Matthew 5:13-20

This morning, I would like to begin with an explanation. As I have stated before, I feel I have an obligation to speak, to speak truth in love, and to speak truth to power. For much of the last 15 years or so, the Gospel imperative to love God and love neighbor has been central in my preaching, teaching, and ministry, so much so that sometimes I think people get sick of hearing me say it. But say it I do because I must.

Earlier this week, a minister and theologian I respect posted an essay with the title, “You’re right to hate him. Good People do.” The subject of the essay is the President of the United States, and it came out shortly after the disgusting, racist post by him overnight.

Just to clarify, the person who wrote the essay makes a living off their writing, so the more sensational the headline, the more people will click on the article. We call that “clickbait.” This is an important point because you get paid by the click and not for the substance. And I will confess that, although I do not get paid for any of my writings or videos, getting your “click count” up is all part of the game.

In response to his essay, I posted that as a follower of Jesus Christ, I am commanded to love everyone, including my enemies. As one who considers himself a progressive-leaning liberal theologian, everyone means everyone, and that is the usual position my other progressive and liberal leaning friends take. We say things like “it does not matter what their sexual orientation or immigration status is, we have to love them.” We speak about human dignity, and we wring our hands at how divisive our country has become in “this political climate.” And then he posts an essay saying it is okay to hate. I’m sorry, but that makes you a hypocrite.

But what was more shocking was the response I received to my comment.

So let me say this as clearly as I can: Jesus commanded that we love God, we love our neighbors, and we love our enemies, PERIOD! We cannot speak about loving the immigrant with one breath and with another say it is okay to hate the President because we don’t like what he is doing. That is the textbook definition of a hypocrite.

Look, I don’t think it is any secret that I stand in direct opposition to almost everything this administration has done and probably will do. I have repeatedly condemned the excessive use of force, the constant name-calling, the taking of benefits, and all the rest. I do not believe the man is a nice person, but that does not give me the right to hate him.

To put a fine point on it, hate is what got us all here.

I have been struggling with the answer to the question: how did we get here? We got here because we allowed ourselves to hate the other for no other reason than that they are different. When we hate another person, we remove their humanity and dignity, and it gives us license to do what we want. Hate is destructive, hate injures, hate causes violence, hate prevents us from seeing the divine image in the other person, and hate kills. Hate rage posts racist videos in the middle of the night, hate is what makes us feel the laws do not apply to us, and hate is what allows us to use a five-year-old as bait so we can arrest his father. As a follower of Jesus, I am not allowed to hate.

I can hate everything someone stands for. I can take to the streets in peaceful protest dressed as a dinosaur and carrying signs. I can speak up and speak out against policies. I can call my elected officials and voice my opposition. I can do all of that, but I cannot allow myself to hate.

Now, I will confess that I did not always think this way, and it has taken me many years of deep soul searching to get to this place. It has taken me a long time to realize that I cannot let hate win the day; I cannot let hate eat away at me like a cancer, because that is what it is.

My friends, hate is the easiest thing to do, and it gives us a pass for how we react. Love takes work, and it costs a lot.

In the Gospel we heard this morning, Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world… Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:13–16

Jesus does not say, “You should try to become salt.” He does not say, “You might someday become light if you are faithful enough.” He says, “You are.”

This ties in with the portion of the Statement of Faith we have today, Christ “calls us into his church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship, to be his servants in the service of humanity, to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil, to share in Christ’s baptism and eat at his table, to join him in his passion and victory.”

These are strong words. This is not only who we are, but what we are called to be!

We often prefer joy without cost. We would like resurrection without Good Friday—transformation without sacrifice. I would much rather stand here and preach the love of God without having to rely on references to recent events. But that is not where we are, and there is a cost associated with preaching a constant message of love.

Jesus never disguises the reality of discipleship. He tells us plainly, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke prophetically about the danger of what he called cheap grace. Writing during the rise of Nazi Germany, he warned the church that faith stripped of discipleship becomes spiritually hollow and morally dangerous. He wrote:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

Cheap grace allows us to admire Jesus without following him. It allows us to speak of faith while avoiding the demands of love. Cheap grace allows us to be concerned about ourselves and our so-called “personal relationship with Jesus” while ignoring what is happening to our siblings in Christ.

But Bonhoeffer reminds us that the Gospel offers costly grace. Costly grace calls us to follow Christ into places where compassion demands courage. It calls us to embody love not as sentiment, but as lived commitment.

And yet, costly grace is not grim. It is filled with joy. The joy of discovering that when we lose our lives for love’s sake, we find them renewed. The joy of living with purpose shaped by God’s dream for creation. I cannot walk around filled with hate and being required to hate people just because they are different; life is too short for that.

I want that Joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart, I want that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart to stay!

