Tag Archives: Justice

“Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God” (4th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/1/2026)

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Readings

Each of these readings deserves its own sermon. This time around let’s wonder about three things. First, the Beatitudes as a rereading of that last verse in Micah. Second, Paul on wisdom and folly. Third, that phrase in Paul’s letter, “the message of the cross.”

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah’s audience (Isaiah’s audience—they were contemporaries) was justly very proud of the temple. Solomon had built it, had spared no expense in building it, and it was breathtaking. And as long as the multiple sacrifices and festivals stayed on schedule, it was easy to assume that the Lord found it breathtaking. So prophets like Micah had the thankless task of reminding the people that while worship (including prayer) was essential, it was not the only essential thing. In characteristic prophetic hyperbole: “what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” And over the centuries we’ve periodically needed this reminder: worship is essential; it’s not the only essential thing.

(Parenthetically, we might hear today’s psalm, Psalm 15, as a reminder, in the temple, to remember the prophets’ teaching.)

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God: we can hear Jesus’ Beatitudes as sketching out what, with Jesus’ coming, that looks like.

The Beatitudes, the beginning of what we refer to as the Sermon on the Mount, are set just after the calling of Peter, Andrew, James, and John that we heard last week. Matthew sets the stage: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (4:23-25)—and then our text.

Why’s that important? Coming at the Beatitudes cold (“Happy are the poor in spirit, those who mourn…”) one might be tempted to call the local asylum: one of your patients is loose. But after that long list of folk Jesus has touched, it’s possible that he knows what he’s talking about. That’s important for us as hearers. We’re not meant to come to the Beatitudes cold. If Jesus hasn’t touched me in some important way, they’re not the place to start.

Micah set up his summary with “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you.” Jesus sets it up with “Blessed/Happy are…” Translation of the Greek makarios is a challenge, the English versions opting for ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’, both of which have drawbacks. ‘Blessed’ can suggest something disconnected from real life; ‘happy’ can suggest something fleeting. It helps to notice that it’s the opening word in the Book of Psalms: “Happy are they who have not walked…” We might say it’s about describing a truly human life.

Most of the beatitudes focus on character as seen in conduct, the merciful, the peacemakers, etc. The beginning and ending beatitudes focus also on the vulnerability tied to that character. While in a perfect world good character would produce good fortune, we’re not in a perfect world, so good character carries risks. As Ben Sira put it “My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing” (2:1). So “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” not because that’s how the world works, but because, as Jesus has been proclaiming, “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” As Jesus has been proclaiming, underlined in the last beatitude which shifts from “Blessed are the…” to “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” So the Beatitudes are news, tied to Jesus’ arrival, rather than timeless truths.

And the thing about news (worthy of the name) is that it guides the conduct of the wise. Snow’s in the forecast—so leave the sand and shovel in the trunk. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—so that’s the character we want to encourage. Parenthetically, here, as in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, the focus is first on the community (the parish), then on the individual. What sort of community are we? What sort of community are we becoming?

And the community/congregation is integral to when/how these futures happen (“they will be comforted…will inherit the earth…will be filled”). Only in heaven? That would make “inherit the earth” meaningless. “They will receive mercy” only from God? Jesus’ teaching seeks to mold us into congregations in which the Beatitudes are experienced to be true in our dealings with each other. (“Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’” (Matt. 18:21-22). The Beatitudes are news; let’s respond wisely.

Paul, as we heard, pays attention to what the message about the cross does to words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. The way of the Beatitudes, executed supremely by Jesus, looks foolish and weak to the world, then and now. The meek will inherit the earth? Or, as Stalin put it, “The pope! How many divisions has he got?” So the Corinthians need to realize that being baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection overhauls the meaning of ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. These “I belong to Paul/Apollos/Cephas/Christ” games need a second look.

That’s something we have trouble hearing. We categorize: there’s culture, economics, politics, religion, etc. “Christian” goes in the religion box, so leaves the other boxes undisturbed, leaves the meaning of ‘wise’, ‘strong’ etc. in these other boxes undisturbed. Or, worse, ‘Christian’ becomes another argument for whatever cultural, economic, or political positions I already hold. It’s easiest to see this in others. Putin invades Ukraine; the Russian Orthodox Patriarch declares that it’s God’s will. No. To be baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection means a mental asterisk on words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’ as I learn from Jesus how to use them.

