17th Sunday After Pentecost 2026

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive our seed.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children, daughters and sons of God.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

I want to suggest to you that our scriptures are actually kind of offering a lot of room for cognitive dissonance.

So we get in the reading from Samuel this lament from David.

There's a lament from Ezekiel.

And then we get to Revelation where we hear, oh, there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth.

And even Jesus sort of says, like, hey, there are these people living in categories that we would not think are blessed, and yet they're blessed.

Right?

So I hope you hear this tension between here.

And I want to suggest to you that all of this really has to do with what lament actually is, lament.

So if you were in the Exodus group, we talked about this last week.

I don't know if you realize that more than a tenth of the Psalms are Psalms of lament.

What is a lament?

Well, it is a lament when we whine, like, oh, there's no parking at the Costco.

I just think that's complaining, actually.

A lament is a little bit different.

A lament is the recognition that God's kingdom, God's family, God's promise, God's image and likeness are in many ways at hand.

Like they're reachable, they're here, and yet they're not here.

So lament maybe is the cognitive dissonance that happens between promise and fulfillment.

A lament is what happens in between Black Friday and Easter morning.

And a lament is not a thing that we like to do in Western culture, especially in the United States.

What we like to do is when there's a challenge, we like to view it as an opportunity.

Now, I don't want to like call out Joel Osteen, but I'm going to call out Joel Osteen.

It's very possible that when I have a setback, it is an opportunity to change my attitude.

But I do want to suggest to you that on, well, Thursday night in the garden, when Jesus said, Father, this is not what I want, but if it's what you want, I'll do it.

He didn't say, Thanks God for an opportunity to suffer.

So I don't think Joel gets it completely right.

I mean, I'm not criticizing his ministry, but like flattening it where it's just all about perspective taking, I don't think is right.

I think there actually is biblically, and to be honest, in my own life, room for lament.

Again, a lament is that gap.

It's maybe being in the bottom of the trench between where we were and where we're going.

If I was going to talk to you about the windows over there, because Revelation talks about a second earth, it starts over there, and you're far left with that door where things are a mess.

And there you'll find the Greek letter alpha, which is like the beginning.

When the Bible talks about water, watery chaos, water is a symbol of entropy, of heat loss, right?

Of things not being arranged super well in a way that, hey, could lead to destruction.

Your next scene over there is Thomas and the risen Christ.

And Thomas doesn't immediately worship Jesus.

He says to the disciples, I need to touch the wounds.

Not like, hey, I'm grateful he's back.

I need to touch the wounds.

We don't know if he actually does.

And what Christina has done in the scene is converted the wounds to roses that have now become universal.

But Thomas wants to touch the tense places in Jesus.

He doesn't want to touch Jesus on the shoulder.

He wants to touch the wounds, the places of lament, right?

Then you contract that the spirit is coming to make all things new, and therefore when the good shepherd calls, the lamb comes willingly.

I've never seen an image like that other than here.

Usually Jesus already has the sheep and looks a little put out.

And then in the end, you see the omega where things are realigned, where natural predators come together in harmony, right?

So the wall is a journey, and what do you know in the middle of the wall is the column burying it?

And I don't think what we do, I don't think we do this well if we say, well, dead people have it better.

They're with the Lord.

So in some ways it's great that they're dead.

I mean, that's nonsense, isn't it?

I think it's nonsense.

On the one hand, we say we do believe in eternal life, and on the other hand, when we've spent our life entwining our hearts with somebody else's, so much so that we're not even sure where ours ends and theirs begins.

How could we not lament the lack of their presence any longer?

So I hope I'm making the case for lament.

I wouldn't make it one one other way because this evening begins the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, which is Yom Kippur.

This begins the Day of Atonement.

So just a reminder that this actually has a longer like backup.

It begins with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which we know happened twice.

It happened in 586 BCE, and then it happened in 70 CE or AD.

