Sermons
February 22 - “Covenant of Grace”
A Covenant of Grace
Psalm 32
Matthew 18:15-21
22 February 2026
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
Traditionally, the scripture reading for the first Sunday in Lent is a different reading from Matthew, when Jesus is tempted three times by Satan and withstands the challenge. Lent is a time when we consider the temptations and challenges that we face, and we engage in acts of discipline in order to try, like Jesus, to resist. It’s a time for mindfulness, for intentionality, to develop habits that (we hope) will bring us closer to God. In Lent, we may try the classic approach of giving-up-something like chocolate or alcohol or social media; or we may take on a new practice we hope will become a habit, like daily journaling or walking.
As a church community, we have just adopted a new Behavioral Covenant at our Annual Meeting a few weeks ago… And the best way to ensure that it becomes a meaningful covenant in our common life, a set of shared practices we want to be habitual (rather than another list of good ideas that we stick in a drawer), is to talk about it. So for these six weeks of Lent, we’re going to focus on the six behaviors in the Covenant that we want to adopt with one another.
This week, we begin with the scripture reading that undergirds most covenants and conversations about how we want to be a church community together: Matthew 18. Jesus, talking with the disciples, draws out a clear process for handling conflict in the church.
Now I know, I know: we are all nice polite New Englanders, and we would never admit to ourselves that there might sometimes be conflict in the church. But we also know that wherever two or three are gathered, there are at least four opinions! We are going to encounter conflict sometimes. For all our desire to think of ourselves as above all that, striving for some noble ideal of community—we are the Body of Christ, we are all children of God, we are called together by the Holy Spirit—the truth is that we are a group of humans. A little bit inconsistent, a little bit contradictory, a little bit proud, a little bit stubborn… any relationship between two people necessarily involves energy, and that energy sometimes includes tension, or friction, or difference. Conflict is a natural part of all relationships, and if there’s sometimes natural conflict just between two people, of course there will naturally be conflict among groups of people. Conflict isn’t bad, conflict is healthy—when you handle it in healthy ways. Which is what a Behavioral Covenant is supposed to help us to do.
Because, really, church is hard. Getting along with other people is hard. The divisions we encounter in our daily lives, in the wider community, have grown so much that we have less and less ability to be in community with those who think differently or hold different perspectives than we do. And for a long, long time, church has been the main place in our society where we can be in relationship with people who don’t agree with us. We commit to joining, belonging to a church community and staying in relationship with people who may have different opinions or experiences. We stay at the table together. Church is a place where we are challenged to live together with people who may fundamentally disagree with us about the way the world should work. Church is a place where we sometimes have to be vulnerable and share with others the things we’d rather not speak out loud to anyone. Church is a place where we encounter our own emptiness and maybe work on filling it a little bit. Church is a place where we behave badly sometimes, and where we trust one another enough to let them call us on our bad behavior when it happens.
That’s what Jesus was talking about in our passage from Matthew. Matthew’s church knew something about bad behavior, and outright conflict, and even schism. Matthew’s congregation was in the process of figuring out who they were in the midst of an identity crisis in Judaism—some scholars think Matthew’s community may have been kicked out of the synagogues. Disagreement and distress in this new community was right there on the surface for all to see. So it’s no wonder that Matthew includes this guide for how to deal with people who are causing conflict in the church. The unity of the community was critically important to Matthew. This plan for how to handle conflict is geared toward a slow, deliberate process that promotes peace long-term. It’s about skill-building and resilience to get through difficult times. If someone sins against you, go talk to him. If he doesn’t want to talk, bring another one or two people to witness the conversation. If that still doesn’t change the situation, talk with your church community about it and enlist their help. If he still won’t listen, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Now, some hear this tax collector part and think it means that the person in question should be ostracized. That’s not what it means. Gentiles and tax collectors were shunned from mainstream Jewish society, but we have to remember that so was Matthew’s community. Jesus was the one who ate with tax collectors, and reached out to the Gentiles. Jesus was the one who broke the rules when it came to who was in and who was out. In this new Christian movement, Gentiles and tax collectors and prostitutes and widows and all kinds of down-and-out folks were encouraged to participate fully. Some people were new: the Gentiles and the tax collectors had a lot to learn, and the Jewish-born Christians took seriously their responsibility to teach newcomers about the laws and stories by which they lived. “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” meant that the community should stick with the recalcitrant person and work to educate and enlighten him. This passage is about seeking peace and reconciliation and transformation, not about separating the sheep from the goats.
