Sunday, February 8, 2026 - "Beatitudes: Mercy, Purity, Peace"

Watch the Sermon here

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Beatitudes: Mercy, Purity, Peace”

Rev. Amy Morgan

February 8, 2026

Matthew 5:7-9

Jesus taught them, saying:

“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 the arrogant,

For theirs is the kingdom of their own company.

Blessed are the superstars,

For the magnificence; 

in their light we understand better our own insignificance.

Blessed are the filthy rich,

For you can only truly own what you give away -

Like your pain.

Blessed are the bullies,

For one day they will have to stand up to themselves.

Blessed are the liars,

For the truth can be awkward.

These are the beatitudes that bridge two songs on the band U2’s 2017 album Songs of Experience. The first song is about fighting to reclaim love and liberty and the second is about the American dream and identity. The poem in between, what one theologian calls “anti-beatitudes,” is clearly meant as a rebuke of our values and an invitation to communal self-reflection. 

If it stings a little to hear an Irish band critiquing American culture, we might get a small sense of how Jesus’s beatitudes would have landed in first century Palestine. These statements were pointed indictments of the Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultures that intermingled in his region. Jesus is a part of these cultures, but also stands outside of them. In the Beatitudes, and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount that follows, Jesus uses language and metaphors that speak directly to issues of the day, to philosophies, slogans, and assumptions that most of his audience accepted as gospel truth, and he flips these ideas on their heads in much the same way U2 upends the way Americans see ourselves and our values. 

In the fourth of Jesus’s beatitudes in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus addresses wealth, greed, and self-reliance by talking about mercy. The Greek word used here has an English decedent that is very fun to say: eleemosynary. Eleemosynary, in English, is defined as relating to alms or charity. It is a term that has no meaning outside of systems of economic inequality. No one must rely on anyone else’s charity if everyone has enough. 

But in Greek, the term means something more akin to compassion, though it carries a connotation of action. It isn’t just feeling bad for someone. It is doing something about that feeling. It is love in action. The 4^th Century Christian Bishop, Gregory of Nyssa, preached that mercy should be defined as “voluntary misery caused by other people's ills… a loving self-identification with those vexed by grievous events.”

In the Hebrew scriptures, the parallel term, rachum, is central to God’s character, as the one who is merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Jesus’s first-century Jewish audience would have immediately recognized this connection and seen it as a critique of those behaviors, attitudes, and systems within their own faith and culture that obscured God’s merciful image. 

Jesus is not just making hopeful future promises to those who are kind-hearted. He’s not just saying, “if you’re nice, people will be nice back to you.” He’s holding up the mirror of God’s image, the divine image in which all human beings were created, and inviting his listeners to see how well or poorly they are reflecting that image. Are they participating in systems of economic injustice? Are they doing anything to alleviate someone else’s suffering? Are they reflecting the image of a merciful, patient, loving God? These are the questions Jesus is prompting us to ask ourselves in this beatitude. 

But he isn’t asking us to feel guilty or beat ourselves up about what we see in that mirror. Gregory of Nyssa – in the 4^th Century, mind you – devotes a whole section of his sermon on this verse to having mercy on ourselves. He proposes that the merciful will receive mercy, because only those who are merciful to others will be able to be merciful toward themselves and truly receive the mercy of God that is always offered to us. The tragic inverse of this beatitude, of course, is that those who are not merciful also cannot receive mercy, even from themselves, and certainly not from God, even if it is offered. 

The next beatitude, which pronounces blessing on the “pure in heart,” contains a term that was familiar to people living in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman empire. The word “pure” is katharos in Greek, from which we get the English words “catharsis” and “catheter.” It’s a medical term meaning “to purge” or drain out bodily fluids. But it was made very popular by Aristotle, who developed this term into a philosophical concept. He taught that we should experience catharsis, a purgation of pent-up emotions, by witnessing tragedy in the theater. Seeing the suffering of another human being should lead us to feel pity, which is another word for mercy, and fear, but fear in the sense that “this could also happen to me” as we identify with the one who is suffering. 

So the ability to be “pure in heart” flows directly out of being merciful. “A loving self-identification with those vexed by grievous events,” as Gregory of Nyssa defined mercy, results in catharsis, a purging of emotions that leaves us feeling at peace. 

