4th Sunday after the Epiphany 2026

Sermon: 4th Sunday after the Epiphany 2026

Text: Matthew 5: 1-12

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It has often happened throughout history and definitely today, that the Church has been associated with the past in a negative sense. I’ve heard it described as passé, as a fossil of a way of life that has no relevance in the debates of “modern humanity”. The church has been also accused of being a repressive instrument of a reactionary conservatism, trying to keep people in line, as a place to mold the masses into compliance or not challenge the status quo of the society. The church has often been used as a tool for dominant sinful powers. And if we confess truthfully, parts of the church has and continues to lend itself for those purposes. I’m reminded from many times in history during dictatorships like Francisco Franco’s Spain, how people like him used the Church and people’s faith to curb dissent and foment a rigid way of life. The problem of such a use of the church, other than violating human rights and the essential tenets of the faith itself, is that it fosters an inauthentic faith born from coercion rather than love. You come to church not because of the truth that convicts you and liberate you, you are not going because of the witness of faith passed down from generations; you go because the regime needs to create spiritual subjugation to keep you in line. In these regimes, the church had abandoned the true calling of the gospel for the sake of the security and access given by the powerful. Indeed, the church often forgets its true calling, and therefore it becomes stiff as a fossil: a lifeless and cold performance, an instrument in the tool of the powerful, nothing

more. It is not the blessed life that Jesus invites us today in the greatest Sermon; indeed this image is unlike the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels.

Thankfully, the Gospel cannot be shut down. God makes a way out of no way. As the biblical saying goes, If the people won’t speak, even the stones will speak for them. God’s love can’t be tamed into compliance. It will make its presence known in the most surprising ways possible. And so when we rediscover the vitality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, when we re-read as we did today, the Sermon on the Mount, we find a Word that is fire, a Word brimming with energy and movement. So many people throughout two thousand years of Church history have heard these words and had their lives transformed. Innumerable people have staked their lives on these words and built a more than sufficient ethic for life. And it is not simply a goody-two shoes ethic, it is an ethic that moves us toward a challenging, risky and expansive love for others. The Sermon on the Mount, taken at face-value, provides a life-long project of living. Often our problem is as the English author G.K. Chesterton wrote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” This difficulty is what has led the Church to surrender to the world’s way of seeing things, of giving up the risky and challenging gospel love for lofty and rich security and power. But if we simply embrace the difficulty, then we can begin to see the graces that spring from walking in the way of the Kingdom.

So what is Jesus’ teaching that has proven so radical and difficult, yet life-giving? It is that God has turned the world’s values up-side down, it is that God’s incoming Kingdom seeks to right the injustices of the World’s powers through His Love for all people, but especially those who are downcast. It is as if we put on a new vision,

seeing the world through Christ, as Paul reminds in 1 Corinthians, we take on the mind of Christ. And such a mind is on a mission to bring the whole world into the embrace of God, since we are all His children, it is the inherent gift of our human life. An awareness that God gathers us up in His loving arms, every one of us. And thus to live in the atmosphere of this embrace, we walk a different walk than the world, the walk of the kingdom of Heaven. The ethics of Jesus is that we are called to live now the values of that future Kingdom. That future reality that we long for is meant to be lived now, it is meant to be practiced and preached in the face of the powers that want to deny the marginalized their dignity. It is as the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox wrote in his book The Secular City, the Church is called to be God’s avant-garde. The Church is the place where the future is glimpsed. It is where love sees its ultimate potential, it is where humanity can find renewal and look forward to a liberated existence beyond the trappings of our sins and limited imaginations. The church is not meant for death. It is meant for Resurrection, for New Life. And that is what the Sermon on the Mount proposes.

