As Matthew begins his summary of Jesus’ teachings from the mountain he wants to make Jesus’ intentions clear.  This sermon is not a supplement to the teachings found in the Law.  Jesus is not replacing the Law with the Law 2.0; a brand new teaching that is better than the original.  Jesus makes his intentions clear in Matt 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

How does Jesus fulfill the Law?  The Law says that you need to include a railing when you build a second floor balcony on your house (Deut 22:8).  The Law says that you need to keep an ox`s mouth uncovered when it is threshing grain (Deut 25:4); Clothing should be made without mixing materials (Deut 22:11); Mildew must be dealt with following a strict set of instructions (Lev 14:33-53).  All of these laws have reasons why they were part of the Torah but how does Jesus fulfill them?

The Law has individual verses that are culturally distant from contemporary culture today and as a result some verses are very difficult for us to understand.  Because of this, the Law is best understood when it is considered as a whole: The Torah comprehensively described how a member of God’s covenant community was meant to live in the 14^th century BC.  As a result you can capture the essence of who the people of God were meant to be (and who God is) by understanding the requirements of Law.  Some parts of the Law are difficult to understand but that is because God’s thinking is far beyond ours (Is 55:9).  When we have a problem understanding the Law, the problem lies with our understanding and not with the Law.

The Law is a witness to the character of God.  That is why followers of Jesus today can still read the Law and gain insight into who God is.  Just because we live in a time after Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection doesn’t mean we can’t learn about God from the Old Testament too.  David writes, “Oh how I love your law!  I meditate on it all day long.” (Ps 119:97)   If it was good for David it is good for us too!

The Law however is not an end onto itself.  Paul says that the Law does not save (Rom 5:20-21; 7:13-233; 8:2-3) but instead, the Law points to the fact that we need a Saviour.  In Hebrews 10, the Law is described as a shadow, cast by Jesus Christ.  In other words, the law predicted the kind of character Jesus would embody.  The law required the blood of animals to temporarily atone for sin so that we would understand that Jesus’ blood atones for sin forever (Heb 10:10).  The Law described sanctification in miniature, until Jesus came and lived it out writ large.

Jesus finally accomplishes what the Law said was going to have to happen.  In that way Jesus fulfills the Law.  Jesus satisfies the Law’s requirements and grants us God’s approval through our faith in Jesus’ obedience (2 Cor 5:21).  Just like the Law in the Old Testament, the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t describe a way we can earn God’s approval but rather it describes the person that the Holy Spirit is turning us into.  The Sermon on the Mount isn’t God’s wish list for us: “Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t hate your boss.  You really should try to not lust after your secretary.” The Sermon on the Mount is the character of Jesus Christ which we are becoming day by day through the agency of the Holy Spirit.

This week we begin a series looking at the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7).  In his gospel Matthew is primarily interested in establishing (for a predominantly Jewish reading audience) that Jesus was the
Jewish Messiah, the anointed one of God.  Matthew therefore shares his stories, and edits his gospel with this objective in mind. Contemporary readers sometimes make the mistake of assuming that Jesus
sat down on the mountain side and rattled off the entire sermon, all three chapters in one setting.  Matthew makes no claim to this effect.  We can see in his gospel that Matthew organizes Jesus’ teaching into five “discourses.” (Matt 5-7, 10, 13, 18, 24-25). Each of these teaching sections has a specific purpose.  The first one, which we call the Sermon on the Mount, is a fair summary of Jesus’ teaching during his three year ministry. He would have shared this kind of teaching all the time.  That’s why we read some (but not all) of this sermon in Luke 6:17-49.  Both writers were summarizing what Jesus would typically teach for their own specific purposes.

In some ways, it is a crime what we have done with the teaching of Jesus.  Regular church going folk have flattened, neutered, oversimplified, qualified, watered-down and explained away most of Jesus’ startling teaching.  If you see a movie depiction of the Sermon on the Mount you see people sitting in the grass nodding approvingly while Jesus rattles off, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be
comforted … Forgive your enemies …” and so on.

That can’t be!  What Jesus teaches is outrageous!  The people that Jesus was teaching would have been shocked, and quite possibly outraged. Imagine what a Jewish listener would say when Jesus said that they were lucky to get ripped off by tax collectors.  It is likely that there wouldn’t be a single family in the crowd who had not lost a family member to the hated Roman occupiers. To them Jesus says, “Love your enemies?!?”  Are you nuts?!?

Phillip Yancey in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, talks about a secular university English professor who presented his first year students with the text of the Sermon on the Mount to read as an assignment.  When asked what they thought of the text, the class’s response was vivid.  ”I don’t like the Sermon on the Mount,” wrote one student, “it makes me feel like I have to be perfect and nobody’s perfect.”  ”This is stupid,” wrote another: “Lust is the same as sex? That’s just wacked!” “I hate this!” wrote still another.  People who grew up outside the church who hear the Sermon on the Mount for the first time are outraged at the teaching.  How can this possibly be true!?

