Hello, and welcome to this fifth message in our 2026 Epiphany Series, Manifesting Hope in Darkness. Today our theme is Hope Found in Community.

Most of you won’t know me. My name is Michael Ward, a retired United Church of Canada pastor currently serving Christ Moravian Church in Calgary as interim pastor.

Today’s Gospel picks up right where we left off last week. Jesus has just proclaimed the Beatitudes - those surprising blessings that describe the character of God’s Kingdom or Reign. They paint a picture of what a Jesus-shaped life looks like. And immediately after blessing His followers, Jesus turns from blessing to identity. He looks at this ordinary crowd - fishermen, farmers, mothers, labourers, the weary and the hopeful - and He says:

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Not a list of ideals to strive for, but a way of being in the world that reveals God’s presence and purpose.
Jesus begins with salt. And He speaks in terms of how He already sees us.

He doesn’t say, “Go be salty.” He says, “You are salt.”

In the ancient world, salt wasn’t the pure white table salt we know today. It was mined - full of minerals and attached trace elements that gave each grain its own texture and taste. Every handful was different. And no single grain changed anything on its own. It was the collective that seasoned.

Salt works by drawing out what is already present. It awakens flavours hidden within the food - makes it richer, more savoury.

And Jesus says: That’s you.

Your calling is not to impose something on the world. Your calling is to draw out the God‑given goodness already embedded in others and in creation.

When you listen deeply to someone who feels unseen… When you encourage another gently… When you stand with someone in their pain… When you help someone notice the grace already at work in their life…

You are bringing out God‑flavours. You are awakening what God has already placed there.

Then Jesus shifts the image:

“You are the light of the world.”

Light doesn’t create what it reveals. It simply makes visible what darkness hides.

And here’s something beautiful: white light is not one colour. It is the blending of many wavelengths - many colours.
Likewise, the church’s witness is communal. Diverse gifts, personalities, and stories forming one radiant presence.
Light is not meant to be admired. Light is meant to help others see.

When you act with compassion… When you speak truth with gentleness… When you choose justice over convenience… When you forgive when it would be easier to hold a grudge…

You illuminate possibilities others couldn’t see. Your life becomes a window through which God’s grace is glimpsed.
It’s important to notice that Jesus speaks to the crowd. The “you” is plural.

You all are the salt. You all are the light.

Salt works in combination. Light shines in spectrum.

A single grain of salt is tasteless. A single colour band is limited.

But together? Together they transform the environment.

The church’s witness is strongest when we blend our strengths and weaknesses, our stories and scars. We don’t have to be everything. We simply bring our part. God uses the whole community to season and illuminate the world.

Salt and Light Fulfill Their Purpose by Giving Themselves Away

Salt does its work quietly. It dissolves into the food and disappears, yet its presence is unmistakable in the flavour it brings out. Light works the same way. We don’t admire light for its own sake - we value it because it helps us see what is really there. Its purpose is fulfilled when it reveals what would otherwise remain hidden.

In the same way, Kingdom influence is not about being noticed. It’s not about drawing attention to ourselves. It’s about the quiet, steady transformation that happens when God’s love works through us. When we offer kindness without needing credit… when we serve without applause… when we forgive without fanfare… we are giving ourselves away in love. And in that giving, we become most fully who Christ says we already are.

Salt disappears into the meal. Light gives itself to the room. And disciples of Jesus give themselves to the world - not to be recognized, but so that others might taste grace and see hope.

Quiet acts of kindness. Faithful presence in difficult places. Courageous truth spoken gently. Forgiveness offered freely. Hope held on behalf of someone who can’t hold it for themselves.

These are the ways we “lose ourselves” and yet become who we truly are in Christ.

I believe Eugene Peterson captures the heart of Jesus’ words in his paraphrase of the Bible - The Message:

“Bring out the God‑flavours of the earth.” “Bring out the God‑colours in the world.”

God has already seeded the world with goodness, beauty, and possibility. Our calling is to help reveal it - to help others taste and see the goodness of God.

Salt and light are not about superiority. They are about service. They are not about drawing attention to ourselves. They are about drawing attention to God’s presence already shimmering beneath the surface of things.

So hear this good news:

You are already salt. You are already light.

Not because of your perfection, but because Christ has named you so.

Go into your homes, your workplaces, your neighbourhoods with confidence -  drawing out God‑flavours, revealing God‑colours, trusting that God uses ordinary people - people like you and me - to season and illuminate the world.
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May we live in such a way that others taste grace, see hope, and glimpse the God who is already at work in every corner of creation. Amen.

Today's sermon is offered by Rev. James Lavoy who serves our sister churches, Rio Terrace and Heimtal in Edmonton. If you would like to share this video or watch it again later, you can also access it on YouTube by clicking here.​
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We are living through a moment that feels heavy with history.

Many of us are watching the news from our neighbors to the south, or perhaps looking at shifts in our own political landscape, and we are feeling a specific kind of dread. It is the dread of recognition. We are seeing a crisis unfold that parallels the great horrors we learned about in school. We are witnessing the fascist use of power—the calculated dehumanization of migrants, the expansion of ICE, the brutality of enforcement, and the suspension of civil liberties to achieve control at any cost.

For many of us in this room, part of our distress comes from a sense of betrayal. We are people of privilege. We are used to having agency. We have spent our lives trusting institutions—government, law, corporations—believing they were, at best, benevolent, or at least stable. But right now, we feel powerless to help the vulnerable because the very institutions we trusted are the ones using this dehumanization to achieve their own goals. That which we once felt was trustworthy is no longer trustworthy.

