Change for Good

Jesus Teaches on the Plain - Luke 6:1-49

Infant receiving Meningitis vaccine. Photo compliments of Center for Infectious Disease Research.

Positive strokes

“Accentuate the positive, and minimize the negative,” declared Coach Bob Faulkner every time I grew impatient with my progress.

At thirty-five and no longer an agile kid, I was trying to improve my tennis rating from a 4.5 to 5.0. A player rated a 4.5 in the National Tennis Rating Program is a dependable player, both in singles and doubles, but he lacks patience to maintain long rallies and eventually prevail. A 5.0 player, on the other hand, not only has developed patience and discipline, he also “can disguise his weaknesses by playing to his strengths.” I was stuck at a 4.5 level, still too reckless to stay in long points and lacking confidence due to the weaker parts of my game. That is a polite way of saying I was a “head case.”

Bob Faulkner liked the zeal I brought to competition and volunteered to take me on. In the ensuing months, I imagine that he regretted the offer more than once. My personal frustration over what I was not doing well was overshadowing the strong traits I had developed, off and on, during the previous twenty-five years. Nine years before after I mustered out of the army, I won the number six singles slot on my college team — even though I was older than the coach. The feat even surprised me since I had not picked up a racket once during my years of active duty.

The confidence I had in college had evaporated by the time I landed in Tyler, TX to serve my first call as a clergyman. I joined a competitive tennis league ostensibly to recreate and let off some steam. Instead, I dashed around the court in increasing bouts of frustration and fury. Coach Faulkner had seen quite enough of a grown man, supposedly a religious leader at that, stomping on and off the tennis court like some peevish adolescent. He insisted I attend his 7 AM Saturday clinics, and that’s where I first heard his maxim and started putting it into practice: “Accentuate the positive and minimize the negative.” For me that meant leaning into my topspin forehand, first serves, and volley (net) play and worrying less about my mediocre backhand and second serve. In other words, I should increase my percentage of first serves and get to the net, and on the receiving end, return most serves with my forehand.

That’s quite enough about my adult fantasy of becoming a competitive tennis player — especially since I never made the leap to 5.0. But Bob Faulkner’s dictum is good to remember, especially during this seemingly endless volley of bad news in our nation. Making a diet of negative news can leave us continually frustrated and and stomping about in childish piques of fury — hardly the portrait of a steadfast Christian. At the same time, if we become inured to the bad news, we quit looking for the good news.

Missing the good news for the bad

A world-changing case in point of missing the good news amidst the bad is Bill Gates’s May 8 announcement that he plans to give away 99% of his $108 billion dollar fortune during the next twenty years. Gates’s announcement was all but obscured by Trump’s promise that “earth-shattering news would be forthcoming from his upcoming trip to the Middle East.” Who knew the news would be about an ill-advised gift of a Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner from Qatar and plans that Trump and his sons were given the green light and funding to build a string of resorts and golf courses in Dubai, UAE; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Doha, Qatar; and Muscat, Oman.

Lost amongst the supposed “earth-shattering” was the fact that the Gates Foundation has already given away $100 billion to global causes. In particular Gates and his attendant foundation have focused most of their support to fight diseases like polio, malaria, and measles, reducing child and maternal mortality, and alleviating global poverty. The Gates Foundation has immunized 760 million children, preventing 13 million deaths. Since 1990, due to efforts by Gates, USAID, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations, the overall mortality rate for children under five worldwide has been cut in half. Gates realizes much work is still to be done because 13,100 children under five continue to die every day and most from preventable causes. Thirty-five years before the daily death toll was 26,200.

However, with the United States stepping back in its overall support of these critical areas, Gates senses an urgency to direct his fortune to change the world for good. The Impact Metrics Dashboard maintains a record of the deaths caused by slashing 80% of the grants previously awarded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The loss of funding is killing on average 103 people an hour, most of them children. Impact Metrics Dashboard The total deaths since the USAID cuts stand at about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeler Dr. Brooke Nichols. At the same time, Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because America’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut the funding for medications for HIV-positive mothers.DOGE - NY Times Considering USAID made up less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget, the cuts appear nothing short of barbaric — especially when considering the present administration’s Big Beautiful Bill spending extravaganza will leave the nation $2,600,000,000,000 deeper in debt and will not save a single child from death or a dead-end life.

