Fr. Evan Armatas: Good evening to all of you. It’s a pleasure to be gathered again with you for a new class that I’ve entitled, “The Sermon on the Mount: Christian Spirituality in a Nutshell.” When I got working on my notes for this lecture, I thought, “Boy, I blew it. I’ve given myself four nights, and the reality is we probably need 14.” [Laughter] So this is going to be a bit compressed and quick! Because I’m going to be moving quickly, I’m going to ask each night that we gather, refrain from asking a question maybe to the end just to see if we can’t get through all of our material.

Now, the title, “Christian Spirituality in a Nutshell,” that I’ve attached to the phrase, “The Sermon on the Mount,” is a fair description of what we have before us. We find the Sermon on the Mount, in terms of context, within the gospel of Matthew. It takes up all of chapters five, six, and seven. And the gospel of Matthew itself—with just the most basic observation, you can discern that it’s the first book of the New Testament. And that tells you something. If you are reading the New Testament, the first part of it you’re going to read is the gospel of Matthew. If you will, the Church, who assembled the Bible, wants you to have this text in front of you as you move through the rest of the New Testament.

Thematically, the gospel of Matthew is arranged around basically one major theme. There are several other themes, but this theme, more than any, comes out. “Listen and do.” It’s as if your mother wrote it. You know your mom would say, “You’re not listening to me.” “Yeah, I am, Mom!” “No, you didn’t do what I told you to do!” That’s her proof. The same is true in the gospel of Matthew. The text revolves around the idea of listening and doing. You have to connect the two.

In the gospel of Matthew—and we’re going to see this in the Sermon on the Mount—the hearer—that’s us—is invited to come into a relationship with Jesus by listening to what he is teaching and putting it into practice. That may seem like: “Well, okay, Fr. Evan, you’re repeating yourself.” But it’s interesting, because if you read the gospel of John or the gospel of Mark or the gospel of Luke, the relationship with Christ is presented to you differently, certainly in the gospel of John, where we find a mystical vision of union. How do we enter into union with God? John’s answer will be through things like baptism, the Eucharist.

Not Matthew. Matthew’s gospel is as subtle as stubbing your toe. What he does is he abandons any idea of mystical vision. He doesn’t even really try to hit you with intellectual depth; he’s going to leave that to Luke. He just comes at you with the real value and the real difficulty of what Jesus is saying. And in the Sermon on the Mount we find it’s a rather uncompromising position of word and action united.

So you’re invited in this class, as you listen to what we present, to take on the sermon that Jesus gives on that mountain and to enter into a relationship with him by just putting into practice what Jesus says. So, if you would, you could almost say that Jesus declares that my disciples—and this is the gospel of Matthew—act a certain way. That’s all. That’s what’s radically different about them: their lifestyle, their actions. Again, that’s not what John’s going to say, it’s not what Mark says, it’s not what Luke says—it’s what Matthew says.

And it’s important that, before we move on to John—in fact, the Church says, “We’re not even going to let you read John until you’re baptized.” That’s what we used to do. Now you can pick up a Bible anywhere. But we used to say, “Before you read John, get Matthew down. Before you get to Mark, get Matthew down. Before you bother with Luke, make sure you can do what Matthew’s asking.” It’s basic. Listen and do.

Now, as I said in the beginning of my remarks, this sermon that’s found in Matthew’s gospel comes in chapters five through seven, and it’s a long teaching that Jesus gives. He’s talking for a long time. It’s like one of those 45-minute sermons; it’s not a three-minute sermon. It’s interesting to note the context of this teaching. It’s on a mountain. That’s important. God, throughout holy Scripture, reveals his truth to his people from a mountaintop. One of the simple comparisons that the Church has made from the beginning is: Who’s the great law-giver on a mountain? Moses. And who gave Moses the Law? God. Who is Jesus? Yeah, we can say that in preschool: Jesus is God. But now, instead of having an intermediary, instead of having to hear through Moses and read something like a dry tablet of stone, we receive a teaching directly from the mouth of the Law-giver himself.

In fact, the text, it’s odd. If you didn’t bring your Bibles, next time, bring them, but we have ones in the pew for you. You can open it up. If you open it up to chapter five of Matthew’s gospel, verse one, we find the context: “And seeing the multitudes”—this is verse one of chapter five—“Jesus went up on a mountain. And when he was seated, his disciples came to him.” This is important, because a teacher in the text is seated. Notice, when the bishop comes, where does he stand? Over by a chair, where he can sit, because the traditional conceptual idea of a teacher with authority is he does so seated on his throne, speaking.

