396 Saints at The Wrong Time

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Saints at The Wrong Time”, originally shared on January 29, 2026. It was the 396^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Doing the right thing for the right reason is our goal, right? But is doing the right thing for the wrong reason bad? Today, we’re going to find out.

   Sally and I went to the 44^th Annual Asian American Expo at the Fairplex in Pomona a couple of weeks ago. It’s the largest Lunar New Year celebration in the country.

   There was a whole pavilion dedicated just to anime culture with lots of cosplay. There were 7 pavilions filled with food and cultural enrichment. There was live entertainment, and I got to speak some of the Mandarin I’ve been leaning. The place was packed!

   I had bought our tickets online in advance because its promotional material said that it might sell out.

   But when we got to the entry gates, we saw that there were several lines for ticket holders, and one line with a sign over it that said that if you are 70 or older, you could get in free!

   I told Sally, “Let’s go in there. Maybe if we don’t scan our tickets, we can get our money back. (that’s another story).

   So, we went through that line and, when we got to the front, the guy there asked for Sally’s ID. He checked it and waved her through.

   Then I stepped up. He took a look at me as I reached for my ID and said, “That’s OK. Come on in.” (!) 😊

   But aging doesn’t bother me.

   In fact, one thing that you may not know about me is that I can travel through time.

   I didn’t always know that I could travel through time but, one day several years ago, I realized that I could.

   It’s called aging. It just happens very slowly. 😊

   I’ve learned many things by traveling through time and one of them is that time moves pretty fast.

   One day you’re young, and the next day you’ve got a favorite pharmacy. 😊

   But the only day that we are conscious and alive is in the present. It’s weird, isn’t it? 😊

   Bil (yes, that’s the correct spelling) Keane, the cartoonist who drew “The Family Circus” comic said, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”

   So how do we live our lives, right now, when we believe that these lives are gifts from God? What does it mean when Christians suffer in these lives? What does the Christian life look like in our largely secular culture?

   All of those questions and more come into play when we look at the Gospel reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches this coming Sunday, Matthew 5:1-12, AKA The Beatitudes, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

   Some people say that the Beatitudes represent the radical love that the teachings of Jesus call his followers to live by, but do they?

   I would say that every word in that sentence that you just read is wrong.

   I would say that because I grew up on another planet. Yes, in addition to being a time traveler, I grew up on another planet. 😊

   Or, at least, it seems like that to me more and more every day.

   I grew up in a stable home where several generations of my family were alive and lived close by, where a skilled worker could buy a home and support a family, where kids could tell their parents that they were going out to explore in the morning and their mom would tell them to be home before the street lights came on and wouldn’t think about it for the rest of the day, where I actually did walk to school with holes in my shoes, in the snow, and it was uphill, both ways! 😊

   And, I learned that a good climbing tree had lots of branches and that I could climb it by looking up and grabbing the first branch. And then I could look up and grab a higher branch, and then another branch, and another, and keep going up until there were no more branches or they were too small to support me, and then I would look out and I could see forever.

   That’s how identity, confidence, and trust were built. Not by the baseless affirmations of others, but by doing something hard.

   We see that life lived in this week’s Gospel reading.

    It points toward a life that the world thinks of as hard and away from everything that the world values today. It points us to the reign of God, who makes no promises that life will be easy, but only that He will never leave us or forsake us.

   Is that enough?

   What would you need to call yourself blessed?

   Take a look at who Jesus calls blessed, in Matthew 5:1-12,

   ¹When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

³“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ⁴“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. ⁵“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. ⁶“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. ⁷“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. ⁸“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. ⁹“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. ¹⁰“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ¹¹“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

   What is He talking about? Could this be any farther from the values of this world?

   What Jesus is saying is what theologians mean when they talk about “the theology of the Cross.”

   Jesus says that being blessed is knowing that you have nowhere to turn but to God, and that you turn to God.

   Being blessed is living in the freedom that knows that this world is not all there is, but that there is a better life that has been prepared for us.

   Being blessed is knowing that you are not alone, that God enters into our weakness, our mourning, our desire for a better world, our work for peace, and our testimony to the reliability of God in Jesus Christ, and God meets us there.

   The Beatitudes project a message that makes no sense to the world, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18,

¹⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

   We are sinners separated from God. We can’t save ourselves. Our only hope is for a Savior. The message of the cross is that God has come and   our Savior, our Savior from ourselves.

   The message of the Beatitudes breaks into our world from the outside. God is made manifest in it. It’s an Epiphany!

   Which is why, I guess, that we get the same text today, in the season of Epiphany, that we’ll read again in nine months, on November 1^st, on All Saints Day. We are saints today, but at the wrong time. 😊

   Earlier, I said that some people say that the Beatitudes represent the radical love that the teachings of Jesus call his followers to live by. And I added that every word in that sentence is wrong.

   Why? Because many Christians today are saints, but at the wrong time.

   Because following Jesus is about who we are first. What we do comes second. It is the natural outcome of who we are Jesus Christ.

   It’s like the climax of T.S. Eliot’s play/poem “Murder in the Cathedral”, where a character says, “The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

   The Christian life is lived in response to the new life that God has given us in faith.

   Doing the right things to appease or to satisfy God is a betrayal of that gift. That’s why Jesus was always knocking heads with the Pharisees.

   Who we are is a gift from God, not something we have to earn. We have been born again in our baptism, we have been made a new creation in the living relationship with the one true living God for which we were created, restored for us by Jesus on the cross.

   What we do isn’t what makes us Christians, it’s who we are that makes us do what we do. That’s what makes us Christians.

