Unlikely Altars

Throughout the pages of Scripture, two worlds run alongside each other like parallel tracks that never quite meet. There is the world that exists. The one we wake up in every morning. The one where the poor in spirit are overlooked, where those who mourn are told to move on, where the meek get pushed aside and the hungry stay hungry and mercy is rationed out to the people who deserve it. This is the world most of us have learned to navigate, the one we have made our peace with, the one we have quietly decided is simply the way things are. And then there is the world God desires. The world that was always meant to be. The one where the last are first and the broken are held and the overlooked are seen and the hungry are filled and mercy flows without a ledger. The world where shalom — that untranslatable Hebrew wholeness — is not a distant hope but the actual texture of daily life. Jesus sat down on a hillside and spent eight statements describing that second world. And then He preached a sermon that turned the first one upside down and inside out. We have been sitting on that hillside together for a while now. Seven posts and seven altars along with seven announcements of a world that God desires. And now Jesus says — it will cost you . Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the last beatitude. And it is the only one that comes with a warning. Everything before this has been an announcement and an invitation. Come as you are. Drop the mask. Show mercy. Make peace. Be a thermostat. The kingdom of God is breaking into the world, and you are invited to be part of it. But now Jesus looks at that crowd — that tired, hoping, half-believing crowd — and tells them the truth about what joining this revolution actually costs. Because it is a revolution. You don't begin a revolution with warm and fuzzy words. The writers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Jesus is asking for something in the same territory. Now for most of us the cost will not be physical. We are not the countless men and women around the world who are beaten, imprisoned or killed for the name they carry. Their courage is in a category that humbles everything else. But Jesus is also talking to ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary places. And He is telling us that when we start living the beatitudes — when we show favor to the overlooked, when we invite the marginalized in, when we practice mercy and purity and peace — we will pay a price. Maybe not with our bodies. But with our comfort. or our status or our carefully managed reputations. We might get pushed to the margins ourselves. We might get passed over and excluded. And Jesus says — "Blessed! I am still on your side. I will meet you there." Last June I posted blogs about Pride Month. I did so because I believed they needed to be posted. I believe in the dignity of my friends in the LGBTQ community. I believe they have a place at the table. I believe that when Jesus looked at that hillside full of people the religious system had pushed to the margins, He was looking at them too. I posted. And then the negative hateful comments came. And I went quiet. I convinced myself I was avoiding conflict. I told myself it wasn't the right moment. I told myself a lot of things that sounded reasonable in the moment and hollow in the days that followed. The truth is simpler and less flattering than any of that. I calculated the cost. And I decided it was too high. I was a thermometer. I adjusted to the temperature of the room instead of setting it. And the people I care about — the ones who had every reason to expect me to stay loud — watched me go silent. To my friends in the LGBTQ community — I am sorry. You deserved better from me. You deserved someone who meant it all the way through, not just when it was easy. The silence was a failure and I own it. I don't say that to make this post about me. I say it because this beatitude will not let me off the hook. And here is what Jesus says to do when the cost arrives, which is the part that has stayed with me longer than anything else in this entire series of beatitudes. He says rejoice and be glad. And here is the Unlikely Altar for this last one, and it is different from every altar we have visited in this series, because it is not a place you can photograph or a moment that happens to you while you are standing at a gas station or sitting at a graveside or watching a baseball game. It is something you do. It is the comment you type and actually post when the easier thing would be to scroll past. It is the moment in a meeting when something wrong is happening and you are the one who says so, knowing full well what it will cost you before the words are even out of your mouth. It is the June when you stay loud after the pushback comes instead of going quiet and telling yourself reasonable-sounding things that feel hollow three days later. That moment, ordinary and unremarkable, probably witnessed by nobody who would think to circle it on a calendar and call it holy, is exactly where the world God desires breaks into the world that exists. That is the revolution Jesus started on a hillside when He began calling the wrong people blessed. And He is still looking for ordinary people who want to join it, not the brave ones and the heroic ones and the ones who have already figured out how to make it look easy, but the ordinary ones who calculate the cost and decide to pay it anyway, even when they have failed to pay it before, even when the silence is still fresh enough to sting. The kingdom is closer than you think. Sometimes it looks like a bench. Sometimes a grave. Sometimes a bunt in the ninth inning, a bag of cold fries, a cheering section full of strangers, a mask finally laid down, or a box of ashes sitting quietly in a closet. And sometimes it looks like an ordinary person deciding that grace is worth the cost. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget — the God who announced grace to the overlooked, who stood at the grave and said I am with you, who cheered the names of the forgotten, who loved the face beneath the mask, who kept moving toward the ones who kept saying no — that God is on your side when the room goes cold and the cost turns out to be real and the leap feels more like a stumble than anything graceful.