And then it says, “And he opened his mouth and taught them.” Now, this is peculiar, because we say, “Of course he opened his mouth and taught them.” But with Jesus we don’t always have to hear him speak to be taught; we can see him act. This is important for us to distinguish: in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not display anything in action, although he’s calling us to it. Isn’t that a little ironic? If he’s expecting us to act, why is he just talking? Well, if we are fair, we would say the rest of his life is word in action, but here he’s going to speak and use a lot of words. It’s a little bit, again, like your mom. Sometimes I would say to my mom, “Just spank me.” [Laughter] Did any of you ever say that to your mom? Like, three hours! I’m like: “Hit me! This would be a lot easier.” [Laughter] She’d just keep talking, right? Now, I had an Old Testament professor who says Jesus has a point here. When my mom just kept talking and talking, what did I eventually do? “Okay, fine. Whatever you say.” I’d give up! “Whatever you say! All right! Just stop talking!” [Laughter] Now, that’s funny, but it’s also true. What Jesus is doing is like: “I’m going to talk, and I’m going to keep talking until you finally see that what I am saying is so important and so deep and wise that you’re going to go: You’re right. I give up. I got nothing. Whatever you say. Fine. Got it.” Okay?

Now, how do we organize ourselves as we go through this? I’ve gone back and forth and thought, “Well, do I just draw out themes? Do I give you a list?” And all I could really come up with, and sorry that it’s not any better than this, is that I just have to go line by line, teaching by teaching, commandment by commandment. And then, hopefully, as we go, we can comment. If you want a summary sheet of those main bullet points, let me know at the end of the class if you think that would be helpful, and like we did with the 55 Maxims, we can create these little sub summary sheets that you can have that you can rotate. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be helpful. As I said, have your Bibles out. We’re in Matthew 5:1, and we’re going to start; we’re just going to start plowing through this, and then the next time we get together we’re going to start where we left off and keep going, but my hope is that tonight we can get through the first 16 verses. If you attend my Bible study, you know that that will be a miracle, because sometimes we do one verse in three sessions—one word in an hour! [Laughter] So we’ll see, huh?

All right, if you’re taking notes, you can make a little title here, and you can say that this first part, verse one through verse 16, is a section in which Jesus discusses the marks of a disciple. And he’s going to do this by basically going through the beatitudes. Now, the beatitudes is something that the Church engrains into its liturgical life, so if you are part of the daily cycle of prayer, you’re going to go through the beatitudes at least once a day. The beatitudes, if you will, describe what it’s like to be a disciple. The beatitudes tell us what are the blessings that a disciple will get. Now, I think here Jesus is being clever. He’s about to tell you a whole bunch of stuff he’s going to want you to do, so how does he start? He tells you what you’re going to get if you do it. My mom did this, too. “If you clean the basement, when you’re done, you can have—a cookie!” [Laughter] And so I’d go: “Oooh!” And you get older, and the cookie ain’t so great, so then she’s got to step it up. “If you clean the basement, I’m going to give you—money to go to the movies.” Right? And so it goes. And Jesus does the same. He starts to give us, in these beatitudes, dessert. See, this is what you’re going to get. So tonight there was a nice dessert out there that I liked, and I had two helpings. And I didn’t have two helpings of salad, but I did have two helpings of the dessert. [Laughter] Similarly… Huh? You wanted? It was very good. You should’ve had it. If you didn’t… So anyway, there’s an expectation— What? Oh, you wanted some? No, I ate it. [Laughter] Sorry. There’s an expectation in these beatitudes that you’re going to do them, but there’s also a reward that’s going to come by doing them.

