2026.02.01 | Blessed
“Blessed”
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ
in Hayward, California,
on Sunday, February 1, 2026,
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman.
Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
Scripture: Matthew 5:1-16
“Imagine you’re in Galilee, on a windswept hillside near a little fishing town called Capernaum. Flocks of birds circle and land. Wildflowers bloom among the grasses between rock outcroppings. The Sea of Galilee glistens blue below us, reflecting the clear midday sky above.
A small group of disciples circles around a young man who appears to be about thirty. He is sitting, as rabbis in this time and culture normally do. Huge crowds extend beyond the inner circle of disciples, in a sense eavesdropping on what he is teaching them. This is the day they’ve been waiting for. This is the day Jesus is going to pass on to them the heart of his message.” (1)
Jesus begins his teaching in a curious way. He starts with blessings—the phrases we have come to know as the beatitudes. “In Jesus’s day, to say ‘Blessed are these people’ is To say, ‘pay attention: these are the people you should aspire to be like. This is the group you want to belong to.” [‘We Bless’ means, ‘these lives matter’]. It’s the opposite of saying ‘woe to those people or cursed are those people,’ which means, ‘take note: you definitely don't want to be like those people or counted among their number.’ His words no doubt surprise everyone, because we normally play by [different] rules of the game.”
In our time—which wasn’t too much different from Jesus’s in some ways—the popular rules of the game are:
Do everything you can to be rich and powerful.
Toughen up and harden yourself against feelings of loss.
Measure your success by how much of the time you are thinking only of yourself and your own happiness.
Be independent and aggressive, hungry and thirsty for higher status in the social pecking order; How many clicks do you have? How many likes did that post get? How many views of your TikTok video?
Strike back quickly when others strike you, and guard your image so you’ll always be popular.
“But Jesus defines success and well-being in a profoundly different way. Who [is] blessed? What kinds of people should we seek to be identified with?”
Blessed are the poor and vulnerable and those in solidarity with them
Blessed are the bereaved who mourn for loved ones they’ve lost to illness or violence.
Blessed are those who are gentle, who are brave enough to be nonviolent.
Blessed are those who are insatiably hungry and thirsty for justice, for the common good, who aren’t satisfied with the common good.
Blessed are those who choose to be merciful and compassionate instead of vengeful.
Blessed are those who choose to be pure in heart—those who live with openness and sincerity, rather than deceit and hypocrisy.
Blessed are those who choose to spread peace and reconciliation instead of hate and division.
Blessed are those who stand for justice and keep working for it even when they’re misunderstood and misjudged.
Blessed are you who stand for justice as the prophets did, who refuse to back down when they are slandered, mocked, misrepresented, threatened, or harmed.
“Jesus has been speaking for only a matter of seconds, and he has already turned our normal status ladders and social pyramids upside down. He advocates an identity characterized by solidarity, sensitivity, and nonviolence. He celebrates those who long for justice, embody compassion, and manifest integrity and non-duplicity. He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with him in the prophetic tradition of justice.”
“Our choice is clear from the start: if we want to be his disciples, we won’t be able to simply coast along and conform to the norms of our society. We must choose a different definition of well-being, a different model of success, a new identity with a new set of values.”
Notice how Jesus turns from third person to second person in the last blessing; instead of saying “Blessed are those,” he says, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you.” He addresses his disciples directly and offers no illusions about what it means to choose this identity. “Jesus promises we will pay a price for making that choice. but he also promises we will discover many priceless rewards. If we seek the kind of unconventional—even revolutionary—blessedness he proposes, we will experience the true aliveness of God’s kingdom.”
These days, when we are keenly aware of the problems of having a flawed human king ruling over us, it’s a bit hard for our modern minds to imagine what Jesus is promising when he says “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven.” The Greek word that’s translated into “kingdom” is basileia, and some scholars suggest that a closer English word would be “commonwealth.” Another word that works for me is “ecosystem.” The “ecosystem of God” is a place where all inhabitants live in a way that supports the wellbeing and flourishing of all—human and other-than-human alike. Some folks like to say “kin-dom of God,” which emphasizes our relatedness and dependence on each other, like a family. It’s not a pie-in-the-sky place that we go to after death, but a world that is alive in God’s heart—and that we have access to in the here and now. We create it, a little every day, when we live out our call as disciples of Jesus.
However we name it, in that kingdom, that ecosystem, is “the warmth of God’s comfort, the enjoyment of the gift of this Earth, the satisfaction at seeing God’s restorative justice come more fully, the joy of receiving mercy, the direct experience of God’s presence, the honor of association with God and of being in league with the prophets of old. That is the identity [Jesus] invites us to seek.”
I imagine that if I were there on that hillside above Galilee, I would have been moved by Jesus’s words and eager to hear more, to say yes to Jesus’s invitation. But I’d look around and see the world as it is—everything’s a mess, people who are supposed to protect us are doing evil, and we’re living under an authoritarian regime that thinks we’re garbage (if they think of us at all). What can we possibly do?
And Jesus answers in the next verses: Be the salt of the earth. Be the light of the world.
“Like salt that brings out the best flavors in food, we will bring out the best in our community and society. Also like salt, we will have a preservative function—opposing corruption and decay. Like light that penetrates and eradicates darkness, we will radiate [compassion], goodness, and well-being to warm and enlighten those around us. Simply by being who we are—living boldly and freely in this identity as salt and light—we will make a difference as long as we don’t lose our saltiness or try to hide our light.”
It is tempting, in this time of overwhelming fear and grief, so surrounded as we are by evildoing, to let ourselves be tamed and toned down and shut up. But the beatitudes remind us that Jesus means for us to stand apart from the status quo, to stand up for what matters, and to stand out as part of the solution. He means for our lives to overcome the blandness and darkness of evil with the salt and light of good works.
As I see the images and hear the stories coming from Minnesota these days, I see salt and light in action. Ordinary people are banding together to create extraordinary community. They are living out the beatitudes before our eyes.
Restaurants, bars and coffee shops have become hubs for organizing, for collecting donations, handing out whistles, and gathering sites for volunteers and observers.
Businesses and homes across the Twin Cities are displaying “know your rights” signs and signs supporting immigrant neighbors.
Organizations of all kinds offer trainings for protesters, observers, and volunteers.
Ordinary folks are gathering and organizing in their neighborhoods to assist and protect their vulnerable neighbors. They deliver food and supplies to those afraid to go out. They drive folks to jobs. They stand watch at street corners in the frigid weather at all hours, ready to whistle and report at any sighting of ICE. They form shields around vulnerable areas, especially schools.
On Friday, January 23, tens of thousands marched in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul, while businesses closed in solidarity, or stayed open to provide free hot coffee and warmth for marchers. Then, they did it again last Friday the 31st, along with thousands in cities across the country.
They are salt and light. Ordinary people standing up and living their values and becoming an example to us of what it looks like to build the ecosystem of God.
My prayer for us is that we, too, will discover how we can be salt and light in this time. That we will take to heart the revolutionary call of the beatitudes and continue to live them out as we create God’s ecosystem right here, right now. Amen.
(1) All quoted passages are from Brian McLaren We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Hachette, 2014), 127-9.