"Vote With Love"
Joy Castro-Wehr, Westmoreland UCC
October 18, 2026
Last year, exactly one year ago today, to be exact, funny how things work – I went and heard one of my favorite writers and people speak, the Jesuit priest, Father Greg Boyle. Among all the beautiful stories and ideas he had to share that evening, one concept he spoke about really stood out to me and has become something of a theological earworm for me this past year. The concept is called “acatamiento” – a word of Spanish and Latin origin that best translates to something like affectionate awe. To look at someone as God gazes upon us all, with acatamiento, is to feel delight, compassion, and a tenderness for their particularity and story. I came home from his talk jazzed about the concept and have used the word countless times over the course of my last year working as a hospital chaplain in Baltimore. Seriously, I’ve used it a lot. I’m probably bordering on needing to ask Saint Ignatius himself for permission to use his ideas at this rate.
Where I’ve discovered the real power of this affectionate awe lies is in its interruption of my mind’s snap judgments. It shifts me down into a heart-centered mode; It interrupts my, and I dare say our human tendency to, even unconsciously, sort the people in front of us into good or bad, worthy or unworthy, suitable for understanding or merely, temporarily tolerable. This affectionate gaze is a way of blessing someone. In intentionally seeing someone’s inherent worth in God instead of remaining indifferent or even judgemental, we reverse our unexamined meritocracy of holiness.
When Jesus climbed up the mountaintop that day to teach, he spoke about the blessedness of nine specific states of being. I know that all of us have experienced one or more of these states ourselves; we’ve felt meek or in mourning, we’ve been poor in spirit or reviled and persecuted… we also know that far too many people face these material and spiritual difficulties in our country today. While standing on top of the mountain, I imagine that while Jesus looked out at his disciples scattered around him, his gaze was filled with a profound, affectionate awe. I read acatamiento into the Beatitudes because of Jesus’ attention to the particularity and vulnerability of those he blessed. He uses rhetoric that unquestionably interrupts someone’s value set by the norms, politics and culture of the time, and asserts instead that their blessedness is unshakable, constant, and fundamental, despite society’s estimation of them.
A popular way of describing the world Jesus creates in the Beatitudes is as an “upside kingdom”, in which those who are not typically acknowledged as valuable or good, let alone as blessed, are suddenly illuminated in God’s blessing, affection, and awe. The Beatitudes ask us to turn our indifference into attention. They ask us to notice the ways in which those not materially supported, whose stories are not believed, and whose identities are not humanized by political power are in fact the very ones in whom God’s presence and power in the world rumbles. For the world to be filled with love, justice and mercy, God’s work necessarily starts with those who dwell in that space between the world as it is, and the world as it should be. Blessed are those who can only be seen in our society with an expansively compassionate lens, by chameleon eyes. Blessed are those we too often overlook.
It is election season, Church. I don’t know about you, but I can't check my email, turn on the tv or listen to the radio without hearing talk about the midterms, who's out-fundraising who, who the polls are saying will win… but how polls this far out tend to be inaccurate, anyways ... that nothing is over till it’s over. Accordingly, today marks the beginning of a two week sermon series called, “Vote with Love”, about faithful discernment in the voting booth. Next week Pastor Emily will pick up this theme once more as we continue to explore together how our faith impacts the consequential decisions we’ll all be making over the course of these next few weeks. Unless you voted early like I did ... in which case, we’d still love to see you in church next week.
And so we turn back to scripture, to the Beatitudes. By Jesus’ naming of particular states of vulnerability in his political and social context, he is emphasizing a certain expansiveness of God’s blessing that stands at odds with cultural understandings of power, success, beauty and goodness. And spoiler alert, remembering the sacred story moment: it’s an upside down way of looking at things. I’m going to have my friend join me here again for a minute as I share this. Finding children’s material online for today that applied the lesson from the Beatitudes to our Vote with Love series was quite challenging. So many interpretations of Matthew’s Beatitudes give a sort of, shoulder squeezing placation to those suffering, a sort of “yah it’s hard, but just don’t worry, it can’t be all that bad because God loves you more now that you’re sick or poor. Hope that makes you feel better. So sorry about your suffering, by the way”. There’s a saddening amount of materials that are dismissive of spiritual and physical suffering, grief and hunger in the world. They try instead to gloss over the real hardship of people who face hunger, who are persecuted, or who work as peacemakers in our world. Instead of rushing to placations and teaching a faith of avoidance, we can instead zoom out and ask, what’s Jesus really getting at here? What do all of these categories have in common? What do the merciful and pure in heart share with the meek and hungry? With a wide scope, Jesus is pointing to all those disempowered, unsupported, dismissed by the powers that be and says look. They, too, are worthy of your blessing. They always have been worthy of God’s care. It is us who fail to see them in their blessedness.
Mercy and peacemaking certainly are Godly, but they are not treasured characteristics by the world that is. They bring us along, instead, to the world that could be. Acatamiento: to gaze at someone with affectionate awe. To see what others do not, turn attention to those who normally receive the indifference of the world. To see what could be in others. In this election season, let us use a wise and wide gaze to see and care for everyone living in our society - the poor, the stranger, the immigrant, the needy. Because blessed are those we too often overlook.
I was listening, as so many of us do, to a podcast episode about the Beatitudes on my way home from work earlier this week. They were discussing various, probable translations of the word “blessed” in both Greek and Aramaic, and illuminating one possible way Jesus might have meant it in this context. Now, there are many translations of the word ‘blessed’ when it comes to this passage, but I found this duo’s translation particularly useful for this week, as we seek to shape our politics faithfully. I’ll break the episode down simply.
The use of the word “blessed” in the first part of a sentence – for example, blessed are the poor in spirit, signifies a correctness or goodness in their way of being, but doesn’t call them uniquely blessed by God. This translation of “blessed” actually means, you’re living in a good state because it has put you in the way of being blessed. The blessing, these translators argue, is in the second phrase. The blessing is being comforted, being fed, being called a child of God – These are the blessings. Notice the difference. These blessings are up to us. There’s a movement, a hopefulness in this translation. There’s a trust that good things are coming, that circumstances will change. That the kingdom of God is possible. The Beatitudes are not a static statement on the way things are, but a forward-looking invitation. They are a call to action.
If the real blessing lies in how God and society respond to your state of being, then, in reading the Beatitudes like a voting guide, we have a serious responsibility to act as teammates with God to make change happen. While the state of blessedness of the immigrant, the hungry, the grieving, the sick, the out of work, is immutable, the blessings they receive in this state are up to God and to us. Widen your gaze and see all as worthy of your attention and care. Vote with love, like others are depending on you. They are.
With stewardship season now behind us, this community has the opportunity to mobilize ourselves and our resources once more, this time by exercising our civic responsibility to co-create with God the just and loving world we wish to see. The state of blessedness for the vulnerable, the immigrant, the child, and the stranger, is determined already. They, just like you, are beloved children of God. But for the blessings of just and merciful policy, safe neighborhoods, a healthy planet on which to live, plentiful food, – these are our sacred responsibilities, church. Blessed are you who is moved to compassion and mercy. May it be so.
Amen.