There is a difference between a thermometer and a thermostat that most of us never give a second thought. A thermometer tells you the temperature of the room. It reads what is already there, adjusts to whatever surrounds it, and reports back faithfully. It is reactive by design; in other words, it waits to be acted upon. The room decides what the thermometer says. A thermostat does something different entirely. It doesn't adjust to the room; rather, it sets the temperature. It decides what the room will become and then works quietly, persistently, without fanfare, until the room catches up. It doesn't wait for conditions to improve before it does its job. A thermostat makes the first move. Jesus had a word for the thermostat kind of person. He called them peacemakers . And He said they would be called children of God . Now here is something worth pausing on, because the promise attached to this beatitude is unlike any of the others. The other beatitudes talk about the kingdom of heaven, seeing God, or receiving mercy. But this one claims they will be called children of God. And that was not some throwaway compliment. It meant something in the first century, and it means something today. I was watching one of my boys play baseball one evening, standing along the third base line with a buddy of mine. Out of nowhere, he looked over at me and grinned. "You can't deny those kids", he said. "Every time I see them I see you." That is what Jesus is describing. A family resemblance so clear that nobody has to be told. Which means that if peacemakers are the ones who look like their Father — then the central characteristic of God must be peacemaking itself. The whole sweep of Scripture points exactly there. A God who keeps moving toward people who keep turning away. A God who initiates, absorbs, returns, and offers again. A God who, even when the door keeps closing, finds another way to knock. That is the family business. And Jesus is inviting us into it. But we need to be careful about what we think peace means. When most of us hear peace, we think about what is absent. The absence of conflict or the absence of noise. The quiet that settles in when everyone has finally stopped fighting. But that is not what Jesus meant. The word He used for peacemaker doesn't appear anywhere else in all of Scripture — it is unique to this one beatitude — and at its root is the Hebrew understanding of shalom . And shalom is not about absence. Shalom is about presence. Shalom is the presence of wholeness and the presence of grace . It is about a restoration to the way it should always meant to be. Shalom is taking what was broken and making it whole. We could translate this beatitude, “ Blessed are the whole-makers" - the one who moves toward broken things and offers restoration. Now those who are “ whole-makers ” or “ peacemakers ” are not naive about how broken things are. They have simply decided that the broken thing is worth moving towards. They are not passive; they are like a thermostat, setting the temperature. Peacemakers make the first move. I know something about what that costs. My father left when I was young. He left without a goodbye, a note, or a warning. He was just gone, the way a foul ball disappears into the stands and doesn't come back. For a long time I didn't think much about it. You can't grieve what you don't yet understand. But years later things changed for me as I was leading a group through Philip Yancey's book What's So Amazing About Grace? One of the chapters was titled "Breaking the Chain of Ungrace, " in which Yancey discusses what it takes to break the cycles of resentment, blame, and pain. Something in it reached into my chest and wouldn't let go, so I made a decision. I was going to be a thermostat and move toward the broken thing. I found him on the internet along with his office number. His secretary answered and told me I must have the wrong number — Mr. Vershel didn't have any children. But I didn’t quit. I sent an email carefully written, making sure that there was no blame or judgment - - just a son wanting to know his dad. And I waited and waited and…then I sent it again. And again nothing. Years later I found him on Facebook. So of course I sent a message and a friend request. And again silence. Three attempts and three doors closed. Three times the same basic message: you do not exist. “ Blessed are the peacemakers ”, Jesus says. He does not say, "Blessed are the peacemakers whose peace is accepted." I don't know exactly how to say what happened next without it sounding like something it isn't. There was no reconciliation. No phone call where everything finally got said. No moment where the distance collapsed, and we found each other on the other side of it. He died. And somehow — I still don't fully understand the path it traveled — his ashes ended up with me. There is a box in my closet that holds what is left of him. Right next to the box with his old baseball glove — a left-handed glove I found years later, a glove that never fit me, from a game we never played together. One box for the man who left. One box for the life we never had. I did not plan to become his keeper. But here we are. And I have thought about this more than I can explain — the man who denied having children ended up in the closet of one of the children he had. The peacemaker became the keeper of the one who would not make peace. I don't think that is an accident. I think that is shalom working in ways I cannot fully trace. Because shalom doesn't always look like resolution. Sometimes it looks like faithfulness in the face of rejection. Sometimes it looks like a thermostat that keeps working even when the room never warms up. Sometimes it looks like a son who keeps his father's ashes because there was nobody else to keep them — and found, in that strange and quiet act, something that felt less like loss and more like grace. The Unlikely Altar for this beatitude is not the moment peace is finally achieved. It is the moment it is offered anyway. It is the phone call you make and the email you send into the silence. It is the move you make toward the broken thing — not because you are certain it will work, but because you are a chip off the old block of a God who never stopped moving toward you. Maybe that relationship in your life never gets resolved the way you hoped. Maybe the door stays closed. Blessed are the peacemakers still. Not because the peace was accepted. But because they looked like their Father when they offered it. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget — we come from a God who is in the business of moving toward broken things. That is the family resemblance. That is what people are supposed to see when they look at us. Be the thermostat.

