Sunday, January 25, 2026 - "Beatitudes: Poor in Spirit and Mourning"

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The First United Presbyterian Church

“Beatitudes: Poor in Spirit and Mourning”

Rev. Amy Morgan

January 25, 2026

Matthew 5:1-4

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.”

On Tuesday, a panel of all 17 active judges in the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments regarding laws passed in Texas and Louisiana requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom. The case is almost certainly going to end up in the Supreme Court this year in the latest battle over the separation of church and state. 

Now, it is not my place to weigh in from this pulpit on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. However, it has always puzzled me that Christians in our nation have insisted that the ten commandments should be promoted as the foundational principles of both our country and our faith. No knock on the ten commandments. They are a cherished part of our scriptural tradition and valuable for many reasons. But they were given by God through Moses to the Hebrew people as the starting point for the 613 commandments that comprise the Jewish law. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is depicted as the new Moses, and in chapter 5 of this gospel, Jesus stands on a mountain, just as Moses did when he received the ten commandments, and Jesus, the Christ, offers some teaching that, honestly, might be more accurately, appropriately, and distinctively representative of the Christian faith. Historians can argue about the faith of the Founding Fathers and how that influenced our governing documents. The courts might decide whether or not displaying Jesus’s teachings in public schools violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause. But I wonder how this whole national debate might change if what Christians argued for were scriptures that upended societal values rather than reinforcing penal codes. 

This wondering, and conversations around it with some of you, has led me to develop this sermon series on the first twelve verses of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Commonly known as the Beatitudes, these verses offer a framework for understanding reality in the realm of God. They pronounce “blessing” on several groups of people we would generally not consider fortunate. Instead of depicting a world where people who follow the rules and do the right things are rewarded, or at least avoid punishment, they depict a world where those who suffer, who are oppressed, who are more committed to goodness than to power, are the lucky ones, the recipients of God’s favor. 

This word translated as “blessed,” makarios in Greek, comes from a root word meaning “to become long or large.” The people Jesus describes in the Beatitudes experience a more expansive life. It isn’t blessedness or happiness in the sense of getting everything we want or even need. Makarios, blessed, means these folks live a larger, more comprehensive, more inclusive life. A life that takes everything in and takes nothing for granted. A life that sees the bigger picture. A life with a more holistic perspective. 

According to one Greek lexicon, makarios “frames a theology of blessedness that is simultaneously present, ethical, and eschatological.” It describes life in this moment. It prescribes a way of living in community. And it points to a future reality that is not yet fully realized. 

The Beatitudes are more than simple words of comfort and future promise for those who are not feeling very blessed. They are meant to radically alter how we see and experience life in this world. They should drastically change how we operate as a society. They could shape our approach to justice, education, and every aspect of governance and civil society. 

So perhaps Christians don’t advocate for the display of the Beatitudes in public schools because they are, in fact, far too dangerous. 

For instance, what if we took seriously Jesus’s pronouncement of blessing on the “poor in spirit?” 

This word, poor, ptochos in Greek, depicts more than just material poverty. It literally means crouched or cowered and suggests a state of public destitution and dependency. Now, Matthew gets criticized for adding “in spirit” to this state of being, because some might argue that Luke’s version, which just says, “the poor,” takes more seriously the economic justice matters of God’s kin-dom. But poverty of spirit, a spiritual state in which one is utterly incapable of helping oneself, feels an awful lot like what we might call depression. And depression, mental illness in general, impacts humans of all socio-economic strata. It can be incapacitating. It is isolating. It is still heavily stigmatized in our society that condemns any perceived emotional weakness. 

And this is the FIRST group of people Jesus says are blessed. And he says that “theirs IS the kingdom of heaven.” Currently, in their cowering state of suffering, they possess all the riches of God’s realm. This is not a future hope – when they get treatment, when they feel better, when they’ve got themselves sorted out, when they look back on this experience, they’ll realize something profound and see God’s kin-dom all around them. No, right now, in their darkness and despair, they are blessed, they are holding the deed to the real estate of heavenly wonder. 

That sounds super ridiculous. Especially if you’ve ever experienced this state of spiritual poverty or lived with someone who has. There’s nothing enriching about it, no happiness to boast about. This almost sounds like a cruel lie. 