What Jesus is calling us to is outrageous. Jesus sets a very high standard but he does not give us these impossible ideals and leave us to fail at achieving them.  In living His life on earth Jesus accomplished these impossible standards and through faith we are granted the righteousness that Jesus achieved.  Jesus calls us to unreserved devotion as disciples and leaves us no room to be supporters, or fans. You are either all-in or all-out. It is a bold challenge to those who call themselves followers of Christ. Giving Jesus your mental assent is no better than ‘believing’ in Jesus like he is the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. The Sermon on the Mount is a profound summary of the teachings of Jesus and I look forward to exploring them, and the challenge that goes with them over the next few months.

3.  Lots of People Get a Chance to Talk About Jesus and Their Everyday Life:  In teacher’s college I remember one of my methodology professors putting it simply.  “The one doing the talking is doing the learning.”  To talk about what Jesus is up to in Luke 10 means you have to think about it, synthesize your thoughts, and build a sentence or two out of your own thoughts and then express yourself.  There is a lot going on in your head when you communicate and all that work leaves behinds mental pathways that last. When you have an opportunity to speak about something, you learn about it too. I would bet that on any given Sunday that we Dwell, you are more likely to remember what you shared in Dwelling than anything about the sermon.  That’s because with a sermon you are just a passive receiver.  When you are Dwelling in the Word, you are a participant.

2.  We Get Practice Listening: I don’t care who you are, there isn’t anyone among us that couldn’t use some practice listening to someone else.  Most of the time we are not good listeners.  Stop reading right here are think back to the last conversation you had this morning …  I’ll bet you can remember what you said and can’t remember the other person said.  We tend to be very self centered in our communications; we talk and then negotiate the next time when we get to talk again.  Jesus was an excellent listener and as followers of Jesus we should be too.  It will do us tremendous good to get some practice at listening and who better to practice with than our church family (they’re a pretty forgiving bunch J )

1.   My Sons Get to Hear How Judy Dickie Thinks About Jesus: When we Dwell during our corporate worship time, lots of inter-generational conversations take place.  The first time we did Dwelling in worship it was clunky and awkward (I will readily admit that) but I looked across the auditorium and found that Judy had sat down with my son Jacob and Micah Rose and was rereading Luke 10 with them and asking them about what they had heard.  I was so grateful that Judy had reached out to them and taken the time to engage them.  That is what church is all about.  If coming to church was just about hearing a sermon and getting juice and a cracker handed to you, you could do it anywhere.  But being the church is about belonging to each other;  Caring about each other so much that it almost hurts!  When we do Dwelling we are being church to each other and when you duck out of Dwelling or fail to engage it you are missing out.  You will never know how much you are missing until you give it a try.

Have you ever wondered why the date for Easter keeps changing each year?  The reason has to do with the Jewish calendar.   Jewish New Year (celebrated as Passover) is observed at sundown on the evening of the first full moon after the first day of Spring (vernal equinox).  Jesus was celebrating Passover with his disciples Thursday night when he was betrayed.  Jesus was crucified on Friday (Good Friday) and rose from the dead the following Sunday.  Because it’s based on a lunar calendar, the date changes every year.  Because of the way the full moons happen, next year Easter falls on March 31^st.

The name “Easter” comes from a pagan festival, observed long before Christ, which derives its name from Ishtar, a Babylonian idol goddess whose Anglo-Saxon name was Eastre. In Babylon, round cakes imprinted with the cross (a sign of life to the Babylonians) were made.

The word “Easter” does not properly occur in the Bible, (although the King James Version has it in Acts 12:4 instead of “Passover.”)  So why do we observe Easter?  We know from Scripture that God’s desire is that Christ’s death upon the cross and his subsequent resurrection be remembered every week.  This is what the early church did (Acts 20:7). The resurrection upon the first day of the week is undoubtedly the reason for early Christians assembling on that day rather than the Sabbath. The early church found in the Passover, and specifically in the death and resurrection of Jesus, a substitute for the life-connections of the pagan holiday Easter.

An annual celebration of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is a glorious opportunity for us to share the reason for the hope that we have.  Perhaps you saw the front page article in Newsweek this week titled, “Christianity in Crisis: Why we should ignore politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists and just follow him.”  Easter is an opportunity for us to discuss who Jesus is and why his resurrection matters to us.

When you talk to people about Jesus make sure to mention that we celebrate the resurrection not just at Easter but every week when we share a communion meal together.  When we pass the bread and the fruit of the vine each Sunday we preach a sermon to each other.  Paul says we, “proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” (1 Cor 11:26)  The early church commemorated Jesus’ death and resurrection every week when they assembled. We are a community of believers where Easter happens 52 weeks each year.