Each “blessed” in Jesus’ sermon is an invitation to turn the world up-side down, to break old patterns of violence and restore anew, to bring the future to light with your life. It is to wrest the sword from the opponent’s hand, in this case the opponent being the powers of death itself. Each “blessed” is a defiant declaration of the new world waiting to be born. Let us not tame this happiness that Jesus preaches.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” God will restore the equality of the world, for the powerful like to hide the poor while they are also exploited by them. Blessed are the poor, for God will give them what has been denied

them: dignity, a place that embraces them and does not hide them, One who seeks to give them a place where they are not exploited as the cogs in the machine, but rather they are at the center and face of God’s community.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” God will wipe away every tear of grief. For our lives so full of it, in so many different forms. We can mourn the loss of our loved ones, the loss of our livelihoods, the loss of our abilities, the loss of our very selves. Yet, God promises to embrace us in the joy of communion. No one will be lost, nothing is taken away forever. Love is present, and can only grow and grow. A new reality has settled into the soil, the seed of the Resurrection. We will not weep forever, but we will rejoice and be consoled forever.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” God takes the hand of the powerless and the humble. He looks at the proud from afar. How many people have been cast down through oppression by those who claim to be strong, people who live in the ordinary “weakness” of being a loving and communal human being. The powerless of the world are many, people whose land is taken, people who are beaten down, threatened, abused, conquered. Yet the earth, God says, is theirs to inherit. To them, God gives the land back, restores them to the strength of their inherent worth as children of God. No longer they need to fear, for their strength is not the corroding riches nor the weapons condemned to rust, their strength is the Lord. They can live into the divinely ordinary strength of God’s love. Let the weak say, “I am strong” says the Lord.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Happy are those who yearn for God’s justice, for no one can escape the Judgement of

God. All those who think they are untouchable, that they can “get away with it”, those who scheme against neighbor, these will come away disappointed. God has prepared the table already, and justice will flow like great streams of water.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” You shall reap what you sow. Sow mercy, and you will receive mercy. Sow sin, and you shall pay its wages. Mercy is a gift rooted in God’s love. God knows that mercy has the power to reconstitute a life, it is the second chance, it is the door to beginning again, it is one of the ingredients of the resurrection life.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Happy are those whose intentions are pure, whose heart has not swayed away from God’s love. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said it best: “Purity of heart is to Will One Thing”. In a time that pulls us apart to so many directions and distractions, Jesus calls us to the One thing that matters, what should be the focus of our every action: the love of God and neighbor. To single-mindedly desire the love of God which brings about the good within every human person. The world wants to taint our hearts with hatred, suspicion, cruelty, indifference to the cry of the neighbor. God wants to make our hearts pure with love and mercy, meaning to feel and seek the good for others.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Jesus is the Prince of Peace, we who bear His name and follow Him seek to break the spear and the sword, and make them tools for the creation of a new society that cares for each other. Peacemaking is the process by which we shed away our enmity, we put them aside for the good of all: it is reparation, dialogue, accountability, and enduring memory. We will be known as God’s children because we build bridges with our

neighbors, because we revere their God-given worth, because peace should be the air we breathe, it is the atmosphere of God’s Kingdom, a true peace where all are fed, where all are embraced, where all are recognized and loved, where all have a home and a place on equal footing. Being of God means being of one common humanity with everybody else, a universal brotherhood, an acting in belovedness to one another.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 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.” Uplifted are those who speak truth today and are willing to pay the price for it, for truth never comes cheap. The Kingdom of Heaven has arrived in the life of One who paid the price of truth on the cross. The way of God’s Kingdom is love of truth, a truth that does not capitulate on love, that bears the weight and responsibility of it. No matter the insults, truth will shine its light, truth will always come with a moment of reckoning. Great is the list of martyrs for truth: from Jesus, to each of the disciples, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Rev. Dr. King, to Oscar Romero, and so many more today who prophesy for God’s justice. As the scholar Walter Brueggerman described: “The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that practices denial, and to hope in a society that lives in despair”.

Beloved, take to heart these words of Jesus. They are enough to lead you to love. They are the glimpse of the Kingdom now. You can have a taste of it now through

them. And in this church, you get to have the chance to practice them and plant them in your community. It is a new creation that you are participating in. You are called to be collaborators for the Kingdom. Thanks be to God because He treads the blessed way before us. Let us follow Him into the future that starts within us now. Let us pray and invite this blessedness into our lives: