Homily, November 2, 2025, Rev. Holly Cardone

Hope on the Plain

November 2, 2025

Our gospel reading this morning, from Luke, is what’s often called the Sermon on the Plain. Most of us are more familiar with Matthew’s version, the Sermon on the Mount, which fills three full chapters. The two sermons share much of the same content, but the context and tone are strikingly different.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus goes up a mountain, evoking the image of Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Law. Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses—the authoritative teacher giving a new Torah, not carved in stone but written on the human heart. He’s addressing his disciples, though the crowd listens in. The teaching in Matthew is structured, deliberate, focused on spiritual and ethical formation. It’s long, meditative, and directed primarily at Jewish Christians who were trying to understand what following Jesus looked like in the midst of their inherited religious tradition.

In Luke, the scene is entirely different. Jesus comes down the mountain to a level place. He meets the people where they are. The crowd is mixed—disciples, yes, but also the poor, the sick, the curious, the desperate, people from Judea and from Gentile lands. Luke’s Jesus doesn’t stay elevated on the mountaintop; he comes down into the noise and mess of the crowd. His message is about God’s justice, the kind that lifts up the poor and humbles the powerful.

In contrast to Matthew’s lengthy sermon, Luke’s version feels almost like street preaching, direct, grounded, urgent. His Jesus speaks to real people about real suffering: hunger, grief, oppression, pain, both physical and emotional. He doesn’t spiritualize it. He talks about what’s happening right now. Luke ends this section with these words:

“But I say to you that listen: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

The Golden Rule.

We don’t talk about the Golden Rule much anymore, do we? It feels almost quaint, like something that belonged to another time. But maybe that’s exactly why we need to recover it. “Do to others as you would have them do to you” is the heart of the gospel—and it’s about as countercultural as it gets.

Love your enemies.
 Do good to those who hate you.
 Pray for those who abuse you.

Those are not easy instructions. They’re not sentimental. They’re radical. In a world so deprived of love, maybe this could be our daily prayer: “God, help me to love today where there is no love.” That might be the simplest way we can participate in God’s work of healing and hope. Just a small act of love, a small refusal to retaliate, a small choice to bless instead of curse—these things matter. They create ripples that reach farther than we know.

At our 10:15 service today, we’ll be celebrating two baptisms, one infant and one adult. It’s a holy thing to witness: people of different ages saying yes to the life of faith, to belonging to this community, to being drawn into the mystery of Christ’s love.

Baptism is our full welcome into the life of Christ and the community of the Church. Through water and the Holy Spirit, God forms an unbreakable bond with each of us. In baptism, God adopts us as beloved children and joins us to this sacred community of people worshipping together, working toward compassion, justice, and mercy. Baptism marks the beginning of a new life—one filled with grace and forgiveness, belonging and hope.

For a family to bring their baby for baptism, or for an adult to ask for baptism as a sign of wanting to belong to the life of Christ and the Church, is an act of hope. It’s a declaration that we believe something sacred is happening, that God is still at work in this messy, complicated world. It’s hope that something will change, that God will do something among us that’s bigger than what we can see or imagine right now.

Hope is woven all through the ministry and teachings of Jesus. The Beatitudes themselves are full of it. They may not sound like good news at first, “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who weep,” but they’re all about hope. They proclaim that God is turning the world upside down, that blessing and favor are not reserved for the powerful, the successful, or the beautiful.

In the first-century world, as theologian Diana Butler Bass writes, “the richer and more powerful you were, the more virtue you were thought to have, the closer you were to the emperor, the more blessed you were, and the more blessings you could bestow on others.” To say “blessed are the poor” was to flip the hierarchy. It was shocking. It said that God’s favor doesn’t flow from the top down; it begins at the bottom, with those who have been forgotten.

The Greek word used for “blessed,” makarios, can mean happy, but it also means favored or graced. So Jesus isn’t saying “happy are the hungry.” He’s saying, “You who hunger, you are seen by God, favored, loved. God is with you.”

That’s the heartbeat of baptism, too. We don’t earn it. We don’t bring anything to deserve it. We simply show up, and God meets us where we are, on the plain, not the mountaintop. God claims us and calls us beloved.

And maybe that’s the invitation for us today: to live like baptized people in a world that’s forgotten the Golden Rule. To love in ways that seem foolish. To bless those who curse us. To forgive when it would be easier to harden our hearts. To show up for one another with compassion and hope.

Because every act of love, every moment of forgiveness, every baptism, every prayer for our enemies, it’s all part of the same story. It’s the story of God coming down the mountain, meeting us on level ground, and saying: You are blessed. You are beloved. You belong.