A sermon preached by Reverend Jeff Chu on Sunday, 1 February, 2026
Kenmore-Brookfield Anglican Church, Kenmore, Australia
Texts: Micah 6:1-8, Ps 15, 1 Cor 1:1-18, Matt 5:1-12
Who do you want to be?
It is February 1st. Just one month ago, some of you implicitly answered this question as you launched wholeheartedly into a well-intentioned self-improvement plan to kick off 2026—the diet to end all other diets, yet another new you for yet another new year, commitments to do that thing more or to do this thing less— steely resolutions that turned out, within days, perhaps weeks, maybe even hours, to be made of some altogether more fragile material.
Who do you want to be?
Just one month ago, the stated answer might have been more disciplined or less tipsy or better read or thinner or more active or less indulgent or more organized or less late. And whether you stuck with your resolutions or not, I’m guessing you’re not quite there yet. After all, it’s just February 1st. (Side note: My key to avoiding the disappointment of unfufilled New Year’s resolutions is not to make any New Year’s resolutions. It has worked very well for me.)
Who do you want to be?
I ask you that question in part because, at first glance, our texts today seem largely and loosely preoccupied with the question of who we ought to be or, put another way, who God might want us to be. You might perhaps even read these -passages as a collection of vague instructions for holy living. Let me pull back the preacherly curtain and admit to you candidly: Preaching to you about instructions for holy living was not who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do today. Yesterday at St. Francis Theological College in Milton, we had a lovely gathering centered on the beautiful growing work at Baroona Farm— honoring the earth, imagining the possibilities of feeding the hungry, feasting together, nurturing community. So I was naively hoping that, in keeping with those horticultural themes, the Spirit, via the Lectionary, would deliver us some nice agrarian parable or perhaps that time-honored imagery of the flowers of the field, a cute mention of a hedgehog or a fox, even the familiar invitation to consider those lilies or to follow God’s eye toward that little sparrow. At least give me some good shepherd!
No such luck.
Instead, we have a poem about morality from King David, no angel himself, and some hyperbolic ancient-Hebrew invective from the prophet Micah; riddle-like sermonic puzzles from Jesus and long-winded talk about persecution and foolishness from the Apostle Paul, who no doubt could have used an editor to ask him to be just a bit more concise and clear. Happy summer!
It’s chastening, I suppose, to remember that humanity has always struggled to be the best version of itself. It rebukes our notions of steady progress; perhaps the main thing that’s changed, really, is technology, because all the evidence all around the world suggests that we are fundamentally not so different from the arrogant and hypocritical society that Micah identified nearly three millennia ago. As he says, the mountains and the hills will bear witness; they’ve seen us through the ages and through it all.
So let me return to the question I have already asked you three
times: Who do you want to be?
It’s a tricky business, saying what you want and being honest about who you want to be. It’s a dangerous business in spaces like this one, which so often have prioritized not truth or candor but some spiritual version of our Sunday best.
I should also add that, in our world, it’s a lucrative business, telling others who they ought to want to be and then offering them some promised solution to get them there. Maybe it’s physical improvement. Maybe it’s spiritual or psychological. Or we could even look at this holistically; throw in some financial reorganization and perhaps a career turbo boost for the win.
Billions upon billions are spent on serums and fillers, a procedure to cut away here or another to add something there, lab-tested therapies and novel methodologies, consultants and analysts, self-help books and this season’s looks, optimization plans and efficiency strategies, protein shakes and new takes, never free, about how to be you, except just a little better. I bet you there’s an app to download, or a multi-day streak to maintain, or some other tool to get you just a little closer to that goal. Isn’t that how you win? Isn’t that how you prove you’re good enough?
Who do you want to be?
It’s not a question I ask you lightly, nor is it an easy one to answer. If asked honestly, it probes deeply. It might even reach places that rarely see the light—spaces in your spirit that are tender, even uncomfortable, perhaps painful, to explore. To name the desires of your personhood can also mean to compare your ideal, flawed as the picture might be, with your reality, flawed as that picture inevitably is, especially in your own self-critical sight.
I’m asking you—or perhaps it’s more gentle to say inviting you— to be candid about this question because I’d like for you to hold your answers to this question up against the implicit desires expressed in our holy Scriptures for you.
I don’t know if this will seem obvious to you at first glance, but what these texts offer is not a harsh, demanding to-do list like some of us were reared with, nor is it an impossible set of goals that we must chase year after ultimately unresolved year, January after unfulfilled January. I don’t want you to feel shamed either, because I don’t believe these Scriptures are about shaming. Well, maybe the Micah text is a little bit about shame, because he’s condemning, in one broad swipe, arrogance and hypocrisy, performative spirituality and empty gesture. His is shaming in the service of calling the people to account, urging them to remember their ancestors, all they survived, all the ways God showed up: This is not the way, he says. You know this is not the way.