The Statement of Faith reminds us that Christ calls us “to be his servants in the service of humanity.”

In a culture obsessed with power and visibility, servanthood appears weak. Yet Jesus consistently redefines power. He kneels before his disciples and washes their feet. I need us to really think about this: God made flesh, ties an apron around his waist, kneels, and washes his friends’ feet. Washing someone’s feet was considered the lowest job in the household, and the God who created all there is knelt and washed feet.

Sure, we like to think of the strong, manly Jesus, the one who flipped over the tables in the temple, but there is also this Jesus, the servant who washes feet, binds wounds, and feeds people. And after he washes the feet of his friends, he says, “I have set you an example.” (John 13:15)

Servanthood is not a weakness. It is holy strength.

Bonhoeffer warned that the church must not merely bandage wounds beneath the wheels of injustice but must sometimes jam a spoke into the wheel itself. Discipleship calls us beyond charity into solidarity.

This is where Matthew’s Gospel pushes us even further. After naming us salt and light, Jesus says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17)

Jesus is not dismantling moral responsibility. He is deepening it. He is calling us beyond external compliance into transformed hearts. He tells his followers that their righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, not by becoming more rigid, but by becoming more compassionate, more faithful, more rooted in love.

True righteousness is not about rule-keeping. It is about love embodied in daily life. It is justice lived out in relationships, policies, and community life. It is holiness expressed through mercy.

The Statement of Faith calls us “to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil.”

To proclaim the Gospel is to announce that in Jesus Christ, love is stronger than hatred, mercy stronger than judgment, and life stronger than death.

But a proclamation requires visibility. Light hidden under a basket cannot guide anyone home.

The powers of evil often appear quietly, in systems that deny dignity, in policies that abandon the vulnerable, in narratives that teach us to fear difference or ignore suffering. Cheap grace tells us to remain silent for comfort’s sake. Costly grace calls us to faithful resistance grounded in love.

One of the comments on my post asked, “Are we not supposed to hate the anti-Christ?”  I replied that we have to get past thinking the Anti-Christ is a person, the Anti-Christ is anything that stands in opposition to Jesus, and if we hate, we have become the Anti-Christ. Sometimes it is difficult to look in the mirror.

The church must never confuse peace with silence. The Gospel is good news, but good news is not always easy news. It challenges every structure that diminishes the sacred worth of God’s children.

The Statement of Faith reminds us that we are called “to join him in his passion and victory.”

The Christian life invites us to walk with Christ not only in resurrection triumph but also in sacrificial love. To join Christ in his passion is to stand beside those who suffer, those who mourn, those pushed to the margins of society.

Bonhoeffer ultimately lived this truth. He trusted that costly grace leads not to despair but to resurrection hope.

The risen Christ still bears the wounds of Good Friday, reminders that suffering does not have the final word in God’s economy of grace.

Friends, the church is called to be a sacramental community, a people through whom invisible grace becomes visible love.

The temptation toward cheap grace remains strong. It whispers that faith should remain comfortable and safely removed from the world’s pain. But Christ calls us into costly grace, grace that transforms us, stretches us, and sends us into the world as agents of healing and justice.

We will not live this calling perfectly. We will stumble. We will grow weary. We will sometimes fail. And yes, we will hate.

Yet God remains faithful.

Christ continues to gather us at water and table. Christ continues to call us to shine with love in a world hungry for hope.

So let us remember our baptism. Let us come to the table hungry for grace. Let us reject cheap grace and embrace the costly grace that leads to an abundant life.

Let us be salt that preserves dignity.

Let us be the light that reveals hope.

Let us serve boldly. Proclaim courageously. Resist faithfully. Love extravagantly.

For the One who calls us is the One who sustains us. And the One who invites us into discipleship is the One who leads us from death into life, from fear into hope, and from isolation into beloved community.

Amen.

This morning, we finish the section about God. These lines from the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith are said so often that they risk becoming familiar without being fully heard. We are invited to linger with these words:

“He seeks in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.
He judged men and nations by his righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.”

These lines may sound like they are pulling us in two different directions. Holy love sounds welcoming, gentle, and reassuring. Judgment makes many of us uncomfortable. And sin, well, that word carries a great deal of baggage. But the Statement of Faith does not shy away from holding these realities together, because Scripture itself refuses to separate love from truth, or grace from moral seriousness.

The Statement of Faith refuses to let us separate what God has joined together. Love without truth becomes sentimentality. Judgment without love becomes cruelty. The faith we proclaim insists that God’s love is strong enough to tell the truth, and God’s judgment is rooted in a desire to heal rather than to harm.

My theological position is not to speak of sin as inherited guilt or human worthlessness. I don’t believe that people are born condemned, broken beyond repair, or separated from God by some ancient biological failure. I believe we need to acknowledge something far more recognizable and honest: that to be human is to be finite, fragile, and vulnerable to distortion.