Not far from where Jesus sat down to teach, there were theaters. The region of Galilee in the first century lived inside a broader Greco-Roman world, and that world loved spectacle. Open-air theaters with stone seats carved into hillsides and stages wide enough to hold a crowd’s attention were scattered throughout the landscape around the very places Jesus walked and taught. The people who followed Him up that hillside didn’t have to imagine what a theater looked like because they had seen the performances for themselves. They understood the craft of it all. And they understood the masks. In the ancient world, actors wore them. Large, exaggerated masks that told the audience who the character was before a single line had even been spoken. The hero wore one face, while the villain wore another. And the audience? Well, they never saw what was underneath the mask. The actor himself could be exhausted, grieving, uncertain, or afraid, but none of that mattered once the mask was in place. What the crowd saw was the performance, and what the crowd got was the carefully constructed version presented to them under the lights. Those actors were called hypokrites . Now, here is something most people never hear in church. In the first century, that word was not originally an insult. A hypokrite was simply a performer, someone trained and respected for the ability to step into a role convincingly enough that the audience believed every word. The problem was not the theater. The problem came later, when Jesus looked at the religious leaders of His day and realized they had started doing the same thing with faith. He wasn’t calling them names as much as He was making a diagnosis. “You have become performers,” He was saying. “You have learned how to wear the right face in public. You know the right prayers, the right language, the right gestures, the right places to stand so people can see you. You have become so skilled at performing holiness that somewhere along the way you may have forgotten the difference between the mask and the man underneath it.” That crowd on the hillside would have heard those words differently than we do now. They would not have heard a simple moral scolding. They would have heard a surgeon naming the wound out loud. So when Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” He never actually stops to define what that means. There is no checklist attached. No seven habits of the spiritually successful. No formula for finally becoming impressive enough for God. He simply says the words and lets them settle over the crowd like a question hanging in the air. Because honestly, who among us is pure in heart? Who among us has nothing hidden, nothing managed, nothing rehearsed? Who among us has never worn a face that looked calmer, kinder, stronger, or more faithful than what was really happening underneath? But if you keep following Jesus through the Gospels, something begins to come into focus. Again and again, His sharpest words are aimed not at broken people, but at performative ones. He tells the Pharisees they are polishing the outside of the cup while the inside remains untouched. He watches one man stand in the temple, praying a polished, carefully constructed prayer about all the ways he is better than everyone else around him. Then Jesus notices another man standing at a distance, unable even to lift his eyes toward heaven, simply whispering, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And Jesus says, “That one. That one went home justified.” Augustine once said that the real contrast in this Beatitude is not between purity and impurity, but between purity and hypocrisy. I think he was right, because a pure heart is not a perfect heart. It is not a heart that has finally climbed high enough to escape the mess of being human. It is not a heart that has figured out how to impress the room. A pure heart is simply an honest one. It is the person who finally grows too tired to keep performing and instead comes to God carrying what is actually true. And I think that is what the people on the hillside found so startling. Most of them could never keep up with the religious performance expected of them anyway. They were fishermen and laborers and tax collectors and women who had spent years being quietly reminded that they were falling short. The distance between who they were and who they were supposed to be felt enormous. They had been taught, directly and indirectly, that holiness belonged to people who performed better. Then Jesus sat down, looked directly at the people who could never quite keep the mask in place, and said, “Blessed.” I imagine some of them exhaled for the first time in years. I think about this often when I sit with families in grief. There is a version of grief that knows exactly how to behave in public. The right words get spoken. The right face gets worn. Everything is managed with quiet dignity, and I understand why. Some pain feels too personal to spill open in front of a room full of people. But every now and then, somebody stops performing. A daughter who held herself together through the visitation and funeral quietly breaks down at the graveside. A son who has not cried in decades suddenly reaches for his mother’s hand and cannot let go. A widow finally stops answering the question, “How are you doing?” with polite reflexes and simply says, “I honestly don’t know.” And those moments always feel holy to me. Not because composure is wrong. But because in those moments, there is no performance left. People let their masks slip, and suddenly something true stands in the open air between everybody who is present. I think that is what Jesus meant. Not that God only meets us when we fall apart, but that God has never needed our performance in order to love us in the first place. He meets us most deeply in the places where we stop pretending long enough to be known. The Unlikely Altar for this Beatitude is difficult to photograph because it is not really a place. It is the quiet moment, often unexpected and sometimes a little uncomfortable, when you finally grow weary of carrying the mask. Maybe it happens in your car after you have held yourself together all day. Maybe it happens in the middle of a conversation where something inside you simply quits trying to sound okay. Maybe it happens late at night when the performance becomes too heavy to keep carrying for another hour. That moment, strange as it sounds, may be holy ground. Not because you finally got your life together, but because you finally stopped pretending that you had. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget: God has never loved the mask more than the person underneath it. Take off the mask. That is all. Just take it off.

