bodies. And now Paul tells them, all of them, writes it down in his joy-infused letter from prison, because kingdom work got him in trouble yet again: Our citizenship is in heaven.

Our citizenship—that explosive, yet inclusive, little pronoun speaks volumes of the power of belonging to the reign of one greater than Caesar. Our citizenship is elsewhere. We are a colony of heaven, he tells us, and so we’re not surprised when at times we feel like resident aliens in a very foreign land. We are here to proclaim with our whole lives that love is stronger than sin and death, and certainly stronger than fear. We are here to affirm that we are each and all made in the image of God, and while that innate dignity can be denied and violated, it cannot be taken. Christ has made us his own. Everyone belongs.

Screenshot from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html#

I read about a group of journalists who combed through government memos and other documents providing guidance to federal agencies, and created a list of hundreds of flagged words and terms that were to be limited or avoided. In some cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban, but many of the phrases were removed from public-facing websites. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with [recent] executive orders.[5] Not surprisingly, the list contains diversity, equity, and inclusion, racial justice, climate science, and transsexual. I read through the whole list, trying to imagine its human impact, but I couldn’t—it’s too much, too terrifying, painful and ridiculous. The word women is listed, the word men is not, except for men who have sex with men. I found myself returning several times to word #18 in the first column, between barriers and bias: belong.

Belong. That may well be the keyword for the entire project. The compilers in charge of this list of unmentionables don’t just want to be able to say, “We belong. They don’t.” The new inquisitors want to use the power of government to decree by super-size marker signature who belongs—and who needs to be subsumed, deported, declared non-existent, or otherwise disappeared. It’s terrifying and it’s painful and, yes, it’s too much, from all directions, all at once.

But I can hear Paul singing from prison: Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. Our citizenship is in heaven. Christ has made us his own, and as he shared with us the body of our humiliation under sin’s dominion, he will also conform us to the body of his glory. Trust the promise of God. Trust the humble way of Jesus. Trust the power of empathy and compassion, and the streams of kindness poured daily into the world by ordinary people waiting and working for God’s reign to come in fullness.

I don’t know if Paul knew the old adage, “They’re so heavenly minded, they’re no earthly good.” He probably didn’t know it, but I’m certain he would push back emphatically if he heard it, and insist that we must indeed be heavenly minded if we are to be any earthly good at all.[6] We are citizens of heaven. Christ has made us his own and sent us as ambassadors in service to God’s reign, with humility and courage. Therefore, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

[1] Philippians 1:3-5

[2] See Philippians 3:7-16

[3] Philippians 1:27-28

[4] See Philippians 2:6-11

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html#

[6] With thanks to Elizabeth Shively https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-philippians-317-41

Led by the Spirit

Thomas Kleinert

We use ash to mark the beginning of Lent. Ash has long been used as a symbol of grief and repentance. Ash is all that is left when the fire has burned out. The ash we use on Ash Wednesday is what is left of the palm fronds we spread on the ground or waved with joy when we welcomed Jesus and his reign to the city. That bonfire of glad expectation burned out fast, and it’s humbling to realize how short-lived our commitments can be.

We use ash to leave a visible mark on our skin, but the words we hear during the ritual remind us that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. We let ourselves be reminded that we are earthlings—creatures of God, made in the image of God, made from dust. “Being human means acknowledging that we’re made from the earth and will return to the earth,” wrote Richard Rohr. “We are earth that has come to consciousness. … And then we return to where we started—in the heart of God. Everything in between is a school of love.”[1] It is fitting that the words human, humus, and humble all come from the same Latin root, meaning soil. In the second creation account in Genesis, God forms the human being, adam in Hebrew, from adamah—dust of the ground, dirt, soil—and breathes into the earthling’s nostrils the breath of life. We belong to God and to the ground from which God has made us. We belong to creation and to the Creator, and we are to live in ways that honor our deep belongingness to both. With ashes on our foreheads, we humbly remember our humanity. When we forget our deep belongingness to God and to creation, the opposites of humble emerge: we become arrogant, haughty, imperious, pretentious.

According to the story in Genesis, God planted a garden in Eden, and put us in it to keep it. God said, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Our story doesn’t begin with ashes; it begins with a garden and the human vocation to work and keep this marvel of lush life. One tree God has declared off limits.

You know there’s another voice in the garden, the serpent, more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made. And the crafty serpent doesn’t say much, it only asks a question, “Did God say, you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” It’s not what God said, but like some crafty podcaster, the serpent is “just asking questions,” sowing seeds of suspicion: “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God did not tell the whole truth, the voice insinuates, and the relationship between humans and God begins to unravel. We’re meant to be gardeners in Eden, but we wonder if perhaps the other voice has a point… and we eat. When questioned by God, the man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, and the serpent is silent. Guilt and fear, shame and blame have entered the scene, and jealousy and violence soon follow. We look around, and nothing, it seems, is the way it’s supposed to be.

There’s that arrogant little man with his dreams of empire who invaded a neighboring country, shelling its cities and killing its citizens, sending hundreds of thousands to die for the dream of greatness. He’s a violent little man, ruling over a house of greed and lies, in alliance with violent little men in Pyongyang and Teheran, and greatly admired by the pretentious little man with the red hat—yes, they are dangerous, but they’re just little men who can think of power only in terms of domination, because they have forgotten that life is a school of love.

The story of the earthling in the garden invites us to consider that the most consequential crack in our very fractured world is the rift in our relationship with God. And with that, we’re also invited to consider that the wholeness of life we all long for begins with the healing of that rift. Haughty little men with dreams of empire will continue to rise, their souls, their imaginations, and their actions utterly out of tune with the humility that goes with being human—they will continue to rise, and perhaps we can learn to recognize them sooner, before they convince so many of us that their violent pomposity is strength.

But the greater task for us is to remember our deep belongingness. We must know and strengthen what connects us. We must nurture what helps us work together. We must seek to live with the courage to love God with our whole and broken selves.

Our faith teaches us to say, “We have sinned. We have not trusted you. Guilt and fear have built their walls around us, and shame has locked the door. Forgive us. Set us free. Take us home.” We learn to say, “I have sinned.” We learn to trust God’s word, “You are forgiven.” And we begin again to live out our belonging to God, to each other, and to creation.

When Jesus was baptized, a voice came from heaven, “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In the next scene, Jesus is led by the Spirit in the wilderness. Jesus is alone, and he is not. He is filled with the Spirit. And he knows who he is. The voice he heard by the river didn’t mumble. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus enters the wilderness to fast and pray. Forty days of sleeping in caves during the heat of the day. Forty nights of praying under a blanket of stars—just he and his questions and the spirit-companion. Until the hunger pangs come upon him with ferocious need. That’s when he hears that other voice—a friendly voice, concerned, almost caring. “Why are you doing this to yourself? You are the Son of God, why are you sitting on your hands?” This is not the voice from the river. Who or what then is this?

“How about one small miracle for yourself?” the voice whispers. “Come on, help yourself to some bread. Nobody’s watching. It’s just you and me here. Touch that stone and turn it into bread, and eat.” But Jesus doesn’t. He is famished, weak, and vulnerable, but he won’t act in self-serving ways.

