Redlands United Church of Christ February 1, 2026 Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Rev. Rachael Pryor, Conference Minister Southern California Nevada Conference
Matthew 5:1-12 (NRSV)
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Just over a week ago, I was on my way to downtown Los Angeles with the Rev. Dr. John Forrest Douglas, pastor of Church of the Foothills United Church of Christ in Ventura. Even though he’s the pastor of my own local church of membership, I’m rarely there on Sunday mornings, and we hardly ever get a chance to talk outside of committee meetings. I confessed to him on the drive that, while I normally don’t mind spending time by myself on the road, I was glad for his company because I was in a much grumpier mood than usual that morning. I was really irritated about the fact that, instead of answering several dozen emails and taking care of a wide variety of more important tasks, I was stuck going to this dumb protest and wasting my time and my energy and my voice tromping around downtown L.A. yet again because a bunch of immature, trigger-happy know-it-alls can’t figure out how to employ common sense and basic human decency – let alone democracy! – in the governance of this nation.
I think that gives you a fair enough taste of my rant, which was liberally seasoned with some additional words and phrases that are not appropriate for this audience. Of course, as I knew would be the case, my spirits were buoyed by the joyful fellowship of the protest; by the opportunity to connect with several dozen local church members and clergy who attended; by the powerful speeches and prayers; and by the reminder that we are not in this alone, we are not a small minority of quiet voices. I drove away later feeling peaceful and energized, and although intellectually I knew this would be the case, emotionally it’s still easy to fall into this narrative that it’s all too overwhelming. That I’m too tired to keep up this resistance, even though I know we have a long way to go.
I’m not the first or only one to say this, and I’m thankful for the witness and theology of people like Tricia Hersey with The Nap Ministry or adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism. So I have to admit that my attention was suddenly caught by a news clip from PBS when I heard, of all people, a Black woman say “We are exhausted because we are doing too little.”
What?!?! In this moment, all of moments, that is not what I expected to hear, especially from someone who has both systematically and personally experienced a tremendous amount of oppression in the past year, and throughout her lifetime.
Reporter Goeff Bennett of PBS news opened an interview with the incomparable Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom – sociologist, professor, New York Times columnist, and MacArthur Fellow – with this question:
“Amid this sense of exhaustion, what does renewal look like when, it’s not that people are apathetic, it’s just that people are tired. They’re worn out.”
And Cottom responded by reframing the entire foundation of the question.
She said, “I would argue that much in the way that we sort of have misconstrued the idea of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other as ‘self care’ – solve your problems with a bubble bath – we kind of have that problem writ large with politics… That if you are exhausted and overwhelmed by the onslaught of negative news, that you sort of need to retreat, right? And you need to withdraw. When in fact, everything from our research to history to art will tell you it is the exact opposite. That sometimes we aren’t exhausted because we are aware of too much, we are exhausted because we are doing too little.”
“The antidote” (she continues,) “to political exhaustion, the type that we are talking about is that we are getting so much passive information and we have so few opportunities to act. We are tired, then, not from doing too much, but from doing too little. People who feel agentic aren’t as tired. They are not as easily overwhelmed. So if you are exhausted by the onslaught of bad news, go to a protest. If you are exhausted by social policy that is demonizing children, start teaching children how to read. …The more time you spend doing something, whatever is possible for you to do in your space in the world, the less exhausted you are by the onslaught of information that really wins when it can convince you that the only thing you can do is watch what is happening to you. (video here)
That word, “agentic,” is new for me, but I’m already in love with it. At some level, even the idea of resistance, or of resilience, can be troubling because it implies a response to an original action, an original harm. We only have to resist in the face of something worth resisting. We only have be resilient when too much is being asked of us. I have heard so many people, especially from groups and identities that experience bias and oppression, tell me that they are sick of hearing about resilience. They don’t want to have to be resilient any more. When are we just going to be able to live, without having to claw fleeting moments of joy and vitality out of a system that is, in some cases, literally trying to kill us?