If you’re a fan of Science Fiction or even if you’re not, there is a worldview that you have likely seen on TV or in movies that makes big claims about how life works.  One of the first places this idea showed up in pop culture was in a short story written in 1952 by Ray Bradbury (author of the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451).  The story was called, “The Sound of Thunder,” and it is about an illegal time machine, operated by a guy named Travis.  For a price he will take you back in time to see sights or experience things that would be otherwise impossible.  The one rule Travis has is that you can’t touch, engage or interact with the past world in any way, lest you cause a chain of events that unintentionally leads to radical changes in the future. In the story, Travis explains to his new customer, Eccles that accidentally killing one mouse would kill all the future offspring of that mouse which might cause a fox to starve, which would cause thousands of foxes to never be born which might cause a man to freeze to death which could kill thousands of people.  Thousands would die just because of the accidental death of one mouse.

Despite the warning, Eccles steps off the machine while visiting prehistoric Earth and squashes a butterfly.  Upon their return to the present they find the world radically altered, and not for the better.  The worldview here is called Determinism and it proposes that all outcomes are caused by a single set of pre-existing conditions.  If you slightly alter the preconditions you radically alter the outcome.  Science Fiction or not, most people believe this.  Most people believe that their future is totally under their own control and they will determine it through the choices they make.

Our text this week throws that understanding for a loop and leaves us with a problem.  Romans 8:28-30 says that, “all things work together for those who love God,” and that God has predestined things to work out as they do.  God is sovereign over all outcomes.  He knows how everything is going to turn out.  Here’s the problem: if God already knows, they we don’t have any choices!  We are blessed or cursed with an end point to our lives that we have no control over.  How can that be fair?  Or just??

In Proverbs we read, “To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the proper answer of the tongue. … In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.” (Prov 16:1, 9)  What this is saying is that when you are asking, “Does God know how things are going to end or do we have free will?”  You are asking the wrong question!  This is not a “either/or” situation but rather a “both /and” situation.  You are free to choose whatever you wish and you are responsible for your choices AND God also knows how everything is going to turn out.

But this leaves us with more questions. If God knows how everything is going to happen, why does He let bad things happen?  This is a serious question (one that will take more room than this page can offer; we’ll talk about that in the sermon today) but the bigger problem ought to be if God wasn’t in control.  Do you really want to live in a world where the success of your life is totally determined by your choices?  If you really believed that, how could you get out of bed in the morning?  Every day the possibility would exist that you are going to mess up the rest of your life with a tiny mistake today; or worse!  Somebody else might mess up your life with one of their choices and you won’t know it until it’s too late!

The good news in Romans is that we make our plans but God guides what happens.  We can trust him because He uses all outcomes to conform us to the image of His son Jesus (Rom 8:29).  For those who love God, the bad things that happen are being used for good, the truly good things can never be taken away, and the best is yet to come.  We’ll talk more about this today.

Glory is a biblical word that describes a condition of life that reflects the presence of a pure and holy God.  Something that is glorious finds it’s source in God.  It points to God. In Isaiah 6:3, the prophet describes an overwhelming vision of God, sitting on his throne in the temple. God sat on His heavenly throne as King and His royal robe filled the temple.  The angels in the temple shouted, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”  The temple could barely contain the robe of God the King, but His glory could not be contained.  It spilled out of the temple and consumed the whole earth. It was a spectacle that is exceeds understanding and is beyond imagining.

One of the Hebrew words for glory ( kabod ) is the same as the word for “weight,” or “heaviness,” and this double meaning is particularly vivid.  Something that is glorious has some weight to it; it can be felt.  In the same way a heavy object carries momentum, something that is glorious has gravity that we can feel.  It has an impact on us when we interact with it.

Writing in Greek, Paul uses a play on words in 2 Corinthians 4:17 that the Jewish readers would get while the Gentile readers might not:

 16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

In Romans 8 Paul returns to this idea when he says, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Rom 8:17)  How do we become glorious?

To bring glory to something is to point out it’s value or delight in it’s goodness and both of these things seem unlikely to ever be true of us.  Is God going to brag on us, when His kingdom has fully come?  That doesn’t seem likely, or even healthy. How could God ever be proud of us?  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ became sin for us so that through faith we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).  C.S. Lewis writes,

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise – almost  incredible and only possible by the work of Christ – that  some of us … shall actually survive the examination, shall find approval, shall please God… To be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son – it seems impossible … but so it is.

Our future glory is the delight that the Father will have in us when all is made new.  It is the same delight He feels in His own Son, who was perfectly obedient, a fully compliant.  As we learn to behave a little more like Jesus each day we are being perfected by the Holy Spirit from one degree of glory to another. (2 Cor 3:18)

Through our union with Christ in baptism, His glory becomes ours, our true identity and our future hope.