The Adventurous Lectionary – Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany – February 1, 2026
Micah 6:1-8
Psalm 15
I Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 5:1-12
My reflections on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany began as I preparing for a snowstorm to sweep through the Maryland suburbs I call home. Services for Sunday were already cancelled and I was prepared to preach on Zoom. Just a time zone away, clergy friends were protesting and being arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for resisting the evils of power hungry potentates who put their faith in state sponsored violence, retribution, and transactional political and spiritual salvation. Their followers are comfortable following such behaviors because the god they worship, beneath the loving Jesus, is wrathful, transactional, and easily bruised by human agency, a god of conditional love whose wrath must be quenched by the death of his son.
And as I wrote these words, I read the newsfeed of another act of state sponsored violence intended to provoke violence and then come down with the full force “law.” Micah and Jesus would seek justice, protest evil, and look for God in all God’s distressing and destructive disguises whether in violent ICE or the greater violence of the White House.
As I was reflecting on the scriptures for Epiphany 4, I remembered the counsel of James Baldwin: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” We must expect great things from God in terms of God’s presence in our lives and moral character, and we must expect great things from ourselves in our own moral character and relationships.
Today’s countercultural scriptures turn our social and political norms upside down. They see spiritual growth as connected with social and economic relationality, empathy, and downward mobility. The race is not always to the swift. The powerful don’t always win. Independence is a vice, and interdependence a virtue. Justice trumps profit and humility outlasts celebrity. Greatness demands humanity and success requires sharing Political power plays and bullying will end in ruin for politicians and their nations.
Micah charts this week’s lectionary adventure. The prophet proclaims God’s loving kindness. God has gracefully led the people to freedom. Without God they would be an enslaved people. Grace abounds, but grace also invites. Grace may even demand creative transformation so that we become our best selves, grace-receivers and grace-givers. The gracefulness of God calls us to privilege gratitude and grace in our personal lives and politics, embodied in ways that support our brothers and sisters. Ubuntu, “I am because of you. We are because of each other.” The US needs NATO as much as NATO needs the US, prevaricating politicians need undocumented workers and need to say “thank you” to the currently traumatized residents who make our country work! And our nation needs protesters and resisters and the repentance of our leaders to survive.
God’s primarily interest is not grand buildings and temples and glorious liturgies, or the amassing of wealth and power. God desires economic and relational justice, and care for the least of these. If you don’t hear the cries of the poor, you won’t hear God’s voice in worship. God’s love challenges us to be lovers of the least of these and supporters of the suppressed and surprising.
As a daily walker predawn in my Potomac, Maryland, neighborhood, I appreciate Micah’s counsel to walk humbly with your God. When we move our bodies, our spirits and minds move as well, new vistas nurture new understandings of reality. We are on the move, never static, and learning about God’s ways with every step we take. God desires humility in relationship to the Divine. This humility is not a new form of subservience, for those who walk are agents of their destiny, but recognition that God’s vision and values are characterized by justice-seeking and gracefulness. Humility comes from strength and solidarity of spirit.
If you want to be like God and live in harmony with God’s vision for you, let grace flow through you to others; let mercy especially to the vulnerable shape your behavior. Walk with, accompany, the lost and lonely, helping them find their way as God’s beloved children.
God loves beautiful things – just look at our planet – and God prizes creativity and ingenuity. But, the works of our hands, most especially our places of worship, should be embodiments of justice and love. Our self-affirmation should always be joined with God affirmation and care for our neighbor. Love justice, seek mercy, embrace your oneness with all creation. Worship without loving justice is worthless and damaging to the worshipper.
We don’t need the Ten Commandments in our nation’s classrooms. We need the words of Micah 6:8 in school rooms, the Oval Office, and in the offices on Capitol Hill of the most ardent “Christian” politicians, “what does God require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” We need from the president to the pastor to fall down on our knees and put justice and mercy first.
The Psalms continue the emphasis on worship and justice. God seeks holiness. God desires lovely liturgies and loud hymns of praise, but these fall flat without a corresponding concern that justice be done. Relationship is everything. Do our relationships bring beauty or ugliness to the world? Does our praise bring joy or sorrow to God? Does our worship send us out into the world as God’s healing companions?
