Three pretty crazy things happened to me today... the kind of crazy where they are, seemingly, pretty mundane things but they so fit together that they start messin' with you.

This morning, very few people were at Bread of Life Fellowship. Most of them were on a retreat or camping or something. Tom Mohn, the former pastor, sat at the front and people just talked. They talked about what was going on in their lives and how Christ was messing them up and growing them and loving them. It was cool. At the end, Tom mentioned that they were showing a documentary on Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a local theater. I went up to ask him about it. We talked for a while, and he said he had a book for me.

The book was The Christ of the Mount by E. Stanley Jones. He told me that the introduction would knock me backwards. He was right. Here's part of it.

"India (where Jones lived) is forcing us to face anew the Sermon on the Mount. She insists that this is Christianity. No matter how much we may point to our creeds she insists on pointint us to the pattern shown her in the Mount. The fact is that the Sermon on the Mount is not in our creeds. As the Apostles' creed now stands you can accept every word of it and leave the essential self untouched. Suppose we had written it in our creeds and and had repeated each time with conviction: 'I believe in the Sermon on the Mount and in its way of life, and I intend, God helping me, to embody it'! What would have happened? I feel sure that if this had been our main emphasis, the history of Christendom would have been different.

Are the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount foreign laws? Are the something for which we are not made? It would seem so - at first sight. Chesterton says that on the first reading you feel that it turns everything upside down, but the second time you read it you discover that it turns everything right side up.

The Sermon on the Mount was and is seditious (to our way of life). It finally put Jesus on the cross, and it will do the same for his followers who follow it in modern life. But it would not end there. There would be a resurrection so great, so transforming in human living that we would know by actual experimentation that it is the only way for us to live."

This is what I needed to hear, mainly because I've been really questioning about where to go from here. I don't know that it necessarily makes my path more clear, but every once in a while, when things seem to get muddled and complicated, it's good to return to things that you know to be true. The Sermon on the Mount is Kingdom living. That helps.

So I went to the Bonhoeffer documentary. The Sermon on the Mount kept coming up again and again. Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about what he called "single-minded obedience". He lamented that modern society was so willing to spiritualize away what was probably Christ's most explicit description on what life in the Kingdom was like. "It's really just supposed to show us our sin," people say. "We're not really supposed to LIVE like that."

Oh, I pray for the day that I GET to live like that. Let the floodwaters carry all the competition, self-centeredness, and violence away.

Wayne Jacobson once said that sin is the natural result of my not allowing Christ to love me in a certain area of my life. This makes perfect sense to me now. If the desire to live out the Sermon on the Mount is not born out of duty (which is what the Pharisees experienced) but born out of love, then I will desire to live the Sermon on the Mount, not because I am obligated, but because I am priviledged.

"We mistake it entirely if we look on it as a chart of the Christian's duty, rather it is the charter of the Christian's liberty - his liberty to go beyond, to do the thing that love impels and not merely the thing that duty compels."

If I fail to live up to the Sermon on the Mount, it's merely because I have failed to recognize how much Christ loves me. Recognition of His love will immediately spur me into the natural response, which is Kingdom living.

This was brought home for me by a phone call from a friend. He was having a conversation with a friend of his, and the subject of "absolute truth" came up. My friend said he was really struggling with the concept. He just didn't know what to think. His friend thought it very plain... if you're not consciously serving Christ, you are serving Satan. My friend didn't see it all that easily.

We have reduced Christianity to the acceptance of propositional truths. We have elevated the creed, when the reality of the transformative life that Christ calls us to is in the Sermon on the Mount. We make a big deal about what people believe, but never touch the way we live. We judge people based on what they think about what for most of us are mere abstractions like "absolute truth" and "evolution". All the while, non-Christians around the world are waiting for us to start living the Mount.
posted by Stephen at 11:33 PM | |