Sunday February 1st, 2026 Worship

For better or worse, whenever I hear the Beatitudes today, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I think about the time 25 of my Seminary peers and I commandeered our bus, at the suggestion of our tour guide, to leave the Mount and go down to the city of Tiberias for a little bit one evening. While some members of our group were tired and wanted to stay back and rest before dinner, the remaining folks and I wanted to go experience more of the region. We all got on the bus, made sure we had a count to ensure everyone got back on to go to our lodging for the evening after, and messaged our professor only after we were almost to Tiberias and conveniently couldn’t turn back around easily. Maybe I’m just trying to justify our adventure, but it feels fitting in many ways that we ventured out to be amongst the people a bit more because that is ultimately what Jesus does too. His ministry doesn’t end with his Sermon on the Mount.
While he gathers the disciples around him today to give this teaching, he is really instructing the disciples about what it means to be in relationship with God for when they are sent back out into the world, when they have to leave this Mount. He knows that he is not always going to be with them, and that there is going to be much resistance to their teachings and actions, yet he wants it to be clear that God is working in and through the people and events that are least expected. It’s like what Paul is talking about today when he talks about how the message of the cross appears to be foolish to those that don’t understand what God was doing by flipping the ideas of power and wisdom upside down (1 Corinthians 1: 18-31). For a people expecting and hoping for salvation, watching their Messiah be crucified was not what they had in mind for how this salvation would come about.
I also love the Micah reading because it shows how, throughout the arc of Scripture, what God expects of those who are in relationship with God is different than what society has said was needed. Inside of needing sacrifices to appease God’s perceived bloodthirstiness or burnt offering so that God could partake in the meal, or even loud gonging praise to make sure that God could hear it because that was thought to be the only way to get God’s attention, we are given a different directive. “The Lord has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God?” (Micah 6: 8). What God asks of us is faith active in love instead of a flashy show of righteousness that does nothing to demonstrate faithfulness to God, but instead leans into what society is looking for as a demonstration of our faith. This response of faith that God asks of us is not passive, receiving God’s blessings and not caring about what is happening around us, but instead urges us to leave the comfort of an isolated existence to walk alongside one another. This is a faith that takes on a cruciform shape, with relationship to God and also an outward relationship to the world around us; this example of faith extends us outward in love as a response to what God has already done for us.
This call to faith is the undercurrent of Jesus’ entire message today. Jesus is emphasizing that being liked and being faithful are not the same thing; “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5: 11-12). Just as the message of the cross seemed foolish to people too, Jesus’ message to the disciples today is reminding us that we are called to move forward, grounded in what God has already done. This faith active in love is bound to ruffle some feathers as we continue to return to an emphasis on community instead of isolation and individualism; faith isn’t just about how God has saved me, but about how God loves the whole world. We are called to trust and live into that message.
These blessings seem like they would be impossible on their own, but this is where the relational nature of our faith comes in. To understand these blessings today, it requires that we break away from our idea of blessings being only about health and wealth. Instead, we can see that when we mourn, we gather together so that we are not left alone in our grief. When we care for one another, show mercy and kindness, we are sharing the grace that we have ourselves received from God. When we exist in community, with and for one another, we are moving closer to the vision of God’s kindom. These blessings require that we engage in the world, instead of just waiting for God to drop blessings into our laps.
When we move the world towards the reign of God’s peace and justice, the world is going to have to change. The ways of our world cannot exist within this structure, which is part of why I have seen so many comments this week, regarding all the protests, focusing specifically on what it means to be a peacemaker. As many theologians have reminded us this week, in the Beatitudes today, we are called to be peacemakers, not peacekeepers (Matthew 5:9). What is meant by this is grounded in the Micah reading about what the Lord requires of us. When we are peacemakers, it is grounded in God’s sense of peace, actively pursuing justice and kindness. When we are peacekeepers, we are operating within a worldly sense of “peace,” in which there is simply an absence of conflict, even when systems exist that are causing harm to God’s beloved children. Just as we have to shift our understanding of what it means to be blessed, and God is flipping what it means to be powerful and wise, we are asked to really think about what it means for God’s sense of peace to flourish in contrast to this worldly understanding of peace.
I know that all of this is heavy, and we still don’t always know what to do. But, no matter how you are going out from this place, I hope you spend some time this week really listening to the ways that you are called into the world, grounded in your sense of who God is and what God is up to in our world. This faith active in love doesn’t mean that we constantly have to be out in the streets, burning ourselves out, but it does ask us to interrogate what the world tells us about what it means to be faithful and what God in Christ is telling us about what it means to be faithful. This isn’t about getting points in heaven or getting social recognition for all that we are doing, but it is about how we show up to love this world. To love one another and to recognize the blessings that God gives us through our communal and relational being, even when that brings with it challenges too. After all, when we hear that we are to “do justice,” “love kindness, “and walk humbly with God,” it is something that we are called to together. They are inherently grounded in our communal nature. So, may we go out into this world together, recognizing that we are stronger together than we can ever be apart. And, may we begin to see the vision God has for the world when we are all able to show up as our beautiful, broken, selves working hand-in-hand for the kindom of God.