By contrast, an “agentic” response celebrates choice and empowerment. Instead of focusing on what we can’t do or haven’t done, we can pay attention to what we are already doing, what opportunities are right in front of us. Agency shifts us from a lens of scarcity to a mindset of sufficiency.
Since I’ve already confessed to you my intolerably grumpy attitude about last Friday’s protest, and no one has stomped out of the sanctuary yet, I want to risk sharing one more confession: up until this year, my least favorite passage in all of the Gospels has always been the Beatitudes.
I remember when I was a little kid, one of my aunts had this very 1970’s-looking wall hanging, a piece of wood covered in orange and brown and yellow flowers, with the text of the Beatitudes painted out in a flowy script. …
It hung in her kitchen and when we stayed overnight at her house I would read it while I ate breakfast; and even then I remember thinking, “What a lame deal!” Like, I would not agree to this bargain. Who wants to inherit this earth, anyway?! I don’t want to mourn or be poor in spirit. I’m not going to be meek for this, or a peacemaker. I’m definitely not interested in being persecuted and reviled for my whole life just so I can go to heaven – because even at that point, maybe age 9 or 10, I already had a sense that I was pretty sure everyone got to go to heaven anyway and why would I want to be extra good just to get the same deal?
Eventually my theology matured, but my reading of this passage did not; and try as I might, I could not quite reclaim these words as a part of the revolutionary call to love and justice that I found in Jesus’ other teachings. I couldn’t shake that vintage feeling of an aunt who hung these words in her kitchen but meanwhile had experienced very little persecution in her own life, and who was no particularly considered to be the peacemaker among her 7 siblings.
But late in 2025, I had an encounter that completely redeemed these words for me. It happened, in fact, as I was preparing a funeral sermon for this same aunt’s youngest sister, my Aunt Laura, who died of breast cancer this past summer at the age of 55. Somehow, I can’t remember how, an invitation came across my screen to read another funeral homily, and I flagged it seeking any kind of encouragement for such a difficult task.
It was the funeral homily for the extraordinary Dr. Jane Goodall, who died this past October in Los Angeles at the venerable age of 91. And the minister given the honor of delivering this homily was none other than Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, whom you might remember made headlines when, in a sermon the day after his inauguration, she looked Donald Trump in the eyes and said simply, “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
Bishop Budde connected the Beatitudes with Jane Goodall’s life by way of Jane’s own often-offered words of blessing. She was the model of a person who understood that agency must be claimed where it is offered – a scientist who seized an unsought-for platform and used it unhesitatingly on behalf of our planet. Bishop Budde connected Jane’s faith to these words in Jesus’ most famous sermon, saying,
To receive a blessing, in Jesus’ understanding, and certainly in Jane’s, is not a passive experience, though we may be tempted to hear it that way…. But in Jesus’ mother tongue, Aramaic, the word we translated as “blessed” is an active verb, meaning ‘to set yourself on the right way for the right goal.’
The Palestinian Arab-Israeli theologian Elias Chacour suggests that we translate Jesus’ word of blessing like this: ‘Get up, go ahead, do something, move.’ He writes:
When I understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic, I translate like this:
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.
To me this reflects Jesus’ words and teachings much more accurately, (Chacour writes). I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty to build a human society for human beings;” Christianity is not passive but active, energetic, alive, going beyond despair.
“Get up, go ahead, do something, move,” Jesus said to his disciples, in Bishop Budde’s reframing. …
It’s a reflection of the way Jane Goodall, and so many great saints of our era, have lived their lives. And at heart, it’s the way the earliest Christians lived, too. The ones who were called “martyrs,” from the Greek word μάρτυς (martus), meaning someone who observes or testifies to what they have seen, heard, or experienced. A witness. A person moved to agency, transformed for service, unafraid to talk about the power of Christ’s invitation into a new and sacred kindom of equity rooted in compassion and love.
