Sunday February 23rd, 2025 Worship

I grew up in the era of VeggieTales videos and let me tell you that the Ballad of Little Joe was one of my favorites! I’m pretty sure we still have the VHS of it at my parents’ house, as the was always one of my sick day movies when I was a kid. For those of you that have never watched it, it’s a country Western retelling of the story of Joseph, his colorful coat, his brothers’ betrayal, and everything else that follows in our young Joseph’s story. The premise of these stories is to answer questions that kids have about faith, with the one in this story specifically being the question many of us ask: why do bad things happen to good people. Although, we’re usually asking it in a different context than being put in a different class than the rest of our friends. As a kid, I never really put too much stock in how these videos tried to answer theological questions, mostly because they were designed to be comedic, even including a little intermission in each called “Silly Songs with Larry,” which is really what we all remember still from those videos. But, as I grew up, and especially thanks to my Seminary days, I was able to better understand the ways that these videos simplify faith, perhaps a little bit too much, especially when we take stories that really aren’t the most digestible for children. I’ve probably told you about how they took the David and Bathsheba story and turned that into a VeggieTales video too…
As an adult, I now have to laugh a little bit when I think about how they really tried to sum up the problem of evil with an answer about how God can make great things out of bad things that happen to us. Yet, I can’t really blame them either because I think it is human nature to look for the silver lining, to want to find some explanation for why we suffer. Because it feels very unsatisfying if there isn’t a reason. But if we don’t have a great answer as adults when we ask this question, think about how much more challenging it is to provide a satisfying answer for a child; an answer that will hold up to all their faith exploration and difficulties later in life. Especially in the context of faith, the answer, for children or adults, often then gets translated into God’s will or God’s plan language, as we see in the reading from Genesis today. At times, this can be a great comfort to us, but at other times it makes God seem vengeful, or like God desires for and requires us to suffer in order to teach us lessons.
When we read Joseph’s story in Genesis today, we hear him talk about how his brothers can forgive themselves because this was God’s plan so that people could survive the famine (Genesis 45: 5-9). It all feels well and good, but I also want to scream a little bit about how his brothers literally sold him into slavery thinking that it would kill him. They were so ready to get rid of their brother that they didn’t care what happened to him, as long as he was not in their lives anymore. This isn’t a little sibling argument about who gets to have the last cookie, this is literally his life that they were throwing away. So, I think it’s okay to want to push back on the VeggieTales, everything happens for a reason, interpretation of this story a little bit. This goes back to our talk of theodicy several weeks ago, when I mentioned that things like “Everything happens for a reason,” “Heaven needed another angel,” or “that’s just God’s plan” really only manage to frustrate us rather than comfort us, especially in the midst of tragedy and grief.
Yet, all of this becomes even more complicated when you add in the Gospel reading for today when Jesus talks about loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, praying for those who abuse you, letting people have what they take away from you (Luke 6: 27-30). I have always resisted this Gospel reading because I feel like it often gets turned back on the people who are marginalized and already hurt by the systems. It always felt like good news to the powerful, not good news to the poor and the oppressed. It feels like an ordaining of all the terrible things that happen in our world, like Jesus is saying don’t resist, just let these things happen. My views on this have been changing, as of late.
One of the things that helped was deciding to take a dive into the dictionary definition of mercy, since mercy and forgiveness seem to be the two themes at the heart of these readings today. According to Merriam Webster, mercy means: “compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power.” When thought about this way, I hear how this reading isn’t just asking us to be used and abused by others, but it is also asking those in power to use that power well. We will all have times when we can lord our power over others or we can use it to help them and the community because every person has power, even if it doesn’t always feel like that. Yes, I’ll add the caveat that I know society affords us different levels of power based on many factors. But, this Gospel reading is a call to think about how our actions impact one another. And, I also think that Jesus’ teachings is at least a little bit related to this sense of God’s will being done on earth, because if people are fed, sheltered, clothed, and treated with dignity and respect, we can envision a day where there isn’t violence, use, and abuse of other humans for the benefit of those in power. It isn’t just asking for radical love from the disciples, but a radical new way for all people to interact with the world around them. I should have known that Jesus was up to something more than what it appears on the surface!
But, I also think about how acting in these ways involves choosing to act in defiance of everything we’ve been taught about how to respond to what is happening around us. We are taught to respond with violence or revenge, we are taught to harbor hatred and to continue enforcing the false divisions between us. What Jesus is telling the disciples today isn’t that they need to put themselves in a position to be taken advantage of, but that they should place themselves in a posture that cares for the world around them. This means standing up to the people who are misusing their power to cause harm to others too. This care doesn’t mean that we have to remain silent or that we can’t have empathy for other people, especially when we think about why they might feel the need to take food or clothes. But, it means that we don’t just retaliate with violence and add more hatred to the world.
We often forget that this reading comes directly after the Blessings and Woes passage from last week. When we think about how last week’s readings encourage us to put our trust in God instead of in mortal rulers, that is reinforced in this week’s readings too. As humans, we will make mistakes. We will cause harm, intentionally and unintentionally. We will change our minds. We might be quick to anger and slow to forgive. And we have a tendency, especially in the United States, to only want to look out for ourselves and those we care about. But, at the heart of these readings today, we are again being reminded that God’s love is for the whole world. That when the world tells us to hate this group or that group, God tells us we are to love them and learn from them. Jesus is trying to break down the false divisions created by the us vs. them mentality of the world. After all, when he talks about enemies, he is talking about it in the context of not just people who caused harm to you, but also the social classification of “enemies” because someone looked different, thought differently, or embodied the world differently than you.
Like most of the things that Jesus teaches about, this isn’t a particularly easy task, especially when the divisions of our current world are about topics way more important than liking or disliking coffee or what toppings do or don’t belong on pizza. And, it might mean unpacking some or all of what we have been taught. It’s a challenge for us because, while Jesus doesn’t say we have to like everyone, Jesus does say we have to love them. He’s not talking about how we have to be best friends with them, but when we love people as God loves them, it means that even in their flaws and failings, they are still seen as someone worthy of love and dignity. And, I’ll remind us again that loving someone doesn’t mean that we condone every one of their actions. It doesn’t mean that we dismiss the harm that they or others have done to the world either, or that we put ourselves in the position of continued harm. But, at the heart of what Jesus is doing again today, he is calling us away from the easy ways of hatred, into the more challenging, but also more rewarding ways of love. This isn’t for our sake or even the other person’s sake, but for the sake of the whole and the vision of flourishing life to come. Because it is really easy to hate, but it is a lot harder to love the world that we would risk standing up and showing up for it, no matter what.