Pentecost 23
18 October 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
GOOD TROUBLEMAKERS
Matthew 5:10-12. 1 Peter 4.12-19
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to speak and taught them, saying: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
I recently completed my first foray into physical therapy because of a sore neck. I’ve had ten visits over the past six weeks, and I have been pleasantly amazed at the results. The best part of each session is that they begin with something soft and warm sitting around my neck and shoulders to prepare the knotted muscles for the persecution they are about to receive. And then after the somewhat painful session I get ten minutes of ice around my neck and shoulders and leave feeling like a new man. As I wait with heat and ice there is an inspirational quote on the wall directly in my line of sight that reads: I never said it would be easy. I said it would be worth it. At that moment physical therapy turned into sermon preparation! Because that’s exactly what Jesus says in today’s beatitude to those who would follow him: I never said it would be easy. I said it would be worth it. It has been true of my physical therapy, and in those rare moments of courage in my life, I have found those words to true about following Jesus.
This final beatitude for the persecuted is an appropriate beatitude with which to conclude. For if you embody the seven previous beatitudes as well as the rest of this sermon on the mount you’re going to find yourself persecuted.
This last Beatitude is also the opposite of what the most popular preachers tell us and the opposite of what we want to believe. We want things to go well. From our perspective as God’s beloved children, everything should come our way. We do not understand why we should not have easy lives. Pastors want congregations to like them even when we have to say hard things.
But Jesus said: “If you want a blessed life, you can expect it to be hard.” In other words: Persecution is what we signed up for in the waters of baptism. And I sincerely apologize if you were only told that being Christian was only about the forgiveness of your sin and no one told you about the often difficult calling to walk in the way of Jesus.
In this beatitude it’s important that we don’t miss the two qualifiers for blessed persecution: for righteousness’ sake and on Jesus’ account. We can be persecuted and hated for all kinds of reasons, including our own obnoxiousness and wrongheadedness. To be persecuted does not mean you are right.
But if you walk in the way of Jesus, if you stand for the kingdom of God, get ready for some
opposition, for this world has great stakes invested in the way things are. Jesus didn’t say: Blessed are the neutral. Blessed are those who sit on the fence. Blessed are those everyone likes. He said, “Blessed are you when people oppose you for my sake, for that means you are standing for something good and real and vital.”
And when our lives are hard for Jesus sake and for the sake of what is right, Jesus let’s us know we’re in good company. John the Baptist was executed for preaching repentance and Jesus also preached repentance. Jesus was almost pushed off a cliff after his first sermon in his hometown synagogue because he exposed the racism of his hearers. Jesus was the best and wisest man who ever lived and yet he endured the most humiliating death of his day.
Jesus knew, and he warned his disciples, that it would be the same for them as it was for him: If the world hates you, he said, know that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. But you do not belong to the world because I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Servants are not greater than their masters. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.
Followers of Christ should not expect easy lives. The main symbol of Christianity is not the star of Bethlehem or the empty tomb, but the cross – the first century equivalent of a noose.
The persecution some have endured throughout church history makes the harassment we face seem small. There are horrible stories of the indignities and atrocities suffered by Christians at the hands of the powerful, even at the hands of other Christians.
Humility requires of us to pause and admit when we the church have stood against the teachings of Jesus and been the persecutor: against Muslims during the Crusades and against the Jews throughout most of Christian history, not to mention the church’s persecution of her own brothers and sisters. The great Baptist Roger Williams reminds us: “When the church is the true church it will suffer persecution, not inflict it.”
In the early centuries of the church, identifying as Christian was a sure death sentence. Baptism wasn’t an easy decision anyone made. It was made with deep fear and trembling. Because if they were caught, they would be arrested, tortured, and then killed in some unimaginably horrific way. History tells of Christians who were stripped naked and beaten in public arenas, lowered into vats of boiling oil, blinded by having their eyes cut out, separated from body parts, branded by red-hot irons, mauled by wild animals, burned at the stake, and nailed to crosses.
It is hardly any wonder that falling away from the faith was a problem in the early church. I cannot say with confidence that I would have kept my faith under the threat of such persecution. How about you?
Now there is a brand of Christian discipleship today that has a fixation on persecution, but it’s really more about losing privilege – there’s no real threat to their livelihood. People saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is not Christian persecution. One seminary professor says she hears claims of persecution from her students when their long-held views get challenged with new ways of thinking. And she tells them, “That’s not persecution. That’s seminary.”1
Today liberals and conservatives feel their values, worldview and way of life are under attack from the other side. Everybody feels persecuted because the world is not fair. The person who serves God will not necessarily be admired by those who live in a different way.
But true persecution is when the powers of evil have been marshaled against you. True persecution is when people pursue you with evil intent, when people insult and assail you with abusive words and deliberately invent lies about you, cheat and defraud you, perhaps even call
you unpatriotic – all because you stood for what is right and on behalf of others who have been demonized and dehumanized, oppressed and ostracized. History is full of people defending and ensuring everyone’s child-of-God-ness and getting persecuted for it. If you fight for human dignity, equality, peace, and justice you will find persecution from those who benefit from war, injustice, and racial supremacy.