   It’s like the situation we sometimes find ourselves in when someone tells us, “You don’t have to believe it. You just have to do it.” When that happens, as someone said online, you can be pretty sure you are living in an oppressive system. Our Gospel reading for today describes the people who don’t do it, who resist the temptation to go along to get along, who don’t conform to this world.

   All who believe and are baptized shall be saved, not those who think that they can earn their way by their actions.

   So, when we see people on the news describing their social and political actions as an expression of God’s radical justice found in the Beatitudes, they may pride themselves as being radical, but they are not nearly radical enough.

   The word “radical” comes from the Latin word, “radix”, for “root” or “source”.

   The truly radical vision of the Kingdom of God is life transformation, at the root of our natural human nature, that comes to all those who receive the gift of faith through God’s grace and are baptized. It comes from the source, from God within and among us. We live from the inside, out.

   “Justice” in the Bible has one clear definition: it is doing God’s will. It comes from our inner transformation, not from the Bible verses I can find that agree with my politics.

   We can’t pick only the causes that draw media outrage today and justify our personal sense of righteous rebellion “by any means necessary” and call that the Christian life. We live on a much larger, more radical, scale.

   The comedian Garry Shandling once reflected on Leo Durocher, the ruthless coach of the Dodgers when they were the Brooklyn Dodgers, who famously said, “Nice guys finish last.”

   Garry Shandling said, “Nice guys finish first, and anyone who doesn’t know that doesn’t know where the finish line is.” That is radical.

   Jesus proclaims it in every time he says “blessed” in this week’s Gospel reading to people who have done or experienced hard things, mostly because of their faith in Jesus Christ.

   Of the poor in spirit he says, “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To those who mourn he says, “they will be comforted.” To the meek he says, “they will inherit the earth.” To those who hunger and thirst for righteousness he says, “they will be filled.” To the merciful he says, “they will receive mercy.” To the pure in heart he says, “they will see God.” To the peacemakers he says, “they will be called children of God.”

   To those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake he says, “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To those who are reviled and persecuted and spoken against with all kinds of evil falsely on His account he says, “rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. ‘

   None of those things are what most people would describe as the blessed life today.

   In fact, in Jesus’ day, they, especially the religious leaders, would have said that those people were getting what they deserved for being sinners.

   But Jesus called them blessed. Why? Because they knew that they needed a Savior, and that they had one on Jesus Christ.

   But things have not changed much in some ways since then.

   I read an interview with an editor of “Christianity Today” magazine who is a former church leader in the Baptist denomination. He said that pastors are increasingly telling him that church members are coming up to them, after even parenthetically mentioning the Beatitudes and asking the pastors where they got those “liberal talking points”.  

   When the pastors would say that they were literally quoting the words of Jesus Christ, the response was, “that doesn’t work for me anymore. That’s weak.”

   That reaction is an excellent example of the contrast that historic Christianity brought to the idea of what it means to be a man in this world. It is a change grounded in this week’s Gospel reading.

   I read a review some time ago of Nancy Pearcey’s book The Toxic War on Masculinity, praising it as a "splendid" and nuanced analysis that navigates modern gender debates by contrasting the "Good Man" (the Christian ideal of responsibility/sacrifice) with the "Real Man" (the secular, aggressive stereotype).

   The Real Man was “tough, strong, aggressive, highly competitive, unwilling to show weakness, unemotional, imposing, isolated, and self-made. They grab all the guns, gold, and girls they can get, and don’t care much who gets hurt in the process.”

   The Good Man, the man of God, is characterized by “honor, duty, integrity, and a willingness to sacrifice. They’re responsible and generous, and they provide and protect, especially the weak.”

   We all struggle with putting ourselves at the defining center of our lives and not God. It’s the tendency that is at the center of our national divisions and partisan diatribes. What can we do to bring the temperature down?

   Popular wisdom was once, “If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.”

   The 16^th Century Church reformer Martin Luther’s takes that wisdom a bit further in his Small Catechism with his explanation of The Eighth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

   He said, “What is this? (or What does this mean?) We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”

   In our world, some people would take advantage of that kind of empathy. They would weaponize it and use it against us.

   But what if everybody practiced Luther’s meaning of the 8^th Commandment? It would make the world an almost unfathomably much better place, a much holier place, because it would reflect the grace of God in action.

   Sally and I often drive through LA on our way to the Museum of Tolerance where Sally is a docent or to some doctor’s appointment.

   Sometimes, we take a route that brings us to this sign, “Welcome to Beverly Hills. Police drone in use.”

   We used to see signs that said, “Speed enforced by aircraft,” though I don’t think that I ever saw any speed enforcing aircraft. And these days we’ve never actually seen a speed enforcement drone. Yet. 😊

   I’ve thought that maybe the signs were only set-up to be a deterrent. A threat to control our destructive behavior. Sometimes we need that.

   There is no threat in The Beatitudes, however. They are signs that point us to God. 

   They are a reminder that we are called to be saints at the right time. Anything else is just self-righteousness, a lack of trust in God.

   They are a reminder that doing the right thing for the right reason is the foundation of the Christian life when the reason is Jesus.

   The Beatitudes are a reminder that we are not protected from challenges, even suffering, in this life but that we live in God’s promise, which we see plainly in Hebrews 13:5b,

for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

   It’s by doing the hard things that God has called, equipped, and sent us to do, to be saints at the right time, to do the right thing for the right reason, that we live.

   It’s like climbing a tree. We look up and grasp the hand of God.