So much—too briefly—for Paul. But what of “the message of the cross”? In today’s reading Paul focuses on what it does to words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. But that’s not all, or even primarily, what the cross is about. So let’s pull back the camera. Micah: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Well, why is that good, why does the LORD require that? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God: that’s what reflects God’s character, that’s what fits with God’s creation. And that, combined with the suffering it often attracts (think the Beatitudes, Jesus’ performance of the Beatitudes, “the message of the cross”) is how the LORD heals this world.

But that’s not the end of the story. Toward the end Paul writes “He [God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” That’s more than Jesus messing with our use of ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. That’s our walking in the way of the Beatitudes, the way of the Cross, to participate in the healing of our world. We keep remembering Jesus’ story not because he’s back there and we’re here, but so that his story becomes our story.

So, as we come to the altar, let us remember:

When we come to receive the Body and Blood we’re asking God to work in us so that we—and others—experience the Beatitudes in our common life.

When we come to the receive the Body and Blood it’s to receive Jesus as gift and to become the Jesus-like gift for others.

“The wolf shall live with the lamb”–and Paul’s readers in Rome struggle to make that work! Second Sunday of Advent, 12/7/2025

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Readings

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” So Paul to the Romans in our second reading. Hope: today’s readings flesh that out in some encouraging ways. Let’s dive in.

Whatever else it is, our reading from Isaiah, an exercise in hope.” A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” “Stump of Jesse:” that assumes that things have not gone well. Just a few chapters back we heard Isaiah warning Ahaz “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (7:9), but Ahaz is showing no sign of that faith; he’s putting his faith in the king of Assyria! Nevertheless, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…” The faithlessness of Ahaz—of most of the kings of Judah—will not get the last word. And what a shoot! “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…” And what is happening in Jerusalem will get international attention: “On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him…” It sounds like what we heard last week from Isaiah (“Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’” [Isa 2:3]). Hope.

This hope for what God will do through the shoot drives today’s psalm in more general terms: what God will do through any king. Prosperity, international security: yes. The surprise is that what the king is doing focuses almost entirely on defending the needy, rescuing the poor. From the part the lectionary omitted:

For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress, *
and the oppressed who has no helper.
He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; *
he shall preserve the lives of the needy.
He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence, *
and dear shall their blood be in his sight.

God to the king: you worry about the poor; I’ll worry about prosperity and the other nations. The tragedy of Israel’s history: like Ahaz, most of the kings worried about prosperity and the other nations, with the poor toward the bottom of the to-do list. Gentile rulers—to whom the offer is implicitly extended—have tended to do no better. So the hand-copying of Psalm 72 in the centuries before Gutenberg, also an exercise in hope that someone will take it seriously.

So when John the Baptist proclaims “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” that does encourage the hope that God is doing something about those words from Isaiah and the psalm. He’s baptizing at the Jordan, that river that Joshua and Israel crossed to enter the land. It’s a powerful promise: we can begin again. At the same time, there’s that word “repent.” The problem isn’t “those people.” John’s right there with Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That image of wheat and chaff with which our reading ends? The wheat: not those who don’t need to repent, but those who are doing so. So the first of our brother Martin Luther’s 95 theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Which brings us to our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “Abound in hope:” particularly a challenge in the capital of the Roman Empire, whose legions, architecture, and stories had no intention of going anywhere! Virgil, the Empire’s poet, has Jupiter, king of the gods, saying this of the Romans:

“On them I set no limits, space or time:
I have granted them power, empire without end.” (Aeneid i.333-334)

Living among competing narratives is nothing new! So Paul “May the God of hope–not to be confused with Jupiter–fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” How does Paul think this works, particularly “believing”? Our reading is at the end of a section in which he’s dealing with the challenge of Jewish and Gentile believers living together. Some, in faith, keep kosher and observe particular days; some, also in faith, eat whatever they want and treat all days equally. All are tempted to judge, to enlighten the others. While Paul talks about the groups as the strong and the weak, each group would have seen itself as strong and faithful in contrast to the other groups.