As we move down the Sermon on the Mount, the rewards aren’t there as much. Okay, so it’s a ploy. I already told you that verse one and verse two give us the context, and they tell us a little bit about how Jesus did this. I just have one more thing to say that I haven’t said yet. When we consider where the Sermon on the Mount happens, we said it’s a mountain. Has anybody climbed a mountain? Is it easy? No! Usually by the time you’ve gotten halfway up, you’re feeling it, and even exhausted. By the time you’ve summited, you may have completely depleted yourself, but you begin to have a euphoric experience through the effort. That is not to be forgotten. The other thing is: Do we build cities on mountains? No. No, it’s pretty hard to build a city on the mountain. Where are the cities? Down below, in the valleys. So if you are to move through the Sermon on the Mount, one of the ideas is it’s going to take some effort. And, two, it’s going to require a departure. You’re going to have to leave where you’ve been living and go somewhere else. And when you get there, when you get to the top of a mountain, it’s usually just nature. And hopefully your phone doesn’t work. [Laughter] So there’s a bit of solitude and quiet to that experience, and that would be true, that Jesus gives us this teaching outside the bustle of the city, on a mountainside, in the midst of the peace of God’s creation and in the expectation that you’ve left something behind to get there. So don’t forget that, as we go into this journey, that those things have to have happened.

All right. So we’re going to start. 5:3. We read here, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” The first beatitude is about poverty, and the question becomes: Does it mean materially poor? Not necessarily, although does it mean to be connected with those who do experience material poverty? What do we mean by that? If I’m poor, what do I— If I’m totally poor, what am I totally dependent upon?

C1: The government.

Fr. Evan: Well, in a— [Laughter] This is a non-political class! But tonight, we have the government! If I’m poor, truly poor, truly impoverished, what am I dependent upon? Others! That’s the answer. If I cannot walk for myself, if I cannot feed myself, if I cannot clothe myself, if I cannot house myself, what am I dependent upon? Someone else to do it.

This dependency is where the Sermon on the Mount begins. What does it mean to be poor in spirit? It means to know that I am not the person who can do it; I require another. And this is humility. Where does the fall begin? Pride. “I can do it.” Adam says, “I can do it. I don’t need you. I can figure this out.” By the way, that’s only true for me. [Laughter] “I can do it! I can figure it out.” And likewise, you and I participate—you and me, whatever it is—we participate and continue in this fall through our own pride. We do it all the time. “I’m first. It’s about me. I want what I want when I want it.” So Jesus begins by pointing to the way home. “If you’re going to start on this sermon with me, then the first thing you’re going to have to do is become dependent on me.” So to be poor in spirit is to have pride under your foot. It’s to trust and depend on God, to be faithful to him, to have a heart that is full of poverty.

Now what’s the reward? What’s dessert? It says it right there. You don’t have to look. Heaven! The kingdom of heaven. Now, the kingdom of heaven, this is extra. You didn’t pay for this and I didn’t writ it. It just— Because I’m a nice guy, I’m going to give you a little salsa. When you hear, “kingdom of heaven,” you immediately go: “Ohh, harp. Cloud. Place.” That’s fine, but what you should do is go: “Presence. Person. Relationship.” The kingdom of heaven is a relationship with God, and when you’re in heaven, guess who’s there? Him! And if you don’t like him, you’re not going to like heaven. So if you’re not poor in spirit, if you’re not humble, you can’t enter his presence. Why? Because you don’t need him. So it’s not as if you go to hell; you just can’t get into heaven. Got it?

Some people marry people like that, that don’t really need them. You know what I’m talking about? There are some people who are married to people whose spouses don’t need the other spouse, and in time what do they do? They divorce, because you can’t be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t need you. And so it’s the same with God. You can’t be in the relationship unless you’re poor in spirit and you need him. Then a relationship begins.

All right. Verse four: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Now, this might seem weird, because does that mean that, you know, we’re just sad and we go around weepy and we even look for things to be depressed about? In fact, the Scriptures are really clear that there’s a difference between holy sorrow and unholy sorrow. The one I was just describing is unholy sorrow. Unholy sorrow is sadness and despair, so that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s not being sad; it’s not feeling like there’s no hope. That’s not it at all. In fact, 2 Corinthians 7:8-13, fantastic passage, so I’m just going to read it to you really quick. This is St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, who were jerks. Corinthians were jerks. They couldn’t be nice to each other. It’s a little bit like your children sometimes. They’re mean to each other, and you’re like: “What are you being mean to each other for? That’s terrible!” And they were mean to their relations like their parents. They couldn’t follow anything that St. Paul taught them. So St. Paul writes to them. And we don’t have this letter any more.

For though I caused you sorrow by my letter, I don’t regret it. Though I did regret it, for I see that the letter caused you sorrow, though only for a while. I now rejoice—not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance.

