Letter from Amy: February 4, 2026

The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Mafa, Cameroon, 1973

Dear friends,

I’m not sure I have ever gotten a response quite like I did to Sunday’s sermon on meekness (you can listen here if the snow kept you away!). I’ve already heard about several after-church meals where people wrestled together with the challenge of meekness. And I’ve received nearly a dozen thoughtful texts and emails.

I am so heartened and humbled by this response. You are asking the kinds of questions I want us all to be wrestling with at Incarnation. Just how far do we take Jesus’ teaching? What is the line between meekness and mere inactivity, complacency, even complicity in the face of injustice? How do we live faithfully in our time?

It will take me a while to consider and respond to every question I’ve received. But in the meantime, I want to offer a few additional thoughts on meekness.

First, what is meekness, exactly? Another word for meekness might be gentleness. But this gentleness is something different from an innate personality trait. This is a Spirit-empowered gentleness that channels and restrains our anger, as Proverbs reminds us:

“A gentle answer turns away wrath,

    but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Proverbs 15:1)

And because meekness has a love of justice as its core motivation, this is also a justice-oriented gentleness. Meekness sees injustice (against ourselves or others) and responds with a strong gentleness in pursuit of what is just.

The book of James gives us a picture of this when he counsels:

“My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness [i.e., justice] that God desires. . . . Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” (James 1:19-20, 27)

Unrestrained anger does not produce the justice of God. Our love of justice must be so great, and our dependence on the Spirit so well-practiced, that we willingly restrain our anger, expressing it with the greatest care and patience; that is, meekly. To do otherwise is to become polluted by the world's ways of unrestrained anger, vengeance, and violence, which ultimately undermines our desire for justice.

This is why I find the poem* I shared in the sermon so helpful, showing the muscular restraint of a great horse whose “velvet ears” are pricked toward the master’s call. Meekness is not weakness. Meekness is actually great strength, a well-controlled and rightly-directed power. It wields gentleness in soft, pricked ears that are quiet enough to listen for God’s voice, patient enough to stand still and await the call.

But sometimes we need a real, flesh-and-blood (human, not horse!) example from our own time. One of the best examples of meekness in recent history is the Christian leaders of the Civil Rights movement whose faith in God’s ultimate justice informed their commitment to nonviolence. Theirs was a practiced, disciplined meekness. Before a march or sit-in, leaders would role-play with one another, acting out the kinds of injustices they might face and then responding with meekness. They'd practice being shouted at, insulted, threatened, spit on, having food and objects thrown at them, being shoved and beaten and handcuffed.

In response, they'd look their opponents in the eyes, remember that these were people made and loved by God, and refuse to respond with wrath. They would remind one another that God’s promises were real, that the kingdom was already in their midst, and that justice was surely coming.

Their practices were a sort of meekness bootcamp. And that gets at another aspect of meekness (and its counter, wrath): it must be practiced.

All of life is a meekness bootcamp. We face small personal injustices (real and perceived) all day long: in traffic, at work, in restaurants, at home, when we walk past a neighbor who hasn’t yet shoveled their sidewalks, and so on. And in response, we can either practice meekness — gentle, patient, justice-loving, God-trusting, restrained anger — or we can practice wrath — quick, vengeful, unbridled, God-denying anger.

As we do, we either grow in the virtue of meekness or in the vice of wrath. And while the injustices of these moments seem very small and ordinary, they are preparing us to be the kind of people who respond faithfully to great injustices when we face them.

I’m still practicing this, too. Before church on Sunday, I was angry about the small inconvenience of ice in the parking lot, and I took it out on the closest person to me with a quick, sharp tone. I felt like such a hypocrite, preaching after a wrathful moment like that. As I reflected over the course of the day, I realized that my quick anger was part of a larger pattern in which I was routinely turning to wrath in one area of my life. I felt sad, I prayed, I talked with a trusted friend, and I asked God to help me see this pattern more clearly and to form a different habit.

All of this is a roundabout way of addressing the question of when meekness becomes mere inactivity, passivity, or complicity in injustice. This question matters a lot. It requires discernment (the subject of our upcoming Lent sermon series!) and reliance on the Spirit. But it also requires our commitment to becoming the kind of people whose ears are already pricked toward the master’s voice.

More to the point: if you are wondering how ICE/CBP agents and protestors should conduct themselves in Minneapolis (a good, important, justice-loving question), you may want to start by practicing meekness somewhere closer to home and more within your control. We don’t have to know the answers to the biggest questions in order to take the next good step. Meekness begins in small, ordinary decisions to turn from wrath when nobody is watching and nothing huge is at stake. As we practice meekness and turn from wrath, we become better able to discern God’s call to justice in each moment.

We all want to be the kinds of people who respond wisely and faithfully to our times; whose lives demonstrate the reality of the kingdom and the beatitudes that govern it. But to be those people in the big social issues of our time, we must also be those people in the ordinary and every day. This is a tough bootcamp, but we have God’s Spirit to empower us and our church community to help us practice. Most importantly, we have a promise-keeping God who will one day bring about perfect justice in his kingdom. He does not call us to accomplish this justice ourselves, but simply to be faithful with what he has entrusted us.

I will let Dietrich Bonhoeffer have the last word, from his section on meekness in The Cost of Discipleship:

“They [the meek] show by every word and gesture that they do not belong to this earth. Leave heaven to them, says the world in its pity; that is where they belong. But Jesus says: ‘They shall inherit the earth.’ To these, the powerless and the disenfranchised, the very earth belongs. Those who now possess it by violence and injustice shall lose it, and those who here have utterly renounced it, who were meek to the point of the cross, shall rule the new earth.”

Keep your questions coming! It’s such a gift to wrestle through these matters together.

With love,

Amy

* Here’s the poem I quoted in my sermon:

Who The Meek Are Not

by Mary Karr

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent

under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep

in the rice-paddy muck,

nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles

make the wheat fall in waves

they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan

nun says we misread

that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.

To understand the meek

(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop

in a meadow, who —

at his master’s voice — seizes up to a stunned

but instant halt.

So with the strain of holding that great power

in check, the muscles

along the arched neck keep eddying,

and only the velvet ears

prick forward, awaiting the next order.