What Does the Lord Require

In our basic training post at Fort Sam in San Antonio, all of us in Company D-3 were conscientious objectors to be trained as Army Medics.  Before going on to our medic training, we went through an 8-week course. 

Usually in the evening if we didn’t have much homework or Army busywork, we’d head over to the PX and have some beer and pizza.  One of our fellows was a Buddhist named Holderbaum.  One night someone asked him, how with a German name like that, was he a Buddhist.

He said that to be given conscientious objector status he had to be some religion.  He knew he couldn’t be a Christian because they can’t drink or have sex.  He knew he wasn’t a Catholic because he didn’t believe in the pope and all the saints mumbo jumbo.  By elimination, that must have left Buddhist.

Yes, some of us starchy, legalistic Protestant types are a bit over the top in our understanding of Jesus’s basic message.  We get caught up in the jots and tittles, neglecting the weightier part of the message: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Today’s gospel passage also contains the basics of the Christian-Judeo faith.

It is eloquently summed up in Matthew’s Beatitudes.  You know them — ”Blessed are those who” – fill in the blank

If these are used as a legalistic standard, imposed in a ridged way, who could possibly be saved?  Holderbaum’s right.  No mortal could live up to them in an exacting way.  In some congregations they are “weaponized” to beat others over the head — doing incredible spiritual and psychic damage.

I decided to look in the Trump Bible to see how modern man has approached these injunctions.  I wasn’t going to give him one red cent – he’s already monetized the presidency for some $1.4 billion[1] and counting — so I snuck a free peak.

The modern ethical version goes something like this.

Blessed are those who use the public trust of elected office to run a grift of hundreds of millions of dollars, for they shall have many friends.

Blessed are those who appoint the least qualified to office, for no one will confront you with embarrassing “alternative facts.”

Blessed are those who trash our immigrant neighbors by sending armies of undisciplined goons into the streets of our cities, for they will imagine themselves safer when might makes right.

Blessed are those who ignore the laws and statutes of their nation, for they shall not be inconvenienced by legal niceties and pesky lawyers.

These are Caesar’s beatitudes.  And the spiritual warfare with Caeser yet rages full on in the Book of John’s Revelations.  The mark of the beast, 666, is firmly stamped on this administration’s “banality of evil.”[2]  It has become normalized, cavalierly dismissed.

Not quite the ethic of the Jesus Movement that I learned in Sunday school or seminary.  Or you either.  No, we as members of that saving movement are held to a higher standard.  “To do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God.” 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

These beatitudes are the goal for which we would strive.  Yet, being far from perfect, we will mostly miss the mark.  They are the hallmark of a mature spirituality.

This Easter, Luther James Forney will be baptized.

I was in a quandary as to how to assist Christopher and Alexis in fulfilling their baptismal vows made on Luther’s behalf.

One book that came immediately to mind was Bishop Budde’s book, How We Learn to be Brave.[3]  It was occasioned by her interview on CNN after Trump and an entourage of cabinet officers and military generals proceeded to St. John’s to hold up a Bible upside down.

This was a desecration of our scriptures and a place of worship under Bishop Budde’s jurisdiction.  “I had to say something,” was her stance.  Later, came the blowback she received after she had had the temerity to ask the president for mercy for those being hurt by his policies.

Courage is the character of a mature person of faith, regardless the religion.  Courage to change what can be changed.  This I would hope for young Luther as he grows into his personhood.

I passed along also Dag Hammarskjöld’s book, Markings.[4]  This volume of meditations reflects the mature spirituality of one of our most notable UN Secretaries General.

In Markings a most courageous Swedish diplomat wrestles with his purpose of existence as he enters some of the most harrowing sites of conflict on the planet.  Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld would be killed in a small aircraft crash while on a dangerous mission into the heart of Africa.

In the introduction by W.H. Auden, there is Hammarskjöld’s introduction for an interview on CNN.

