A Sermon on Matthew 5:1-20
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

We thought we were moving to a quieter place. Nine years ago, moving from a little house a quarter mile off I-94, on a busy-ish residential street, and just a couple of miles from downtown Minneapolis, the quiet of our new neighborhood stuck out. Funny thing: even though it was close to the airport, on the few visits we made to the neighborhood as we considered buying our new house, somehow the plane traffic on those days was routed to other runways, giving the impression that we had found a magical triangle of quiet between air traffic patterns.  Walking the neighborhood, it felt good, a little like a resort town with the crowds of picnickers and hikers coming to the neighborhood to visit Minnehaha Falls and Lake Nokomis. It was so different from the urban-feeling space we were leaving. And so, we moved in.

It didn’t take long to learn that we had not, in fact, found a magical triangle of quiet. There’s the normal airline traffic that definitely flies over us, also the National Guard transport planes that we hear idle for what seems like hours before making their runs. There’s the hubbub and closed roads of the Twin Cities Marathon and other city-wide events. There’s the occasional drag racers going down Hiawatha when we’re trying to sleep. We do live in the city, after all, and noise is a byproduct of having neighbors.

Most of those noises fall into the background now, but over the last two months, another noise has come daily: the sound of helicopter rotors. DHS helicopters regularly patrol the Whipple Building, just a couple miles from us, and make surveillance runs to other parts of the city all the time. Every time I hear helicopters, my mind returns to the unrest after George Floyd’s murder, the last time helicopters were a constant presence in our lives, the last time Minneapolis grappled with the aggressive, often menacing face of those whose job it is to enforce our laws. These past two months, I’ve been reminded that helicopters signify that my neighbors are in danger.

Will you pray with me? Loving creator, first cause and steadfast presence, come near, we pray. We find ourselves in the latest in a seemingly unending string of human-made disasters, willingly created by powerful men bent on manufacturing false enemies to distract from who the true enemies are and what they do in our midst. In this gathered community, speak to us through Jesus’ teachings and our shared experiences, and ground us, strengthen us in the truth that lives in our own hearts: that we are all God’s children, that care for others and ourselves is holy, that we can trust the path marked by love. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts together be acceptable to you, gracious God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week we explored the unspoken landscape of occupation just out of view, underneath the story of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples, and how those nets didn’t drop spontaneously or miraculously; social forces prepared Simon Peter and the others to leap into discipleship. The text goes on to tell us that this small band of four went from the lakeshore and accompanied Jesus as he taught in the synagogues and healed, “curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” (Matt 4:23) Crowds from all over, from Capernaum where they started, but also from Jerusalem and further south, and even from outside Israel, began to follow him. And as the crowds began to form, we read, Jesus left this crowd of seekers of wisdom and healing, and takes his four disciples up a mountain to tell them what they would be up to among the crowds that would surround them until Jesus’ murder. He gives the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ first big data dump in Matthew’s gospel.

He begins with what are now known as the Beatitudes: a list of people who receive God’s particular blessings. He lists folks who are despondent, whose spirits shrink to disappearing; folks who have experienced deep loss; folks with little status, few belongings, and no family connections; those who yearn to see proof of human goodness.

But Jesus goes on to tell the disciples that these are only half of the community of God’s blessed. The other half are the responders to all that hurt: folks who show mercy to others; those authentic souls whose hearts are pure, who trust their inner wisdom; those who actively do peace; those who disrupt the status quo for the sake of the marginalized and pay a price for caring.

Then Jesus pivots from the abstract, looks directly at his disciples and tells them, when we teach and heal and show mercy and get punished for it, we are blessed.

The drive to care for those in pain is undeniable, Jesus says, because that is who we are. We are salt. The love and mercy that flow unbidden from us makes everything it touches better. We, our mercy, are salt for the world. I would say that Jesus asks a trick question to emphasize this point. What happens to salt that has lost its saltiness, he asks. The answer, I would suggest, is that it can’t! Salt’s nature is to be salty, just as ours is to be creatures of mercy. To deny this is to deny our own nature.

And we are light. Our selfless acts – our righteousness – illuminate a path for everyone around us.

Before coming to the final teaching at the end of this passage, we need to re-ground ourselves in Jesus’ historical context. First Century Israel was awash in geopolitical conflict, with a dominant Roman culture exerting itself on an ancient Jewish landscape, which, as I mentioned last week, included appointing the head priests and scribes to the Jewish temple. Israel’s leaders were not up to them. Everything, maybe especially God, was contested. In those turbulent times, Israel’s leaders and citizens struggled to find a place of both authenticity and survival. Some wanted to fight their occupiers, some wanted to lay low and out of evil’s path, some looked to the horizon for a savior.

Jesus speaks into this landscape when he says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matt 5:17) In other words, to those who would respond to Jesus’ teachings that they are just his opinion and not based in the Hebrew Bible, he responds that he’s not rewriting anything; he’s pointing past the letter of the law to its essential spirit and naming how to embody, or fulfill, the law’s spirit in that turbulent moment. And what is the spirit of the law? As the prophet Micah wrote, “to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Today, our leaders send out helicopters to watch our community. They weaponize our laws, turning the very ones passed to protect the vulnerable from the excesses of hate and power back again on the powerless. They claim to be acting to uphold the law, but we see that US citizens and others here legally are abducted; we hear that the laws meant to protect the stranger in our legal system, and ensure health care, due process, and common dignity are ignored. History will show the lack of good faith those claims of upholding the law carry.

How will we respond? Matthew’s hope was that we would hear Jesus’ words to the disciples and receive them as our own, that we would wear the mantles of salt and light of the world courageously and humbly, that we would resist the temptations that surround us on all sides to shrink back to a space of false comfort, or flee to a quieter place, or lash out in violence, or argue over questions of ideological purity. Salt and light are, after all, in Jesus’ words, who we are. To be anything else would be to deny the delicious and sparkling gifts sewn onto our hearts before we were born. And so, let us do the work, which is not easy but is clear, of allowing fear to drop away to reveal our true selves. And when we do, let us be the blessing God promises to the poor in spirit, the mourning and the meek, and those who hunger and thirst for righteous. Jesus tells us what we know already: that our own blessing arrives in the giving. Amen.