Being Daring

 

This week we are continuing to swim in the sea of the best sermon ever, Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7.  Today and tomorrow, I want to dive and dwell in longer passages.  I invite you to first take a deep breath and check in with yourself.  Where are you physically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally?  If you are hurting, you will bring that to the text.  If you are frustrated, you can find plenty in scripture that feels like salt being rubbed in a wound.  So, if it is not, “Well with your soul”, you don’t have to read the passage below.  As a matter of love, don’t!  Breathe, take a nap, enjoy a walk outside, listen to music, do what nurtures your soul.  There are no badges for your heavenly sash for being a martyr and pushing through a morning mediation. 

 

If you are in a place of curiosity and want to keep holding Jesus’ words and wisdom, slowly savor this:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Matthew 5:17-20

 

Please remember that the word “righteousness” is not being a Sneetch on the Beaches with stars upon thars who stuck their noses in the air.  Righteousness in Matthew means Joesph, who risked the hostile stare and dared to enter the mystery of God becoming flesh.  Righteousness is a Micah 6 shaped life ~ where we seek justice, live loving kindness, and walk humbly with God.  Not that I don’t do this perfectly or naturally all the time.  But I commitment and covenant to this way of life with God’s grace. 

 

What questions do you have about the above words?

What insights do you have?

Where do you want Jesus to explain more because you are confused or curious?

Where are you bored by the words above (it’s okay to admit and accept that you suppressed a yawn while reading)?

Where do the words above feel like truth and where do you resist what Jesus is saying?

 

Hold all of this.  I encourage you to email or call me if you want to talk more.  Studying scripture is not a game of solitaire, but a group sport.  Studying scripture as an isolated individual can leave us stuck in our own ways of thinking, we need others’ questions and insights.  Find some folks or join the bible study as we seek to find God’s wisdom in these words for our lives today.  Amen.

Being Light

 

You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden.  People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Parent in heaven.  Matthew 5:14-16

 

Yesterday, we played with the spice of salt, today we ponder the metaphor of being light.  The spark of the sacred God lit at your baptism.  The flame of faith God fans by pouring love and grace and mercy into your soul every day ~ as the resource to feed and fuel your life.  Where are you letting your light shine?  Today, get out a candle and your calendar.  Light the candle ~ a symbol of God’s love ~ and look back over the first month of 2025, where did you shine and share your light?  Name and notice what filled your days.  If you had to categorize your life, what are some of the boxes your experiences and encounters fit into and fill?  For example, for me, I can have a box labeled, “work”.  How many hours did that consume?  How about sleep?  How about having fun, being playful?  How about prayer?  How about volunteering?  How about being bored or just being ~ rather than doing ~ all the time?  When we look, listen, and lean into our lives, how we construct a day is how we make a life.  Last month, I said that the questions, what are you seeking, how are you seeking, and why are you seeking, are always at work in you and through you ~ whether we realize it or not.  What does your calendar say you were seeking?  For me, it might be to prove my worth, that I am valuable and that I am in control.  For me, it can be that I love my family.  For me, it can be that I am God’s beloved when I finally stop trying to look so competent and in charge.  Hold your one wild and precious life in the light of God’s love, not trying to be the light, but absorb the flame of the eternal shining on you. Amen.

Being Salty

 

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.  Matthew 5:13

 

I invite you to go get some salt. 

Seriously…don’t worry I will wait for you.  (Insert me humming, “It’s a Small World after all” because I want to make sure that will be stuck in your head all day long.  You are welcome).

Got some salt?  Good.  Put on the tip of your tongue.  What do you taste?  What words awaken within you to describe and define the sensation of tasting salt?  Is the salt a pleasant taste for your or maybe makes you want to reach for a glass of water?

 

Salt is added to increase flavor and zest.  Salt plays and participates with other ingredients.  Salt collaborates.  Salt can be preserved, making something last long.  Too much salt can ruin the soup, or so my grandma used to say.  Rarely do we sit down to a heaping pile of salt for dinner.  Unless we are feasting on McDonald’s French fries, but that is another morning meditation.  Salt is not the main thing but is an important thing.  And too much salt, or salt in the wrong place, can be hurtful.  For example, if you have a sore in your mouth right now and followed my invitation, it probably hurt.  Or, to quote Grandma again, “Don’t pour salt on a wound”.  In the best sense salt adds, plays, preserves, and collaborates. 

