Sermon Recap: Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

This Sunday at Heritage UMC in Clearwater, Pastor Matt Horan continued our journey through the Beatitudes, and let me just say—if you weren’t in church, you missed both powerful truth and a mental image of Pastor Matt in a Speedo. (Yes, that happened. And no, there are no pictures in the church calendar, thank goodness.)

We learned that in both Matthew and Luke’s accounts of the Beatitudes, Jesus flips the world upside down. What society calls enviable—wealth, status, success—Jesus replaces with poverty, hunger, and mourning as the places of true blessing in God’s kingdom. It’s not the power of this world that saves us; it’s our complete dependence on God.

Pastor Matt explained that being “poor in spirit” is where the Christian life begins. It’s the moment we realize we can’t measure up on our own. We don’t start following Jesus because we’re impressive—we start because we’re desperate for His grace. Like swimmers waiting for the race horn, our spiritual poverty is the air horn that launches us into the water. Only some of us, Pastor Matt joked, are still standing on the diving blocks Googling “how to win a relay without swimming” while checking Instagram likes. (Guilty as charged.)

But then comes the hard part: mourning. Matthew places it right after poverty of spirit: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Mourning doesn’t sound like blessing—it feels like loss. But Pastor Matt showed us that it’s not just mourning for loved ones; it’s mourning our own sin, recognizing the ways we’ve hurt ourselves, others, and our world. That grief isn’t meant to crush us—it’s meant to transform us, to make us desperate for something different, something better.

He used the story of Oskar Schindler—yes, the Nazi spy-turned-savior—to show how one man’s grief over his part in the horrors of the Holocaust turned into action that saved 1,200 lives. That’s the power of mourning: it awakens us, convicts us, and can make us hunger for righteousness.

And Pastor Matt didn’t let us off easy. He repeated it several times (for those checking their phones or registering online for the Top Golf tournament): If you are more bothered by the sins of others than by your own sins, you are not following Jesus Christ. Ouch. Convicting. True.

Walking out of Heritage UMC today, I felt both challenged and hopeful. The Beatitudes remind us that the blessed life isn’t the easy life, and it certainly isn’t the Instagram life. It’s the upside-down, grace-filled life of following Jesus—starting with humility, continuing with repentance, and leading us toward righteousness.

If you missed the service, you can check it out HERE.