Your Behavioral Covenant includes “grace” as one of your shared values that will guide your behavior together: “I have an obligation to offer grace to everyone in this congregation. It entails sensitivity to the situation at hand. I will listen with understanding and acceptance because we do not always make clear our perspective as we intended. I will honor silence as another expression of perspective.” “Offering grace” includes assuming that everyone has positive intentions for our behavior toward one another, and remembering that we are all here because we love our church. And when, for whatever reason, our words or our actions don’t have the impact that we intended, we strive together to seek understanding and clarity, to heal the harm, and close the gap between intention and impact. When you hurt me, I have to give you the grace to believe that you did not intend to hurt me; when I hurt you, I hope you will do the same—and in order to heal that hurt, we have to talk about it with one another. Hopefully we can do that in a way that doesn’t escalate the situation and perpetuate the harm, and that’s part of why we bring in our church community to help us have those healing conversations in good faith.
The thing that Matthew doesn’t make explicit here, but that we need to remember, is that this passage is about disagreement between two rational people. It’s a program for healthy interaction between two healthy people. It’s an ideal program for an ideal situation – and not all situations reflect this ideal. Jesus is not setting forth a program to deal with abuse, or mental illness, or destructive behavior. Jesus urged patience with those who needed correction, but didn’t allow violence or unhealthy behavior to destroy his community. He tells Peter to forgive seventy-seven times, but forgiveness doesn’t excuse or ignore or tolerate harm. If only one party can behave with grace but the other party can’t, then we’ve got to find a different way forward—that’s a different part of the Behavioral Covenant, for a different day.
But when we are engaging with our community in healthy ways, we still can make mistakes, we still can disagree or misunderstand one another. That’s where grace comes in. We are all given the promise of renewal through God’s grace, and we can and must extend that grace to one another in Christian community. It’s something we have to practice with ourselves and with one another. If we can practice grace among ourselves, then we will be able to take it out into the world, too.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
February 8 - “Repairers of the Breach”
Repairers of the Breach
Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20
February 8, 2026
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
Have you ever stopped to wonder what could make salt lose its saltiness? What we know as good ol’ table salt, sea salt, sidewalk salt. has a molecular makeup we know as NaCl: sodium chloride. There are other salts (baking soda is NaHC03, sodium bicarbonate), but the salt that would have been extracted from the Dead Sea or the Mediterranean back in Jesus’s day is also that same NaCl that we know. The chemical composition of salt isn’t going to change. NaCl is NaCl. Dissolve it in water, you have salty water: it doesn’t stop being NaCl, and you could evaporate the water and restore the salt into crystal form.
It would have to become something else chemically if it’s going to stop being salt. But chemically, NaCl can’t “lose its saltiness” and still be sodium chloride. Even if Jesus had had the periodic table of elements back in his day, he couldn’t talk about “salt losing its saltiness” as a chemical change. Salt that is not salty cannot exist. Saltiness is the essence of salt.
As far as the science of salt goes, the only way to make salt be less salty is to mix it with other non-salt materials. If you think about the salt we put on our driveways and steps in the winter… sometimes we’ll mix it with sand, right? in order to achieve a higher level of grittiness on the ground without using so much actual salt. It’s not that the salt is less salty, on a chemical level, but it’s no longer pure salt. Salt loses its saltiness by impurity. You could put so much sand into your sidewalk mix that the salt’s efficacy becomes negligible.
And forget about trying to separate the salt out from the sand once they’re mixed. You can’t do it. Once salt has lost its saltiness, Jesus says, it’s good for nothing, and must be thrown away, trampled underfoot. There’s no going back. Salt that has become impure cannot be restored.