But there are folks who are or have been “poor in spirit” who know Jesus is telling the truth. That something about this utter, helpless despair is also deeply true and spiritual and connected to the ground of our being. Author Andrew Solomon describes how poverty of spirit connected him to his own vulnerability and made him more aware of other people’s vulnerability.  In an interview with Krista Tippett for her NPR radio program “On Being,” Solomon said depression made him “both more loving and more receptive to love…And I suppose…that that has also given me a sense that some abstract love in the world, which I suppose we could call the love of God, is essential and significant, and it has been increased in me, both in terms of my appreciation for it and my feeling of being loved or held.” 

Quaker teacher and author Parker Palmer was also interviewed by Tippett about his experience with depression. He told her that depression enabled him to discover the ground of his being, which is how theologian Paul Tillich described God. The full-body experience of depression caused him to see God’s incarnation in a new light and to take our own embodiment more seriously. His therapist once asked him, “Parker, you seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?” A wise spiritual friend also counseled him that “the closer you get to the light, the closer you also get to the darkness.” Parker understood that to mean that “to move close to God is to move close to everything that human beings have ever  experienced.”

In my own experience with poverty of spirit, it felt like I was suddenly living in an alien landscape, a new and unfamiliar world. And while I absolutely hated it, and I wanted to go back to the life I had where I could function and pretend to be happy, I also knew this place I was in was the realest place I’d ever been, and I knew it was where I was going to have to live the rest of my life. It took a long time to recognize that this place, this reality, was the realm of God, and to feel in any way favored by God for having the eyes to see it. But the realm of God is not the place where people who follow the rules and win the races and have all the things are blessed. It really is the place where those who are crouched, and broken, and embodied, can see the light that is always present in the darkness. 

What if this was the first thing we wanted everyone to know about the Christian faith? That God’s kingdom belongs to people who can love so much it almost destroys them, who can live the fullness of human life, who can see in the dark?

And then, what if we told them that those who mourn are blessed because they will be comforted? The mourning Jesus is talking about is grief so severe it cannot be hidden. It takes possession of a person and is embarrassingly public. It isn’t grief masked by anger and threats of revenge. It is pure, raw, embodied grief. 

This week, I asked Dick Webster, a retired minister in our congregation currently under hospice care, what he thought about Jesus calling those who mourn, blessed. He said that “to mourn is a blessing.” He talked about the dangers of not mourning, the anguish of those who can’t mourn. And he said (and told me to quote him), “if you have not grieved, you have to ask yourself if you have loved.” 

Comedian Stephen Colbert has been open about his feelings of gratitude for grief, the blessedness he’s experienced as someone who has mourned significant losses. He said in an interview with Andersen Cooper that those who grieve are lucky, in a way, because “that means they've lived long enough to experience the loss of someone…that they have loved or been loved by enough that it deeply affects them.” He’s concerned that our society has stopped talking about and honoring grief because, he says, “it's this thirst that everyone has and no one's pouring any water for anybody.”

Jesus promises that those who mourn will be comforted, and this word is parakaleo in Greek, like Paraclete, a legal advocate. It means literally to call someone near. In our society, those who mourn are often isolated, cut off from the world that somehow continues to spin without their loved one in it. But Jesus promises that mourning will close the distance between us. Allowing that grief to be visible and public, to participate in public rituals of mourning, brings us near to each other so that we can comfort those who mourn. In God’s realm, grief draws us together. This is truly a radically counter-cultural message today.  

This is who we are, not as Christians, but as human beings living in the already-but-not-yet-complete realm of God. Jesus’s statements aren’t commandments or judgments. They are blessings. They are invitations to see the world as it really is. And we might not like it at first. Because it is a strange landscape, totally contrary to our familiar surroundings. But it is more real than any place we have ever known. 

We live in a world where those who are poor in spirit and mourning are blessed. What if that was the message greeting schoolchildren living with abusive parents or being bullied online? What if that was the message greeting those arriving at a courthouse to be judged as they are filled with self-loathing and regret? It might be a perversion of the Constitution, but it might be a better representation of the Christian faith. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.