He has a vision. He sees all the kingdoms of the world, east and west, north and south, great and small, rich and poor, the ones with just rulers and the ones with self-serving kleptocrats in charge. And he hears that voice again. “I can give all this to anyone I please. Take it. Think of all the good you could do as ruler of the world: end hunger and war, or whatever it is you want. You’ll be in charge. Just show me a little respect.” But Jesus continues to be led by the Spirit.

Then he finds himself in Jerusalem, way up on top of the temple, and there’s that voice again. “You are the son of God, are you not? Show them. Show Jerusalem and the world who you are. Just throw yourself down. It is written, is it not, ‘God will command the angels concerning you to protect you… On their hands they will bear you up so that you won’t dash your foot against a stone…’ Go ahead, jump and let them see you glide down on angels’ wings.”

But Jesus says no. He won’t serve his own interests first. He won’t take advantage of any opportunity to rise to the top by any means. And we won’t manipulate people with publicity stunts. Instead, he chooses to love God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. He chooses to honor his deep belongingness to God and to us.

The most consequential crack in our very fractured world is the rift in our relationship with God, and in Jesus’ life the rift has been healed. The final clash of God’s reign and the demonic dominion of the power whisperer happened on the cross. Again Jesus heard the voice suggesting that he use his power for himself. “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one,” some scoffed. Others said, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” And one kept deriding him, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”[2] He didn’t save himself. He trusted in the faithfulness of God. And raising him from the dead, God affirmed his friendship with sinners, his subversive eating habits, and all his teachings.

The story of Jesus is the story of humanity and God. It is a retelling of our story that begins in Eden, and its healing. Jesus heard the whispers of the other voice as we all do, but he didn’t allow it to sow its seeds of suspicion. He humbly lived out our deep belongingness to God, to each other, and to the earth. In the power of the Spirit, he followed the path of love and obedience, and he bore the full weight of sin: the betrayals, the lies, the torture, the arrogance of the empire builders—all of it. He bore it and trusted God to forgive, redeem, and heal—all of it. Jesus didn’t turn stones into bread, but in the end his entire life was bread—blessed, broken, and shared for the life of the world.

[1] Douglas Kindschi https://www.gvsu.edu/cms4/asset/843249C9-B1E5-BD47-A25EDBC68363B726/grandrapidspress_2017-sep_14_from_the_earth_-_humus_humanity_humility.pdf

[2] Luke 23:35, 37, 39

Mercy now

Thomas Kleinert

Mary sings a tender song with a rough voice.

My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over, it won’t be long, he won’t be around
I love my father, he could use some mercy now

Mercy Now, written by Mary Gauthier, was released twenty years ago, almost to the day. “[The song] came to me as a prayer in a time when loved ones and the world around me were sinking into darkness,” she wrote in her autobiography.

My brother could use a little mercy now
He’s a stranger to freedom, he’s shackled to his fear and his doubt
The pain that he lives in, it’s almost more than living will allow
I love my brother, he could use some mercy now

My church and my country could use a little mercy now
As they sink into a poisoned pit, it’s going to take forever to climb out
They carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down
I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now

She sings of people in power who’ll do anything to keep their crown, and I’ve been listening to her a lot through these twenty years. “The song brought catharsis,” she wrote, “and then, unexpectedly, it brought something else. The desperation I’d felt, laced with anger and fear, began to give way to a new calm. I began to feel connected.” She sings, “Every little thing could use a little mercy now, …and life itself could use a little mercy now, …yea, we all could use a little mercy now—I know we don’t deserve it, but we need it anyhow… And every single one of us could use some mercy now.”[1]

In her book, she recalls how ten years ago, Rolling Stone called Mercy Now one of the “Top 20 saddest songs of all time.”

I’m honored to have one of my songs in a Rolling Stone top-twenty-of-all-time poll, but “Mercy Now” is not sad, it’s real. People sometimes cry when they hear it, but if tears come, I think they are tears of resonance; the words provide listeners a witness to their struggle. “Mercy Now” started as a personal song, then it deepened. It became universal.[2]

Tears of resonance. Something utterly real touches your real self, and for a moment you’re no longer shackled to fear, doubt, pain, anger, and desperation—and you get a full taste of sweet mercy and release.

I know many of you are struggling these days. It’s like you’re living inside this surreal fever dream that loudly insists on being all kinds of great and very smart, when all you can see are emotionally and morally stunted men moving fast and breaking things—commitments, norms, laws, and entire institutions, without a care in the world.

Breathe. Pray. Look up. Know who you are. Know whose promise you trust. Know whose life and whose vision for the life of all you want to live. Breathe. Pray. Hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.[3]

In the midst of this chaotic moment we hear Jesus say, “Love your enemies.” He says it twice in today’s passage. And because he knows that we immediately ask, most of us quietly, “What do you mean… LOVE our enemies?”, he adds three more brief statements to help us unwrap the meaning: Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Keep in mind that “you” in today’s passage, in just about every instance, is plural. Y’all do good to those who hate y’all. These are commands for the whole community of disciples to put into practice, and not just various individuals at the receiving end of hate, violence and abuse. The point is not to create more accommodating victims—meek, silent, and conveniently invisible—but to create a community that cultivates kindness and stands up against hate, violence and abuse with the relentless power of mercy.

When Jesus says, “Do good to those who hate you” he’s not addressing individual black and brown people, queer folk and trans people to figure out  ways to do good to those who hate them—he’s addressing the whole community of believers. He’s telling us to stand together against the reign of hate, and to remind one another that we belong to each other. And then we can talk and strategize about how to remind the haters that they too are beloved.

When Jesus says, “Pray for those who abuse or mistreat you,” he’s not telling individual survivors of sexual abuse or domestic violence to pray for those who have shown no regard for their dignity as persons—he’s addressing the whole community believers. He’s telling us to stand together against lovelessness and against any disrespect for each person’s dignity and sanctity. He’s telling us to be in prayer about how best to protect each other from the trauma of abuse.

Pray for those who abuse you. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. The sayings are short and memorable, and they easily take on a life of their own. They float around in the mind and in the culture, and without the ballast of Jesus’ proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed—without that critical ballast, these sayings turn into destructive pills that only perpetuate piously white-washed systems of domination.

Listen to your mother. Brush your teeth. Wash your hands. Love your enemies. They sound deceptively similar, but the last one doesn’t pretend to be just another bit of parental wisdom. Love your enemies isn’t a bit of memorable advice, passed down from parents to their children, for how to deal with bullies, batterers, and abusers.

Also, cruel advice hardly qualifies as good news. And telling the bullied, the battered, and the abused, “Love your enemy,” that is cruel advice. Saying it may well be the least merciful act imaginable.

Love your enemies. The only one who can say that is the One who did say it. The rest of us need to listen. The only one who can say, Love your enemies, is the One who’s done it. The One who embodied God’s compassion and mercy like no other.  The One who revealed the unfathomable depth of God’s mercy in his whole life and in his death by execution. As Paul reminds us, “Christ died for the ungodly… While we still were sinners Christ died for us… While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God.”[4] Love your enemies is not some pithy adage, short, memorable, made for sharing. Love your enemies is the life of Jesus in three words. It is the revelation of the heart of God.

