The Beatitudes: your politics is too small
![[HERO] Your Politics is Too Small](https://cdn.marblism.com/KHjzRja4Wcn.webp)
This morning at St. Francis, we heard Jesus read the Beatitudes from Matthew's Gospel, and Bishop Stokes was with us. There was something grounding about hearing those words—Blessed are the poor in spirit… blessed are the peacemakers…—in that moment, with actual people in the pews, kids fidgeting in their seats, someone's phone going off despite their best efforts, somebody quietly wiping their eyes at something that landed in a tender place.
Then you walk back out into the world and it all comes rushing back in like a tide you'd momentarily forgotten was rising. You know the feeling, don't you? You're at a dinner party and someone mentions the news, and the whole room shifts in that instant. There's that tightness in your chest, the sudden urge to look at your phone, the quick mental calculation about whether to say something or just pass the potatoes and hope the moment passes.
Or maybe it's the carpool line, or the neighborhood party where someone's wearing that hat or that shirt and you already think you know everything you need to know about them before they've even opened their mouth. We size each other up, sort ourselves and everyone else into neat little boxes—red or blue, us or them, safe or dangerous. This is what politics has become for us, not conversation but a sorting mechanism, a way of knowing who belongs and who doesn't before we've even bothered to listen.
And if you're trying to follow Jesus through all of this? It gets complicated fast, doesn't it? But the Beatitudes give us something else entirely—a completely different map for what "blessed" actually means and what real strength looks like in a world that's forgotten.
Here's the thing I've been wrestling with: most of our politics is too small. Not necessarily wrong, not unimportant, but small in a way that should concern us. We've shrunk the Gospel down to a voting guide, made Jesus a mascot for whichever side we happen to prefer, turned the Kingdom of God into a policy checklist that fits neatly on a bumper sticker. And in doing all of this, we've missed something enormous, something that would explode our categories if we let it.
Jesus names it early in Matthew's Gospel, standing on a hillside with ordinary people who'd come to hear him teach. The Beatitudes sound familiar to most of us, maybe too familiar, but if we actually let them land—really let them disrupt our assumptions—they completely scramble our usual categories of who's "winning," who's "blessed," what "power" even means in the economy of God.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are those who mourn... Blessed are the meek... Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness... Blessed are the merciful... Blessed are the pure in heart... Blessed are the peacemakers... Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake..." (Matthew 5:3–10)
Sit with that for a second and notice what Jesus doesn't say. He doesn't say "Blessed are the influential" or "Blessed are the ones controlling the narrative" or "Blessed are the people who finally get their side in power." He starts with the poor in spirit—not the spiritually impressive, not the ones who have all the answers and certainty to spare, but the ones who know they don't have it together, who come to God empty-handed because that's all they've got.
Then he keeps going through this litany that makes no sense in our cultural moment—mourning, meekness, mercy, purity of heart, hunger for righteousness, peacemaking. None of this fits into red or blue categories, and that's precisely the point. The Beatitudes aren't a political platform we can weaponize for our side; they're a completely different way of seeing power and blessing that refuses to be domesticated by our partisan categories.
In our world, "blessed" usually means something like: secure, admired, in control, protected from the chaos that everyone else has to deal with. But in Jesus' world, "blessed" looks like being open-handed and honest, willing to suffer for what's right, stubbornly committed to peace even when it costs you everything. That's not partisan politics, friends. That's discipleship. And it makes our red-versus-blue battles look pretty small by comparison.
Look, I get it—these issues matter, and I'm not suggesting they don't. Immigration matters, the economy matters, religious freedom matters. Yes, absolutely, without question. But here's the real question that keeps me up at night: what kind of people are we becoming while we engage these issues? Because most political engagement in America right now is about one thing and one thing only: power. Who has it, who keeps it, who loses it, and how we can make sure we're on the winning side when the dust settles.
But Jesus stands on that hillside and says, "Blessed are the meek," and "Blessed are the merciful," and "Blessed are the peacemakers," and he's describing a different kind of strength entirely, one that our culture has mostly forgotten how to recognize. Peacemakers especially—they don't fit anyone's talking points, do they? Peacemaking isn't rolling over and letting injustice have its way, but it's also not destroying the other side and salting the earth where they stood. It's the slow, costly work of refusing to dehumanize people, refusing to write them off as irredeemable, refusing to let fear call the shots even when fear seems like the only reasonable response.
And "poor in spirit"? That's not a bumper sticker or a campaign slogan. It's the posture that says, "Lord, I might be right about this issue and still be wrong in my heart about how I'm holding it." It's humility, it's repentance, it's remembering that I'm not God no matter how certain I feel. That's Jesus' politics, if we can even call it that, and it doesn't fit neatly into either party's platform because it's operating on an entirely different plane.