I could write about Cherie DeVaux, and honestly, I probably should. She made history Saturday at Churchill Downs — the first woman ever to train a Kentucky Derby winner in 152 years of trying. Golden Tempo came from dead last with 23-1 odds and crossed the finish line while Cherie stood in the winner's circle holding her nephew and crying the kind of tears you simply cannot manufacture. That's a real story, a genuinely good one, and it deserves its own altar. But I keep thinking about something else entirely. Every year, the Kentucky Derby does something to me that has nothing to do with the race itself. It's the pageantry. The hats that took three weeks to find. The mint juleps, the singing of My Old Kentucky Home , the roses, the trumpet call, the way a hundred thousand people dress up and gather and hold their breath together for exactly two minutes. There is something deeply human about all of that — something that looks, if you squint a little, like worship. I have come to believe that we need ritual; we always have and probably always will. We mark things with ceremony because some moments are simply too large to let pass without acknowledgment, and Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May is one of the last places in America where everybody agrees, without argument, without explanation, to stop, dress up, and pay attention together. And then on Saturday, just before the gates opened, a horse named Great White reared up, fell backward, and flipped. He wasn't even supposed to be there. Great White got into the Derby field on Wednesday, just three days before the race, as a late entry after another horse was injured. A door opened that wasn't supposed to open. An unexpected chance, the kind that doesn't come looking for you twice. His trainer had him ready, and his jockey was up. The roses were on the table, the crowd was holding its breath, and the pageantry was in full, glorious swing. And right there at the threshold of the gate, not inside it, not pointed toward the finish line, but right there at the edge of the only moment his entire life had been building toward - - something spooked him. His body said no. He weighs 1,370 pounds. And fear? Fear stopped him cold. The chance of a lifetime was gone before it ever began. “It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance.” One chance. One Saturday. One gate. And just like that, it was over before it ever began. I’ve loved that line from Dan Fogelberg for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt it quite like I did on Saturday evening. The jockey walked away unhurt, which matters more than the race ever could. And Great White was reported to be perfectly fine afterward, unaware of what the moment had cost him, which is either mercy or heartbreak, depending on how you look at it. He will never know what he missed. He will never carry the weight of that threshold. He just is, somewhere in a stall right now, exactly the horse he was on Friday - - ready, capable, and unaware. I couldn't stop thinking about him. Not because it's a clean tragedy with a tidy moral, but because I have stood at enough gravesides to recognize that story. I officiate funerals, and I have sat with enough families to have lost count of the ones where fear made the call at the gate. It wasn't made by a failure or by lack of preparation. It wasn’t even bad luck, not exactly. Just fear, arriving at the worst possible moment, at the threshold of the thing they'd been pointed toward their whole life. The conversation they kept meaning to have. The relationship they almost repaired. The door that opened unexpectedly on a Wednesday and closed forever by Saturday. The pageantry of the world rolled on without them, the way it always does, and they never got their two minutes. Here is what I want to say to you today, and I want to say it as someone who has stood in those rooms and felt that grief: some of you still have your gate in front of you. The unexpected door is still open. The chance you didn't see coming is still there, waiting for you to stop letting fear make the call. Because fear will always find something to spook at. It will find a reason why this isn't the right moment, why you aren't quite ready, why it would be better to wait for a Saturday with better conditions, calmer nerves, and more certainty. Fear is patient and persuasive , and it knows exactly where to find you — right there at the threshold, when the gate is finally close enough to touch. But the roses don't wait. The trumpet doesn't play twice. And I have sat with too many people in too much grief over unlived moments to let this Derby pass without saying it plainly. Whatever is waiting on the other side of your gate — run toward it. Not because the fear goes away. It probably won't. But because the chance of a lifetime doesn't come back around, and somewhere on the other side of that threshold is the thing you were made for. God meets you there, at the gate, in the fear, in the unexpected chance you didn't see coming. That's where He does some of His best work — not in the winner's circle, not in the pageantry, but right there in the trembling, terrifying, holy threshold moment. That's an Unlikely Altar if I've ever seen one. Not the winner's circle. Not the roses. Not the pageantry. Just a trembling creature at a threshold, and a God who showed up anyway. If that's where you are today, standing at the gate, heart pounding, door open, fear loud - - May you know, may you remember, may you never forget: you were made for this moment. And you are not alone in it.