And in the Jewish mentality, it happened exactly on the same day of the same month.

And that's called Tishba'av.

And so they have this lament for the loss of their temple.

And that begins about a month prior to Rosh Hashanah, which was on September the 11th.

I've told you this before.

Rosh Hashanah is the head of the Jewish New Year, and it's the day in which God writes your fate for the new year.

You have eight days of repentance to change your fate.

This afternoon is it.

Because once we get to Yom Gibbur this evening, your fate is sealed.

Why do I mention that as lament?

Well, lament doesn't mean woe is me.

Again, it means this, it means this gap between our true values and where we're living.

And when we think about the loss of the temple, when we think about the beginning of the new year, it is an opportunity not just to say woe is me, but to do something about it.

This is where we got Lent, by the way.

Lent used to be seven days.

Rosh Hashanah Natsu Yom Kippur is eight.

We decided we needed more than eight days.

That's why it's 40, right?

We needed 40 days of lament.

And in the middle of this lament, what we get to hear is again the image from Revelation is we don't rapture up to heaven.

I just want to be really clear.

You've maybe heard that before.

When we die, we'll go up to heaven.

Did you read the text there?

Did you hear it?

Heaven comes down.

The realm of God is among mortars.

That increases the causal cognitive dissonance in some ways, doesn't it?

Because if you grew up like I did hearing songs like I'll fly away, well, the world's going to hell in a handbasket, so we need to get down here real fast.

Where everything will be good.

And in fact, the sooner we destroy the earth, the sooner we'll leave.

So let's be bad stewards of the environment so we can hasten that.

That's a real thing, my friends.

That's a real thing.

It's just a dumb thing.

We forgot to read the scriptures, right?

And so what does Jesus say in the midst of this?

People who lament are not cursed, they're actually blessed.

Now, blessed here is maybe not the best translation.

The Greek word is makarius, which means joyful.

Joyful are the poor in spirit.

Back sounds oxymoronic.

How could you be joyful to be poor in spirit?

I would like to remind you, as I do annually, of the Zen proverb or the Zen parable.

Maybe you've heard this before.

A man goes into a Zen master and says, I would like to learn Zen.

And the master immediately pulls out two cups of tea in a kettle and begins pouring a cup of tea.

It's halfway there, full.

He doesn't slow down.

It's three quarters, he doesn't slow down.

It's full, he doesn't slow down.

It's overflowing.

The man says to the master, Stop, you're wasting the tea.

It's getting everywhere.

And the master says, Ah, you'd like to learn Zen, but you're so full of your own ideas that whatever I offer you, offer you, will just spill out onto the table.

So if you want to learn Zen, you have to empty yourself.

So maybe there is a blessing in being not so full of ourselves that we have room for spirit and communion and connection.

And I would like to suggest to you that lament sure seems a lot better to me than stoicism or cynicism or just giving up altogether.

I'm not just talking about politics, although I think politics certainly are indicative this season, but I also think there are relationships in which we've just sort of written off and we've become, I don't want to say smug about, but maybe we've become calloused too.

I don't think when we're calloused, I don't think we're poor in spirit.

In the way Jesus advites us to be.

I think actually what we've decided is I will no longer make room for you.

I don't mean that I don't think that means we're full of the Holy Spirit.

I actually think we're that means we're oblivious to it.

And Jesus has the goal to say that people who are poor in spirit, theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.

I mean, I would like to suggest to you that the more I study the gospel, the more I realize most of my spiritual life, I've tried to make the gospel support values I already had, instead of changing my mindset to the mind of Christ.

And so if I'm so full of myself that I'm just gonna slap the label gospel around it, I don't think I'm poor in spirit, at least not in the way that Jesus is inviting us to be.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

God, that's a job I don't want.

I do remind you this annually, Jesus does not say blessed are the peacekeepers.