Paul: “Welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed you.” It’s not a call to toleration (too often simply a temporary ceasefire until one of the groups feels strong enough to resume hostiliities), but to actively supporting each other’s different understandings of faithfulness.

Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Lovely words, but Isaiah didn’t have to figure out how that actually works. Paul—and the Romans—do. Wolves, lambs, leopards, kids: in God’s faithfulness all thrown together in Rome’s various house churches. Potlucks are going to stay complicated. (With increased awareness of food intolerances in our congregations, we should be able to sympathize!)

And this welcoming one another, encouraging one another, wolves as wolves and lambs as lambs, is a powerful sign that Isaiah’s words aren’t just words, but a world that God is birthing in their midst. So there’s reason for hope. But it’s a hope that doesn’t come cheap. It means the repenting, the turning, that John the Baptist proclaimed, repenting of the natural assumption that our group’s right, that they’re the ones who need to change, that they’re not sufficiently grateful for our tolerance.

Let’s step back for a minute. To the first century Romans Paul writes “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17). But despite the presence of this section in his letter (14:1-15:13) we Christians have been really proficient at finding equivalents to food and drink over which to divide. Within the Anglican tradition, even over the presence or absence of candles on the altar! The problem is that if we’ve got “Welcome one another,” we also have (from Paul’s letter to the Galatians) “if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!” (1:9). Discerning which is applicable in any given situation has never been easy. Nevertheless, this section from Romans is a standing challenge to our tendency to build walls when we should be building bridges.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Not because hope in itself is a good thing; it depends on what we’re hoping for. Our hope centers in prayers like “Your kingdom come” or “Come, Lord Jesus.” How do we “abound in hope”? As our believing shapes our behavior so that our common life offers glimpses of what we’re hoping for, of Jesus’ presence, of Isaiah’s vision: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

“Love your enemies”–the downside of “God is love” (7th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/23/25)

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Readings (Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38)

Easter doesn’t often fall late enough for us to celebrate this 7th Sunday after the Epiphany. Since we often find Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel unwelcome, perhaps that’s intentional. In any case, here we are, with readings that invite us to wonder about how God holds together justice and mercy, and what that means for us.

Justice. Psalm 62 ends with “For you repay to all according to their work,” and that’s the definition of justice this sermon assumes.

Justice: the problem’s centerstage in our psalm. How are we supposed to believe in God’s justice surrounded by all these prosperous evildoers? To which the psalm responds (repeatedly): don’t be angry; be patient; “the lowly shall possess the land” (v.11)—last week we heard Jesus weave that last bit into his beatitudes. That’s all good and true as far as it goes, but what when the patience needed extends over generations? So in the last centuries leading up to Jesus books like Daniel and the Wisdom of Solomon turned to the world to come to find God’s justice.

Our reading from Paul follows that tradition. Last week, earlier in the same chapter, we heard “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (v.19). Why? Because within this tradition God often doesn’t make things right until the next life, the next world. And Paul concludes the chapter—past the verses we heard—with “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (v.58). Not in vain, because within this tradition only with the resurrection does life make sense, is God’s justice obvious. So Paul out of pastoral concern works at length to help his hearers imagine the resurrection.

The cries for justice are frequent in Scripture, as is the deferment of an answer. In response, there are voices—the Book of Job in particular—that suggest that while justice is important, it’s perhaps not supremely important. Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose credentials as a partisan for justice are impeccable, puts it like this in his book On Job, “The world of retribution—and not of temporal retribution only—is not where God dwells; at most God visits it” (p.88).

So if justice is not supreme, what might be? That brings us to another theme in today’s readings: mercy.

“Love your enemies” says Jesus. Why? “Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

We don’t notice often enough how diplomatic Jesus is being. He doesn’t say—as he could easily have said–“Be merciful, just as your Father has been merciful to you.” Scripture often talks about the righteous and the wicked, and it’s easy to assume that these are quite different groups. But then we hit the fine print as it were, the penitential psalms or that line from Psalm 143 “Do not enter into judgment with your servant, / for no one living is righteous before you.” The difference between the righteous and the wicked is not that the righteous are righteous and the wicked wicked, but that the righteous are that group of the wicked who plead for mercy, who seek to act mercifully.