Miroslav Volf is a theologian from Croatia who has lived and taught in the U.S. for much of his life. In his book, Exclusion and Embrace, he recounts an experience from the winter of 1993. It was at the height of the fighting between Serbians and Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, and Volf delivered a lecture arguing that disciples of Jesus ought to embrace our enemies just as Christ embraced us. After the lecture, a member of the audience asked him if he could embrace a četnik. Četniks were notoriously wicked Serbian fighters infamous for destroying Croatian cities, and rounding up, murdering and raping civilians. For Volf, a četnik stood as the epitome of a real and concrete enemy. Could he embrace a četnik?

“No, I cannot,” he answered after some hesitation, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[5]

“I think I should be able to” describes the direction of his life and his life’s work—toward that impossible embrace. Volf struggles, and how could he not, to fully imagine and live what Jesus and the first Christian witnesses teach: Like me, my enemy is the recipient of God’s love and stands with me at the cross of Christ, both of us together in the embrace of the love that will not let us go.

Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you.  Pray for those who abuse you. These words were not spoken for easy repetition, to be passed on as pious personal advice. The place to hear and ponder them is in the embrace of God’s love. That may be the only place to hear and ponder them. And it is only there that we can even begin to think about living them.

The world says, do to others as they do to you. Jesus teaches, do to others as you would have them do to you. And then he points to the reality in which we already live, in the embrace of God’s love, and he says, do as God does to you: be merciful. And heaven knows, there’s no dearth of realities needing our best, most thoughtful mercy now.[6] Breathe. Pray. Practice mercy.

[1] https://www.marygauthier.com/mercy-now-lyrics

[2] Mary Gauthier, Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, United States: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2021.

[3] Hebrews 10:23

[4] Romans 5:6-10

[5] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 9.

[6] Thanks to Sarah Henrich for this lovely phrase; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-627-38-2

Mercy and release

Thomas Kleinert

Could the good bishop have said anything at all even remotely related to the gospel of Jesus Christ without offending the great leader? Clearly, at the solemnities in the magnificent cathedral, her plea for mercy was considered out of place by the perpetually aggrieved man. Will he wait for his third term to assert by executive order his right to install America’s bishops?

“It is astonishing,” James Baldwin wrote, “it is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”[1] Truthful mirror is an apt description of the living word of God, and we’re here to remember that no shouts on Truth Social will dim, let alone break, that mirror.

Cole Riley got my attention this past week when she shared her wise observations — on Instagram, of all places.

If you’re feeling a kind of bone-deep, soul-body exhaustion today, please remember that is by design. However futile resistance and goodness and beauty feel today, do not surrender your appetite for them.

She urges me to understand that the overwhelming exhaustion I feel, this deep hunger for goodness and beauty, is at least in part an intentional deprivation, and she insists that I don’t surrender this hunger by numbing it with the endless offerings of the distraction economy. “Do what you need in order to retain possession over your own imagination,” she writes.[2] What I hear her say, is, Be careful whose clips you watch. Be careful whose language you borrow for your thinking and speaking. Be careful whose words and attitudes you allow to enter your inner space — they will shape your world.

Waves of ugliness and lies can be overwhelming, and you may feel like you’re drowning. But remember: beauty and truth can overwhelm you as well, too much to fully take in — so big the waves can be, they bear you up and carry you in the power of the Spirit.

“The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork,” the psalmist declares.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth

and their words to the end of the world.

The psalmist knows what it is like when we behold more than we can say, when we run out of words to give voice to wonder and awe.  And so we’re invited to watch the sun rise like a groom coming out of the honeymoon suite and taking a run around the world.

Kathleen Norris used to teach poetry in elementary schools for a few years.

Whenever I gave the kids an assignment — such as, “Write something and compare it to this or that” — they would pour out their heart and soul. I got back some incredible revelations of who these kids were and what their lives were like. Sometimes it was painful. And sometimes it was just glorious. My favorite paper was by one little girl. I have no idea what the assignment was. … It may have been to write about color or nature, I don’t know — I tended to give very open-ended assignments. Well, she wrote down, “The sky is full of blue and full of the mind of God.”

Norris thinks the girl was in fourth grade, and her family was stationed at Minot Air Force Base, “transferred fairly recently from a base in someplace like Louisiana.”[3] A little girl in awe of the North Dakota sky; a young psalmist, practicing the art of praise. Soon, I hope, she discovered, like the psalmists of old, the beauty and truth of God’s torah, divine words that revive the soul, make wise, and gladden the heart, Spirit-breathing words that are enlightening, enduring, true and righteous altogether. Words that tune our hearts to sing God’s praise and be fearless. More desirable than gold they are, sweeter than honey, and in keeping them there is great reward.

Jesus clung to that promise, and with his whole being he lived it for us and our salvation. Luke tells us Jesus was back in Nazareth where they’d known him all his life. They’d heard stories, bits and pieces about his teachings and the wondrous things he’d been doing down in Capernaum and other places by the lake. It was the  Sabbath, and he was in the synagogue as was his custom. He was invited to do one of the readings and teach, and they handed him the scroll of Isaiah. And now all of the Spirit-driven movement of the opening chapters — the back and forth from Nazareth to Bethlehem, back to Nazareth and down to Jerusalem, over to the Jordan and into the wilderness and back to Galilee — all the movement slows down to this moment.

He opens the scroll.

He finds the passage he wants to read.

He begins:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

He sits down.

The eyes of all in the synagogue are fixed on him, Luke tells us. Everybody wants to know what he has to say. They are eager to hear his teaching. They long for a word to assure them that the ancient promise is still firm, still theirs. They hunger for a word encouraging them not to surrender their hope: that the day of release would come; that captivity and oppression would come to an end one blessed day, and God’s people would live in freedom.

And when Jesus speaks, the first word out of his mouth is “today” — not some day soon, not one fine day, but today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Jesus, it turns out, wasn’t merely reading, he was giving his inaugural address. This is who I am. This is what I’m about. This is my mission: Good news for the poor. Release for the captives. Sight for the blind. Freedom for the oppressed. His Sabbath talk was short because his whole life was the teaching and the fulfillment.

Jesus read his kingdom manifesto from Isaiah, but he skipped a line. What’s written in Isaiah is, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God” — but Jesus didn’t read that part, and I don’t think he dropped that half-verse by accident, do you? I believe he dropped it because the good news he lives and proclaims is not about vengeance; the good news of Jesus and his church is about mercy and release, it is about our liberation from all that has kept humans from living in the fullness of God’s love.

Sometimes we say the good news of Jesus is about the forgiveness of sins, and it is — as long as we grasp the full scale of our release from our entanglement in sin’s dominion. When Jesus proclaims good news for the poor, he means the poor, and not just “poor sinners.” He looks at his disciples and says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” He says to those with the means to host big dinners, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” He tells the story of a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table. And Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his tree, and soon the chief tax collector tells him, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”[4] It’s good news for the poor, because the compassion and mercy of Christ ripple out into all our sin-distorted relationships and bring about justice until we’re all fully disentangled from sin’s dominion.

Yes, compassion and mercy and justice rule — not vengeance. So be careful whose clips you watch. Be careful whose language you borrow for your thinking and speaking. And be very careful whose words and attitudes you allow to enter your inner space — they will shape not only your world, but the one we all share.