Following me? So we start with “I need the other,” and then what? Then we start with “and I’m not actually okay. I should mourn the fact that I’m broken.” I don’t like to do this in a class, but I’m going to pick on you, Miles. Miles just came back from the monastery. I said, “Miles, how was it?” He said, “Oh, it was fantastic! I couldn’t— There’s no words!” But he said, “You know, one of the things that I came away with was that I’m a mess! But I was really encouraged.” [Laughter] That is what happens at a healthy church. That’s what happens at a healthy monastery. That’s what happens when we are healthy spiritually. You go: “You know, this is terrible! I’m a jerk to my wife. I’m a tyrant to my children. Ah, but I have hope. I’m encouraged.” So he says:

You were made sorrowful to the point of repentance. For you were not made sorrowful according to the will of God so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us, for the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces repentance without regret—

We don’t, like, sit there and wallow in it.

—leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death. Godly sorrow has produced in you what vindication of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what avenging of wrong.

When you have true mourning, then it pricks your conscience, and you get up and you work hard to change the way you’re living.

And so what’s the reward? Comfort. You will be comforted. When you can have holy sorrow for the sufferings that occur in your life through your own sin, when you can have sorrow for the pain and suffering of another, when you can have sorrow for the state of the world, then you could be comforted. But if you’re not mournful of these things, no comfort.

All right, verse five: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Now, we have to make a distinction here. Meekness is not humility. In fact, the Greek words are different. Meekness here is a quality of Christ that we’re encouraged to imitate. There’s another time, here verse five, chapter five, we have this word, “meek.” We’re going to find this word again in chapter 11, verse 29, Jesus again speaking, and he says this: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. And you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In Christ, meekness is strength. Can you find the combination? Is Jesus a weakling? No, he’s not a weakling, is he? I mean, if you just read his life, is he wishy— Does he flip-flop? Never. Is he a pushover? Is he cheesy? He’s really strong. But he’s also meek.

How does this work? Well, pride is certainly something that would not lead us to meekness, but the way that we can kind of find a way through this is to say strength in control. How many of you have strong passions? Anger, gluttony, greed. Now, one of the wonderful ways that the Church talks about these passions— There’s a couple schools of thought; I’m going to present one school of thought: the passions are good, but they have been disfigured by our sin. And Christ comes to reclaim them for their goodness. And when we do that and we combine them with meekness, then it’s strength that’s in control.

Is anger a sin? Most of the time when you use it, it is, but if that passion is meekness, which is strength in control, then can anger be used meekly, and can it be used rightly? For example, we might use anger to war against sin and injustice. But how we usually use anger is: “You’re wearing my headband. Take it off.” And then, if they don’t—this happened this morning. [Laughter] “That’s mine. Take it off!” And then it escalates, and then the anger boils over and then someone’s snatching a headband off of someone’s head and then there’s a fight. You’re not any different. You’re all snatching headbands. [Laughter] You just— It’s just something more complex. Whatever it is, but that’s all we’re doing. Someone cuts you off? It’s a headband. Your sister did something about the holiday party—headband.

So what we look for here is we say that when we are meek, we can place our passions in the right place. They are controlled, and we are strong. We find that we get a reward. What is it? We inherit the earth. All that is in the earth is now ours.

All right. Verse six: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” What brings fullness? Protein. It’s a joke. [Laughter] What brings fullness? Well, we have been taught that wealth or greediness, obtaining things, consuming them, brings fullness. What’s the lotto up to? One and a half billion! So if you win that, you will be full. Now, what’s funny is that when they study lotto winners, what do the lotto winners tell you? “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me!” Now, those of us who haven’t won say, “Well, I’d like to have that worst thing that ever happened to me.” [Laughter]

What did you get for Christmas when you were eight?

C2: Socks.

Fr. Evan: You remember? You got socks. He’s weird. [Laughter] He can remember.

C2: My parents are weird.

Fr. Evan: Your parents are weird and you’re weird! You remembered, and they gave you socks, too. If I ask my children, “What did you get last year?” that they were pining for, they don’t remember. The abundance of things does not make us full. And we don’t very easily dismiss this illusion, and we spend of our lives pursuing fullness, not by means of righteousness.

So what do we do? Well, Christ again, in setting this up for us, says, “If you want to be full, if you want to be complete, if you want to feel satiated and satisfied, that will only come through a constant pursuit of righteousness.” Righteousness, dikaiosini is the Greek. How are we going to say and define that for you? It’s hard! It’s a word that needs a little bit more than just one word.