These were not people who felt like the only thing they could do was sit back and watch what was happening to them. These martyrs held such deep conviction in their commitment to peace, and radical welcome, that they were unwilling to betray their values even in the face of systemic imprisonment and state-sanctioned slaughter. They were suppressed and killed for challenging a system built on fear, violence, privilege, and greed. Their stubborn commitment to speak their truth is why today we equate the word martyr with one who is killed for their dedication to a cause.
Two thousand years later, this experience of martyrdom is being repeated once again, but let’s not fall into the trap of imagining it ever stopped happening. By some accounts in the Roman Catholic tradition, “more than two-thirds of all martyrs in Christian history died in the twentieth century.” We know some of their names: Oscar Romero, Sophie Scholl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harriette Moore, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Honored in their legacy, they were often disparaged in their own lifetimes for demanding too much, too soon.
We’ve watched this cycle play out again in Minneapolis over the last month, but it’s a big jump for us to move to a concept of all of us having to be “martyred” in this midst of this resistance. Most of us are very, very far away from that kind of danger. The Beatitudes are not a command, or an encouragement, to find opportunities to put ourselves in harm’s way as a test of the true strength of our conviction. …
They are not the promise of a reward earned, but the prediction of an outcome: if we share about and build the vision we believe in, we will create the community we long for. All it takes is our willingness to be true martyrs: to be witnesses who observe or testify to what we have seen, heard, or experienced.
On The Daily Show earlier this week, Jon Stewart captured the meaning of witnessing for a twenty-first century Church in his commentary on the Department of Homeland Security’s version of the circumstances surrounding Alex Pretti’s murder.
“That’s how brazenly they lie when they know we’ve seen the truth,” he said. “That’s how they lie when they know we know. Imagine how they lie when there’s no evidence to contradict them. And maybe that, more than anything, explains why Alex Pretti really was a threat. Because he was brandishing a weapon. A handheld aluminum 1080p, 60fps weapon of mass illumination. Because there is nothing more dangerous to a regime predicated on lies than witnesses who capture the truth.” (video here)
We are, on this Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, a baby step away from the lies of King Herod, who demanded the location of the newborn king; and the starlight illumination for the circumventing Magi who knew that worship was the last thing on Herod’s agenda.
I don’t love the imagery of “weapons,” though I appreciate the reference in the phrase “weapons of mass illumination.” I might prefer, instead, agents of mass illumination. Witnesses for mass illumination. No less capable in the neighborhoods of Redlands, California than in the streets of Minneapolis.
We don’t have to wait for ICE to show up on our doorsteps – though I think we know, that is in fact already happening. The greater obstacle to our agency is the altar of politeness at which predominantly-White progressive mainline Protestants have been worshipping for so long that we’ve come to mistakenly equate it with kindness, and goodness, and mercy. We’ve started believing our own lie that nothing we say will make a difference anyways. We don’t want to start an argument. We don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. Blessed are the peacemakers.
And as a result, perhaps you’ve noticed: queer people in this country are not super comfortable right now. People of Color are routinely uncomfortable. Womxn experiencing lack of access to reproductive healthcare are not dying comfortable deaths. Immigrants and citizens and five-year-old children being held in Homeland Security Concentration Camps are not experiencing what we might call “comfortable” conditions. Extreme summer heat and record-breaking wildfires and flooding attributed to human-caused climate change have not exactly been “comfortable” in the past few years.
Thanks be to God, few if any of us will suffer the fate of Alex Pretti or Renee Macklin Good. We only have to be willing to risk social death. To risk killing a conversation. To risk the demise of a friendship, because we gently speak the truth when we see or hear or experience ideas and practices that are unloving. Not only our cameras, not only our smartphones, but our own voices are our best tools of mass illumination. It’s evangelism in the most faithful sense: the courage to speak up for mercy, not only to enemies or strangers, but to our dearest friends and family.
Are you feeling tired? Are you overwhelmed by this historical moment? Then get up, go ahead, do something, you who are pure in heart – for in those moments of agentic blessing, you will see and know and be revived, by that sacred, holy manifestation we call God. Amen.