On the Prophecy of Interdependence
July 5, 2026
Rev. Traceymay Kalvaitis
Zechariah 9: 9-12
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.
Matthew 11: 16-21, 25-30
[Jesus said,] “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” Then he began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.
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Today’s sermon is titled On the Prophecy of Interdependence.
Friends, I invite you into a true story of the evolution of a modern prophet. Like all prophets, this rather unlikely one brought to our world an imperative call to repent or perish. Like all prophets, including the ones in our scripture readings for today (Zechariah, Jesus and John) this modern prophet was harassed and persecuted because the call to change was seen as a threat to some of those in positions of power. Like all prophets, the message shared called all who would listen to acknowledge the interdependence of all beings. Unlike most prophets, this one was a girl.
Picture an eleven year old girl. She is curious and caring, she loves her school and looks forward to going each day to see her friends. On one day in particular, her science teacher shows a film about the effects of plastic in the environment. For the first time, the girl learns about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that was then the size of Texas. The girl suddenly began to barely eat and barely speak. What she had seen distressed her to such an extent that, as her mother describes, “She disappeared into some kind of darkness and appeared to stop functioning.”* Medical and mental health intervention helped to stabilize her, but what seemed to cure her was a realization that she could do some small thing to express her despair. In August of 2018, instead of going back to school with her classmates, our modern prophet sat outside of the parliament building holding a sign that said, “School Strike for Climate.” Greta Thunberg had no idea that she would jumpstart a global initiative to address the effects of a warming world and what we can do to address it before it is too late. It is a classic prophetic message: change or perish. It is a classic prophetic message of interdependency. And the reaction was also classic. Greta Thunberg, on multiple occasions, receives excrement sent through the mail. Her family, including her younger sister, younger by two years, have all been relentlessly harassed, and Greta still receives death threats.
There is that saying, “Don’t kill the messenger” that is older than one might think; it stems from the 5th century B.C. playwright named Sophocles. Ancient warfare used messengers to deliver terms of surrender and if one side thought the terms unacceptable, they were likely to send the corpse of the messenger back as an indisputable reply. Such is the cost of delivering a message no one wants to hear.
Jesus knew all about this. Several times he narrowly escapes being stoned to death or driven off a cliff by those he angered. To say the crowd was “unreceptive” would be an understatement. But isn’t that what we do all the time? When someone tells us something we don’t want to hear, when someone contradicts us, or when someone does something that challenges us or unsettles us, especially if it is something that challenges us to change. Psychologists have recently studied the human tendency to deny the validity of even scientifically proven data when the data conflicts with existing beliefs.
Researchers at Duke University concluded “people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically desirable. If they don’t, then they tend to deny the problem even exists.”** The name for this is solution aversion. If the solution is unpalatable, then our tendency is to diminish the problem and, if we are really threatened, we will deny the science. Researchers found this happens across the political divide, right, left, and center.
Prophets, today and down through the ages, have been repeatedly silenced because of what we now know as “solution aversion.” We heard from the prophet Zechariah this morning. This particular prophecy was one of hope and full of promises of freedom and restoration for the Jewish people who had just returned from exile and had begun to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. These words of the prophet Zechariah, foretelling of a new king that would “command peace to all the nations,” would have been encouraging for the people on the bottom, but threatening to the current king on top. The current king could not tolerate this prophesying; it was threatening his authority. He ordered the prophet Zechariah to be stoned to death right there in the temple courtyard.
I wonder if Jesus expected that he, too, would be silenced. Perhaps that is why he is so passionate in the scriptures today. Jesus was raised with stories of the many prophets who had come before, to call the hearts of the Hebrew people to worship one God, Yahweh, instead of the many gods of other cultures, cultures who, time and again, overpowered and displaced the Hebrew people. Jesus knew that nearly all prophets were eventually killed. People did not want to hear what they had to say because the prophets were calling for them to change their ways. Prophets were difficult to ignore. Prophets did not publish their opinions, they preached them, sometimes loudly, at the city gates, in the market, and at the temple.
Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist, was a prophet who preached in the wilderness and preached in the most radical fashion, accusing, insulting, and berating, the scriptures say. He made his own clothes of camel hair and leather, he subsisted on locusts and honey. At the time that Jesus speaks from our scriptures today, John is in prison and Jesus is deep into his ministry already. Over and over again Jesus has healed the sick, cured the lepers, the crippled, and the blind, yet he is clearly frustrated that these miraculous works are not turning the minds and hearts of the people. Jesus accuses his generation of being like complaining children, quick to find reasons to discredit John and Jesus, John because he ate and drank too little and Jesus because he ate and drank too much. Jesus laments, saying, “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
Jesus then redirects the people’s attention back to all the acts of healing he has offered with the following statement: “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” In other words, Jesus’s deeds, his actions, and his sharing of God’s healing power, not just to those who society deems as “deserving” but to all who are in need; these deeds speak for themselves. These deeds should be convincing enough but the people are so resistant to change.
We, too, are resistant to change. When we are called out of our comfortable complacency we do not like it, not one bit. When our habits, traditions and belief systems are challenged we tend to lash out and try to find any way possible to discredit those who are calling us to change. Zechariah, Jesus, and nearly all of the other prophets whose messages are recorded in our scriptures, were put to death for speaking truth to power. There were many who tried to silence Greta Thunberg through criticism and intimidation, including big oil companies and prominent political figures. She continues to deliver a message of interdependence, calling us to not avoid the difficulty and inconvenience of obvious solutions, solutions like funding research in alternative energy sources, changing the harmful practices of modern mass-agriculture, and (something all of us can do) switching to more of a plant-based diet.
In closing, I urge us to be aware of the human tendency towards solution avoidance. Jesus warned his community about it two thousand years ago, long before there was a name for it. If we are rooted and grounded in faith and hope and love, as our teacher guides us to be, then we can be flexible enough in our thinking to welcome the messengers and prophets among us and discern truth from untruth. And we can also more deeply understand those who cling to untruths because the truth is perceived as a threat. We still have more than enough in common, Friends, enough to bind us together into one system of interdependence between all people and the planet that sustains us. So be it. Amen.
*https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/on-parenting/before-greta-thunberg-was-a-global-icon-she-was-a-tormented-child-who-refused-to-eat-or-speak/2020/03/16/eea2967a-63a4-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html
**https://today.duke.edu/2014/11/solutionaversion
Note: As the founders knew, in declaring independence from the monarchy, the colonies would need to be interdependent in order to survive. It was in and through this acknowledgement of interdependence that democracy took root and flourished.
Pastoral Prayer
God of our hearts, we come as we are this morning. Your promises of acceptance and love seem, at times, impossibly generous; help us to accept them, Lord, and help us to settle, if only for brief moments, into a place of security and knowing that we are children of a most wondrous God. When we doubt and fear, turn our minds in trust. When we dwell on hardship, turn our minds to giving thanks for our many blessings. And when we struggle to hold weight of the many problems in our world, strengthen us to hold them long enough for our hearts to open a little more, and for our inner vision to focus on a way we can be of service to our brothers and sisters. Remind us, Holy One, that one smile can offer welcome, one hug can offer abundant love, and one prayer can send ripples that have unimaginable effects. This we ask in
Benediction
I leave you with these words from Second Thessalonians, chapter 3: “May the Lord of Peace himself give you everlasting peace in every place.” Amen.