C3: Romans 19:16. “Be excellent in what is good.”

Fr. Evan: Okay, be excellent in what is good.

C3: “And be innocent of evil.”

Fr. Evan: And be innocent of evil: right-living.

Righteousness is more than doing one thing versus another; it’s about having a whole picture of what life looks like, and executing it. That’s what righteousness is. That’s why people who see people that don’t do that go: “Oh, he’s a righteous prig.” Why? Because they’ve only executed a part of it. And righteousness requires all of it. If we’re going to be righteous, we can’t just take out a few things. So fullness comes through full living, and God— We call God in our prayers sometimes the Architect of our souls. That’s a beautiful phrase. It comes out most poignantly in the baptism service; before the tonsure, the priest reads this prayer. The One who is the Architect of us, who put us together, who formed us, said, “Ah, this and that,” and knows not just our looks and our height and our weight, but our thoughts—all of it, what’s right. He would want us living this way.

And what’s the reward? Read it. You’re filled! Have you ever had one of those really good meals and you’re just sitting at the table? And you’re filled; you’re full. You’re whole; you’re complete. And you have peace. The eye is calmed. When you’ve eaten well, you don’t want more, do you? No. You’re good. The one time that I had a really beautiful example of that, I was in Wyoming at the retreat center at the chapel that was there for a time, and a bishop visited, a really beautiful man, a beautiful Christian. We served the Liturgy. After the Liturgy we walked over to the dorm, and there was a big outdoor porch where they laid out the brunch, and they brought him his plate, and he said, “No, I’m full.” And we were all like… And then another person tried it. “No, I’m full.” Finally, someone said, “Your Eminence, what do you mean you’re full?” And he says, “I have just tasted of God; I’m full.” If we were totally righteous and tasted God, we’re filled.

All right, verse seven: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” Now this is an interesting one, because the thing you’re supposed to do is the thing that you get. It’s the only one like it, but it’s just the way it is. Now the word here, “merciful,” the word is eleimosyne. The Greek verb is elein. The word itself means “mercy,” but it also means “almsgiving,” so we’re going to take this apart. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” That’s your reward if you do it.

The first part is to say, “The merciful are those who give charity.” So to display mercy to another is to give them something that they need and they don’t have. And that could be material—maybe they just need food or they need clothing or maybe—who knows? Maybe they need help bathing themselves. I don’t know, whatever. It can mean an idea or a thought. They need comfort, some form of mercy. And we’re going to see this a little bit more as we get into the Sermon on the Mount, but this is a really important one that you’re supposed to be doing, and no one else is supposed to know you’re doing it.

But the second way we can be merciful is to show merciful treatment to others. So the one daughter goes: “That’s my headband.” She lost her mercy. What should she have done?

C4: Grabbed the headband back for you?

C5: Been silent?

Fr. Evan: No! Silent. “It’s yours. Would you like my other headband?” But what we’re busy doing is not only telling someone that they’re wearing our headband, we’re snatching it off their head. And then when we want a headband, we’re mad that no one gives us one. If you want to be treated mercifully, then what do you have to do? Be merciful! It’s an exchange, and God’s actually giving you kind of a simple exchange. He’s saying, “Look. The measure by which you measure shall be measured back to you.” That’s Luke 6. The mercy you give will be the mercy you get back. And then he says something beautiful: “Pressed over, running full.” In other words, the more merciful you are— So think of it this way. If you have a situation in which someone really does you a bad one, I mean really is a stinker, go: “Sweet, because if I treat this one mercifully, guess what I just got? Abundance. I just got mercy for myself.” So sometimes God loves us—sometimes—and he gives us these situations to see what we’re going to do with them. And when we’re not faithful, then he takes it back a step and he just makes it like a headband—but he wants to move you to something deeper. And I can say personally I fail all the time.

Now, the last thing I would give you is for any of you who’ve come for confession, as you stand before the icon of the Lord and you confess your sins, what’s your hope that he’s going to do with your sin? Forgive you. Forgive you, loose you, be merciful, right? So what should you give? Mercy. No one who goes under the stole says, “I want justice. Give me justice, God.” [Laughter] All right. Yeah, you give justice, you’re going to get it; you’re going to get justice.