 

Jesus calls us to be salt.  To add zest.  To participate and part-take, not seek the spotlight.  And to realize that each of us, as featherless bipeds, hurt and harm one another.  We can all be a drain rather than a fountain to each other.  When we ask, “How can I be salt”, you rewind back to verses 1-12 in chapter 5.  The Beatitudes that we prayed last week are instructive and inspirational to how we seek to be salt. 

 

Today, I invite you to set an intention and attention to one place where you will be salt, seek to bring zest, add flavor, and seek to heal rather than harm.  I am thinking about that meeting on your calendar, that phone call you have been wanting to make, that trip to the store where you will encounter other humans out in the wilderness of life.  One place (not the whole day).  May you find ways to live your saltiness that stirs and swirls and adds Jesus-flavor to these days and those around you.  Amen.

Prayer for the Stretched and Stressed

 

Perplexing, puzzling, playful, praising God, thank you for words of wisdom that meet us where we are, stretch us to new shapes we did not think possible, and for new insights that dance in our hearts.  Help us, for we are always trying/striving/searching to reconcile the Sermon on the Mount with the Gospels of the World.  We are continually formed, not just in Your image God, but by a world that grumbles about gas prices, exhausted by our own busy schedules because we are not sure how to say, “No”, and feeling that “not enoughness” even as You continually call to us with “belovedness”.  God, we pray You would gospel our lives with the Sermon on the Mount, meet us in moments of fascination and frustration and form us to faithfulness with Your light of love.  Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of this day and the days to come, O God of grace and glory.  In the name of the One whose words we have wrestled with and sought a blessing from, Jesus the Christ.  Amen. 

The Persistent Insistent Sermon

 

The Beatitudes, far from being a new set of virtues that further divide the religious haves and have nots, are words of hope and healing to those who have been marginalized.  James Bryan Smith.

 

When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, God doesn’t send in tanks. God sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so.  N.T. Wright

 

“Jesus understood that God does not play by our rules. Jesus’ God is a generous God, who not only allows the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust, but also gives us the ability to live into what should be rather than what is. The parables help us with their lessons about generosity: sharing joy, providing for others, recognizing the potential of small investments. His God wants us to be better than we are, because we have the potential to be. We are made but a little lower than the divine (Ps. 8.6; see Heb. 2.7); we should start acting in a more heavenly matter. Those who pray, “Your kingdom come,” might want to take some responsibility in the process, and so work in partnership with God.  Amy-Jill Levine

 

Imagine a world in which people really tried to live by the Beatitudes. Well, we can do more than imagine it. We can help bring such a peaceful, loving world into existence by following the One who told us how we can be blessed. And we can begin today. May it be so.  Anonymous

 

The above quotes are offered, not to help you ‘solve’ or ‘resolve’ the Beatitudes.  Jesus’ words are not just speechifying but showing us the wayless way of life and faith mixed messily together.  There is no way one week of morning meditations or five days of re-reading the Sermon on the Mount will make everything more palatable and polite.  These words have a rawness to us, an unfinished/unvarnished edge that might give us splinters.  Yet, these words can be foundational to our faith.  These words can form and reform us as we re-read them.  In the coming weeks we will continue to explore the Sermon on the Mount.  For today, re-read chapters.  Revisit what you wrote down on Monday for what perplexed you and what inspired you.  Whereas Monday you might have been shouting, “Amen” to the line about “Blessed are the pure in heart.”  Today, you might be holding your wounded heart from someone trampling on it with their good advice for which you did not ask.  Maybe someone stomped on your idea at a meeting or generally decided to pass along their pain to you ~ and now you are lugging that in the luggage of your life.  We come back to the words of Jesus time and time again to let the words find us right where we are.  May God move in each syllable and sentence and in your very soul this day.  Amen.

#Blessed??

 

Blessed ~ what comes into your mind when you hear that word?  Is blessing based on external evidence that we can point to and prove your point?  Is blessing tied and tethered to the balance of your bank account or vacation plans or everything going according to your plotting and planning?  It is good to remind ourselves that within Christianity there remains a stream of thought that is called, “the Prosperity Gospel” …and essentially that is what you get when you mix capitalism and Christianity in the laboratory of your life.  You will hear things like, “God wants you to be rich or live your best life ever!”  What is so difficult/demanding is that there is part of us that wants to believe that God and Goodness are infinitely tied together.  Yet, goodness is not perfection.  What is good, may not make it into our top ten moments of life ever!  Good can be a sip of coffee on a chilly Florida day.  Good can be a hug that comes at just the right time, even though it doesn’t duct tape your broken heart back together.  Good can be breathing and being, showing up even when you are not convinced it made a difference. 

