From the recently published commentary on Matthew by Stanley Hauerwas, re: the Sermon on the Mount:

…the sermon is not addressed to individuals but to the community that Jesus begins and portends through the calling of the disciples. The sermon is not a heroic ethic. It is the constitution of a people. You cannot live by the demands of the sermon on your own, but that is the point. The demands of the sermon are designed to make us depend on God and one another (Unleashing the Scripture pp, 63 ,72). As Richard Lischer puts it:

Our only hope of living as the community of the Sermon is to acknowledge
that we do not retaliate, hate, curse, lust, divorce, swear, brag, preen, worry, or
backbite because it is not in the nature of our God or our destination that we
should be such a people. When we as individuals fail in these instances, we do not snatch up cheap forgiveness, but we do remember that the ecclesial is larger than the sum of our individual failures and that it is pointed in a direction that will carry us away from them. (Lischer 1987, 161-62)

The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus. To be saved is to be so gathered. That is why the Beatitudes are the interpretive key to the whole sermon precisely because they are not recommendations. No one is asked to go out and try to be poor in spirit or to mourn or to be meek. Rather, Jesus is indicating that given the reality of the kingdom we should not be surprised to find among those who follow him those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek. Moreover, Jesus does not suggest that everyone who follows him will possess all the,Beatitudes, but we can be sure that some will be poor, some will mourn, and some will be meek.

For the church to be so constituted, according to Bonhoeffer, requires the visibility of the church. To be salt, to be made light for the world, is a call for the church to be visible.

—Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible: Matthew, Stanley Hauerwas, p. 64.

Such is life amongst those who recognize a different Kingdom;  a different world;  a different “reality” which we need the life of the community to live and to envision properly;  indeed,  to envision at all.

It is deeply ironic that the very strength I need to keep up the fight to find such a people is made too hard without the support of such that I seek.  I need the strength of such a community to know that I need them.  Perhaps I am living on fumes right now; on a history that has tasted of it enough to know that I can’t give up ,  so I don’t.  But the irony is all the more ,  knowing the pressures of the world to be cynical toward such a mystical reality;  or even skeptical that such an embodiment can actually take place.