Early in my years at seminary, a little over 30 years ago, I read the book Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willamon, who were on the faculty of Duke Divinity School. It continues to be one of the more important books I’ve read—and it is not long or complex. The paragraph that has stuck with me and shaped my understanding of discipleship for 30+ years is the following:
We can only act within that world which we see. So the primary ethical question is not, What ought I now to do? but rather, How does the world really look? The most interesting question about the Sermon [on the Mount] is not, Is this a practical way to live in the world? but rather, Is this really the way the world is? What is “practical” is related to what is real. If the world is a society in which only the strong, the independent, the detached, the liberated, and the successful are blessed, then we act accordingly. However, if the world is really a place where God blesses the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted for righteousness’ sake, then we must act in accordance with reality or else appear bafflingly out of step with the way things are. [p 88]
The competition between these two worldviews has existed for thousands of years. In fact, some creation myths tell the story of violent battles between god-figures, and the world being born out of the outcome of the battle. On the other hand, the biblical creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, though they differ from one another, both tell the story of a loving God creating the world in love, through love, and for love.
We see the competition of these stories in the time of the prophets, we see it in the time of Jesus, and we see it in our own time. On January 5, Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to President Trump said in an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN, “…we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”[1]
The Bible was written in a world where power seemed to be the name of the game, and the great powers like Assyria, and later, Babylon, followed by Persia, Greece, and Rome conquered and occupied smaller countries like Israel, which in the time of Micah was divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Micah seems to have been written over a period of time when first Assyria and then Babylon were invading Israel and Judah, deporting many, and during the Babylonian occupation, destroying the Temple. These were powers that governed by force and fear. Taylor, in his sermon last week, described Assyria’s methods in some detail—if you didn’t get a chance to hear his sermon, do look it up online and listen to it.
The prevailing cultural view at the time was that if God’s people were suffering, it was because they had sinned. So Micah is believing that tragedy of these invasions is a result of the nation not living in a way that pleases God. The passage is in the form of a trial—interesting that even thousands of years ago, long before the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, people are looking to the legal system for help. And after God presents the charges against the nation, the prophet asks how can the people please God? What does God expect of us, the prophet asks? Will sacrifices please God? Even copious sacrifices? Gallons of oil? Thousands of animals sacrificed? Even a child? No, none of that is what God seeks, the answer comes.
Do what I do, says God, love in action – for that is justice; live deep compassion – for that is kindness; and walk humbly with me. What does it mean to walk humbly? It means to walk without the conviction that we are always right, and that our understanding is the only correct understanding—so it means to walk with an open heart and open mind. Walking humbly with God means that we are prayerfully seeking wisdom, listening to others, listening for God.
These practices are profound. Some might call them radical. We’ve seen over the last month that practicing kindness can be dangerous, and can be threatening to those who practice domination through force.
In the time of Jesus, it was widely believed that those who were wealthy and powerful were so because God favored them, had blessed them; and that those who were poor and powerless were so because God had not blessed them, they had not earned God’s favor. And so in the verses from Matthew we read today, known as the Beatitudes, Jesus shares a different understanding of reality.
The first four beatitudes are describing actual conditions that people find themselves in, often because of the excesses of empire. Those conditions that are translated as poor in spirit, mourning, meek, and hungering and thirsting for righteousness in the original Greek all begin with the same letter – we would get more of a sense for how this sounded if we were to say, perhaps, “Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, those who are plaintive, those who are powerless, and those who pine for righteousness.”
To be poor in spirit is not just to be poor, but to be beaten down and discouraged as well – to be in hard circumstances and without hope. But Christianity is a reality-based faith: Jesus is pointing to a real circumstance of blessing. God is blessing the poor in spirit. God is present and working in their lives. They have God’s favor, God’s love. This was a huge statement to make in the ancient world. Jesus is teaching them and us that God’s realm has different values than the socio-political realm of Galilee occupied by Rome, or perhaps the socio-political realm of our modern materialist culture.
The second beatitude is “Blessed are those who mourn” – and this is a reality of life in the presence of injustice. Of course, people will always have reasons to mourn – people die, and those who love them mourn. But in unjust systems, people die who shouldn’t, and grief becomes more prevalent than it ought to be. We know about this. We know that people who live in poverty have shorter life spans. We know that systemic racism impacts health access and creates food deserts. And we know that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed when caring for others. And God knows, too; and God mourns.