Within Scripture Jesus’ “love your enemies” is not a new idea. (Recall that in both Testaments love is about actions, not emotions.)  We hear this in Exodus: “When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free” (23:4-5). But it’s not until Sirach—which the Protestant reformers relegated to the Apocrypha—that the connection between receiving mercy and showing mercy is clear: “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, / and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. / Does anyone harbor anger against another, / and expect healing from the Lord? / If one has no mercy toward another like himself, / can he then seek pardon for his own sins?” (28:2-4). So Jesus in the “Lord’s Prayer:” “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us” (Lk 11:4a).

“Love your enemies…be merciful.” How unwelcome these words were and are. “Hey Jesus, have you forgotten about the Romans and those so-called Jews who collect their taxes?” And our polarized context brings the problem into sharper relief. “Real people are being hurt; many are at risk”—that’s a cry heard across the various spectra. All this is the downside to “God is love.” “God is love” applies also to our enemies. More precisely, for the preacher, the problem is not so much God’s love, but that there’s such a chasm between how much God loves and how much I love.

So, how does God do justice and mercy? James, Jesus’ brother, nails it: “mercy triumphs over judgment” (2:13b).

So the Gospel is finally a variant on “Olly olly oxen free?” No, because there’s that first half of the verse from James that I just quoted: “For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy.” Or, as Jesus puts it in Matthew’s account: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (6:14-15). We can hear this as justice getting its due; we can hear this as the Father extending to the merciless the only mercy they can receive. The question of eternal life is finally the question of whether we’re the sort of folk who’d want to spend eternity with this merciful God.

Recall how the Eucharist moves. Scripture and Creed remind us of God’s love and mercy. We pray, and then, more pointedly, we confess that we’re only sometimes on board with this love your enemies / be merciful business and commit ourselves again to try to do better. Then the Absolution, then the Peace.

Two more things, then we’re done. Jesus’ “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” poses two intimately related questions: How do we want to live? How does God live? Intimately related, because we rightly think that living like God sounds pretty good, but our pictures of how God lives are all over the map. How does God live? Doing whatever God wants? Answering to nobody? Showing mercy? Jesus is suggesting, I think, that if we get some clarity as to how God lives, a remarkable number of other issues sort themselves out.

Finally, Joseph in our first reading, which reminds us why all this matters. Paul spends a good deal of ink on the resurrection; from the brothers’ perspective Joseph might as well have been raised from the dead. Joseph could have moved the brothers into one of Egypt’s prisons, thrown away the key, and justice would not have raised an eyebrow. Joseph chooses mercy, chooses to acknowledge that God was also a player in their history. “And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” Today, when too many are acting like Joseph’s brothers, our merciful God is also a player, and calling on us to show mercy.

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany: A Sermon

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Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us in these readings?

Let’s start with Paul on Jesus’ resurrection from our second reading. “If Christ has not been raised…” What’s at issue here? Paul gives multiple answers to the question; here’s one of them: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (v. 32). If Christ has not been raised this [our presence in this Mass] requires a special kind of stupid. Another answer implicit in the text: If Christ has not been raised, then this world doesn’t matter. It’s disposable. But Christ raised—that’s God’s strongest statement that this world matters, that this world has a future.

The Gospel describes that future. Jesus’ words are surprising, by many accounts nonsense. No one wants to be poor, hungry, etc., and those who are poor, hungry, etc. are not obviously blessed or happy. So the verb tenses are important: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” This future is not simply a continuation of the present. And perhaps a better translation than ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ is ‘fortunate’: as in you’ve got the winning lottery ticket.

But wait! How can Jesus be pronouncing the poor etc. fortunate and the rich etc. unfortunate? How, for that matter, could his mother sing “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, / and lifted up the lowly; / he has filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty” (Lk. 1:52-53)? Here we need to pull the camera back, say, to Psalm 82. It’s short; I’ll read it.

1 God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
2 “How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?
3 Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
4 Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
5 They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk around in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 I say, “You are gods,
children of the Most High, all of you;
7 nevertheless, you shall die like mortals,
 and fall like any prince.”
8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth;
for all the nations belong to you!