Much of this part of the sermon on the mount is written by Matthew for his community, and doesn’t appear in any other gospels or first-century sources. Matthew was writing for a congregation probably in Antioch, in Syria. This congregation was made up of Jews who were struggling with their Jewish identity: This was a time of significant cultural upheaval in many religious traditions, and Jesus wasn’t the only street preacher around. Jesus, the early formation of what became Christianity, was a symptom of this cultural upheaval, not a cause. There was a shift happening in Judaism that had nothing to do with Jesus, and Matthew’s community was feeling it. Who are we, as a diasporic people, an ethnic AND religious minority, when we’re having doubts about how we live out our faith and teach it to our children in this multiethnic, multireligious, cosmopolitan environment? How can we be faithful to our heritage and traditions, our community, our GOD… and also live with authenticity and integrity and truth? Matthew pulls together snippets of things Jesus has said, but also adds interpretive elements that help his congregation relate to Jesus’s words. All four of our gospels do this, to varying extents.
In fact, what we know as “The Sermon on the Mount” is not a sermon at all, it’s a bunch of random sayings of Jesus that Matthew strung together in whatever order he thought his congregation needed to hear them. Plus a little extra, to make it make sense. Matthew’s community is experiencing a multi-layered existential crisis. And to that crisis, Matthew brings this saying about salt’s saltiness. And a lamp on a lampstand. And a city on a hill. And the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. The gist is simple—be true to your purpose. Don’t let your purpose be diluted, impure. Don’t let your light be hidden, dimmed. Don’t hold to some of the law but not all of the law, don’t expect Jesus to fulfill some prophetic teaching but not all prophetic teaching. The law and the prophets were guides to staying true to the purpose of righteousness—that is, being in right relationship with God and with each other. And either we’re in relationship with God, or we aren’t. Either we’re working on it, or we aren’t.
If you’re salt, be salt. If you’re light, be light. Let everyone see you and know who you are and what you do. The purpose of a community of faith is, in part, to live out our faith together. How we live out our faith is about how we are in relationship with God and with one another, but being in relationship with God or with anyone is not a static activity—there’s no checklist, no formula, no finish line. It’s an ongoing process. A process that depends on God being who God is, and us being who we are in response to who God is. As we learn more, that relationship shifts.
Matthew’s community was struggling with knowing who they were in the midst of enormous cultural change. They were changing, and the world around them was changing, and the old ways of being weren’t really serving them or serving God anymore. They had to figure out who they were becoming, so they could understand and claim their new purpose. How can we be a community of faith when our faith is challenged, and may be changing? How do we live in right relationship with our neighbors when we don’t know who we are, or who our neighbors are, and how to share our gifts with them, and receive what they have to offer as well?
We have more in common with Matthew’s congregation than we really think we do. Like those first-century Jews in Antioch, the culture around us is changing, and our faith community is changing, too—and we don’t really understand all of those changes, or what they mean for us, but we know that the ways we’ve always done things aren’t working anymore. We know there’s some kind of disconnect between us and our neighbors. We know there are challenges within, disagreements or miscommunications or incorrect assumptions that expose the ways we are not always on the same page. We need a renewed sense of purpose, a shared vision. If we’re salt, we need to be salt, and stop adding a bunch of extra stuff that just pollutes our saltiness. If we’re light, we need to be light, and make sure we’re up on a lampstand rather than under a bushel basket, so that we can offer our light to the whole house.
This is where Isaiah’s words today can help us. Last week, I talked about Isaiah a little bit—how he was probably an aristocrat serving in the king’s household, how he tended to emphasize God’s favor for Jerusalem in a way that was probably biased by Isaiah’s love for Jerusalem. What I didn’t need to explain then, but now I do, is that the book of Isaiah is actually thought to have been written by multiple authors, probably three different people, And the author of the first 39 chapters, related to last week’s Micah passage, is not the author of Isaiah 58, what we’re reading today. The book of Isaiah spans about 150 years of history, and Isaiah 58 is part of what scholars consider “Third Isaiah,” at the end of that 150 years. Third Isaiah is much more direct about the ways the king of Judah has been a bad leader, and the ways that God wants the people to be more faithful.
Isaiah says, the people want to know God, they want to be in right relationship with God, but they’re going about it all wrong. They fast and pray and make a big display of their sacrifice and humility—but it’s a self-serving show, more about propaganda and image-making than about living faithfully. And then they use their fasting as an excuse for bad behavior—classic “hangry” meanness, picking fights and punching down on those who are weaker, being harsh with their employees, indulging in anger and defensiveness instead of taking responsibility for the harm they cause. That, Isaiah says, is not going to win them any attention or favor from God.
