Blessed Are Those who Thirst for Righteousness — WADE IN THE WATER

"The Beatitudes" by Kelly Latimore Icons.

A few weeks ago, I introduced to you all the River of Life exercise. 

The idea is to draw your life journey as a river. 

For each key Life Events, you add landmarks like:

• Islands for places you have lived. 

• Tributaries for people or events that flowed into your life. 

• And Waterfalls for challenging or difficult times.

If we were to imagine the story of ancient Israel, as a river, we might imagine that during the time of Micah, the waters are growing, gaining speed, but the waters are getting rougher, rapids, and up ahead, there is a huge waterfall. 

The prophet Micah lived in a small agrarian town in the southern kingdom, at the same time Isaiah prophesied in the city of Jerusalem, to the north. And at this time, Israel was experiencing a religious revival. The temple was crowded and giving was up. 

But Micah knew that there was a problem. He could see that how people were living was taking them to the dangerous edge of those cliffs. 

Society’s elites were arrogant and indifferent, enacting policies that enriched the powerful while exploiting peasant farmers. Religious leaders treated their ministry like a business rather than a vocation. And an economic revolution was taking hold, one where the rich grew richer at the expense of the poor. The people were becoming more religious, but they were not actually upholding their covenant with God.

Micah warned that by violating their covenant with God, the people were setting themselves on a path of destruction. It was because of their wickedness, Micah believed, as did many of the prophets, that God would allow the Assyrian Empire to conquer the northern Kingdom, and later, Babylon would bring even greater ruin.

When I read chapter 6 this week, I imagined how the River of Life would represent Israel at this time—the waters growing wider, picking up speed, rushing towards that cliff. 

Then I imagined a beaver beginning to build a dam—interrupting the river’s flow, slowing it down, and redirecting its energy.

Beavers are what ecologists call ecosystem engineers. With nothing more than wood and mud, they transform fast-moving streams into slower, deeper, more complex wetland habitats. In the process, they reduce flooding, raise groundwater, and improve habitat for other wildlife—including fish, which is good news for the anglers in the room. 

So, today, we might imagine Micah as that humble beaver.

Micah’s warnings and Jesus’ teachings in Matthew force us to slow down, to reflect, and to take account of how we are living our lives. 

Hearing God’s judgment, Israel, represented as a single person, pleads with God, what shall I offer to appease you, God? Burnt offerings? A thousand rams? His offerings become progressively more extravagant.

But the prophet replies, “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” 

Micah makes it plain. God is not impressed by displays of private devotion that leave public injustice untouched. Faith is not proven by what we offer at the altar, but by how we treat one another—especially the vulnerable.

We cannot claim to walk with God while exploiting the stranger, neglecting the orphan, or abandoning the widow. Being in right relationship with God is inseparable from being in right relationship with our neighbors.

For those of us who are comfortable in this moment, these words may bring conviction.

For those who are concerned, discouraged, or even despairing at this present moment, these words may bring comfort.

And then Jesus steps onto the scene…  

We might also imagine Jesus as another beaver, building up a dam in the river of our lives. 

“Blessed are the poor, the meek, and the merciful; those who mourn, who hunger for righteousness, and who are persecuted… for the kingdom of heaven is yours.”

These words also, like Micah’s, slow us down, draw us deeper into God’s way of seeing, and challenge us to redirect our energies. 

These nine blessings—known as the Beatitudes—are likely very familiar to us. 

But even today, interpreters don’t fully agree on what Jesus means. 

When he says, “Blessed are…,” is he speaking about the present? Or is the blessing something still to come—in heaven, or in an age yet unfolding?

It’s important for us to recognize that Matthew’s gospel understands history in two eras: the present evil era, which God is bringing to an end, and the coming age when all things take place according to God’s purpose of love and justice.  

It’s not hard to understand why so many people throughout time, especially those who are poor or marginalized, have long heard the Beatitudes as a promise of future redemption—a word that sustains them through suffering and gives them strength to make it to tomorrow.

But others that read the Beatitudes as a vision of human flourishing here and now—not just heaven someday, but heaven breaking into earth.

Cree-Anishinaabe biblical scholar Danny Zacharias reads them this way, describing the Beatitudes as a way of being in the world. Quoting another indigenous Christian teacher, Bear Heart, he writes: “They describe the way of life that leads to true human flourishing, now and in the age to come.”

I think this holy ambiguity is what makes the Beatitudes such a powerful teaching. As followers of Jesus, we return to them again and again—to drink from these living waters, and to be refreshed.

And yet, that very familiarity can dull their original power. We hear the words so often that we forget how unsettling they truly are. What sounds gentle and poetic is, in fact, deeply counterintuitive and countercultural.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus turns the values of the world upside down, sketching for us God’s “Upside-Down Kingdom” and inviting us to live as its citizens.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, and those who mourn…” makes little sense in a culture that prizes strength, competition, and wealth. We are told that being peaceful, merciful, or meek will get you nowhere.

The Beatitudes kind of make Jesus and Jesus followers sound like a bunch of suckers. 

I was reminded of this this past week.

I was texting with a friend in Minneapolis about how his neighborhood alerts each other to ICE activity—and importantly, how they try to avoid false alarms that only spread fear.