There is a word in the Hebrew Bible that appears more than 150 times, and we have never found an adequate way to translate it into English. The word is chesedh . We try. We use mercy, lovingkindness, steadfast love, and compassion. And every translation captures something true. But none of them capture everything. Because chesedh isn't just a feeling, an attitude, or even a virtue, it's the word the writers of Scripture used over and over again to describe the defining characteristic of God — the way God moves toward people, especially people who have no reason to expect it. And there is a related word, rahamim , which means something even more visceral. It comes from the Hebrew word for womb . It's the kind of love a mother has for the child she carried — not distant, or theoretical, but rather physical and active. It is a love that cannot stay still when the one it loves is suffering. That's what Jesus was talking about when He said, " Blessed are the merciful. " It’s not pity, and it’s more than just feeling sorry for someone from a safe distance. And it surely isn't just some kind thought sent in the general direction of someone's pain. Chesedh . Rahamim . It is a love that gets up and moves. Now imagine you are sitting on that hillside, the day Jesus said those words. You are not there because life is going well. You are there because you are out of other options, and something about this carpenter from Nazareth made you think — maybe. Just maybe He is the One. You are a fisherman with calloused hands who has been told your whole life that God is for the educated and the clean. You are a woman who has been publicly shamed and hasn't forgotten the faces of the people who did it. You are a tax collector who knows exactly what your neighbors think of you. You are a mother whose child is sick and who has been told, quietly and not so quietly, that this is what you deserve. You have heard religious teachers your whole life. You know how this usually goes. They tell you what God requires. But more than that, they like to remind you that you fall short. And they remind you again and again and again. So when Jesus says, " Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy, " what runs through your heart? Probably not faith; at least not yet. Probably something closer to — so what? Nobody has ever shown me that. Why would I believe it now? And yet you stay. Something keeps you on that hillside. Maybe it's hunger. The rahamim kind — deep, desperate, from somewhere in your core. The longing for someone to finally mean it. In November 2008, a high school football team from Gainesville, Texas, took the field for what should have been just another road game. Gainesville State had fourteen players, wore seven-year-old pads and hand-me-down helmets. And they were winless with a 0-8 record. When Gainesville State arrived at games, they were escorted by security guards who removed their handcuffs before kickoff. You see, Gainesville State is a juvenile correctional facility. Their players are there by court order — drugs, assaults, robberies. Many of their families have disowned them. They play every game on the road, so there are no home crowds and no one is cheering their names. Their opponent that night was Faith Christian School — seventy players, eleven coaches, the latest equipment, and hundreds of involved parents. Before the game, Faith's head coach, Kris Hogan, sent an email to his fans. He asked them to do something unusual. Half of them, he said, would sit on the visiting side. They would learn the names of the Gainesville players. And they would cheer for them. When the Gainesville Tornados took the field, they ran through a banner that read Go Tornados. Two hundred strangers cheered their names. Faith's own cheerleaders led cheers for the opposing team. One Gainesville player said, “ We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to games. But these people, they were yellin' for us. By our names. ” Faith won 33 to 14. It didn't matter. Because at the end of the game, when the teams gathered to pray, a Gainesville player named Isaiah asked to lead. And this is what he prayed: “ Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there were so many people in the world that cared about us. ” That is chesedh. You see, it’s not just feeling sorry for kids in a hard situation. It’s not writing a check from a comfortable distance. But it is about a large group of people who chose to get into the skin of fourteen young men who had never been cheered for and cheered for them anyway. And it changed Isaiah. You can hear it in his prayer. Something broke open in him that night that had never been open before. That is what mercy does when it is real. Isaiah didn't just feel better that night. For maybe the first time in his life, he felt what grace actually feels like, with skin on it. And you don't walk away from that as the same person. They will receive mercy. That crowd on the hillside didn't know what to do with that promise yet. But maybe — just maybe — some of them had felt something like what that young man Isaiah felt. The shock of being cheered for by people who had no reason to cheer. The disorientation of being treated like you matter by people who didn't have to. And maybe that's what finally made them believe it was possible. Chesedh doesn't always look like 200 fans on the bleachers. Sometimes it looks like a cup of cold water handed to a stranger who is thirsty. Doesn't seem like much and is often barely worth mentioning. But to the one drinking it — standing there parched, overlooked, and not expecting anything from anyone — that cup is the whole character of God made visible in one ordinary moment. That's the Unlikely Altar for this one. It isn’t some grand gesture or a stadium full of people. It is the moment when someone who has never been shown mercy receives it — and something in them shifts permanently. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Not because mercy is a transaction. Not because you give it and get it back like change. But because when you live chesedh — when you get into someone's skin and choose to move toward them instead of away — you find yourself swimming in the same love that has been moving toward you your whole life. Even when you didn't know it. Even when you were the one on the visiting side, wondering if anyone would ever cheer your name. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget — there is a love that will not stay at a distance. It has a Hebrew name we cannot fully translate. It comes from the womb. It moves toward the ones everyone else has written off. And somewhere today, in the most ordinary and unexpected moment, it is looking for a way to show up through you. Blessed are the merciful. Go cheer somebody's name.