“Do what you need in order to retain possession over your own imagination,” writes Cole Riley, and I would love to talk with her about that. I don’t want my imagination colonized by liars and peddlers of fear — I want an imagination fully formed by the beauty and truth of God, an imagination schooled in the company of Jesus and continually shaped by the same Spirit that anointed him.

God’s words instruct us to perceive the beauty and wisdom in which all parts of creation are knit together in mutual belonging. Wendell Berry writes,

We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time.[5]

No, nobody knows it all the time, but the Spirit of God who’s made her home among us knows. The Spirit that anointed Jesus will not cease to inspire and invite us to entrust ourselves to her movement.

When Jesus said, “Today” he meant that very day; and when we hear him say, “Today” he still means today. He’s addressing our hunger, our captivity, our impaired vision, our entanglement in imperial oppression, and he’s come to break our chains, open our eyes, and lead us out.

In the meantime, may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our redeemer.

[1] James Baldwin https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/09/this-morning-this-evening-so-soon/658022/

[2] https://www.instagram.com/blackliturgies/p/DFDZn5qOFyo/?img_index=2

[3] https://www.leaderu.com/marshill/mhr07/norris1.html

[4] See Luke 6:20; 14:13; 16:19-31; 19:8

[5] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and The Survival of Creation,” Cross Currents, Summer 1993, Vol. 43, Issue 2.

But now

Thomas Kleinert

There was a time when you were only known as “the baby.” Your parents, your siblings, really anyone who dreamed or knew about you — they only spoke of you as “the baby.” They spoke with joy, certainly, and with anticipation and hope, but you were still just “the baby,” a tiny mystery of a person. Depending on the year of your birth or how much confidence your parents had in blurry ultrasound images, they may not even have known if you were a boy or a girl, or if there were more than one of you.

At some point during the pregnancy, your family started making lists of possible names for “the baby;” girls’ names, boys’ names, names that aren’t gender specific. They may have listed grandparents, aunts and uncles, best friends and favorite characters, names that would go well with the family name or start with the same letter as your siblings’ first names, or names that capture courage, kindness, or whatever other trait they hoped you would embody. And as the due date drew closer, the list got shorter. Eventually the moment came when they looked at you and they just knew what your name was going to be, and they spoke it. For the very first time, you were called by your name. You were no longer just “the baby,” you were somebody.

Mary and Joseph didn’t start with a list. The angel told Mary, according to Luke, “You will name him Jesus,” and according to Matthew, it was Joseph who was told by an angel, “You are to name him Jesus.”[1] So that was settled months before Mary even started to show.

The two readings we heard today are powerful, beautiful affirmations of identity, and in each, God is speaking in the first person singular, addressing somebody directly, through the voice of the prophet or a voice from heaven.

“I have called you by name,” says the creator-of-you, Jacob, the shaper-of-you, Israel, “You are mine.”

“You are my beloved son, I delight in you,” says the voice from heaven to Jesus, who’s just been baptized and anointed with the Holy Spirit for his mission.

I love that we get to hear these words of affirmation at the beginning of the year, this year in particular, when we mustn’t forget who and whose we are, and who it is we follow on the way to God’s reign.

Isaiah gives us exuberant poetry, addressed to a people stuck in desolation. In Isaiah’s message, the Babylonian exile is described as a punishment, or at least a consequence, of the people’s failure to honor God’s commandments, God’s torah, God’s instruction for faithful living. God, says Isaiah, turned away from them. God gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and poured upon him the heat of this anger and the fury of war; but [Jacob] did not take it to heart. Isaiah vividly describes the exiles as a people robbed and plundered, all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons. They are sinking in hopelessness, and there’s no one to rescue. There’s no one, says Isaiah, to say, “Restore!”[2] No one.

And in that desolate landscape of devastating silence, Isaiah stands and proclaims the new word, the word of the One who makes all things new. “But now,” shouts Isaiah — now there is someone to say, “Restore!” Now God speaks the new word declaring an end to judgment and captivity, and the promise of homecoming rises like a song in the morning.

Oh, we’ve heard the prophet tell us of the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it,[3] but now he speaks of us, he speaks of God’s people and who we are:

Thus says the Lord, the One who created you, O Jacob, who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.

Rise up, stand up, remember who you are. Remember, you have been created, shaped, called, claimed and redeemed for a purpose: you are the children of Abraham and Sarah, countless as the stars — I have called you by name; you are mine, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.[4]

In Isaiah’s proclamation, the Creator of heaven and earth speaks to God’s people “like a lover,” as Anathea Portier-Young put it, “whose heart is bursting, who has waited an eternity just to say their name.”[5] And the Holy One of Israel will do all that is necessary to secure their release and homecoming. Why?

Because you are precious in my sight and honored and I love you.

These words are spoken first and foremost and irrevocably to the Jewish people who have lived as people of the promise since the days of Abraham and Sarah. And we are invited to hear them addressed also to us, to all whom Jesus Christ has embraced as his siblings, all who pray with him for the coming of God’s reign, all who follow him on the way and enact with him at his table “the great ingathering of God’s beloved from all of God’s creation.”[6] For the end will be what God has spoken from the beginning: the feast of life when all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. In the company of Jesus, we dare to hope that when God says “everyone” it means everyone: everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Home from our exiles, all of us scattered ones who forget so easily.

Today we celebrate that Jesus gets in the water with us. It may seem counterintuitive to step into the river of repentance when the oceans are rising and powerful storms are flooding the land. But when fires rage bigger, faster, and hotter than anytime on record, stepping into the river of repentance feels like the saving proposition it is. Today we celebrate the gift of this river, and that Jesus steps into it with us, not because he needs to, but because he wants to. He wants to be where we are, so we can be where he is. We step into the river of repentance with our sins and regrets, our guilt and shame and fear, and we pray that like water, grace is washing it all away, until we are who we were made to be, until we know who we are.

And Jesus steps into that very river in deep solidarity with us — and he drowns in it, drowns in our sin, in our helpless brokenness, in our fear and ready violence, in all the heavy lovelessness we carry. All of it. Drowns in it.

And you’ve heard the story, you know he rises, and you know the heaven is opened and the Holy Spirit descends, but now the voice from heaven speaks, and he hears it, he knows it, and he only hopes that we hear it too:“You are my Son, the Beloved, in whom I delight.” He knows this; this is the song in his heart. He hopes we hear the words as addressed not only to him, but to all of us.

In Luke’s narration of the gospel, the scene by the river is followed by a lengthy genealogy: name after name, generation after generation, the whole long line that makes Jesus who he is, going back all the way to Adam and Eve — but the voice from heaven has already declared who he is, has already spoken his true name.

We are all deeply shaped by our ancestors and what they have done and left undone, by the legacy of their dreams and the pain of their trauma, but Jesus reveals who we are: God’s beloved in whom God delights. This relationship is the one that shapes and heals and fulfills all the others that make us who we are.

God’s love for us is the one relationship in life we can’t screw up. We can deny it, sure; we can ignore it, neglect it, forget it, and run away from it, but we cannot end it. Nothing we do or refuse to do will change who we are: God’s own, God’s beloved, God’s delight.