If you read The Handmaid's Tale and the Hunger Games in these like post-apocalyptic novels, the peacekeepers are essentially the SS and the Gestapo and the KGB.

They're the ones who keep the peace so that you don't rebel.

You ever tried making peace and been thwarted?

Because the other person didn't want it?

Maybe you picked a bad time.

Actually, maybe you picked 70 good times and they still didn't want it.

And Jesus says that's blessed.

More so than the people who settle for the status quo, which looks more like a demilitarized zone than it does peacemaking.

It's easy to build fences and walls along the Mexican border in places like Gaza.

That's a lot easier than actually healing relationships.

If that sounded political, it was.

And is.

Because it's easy.

But Jesus doesn't say blessed is the easy.

In fact, Jesus might actually be saying, Blessed is the hard, the darn nigh impossible.

The thing where we say, God, you're calling us to this, and I can't make it happen, and so I lament that I can't make it happen, even though I know it would be right and good and blessed.

It's almost like Jesus is saying something like, Blessed are those who don't give up on God's values, even though they don't see them happen.

Blessed are people who on the day of their execution are able to say, I've been to the mountaintop, but I'm not getting in myself.

That was Martin Luther King, by the way.

That was also Moses.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

That's not something we say culturally, is it?

Blessed are the shrewd and the savvy and the people who stock up for their retirement, which hey, I'm trying to do as well.

I don't think those are incongruous things.

I don't think they are, saving for retirement and being pure in heart.

But I do see us calling people who are pure in heart naive instead of blessed.

I know you've heard the story before, but it's just gonna stick with me, right?

When I suggested to Kitty Carmen that she had a good heart, and she said, Yeah, I got it from my dad.

And I said, No, no, no, like like you're kind and you're thoughtful, like your heart is good.

She was like, Well, there's no other way to be.

And I said, There's a lot of other ways to be.

And she said, I'm not interested in those.

And one of her family members said she was naive.

Like she didn't know any better.

And I'm gonna tell you, I think that's wrong.

I think she did know better.

She just decided she wasn't gonna settle for that.

I wonder if that isn't what Jesus is saying.

And of course, it is hard to be kind to people who are not kind to you.

That is hard.

And it is also a purity of heart.

Why would we settle for less?

I think probably because we just don't want to put up with the pain.

And I do want to suggest to you that probably one-tenth of the scriptures are about lament, at least one-tenth, because lament is not about whining.

Lament is about saying we worship these values in God.

And we need one another as we live in the gap.

The gap between what God has said and what we've settled for.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And I just want to remind you that the word righteousness actually just means justice.

And I can tell you, I don't want to sound too political again, but here's an easy one.

I go to a dog park frequently, and one of the people at the dog park, who's a churchy person, mentioned to me how awful it is that there are people who leave Methodist hospital here and they have mental illness and they roam the streets because they have mental illness.

And he doesn't know what happens to those people.

And I'm like, well, in Nassau Bay, if they run the streets, they get arrested.

Because we have an ordinance against roaming the streets.

And the person said, Good, that's what should happen.

Wait, people should go to jail because they have a mental illness?

Yeah, that way they'll be safe.

I just don't hear that as a hunger for justice.

I'm sorry.

I hear that as a hunger for security, but I don't think that's a hunger for justice.

I don't think the solution to homelessness is to put people in jail for being homeless.

I know it's easy.

I know it's a thing that we can then say, they're safe and I'm safe.

But there's people in the room who have worked in jails.

Do you know air conditioning is optional in the state of Texas?

So's heat.

Do you know leaking plumbing and sewer pipes are optional?

And that's what you deserve for being homeless?

That doesn't even make sense, does it?

Blessed are those who hunger for justice, not for easy answers.

God, again, I just hope you hear that if you're finding yourself thinking like, hey, God is promising to be among us and I don't see it, join the scriptures.

And Jesus says something really interesting.

Not just that, well, God will make a provision for you later.