You weren't thinking about death. You were scrolling. Maybe it was late, and the TV was on in the background, but you were only half watching. Or maybe you were looking at pictures of the grandkids, or a video somebody shared, or just moving your thumb out of habit the way most of us do when the day gets quiet. And then the ad appeared. You could have kept scrolling. And to be honest, most people do. But there was something about the ad that made you stop. Maybe it was the word family or the word burden. Maybe it was a face that showed up uninvited in the back of your mind — someone you love, someone you'd do almost anything for — and for just a moment, you let yourself think about what you might be leaving them to carry. So you filled out the form. Now here's what I've learned after months of calling the names on that list: most people can't tell you exactly why they stopped. Some stopped out of fear. The fear of dying before things are in order, or the moment they realize what a funeral actually costs. Fear has a way of moving us before we fully understand what we're doing. Others stopped out of love. They see something like that and think of their spouse, or their kids, or a grandchild who would be left to figure things out on a day when thinking clearly isn't exactly easy. And some stopped because the form was there and it was simple, and maybe it passed a quiet moment without asking too much in return. I don't know which one you were. Maybe all, or perhaps none of the above. But I do know this: you typed your name, filled in the numbers, named someone you care about, and hit submit. And whatever was behind that — fear, love, or just a quiet Tuesday afternoon — something in you moved. And I want to be honest with you about something. I'm not calling because I need the commission to survive. I don't. I'm calling because I officiate funerals, and I stand with grieving families several times a week. I've seen what happens when nothing is in place. I've watched the frustration, the stress, the quiet panic behind the decisions that have to be made quickly and paid for just as fast. And once you've seen that up close, you don't really get to unsee it. Now, I might be wrong, but I don't think that form was just about information. I think somewhere along the way, you've seen a GoFundMe for a funeral. Maybe you shared it. Maybe you gave five or ten dollars because you knew the family and it felt like the least you could do. And somewhere in that moment, without even putting it into words, you thought: I don't want that to be my people. I don't want my kids passing the digital hat while they're still trying to figure out how to get through the week without me. I don't want my spouse choosing between burying me with dignity and keeping the lights on. I don't want the people I love most asking strangers for help on the worst day of their lives. Just so you know, that isn't fear talking. That's love — the kind of love that thinks ahead. And a love like that is quietly one of the most faithful things a person can do. So here's where I come in. I'm the guy who calls. You may have seen my number and let it go to voicemail. You may have read my text and meant to respond. You may have genuinely forgotten you ever filled out the form in the first place, because life got loud again the moment you put your phone down, and the stillness disappeared. I understand all of that. I really do. But I keep calling. Not to pressure you or hit some quota. I keep calling because I've stood at too many gravesides and sat with too many families trying to figure things out in real time. And there is a difference when things have been taken care of. Love will always make grief heavy — nothing changes that — but when the practical pieces are already in place, there's a little more room to breathe. And I wonder if part of you already knows that. Here's the question I keep coming back to, and I ask it with nothing but care and concern: when your loved ones are sitting in the funeral home, what will you have left them to carry? Not your furniture. I mean the practical weight of your absence. The bills that still arrive. The funeral that still has to happen. The decisions that still have to be made by people who are already carrying more than they know how to hold. You had a moment — maybe just thirty seconds on a Tuesday night — when you let yourself think about that. When love or fear or something that felt like both moved your hand and you filled out a form. That moment was worth something. It still is. The form was just the beginning. The conversation is where it becomes real. And whenever you're ready for that conversation — unhurried, no pressure, just honest — I'll be here.

This past week I was filling my Jeep with gas, on my way to officiate a funeral, when I saw him. I don’t think he saw me watching, but I did. He was standing off to the side of the parking lot, half-turned away from the store, rummaging through a trash can until he pulled out a crumpled McDonald’s bag. He opened it right there and started eating what looked like leftover fries. Cold. Greasy. Whatever someone else didn’t finish. Cars kept moving in and out. The pump kept clicking. Life didn’t slow down for him. I probably should have walked inside, bought him a decent meal and a Coke, handed it to him like it was nothing. But I didn’t. He went on his way, eating fries from a trash can. I got back in my Jeep, pulled out of the station, and headed toward a room where people would be gathered to remember someone they loved. And somewhere between the gas station and that funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Not just what he was doing… but what it stirred in me. That quiet, uncomfortable mix of heartbreak and guilt and the deep-down sense that something about the world is just not the way it’s supposed to be. And as I drove, a familiar phrase kept finding its way back into my head, like it had been waiting for me to notice it again. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Most of us have heard those words before. We’ve heard them enough that they can start to feel like something soft, something spiritual, something that belongs in a sermon or stitched onto a pillow somewhere. But I wonder if we’ve ever really let them land. Because righteousness, the way Jesus is talking about it, isn’t about being good or moral or checking the right boxes. It’s bigger than that. It’s about things being made right. It’s about the world looking the way God intends it to look… whole, just, restored. It’s about what Scripture calls shalom. Because if you remember who was sitting on that hillside listening to Him, this would not have felt abstract at all. These weren’t people who had just finished a nice lunch. They were fishermen, farmers, and laborers. People who knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry. People who understood thirst not as a metaphor, but as something your body feels when it hasn’t had enough for too long. So when Jesus said hunger and thirst, they didn’t need an explanation. They felt it. And then He takes that feeling — that desperate, undignified, I-will-dig-through-a-trash-can-if-I-have-to kind of hunger — and says that is what your longing for righteousness should feel like. Not polite. Not distant. Not theoretical. But a desperate craving. Sometimes that hunger shows up on a global scale, and it hits you like a fist. It’s the footage you can’t quite turn away from. Children in places whose names we struggle to pronounce, drinking water that would make us sick. It’s the moment when numbers stop feeling like numbers because you’ve seen a face, or a story, or a man in a parking lot eating cold fries out of someone else’s leftovers. It’s the part of you that knows, deep down, that the world has enough — enough food, enough water, enough resources — and yet somehow it doesn’t reach the people who need it most. That gap between what is and what should be… that ache… that’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. That’s a longing for shalom. Sometimes the hunger is quieter than that. I have sat in rooms where a marriage was coming apart, and what always surprises me is how little noise it makes. You expect shouting, doors slamming, something you can point to. But more often it’s just a heaviness. A