Gates also has been moved to increase the pace of his giving because, as he says, “Microsoft is turning 50 years-old and I am turning 70.” Above all however, Gates was inspired by a 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth, which makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society. Carnegie’s most poignant line in the essay reads, “The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.” Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant, gave his wealth to establish local libraries, American universities, and entities dedicated to research, education, and international peace. He also donated to churches and supported organizations like the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The corporation continues to carry on Andrew Carnegie’s legacy of philanthropy in four areas: education, democracy, international peace and security, and higher education and research in Africa.

Rather that celebrate Bill Gates’s unconstrained generosity, conspiracy theorists have hounded him. The favorite theory is that Gates is on a mission to wipe out the human species through forced injection with fertility-blocking, mind-controlling, or otherwise poisonous substances and ‘microchips’ disguised as COVID-19 vaccines. Some even believe the COVID-19 pandemic was deliberately engineered by Gates and other ‘global elites’, including the United Nations, to depopulate the world. Apparently, the Bible rings true yet again, ‘The light shines in the darkness, yet the darkness cannot overcome it’…but it sure doesn’t keep the darkness from trying! (John 1:5). Yet evil withers in the bright light of selfless generosity.

Photo compliments of Chayene Rafaela.

Scarcity or abundance?

Jesus, for his part, describes generosity as an unstoppable force. He voices this contention in the middle of his Sermon on the Plain, which serves as the acme of Luke 6: ‘Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back’ (6:38). Jesus employs an arresting image of a merchant measuring out grain to a customer in a 1st century marketplace. The customer receives far more grain in the transaction than she expected, such that cereal grains are spilling out of the measuring container and streaming onto her lap and clothes. Jesus paints this picture for the crowd surrounding him to describe the life God has in store for those who emulate His openhanded magnanimity, a life overflowing with immeasurable meaning and grace.

Jesus’ Sabbath blue laws - Luke 6:1-11

As a counterpoint, Chapter 6 opens with Jesus wrangling with those who represent God as doling out skimpy grace. Sabbath law is religious authorities’ stated point of contention with Jesus, but the core disagreement is whether we have a God of scarcity or abundance. First, Jesus is criticized for allowing his disciples to casually pluck heads of grain and eat the kernels on the Sabbath day. The religious authorities equate the disciples’ laissez-faire action equal to threshing the wheat on a workday. Jesus quickly defends the twelve by citing an example from David’s life (1 Samuel 21:1-7). Jesus then lowers the boom on his critics by abruptly asserting, ‘The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath…not you’ (6:1-5).

Jesus wrangles with the authorities a second time when he heals a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. This incident turns up the heat on the argument, as Jesus prepares to brazenly heal the man during synagogue worship. Not giving the Pharisees and teachers of the law a chance to chime in, Jesus commands the injured man to stand in front of the congregation. Jesus then addresses the assembled worshippers, ‘I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or do evil, to save a life or destroy it?’ Following his query, Jesus heals the man in full sight of everyone, which ignites fury amongst the authorities and their desire to eventually exact revenge on Jesus (6:6-11).

God’s injunction to do no work on the Sabbath does not first occur with the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:8-11, but somewhat earlier in Exodus 16:23-29, where Moses, following God’s guidance, instructs the newly freed Israelites how to gather God’s daily gift of manna. He tells them to only collect enough for “their daily bread” — no more. The exception would be Fridays, when they were to collect enough for two days, so that they did not have to “work” on the Sabbath. Those who ignored Moses’ instruction, collecting more than they needed on a given day, discovered the extra amount of manna they had hoarded rotten and rife with worms. Notice that the emphasis here is not work; it is gluttony.

The two brief confrontations concerning the Sabbath that Jesus has with the religious authorities reflects the manna story from Exodus in three ways. First, Jesus insists that he is ‘Lord of the Sabbath.’ His gracious actions are a mirror of God’s grace. The Sabbath is set aside for human beings, not as a straight jacket, but as an avenue to trust in the loving grace and provision of God as seen in the person of Jesus Christ. Seen this way, Jesus is truly ‘the bread of life’ (John 6:35). Second, Jesus specifically identifies himself as the Son of Man, the one who both announces and inaugurates God’s Kingdom — as illustrated in Daniel 7:13. When the Son of Man fully establishes God’s Kingdom on earth, all of our days will be Sabbaths. As John of the Revelation foresaw, heaven and earth are united on the last great day: ‘God will make his home with us. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away’ (Revelation 21:3-4). Looking at the Sabbath in that way, lets us know that we can spend our entire lives in the anteroom of eternity. Third, our Sabbath “work” is to trust in God’s abundance and to not fall back into fear of scarcity. Fear of not having enough or fear of others having more than us or fear of those taking what we feel is rightfully ours — degrades us into gluttons and makes us rotten to the core — like hoarded worm-ridden manna.