So what is the way?
I’ve asked you who you want to be multiple times in the hopes that the question will lodge in you like the sand in the oyster that then produces a pearl. I hope it will keep turning in your heart and mind, surprising you, even maybe dismaying you, because it’s truly a super-annoying question. Because the continual and candid asking of this question forces you to confront assumptions and encourages you to reimagine what you thought you already knew and it opens you to possibility and it invites you into wondering and it likely shifts you onto unfamiliar terrain and it undoubtedly leads to yet more questions as you pay attention to what it stirs in you.
And it is in those openhearted, vulnerable questions that I believe that you and I will be met by all these spiritual ancestors. From Micah, we get a reminder of the God who created and the God who liberated. From David, we get a testimony about integrity and how what we believe is expressed through and enacted in our posture and behavior toward others. From Paul, we get an encouragement that such a posture will often sit uneasily with the values and messaging of this world—that power and strength in our contemporary context are actually folly and weakness in the eyes and heart of God.
And then, from Jesus, we get this litany of beautiful, if challenging, blessing.
I picture Jesus up on that Galilean mountain, sun-splashed waters below, hills rolling toward the horizon, the houses of Capernaum like little blocks in the distance. And if the text is to be believed, Jesus might just have been indulging his inner introvert, trying to get away from the crowds that had been clamoring for his attention and his healing hand. But there they were, inescapably, a patchwork quilt of people blanketing nature’s amphitheater, shushing one another to try to eavesdrop on the rabbi instructing his students—and here we are, doing much the same, receiving the echoes of that long-ago teaching that is part of our spiritual inheritance and maybe not understanding much of it at all.
What would those disciples have thought the first time the words hit their ears? How would they have responded as he invited them onto the way of peacemaking, the way of pure hearts, the way of mercy, the way of holy longing, the way of meekness, the way of sacred sorrow? These instructions are so befuddling for so many of us now, and we’ve had the chance to hear them again and again. How would they have hit them?
As I worked my way down the list and then back up again, through the peacemaking and the purity of heart, through the
mercy and the faithful desire, through meekness and mourning, it struck me that Jesus calls us to a kind of holy and indeed holistic attentiveness to all that has made us who we are and all we are still hoping to become. To mourn, to show mercy, to make peace—these are acts of remembrance and recognition. To be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be pure in heart— these are acts of aspiration and hope. And all of this fundamentally needs for us to be steadfastly openhearted and relentlessly, even radically vulnerable to God.
I don’t think it’s a mistake or even a minor detail that Jesus opens his litany of blessing with the most confounding phrase of them all. In a 2020 sermon on what it means to be poor in spirit, Pope Francis said that, to embody this, you don’t really have to do anything at all except stop pretending. “The fundamental thing to reiterate,” he said, “is to recognize that we already are poor in spirit.”
To be poor in spirit means to be vulnerable, to admit our neediness in those places that material wealth and physical
abundance will never satisfy, to long for a love that endures, to seek fulfillment beyond oneself, to acknowledge the fickleness and the insufficiency of our society and its lusts. To be poor in spirit, then, means to be emptied of any pretense and stripped of puffery, freed from delusions of our own individual importance and liberated from lies of independence and self-reliance. To be poor in spirit, then, means to be humbly and honestly human, ready to receive help and open to helping others.
I also don’t think it’s a mistake or a minor detail that all of these texts are delivered to us in the collective: Micah’s proclamations were delivered to an ancient nation, David’s psalm sung by congregations across time, Paul’s letter to a gathered church, Jesus’s words echoing down a mountain and onward to us. We cannot do any of this alone, and we were never meant to. We were always meant for life together—to remember together, to notice together, to be loved together, to love together, to bless the world together.
The blessings that Jesus offers are not personal possessions, nor are they security blankets that we wrap around us for our static comfort. The ancient understanding of being blessed meant having one’s needs met, such that there was the possibility of communal flourishing—and so maybe I was wrong. Maybe this was an agrarian text after all. Maybe this passage really was about growing things, because it’s about cultivating hope and healing and imagination and possibility and belonging and love, which is all that we’ve ever needed and wanted, even if we haven’t quite been able to name it yet.
We are blessed indeed—blessed not ultimately for our own sake or for our own glory, but for the salvation of all the world. We are blessed to be a blessing to humans who ache from all that we’ve inflicted on one another. We are blessed to shout love into a world that is so hateful and to offer healing to a planet that resounds with hurt. We are blessed to proclaim good news amidst the bad and to rebuke retribution with a tender chorus of mercy. We are blessed to extend the embrace of the One who sees us as we are and who loves us so deeply, more than we can imagine or understand.
Who do you want to be?
I can’t answer that question for you. But I can tell you who you already are: You are God’s beloved.
In the name of the One who is holy, the One who is imaginative,
the One who hovers lovingly like a mother hen over her chicks,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever, amen.