silence that settles in between two people who used to know how to reach each other and somewhere along the way forgot. You can feel the absence of wholeness like it’s taking up space in the room. And if you’ve ever been there, you know the feeling. That deep, steady ache that things could be different. That somehow the distance could be crossed. That healing might still be possible. That’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. That longing for two people to find their way back… that’s a desire for shalom. And sometimes the hunger is the most personal thing in the world. Maybe it’s not something out there or between two people. Maybe it’s inside you. The habits you keep circling back to. The patterns you’ve tried to break more times than you can count. The quiet voice that wonders if this is just who you are now. And yet… underneath all of that… there is still something in you that hasn’t given up. Something that still wants to be whole. Something that still longs for things to be made right. Even when it’s tired. Even when it feels worn down. That longing… that refusal to settle… that is hunger and thirst for righteousness. And Jesus looks at that person — not cleaned up, not finished, not figured out — and says makarios. Not “happy.” Not “fortunate.” Something closer to… God is with you. God is on your side. Right there in the hunger. Right there in the longing. Right there in the place where you know things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and you haven’t stopped caring. Which means maybe that moment at the gas station wasn’t just something to feel bad about and move past. The hunger itself is an unlikely altar. Maybe the ache you feel when you see something broken — in the world, in others, in yourself — is not something to avoid or explain away, but something to pay attention to. Because that ache might be the very place where God is already at work in you. The place where your soul is learning to want what God wants. And maybe being filled doesn’t always mean everything gets fixed all at once. Maybe sometimes it looks like this: You don’t stop noticing. You don’t stop caring. You don’t stop longing for things to be made right. And somewhere in that hunger… you find that you are not alone. You never were.

There’s a certain kind of strength that tends to get most of the attention in this world, and you don’t have to look very hard to recognize it. It’s the voice that fills a room without asking permission, the kind that makes people turn their heads before they’ve even decided if they agree. It’s the swing that tries to send the ball over the left field fence, preferably with enough distance to make people stand up before it even lands. That kind of strength is visible, measurable, and makes for good highlights. Somewhere along the way, most of us quietly absorbed the idea that this is what strength is supposed to look like. But every now and then, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a different kind of strength moving through the very same space, and it’s easy to miss because it doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the person who could say something sharp and decides not to, or in the moment when someone clearly has the upper hand and realizes that winning isn’t actually the most important thing happening in the room. It’s the kind of strength that doesn’t need to prove anything because it already knows what it’s carrying, and if you blink, you can miss it entirely. Baseball has a way of revealing that kind of strength, usually when nobody is expecting it, and I remember one of those moments pretty clearly. It was Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, bottom of the ninth inning, with the Yankees leading by two runs and Mariano Rivera on the mound, which in those days felt about as close to automatic as baseball ever gets. When Rivera came in, games didn’t so much continue as they slowly came to a conclusion. Arizona managed to get a runner on base, which was already more hope than most teams found in that situation, and then Jay Bell stepped in to pinch-hit for Randy Johnson. He was a guy who knew how to swing the bat, fourteen home runs that year, over seventy runs driven in, and enough experience to understand exactly what October pressure feels like when it settles into your chest. And somewhere in that moment, whether it came from the dugout or from some instinct inside him, he squared around and bunted. It didn’t work the way you might draw it up. The runner was thrown out at third, and if you just glance at the box score, it probably looks like a mistake. The kind of decision that makes you wonder what he was thinking. Except the inning didn’t end, and that matters. Because the next batter, Tony Womack, doubled and tied the game, and a few moments later, Luis Gonzalez ended the World Series with a soft single that barely made it out of the infield. Everybody remembers the Gonzalez hit, but almost nobody remembers the bunt, which is often how this kind of strength works. Sometimes the strongest player on the field is the one who knows when not to swing. Even when everything in you wants to, even when it doesn’t work out cleanly, and even when it looks, at least for a moment, like you got it wrong. And it turns out Jesus had something to say about that kind of strength. “Blessed are the meek.” Most of us hear the word "meek" and picture someone who gets overlooked or pushed around. We often think of someone who doesn’t have much presence, while louder people take up all the oxygen in the room. But that’s not what Jesus was describing. The word He uses is praus , a word that was used in the first century for a wild horse that had been trained, not broken or diminished, but still strong. A horse still capable of running full speed, still a warhorse, just one that had learned when to run and when to stand still. And Jesus looks at that kind of person and says makarios . Not “happy” or “fortunate,” at least not in the way we usually mean those words. Something closer to this: God is with you . God is on your side . Not because you are the loudest or the strongest or the one who swings the hardest, but because you have learned something the world keeps forgetting. Jesus lived that kind of strength. He didn’t avoid conflict, but He also wasn’t interested in winning it the way everyone else was. And there’s a difference there that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. He carried power without needing to prove it. That might be the clearest sign that it was real to begin with. Somehow, Jesus knew not only what He could do but when not to do it. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Not conquer it, which is how we usually imagine strength working, but inherit it, which means it comes as a gift rather than something you muscle your way into. I’ll be honest with you, this is one of the Beatitudes I am still learning how to live into, because the bunt does not come naturally to me. My first instinct is usually to swing away, the kind of swing that either clears the fence or leaves you walking back to the dugout wondering what just happened. Restraint is something I have to choose, and I don’t always choose it well. And that might be the clearest sign that it was real all along. Maybe “blessed are the meek” isn’t describing people who have already figured this out so much as it’s inviting the rest of us to keep learning how to choose differently, even when the swing feels more satisfying and even when we have every reason to let it go. The Unlikely Altar for the meek isn’t something you can photograph or circle on a map, because it doesn’t stay still long enough for that. It shows up in the space between what flashes through your mind and what finally comes out of your mouth, in that quiet moment where you realize you could go one way and, almost gently, decide to go another. And more often than we notice, that’s exactly where God meets us, not in the noise of the moment but in the choosing of it, in the restraint that nobody else may ever see but that somehow still changes everything. Blessed are the meek, not because they are weak, but because they know they could swing and choose what matters more. Because sometimes the strongest thing you can do is not swing at all.

