4th Sunday after Epiphany (Year A)
February 1, 2026
St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church, Easthampton, MA
https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi4_RCL.html
Are you blessed?
I mean, do you feel blessed?
Have you ever posted to social media about some positive development in your life and used #blessed?
Do you have a throw-pillow embroidered with the word or a fancy calligraphed piece of artwork that says how blessed you are?
Because that’s what a lot of people mean when they use the word. A lot of times it gets thrown around as a word to name gratitude. Certainly a good thing – noticing, giving voice to our gratitude for life and love and good things. But blessed sometimes has this connotation of God given. As in, God made this good thing happen, therefore I am blessed. Again, I don’t mean to knock it – noticing with gratitude and giving thanks to God for it is a beautiful spiritual practice.
The challenge comes when we feel #notsoblessed. It doesn’t negate the feeling of the good things, the gratitude. But it’s easy to start to question God’s presence when things aren’t going as planned. What exactly is Jesus talking about?
When we read this famous passage of blessing, the beatitudes, often we take it as some kind of call to become Mother Teresa. Again, we could use a little more Mother Teresa energy in our world, no doubt. But it’s also pretty unattainable.
Or we take the passage as a call to be nice. The poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning, the ones thirsting for righteousness, the merciful, and so on – we too often picture calm, gentle, keeping the peace. A dear friend and colleague of mine likes to say that the church is afflicted by “nice,” meaning we’re better at pretending everything is calm and peaceful in order to avoid doing hard things.
So, what does it mean, then, that Jesus more or less begins his public-facing ministry in Matthew’s gospel with these words? This is Jesus’ campaign launch, setting his agenda, describing who he is and what he’s about.
` He begins not with a declaration of strength, or power, or glory. It is not a declaration against others, against an ideology, against anything.It’s a declaration of blessing. And not a blessing on the victors but on the forgotten, the ignored, the despised, the rejected. It’s blessing where one does not expect it. It is blessing in places that are not usually #blessed. It is blessing for those who are longing and hurting, weeping and sighing.
And it isn’t abstract for Jesus. This is a declaration of what his ministry will be about. He is about to spend the next three years healing the broken, eating with sinners and outcasts, touching lepers, engaging the oppressive authorities, living without a place to go home to. He’s about to put his life on the line not just so that he can inherit the earth with the meek but such that all creation is restored to itself. This is not just a list of nice things we should try to go and be, this is a list of exactly where Jesus plans to be – despised and persecuted. This is a list of where we, in our world today, will find God.
I think one of the challenges for us is to figure out who in our modern world today are the people Jesus is proclaiming blessed. Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber has a well-known list of modern day beatitudes from which I draw here with some of my own updating and editing.
Blessed are the agnostics and those who have doubt, those who aren’t sure and so can still be surprised.
Blessed are those who have nothing to offer and whose need can feel overwhelming to themselves and to those around them.
Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion and who sing the hymns too vigorously.
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction, whose tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are the incarcerated, the tear-gassed, the deported, and the beaten.
Blessed are they who feel they cannot fall apart because they are keeping it together for everyone else.
Blessed are the unnoticed, the forgotten, the lonely, and those forced into hiding.
Blessed are the children who eat alone at the lunch table, the youth who stand between the bullies and the bullied.
Blessed are those without documentation and those without an advocate in a broken system.
Blessed are those who stand between the oppressed and the oppressor.
Blessed is everyone who has forgiven us when we haven’t deserved it.
And that is just the beginning. Just the beginning of God’s blessing that which we forget to bless. Just the beginning of where we will find the strength and joy and comfort and love of God’s presence in our world. Just the beginning of where God will show up in us and our lives and our ministry. This word of blessing is just the beginning of all Jesus will do in his life and all Jesus will do in ours.
There is blessing not just because of what God promises in the blessing, but because it is in those very places that we will find Jesus. Blessed because there we are in the presence of God.
Dear ones of St. Philip’s, I dare say Jesus today blesses churches that have moved from just trying to survive to celebrating their thriving. Blessed are churches that don’t have a budget as big as they might want and do ministry anyway. Blessed are churches that feed the vulnerable with take and eat meals. Blessed are churches that pray and sing and speak God’s love for this aching world week after week.
It doesn’t always feel #blessed. Maybe sometimes it does. I hope sometimes it does. But it is always where we find Jesus. But I have a warning for you. Living in the places we find Jesus is not safe. To live in these spaces, to put ourselves not with the powerful of our world, to stand with the vulnerable, to actually do the things that might bring about a just peace in this world? Well…in the words of Paul, it’s foolishness.
It will likely get you nowhere in terms of how the world measures success. Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking with God in these ways is not guaranteed to increase your average Sunday attendance or your parochial report revenues. It will not likely gain you riches or fame or power over others. Sometimes, like Jesus and like so many others who put themselves between the powerful and the vulnerable, it will get us killed. That’s the foolishness of the cross. It’s the foolishness of believing what Jesus says about where we find real blessing. It’s the foolishness of God’s abundant mercy for me, for you, for the neighbors we love so dearly, and for the ones we hate with a passion.
This world right now needs to know the presence of Christ in these beautiful and powerful and blessed ways. And that is what we are doing here today, doing here every Sunday. We are becoming again the body of Christ, blessed and broken for the sake of the world. We are feasting together in order to remember the presence of God in us, so that we are ready to go again into a world who calls this radical love foolishness. But we remember, that wherever we go from here, God calls that radical love blessed. And, that no matter what, God proclaims you blessed, in your life today, tomorrow, and the next day, in your life in joy and sorrow, in your life when you walk the way of justice and when you feel the weight of the broken world. Dear ones, blessed are YOU.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 