Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Partner in Preaching, A few thoughts on Jesus’ beatitudes and our celebration of All Saints Sunday, which this year falls just a few days before a bitterly partisan election and as we enter into the early weeks of what may prove to be a dark and difficult winter as the pandemic surges across our communities, nation, and world. First, I find it helpful to remember what Jesus is up to this passage. It’s located, of course, in the larger narrative of his “Sermon on the Mount.” And that sermon – far from being simply another, if extended, homily is, especially in Matthew, a description of, and summons to,...

Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Partner in Preaching, There is a scene in Schindler’s List that came back to me while reading the Beatitudes. Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, is the commandant of a German death camp. Goeth is, in brief, a violent sociopath, prone to kill the Jewish prisoners at his camp indiscriminately. And he believes that his ability to kill is the very essence of power. Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, is a consummate showman and has somehow worked his way into Amon Goeth’s good graces. One evening, Schindler challenges Goeth’s beliefs about power. The ability to kill isn’t power; the ability to have mercy is...

Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Partner in Preaching, Matthew tells the story a little differently. You probably know that just as well as I do. Yet when I read the “Sermon the Mount” I sometimes blend Matthew’s account and Luke’s together, blurring some of the distinctiveness. In Luke, for instance, Jesus offers his sermon not on a mountain but a “level plain.” And in Luke Jesus preaches to “a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people” (Lk. 6:17). But in Matthew Jesus has just twelve disciples – the twelve we often call them – representing the twelve tribes of Israel. The crowds,...