The third beatitude is “Blessed are the meek” – Warren Carter in Matthew and the Margins, described meekness as the third state of desperation in the beatitudes. Meekness is not wimpyness, he points out; it’s powerlessness.[2] These are those who are without resources, without access, and in many cultures that would be those without land. It’s the campesinos in Colombia who have been forced off their farms by the paramilitaries and the multinational corporations. It’s the refugees who have been driven from El Salvador by the violence. It’s the homeless in our own country who have reduced access to mental health care, or who are shut out of housing by insurmountable cash barriers of security deposits, first and last month’s rent.
And the fourth beatitude is those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – those who pine for a fairer, better world; those who see the possibilities and seek to make them real; those who can taste justice, and yearn for it, not only for themselves but for those around them.
These, and the rest of the Beatitudes, aren’t telling us exactly what to do, as Micah does; they are giving us a picture of life in God’s love-based Kingdom, a far different reality that the power-based empires we see in the world.
Before he died, Jesus showed us that at the heart of God’s way was not competition but communion; that God’s way isn’t to break each other’s spirits or bodies, but to break bread together as we will shortly. It may not be the way seems to prevail in the world, but it is the way of the deeper energy that created the world—the love-energy of God’s Spirit that still flows through the world and, if we listen deeply, will still tell us who and whose we are.
So the question for us as Christians, as the baptized, as the Body of Christ in ministry with the world God so deeply loves is, how do we respond in this moment, at this time when again there are those who wish to shape the world through force, and power, and cruelty; those who seek to set us against one another: white against black and brown, straight against queer, rich against poor, citizens against immigrants, red states against blue states, Americans against the world? These issues cannot be dismissed by people of faith as “political” issues that should be off-limits for the church. They are moral issues that we must address, as Jesus did. When the Vice President of the United States says, ““It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with; I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers,’”[3] it is important for Christians to point out that this is a completely opposed to what Jesus said about who our neighbors are. And that the people in Minneapolis are being neighborly. Because incarnation isn’t just about what Jesus did a long time ago, but is about how our faith and hope are embodied in our time. Faith isn’t just an idea, and hope isn’t just a wish—just as Jesus embodied God’s love, and just as creation embodies God’s love and hope in the world, so too are we called to make our faith and hope real to ourselves and to the world in our living.
And there are many ways to do this. Some people may be called to organize and to march – I hope so. Some people are called to call those in power to account through writing letters to congressmen, senators, and to the editor in the newspaper. These, too, are important ways to resist the powers of domination. Other people are feeding the hungry, working on housing, caring for creation, sitting with the dying.
But aside from these important ways, there is something simple and yet profound that is within reach of each of us. And that is to work for connection…or to put it in the words Micah used, we can love kindness. A number of things have worked to divide us, and isolate us more over the last couple of decades—COVID and social media have both certainly played a huge part in people being less connected and lonelier than in past years. One thing that we can do is to see people, notice people, and talk to people. There are so many forces that divide us. When we notice people, we bridge the divides.
About 8 years ago, when I was living in Central WI, an area that didn’t have a lot of diversity, and the local university got a new administrator who was black, and a few months after he had arrived, I heard that he had told some people that when he walked down Main Street, no one would meet his eyes. I was horrified. Our church was on Main Street. And starting at that time, I began to make a practice of meeting peoples’ eyes. And I still do it. And I talk with people. I chat with the checker in the grocery store and the person behind me in line. One example from this week—I was shopping and saw a woman who had a really nice haircut, and I said to her, “I like your haircut,” and she said, “Oh it’s not mine—it’s a wig,” and she went on to tell me about her cancer and her fear, and I’ve been praying for her. Now, most of the time when I try to make a little connection, it doesn’t go that deep. This was very unusual. But my noticing her gave her the opportunity to open up.
Jesus noticed people. Jesus saw the people around him. Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God are not vague generalities or airy ideas. We use real water to baptize people, and we share real juice and bread in communion, and loving others also needs to be real. That’s not political, it’s incarnation. It’s kindness. And it’s what we are called by God to do. Amen.
Scripture Readings
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[1] CNN, January 5, 2026 (From “The Lead with Jake Tapper”), https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cg/date/2026-01-05/segment/01
[2] Carter, Warren, Matthew and the Margins: A socio-political and religious reading, London & New York:T & T Clark International, 2000, pp 132-133
[3] Pod Force One with Miranda Devine, “I wept at Jesus’ Tomb”; Trump’s 2028 dream ticket with “best friend” Rubio; & UFO mysteries, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4-Fuq8jDxo&t=1701s