The Greatest Sermon

 

I've been reading a book about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel because I have been feeling lately that Christianity in the US has come to largely ignore it, and I want to understand why. 

You don't have to look far in our current culture to discover that the message of Good News that Jesus proclaimed in his most famous teaching has been relegated to the sidelines by far too many people who call themselves Christians. 

It's been replaced by a triumphalistic, fear-based, bastardized version of something that passes for Christianity but doesn't resemble at all what Jesus taught and lived by example.  

Sadly, many politicians and Church leaders have so wholeheartedly embraced this shadow side of the Christian faith as a way of focusing on what they consider "Christian values," most of which Jesus had little or nothing to say about.  

It's like a sleight-of-hand trick.  If you keep people afraid these values are being compromised, you can get them to channel that fear into a desire to "win the battle" over these values at all costs, even if it means ignoring the basic teachings of the One they claim to follow.  

I wonder what kind of transformation we might see within the Christian Church in the US if, as people who say we follow Jesus, we decided to live as Jesus exhorted his followers to live in his Sermon on the Mount.  

Some might say, "Those teachings are impossible to live by."  I get it.  There are some radical ideas in the Sermon on the Mount.  There are exhortations to "turn the other cheek," to lose your life to find it, to learn from suffering, to care for the poor, to be peacemakers, and to love your enemy.  

In his introduction to Following the Call, Charles E. Moore has this to say about the Sermon and why Jesus framed it as he did: 

[W]e must remember that Jesus did not come to impose anything on us; he came to redeem, no condemn!  Jesus does not call us to some "impossible possibility." No, he gives witness to the fact that God is able to meet our deepest longings for righteousness, mercy, peace and love. 

I'd like to say a few things about this quote because it resonates with me so deeply and points out something incredibly important.  

For many Christians today, condemnation of the other and a rejection of anyone who is "not like us" has become a mark of what it means to be Christian in our current culture.  Righteousness, mercy, peace, and love are given short shrift or patently ignored.  

It's hard to win the culture wars if you're accepting and loving toward those with whom you disagree or people who are different from you.  There's very little triumph when showing mercy, peace, and love to even your so-called enemies.  

But this is at the heart of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and only by teaching, preaching, and living by Jesus' values (not our own) can we hope to see God's kingdom or shalom on earth "as it is in heaven."   

Consider doing so if you have never read the Sermon on the Mount. It is found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7.  I can promise that if you read carefully, you will discover that you will have many questions because some of Jesus' teachings are hard to hear.  

I can also promise you that you will leave that reading with a new sense of what it means to be a Jesus follower.

If we want to see real transformation within the Christian Church, it has to begin and end with Jesus and what he taught his followers. It must also begin with a commitment to truly follow Jesus and be led by his teachings and example.  

May it be so.  And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all, now and forever. Amen.