“I found in the writings of hose medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say Yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say Yes also to every fate life had in store for them.”

“Love…for them meant simply an overflowing of the strength with which they felt themselves filled when living in true self-oblivion. …love found natural expression in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil, suffering—or happiness.”[5]

I would hope for young Luther that he would have the spiritual strength and courage to wrestle with life in this same way.  That he would realize that truly living would be found in a task greater than himself.  That he would find where the needs of the world met his innate gifts and interests, there would be his vocation – his true calling as did Dag Hammarskjöld.

In Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesdays with Morrie,[6] I found a delightful and most poignant story of a former student spending time with his dying professor.  It is graced with compassion and deep understanding.  It is a master class in the Beatitudes.

Mitch had promised upon graduation to keep in touch with this favorite professor.  But, of course, work and family and a hundred other things got in the way.

Flipping through the channels late one night he inadvertently comes across an interview with Ted Koppel on his program “Nightline.”  There was his professor, Morrie Schwartz.

Koppel had been alerted earlier on by a friend to a headline in the Boston Globe: “A Professor’s Final Course:  His Own Death.”  The professor had recently received a diagnosis of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  A slow wasting disease inexorably leading to death, beginning with a wasting of the muscles of the legs and proceeding up the trunk of the body.

Cameramen and sound equipment were situated in Morrie’s living room.  But before Morrie would let Koppel proceed, Morrie said he would first needed to  “check him out.”  One of Morrie’s friends quipped, “I hope Ted goes easy on Morrie.”  Another replied, “I hope Morrie goes easy on Ted.”

The door closed and Ted and Morrie were left alone inside Morrie’s office.  Morrie began, “Tell me something close to your heart.”

“‘My heart?’  Koppel studied the old man. ‘All right,’ he said cautiously, and he spoke about his children.  They were close to his heart, weren’t they?”

“Good.” Morrie said. “Now tell me something about your faith.”

When Ted demurred, saying that he didn’t often talk about such things with strangers, Morrie interjected, “Ted, I’m dying,” peering over his glasses.  “I don’t have a lot of time here.”

Once they were back in the living room with cameras rolling, towards the end of the interview, the reporter asked Morrie a question: what did Morrie dread most about his slow decay.

“Morrie paused.  He asked if he could say this certain thing on television.”

“Koppel said go ahead.”

“Morrie looked straight into the eyes of the most famous interviewer in America. ‘Well, Ted, one day soon, someone’s gonna have to wipe my ass.’”

A thousand miles away Mitch, the professor’s old student. heard Koppel intone, “’Who is Morrie Schwartz…and why, by the end of the night, are so many of you going to care about him?’”

Mitch Alom’s precious book, which has sold in the millions, came into being out of that late night happenstance before his TV.

The compassion displayed by Mitch as week after week he sat with his dying professor is the entire summation of the Beatitudes. 

These brief injunctions are the door to eternal life, yet a blessedness possible in some measure right now in this life.  This is the gentle spirituality I also would hope for Luther James as we baptize him in April.

Such compassion is the most courageous act in these disjointed and inhumane times.  It is the mark of our full humanity.

And like Morrie, we don’t have a lot of time here, so what we do have, let’s use to the Glory of God and for the love of our neighbor.  Amen.

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[1] The Editorial Board, “Trump’s Cash Grab Undermines our Republic, The New York Times, January 25, 2026.

[2] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).  Arendt makes the point that the evil Eichman spawned seemed so benign that ordinary Germans would dismiss as well as participate in it.  It became normalized in the culture of Hitler’s Nazi regime.  Here, a matter of degree, not kind.

[3] Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith (New York: Avery, Penguin Random House, 2023) 

[4] Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964).

[5] Op. Cit., viii.

[6] Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson (New York: Doubleday, 2007) 18-23.

February 1, 2026

Epiphany 4

Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15
I Corinthians 1:18-31; Gospel: Matthew 5:1-12
“What Does the Lord Require?”