Jesus actually says, it is blessed, it is joyful to live in the gap in which we cling to God's values when we don't see them lived out.

If that sounds like cognitive dissonance to you, well, I think it is.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they'll be comforted.

I mean, what are we going to tell people?

Stop mourning.

Your husband's been dead for six months now.

Move along with your life.

Actually, culturally, that is what we tell people.

Because it's easier.

Not because it's right.

We'd like to tell people how long they're allowed to grieve instead of it takes how long it takes.

And here we are in community with you.

Now, I know that we all have different laments.

Some of us are very, very concerned about children's rights.

Some of us are very concerned about ecology.

Some of us are very concerned about Middle Eastern politics, right?

I think we all have different, I don't want to call them pet issues, but different calls based on where we've been.

Which is why I think there's something really lovely about this idea of lamentation corporately.

I don't get to just go home and lament by myself.

I think sometimes we are being called to listen to one another lament in ways we don't.

Like, you ever had a temporary handicap tag?

I've got one right now.

I used to think that having a temporary handicapped tag meant you would get really good parking.

And then people would go out of their way to help you in and out of businesses.

Wow, it took me about three hours to be disabused of that.

But I don't know if you know, but if you're handicapped temporary or not, the doctor's not coming out to get you.

I don't know the medical office where they're gonna send a wheelchair.

I don't know if you know that they have those really great carts that are motorized at places like HEB at Costco, but they're not next to the parking spot.

How do you get them?

And you have to park them back by the store interest.

How do you get back to your vehicle?

Things I never thought about till I needed one.

Oh, I also don't know if you realize that when you're driving one of those cars, that people walk right in front of you and stop.

Because you don't matter to them, because you're injured.

I'm not saying anything wrong and like factually wrong.

This is my experience.

And if you've got one, you've you've had this experience.

I guarantee you you've had this experience.

And Jesus says, Blessed are the people who hold on to the tension between what God wants and how we live.

Blessed are the people who don't give up on what God is going to do.

And that means, I think, as we live between now and then, that we need space to hear one another and say, You are right.

You are right.

Instead of, well, your experience doesn't fit my world, so I'll throw it out.

I think we need room to say, I trust you.

And that isn't right.

I don't know how to solve it, and I'm not gonna let it go.

This I want to suggest to you might be the biggest thing Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes.

I like to serve other people on my terms, and I like to decide when it's done.

I gave you that, we're done.

Maybe this is about accompaniment, which says, I'll travel with you and you'll tell me when we're done.

Blessed are people who accompany people in need or lamenting instead of doing a favor and stopping.

I'm not Jewish and I'm not celebrating Yom Kippur, and I don't believe in the shiksa in which God sort of says, Well, because you're living this way, I'm gonna get you lice.

And I don't think most Jewish people believe in that either.

I actually think if we don't repent and live into this way of lament and holding one another up, we are sealing our fate.

If we don't change, we're sealing our fate.

And what is that faith?

We will be joyless.

We will be joyless.

And we will think that the hollowness of our lives are what God intends.

That's scary.

Now, here's the last good news, because actually, I think that the gospel's wrong.

Jesus goes up to the mountain, then he sits down and he gives the sermon on the mount, right?

It's just that acoustically that won't work.

You can't hear anything at the bottom when the guy is on the top talking down.

So, what every archaeologist will tell you is that people sat on the mountain, and Jesus was at the bottom, so that his voice would carry.

Which means Jesus doesn't talk down to us.

He talked up to us.

Jesus talks us up.

He talks up to us and he says, This is where joy and blessing are to be found, not letting go on God's vision, especially when it's hard, and y'all can do it.

And I think if we uns are gonna do it, well, we'd better do it together.

Because Jesus didn't give the sermon up the mount to one person.

He gave it to a group of people who were going to need to hear one another's laments and hold each other up and remind us in the middle of our pain to hold on to what's holding on to, especially when it's hard.