No, God says through Isaiah, the fasting that I want to see, the fasting that will satisfy my desires, is a fast, a discipline, a practice, that brings about justice. The fast that God chooses is a breaking of yokes—the farming device that harnesses two oxen together to pull a plow or a wagon. When the oxen are tied together that way, they can more than double their strength, equipping them to work effectively as a team—but when humans are tied together that way, they are more likely to be oppressed, abused, forced to injure themselves or each other in the course of their labor. A yoke is a tool, and a symbol of injustice, God wants them broken. The fast God wants us to follow, the discipline God wants us to adopt, results in the liberation of the oppressed, the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the breaking of tools and systems of injustice.
If we follow that fast, Isaiah says, then God will take care of our needs and be present and attentive to us when we ask for God’s help. “The LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong… Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
It was as true 2600 years ago as it is today: God wants God’s people, God’s followers, God’s children, to pursue justice and work to end injustice. If we do that, we will be called “Repairers of the Breach, Restorer of Streets to live in.” That is, we will be known as people who have a purpose (ending injustice), and who actually met that purpose. We will be salt, pure and untrammeled, sparkling with the essence of saltiness. We will be light, set on a lampstand and shining throughout the house. If we work to end injustice, we will be part of the healing of the world, the repair of what has been broken.
THAT is a purpose worthy to pursue. Not so that we may be glorified, but so that God may be known and glorified. Let’s be salt. Let’s be light. Let’s be repairers of the breach. Let’s be a people of purpose, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
February 15 - “Dazzling!”
Dazzling!
Matthew 17:1-9
15 February 2026
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
First Congregational Church of Williamstown, UCC
The Transfiguration is one of the key stories signifying Jesus’s divinity. It shows up in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and some people think that John’s gospel alludes to it as well—and whether or not you think that it does, the fact that we want it to be in all four gospels is an indication of its importance.
The story is really this brief and simple: Jesus goes up to the top of an unnamed mountain, with Peter, James, and John, and while they’re up there, his face changes, his clothes become dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah appear as well, and they’re talking with Jesus. The three disciples hear a voice from a cloud saying, “This is my son, listen to him!” As this is happening, Peter—who is kind of the perpetual fall guy who says the boneheaded thing we’re all probably thinking but is clearly wrong—Peter says “hey, Jesus, I know! We’ll build some booths up here on this mountain, for you and Moses and Elijah!” That’s when the voice from the cloud interrupts Peter and the booths are graciously forgotten. The three disciples hear the voice from the cloud and they fall down on their faces, overcome with fear. After all, mere mortals cannot look God in the face and live, right? So they hit the dirt for safety’s sake, and Jesus comes and tells them to get up. They do, and things have returned to normal up there—no white robes, no Moses and Elijah, no cloud with a voice. And Jesus starts to lead them back down the mountain, saying to them that they shouldn’t tell anyone what they’ve just experienced. We’re just all supposed to know what a big deal this moment is. And sure enough, when they come down from the mountain, the Transfiguration is not discussed again. The story of Jesus and his disciples moves on.
As a theological event, the Transfiguration is more important in Eastern Orthodox Christianity than it is in western Christian traditions, but even so, it’s an important day for us. This is only one of two episodes in the story of Jesus when a voice from the clouds, presumably God, speaks directly and audibly to a gathered crowd of people (the other one is Jesus’s baptism). And in this event, the presence of Moses and Elijah cements Jesus’s place in the canon of key religious figures. A couple of weeks ago, we read a passage in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus mentions that he will fulfill the law and the prophets—and this moment with Moses, representing the law, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets, is seen by some as the symbolic fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Moses and Elijah are, presumably, saying something like “Great job, bud, you’ve got this from here,” and fully passing the torch to Jesus. But that’s just speculation.
This is the last Sunday in the liturgical calendar before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. And so what we’re really doing here today is juxtaposing an experience of Jesus’s divinity and an encounter with our own humanity. The word “Transfiguration” means transformation, but more literally it means to cross the face—that is, Jesus’s face was changed, his appearance was changed. This was the moment that his followers came to know that he was not just a teacher, not just a human. And Peter’s very human instinct was to build a monument to that discovery. The “booths” he suggests would be a place of worship, but mostly they would be something of permanence, to capture the fleeting moment. Peter’s instinct is to DO something. Do something that will last.