Christ heals the man with paralysed hand. Byzantine mosaic in the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily, Italy

Making the list - Luke 6:12-16

After wrangling with his vicious detractors over the Sabbath, Jesus escapes up the mountain to pray throughout the night. When he returns, Jesus calls his disciples to him and singles out twelve of them as apostles. The twelve apostles are specifically listed in all three synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Synoptic is taken from the Greek synoptikos, which means “seeking together or having a common view.” The lists of apostles appears in Matthew 10:1-4; Mark 3:13-19; and Luke 6:12-16, but there is a problem…the names on the lists do not completely agree. Scholars offer a variety of explanations for these variations. One explanation is that the authors have different audiences — be them Jew or gentile. For example, Levi is the apostle’s Hebrew name and Matthew his name in Greek circles. Other scholars refer to the use of nicknames, such as Nathanael being called Bartholomew, which in Hebrew means “son of (bar) Tholmai.” Most scholars believe that Thaddeus and Judas, son of James are the same person, but Thaddeus is occasionally used in the New Testament to distinguish him from Judas Iscariot, the betrayer.

All three of these explanations have merit. Michael Patella, professor at St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, MN, adds another valuable perspective. He notes that the early church put a great deal of stress on an apostle’s influence when gauging whether a particular faith community was orthodox (Gk. “right belief”) — that is having a correct understanding of the Christian gospel or whether a piece of writing should be considered canonical (Gk. “rod or rule) — that it meets the test of being included in the New Testament. Patella considers these two tests and adds: “Another suggestion for the variety of names is that each Gospel writer is recalling representative figures peculiar to the community for which he is writing. These figures may have known or worked with one of more of what came to be called ‘the Twelve.’” (Patella, 44).

Patella’s theory adds dynamism to our understanding of the apostles. Rather than idolize the Twelve, they become “representative figures to particular communities” who were developing the critical foundations of the infant Christian church. Recalling that apostle is taken from the Greek apóstolos, which means “messenger or one sent forth as an emissary from a king” we realize that apostleship is not some historically frozen category, but Christ’s active calling forth of individuals in every place and generation. Above all, apostles, whenever and wherever they are summoned, re-present Christ who entrusts them with his message of immeasurable grace.

Plain talk Luke - 6:17-26

Luke does a 180° reversal from Matthew. In Matthew’s Gospel account, Jesus draws the people up the mountain to preach to them as a latter day Moses, whereas in Luke, Jesus comes down the mountain and “levels” with them on the plain. Jesus’ marquee sermon in Luke is far shorter and much earthier than Matthew’s version, as well. Case in point, like Matthew, Luke’s Jesus begins with the Beatitudes (Lat. “blessings), but Luke’s edition is more personal, as Jesus uses the second person rather than the more distant third. Also, he does not spiritualize his roll call of blessings. Luke’s Jesus does not say ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ but rather ‘Blessed are you who are poor’ (Matthew 5:9; Luke 6:20). Nor does he say in Luke, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,’ but rather, ‘Blessed are you who hunger now’ (Matthew 5:6; Luke 6:21). In Luke, Jesus speaks graphically about the human condition — many people are poor, many hungry, and because they are clinging to Jesus as their only hope, they are often hated (Luke 6:22). I get the impression that Luke would detest our modern semantic labeling of those in need as underserved, food insecure, and un-housed. Using such anodyne terms allows us to distance them from us, dismiss their needs, and become increasingly in-humane.

What’s Love got to do with it? - Luke 6:27-36

After detailing those who are blessed by God, Jesus exhorts the crowd to love as God loves, judge as He judges, and thereby become fruitful human beings. Regarding the first, how we are to love, Jesus declares the grace they have received from God should be extended to others — even as far as extending their love to enemies. Paul concisely describes the grace he experienced from God when he was Christ’s avowed enemy: ‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8). God does not wait to love us until we become his “friends” or conform to his exacting specifications. Yet in our fallenness, we continue to love others that way, even after Christ has reached out and saved us. Jesus spells out our hypocrisy in his sermon, ‘If you love those who love you, what’s the big deal, even detestable malefactors love those who love them?’

Logjam - Luke 6:37-42

Jesus next answers the question that has arisen in the minds of all those in the crowd: “How do we start to love those who do not love us, who may even despise us?” Jesus answers, ‘Don’t stand back from others sizing them up, but open your heart to them in forgiveness rather than closing your heart in condemnation.’ Jesus reaches the climax of his sermon here. The antidote to hate is give unstintingly to those you previously judged unworthy. Jesus’ dinner parties come to mind here. He intentionally shares his table with those who live grossly contrary to the Father’s will. Shaming does not lead to conversion; loving does.

Stark personal honesty is the means by which each of us reverses course from judging to loving. ‘See the log that has long been obscuring your vision.’ The log impairing our sight keeps us from seeing others in the way God sees them. Such blindness leads us to detestable thoughts and heinous actions. Consider the descriptions of immigrants modern Americans are freely repeating. “Animals, subhuman, rapists, murderers, gangbangers, and even cat-eaters,” we call them as if we were attending a 1933 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally with Adolph Hitler.

Fruity people - Luke 6:43-45

Once we finally wrench the log out of our eyes, we will quit our insider’s games, superiority fantasies, and take account of how we are actually living. Jesus told those in the crowd, ‘You know a tree by its fruit. You can’t make fig jam from a thorn bush. You can’t produce wine from poison ivy.’ Religious belief that does not result in generous living is a farce. It’s a farce because if we really put our trust in Jesus Christ and his sacrificial witness to the world, we will not be able to stop ourselves from imitating his generosity. I am reminded of the anonymous Christian sage who declared, “When a person is saved, his relationship with his stuff changes.”

Building a life - Luke 6:46-49

Imitating Jesus is the goal of the Christian life, so much so that at the end of his Sermon on the Plain, Jesus rails, ‘Why do you call me your Lord and Savior, but do not do what I say?’ He continues that we must dig deeply, get entirely honest, and make Jesus the incontestable foundation of our life. If we do, no storm will topple our unwavering integrity, deep-seated peace, and rock-solid faith.

Pardon me…but no.

That’s not to say any of this will be easy. Take 72-year-old Pamela Hemphill of Idaho. Recently, she asked that her pardon for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 be revoked. Contacting her Republican senator, Sen. James Risch, she asked him to formally inform the Department of Justice that she does not accept her pardon. Senator Risch subsequently did so, which makes Hemphill the only rioter of the convicted 1,500 to come clean. Speaking to CBS News on June 1, Hemphill explained, “The pardons just contribute to their narrative, which is all lies, propaganda. We were guilty, period." She continued, "We all know that they're gaslighting (mentally manipulating) us. They are using January 6 to just continue Trump's narrative that the Justice Department was weaponized," she said. "They were not. When the FBI came to my home, oh my God, they were very professional. They treated me very good."

Hemphill spent sixty days in prison, and that is where she was able to contemplate her actions, get honest with herself, and acknowledge how her family and friends captured her thinking in dark and destructive ways. As a matter of fact, she posted on social media before she left on January 1, 2021, “It’s a WAR. On my way to Washington DC January 6.” While in prison, she began to realize that she had been wantonly brainwashed.

"I'm not going to be bullied by MAGA anymore," she recently wrote on social media. Despite these challenges, Hemphill remains committed to honesty about what happened on January 6th, describing it as "the worst day in our history." However, once Hemphill repented publicly of her part in the January 6 assault of the capitol, the death threats began to roll in. She’s not at all surprised that people have gone so far as to phone her probation officer to implicate her in crimes. The darkness never tires of trying to smother the light. Pamela Hemphill - CBS News

Christians should not be surprised either. Recall that when Jesus was raised from the dead, the religious authorities paid the soldiers guarding Jesus’ tomb to claim that the disciples slipped in and stole Jesus’ body while they were asleep (Matthew 28:12-15). Their dark conspiracy fell to earth with a thud. These modern purveyors of negativity are doomed to fail. Better to “accentuate the positive,” I say.

Sources

Goldberg, Michelle, “Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death,” New York Times, May 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/elon-musk-doge-usaid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Impact Metrics Dashboard, https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc

MacFarlane, Scott, “Former Trump supporter Pamela Hemphill refuses and returns her Jan. 6 pardon,” CBS News, June 1, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pamela-hemphill-trump-supporter-refuses-jan-6-pardon/#

Patella, Michael F., The Gospel According to Luke, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005.