I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 1, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12.
We are living through difficult times. You don’t need me to tell you that.
There is division, yes, but beneath the division, I sense something even more concerning: despair. Despair that we are losing ourselves, losing each other, losing our way, and despair that there’s nothing we can do about it.
Maybe I’m just stubborn and naive but I refuse to believe that’s true. And so I’ve been thinking: what is the counter to despair? How do we resist it? Secular culture might suggest that the opposite of despair is happiness or positivity, but I think our faith teaches us something else, and it’s vital that we understand it.
So, in order to to describe what this ‘something else’ is which can save us from despair, I am going to tell you briefly about two things which may seem, at first, to be completely unrelated.
The first ‘something’ is my grandpa’s candy dish. For the entirety of my life, there it was: a small stainless steel bowl covered by an old pink melamine saucer. It looked like something that’d been improvised on the fly one day and then just remained on the kitchen table forever.
No matter what else changed in the world, I knew that if you went into that kitchen, there that dish would be, and you could lift up the pink saucer and find grandpa’s perennial favorite, bridge mix, an odd mixture of chocolate covered things: raisins and nuts and malted milk balls. I didn’t love bridge mix, but I did love that it was always there for anyone who wanted it. That dish became a sort of sacramental presence, like the basin of holy water you dip into in church to remind yourself of something good and lasting. It was its constancy that made it sacred, that candy dish.
The second ‘something’ is one I hope you’ve already heard about. On August 20, 1965, an Episcopal seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels was murdered by a white supremacist in Alabama. He had been volunteering in the state throughout that spring and summer, supporting the civil rights movement. On the day he died, he and his fellow activists had just been released from jail for taking part in a nonviolent protest.
While waiting for a ride, Daniels and a few of his companions walked over to a store to buy a soft drink, but a man with a gun was blocking the entrance. The man aimed his gun at Ruby Sales, a young Black woman, and Jonathan Daniels instinctively pushed her out of the way; he was shot instead and died instantly. Daniels is honored as a martyr on the calendar of The Episcopal Church and Ruby Sales, who is still living, went on to a long ministry of faith-based activism for racial justice.
Something that always strikes me about Daniels’ story is how simple his actions really were. He was just trying to buy a soda, and then suddenly the stakes were impossibly high. Daniels did not set out to be a martyr or a hero that day. He just followed the same habits of care and kindness that he’d been practicing for a long time. It just so happened that this time, in the face of an active evil, his kindness became sacrificial.
I think this is an important distinction to make: we remember Christian martyrs not just because they are killed, but because they refuse to stop living according to God’s values when it matters the most. In other words, it was Jonathan Myrick Daniels’ constancy that made his life sacred, not the violence which ended it.
Constancy. That is the ‘something else,’ the true alternative to despair, conveyed to me by both a candy dish and a martyr. Not happiness or positivity, but constancy. Above all else, God is interested in our constancy. Our commitment to doing the things—often the very simple things—that God has always asked people to do, and our refusal to give up on them when the years grow long or times get tough.
And what is it that God wants people to do?
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
The prophet Micah needed people to hear: you are making this God thing too complicated. You are attempting overwrought gestures and grandiose conquests when all God actually desires is your constancy of love. Sometimes these actions will cost you not very much at all. Some day they may cost you your own life. But the fundamental question is: will you keep offering them regardless?
I have been struck in recent weeks by the constant, faithful actions of our siblings in The Episcopal Church in Minnesota and the networks of other neighbors in that region who are supporting each other in the face of great hardship.
Put aside policy debates for a moment and just look at the human scale of what these people are doing for each other. Outside observers have taken note, with some surprise, at how effectively all these scrappy Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics and people of other faiths are doing the very basic, yet suddenly prophetic actions of delivering groceries, making casseroles, offering rides, praying, sharing information, and showing up to bear witness.
I don’t know, maybe some of these observers have never been part of a church community, especially in the midwest, but the fact of the matter is: this is the stuff we always do. Casseroles and car rides and mutual care are the bread and butter of our life together. That’s true in tranquil times, in times of personal grief, and now, it seems, in times of national, moral crisis.
What is miraculous is not so much the nature of the actions themselves, but people’s constancy in offering these things to their neighbors even now that the wolf is at the door. The constancy of their willingness to show up, to pray, to act, to give, even when the stakes are much higher than they used to be. It is their constancy in doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly, as best they know how, that makes all of this sacred.
I have said this before in various ways but I am going to say it again, because I need you to hear this; I really need you to take this in as a counter to the temptation of despair: the way through the challenges of our time, and through the personal challenges we face, too, is not about some new innovative, impressive action we haven’t thought of yet.
Look at Minnesota. Look at Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Look at my grandpa’s candy dish, for heaven’s sake: you already know exactly what love looks like! We already know how to do what love requires of us! The question is will we remain constant in doing it, regardless of the circumstances around us?
We practice this here with each other every week so that it becomes like second nature. Did you think we were just gathering at church to pass the time til Jesus comes back? No, friends. We are practicing constancy.
Here’s the sacred logic of church life: we make soup for the annual Soup Supper and then, if loss or strife comes to our community, we’ll know how to make soup for those who grieve or for our vulnerable neighbors. And then, by God, if the apocalypse comes we will keep making soup even as the world falls down, just to spite the devil.
You see, those forces of evil—the ones that tempt us to despair—would love for us to think that the real solution to our collective problem is something big and dramatic and remarkable, something far sexier than soup or car rides or common kindness. Because then we would do nothing and content ourselves with waiting for someone else to come in and fix it all.
But there isn’t anyone else. Blessed are you, Jesus says. Blessed are you, just as you are, poor and mournful and meek. Empowered are you for this work. There is only us and what we have and what we know how to do, with God’s help and with constancy. And Jesus says that it is enough. We just have to keep at it.
Blessed are the ones who keep at it.
So, whatever you do, do not read the news and sit back and throw up your hands and say, “oh what am I to do, what are any of us to do?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
There’s only one question: will we do it?!
If you need help figuring out what that looks like in practice, open your church bulletin, go to the back, and pick something. And do it. And keep doing it. Keep praying, keep serving, keep showing up, no matter what happens next.
Like my grandpa, or Jonathan Myrick Daniels, or our friends in Minnesota, we will keep offering our small, necessary, transformative acts of love, together.
And in our constancy, our lives will be made sacred, too. In our constancy, the world may still struggle, and divisions may persist, and we may weep.
But there will be no room for despair.
By Another Road 