February 1, 2026 - Fr. Steve Moore

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The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

If you permit me, I'd like to reread those Beatitudes we heard from a slightly different translation.

The Creator's blessing rests on the poor, the ones with broken spirits. The good road from above is theirs to walk.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who walk a trail of tears, for he will wipe the tears from their eyes and comfort them.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who hunger and thirst for wrongs to be made right again. They will eat and drink until they are full.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who are merciful and kind to others. Their kindness will find its way back to them, full circle.

The Creator's blessing rests on the pure of heart. They are the ones who will see the great spirit.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who make peace. It will be said of them, they are the children of the great spirit.

The Creator's blessing rests on the ones who are hunted down and mistreated for doing what is right, for they are walking the good road from above.

While others will lie about you, speak against you, and look down on you with scorn and contempt, all because you walked the road with me, it is a sign that the Creator's blessing is resting on you. So let your hearts be glad and jump for joy, for you will be honored in the spirit world above. You are like the prophets of old who were treated in the same way by your ancestors.

I learned in my first year in college, taking Latin at Le Moyne, that every translator is a traitor. And we have to acknowledge that the scriptures, as they're translated, probably have a variety of meanings depending on how they're translated. So I read to you from the First Nations Version of the New Testament, a more recent translation that recognizes that it's not just the words and the syntax that need to be translated, but also the cultural understanding of the words. And this is put into First Nations language. And you can hear slight differences, although the spirit is the same.

But the real problem isn't just the translation. It's how we understand it—how it makes it into our practice of our faith and our understanding of ourselves. And I think we've come to realize that we live in a world that is pluralistic, that has people from all sorts of different walks of life, but also people who approach their Christian faith and their version of Christianity emphasizing difference in approaching even the scriptures and how they interpret the living of their life.

There's a Hasidic tale that tells of a house where there's a wedding festival. The musicians sat in a corner and played their instruments. The guests danced to the music and were merry, and the house was filled with joy.

But a deaf man passed outside the house. He looked in through the window and saw people whirling about the room, leaping and throwing up their arms. “See how they fling themselves about,” he said. “It is a house filled with madmen,” for he could not hear the music to which they danced.

It's the same with us if we actually take to heart the words of the Beatitudes, the gospel we hear today.

Jesus climbs a mountain and looks out in the same manner that Moses looked out to give the law. But he doesn't give a law separating. He doesn't do the “thou shalt nots.” That's been done. Instead, he gives a blessed “are you,” a command to change our hearts and our lives. That is so difficult to wrap our heads around that most people simply ignore it.

But we are called on this day and every day to put this belief at the center of our lives. And the problem that we're facing in our world today is that in this supposedly Christian-majority nation, so many people who identify as Christians don't put these types of commands at the center of their lives.

Now, you don't have to agree with me, but I do think it's odd that in our southern states, where there has been a change in the attitude toward what we will put in our public spaces, the emphasis is usually on the Ten Commandments. I have never heard of a legislature or a board of education mandating that we put the Beatitudes in our classrooms. Never have I heard it—and maybe it's out there, but I've missed it.

This positive rendering of changing our hearts and our lives is rarely put forth as the essential element of the Christian life. And yet, when we don't do that, we miss, I believe, the essential element of our faith. But we recognize that we live in a world where often the opposite values are held up.

John Dear, the peace activist and priest, wrote in his book The Beatitudes of Peace that the world around us actually is an anti-Beatitude world, and often the churches take an anti-Beatitude and anti–Sermon on the Mount approach. So he wrote an anti-Beatitudes. Here they are, in a nutshell:

Blessed are the rich.

Blessed are those who never mourn, who cause others to mourn.

Blessed are the violent, the oppressors, those who dominate others or run the domination system.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for injustice.

Blessed are those who show no mercy.

Blessed are the impure of heart.

Blessed are the war makers.

Blessed are those who are never persecuted, who never struggle for justice, who never rock the boat on behalf of the poor and the disenfranchised, who are never insulted because of their allegiance to the nonviolent Jesus.

Now you get his slant on things, but we live in a world where the rich and the powerful are held up as those to be followed, where power is what is sought after. And it really is an anti-Beatitude world in which we are living.

And for those of us who are followers of Jesus, we have to recognize that the call of this spiritual life is to go against the very attitudes that pervade our so-called Christian country. That for you and I, that thirst for God, that recognition that there is much to mourn, that call to be kind and merciful and to be peacemakers and pure of heart—and yes, to be derided and misunderstood because we are dancing to music that no one else seems to hear—is essential to our lives.

It is a very difficult place to stand at times, but we recognize that we stand with brothers and sisters, both here present and around the world and throughout history, who have done the same.

If we think we are coming to church to look respectable or to find powerful friends, we are in the wrong place. And if we believe that we become Christians or followers of Jesus because it's going to get us somewhere, then we are in the wrong place.

But if we have found something—if we have recognized our own poverty of spirit and recognized our need for God, if we embrace those things in our lives which cause us to mourn, if we recognize that kindness and mercy are the way to true connectivity and relationship, and if we recognize that there are things in the world worth standing up for, even at the cost of our own comfort, reputation, or even our lives—then we are in the right place.

The problems of our world are created by us, and Jesus' teaching serves as a corrective, as it always has, defining ways to true peace and unity. The love which Jesus has preached is a radical love—a radical love which opens us up to encounter the world differently.

But we have to recognize that this way can be difficult, and we often push it off as near impossible. But I promise you, if you give yourselves to it, it makes all the difference.

You may have opinions about Stephen Colbert, but he is a smart guy. And he said once upon a time:

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we have to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition—and then admit that we just don't want to.

You and I are called to live differently. We are going to be misunderstood. We can spend our lives becoming angry and bitter that the world is not as we would wish it to be, or we can recognize that it is our own poverty that opens us up, that keeps us living forward in this manner that is different than those around us—and recognize that while it comes at a cost, there really is no other way worth living.

There really is no other life that will satisfy. The lifestyles of the rich and famous may give you comfort, may give you powerful friends, but I would argue will also leave you miserable.

Because at the end of the day, at the end of your life and my life, what will matter is how much we have loved and how much we are loved.

I have watched a lot of The Wizard of Oz lately because my eldest was the Tin Man in the middle school production. So I've heard the songs over and over and over again. But you remember at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when they go up to get their courage and their heart and their brains and all that other stuff from the wizard? He says to the Tin Man, you want a heart—you don't know how lucky you are not to have one, because a heart will never be perfect unless it can be made unbreakable.

But remember that you are not judged by how much you love, but how much you are loved by others. But there's a caveat there. It's not the respect that Jesus is talking about—being persecuted. Being really loved shows a life of connection. That life of connection really only comes from living the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.

It's like one of these health fads. We do this because it's what we're called to, but it's ultimately the most healthy way of living for all of us. And if you want to test that out and see if what I'm saying is true, look at our world and our culture and see how many people are sick and struggling. We do not live in a healthy time. I don't care what medicine can do. I don't care what Botox or plastic surgery can do. We live in a time filled with dis-ease and disease.

And really, the only remedy, I believe, is to get back to these teachings which are essential and core to who we are—our own need for God, our own way of living into the world.

And as we're reminded in our first reading from the prophet Micah, what does the Lord require of you, really? To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.