The struggle to live for Jesus and to embody his teachings is never easy, even in what Flannery O’Connor called “the Christ-haunted South.” Employers do not appreciate it when employees do what is right rather than what is profitable. Goodness and honesty, morality and fair play will be met with vitriol by those who want to win at any cost.
Luke’s version of this final beatitude pronounces a woe to those who are praised all the time. I wonder what it says about those of us who are and want to be well-respected and well-loved by the society in which we live? If we have never faced hardship because of our faith, we should perhaps question the depth of our faith. It would be helpful to ask ourselves on a regular basis: “What price am I paying for being a Christian?” And it’s not because we need to go searching for persecution. It’s because some things are worth suffering for.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo says, “I cannot do this, Sam.”
Sam replies, “I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.”
So Frodo asks, “What are we holding on to, Sam?”
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
And to fight for something good is to find yourself in “good trouble.” That’s what the late John Lewis, the great civil rights leader and congressman called it. Our newest member Lilly Lewis has a dog named Good Trouble – best dog name ever!
Lewis’ partner in “good trouble,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was called a “disturber of the peace,” but he was addressing the wounds that were keeping peace from happening. He knew there is no peace without justice and mercy, equality and fairness. Ironically, trying to unite people under our nation’s promise of liberty and justice for all can get you persecuted. Martin Luther King said before the march on Selma: “I can’t promise you that it won’t get you beaten. I can’t promise you that it won’t get your home bombed. I can’t promise you won’t get scarred up a bit. But we must stand up for what is right. And if you haven’t discovered something that is worth dying for, you haven’t found anything worth living for.”
Another good troublemaker is Barbara Jenkins who found something worth living for. She spends her time writing letters, making calls, going and seeing people to make a difference in the way the law treats juvenile offenders. Night and day, seven days a week she worries the authorities to death. She’s made a lot of enemies.
She was once asked: “Do you enjoy doing that?”
“Well, not really,” she said.
“Do you get paid? Are you on salary?”
“No.”
“Did you have children in trouble with the law?”
“No.”
“Then why in the world do you do it? None of your friends are doing it. Lots of people are always angry with you.”
And she said, “I do it because I have to.”
When life is hard we are tempted to hide. But when we start to see the abundant world that’s possible with God, and we know deep in our hearts that things should not be the way they are, God invites us to do what we have to do, to act with compassion for those who are hurting, to bring liberty and justice to all people in the name of Jesus Christ. Blessed are you when you are persecuted, misunderstood, and even slandered for your faithfulness to Jesus Christ. It’s the blessing nobody wants, right?
During World War II a young German pastor Martin Niemoller spent many months in a concentration camp because of his faithful witness to Christ as he spoke out against Hitler’s fascist regime. When his minister father was asked how he felt about his son’s imprisonment, he replied, “It is a terrible thing to have a son in a concentration camp. But there is one thing which would have been ever more terrible for us: if God had needed a faithful witness, and our Martin had been unwilling.”
Practicing the beatitudes will bring persecution. As one writer said: “The empire will certainly strike back.”2 But God gives us the courage and strength to do hard things – together. In being courageous when it is hard we learn what it means to be God’s people.
You may say now at the end of the beatitudes: “Who can do this? Who can live like this? I can’t! I’ve tried!” If that is how you’re feeling: You’re exactly where God needs you to be. You’ve just opened the door to the kingdom. You have arrived at the first beatitude: “Blessed are the destitute in spirit the empty, for you will be filled!”
Annie Dillard, another of my favorite writers who passed away just last month, said that the spiritual life begins as we make our lives empty and hollow like a cup. If we do, she says, grace comes like a man holding his hands as a cup under a waterfall.
So empty your hands of all that doesn’t really matter and let your life be empty and hollow like a cup under God’s waterfall of grace. And you will be called the children of God filled with all the goodness of God’s kingdom.
And then, you can obey the only commandment among the beatitudes: Rejoice and be glad. Rejoice and leap much, for great is your reward!
For you see: The point of blessing isn’t that things are going to be fine. The point is that there is hope on the other side of everything falling apart.
It has been said that Jesus died so we don’t have to. But in reality, Jesus died to show us how to, and that after we’re done dying, there will be another chapter in the story.3
As hard as it might be, my Christian brothers and sisters, may God give you courage and boldness this week to speak and stand for what is right. And in doing so, God will bless you. Of course, it’s the blessing no one wants. Or do you?
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1. Anne Sutherland Howard, Claiming the Beatitudes, Alban Institute, 2009, 107
2. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary, Westminster John Knox Press, 2021, 97
3. Jason Adam Miller, When the World Breaks, Faith Words, 2009, 208-209