The Corinthian passage is another reminder that relationship is everything for God and ourselves, and in citing the cross as the paradigm of relatedness, Paul is inverting our social, economic, political, and ecclesiastical norms. Paul’s polarized readers must have been astounded by his words. Victory through suffering. A God who suffers for us, who is known by humility and not power, grace and not demand. They were divided by their linear win-lose advocacy of their theological and ecclesiastical viewpoints. They placed their theological party’s victory ahead of the well-being of their brothers and sisters in Christ. In contrast, Paul says the cross is everything. In contrast to the scorched earth politics of Caesars then and now, God wins through suffering and weakness. In words that echo Philippians 2:5-11, divine power does not compete, defeat, or destroy; it unites, taking on human flesh, experiencing human suffering and winning by healing and companionship. If we place God’s relational vison at the forefront and live a cross-centered life, we can embrace and learn from the many diverse forms of Christianity, remembering that God speaks personally to each person and community and that we can grow in grace by learning from each other’s experiences of God. We are called to emulate God’s all-embracing vision, our faith is reflected in faithfulness not doctrinal purity, compassion not orthodoxy, service not certainty.
God’s wisest ones are not the power players or the celebrities, or prevaricating and pontificating politicians, but those who recognize their dependence on God for all good things and who share their wealth and power with others. Those who recognize their connectedness with all of life and their dependence on God’s grace reflect God’s own relationship with the world. God is, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead proclaims, the fellow sufferer who understands. God is also the loving companion who celebrates.
The preacher could easily spend a whole season on the Beatitudes. Each blessed virtue surprises and transforms. Each countercultural blessed virtue is the open door to creative interdependence. Those who are blessed know their weakness, vulnerability, and need for grace; they know that they need God and they need one another. We are connected, as Martin Luther King avers, in an intricate web of relatedness in which our well being and the well being of others personally and nationally is one connected, dynamic reality. Forget the Ten Commandments, and the faux piety of power hungry Christians, and put the Beatitudes vision of service, sacrifice, peacemaking, and downward mobility – a beloved community – in every classroom.
We need to be blessed and we need to bless each other. Our calling as followers of Jesus is to commit ourselves to giving and receiving blessings, and especially bless our most vulnerable members, our children, persons with disabilities, and elders. God blesses everyone and those who know their deepest needs – the protagonists of the Beatitudes – open their arms and hearts to receiving God’s and our care. The self-made person or bullying politician is most pitiable, the individualistic job creator is most benighted, according to scripture, because they can become prisoners of their so-called independence and forget that everything is grace, everything is gift, everything is dependent on the love of God and on the efforts of those they often scorn, the “essential” workers we view as inferior.
There is a holy vulnerability in the Beatitudes that brings us home to the healing power of affirmative relationships. There is an ethical dimension to the Beatitudes, calling us to go beyond apathy to empathy, and self-interest to sharing in and responding to the suffering of the vulnerable and forgotten. Justice is inherent in giving and receiving blessing, and in receiving blessings we take our place as agents of justice and healing. This is not a welfare state but a blessed community, where all are welcome, all are cared for, all are encouraged to creativity, and all are invited to agency. The blessed and beloved community is that gloriously dynamic and interdependent body of Christ, described in I Corinthians 12, where all gifts are nurtured and all talents a gift to oneself and the community.
On cold days in January and February, God calls us to rejoice and resist, picket and pray, care and create, and work to make our congregations lights of loving and countercultural witness calling ourselves and communities to healthy humility and godly generosity. To live simply so that others may simply live, and sacrifice privilege and possession to heal our broken world. We must be both prophets and healers, prophetic healers, to face just such a time as now.
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Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, MD and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. He is the author of over eighty books, including Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet; Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-Human World; Messy Incarnation: Meditations on Christ in Process; and Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries. His latest books are Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-human World and Three Wise Wisdom: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna (volume seven in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” series along with his upcoming Lenten devotional, Just a Little Walk with Jesus: A Spiritual Saunter with Mark’s Gospel and Whitehead and Jesus. He can be reached at www.brucepperly.com.
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