Reading the Sermon on the Mount has become a great way for my wife and I to spend some quiet time together in the morning before the day kicks into high gear. Today, she and I talked for a while about some patterns we saw in the “you have heard it said…but I tell you” passages in Matthew 5:21-48. We remembered that the familiar “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” (Matthew 5:38) refers back to commands in Exodus,... Read more
I was sitting down this morning to write the next post in the “Slow Church and the Urgency of Justice” series, when I got distracted by an excellent post by Jon Boyd on the Intervarsity Press blog… [Question] Junot Díaz on Creating a Reading Public Boyd shares some excellent thoughts from novelist Junot Díaz, and then poses these questions: What are we doing these days, and what more could we be doing, to encourage readers in this day and age?... Read more
A few of us are reading the Sermon on the Mount every day during Lent. (You’re welcome to join us!) What stood out to me as I read this morning is the placement of that familiar command: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33) It appears toward the end of a passage about not being anxious about the necessities of life. Perhaps because of some experiences... Read more
Community is what doesn’t happen when we’re busy making bigger plans. That’s what came to mind as I re-read this passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic Life Together: (more…) Read more
Continuing the series on “Slow Church and the Urgency of Justice” today. This is the sixth post. (Link goes to the initial post in the series). Previous post: “I know something worse than hate…“. Today’s post is a bit tangential, but I believe it is necessary as we seek to explore Marva Dawn’s understanding of how we as the Church respond to the powers of death and darkness in the world. As I mentioned yesterday, the title of Dawn’s book... Read more
Continuing the series on “Slow Church and the Urgency of Justice” today. This is the fifth post. (Link goes to the initial post in the series). Previous post: Engaged with our Neighbors’ Struggles Against Injustice. In our last post in this series, I emphasized that working toward justice begins in our local neighborhoods. There is a great danger in trying to address injustices in the abstract. Our efforts to address injustice in the abstract often (unintentionally) results in great damage... Read more
When John proposed the idea of reading the Sermon on the Mount every day through Lent, one of the first things that came to my mind was the paraphrase of the SOTM that my friend Ken Oster wrote a number of years ago entitled “Jesus Manifesto,” (not to be confused with the later book of the same name by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola). After a fair bit of digging, I finally found my one page version of Ken’s Jesus... Read more
This morning I read just past the end of the Sermon on the Mount, where it says that the crowds were amazed at Jesus’s teaching because, unlike the scribes, Jesus taught as one who had authority. I almost took that as an invitation to go back and re-read the sermon…this time with feeling! One thing I struggle against is that the Sermon on the Mount is so familiar, and it’s full of so many well-worn phrases — light of the... Read more
As Chris mentioned in a post yesterday, a group of us are reading the Sermon on the Mount every day for Lent. (We set up a Facebook page, if you’d like to join the conversation.) Throughout the Lenten season, Chris and I will be posting occasional thoughts here about our experience with this extraordinary passage. My wife and I read Matthew 5-7 out loud to each other yesterday morning (Ash Wednesday), and I ended up thinking about it all day.... Read more
Fasting toward the Common Good Chris recently wrote an article for The Good Men Project, which begins: Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent for Christians around the globe. Based on the example of Jesus, who fasted for 40 days in the wilderness, Lent is the season leading up to Easter that has traditionally been understood as a time of fasting. Today, many Christians have reduced the practice of fasting during Lent to giving up some luxury... Read more
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