Over the years, I have stood at countless gravesides, either as a pastor or as a celebrant, I have learned a profound truth. Every family handles grief differently. And you can see it in the way they stand and in the silence that sits over them like a pall. And even though I have witnessed it many times, I am never ready for the parents. I have watched a mom and dad lower a casket so small it breaks something in the air around it. There are no words. No theology can make sense of it. The flowers on top of the casket seem almost cruel in their brightness. And the dirt - well, it is just dirt. Then there are the parents who stand on the edge of that hole, trying to make sense of the senseless. When I watch the family and friends standing at the grave, I feel the full weight of what it means to be human, which is to say, the full weight of what it means to love something you cannot keep. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in those moments, I hear a question I have never been able to answer, standing there in the grass: What does God say to this? Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them…Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. If you have ever stood at a grave and someone turned to you and said those words, I imagine you might have felt something catch in your throat. Please understand, not because the words are wrong. But because in that moment, with the dirt still fresh and the flowers still bright and the people you love still unable to make their feet move toward the car, comfort feels very far away. And if someone had leaned over and whispered, "Happy are those who mourn,” — you might have said a few words you would regret later, then walked away. And you would have had every right to. But please know that is not what Jesus said. He said makarios . And makarios doesn't mean happy. It never did. It means something closer to — God is with you . Right here at the grave. Right now, in the midst of the hurt and the questions. In the moment when no words can make any sense. Jesus says, Makarios … He doesn’t say, "Let's wait till the grief gets easier. ” He doesn’t say, “Time heals all wounds.” And He doesn’t say, “You will get over this.” He simply says, “Blessed are those that mourn…” The theologian Frederick Dale Bruner said that when Jesus used the word makarios , which is translated to blessed , he was reminding the people that God is with them. It is as if God taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, “I am with you.” And you know what I hold onto every funeral I stand with families? I hold on to the belief, in ways I can’t fully understand or explain, that those words are true. Okay, maybe God doesn’t just whisper them, He proclaims them in a big voice, bigger than the smallest casket even. He states them in such a way that they echo through every graveyard and every tomb. “Even in this moment, especially in this moment, I am with you. I am on your side!” You see, I believe that because the God of Easter is not a God who watches grief from a distance and then sends an email. He is a God who came down, who stood at His own Son's grave. Who knows what those parents are feeling — not as theology, not as doctrine — but from the core of His being. That is what Easter means even at the hardest grave. Not that death didn't happen. Not that the pain disappears with the sunrise. But that the God who walked out of the tomb on Sunday morning did it for exactly this moment. For the parents at the smallest grave. For the widow who can't make her feet move. For everyone standing in the grass, wondering what God could possibly say to this. He says, "I am with you." Even now. Maybe especially now. And I'll tell you something I don't always say out loud. When I get in my Jeep after a graveside service and drive away, I sometimes wonder. And I hope. I hope that God does more than whisper. But then I remember Easter. It doesn't look like holy ground. It doesn't feel like it either. But it is. But maybe that is exactly where the God of Easter shows up. Not after the grief passes. Not when the marker is finally in place, and the grass has grown back, and people have stopped bringing casseroles. But right there in the silence that sits over a family like a pall. In the moment when love has nowhere left to go. The grave is an Unlikely Altar . But Easter was an unlikely morning. On this Easter, may we know, may we remember, may we never forget — we have a God who doesn’t watch from a distance. Our God comes down and stands at the grave. And in a voice bigger than any casket, bigger than any grief, bigger than any question we have ever carried, He proclaims: I am with you. Even now. Maybe especially now. He is risen. And that changes everything.