And we don’t know what to do.

This dilemma causes us to ask serious questions of ourselves. It impacts our identity. Who are we, if the structures that hold us up are crumbling? It is into this exact feeling of displacement—this political and spiritual vertigo—that we must read the Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes are often read as a list of "be-attitudes," sweet platitudes for a quiet life. But contextually, they are the thesis for Matthew’s entire Gospel. And Matthew’s Gospel does not begin in a vacuum; it begins in horror.

Remember the prologue. Jesus is born into a world of state-sponsored violence. He is a child refugee fleeing a jealous king. He grows up under occupation. And just as he emerges into adulthood, his teacher, his cousin, his confidante—John the Baptist—is arrested and executed by the state as a political prop.

This tragedy motivates Jesus to turn to the wilderness. And we must remember, the wilderness wasn’t empty. It was full. It was the place where people went when they weren't welcome in the circles of power in Jerusalem or Rome. It was full of the marginalized, the resistance, the sick, and the poor. Jesus had to reconcile with these encounters. Through his own spiritual practices of prayer and fasting, he found this great insight: that when we draw lines in the sand, the Divine is on the side of the oppressed.

From that wilderness, he went to Galilee—not the capital, but the margins—and climbed a mountain to deliver his thesis.

He looks at this crowd of "nobodies" and he calls them "Blessed."

Now, the Greek word Matthew uses here is Makarios. We often translate this as "happy," but that is too small a word. If we look at the etymology, we find something far more robust. Ma means to "lengthen" or "expand." Kar is short for charis—grace, gift.

So, blessing, in this context, means "a lengthened grace." Or perhaps, "expansive grace."

I like to think that Jesus, sitting atop that mountain with the exiles and the gentiles, felt at home with them, just as he did in the desert. He looked at people who had been objectified by the Empire, people whose backs were the stepping stones for the powerful, and he said: You have a right to experience expansive grace. You have a right to take up space.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are those who mourn."

Think about how subversive that is. In our culture, and certainly in the Roman Empire, grief is a weakness. Meekness is a liability. But Jesus reframes them.

Liberation theologians like James Cone remind us that God is found among the lynched, the incarcerated, the detainee. When Jesus blesses those who mourn, he is not romanticizing sadness; he is validating the grief that comes from seeing the world as it really is. As Cone might say, to be "blessed" is to be located where the Divine is located—and the Divine is located with the victims of the state.

"Blessed are the meek."

The Womanist theologian Delores Williams challenges us here. She warns us against glorifying suffering, against acting as "surrogates" who carry the cross for others merely to be crushed by it. She reminds us that Jesus came to show us how to live, how to survive. In this light, "meekness" isn't about being a doormat. It is about a refusal to play the Empire’s game of violence. It is a "survival strategy"—a way of maintaining one’s humanity in the face of a system that wants to turn you into a monster.

To have "expansive grace" when you are being crushed is the ultimate act of resistance. It is saying: You may take my civil liberties, you may threaten my safety, but you cannot shrink my soul.

We know how this story plays out. Jesus leaves that mountain, challenges the powers in Jerusalem, and is executed. But I want to turn your attention to the very last paragraph of Matthew’s Gospel. If the birth is the prologue, and the Beatitudes are the thesis, this is the conclusion.

In Matthew 28:10, the resurrected Jesus tells Mary and Mary Magdalene, "Go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee. There, they will see me."

Note the location. Not Jerusalem, the seat of power. But Galilee. Back to the start. Back to the margins. Back to the mountain where he preached that formative sermon.

So the disciples go. And Matthew 28:16-17 says: "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted."

That word, "doubted." In Greek, it is distazo.

It doesn’t mean skepticism. It isn't an intellectual refusal to believe. Di means two. Stasis means standing. Distazo means "standing in two places." It means holding two postures.

The disciples stood on that mountain holding their grief, their trauma, their meekness, and their fears of the Roman state. But simultaneously, they stood there with their Makarios—their expansive grace, their comfort, their fulfillment, their awareness that the Community of God had come near.

They were not just hearing the Beatitudes anymore; they were the embodiment of them. They were a living Distazo.
This is where we find ourselves today.

We are watching a world that looks like it is falling apart. We are watching the rise of forces that want to shrink grace, that want to hoard space for the powerful and deny it to the vulnerable. And we are asked to question our own identity.

Are we products of a broken political system that relies on exploitation to wield power? Or are we children of the Divine, full human beings, capable of carrying our grief along with our hope?

What are we to do with this Distazo—this double posture—in this time of crisis?

First, we must be aware of our privilege. We have to admit that, historically, we likely wouldn't have been the people on that mountainside with Jesus. We would have been the citizens in the city, safe behind the walls. But now, we have heard the message. We have been called to the mountain.

To practice "Subversive Hope" is to inhabit our Distazo.

It means we do not deny the horror. We do not look away from the ICE detention centers or the erosion of democracy. We stand fully in the reality of that grief. We mourn. We hunger for righteousness.

But, at the exact same time, we stand in our Makarios. We claim our expansive grace. We refuse to let fear make us small. We refuse to let cynicism make us brittle. We use our privilege, our voices, and our agency to say that everyone—the migrant, the queer person, the poor, the outcast—has a right to take up space.

We must use our whole selves—grief and hope—to show up to that mountain. We go there to be healed of our complicity. We go there to find the Divine in the face of the other. And then, we go on our way, in the community of God, inviting others to follow.

May you be blessed with expansive grace. May you have the strength to stand in two places. And may you take up space for the sake of love.
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Amen.