Verse eight: “Blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God.” Purity in body and in your heart: maybe this is the toughest beatitude, for to be pure means to be unmixed with anything else, and we know that from commercials. “It’s the purest of…” whatever, and that means it’s nothing else: pure as the driven snow. Christ wants us to practice and have at our command all the virtues. It’s a little bit like that early one about righteousness. So for example, if you give charity to those in need but still have greed in your heart—yeah. If you are humble but fornicate, then you have not yet obeyed the commandments of God. And God would have us holy; without this, no one can see God.

And the Fathers give us a simple way to understand this. They say it’s a mirror. If we’re holy, then we can see clearly our reflection, but if we are unclean, if our souls are not pure and our hearts are mixed with the world, then there can be no vision of God: We can’t understand the Scriptures; we can’t understand the holy teachings. Sometimes Christ says some hard things. He says in one place, “Don’t throw your pearls in front of swine.” What do swine eat? Everything and anything, mixed together with dirt and muck. They’re unpure and unclean. That’s why it was a dietary restriction in the Old Testament, not because you can’t have bacon, because a swine represented something unclean and mixed up and filthy. Don’t eat it. By that, he was teaching you something he was going to expound later on. So if you think that for a moment the pearls of God can be understood if you’re living a mixed-up life, it ain’t going to happen.

Right before the Eucharist is served, the priest exclaims, “Holy things for the holy.” Agios: what does that mean? A-gi: not of this earth. Set apart. Not of this world. To be unmixed, unstained, untainted. Not to be not in the world—where else would you go? Christians are in the world, but we’re not of the world. That’s the difference. We can be in the world all day long. St. Paul even says it in one of his letters, “If I told you to leave the world, where would you go?” We’ve got to stay in the world!

Okay, verse nine: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall become sons of God.” How do you become a peacemaker? It starts with being at peace with yourself, knowing yourself, finding the kingdom of God in yourself. That book, Reclaiming Conversations, that I’ve been mentioning a lot, it’s a great book, and it quotes Thoreau, who had one chair for solitude, two for a friend, and three for community. But you’ve got to sit in the first chair first. To be a peacemaker means to have made the journey inside, to reconcile ourselves with ourselves.

Think about distraction. What does distraction do? It keeps you from dealing with yourself. You know that experiment where there was— I heard about this experiment that was in this book as well, that he told people, “You’re going to sit in this room, 20 minutes of silence. There’s a machine that’ll shock you. That’s all you can have.” You know what most people did after the 13th minute? Started shocking themselves. It was so painful to be alone with themselves that physical pain was better than being left alone! What do you do the minute you’re bored in the line at the grocery store? What do people to at stop lights? What do they do when they’re— No one can be with themselves! Peace starts with being with ourselves, reconciling ourselves with ourselves.

Peace begins—and please listen to me on this one. Peace begins with God’s peace. We must accept that all that occurs in our lives is in the hands of God. That’s called providence. The minute we say, “No matter what happens today, it’s in God’s hands,” and if we connect that with the conviction that God is victorious and it’ll be okay because he’s conquered death, then we can have peace. So Jesus Christ himself, having that peace in himself, he then brought that peace into the world. What do you often try to do? You try to be a peacemaker to your daughters who’ve got a headband problem, and you haven’t spent any time on your own at peace. So then what do you do? You bring your lack of peace into a very peaceless situation.

So what’s the reward? What is the reward, if you— That you’re sons of God. The Son of God is the one who brought peace.

Okay, verse ten: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” The simple way to understand this is to say this: Jesus was persecuted. If you’re going to listen to him, then the same will happen to you. And persecution for the Gospel comes to any of us who choose to live it and what it teaches and promotes. So in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, this is what St. Paul writes.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, the covetous, drunkards, revilers, swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you.

Lest you start looking down your nose at someone else. [Laughter] “Well, pff, I used to be a drinker, but— I used to be a homosexual, but I’m not any more.” Any of that is just uncalled-for in the Church. “Such were some of you.” “But you were washed.” You were baptized.

You were sanctified. You were anointed in the Holy Spirit. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

And what’s your reward? The kingdom of God.

Okay. All right. So now we’re going to wrap up here in ten minutes. Verses 11 and 12. So in verses 11 and 12, we move out of the beatitudes. Some say maybe verse 11 is still a beatitude, but for most they say it’s not; it’s connected with what comes after it. So verses 11 and 12 read this way:

Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Notice that the persecution and the reviling is false. It’s one thing to be reviled and persecuted when the person who’s saying it is saying something true. That’s hard to take, isn’t it? But what about when they’re lying? I won’t stand for that. And what is Jesus saying here? You have to do that. When they falsely accuse you, you have to accept this. Why? “For my sake.” He says even that when this happens, “rejoice and be exceedingly glad,” because you’re going to get a reward.