Let me be as direct as I know how to be: if your political identity matters more to you than your baptismal identity, your politics is too small. If you can't worship next to someone who votes differently than you do without feeling like you're betraying something sacred, your politics is too small. If you think the Kingdom of God rises or falls on who wins the next election, your politics is way, way too small.
Jesus didn't come to hand out tribal badges or to confirm our existing prejudices about who deserves God's favor. He came to bless the kinds of people our culture overlooks, to turn our power structures upside down, to show us what strength looks like when it's not based on domination. "Blessed are the merciful" means you don't get to build your life on contempt for the other side. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness" means you don't get to call apathy "being realistic" or cynicism "wisdom." "Blessed are the peacemakers" means you don't get to confuse "owning" somebody on social media with faithfulness to the Gospel.
And "blessed are the poor in spirit" means you don't get to pretend you're self-made or self-saved, that you've got it all figured out while everyone else is stumbling in the dark. You don't. None of us do. We're all beggars telling other beggars where to find bread, as the old saying goes.
The Beatitudes don't make us indifferent to real issues or tell us to check out of civic engagement. They make us different people as we care about real issues—people marked by humility instead of arrogance, mercy instead of contempt, courage instead of fear-mongering, purity of heart instead of cynical calculation, a genuine hunger for what's right instead of just winning, and a commitment to peace that's stronger than our need to be right. This isn't passive, and it's certainly not "be nice and avoid conflict at all costs." This is active, costly, dangerous love—the kind that got Jesus killed because it threatened every power structure of his day. But it's also the kind that actually changes the world, not just through legislation or executive orders, but through the deep transformation of human hearts.
So what does this look like here and now, in our particular cultural moment? It means recognizing that the person you disagree with politically isn't your enemy—they're your neighbor, and Jesus had some pretty clear and uncomfortable things to say about how we're supposed to treat our neighbors. It means you can advocate passionately for policies you believe in without demonizing people who see things differently, without treating them as less than human or beyond redemption.
It means your first allegiance isn't to a party or a candidate or a political ideology, but to Jesus—whose "blessed are the peacemakers" won't let you turn people into caricatures or reduce them to their worst moment on social media. It means sitting in some uncomfortable tension, holding complexity without needing to resolve it immediately. You might not find a political home that perfectly aligns with the Beatitudes, and that's okay, because the Gospel isn't a platform we can build a campaign around. It's a Person we're learning to follow, often stumbling as we go.
And it means the work of justice and mercy doesn't stop at the ballot box or end when our candidate wins or loses. It happens in your actual neighborhood with actual people—the soup kitchen where you serve meals, the struggling family down the street who needs help with rent, the immigrant community that's afraid and uncertain, the rehab center where people are fighting to rebuild their lives. This is where the Kingdom shows up, not in the halls of power or the cable news green rooms, but in the ordinary, unsexy, day-to-day work of loving people who can't do anything for us in return.
Here's the good news that keeps me going: you don't have to figure this out alone, and you're not expected to have it all sorted before you take the first step. At St. Francis, we've been wrestling with these questions together in Sacred Ground groups where we can have honest conversations about race, faith, and identity in America without political litmus tests, just curiosity and a willingness to listen to perspectives that might challenge our assumptions. We've been trying to work out what it looks like to follow Jesus in divided times, not because we have it figured out or because we're somehow more enlightened than everyone else, but because the questions matter and we're better off wrestling with them together than alone.
And here's what we're learning as we go: the Gospel is always bigger than we think it is. More radical, more inclusive, more costly, more hopeful, more disruptive to our comfortable categories. It won't fit neatly into your existing political framework because it wasn't designed to—it'll blow it up and invite you into something larger and stranger and more beautiful than you imagined.
So here's the invitation, as simple as I can make it: What if you let go of the need to win the argument for just a moment? What if you stopped treating people like opponents to be defeated and started seeing them as image-bearers of God, broken and beloved just like you? What if you asked yourself, "How does the Gospel challenge my politics?" instead of "How do my politics confirm what I already believe about the Gospel?"
This isn't naivete, and it's not the claim that "both sides are the same" or that we should just opt out of civic engagement altogether. It's checking in to something deeper, something older, something more real and lasting than the political winds that shift with every election cycle. You belong to Jesus, not to a party, not to a tribe, not to whatever cable news narrative you've been absorbing. And Jesus? He's doing something bigger than you can imagine, something cosmic and eternal that makes our political battles look like sandbox fights when seen from the perspective of eternity.
Your politics is too small, but God's Kingdom? It's exactly the right size—big enough to hold all of us, messy and divided and anxious and hopeful as we are, big enough to redeem even our broken attempts at loving each other well.