And Peter is all of us, isn’t he? When we encounter the holy, or we have an idea we think is inspired, we have this urge to make it permanent, to hang on to the feeling, the memory, the sensation of awe and excitement—by translating our experience into something we can touch, hold, put in our pocket, keep on a shelf, walk past and remember. Something tangible. And maybe we do build a building to mark the spot. A triumphal arch. A column. Maybe we do stack some rocks into a cairn, or put together a little pyramid of sticks or a pile of dirt.
But just at the moment Peter expresses this desire out loud, “Lord, let us make three booths, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah” – just as the words come out of his mouth, the voice from the cloud booms out an altogether different idea: “This is my son, the beloved: listen to him!”
We know now that the Transfiguration was the middle of Jesus’s ministry, but when it was unfolding in real time, of course the disciples had no idea what was still to come. Peter was dazzled by the change in Jesus himself, the bright white clothes, the historic figures who just appeared. He was, the text says, overwhelmed with fear in one moment, and probably quite stunned and confused in the next, as all that dazzling chaos was just …gone. It makes sense that Peter would think this moment was some kind of pinnacle of Jesus’s ministry. A moment of divine revelation that direct and world-changing hadn’t been experienced in hundreds of years, and he was there for it! He has to get the word out! He has to do something to mark this event!
Sometimes this very human impulse we have to DO SOMETHING, to make this moment permanent, to transform the numinous into the tangible—sometimes that instinct makes us miss the point of the holy thing that’s happening. We want it to last forever, and we lose the holiness of the fleeting moment. Don’t DO ANYTHING, just listen. Don’t try to manage, don’t try to control, don’t try to capture what God is doing. Just listen. Just witness the moment. Just be grateful you’re there to witness it. Stop trying to fix, stop trying to leverage, stop trying to produce. JUST LISTEN.
Peter, this moment isn’t about you and what you want. It’s about God, and what God wants. What you are doing is not as important as what God is doing. Your instinct to do something is going to get in the way of God’s doing something, so stop it. JUST LISTEN.
And sure enough, the moment passes, the light in Jesus’s face fades, his clothes go back to being their normal dusty whatever-color, Moses and Elijah are nowhere to be seen, and Jesus begins leading the Three back down the mountain. He makes them promise NOT to tell anyone. Don’t make this a permanent thing. Don’t hang on to it. Don’t try to convince anyone else that it was real, don’t try force your human impulses onto a divine revelation.
Peter, this moment wasn’t about you. Shut up! JUST LISTEN. Because what happened up on that mountain, yes, was a holy moment of God’s inbreaking into the world—the exact thing that the people have been praying for for a thousand years—but it’s part of a bigger picture that God is shaping, a bigger action that God is taking. And if you give in to your human instinct to make this one moment permanent and focus on it, you’ll miss the bigger thing God is doing in our midst. Your excitement and awe are a distraction: there is strategy here, Peter, and your impulse is serving your whim, not serving God’s strategy.
There is a reason we plunge so deeply every year off the top of the Transfiguration mountain into the depths of Lenten humility: we need to be reminded to listen to God’s voice, to check our impulse to center ourselves and our own experiences and reactions. Lent is a time to listen to what God is doing, and figure out how we might be a part of it more effectively. It’s a time to recognize that our will is usually separate from God’s will, and make sure we’re really trying to follow God’s will. It’s a time to make sure that we are not letting what dazzles us distract us… when we should be paying attention.
Lent is also a time to make sure that we’re listening to the right voices. Not listening to the voice inside me that says, “I want to Do the Thing. I want the attention, I want the points, I want the satisfaction, I want to be right.” When we take the time to listen, to stop talking and listen, stop doing and listen, we hear the voices of the people God is calling us to serve. The people God is calling us to serve! We hear them telling us what they need, instead of us doing for them what we think they need. We hear them telling us their stories, instead of the narratives made up for us by someone else. We hear them telling us their aspirations, instead of us crafting our own assumptions.
When we listen to their voices, instead of the voices we substitute paternalistically for them, we hear how God is calling us to serve. When we stop doing, and start listening, we become more like the Jesus we meet at the end of Lent: “Not my will, but yours be done, O Lord.”