Now, what happens if you set the record straight? You lose your reward, that’s all. You’re not in trouble, but there comes a point at some— I don’t know where this is, because I’m not there, because every time someone falsely accuses me, I set the record straight. But at some point, if you were to mature spiritually, you would accept the false accusation, because you would be interested in the reward that you would receive. And then you say, “Well, I’ll just take it, because God’s going to give me something. I don’t know what he’s going to give me, but there’s some reward that’s coming.”

This is, in Christ’s words, the path of the prophets. You could insert it’s the path of the saints; it’s the path of the martyrs. And that their persecution for Christ is accompanied with great joy. Is that true when we read their stories? Yeah! They’re, like: “Sweet! We’re going to be beheaded!” Like, what!? [Laughter] What is— If you really read the epistles, what is St. Paul’s most joyful epistle? There’s only one answer. Philippians. Read Philippians. It’s like… full of joy. Where is he writing it? On death row. His persecution— Why is he in prison? Falsely, wrongly! For preaching Christ. And he’s so excited that he’s— What does it say about the apostles, Peter and John, after they go to the Sanhedrin and they beat them? They come out and they’re like: “Yay!” They’re singing praises because they got to suffer for Christ’s sake. What!? None of us are there. This is why it’s a mountain, and this is why we’re trying to climb it, because we may not be there at 16 or 18 or 30 or 47 almost or 65 or 70, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not trying to put one more foot in front of the other. And at some point, we should be there.

Verse 13. I might do it! [Laughter] “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.” Ooh! This is the first, like, warning. But it starts off with: “You’re the salt of the world.” I was saying earlier in my sermon after our worship service tonight that there are three things God uses often to describe a disciple—salt, water, light. Here’s salt. The disciple, then, is a person who begins to put into practice what Jesus has just taught us above in his beatitudes. That’s why this verse comes here. At verse 13, he’s saying, “Okay, I just told you in verse three through verse 12. I gave you my beatitudes. I told you what’s going to happen when you do them. You’re going to get persecuted. And now I’m telling you that if you lose this teaching I’m giving you, you’re going to be worthless. But if you can keep it, you’re salt.”

What is salt? I love salt. It seasons everything. I asked a good friend of mine’s wife, “How come all your food is good?” She goes: “I use a lot of salt.” [Laughter] That was it! You’ve got a salad, throw a little salt on that thing. You’ve got a steak? Put a little salt on it. Is there much that you can’t put salt on? Even sweet things with salt—it’s fantastic! Isn’t it, right? Sweet and salty? Come on, salty caramel? I gave a whole sermon on that ice cream. Remember that? It was two summers ago. I talked about salty caramel, like what the heck!? We didn’t have this when I was a kid! Did we? No, someone figured it out: “Put the salt in the sweet!” [Laughter] Like, yes! Put it on everything!

What else does salt do? It dries up things that are wet and moldy: the teachings of the world. It aspirates them? No, what’s the technical term? Desiccates. Desiccates? It desiccates them; it dries them up. It cleans things. It’s an—astringent? What’s that word? No, it’s a— What? I said the right word? Okay. You put salt on it, and it cleans it, right? It preserves things. That’s why Jesus is using it. It gives flavor, I said at the beginning.

So this is something that we will begin to be in the world if we’re following these teachings that Jesus just gave us. But then there’s a warning. If you become insipid: if you lose that edge, especially a teacher, then you are good for nothing. And so that’s scary.

All right, verse 14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Okay, so when we were salt—now we’re light. What’s the qualities of light? You can see! Okay, close your eyes, turn out the lights, walk around. [Laughter] Ouch. It’s as simple as that. So Jesus is asking us—and here I would say: Go read Ephesians 5. St. Paul says, “Be imitators of God as beloved children. Walk in love.” Walk in love? Okay, walk in love. Love illumines. Walking is the progress of your life. If you go through life in love, then you can see, just as Christ also loved. “But immorality or impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. And there must be no filthiness or silly talk, coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.”