So we’re talking, and the conversation is obviously bringing up a lot for him. This is a friend who spends much of his free time driving his neighborhood, looking out for ICE, and trying to keep his neighbors safe.

Then all of a sudden he asked me a series of questions about faith, including, “how I find a faith I’ve never had?”

I started writing a response…, but before I could hit send, he wrote me this… 

“Basically, does Jesus love me, and does that make him dumb?” 

This friend has a sharp, sarcastic sense of humor, which, in times like this, protects a deeper tenderness. 

I rewrote my message. 

I wrote, “Yeah, I think Jesus does love every single one of us, and maybe that makes him seem like a schmuck from our perspective, but I also think that is kind of awesome.” 

I appreciate the observation that novelist George Saunders once made, “perhaps we struggle to imagine God loves us because we lack sufficient information.” 

God loves all of us just like we love that friend who we know is smart, beautiful, and capable, but who just can’t see it themselves. They lack that critical self-knowledge of their belovedness. 

Like the omniscient narrator of a novel, God sees all of us—our flaws and mistakes, the harm we’ve done—and yet loves us anyway. Because God also sees all of our beauty, all of our wounds, and all of the struggles that have shaped us. And God’s love does not leave us unchanged. God loves us too much not to tell us the truth: and to call us toward renewal, repair, and transformation.

And that is why—hard as it is to say—Jesus also loves my enemies: the Christian nationalist preacher, the ICE agent, the cruel government officials, and all the people who cheer them on. 

Jesus sees every broken, every evil, every harmful thing done by these people, and loves them still, because Jesus also sees every broken, pitiable, and redeemable quality in those people. Love is the starting place, the motivation for change, not the reward for getting it right.

So yeah… in the face of such injustice and cruelty, the Beatitudes can make Jesus, and Jesus followers, sound like a bunch of suckers. Especially to someone like my friend, who, having never been a religious person, is now, in the depths of despair and anger at injustice, tentatively exploring what Jesus might mean in his life. 

It's astonishing that just when we might most crave righteous anger and revolutionary condemnation, we are instead met with these challenging, confusing, merciful words of this humble rabbi. And perhaps we find his words disappointing. We might assess his values as too weak, too upside down, too dangerous. 

Unless, of course, we begin to notice how hollow the world’s values— like individualism, competition, and wealth—actually are. 

These are values that diminish community and disregard the gifts entrusted to us by our Creator.

And Jesus’ teachings challenge these values, to guide us toward something deeper—full, shared, human flourishing. 

But how, we might ask, can anyone survive attempting to live out the Beatitudes? We might think that only saints like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu are up to the task. 

But Jesus meant the beatitudes for all of us. He literally went up the mountain to make sure the crowd of people following him could hear what he was saying. He went up the mountain, a site of great spiritual significance, so that his followers could understand the importance of this teaching. 

So how do we do it? How do we make what seems so impractical, practicable?

One commentary provided this insight: that there are three principles for living into the spirit of the beatitudes.  

1. Simplicity 

2. Hopefulleness

3. Compassion 

When we place those alongside Micah’s call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, the overlap is striking. 

Justice and mercy grow out of compassion. 

Humility encourages simplicity. 

And reliance on God’s guidance makes space for hope.

This week, the words of Micah and the teachings of Jesus helped me reorient some things in my life—specifically letting go of habits that distract and exhaust me, and taking up ways of living that actually sustain me in living as God requires us.  

This week, Simplicity has meant embracing stillness and silence. Resisting the pull of social media and entertainment—not because those things are evil, but because they fragment my attention and dull my spirit. Walking humbly with God sometimes looks like choosing less, so that what remains can go deeper.

This week, hopefulness has meant showing up to organizer meetings I’d rather skip. When despair creeps in, the answer is not always more self-care—more bubble baths, more TV. Sometimes what we need is to do more, not less: to be in community, to stretch beyond what is comfortable. Research shows that people who experience agency—who act together—feel more hopeful about the future.

And this week, compassion has meant staying connected. Checking in on friends in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Going to my friend's baby shower, even though it was at her MAGA parents’ home. Compassion often looks ordinary and awkward and inconvenient—but it keeps our hearts from hardening.

The three principals coalesced together in one small act. And this is the only practice I would especially encourage you to take up. Each night, I lit a candle in my window for Minneapolis. This was a gesture of solidarity that people in the ground in Minnesota are encouraging supporters around the country to take. 

It's a simple act. It’s a hopeful symbol. A compassionate refusal to forget the suffering of our neighbors.

Through the words of Micah and Jesus, God's teachings slow us down, draw us deeper, and widen our perspectives so that love, justice, and mercy can take root.

I don’t know what redirection you might need this week. So I invite you to ask the question, how might God be redirecting me right now?

Where are we being called to slow down?

To choose simplicity in a world that thrives on excess?

To cultivate hope—in ourselves and in a world desperate for it?

To deepen our compassion?

To notice where we have the capacity—and the courage—to take greater action?

That is the invitation of the Beatitudes.

Amen.

This sermon was originally preached by Rev. Delaney on 2/1/25.