Often we forget. We may forget because we’re busy making a name for ourselves. We may forget because others have convinced us that we are not worthy of love, too insignificant for any kind of attention. We may forget because pain and shame have buried our sense of self as God’s own.

What are we to do about our forgetfulness? We follow Jesus, he’ll remind us. We pray, and at least occasionally we let God do all the talking. And again and again we gather at the homecoming table for the feast of life, the great ingathering of God’s beloved from all of God’s creation.

There was a time when you were only known as “the baby.” Yet long before anyone would think of what to call you, God named you: God’s own, God’s beloved, God’s delight.

Do not fear, for I am with you, says the Lord. I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, Give them up, and to the south, Do not withhold. Bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth — everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

[1] Luke 1:32; Matthew 1:21

[2] See Isaiah 42:22-25

[3] Isaiah 42:5

[4] Isaiah 43:21

[5] Anathea Portier-Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/baptism-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-isaiah-431-7

[6] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (WBC), 54.

Now what?

Thomas Kleinert

We have heard the story and told it, the story of God and the baby. We have sung the old carols and hummed along with the holiday playlists. We have lit the candles, lots of candles held high as a witness to the light that shines in the darkness, defiantly hopeful that the darkness will not overcome it.

We have celebrated the birth of Jesus, and in many homes the days revolved around a big dining table, surrounded by people of all ages, in a sea of torn wrapping paper — gifts, smiles, thank-yous, and an abundance of good food and holiday cheer. Some of us even missed the half-time show with Beyoncé. All because of the wondrous story of God and this baby. Now what?

“Well, so that is that,” says the narrator in W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio,

Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—

Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.[1]

How very grown-up this voice sounds. How little room it leaves for wide-eyed wonder. “Once again,” the voice declares with a regretful tone, “once again, as in previous years, we have seen the actual Vision – and failed to do more than entertain it as an agreeable possibility; once again we have sent Him away.”

I think it’s a little early for Auden’s reflective earnestness, though, and you and I wouldn’t be here on the first Sunday after, if the light of that night had not started a little fire in our hearts. So here are, just for contrast, the words of Sharon, as told by John Shea:

She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity, convinced every word was revelation. She said, “They were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass … , but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lighted the roof. Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was?” Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars. “The baby was God.” And she jumped in the air, whirled around, dove into the sofa and buried her head under the cushion, which is the only proper response to the Good News of the Incarnation.[2]

The good news of the incarnation is a lot to take in. For five-year-old Sharon it takes careful retelling, and she can’t tell it without jumping and whirling around, and then some sofa-diving. She knows what an awesome thing it is to say, “The baby was God.” It changes profoundly how we think about God, heaven and earth, sun and moon and stars, and every baby born into this world where rich men rarely come bearing gifts without an agenda and wise men and women are worried. The Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, and he has changed everything. The baby was God, and all the possibilities we see in the eyes of the infant unfolded into the particular life of Jesus.

Jesus is our childhood’s pattern, 

Day by day like us he grew.

He was little, weak and helpless, 

Tears and smiles like us he knew.

Thus he feels for all our sadness, 

And he shares in all our gladness.[3]

Luke’s story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple is the only incident in the biblical gospels about the life of Jesus between infancy and the beginning of his ministry as an adult. “Jesus is twelve years old, a signal to the original audience,” writes Wesley Allen, “that he is on the cusp of adulthood as defined in the ancient world … His actions on this occasion, then, foreshadow his ministry and especially his relationship with God.”[4] Just as the adult Jesus will make one trip to Jerusalem on Passover, where he will encounter the teachers in the temple and finally give his life in obedience to God’s will, so the boy Jesus, near the end of his childhood, makes one trip to the temple, on Passover, where he encounters the teachers. To his family, he appears to be lost, but he knows he is exactly where he needs to be. It’s not hard to imagine him sounding just like any sassy pre-teen in this scene. "Why were you searching for me?” he says to his parents. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?" Day by day like us he grew, and he grew into his own. But isn’t it a little early to think about 12-year old Jesus just four days after Christmas Day? Doesn’t it feel a little rushed?

I don’t own a Christmas sweater. Several years ago, though, I picked up a pair of Christmas socks at Target. Black, with little green Christmas trees and a fat, jolly Santa. Every year, I wear them once, maybe twice, and then they go in the laundry basket and eventually back in the far back of the sock drawer until next year.

Why am I talking about Christmas socks? Because they fit the category of seasonal accessory, and because the wonderful passage from Colossians talks about getting dressed. The baby was God. The Word became flesh. We have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Now what?

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

The baby was God, and with the Magi from the East and Sharon’s Three Rich Men we come to adore him and to offer our gifts—only to discover that Christmas is a reverse baby shower: new threads for us.

Three-year-old Liam got Batman sheets for Christmas, and he may still wear his Spiderman pyjamas, but he’s outgrowing his Paw Patrol undies. He’s a big boy now.

We’re invited to let ourselves be clothed in layer upon layer of all that Jesus embodies—his compassion and kindness, his humility and patience, his forgiveness, his peace, and above all, the fullness of God’s love he enfleshed.

Your Christmas sweater may already be back in the closet until next year, together with the left-over wrapping paper and all the decorations in the attic. But the birth of Jesus isn’t just about decorations, it truly is about God’s incarnation: the complete enfleshment of God’s fullness in a human being. We know Jesus didn’t come so we could have a day or two or three of merriment and memories—beautiful and life-giving as such days are. He came to reclaim and fulfill all our days. He came to free us from sin, from our self-absorption and greed, and from the ugliness of thought and speech that holds us captive. He came to bind us together for good in the love of God. And you know how much this land and every land needs communities of compassion and people who seek to make room in their hearts and their neighborhoods for the peace of Christ to rule. It begins with you and me and our willingness to wear these new clothes year-round. It begins with our willingness to let the word of Christ not just come and visit, but dwell within and among us.

The baby was God, and I am thankful for Sharon who gives voice to an exuberance that can’t contain itself and calls on heaven and earth, sun and moon and all living things to praise the One who loves all things into being.

The baby was God, and I am thankful also for Auden whose narrator gives voice to the shadow experience of this exuberance:

Once again we have attempted—quite unsuccessfully—to love all of our relatives, and in general grossly overestimated our powers.

But even this very grown-up and somber voice of after-Christmas pensiveness points to our child-like dependence on the One who comes to us in the baby.

Once again, as in previous years, … we have sent Him away, begging though to remain His disobedient servant, the promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

We know Jesus came to reclaim and redeem our every day. We have sent him away, again and again, because the love that found us demands so much of us, and we are slow to change. But “begging … to remain His disobedient servant” we wrap ourselves in Christ’s compassion, kindness, and patience, and we get a little closer to wearing them year-round.

May the fire God has kindled in our hearts burn brightly, bright enough for us to trust that even though we “cannot keep His word for long,” the word enfleshed in Jesus keeps us for good.

[1] For the Time Being, in: W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 399.

[2] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977), 68.

[3] Cecil F. Alexander, “Once in David’s Royal City,” Chalice Hymnal No. 165.