 

And, to name the elephant in the room, the goodness Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount are the very experiences and encounters we tend to question whether God really exists.  Jesus juxtaposes contradictions.  Blessed are the poor?  Well, maybe when they have a good job and house, but not when scrapping together.  Or, we can idealize poverty as somehow being closer to God, like monks and nuns who take vows to never own anything.  I believe the Beatitudes should feel like nailing Jello to the wall, because these words are not just spoken to our minds, but to our whole lives.  This is not just intellectual ascent, but a reordering of a whole system (political, economic, social, and religious) that might cause us to question why we are doing what we are doing.  And of course, most of the time, people like the status quo and prefer that you not ruffle their feathers, thank you very much!

 

There is no one way to solve this Rubix Cube-like puzzle of faith.  I imagine the disciples’ jaws dropping when they heard these words.  “What in the name of Yahweh are you talking about, Jesus?”  God continues to surprise earth with heaven in ways we don’t understand but we stand under to guide us.  I invite you to pick one of the beatitudes today and sit with the mystery shoved in a puzzled stuffed in an enigma that it is.  And I would love to hear your insights and questions into what you uncover as you do this.  May God’s wisdom continue to challenge us in life-giving, discipleship-forming, and never-finished-with-us-ways in these days. Amen.

Sermon on the Mount

 

Yesterday, we read the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7.  I invited you to sit with places Jesus’ words fascinated you and where these words frustrated you.  I invited you to hold places where you wanted to know more and where you were ready to storm off the mountain side in a huff.  Following Jesus is not always smooth sailing on calm seas.  The life of faith is not an insurance policy or money back guarantee to the “good life”.  If anything, God is continually turning our world upside down…or I am convinced…right side up.  We heard this a month ago at Christmas, when we pondered, what if we had the courage of Joseph to stand with those who are poor and poor in spirit, those who mourn and are meek (which can also mean strength under control), those who are hungry and those who are hurt by systems of oppression?  This will not earn us fame or fortune or followers on social media.  Oh, sure, initially you can make a splash by sharing love and at some point, people will be saying, “That isn’t the way we have done things around here.”  Jesus starts off the sermon with the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12.  I invite you to re-read those today.  As you read, pause after each verse and ponder who you know or how your story finds space and a place in what Jesus says.  Or maybe where the statement so shatters the status quo of the place we call “home”?

 

For example, as you read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”, who are poor in spirit?  What does that phrase, “poor in spirit” even mean to you?  Does it mean that the person’s soul is empty?  Or there are too many cobwebs amid the cardboard boxes of emotional life shoved into the corners (that describes me all too often)?  Is poverty a financial condition or a way of being in the world?  I know people who take endless vacations to exotic destination and locations but often come back mumbling and grumbling that the plane was five minutes delayed, and the food was meh and the biggest ball of twine is sooooo overrated, even though they snapped countless selfies in front of it and posted online that it was the, “Best. Day. EVER!”.  Poverty is an expansive and evolving word.  We don’t need to confine the definition of poverty to one box.  Who and where and how has the word, ‘poverty’ been a lived reality in your life.  I can think of my childhood when my dad lost his job, and we had to go on food stamps and had grilled cheese sandwiches with block cheese we picked up from the Union headquarters trying to help us out.  I think of my parents barely making ends meet.  And I think of the beloved of God I saw this morning in a sleeping bag on the streets.  Thirteen words of Jesus can stir so much within us when we sit with, hold and are held by these words. 

 

When have you mourned and what are you grieving right now, because grief is always a thread and theme in life.  Where are you feeling meek, maybe silenced on the sideline, what are you hungry for both in your stomach and in your soul?  Where do you long for mercy and where do you resist mercy for another?  I pray you will let these words simmer in your soul and sing to your heart.  May your mind, heart, soul, and life start to discover/uncover ways of blessing in the very places/times our world says have no blessing at all ~ because God is everywhere ~ especially in messy manger and unpolished/less-than-perfect stables of your life and mine.  With God’s love.  Amen.