Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (February 1, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and edited for clarity.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
You know this is Jesus. This is Jesus. Blessed are the poor in spirit. It’s Jesus who said on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” He knows desolation. This is Jesus, right?
Blessed are you who mourn, who know that it’s right to cry when there is tragedy and grief and when brothers and sisters are hurt. Jesus cried at the death of his friend Lazarus.
Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth. This is Jesus. He walked gently and tenderly on the earth, and he dealt tenderly with everybody who came to him.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who yearn to see goodness, and who have in their heart a vision of the reality of the kingdom of God and see the gap between how things are and how God intended them to be. And blessed are those who never stop yearning for God’s kingdom, for the reality that God intended for everybody.
Blessed are the merciful. Jesus was merciful. People came to him for healing. When people came to him for counsel, he gave. He gave to tax collectors and soldiers of the empire and the poor alike. He gave mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart. You will see God. When he was baptized, the heavens opened like curtains, and the Spirit of God came down like a dove, and the voice of God was in his ear. Blessed are you who are pure in heart.
And blessed are the peacemakers. Remember when he was in the garden and Peter stood in front of him to defend him and cut off the ear of one of the people who was there to arrest him, and Jesus said, “Put that away.” And he reached out his hand and healed that man.
Blessed are you who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you. Rejoice and be glad now.
This was Jesus. He did what was right inexorably, with purpose, never swerving. He did what was right regardless of what people said about him or did to him.
Blessed are you. This is Jesus, and it is us. He embodied every one of these blessings with his body, with his life, with every word he spoke and every act—everything he did.
And we, the church, we have been brought into his body, right? We have been brought into his body. We are members of this body that embodies this reality, this truth.
You know, when Jesus tells us we’re blessed—when we can embody these things—it’s confusing for us. It’s hard for us. I mean, we see the beauty of it. And I can superimpose these words over people standing up for justice in Minnesota, right? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” I can place these words over people who laid down their lives to protect a neighbor like Alex.
And still, it is hard for me to say “blessed” are those people who stand in the cold, who work their whole lives—as many of you have—for justice and righteousness, and who, as you approach old age, find yourself seeking again those things. It’s hard to feel blessed. Sometimes we have to wrestle a blessing out of life.
The blessedness is in the humanity. If we can be—if we can embody—these things: peace and mercy and yearning for justice, and above all, I think, this tender care, this care that mourns when a sister or a brother or a sibling is hurt or impoverished or degraded, when our heart hurts and we mourn, we are in touch with our own humanity.
We are in touch with our own humanity and with the humanity that is all around us.
If we can be these blessed ones—and we are always called, as members of the body of Christ, growing into this every day of our lives—we talk about growing into the full stature of Christ. If we can embody, as Jesus embodied, this humbleness of heart, this tenderness toward one another, this seeing of our connectedness as human beings, I think we are blessed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to pray for our enemies. I think there’s a clue in these beatitudes. Because to be connected to our humanity—which is a gift from God—means that we are made in the image of God. If we are connected to it, and we are connected to other people’s humanity, then we do mourn and cry and weep and thirst and hunger when we see sorrow and pain and oppression and injustice and violence and degradation.
But if we’re in touch with that, we’re in touch with what God intended for us, and we live in fullness of life.
There is an alternative. There is an alternative, which is to lose touch with the precious gift of being alive and being a human being, and the precious gift of the humanity of our neighbors.
We talk about praying for our enemies. I think that the enemies of Christ are any of us when we choose violence—when we degrade, by word or deed, the humanity, the God-given image of God that is in every human being. To be an enemy of Christ is to degrade, by word or deed, the image of God in any human being. And it is a sorrow, and it is a grief.
We know that every one of us has, at some time, done harm by word or by deed to another human being. It is possible for us to lose our way and spiral farther and farther from this image and this blessedness that is God’s intention for us.
But these beatitudes—these blessings—and our embodiment of them: when the heart breaks over violence, pain, and suffering that ought not to be, we are restored in Christ, blessedly, to God’s intention for us.
It is that we would love one another. That we would love one another as the one who created us and restores us loves us.
I want you to hold these blessings. Let them make your heart more and more tender. Let them deepen your prayer. Let them inspire you to stand up and do what is right, and to contest every word and every act of violence and degradation.
That is our calling as Christians. That is who we are, because it is who Jesus is.
Blessed are you.
Amen.