So this is my invitation to you for Lent: The word “fear” in this passage can also be translated as “awe” (they’re actually the same word in Greek) – let yourself be overcome with awe, humble yourself face down in the dirt, forget your ideas for what you should do, and instead: just listen. Ask more questions than you answer. Listen for God’s voice, and make sure it is louder in your ear than your own voice is. Listen for how you can serve, not for how you can do. And wait for Jesus to guide you down the mountain and back into your ministry with a new sense of priorities–not your will, but God’s be done. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
February 1 - “Redeemed and Required”
Redeemed and Required
Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
First Cong’l Church of Williamstown, UCC
February 1, 2026
Will you pray with me, please…
The prophet Micah was doing his prophet thing at the same time as the prophet Isaiah. They were both in the same place—the Southern Kingdom of Judah, which included the city of Jerusalem. They wrote about the same events at the same time: the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE, and Assyria’s eventual siege of Jerusalem, which took place in the year 701 BCE.
But there are some key differences between the two prophets: Isaiah is an insider, he works in the royal court of Judah, some scholars even think he’s from an aristocratic background. He’s certainly got access to the world of the elites: He’s a counselor to the King—several kings, in fact, over the course of 40 years. He’s a cultured, cosmopolitan, city guy. He loves Jerusalem. Isaiah also believes that God loves Jerusalem, and he insists that although it’s likely that Jerusalem will be destroyed in the course of invasions from Assyria, there still hope because God loves Jerusalem and will rebuild it bigger and better every time.
Micah, on the other hand, is an outsider. He’s a poor guy from a small, rural community perhaps about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem. He, too, is writing to the elites, the various kings and leaders of Judah over the years, but not because he works for them. He is not offering counsel, he’s offering critique. And he could give or take Jerusalem. Micah, too, foretells the destruction of Jerusalem. Micah, too, prophesies hope for Jerusalem’s eventual rebuilding. At best, though, Micah doesn’t really care about Jerusalem one way or another. He’s not attached to it. He prophesies its destruction in war and expresses hope for its rebuilding—not because Jerusalem is especially beloved by God, but because God is in covenant with God’s people. God made a promise to the people, and God will honor that promise. Micah has hope not because Jerusalem is great, but because God is great. Even when people aren’t.
That these two prophets speaking to the same kings about the same events in the same time frame should then have two very different perspectives and approaches from one another shouldn’t be that surprising—after all, they’re two different people. They come from different places, and they know their audiences differently. They will see and hear and prioritize different aspects of the same events, because they have had different experiences shaping their lives, and they have different relationships with the king to whom they are speaking. Isaiah is close to King Hezekiah of Judah, but Micah’s prophecy is the one that actually impacts Hezekiah’s decision-making.
Prophetic speech in the days of the “prophets of old” wasn’t about forecasting a future, it was about explaining the events of the present as they unfold. It was about speaking truth to power. Isaiah, speaking to King Hezekiah about the likely invasion of Jerusalem, says essentially, “Yeah, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, and then God will restore it again.” But Micah says to Hezekiah, “Jerusalem is going to be destroyed unless you do something—you have to change your ways.” Hezekiah makes a deal with Sennacherib, the invading Assyrian king. And that deal saves Jerusalem from destruction for another hundred-plus years.
We can make comparisons, too, between Matthew’s gospel and Luke’s gospel. They were both writing around the same time, using much of the same material, talking about the same person and events. But they were different people, writing for different audiences. And the ways they tell the story of Jesus are deeply impacted by who they are and who their audience is. Matthew is writing for a community of Jewish Christians, probably in Antioch in Syria, who are a homogenous minoritized group trying to find their place in a shifting cultural landscape. They are economically stable, but unsure of their identity as Jews who are in the process of probably splitting off from Judaism. Luke, meanwhile, is writing for a newly-forming, constantly-shifting, diverse group of Jews and Gentiles in or near Jerusalem itself. They are economically and socially unstable, but they are galvanized by a purpose and vision, so their commitment to one another and to the nascent Early Church is fervent.