[4] O. Wesley Allen Jr. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-luke-241-52-5

Change

Thomas Kleinert

There’s a reason they don’t pay prophets to design inspirational cards for the Advent season. You just can’t make embossed, heavy cardstock, color print and extra glitter work with a line like “The ax is lying at the root of the trees!” or the classic holiday greeting, “Merry Christmas, you brood of vipers!” But on the road to Christmas, there’s no good way to avoid John the Baptizer down by the Jordan, no matter how much we might prefer staying at the month-long Christmas party that started the day after Thanksgiving, just dipping gingerbread cookies into our egg nog. There’s no good way to avoid John, and he’s on fire.

“Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” he yells, sounding like one of the prophets of old: furious, single-minded, borderline obsessive. The people have come to receive his baptism in the river. It’s a powerful ritual of making a fresh start, of going back to the beginning: God’s people crossing the river to enter the promised land anew. But John won’t let them get away with thinking that a water ritual would make them presentable on the day of the Lord, or that some other symbolic action like putting on sackcloth and ashes would do, or that they could always fall back on being children of Abraham with whom God had made the covenant that included all his descendants. John slams all those exit doors shut until it is just the crowd and this ancient and urgent demand: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

And amazingly, most of them don’t leave to find a more accommodating prophet. They get it. “What then are we to do?” they ask.

Repentance is one of those churchy words we may get tired of hearing. Some think it’s something like reallyfeeling really sorry, with thick layers of religious overtones and tears of contrition. Not really. What it means is both very simple and very hard: to stop doing what I’m doing and to start doing what I was made to do. The term in Hebrew literally means turning around, as in returning to the ways of God. And the Greek term literally means change of mind, indicating a complete turn-around in one’s thinking that effects a change of direction in one’s life. It doesn’t matter if you typically think your way into a new way of acting or act your way into a new way of thinking. Repentance is a fundamental reorientation of your life, a reorientation that becomes visible, tangible, and, hopefully, durable. All this is to say is that repentance may well be a churchy-sounding word, but it’s one we just can’t do without.

“What then are we to do?” folks ask. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none,” says John; “and whoever has food must do likewise.” It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. Bearing good fruit, it turns out, is neither spectacular nor heroic; it’s rather ordinary. John reminds me that in the divine economy, if I have more than what I need to sustain my life, the neighbor who does not have such abundance has a claim on it. And I can’t even tell him how many pairs of pants are hanging in my closet.

The last time I spoke with Father Strobel before he joined the saints in heaven, I was driving the van to pick up a group of guests from the Room in the Inn campus. The line was short that night. I pulled right up and got out of the van. I saw a man who looked familiar, despite the surgical mask covering much of his face. “Charlie, is it you? I haven’t seen you in what feels like ages! It’s Thomas from Vine Street. It’s so good to see you! How are you?” Even in the dark, I could see Charlie’s eyes light up with a smile. He told me he was doing OK, mentioned his health problems, but that wasn’t what he wanted to chat about. He couldn’t stand staying at home, he told me. He needed to be where he was, at the campus, with the folks who didn’t have housing, people he knew to be his siblings and his friends.

“The real problem,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the real problem is private property. There’s nothing wrong with owning things, but the way I understand Jesus, he tells us, ‘This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.’”

I laughed and said, “That’ll preach, Charlie!” On the way back to the church, I kept thinking, who but this man would skip the chit-chat about the weather or some sports team and go right to the heart of the matter? A lifetime of prayer and loving service condensed into a simple, incredibly challenging statement, offered with humility and the warmest smile:

The way I understand Jesus, he tells us, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.”

“Love your neighbor” is not a religious way to spell charity; it’s the most challenging way to spell justice. It is the challenge to take my neighbor’s need as seriously as I take my own. Moses and the prophets teach it. John declared it. Jesus lived it. And in the fourth century, Bishop Basil of Caesarea said in a homily, “When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who couldclothe the naked and does not?” And the bishop continued,

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.

Or as James put it, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.[1] And in the First Letter of John we read, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?[2] Or as Charlie paraphrased Jesus’ teaching, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.” Love of neighbor is a golden thread woven into the texts of our tradition, and we need to weave it into our lives with continual repentance, continual conversion to the vision and purposes of God.

Little we do in this weekly worship gathering ever strikes us as revolutionary. Our liturgy is not designed with radical, global change in mind, but we do what we do, all that we do, in the light of God’s coming reign. We practice confession and forgiveness, we practice gratitude and praise, we practice saying our small yes to God’s great and eternal Yes, we practice saying, “Jesus Christ is Lord!”, and we trust that by letting those practices become habitual we are changed into subversive change-makers.

The tax-collectors in the crowd ask John, “What are we to do?” and John doesn’t tell them to walk away from their jobs, because the system of taxation is corrupt and unjust. He does tell them, though, not to take more than they are authorized to take.

And John doesn’t tell the soldiers in the crowd to quit service in the Roman military, because they are collaborating with an unjust and corrupt system — we all are. He does tell them, though, not to extort money from anyone through threats or false accusations. Again, nothing heroic, nothing spectacular, just a commitment to act with justice within the social structure, a commitment to let love of neighbor become visible and tangible in everyday situations.

John tells the people of the coming one who is more powerful than he, who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Just moments before, John talked about trees getting cut down and thrown into the fire, so it’s quite understandable when some folks wonder if wheat and chaff represent two groups of people—perhaps those who bear the fruit God expects to find and those who don’t?

No. The point is rather that until harvest time, every grain of wheat is wrapped in a husk. After threshing, all those precious wheat berries are mixed in with a dusty mess of husk parts called chaff. And to this day, farmers around the world make use of the wind to separate the chaff from the grain—a small portion of the messy mix is tossed up into the air, the chaff is blown away some distance, and the wheat kernels fall back to the ground. And the point, of course, is to save every last grain, not merely some.

The image suggests a view of judgment that is liberating rather than punishing: We experience life as a mix of good and evil impulses and actions; they are often frustratingly intermingled; combinations of good intentions and bad outcomes; poor judgments we can’t forget and compromises that haunt us; too many choices where we had to pick the lesser of two evils — and the judgment John announces as the work of the coming one is a judgment. But it’s not a judgment of division and elimination. It’s a judgment of cleansing and gathering. It’s the judgment of fiery love that burns away all the bits that keep us from being who we were made to be, all the bits that trap us in self-absorption and apathy, all the bits our practice of repentance didn’t help us shed, all that gets in the way of our life as God’s people.

So, yes, it’s good to meet John on the road to Christmas. And it’s good to make it a habit to repent and rejoice. The Lord is near! And that you can write on your Christmas card, can’t you?