We are not born sinful in the sense of being morally corrupt from birth. But we are born into a world already bent out of shape, into histories of injustice, systems of inequality, patterns of fear and violence that predate us and shape us long before we are aware of them. We arrive not guilty, but conditioned. Not damned but disoriented.

Theologian Paul Tillich named this condition estrangement. Sin, he said, is separation, from God, from others, from us, not a moral defect passed down through biology, but an existential condition that arises from freedom and fear.

In this light, sin is real, but it is not the denial of human worth. It is the distortion of human freedom. We are not sinners because we are human; we sin because we are human and afraid.

God’s response is not rejection but seeking love.

“He seeks in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.”

Aimlessness is a profoundly pastoral word. It acknowledges something deeply human: the experience of drifting, of losing our center, of waking up one day unsure how we got where we are or what our lives are oriented towards.

Before sin becomes willful wrongdoing, it is often a loss of direction. It is forgetting who we are, whose we are, and what we are for. Scripture names this: sheep without a shepherd, people wandering, hearts that have lost their way.

Long before sin becomes deliberate wrongdoing, it is often disorientation. Augustine understood this well. He described sin not first as lawbreaking, but as disordered love. In his Confessions, Augustine wrote that the human heart is restless until it rests in God, not because humans are evil by nature, but because we so easily love the wrong things in the wrong order. Aimlessness, in this sense, is loving lesser things as though they were ultimate.

God’s holy love addresses that condition first. God seeks not to condemn, but to reorient. To save us from aimlessness is to call us back to purpose, to restore our capacity to live in right relationship with God, neighbor, and the world.

But love does not stop at reassurance. Love also tells the truth. And so, the Statement continues: “He judged men and nations by his righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.” Here is where we need to pay close attention to the scope of that judgment. Not just individuals. Not just private morality. Men and nations.

God’s judgment is not about tallying personal failures or policing moral purity. It is about naming where human freedom has gone wrong, where fear has overtaken trust, where self-interest has eclipsed responsibility, where systems we benefit from harming others.

The prophets were relentless on this point. They did not accuse people of being born sinful; they accused nations of becoming unjust. They did not judge humanity’s existence, but humanity’s choices. They named economic exploitation, political violence, religious hypocrisy, and indifference to suffering as violations of God’s righteousness.

Ezekiel 16:49, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

Baptist theologian and Pastor Walter Rauschenbusch would later say that the doctrine of sin is the religious interpretation of a universal social fact. Sin is not only personal; it is structural. It is embedded in systems that reward greed, excuse violence, and render suffering invisible. And God’s judgment is not directed at human existence itself, but at the ways we organize our common life.

This is where many of us become uncomfortable. We are often willing to accept a God who forgives individual shortcomings. We are less comfortable with a God who judges nations, who asks hard questions about policies, priorities, and power.

Scripture insists that God’s righteousness is not confined to private virtue. The apostles carried this witness forward. Mary’s song announces a God who brings down the powerful and lifts the lowly. Jesus speaks more harshly to those who benefit from unjust systems than to those who struggle within them. The poor are not the problem; the system that keeps them poor is. And those who benefit are.

In this view, sin is not so much a stain as it is an estrangement. We are estranged from God when we forget our dependence. We are estranged from one another when we allow difference to become hierarchy. And we are estranged from ourselves when fear shapes our lives more than love.

And God’s judgment, declared through prophets and apostles, is not meant to crush us, but to awaken us. Judgment is clarity. It is the moment when the truth breaks through our justifications and calls us back to what is real and life-giving.

Judgment, then, is not about punishment. It is about truth. It is what happens when God’s holy love refuses to lie about the cost of our choices.

Reinhold Niebuhr captured this tension beautifully when he said that humans are both capable of justice and inclined toward injustice. That is why love must be joined to accountability. Without judgment, love becomes naïve. Without love, judgment becomes destructive.

And here is the crucial point: the God who judges is the same God who seeks to save. Judgment is not the final word; it is a necessary word along the way. God exposes brokenness not to shame us, but to heal us. God names injustice not to condemn humanity, but to call us back to responsibility.

Friends, this is a faith that takes humanity seriously, our freedom, our responsibility, and our capacity for change. It refuses to despair about human nature, even as it refuses to deny human failure. It trusts that grace is stronger than estrangement, and that love is more powerful than fear.

We are not saved from being human. We are saved into our humanity, called to live awake, purposeful, and accountable in a world God refuses to abandon.

May we hear God’s judgment not as a threat, but as an invitation. May we receive God’s love not as permission to remain unchanged, but as courage to live differently.

For the One who seeks us in holy love is still calling people and nations toward righteousness, justice, and life.

Amen.