Both Matthew and Luke tell of Jesus preaching/teaching to his disciples and a larger gathered crowd, beginning with this list of blessings we call “The Beatitudes.” Blessed are these people, because of this reason. And blessed are those people, because of that reason. The lists are different. There are a few places where they overlap, but they’re different. Matthew adds extra blessings that Luke doesn’t include; Matthew omits a balancing list of “curses” that Luke lifts up: Blessed are you if this, but cursed are you if that. Matthew’s list is more ethical, ephemeral; Luke’s list is concrete, personal. So where Matthew says “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Luke simply says “Blessed are the poor.” Where Matthew says “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” Luke simply says “Blessed are the hungry.” Matthew’s congregation isn’t poor, they aren’t hungry. So they don’t need to hear the same blessings that Luke’s congregation does.
All of these prophets, these evangelists, were writing from their particular perspectives, for their intended audiences, and they weren’t writing for us. We are not who they imagined would be on the receiving ends of their words, their visions. Two thousand years later, 2750 years later, through countless generations of oral tradition and transcription and editing and translation and illiteracy and church politics and world politics, here we are, hearing these scriptures and taking them to heart. Micah 6:8 is part of our church’s statement of purpose. Matthew’s Beatitudes offer a vision of a spiritual life that resonates for so many in our aspirations and convictions today: Blessed are the merciful; blessed are the pure in heart; blessed are the peacemakers.
All of them also have something to say about who God is, and what that means for who God calls us to be. And they don’t all say the same things. And that’s okay. Because as any writer or speaker or teacher or parent will tell you: your listeners aren’t necessarily going to hear the words you say, they’re going to hear what they need to hear. The more the words of Micah or of Matthew grow distant from the specific community and situation they address, the more they become the words of the tradition, the words of the faith, the words of the community. What can WE learn from them? What HAVE WE learned from them over the years? But I want to give a word of caution here, too: the more the words of Micah or of Matthew become the words of the tradition, the faith, the community—the less they are specific to us, to me and my community. The question is not what do I need to hear, what do I need to learn, but what do we need to hear, what do we ALL need to learn, what does the WORLD need?
And we, our church, are not the only ones who can answer that question. We are not the ultimate authority on who God is, or who God calls us to be. For that, we have to listen, we have to discern, together. And the words of scripture can help us to do that.
Both Micah and Matthew, 750 years apart, addressing wildly different circumstances and communities, say something incredibly similar about who God is, and therefore who we are called to be.
Fundamentally, for Micah, God is good! And because God is good, and God is in covenant with us, therefore God expects us to be good, too. Micah says that Jerusalem will fall because there is no justice there. It’s leaders do not know justice, and that needs to change, because our covenant with God describes a relationship of reciprocity. God has redeemed us, Micah says: “I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery…” so I don’t want your burnt offerings, your rivers of oil, your firstborn child. I want you to be like me. I’ve told you what is good: to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. You can’t buy my favor, I’ve already given it to you. But relationship with God is a two way street, says Micah: I don’t do one-sided justice. I have redeemed you, and I require your participation in the work of caring for the world.
Matthew, too, because his community is a little more stable, a little more able to focus beyond mere survival, has a very similar take. Blessed are the _____ because God is good. For Matthew, a relationship with God is based in righteousness [right relationship] as a response to God’s goodness. It’s not that God wants us to be good, but we want to be good because God is good.
How do we know what goodness is? Well, Matthew says you’re blessed if you “get it.” Blessed are the peacemakers, because they make the world peaceful. Blessed are the meek, because they inherit. Blessed are those who suffer for righteousness sake, because that’s what happens when you say the thing that the world doesn’t like—but you’re trying to do what’s right.
For Matthew, we’re supposed to want to be good. For Micah, we’re supposed to be good because that’s the nature of our relationship with God. They’re very similar, kind of a difference without a distinction. The key is relationship. It’s not my rightness, my goodness, my work, my justice, my idea of truth: all of that belongs to God, and comes from being in relationship with God. It’s a process, an understanding. We try, and sometimes fail, listen, and practice, and work, and listen some more. Blessed are you who listen and try. Blessed are you who work for something better than what is. Blessed are you who work for justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God, because that’s the heart of what God calls us to do.
We don’t do it alone. We don’t do it as individuals, but as a community—people called together by the Holy Spirit. Not because we say this is what’s good, but because God says, “this is what’s good.” Let us listen, and do the work. Let us do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Because that’s who God is, and who we are called to be, in Jesus’ name. Amen.