sermon on the mount

Mars Hill Michigan is starting a 6 month series on the Sermon on the Mount this Sunday. This is one of my favorite (challenging and encouraging and hopeful) passages in the Bible, so I'm pretty excited to join with them over the next half year. As they like to do on these big series, they'll be publishing a page containing verses, thoughts, practices, and prayers at the beginning of the week so you can be meditating on and wrestling with it before the Sunday teaching. There are always some insightful and beautiful ideas so you should get started.

Here's one section that really stood out to me.

No one in his or her right mind would want to live this "blessed" life, would they? Yet Jesus was doing something different from what his hearers expected. He wasn't giving a spiritual to-do list. This wasn't a self-help teaching about how to achieve blessedness by attaining poverty of spirit.

This was an announcement.

The healing that had just taken place was nothing less than the rule and reign of God coming to rest upon the least likely of people.

In the midst of their poorness of spirit, these people had been blessed;the Kingdom of God had come upon them. In other words, fortunate are the racists because the rule and reign of God can come upon even them. Fortunate are the addicts because the rule and reign of God is only a breath away. Fortunate are those who've blown it. Blessed are the nobodies. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with blessing, and there is nothing anybody can do to earn what he's describing.

God is blessing people for no reason other than the fact that blessing is what God does, and everybody, everywhere, is fair game.

They also have some new art for the series which I'm including a small glimpse of below. Click on it to view the whole piece. Open it up and then read the artist's thoughts about their work:

Sometimes I feel as though God is this invisible abstract idea. A voice in my head that has no face but speaks to me in ways I can't even comprehend or explain... Sometimes the vocal is lost among the swirling messages and instruments of the day vying for attention. [But] the voice, the sermon on the mount if you will, never ceases to speak. The father's face can be seen everywhere, even in the speck of dirt the little girl is picking up."