He goes on and describes beautifully what this means, and then he says, “For you were formerly in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of the light.” What do we call the brothers and sisters of the Lord? Adelphotitos, adelphotiti, a brother of light, a sister of light: that’s what a Christian is. “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them.” Where? In someone else? No. [Laughter] In yourself. You know how many Christians read that passage differently? Most. [Laughter] Okay, thank you. That’s not where you’re supposed to expose them. Where does judgment begin? With the household of God, not with everybody else. As far as you’re concerned, they’re all in heaven; you’re not. Don’t pay attention to what they’re doing.

“But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light. Everything that becomes visible is light.” All right, and the rest: “We disciples of Christ, then, are to be the light of the world.” So it’s interesting, because his disciples were to be salt and light. And if you think about this, light providing illumination, knowing where and how to go, exposing what is wrong in ourselves, our own sins, providing for the world a way out. Don’t tell them about the way out; be the way out. Philippians 2:15: The way and life of the Christian can stimulate the way in the world to consider another path in a new way.

I haven’t done anything really that good in my life, but it’s interesting to me that when I decided to go to seminary, my former life was not seminarianesque. [Laughter] And people are always intrigued by meeting my mom. “Oh, what was he like?” [Laughter] “Did he fast? Did he pray? Was he reading his Bible? Was he so sweet and kind and gentle?” No! None of those things! [Laughter] And so when I went to the seminary, when I made the shift in my life, I had a dear friend that I had grown up with. She came up to me and she said, “I don’t know what to do with this, but you going back to seminary has caused me to look at myself.” That’s all she said. I didn’t say anything to her, but it caused a crisis. And what difficult— If the world no longer has salt and light in it, then no one knows where to go, and nothing has flavor. So if we as Christians don’t provide a different way, if you line us all up next to everybody else and there’s no difference, then what good are we?

Okay, there’s more to say about light, but we’ve got to finish. I would say, you know, you can look at Romans 13:12, because the light can’t be overcome by darkness. You can consider the Paschal Liturgy; it’s the Liturgy of light: “Come receive the light from the Light, the unwaning Light which is Christ.” You know, that whole thing, and we light our lights. We take our lights home; we keep our lights in our homes.

All right, verse 15 and then verse 16 and we’re done. So I’m going to go over just a couple of minutes. Verse 15: “Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket”—it’s connected to the previous verse—“but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” We just said earlier that we have to be light in the world so that people know where to go, but we have to be careful here. When we do that, where does the glory go? To God. Where do we like the glory to go? [Laughter]

So I sent someone an email today, because someone gave some money to the church and said, “Help this person with it.” So I said, “Okay.” So, you know, I’m the intermediary. I take care of it. I send the email, and they say, “Oh, thank you, Fr. Evan.” Oh no! Capitals, bold: DON’T THANK ME. I didn’t do anything! Give thanks to God. We have to be practical like that, because it happens all the time. “Oh, thank you.” “No, no, no! Stop! Don’t thank me! No thanks are necessary.” Okay?

We know that Christ is the light of the world, and then we take this light that’s been imparted to us, unworthy as we are, by his grace, and we endeavor to let that light shine, to make sure it’s not extinguished in us. And this visual then brings light to the world, it illumines our lives and other people’s lives, and we say, “Glory to God,” not “Glory to me.”

Okay, last one. Oh, I did it! Last one is: “Let your light shine.” You know… I guess I already talked about it! It’s not about you! [Laughter] It is about me, though, right? Isn’t that always what it is? It really is about you, isn’t it, Katerina? It really is. No matter how much you say it isn’t, it ends up being about you again, doesn’t it? How hard it is to rail and wail and fight against that tendency to bring it back to us, right where we started. Poverty. It can’t be about you!

We can say that a Christian life has a private, but it has a public function. And we have to be doing the things that the light has required us to do in the world, not just in our churches. You have to do the work. You have to do it at the dinner table. You have to do it at the grocery store. You know, it’s really hard for me to hear sometimes when a vendor, who’s encountered the Church, says, “I was treated rudely by one of your church members.” It hasn’t happened here, thank God, but I was at a big church; we had lots of vendors. Sometimes the Christians in the Church were not treating the people outside the Church like Christians should, and we’d hear about it from the vendor! And I thought, “Oh, this is so sad.” So other verses to consider are John 3:21, 1 Corinthians 10:31, and 1 Peter 2:12.

Okay! We’re going to end here. We went five minutes over. The next time we will pick it up at verse 17. Why don’t we rise for prayer?