Within Holy Scripture this vision is an uncontested portrait of our world. Our world is usually unjust. While there are exceptions, the wicked, sinners, and scornful of Psalm 1 usually play an outsized role in making and interpreting our laws. The Golden Rule: those with the gold rule. So Jesus, with only some hyperbole, declares the poor, hungry, etc. fortunate and the rich, full, etc. unfortunate, because usually the poor are poor because of injustice and the rich are rich because of injustice.

Within Holy Scripture the benchmark for justice is the law of Moses, that law that this morning’s psalm celebrated. And there it’s clear that justice is both about how wealth is acquired and how wealth is stewarded. Acquired: only one set of weights and measures in the marketplace. Stewarded: “my” wealth is what I hold in trust for the community. Harvests are to be incomplete, so the poor have something to glean. In Deuteronomy all debts are cancelled every seven years. In Leviticus every fifty years there’s a Jubilee in which all return to their original tribal inheritance. Justice means nobody stays poor—or rich—indefinitely. [NB: this vision of justice aligns with the Native American critique of European society in the early dialogues, for which see Graeber & Wengrow The Dawn of Everything.]

Of course other factors influence where wealth or poverty cluster. Proverbs talks a lot about diligence and sloth, wise and foolish decisions. The larger environment plays a role, all those things over which we have no control: droughts, locusts, armies passing through. But when the Bible pulls back for the big picture (like Psalm 82, Mary’s Song, the Beatitudes), injustice is centerstage.

The poor, hungry, etc. of the Beatitudes are fortunate because God will respond to the prayer at Psalm 82’s end: “Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you!”

How do we respond to these texts? Before moving to our other readings, three observations. First, between Psalm 82 and the Beatitudes, to the degree that I’m rich, full, etc. it’s sheer folly to assume that that’s simply the result of my virtue. On the personal level, that might be. On the corporate level, no way. So one of our confessions speaks of “the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” We live on stolen land, our consumer goods are cheap because we’re happy to get them from countries that discourage trade unions—or use slave labor. Should we wish to move from confession to amendment of life, there’s plenty to keep us occupied.

Second, the two verses immediately following today’s Gospel reading: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” So understandable as it might be, our response to the Beatitudes is not to take up the sword, to set ourselves up as judges.

Third, the poor, the hungry, etc. need to wait until Jesus’ return? Absolutely not. Jesus’ vision is that his church be the sphere in which his words are experienced to be true. Recall Jesus’ words to Peter: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age– houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions– and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk. 10:29-30). But from the start we’ve tended to downsize that vision, so Jesus’ brother James has to write:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. (2:14-17)

[In other words, we’re used to hearing James’ words as an argument with Paul re the roles of faith and works. Perhaps equally at issue: whether the church incarnates Jesus’ communal vision, or is simply a group of folk each pursuing their individual salvation.] What’s the church for? (What’s faith for?) The Beatitudes can do wonders for our imagination.

Turning to Jeremiah and Psalm 1, we might hear that image of the tree planted by water as a strategy for life in the world as described both by Psalm 82 and by Jesus’ Beatitudes. It’s an unjust world, and God’s addressing that, but it’s not a quick fix. God’s playing a long game, and the image of the tree planted by water urges us to likewise play a long game. That can be hard. The trust on which Jeremiah focuses is the trust that God’s timetable is preferable to ours. (And, parenthetically, like Jeremiah we’re free to repeatedly bend God’s ear about that—as long as we’re willing to listen to how God might respond.)

Did you notice the chorus in today’s readings? Jeremiah: How fortunate/blessed/happy those who trust in the Lord. The Psalm: How fortunate/blessed/happy those who delight in the law of the Lord. Jesus: How fortunate/blessed/happy the poor. Why (bottom line)? God raised Christ from the dead. God has plenty of skin in the game, and, shifting the image, God regularly invites us to share His Body and Blood so that we play that game well.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” Blessed are we as we continue to examine ourselves and make the choices that position us to together hear Jesus’ words as good news, to together experience Jesus’ words as good news.

Rise up, O God, judge the earth;
for all the nations belong to you!

Our God is responding to that prayer today, and invites us to join in that response today. We’ll let Isaiah take us out:

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field—all us trees of the field—shall clap their hands. (55:12).