[1] James 2:15-17

[2] 1 John 3:17

Beware

Thomas Kleinert

Those who saw the temple in Jerusalem say it was a magnificent structure. Newly rebuilt under Herod the Great, and still under construction during Jesus’ lifetime, it occupied a platform twice as large as the Roman Forum with its many temples and four times the size of the Acropolis in Athens with the famous Parthenon. The massive retaining walls that supported the complex, including the famous Western wall that remains today, were built with enormous blocks of stone, some of them 40 feet long. The front of the temple itself was a square of sculpted rock, 150 feet by 150 feet, much of it decorated with silver and gold. First-century historian Josephus wrote that the gold “effected so fierce a blaze of fire that those who tried to look at it were forced to turn away. Jerusalem and the temple seemed in the distance like a mountain covered in snow, for any part not covered in gold was dazzling white.” The combination of the temple mount, the platform of huge retaining stones, and the large building of the temple itself raised the temple complex to a height that could be seen from miles away, and in bright sunlight, it shone like a luminous city come down from heaven. This was the House of God – this was, in the minds of many, the center of the world. This was the very presence of God with God’s people, the ancient promise rendered in stone. It was holy ground, a sanctuary where rituals of atonement and purification along with festivals of liberation and thanksgiving sustained a people seeking to live faithfully with their God. The temple was an essential institution of Jewish life.

Jesus had come to the temple every day since he came to Jerusalem, and tensions between him and the temple leadership had been growing. Now he and the disciples are leaving, and one of them says, perhaps with his fingers tracing the seam between two of the colossal blocks, “Look, teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” He is dazzled, but he doesn’t see what Jesus sees. I wonder if he actually saw what Jesus wanted us to see just moments ago when he drew our attention to the poor widow putting her last little coin in the temple treasury – if this disciple saw her, she didn’t leave a lasting impression; not like the massive walls. “Not one stone will be left here upon another,” Jesus tells the stunned disciple. “All will be thrown down.” Nothing suggests he meant it as a threat; just a simple announcement. The words sound very matter-of-fact, spoken in passing. The beauty would fade, the majesty fall, the power crumble and collapse.

In the next scene, Jesus and four of the disciples are sitting on the Mount of Olives with its spectacular view of the Temple Mount, and they ask him some follow-up questions about all will be thrown down. They’re not curious as to why or how, only when this would be — as though the why were a given and the how irrelevant, and everything now was just a matter of time. In the apocalyptic imagination, the announcement that “not one stone will be left here upon another” is a given — the burning question is, when will the present age crumble under the weight of evil and give way to the kingdom of God? When will this be and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?

The Gospel of Mark was composed and first heard in a time of great uncertainty. In the 60’s of the first century, the weight of Roman occupation of Judea became too much to bear. Mob violence was disrupting life in Jerusalem. Assassins attacked and murdered people, including one high priest, in broad daylight, and kidnapped officials who collaborated with Rome. Gangs of roaming robbers burned and looted villages.[1] Prophets delivered oracles of doom, and daily the news seemed to confirm their words. Jerusalem was a tinderbox in those tumultuous years, with revolutionary sentiments mounting and finally catapulting Judea into open rebellion against Rome. “Deceivers and impostors, under the pretense of divine inspiration, fostering revolutionary changes,” wrote the historian Josephus, “they persuaded the masses to act like madmen and led them out into the desert in the belief that God would give them signs of deliverance.”[2] Insurgents took control of the city, but not for long. Roman troops under the command of Titus laid siege to Jerusalem, and in the summer of the year 70, the city fell and the temple was destroyed — only seven years after construction had finally been completed.

The Gospel of Mark was composed and first heard in a time of wars and rumors of wars. There were Christian prophets whose words were honored by the assemblies of believers as the words of the risen Lord, and some of those prophets were certain that the catastrophic events unfolding in Jerusalem could only mean that the return of Jesus in power and glory was imminent.

In Mark’s community, however, the words of the living Lord were words of caution and encouragement. “Beware that no one leads you astray.” To the prophets, teachers, and preachers of Mark’s community, the bewilderment, the desolation, and the chaos so many of us are experiencing — Simon Dein calls it the “paralyzing anxiety that the world is dissolving”[3] — was familiar territory. It’s from those depths that they proclaim to us a message of resilient hope. Beware that no one leads you astray, says the Lord. Beware that no one leads you astray, when truth is shaken, when nations make war and people flee in terror, when the silent tsunami of famine inundates the devastated land, when impostors preach alluring sermons of fear, resentment, and weaponized grievance. Don’t despair. Beware. Resist the pull of cynicism. Cultivate hope. Cultivate wonder. Cultivate gratitude. Practice faithful commitment. Be alert. Stay awake. Laugh. Live the love that is the way of Jesus.

Adrienne Maree Brown wrote in 2016, under the Black Lives Matter hashtag, “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”[4] A few years later, in the summer of 2022, she wrote,

I have to revise that. Things are getting worse for most of us, between mass shootings, climate catastrophe, regressive sociopolitical battles and an ongoing global pandemic. It’s an overwhelming, terrifying and grief-stricken time.

After naming several of the losses we haven’t had the time or the emotional capacity to fully process, she adds,

This palpable, active, ongoing grief is a non-negotiable part of this period of immense change. Grief is one of the most beautiful and difficult ways we love. As we grieve we feel our humanity and connection to each other.[5]

We are people called to live the love that is the way of Jesus, and this grief settling into our bones is part of it. We are called to lean forward into the promise of a world redeemed by the love of God.

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,” Jesus says, “do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” And then he speaks of birth pangs. For many of us it does feel like the end of the world when every day just seems to add layer upon layer of loss. Some of it is disillusionment, which is painful, but it frees us to see with greater clarity and live more honestly and truthfully — and certainly disillusionment is the kind of loss most of us would welcome as we hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.

But Jesus speaks to the whole messy experience of losses piling up and weighing us down — the tears, the worries, the bad dreams and the sleepless nights, the knot in the stomach, the shoulders that feel like they’ll never relax again. He sees our reality and he knows it; knows it and bears it. And he speaks of labor pains. He tells us that the world is in labor, and the suffering of creation will be healed and fulfilled in the joy of birth.

How long is this labor, we ask, of course we ask, how long must we wait? When will we laugh with tears in our eyes and cry no more?

He doesn’t know when. What he does know is that something is struggling to be born, and he calls us to lean into the promise, and breathe through the pain, and follow him on the way.

The English historian Eric Hobsbawm, born in 1917, grew up in Vienna and, after the death of his parents, with an aunt in Berlin. Berlin was not a good place to live for a Jewish teenager in those years. He was fifteen years old when one day in January 1933, as he was walking his little sister home from school, he saw the headline at a newsstand, “Adolph Hitler Appointed Chancellor of Germany.” Reflecting on those years Hobsbawm later wrote,

We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. … It is difficult for those who have not experienced the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ of the twentieth century in central Europe to see what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a provisional waystation between a dead past and a future not yet born.[6]

Now it’s our turn to live in something that cannot really even be described as a world; it’s our turn to live in this in-between time, so hard to describe, so difficult to understand, so exhausting to navigate. Yet amid all the endings pointing to a non-world ruled by autocrats, something is struggling to be born, Jesus assures us: a world where God and creation are at home.

We believe that the Spirit of God is at work among us, unresting, unhasting, breathing with us through the pain, building a new temple, one that isn’t modeled on imperial architecture, but a living temple where God is at home in the world. A temple that isn’t overwhelming in its heavy, gold-plated magnitude, but one that shines with the glory of God. A temple made entirely of human beings who are fully alive and are finally one with the love that made us.[7]

[1] See Josephus, Jewish War, 2.254-56; Antiquities 20.185-88; 208-10

[2] Josephus, Jewish War, 2.258

[3] Cited by Amanda Brobst-Renaud https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-33-2/commentary-on-mark-131-8-5

[4] https://www.instagram.com/adriennemareebrown/p/BHqlZ57jbBT/

[5] https://adriennemareebrown.net/2022/06/07/an-emergent-strategy-response-to-mass-shootings/

[6] Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the forgotten twentieth century (New York: Penguin, 2008), 117.