Jesus says that the blessing for the “pure in heart,” however, is not peace, per se, but the ability to “see God.” The Hebrew scriptures are very clear that no one can see God and live, and the stories of visual encounters with God are very carefully constructed to protect this reality. The Apostle Paul affirms, too, that no one has seen God or can see God. 

But God can be seen, can be made visible, through what God produces. God can be seen through God’s children.

And the ones who will be called God’s children are the peacemakers. The word “peacemaker” in Greek comes from a word meaning “to join or tie together into a whole.” Like the Jewish concept of shalom, it is not simply the absence of violence but truly a sense of wholeness, of all essential parts being joined together. 

First-century Palestine languished under Roman occupation, with the Pax Romana enforced by military might. Against that backdrop, Jesus offered a radically different peace rooted in reconciliation with God and neighbor. Early Christians adopted this identity. As the early church father, Tertullian, noted, “We are a society of peace.”

But before we can be a society of peace, we must be peacemakers within ourselves. Gregory of Nyssa noted that “A peacemaker is someone who gives peace to someone else; but no one could give to another what he does not possess himself…[God] intends the grace of peace to be abundantly multiplied for you, in order that your own life may become a cure for other people's sickness.”

The blessing of being called “children of God” does not indicate a change in name or title. The word used here means to “call forth, bid, or invite.” Peacemakers are invited to be the family of God; they are called to live as a community that upholds God’s reputation. 

In these three beatitudes, we see mercy flowing into purity of heart and purity of heart leading to peace within ourselves which empowers us to become peacemakers. Identifying with those who suffer, being purged of pent-up fear and rage, and seeking the wholeness of our community – these are the paths to blessing, to receiving mercy, seeing God at work in the world, being invited to belong to God and one another. 

This all sounds wonderful, but we must remember that these words were spoken into a world defined by economic inequality, dogmatic religious condemnation, military occupation, and cultural divisiveness. Jesus’s teachings were dangerous in this setting, not comforting. They criticized some of the values his audience held most dear, even if they would not have said so out loud. To believe Jesus would be like stepping off the cliff of everything you’ve known to be right and true and hoping you’d step onto an invisible path instead of plummeting to your demise. 

That’s precisely what F. Kefe Sempangi did when he truly put these beatitudes to the test. Sempangi founded the Presbyterian Church in Uganda during the dictatorship of Idi Amin. Mass murder, torture, and brutality terrorized the land. Sempangi and his congregation of nearly fourteen thousand members became targets of the regime. On Easter Day in 1973 he preached to over 7,000 people, who had traveled from far and wide to attend his church. After the service, a number of Amin’s assassins followed him back to the vestry and closed the door behind them. Five rifles were pointed at his face.

“We are going to kill you for disobeying Amin’s orders,” said the captain. “If you have something to say, say it before you die.”

Sempangi remembers, “I could only stare at him. For a full moment I felt the full force of his rage….From far away I heard a voice, and I was astonished to realize that it was my own.

‘I do not need to plead my own cause….I am a dead man already. My life is dead and hidden with Christ. It is your lives that are in danger, you are dead in your sins. I will pray to God that after you have killed me, He will spare you from eternal destruction.’”

The leader stared at Sempangi without speaking. Then he lowered his gun and said,

“Will you pray for us now?”

“Yes, I will pray for you.”

“Father in heaven…you who have forgiven men in the past, forgive these men also. Do not let them perish in their sins but bring them to yourself.”

It was a simple prayer, prayed in deep fear. “When I lifted my head,” Sempangi observed, “the men standing in front of me were not the same men who had followed me into the vestry.”

From that day forward, converted by the mercy of Christ, the purity of another human’s heart, the true desire for peacemaking, the gunmen vowed to protect Sempangi from Amin’s assassins. Sempangi stepped off that cliff, and lived to tell about it.

Theologian Karl Barth, author of “The Barmen Declaration,” which was written in protest of the Nazi influence on the German church, observed that “the whole friend-foe relationship” is invalidated by the cross of Christ. Angry denunciation, retaliation, and killing are all ruled out.”

The deeper we go into the beatitudes, the harder they are to hear. They sting a little, and they should. They are a critique of not just the first century, but of every century of human existence. Because we live in a creation that is groaning for redemption. We live in the tension of the realm of God that has arrived but is far from complete. 

Even so, we are offered the invitation to step off that cliff, to trust that Jesus knew what he was talking about, to believe that mercy and compassion and peacemaking will bring us together and make us whole. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.