[7] My thanks to Debie Thomas whose writing and voice continue to help me say what I believe needs to be said, especially https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2010-not-one-stone

Two widows

Thomas Kleinert

Two widows. One of them we know as the widow of Zarephath. Jesus talked about her when, early in his ministry, he preached a sermon at the synagogue at home in Nazareth.

“There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.” And when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage, and they were ready to kill him.[1]

It’s a kind of jealousy we’re familiar with. We gotta take care of our own first, we say, sometimes quite emphatically. And when we’re filled with rage, we have a hard time remaining receptive to others, or at least curious about them. Most of us today aren’t filled with rage, though. Talking with folks over the past few days, I heard of disappointment and bewilderment, and there’s been considerable numbness and worry, but not much rage. So perhaps we can be receptive to the nameless widow from the other side and her gifts.

Elijah the Tishbite, the man of God, is introduced in the first book of Kings, chapter 17. He steps on the scene during the reign of King Ahab of Samaria, a king infamous for exploring other options than the Lord God as divine guarantors of the land’s fertility and hence the king’s power. Ahab had married a Sidonian princess, Jezebel, and in the book of Kings she is blamed for the fact that Ahab abandoned the worship of the Lord God of Israel and instead erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal which he built in Samaria. We’re presented with a mighty clash of theopolitical systems: Who gives life to people, Baal or the Lord?

Elijah stepped on the scene and told Ahab, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” And that was the beginning of the long drought. After a while, the Lord told Elijah, “Go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon (you know, Jezebel’s home town) and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” When Elijah came to the gate of the town, he saw her. She and her son were one meal away from starvation, and she was gathering some wood so she could prepare their last supper. She also saw him, the stranger who asked her for a drink and something to eat. She gave him a drink of water and she told him times were hard, recalling for him how little meal was left in the jar, and how little oil in the jug. And the stranger said to her, “Do not be afraid. Make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son.”

Why say, Do not be afraid? Why would she be afraid? Ashamed perhaps for not being able to show proper hospitality to the stranger. Or heart-broken, knowing that there would be no more food the next day for her child, or the stranger, or herself. “Do not be afraid,” said the stranger. “I have a word from the Lord God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”

“Do not be afraid to trust the promise of the Lord God,” is what he was saying, inviting her — the Sidonian widow who had so little food left, and yet she had more than he did — inviting her to trust and share. And she did. She went and prepared three little cakes — and for as long as the drought continued in Israel, the story goes, the jar of meal in this widow’s household was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail.

We can hear this story as a colorful affirmation of the Lord God of Israel as the true life-giver, a story told with great delight in the villages of Israel while Ahab and Jezebel in the capital were pushing hard to remake the realm with Baal as the source of their power. We can hear this story as the first round in the clash between the prophet and the king, and the prophet didn’t just win, he scored a major victory on the opposing team’s home field in Sidon. What easily gets lost, though, in this triumphant take on the story, is the unnamed foreign widow who showed hospitality to the stranger from Israel, and whose trust in the promise of the Lord God unlocked blessings beyond anything our drought stricken minds can imagine.

I’m not starving for lack of food, there’s plenty for most of us in this country, thank God. I hunger for understanding, I thirst for truth and a renewed sense of community, and what I’m craving more than anything is the spark of courage the widow of Zarephath showed — whether she struck that spark herself or whether it simply came to her in the encounter. She’s the one who unlocked blessing for the stranger and her child and every guest who would come knocking on her door during the drought years. She’s the one who inspires me to trust the promise of God.

Now Jesus draws our attention to the other widow. We don’t know her name either. Had they had an annual temple report listing the names of major donors, hers wouldn’t have been in it.

“Beware of the scribes,” Jesus taught the crowd. He didn’t mean the scribes in general, but the ones who liked to walk around in long robes. The ones who liked to be seen, strutting around like peacocks spreading their tails, craving attention and seats of honor. The ones who never tired of reciting long, elaborate prayers so all would see and hear and recognize them — the ones who, famous for their piety, were nevertheless capable of devouring widows’ homes and livelihoods.

Ostentatious piety was one thing, but exploiting widows was a serious charge. Scribes enjoyed great respect as teachers of the Torah, and caring for widows, orphans, and strangers was known to be a central concern of God’s commandments. The law was clear:

You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge.[2]

The prophets were equally clear, and the Psalms also reflected that sacred commitment to caring for the most vulnerable people by declaring,

The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.[3]

Jesus was teaching in the temple, at the heart of an institution established to the glory of God and for the flourishing of God’s people, but one that was used and abused for the worst of very human ends: vanity, self-promotion, and exploitation.

Jesus sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. Nobody was paying attention to the poor widow who put in two small copper coins. Compared to the gifts of the rich, is was like nothing, like a penny in the parking lot nobody bothers to even pick up. To her, it was everything.

Nobody was paying attention to her, but Jesus points her out to us. He notices her because his eyes, as Debie Thomas put it, “are ever on the small, the insignificant, the hidden.”[4] Jesus wants us to see what he sees, be attentive to what he notices.

“Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

So much attention for those who gave much, so little for her who gave everything. Everything. Are we supposed to cheer or weep? Jesus doesn’t applaud or commend her, nor does he tell us to go and do likewise. All he does is describe the scene. And there’s no hint in the text to let us know if he speaks with joy in his voice about this woman’s act of complete devotion to God, or if he speaks with anger because he is witnessing how a corrupt institution that is supposed to glorify the God who upholds the orphan and the widow, takes a poor widow’s last coin like some shameless TV preacher.

The day after Jesus and the disciples had come to Jerusalem, he entered the temple and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the stalls of those who sold doves. For a moment, he practically shut down the entire temple operation. “Is it not written,” he shouted, quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah“‘my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”[5]

When the poor widow left the temple, Jesus left it as well. One of the disciples, awed by the magnificent architecture, pointed out some of the details, inviting Jesus to admire them with him. Jesus’ response was quick and short: “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”[6] He had just watched a poor woman give her all to an indefensible institution, one whose leaders refused to honor God by protecting the poor. No edifice steeped in such injustice will stand.[7]

Tossing her last coin into the temple treasury that day may not have been an act of devotion at all, but of judgment. An act of prophetic judgment against leaders who would take her last coin, but not see her, not recognize her dignity as a member of God’s household.

So much is uncertain as we try to imagine the months and years ahead. But trusting the promise of God, and letting ourselves be made into God’s dwelling place on earth together, we can assure each other that numbness will again give way to loving attention and sparks of courage, and no structure steeped in injustice will stand.

[1] Luke 4:25-28

[2] See Exodus 22:22 and Deuteronomy 24:17

[3] Psalm 146:9

[4] Debie Thomas https://www.journeywithjesus.net/theeighthday/446-the-widowed-prophet

[5] Mark 11:15-17

[6] Mark 13:1-2

[7] Debie Thomas, see note 4.