Latest / truthunedited / Fall Asleep to The Sermon on the Mount _ Deeply EXPLAINED for Those Who Need It Most Tonight

Transcript

Fall Asleep to The Sermon on the Mount _ Deeply EXPLAINED for Those Who Need It Most Tonight · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There was a sermon that sounded dangerous to the world
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: that first heard it. Not because it called for weapons,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: not because it organized armies or promised revenge against those
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: who had taken too much for too long. It sounded
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: dangerous because it told the people at the bottom of
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: everything that God's kingdom was nearer to them than they
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: had ever been told. Rome had no answer for that.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: The religious establishment had no answer for that. And two
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: thousand years later, in quiet rooms at midnight, in the
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: space between the last thing you did to day and
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: the first thing you will face to morrow, people are
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: still sitting with these words and finding that they have
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: not lost a single gram of their weight to night.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: We are not going to simply hear the sermon on
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: the mount. We are going to go inside it, layer
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: by layer, vaught by vaut, following threads that most readings
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: leave on the floor. You do not need a theology degree.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: You do not need to have read anything before this.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: You own only need to be here, breathing, willing to
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: listen to something ancient that has been traveling toward this
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: particular night for a very long time. Breathe in, slowly,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: let the day go. It will be there in the
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: morning to night belongs to something else. Let us begin
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: chapter one, The Hill and the world that made it necessary.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: To understand what Jesus said on that hill, you first
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: have to understand why the hill was necessary at all.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: There is a woman named Sarah. She is thirty four
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: years old and she lives outside of Columbus, Ohio. She
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: works in hospital administration, which means she spends her days
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: managing systems that are supposed to help people but frequently
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: make people feel like numbers in a spreadsheet instead. She
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: grew up in a church. She still believes mostly, though
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: she would have a hard time explaining exactly what she
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: believes or why if someone pressed her. At the long
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: moment to night, she is lying in bed at eleven
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: thirty with her phone face down on the night stand
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: because she made a rule about her phone after ten
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: and she is trying to keep it. She is thinking
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: about a conversation she had to day with a colleague
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: who said something that was technically not wrong but felt
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: profoundly unkind. She has been running that conversation through her
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: head for six hours and cannot stop. She put on
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: this video because someone she respects mentioned it. She has
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: been meaning to actually understand what the Sermon on the
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: mount says, rather than just knowing that it exists. She
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: does not know yet that what she is about to
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: hear was spoken directly into the same kind of exhaustion
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: she is carrying tonight. She does not know yet that
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the world Jesus walked into looked, in certain essential ways
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: exactly like the world she walked through to day. Let
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: me show you that world. The year is somewhere around
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: twenty eight to thirty of the first century. Palestine is
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: under Roman occupation. And Roman occupation is not simply soldiers
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: on corners. It is a total system designed with engineering
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: precision to extract everything possible from the people it controls,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: while ensuring they remain just functional enough to keep producing
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: what is being extracted. The taxes alone would take your
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: breath away. The Roman poll tax, the land tax, tolls
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: on roads, tolls on markets, tolls on fishing boats and
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: the fish that came off them, customs on goods bought
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: and sold in the very markets where people tried to survive.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Tax collectors, many of them Jewish Men, who had accepted
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a deal with the occupying power in exchange for personal profit,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: collected what Rome demanded and frequently collected considerably more, keeping
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: the difference for themselves without legal consequence. A fisherman working
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: the Sea of Galilee in that era might pay taxes
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: on on his boat, his nets, his catch, the road
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: he used to transport that catch, and the market where
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: he tried to sell it. By careful historical estimates, an
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: ordinary Jewish family in first century Palestine was surrendering somewhere
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: between thirty and forty percent of everything they earned to
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: various layers of authority. This was not prosperity theology. This
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: was survival mathematics, and the numbers frequently did not work.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: But beneath the economics was something harder to calculate and
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: harder to bear, the humiliation, the daily accumulated awareness that
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the land your ancestors believed God had promised them was
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: not yours. That soldiers could walk into your home and
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: command you to carry their equipment for a mile, and
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: you had no legal recourse. That the entire architecture of
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: the visible world had been built to remind you, without
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: ever stopping, that you did not matter to the people
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: who held power. This is the world, but it is
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: not the only pressure. The religious establishment added its own weight.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: The Pharisees were not villains. That is important to say clearly,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: because the Sermon on the Mount is not a story
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: about good people fighting bad people. The Pharisees were sincere,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: They were devoted. They had built around the original commandments
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: of Moses, an elaborate structure of additional interpretations, sometimes called
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: the oral Law, designed to clarify every ambiguity and prevent
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: every possible accidental violation of God's commands. The intention was genuine.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The effect for a farmer who had not studied since childhood,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: for a fisherman who could not read Hebrew, for a
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: widow whose days were consumed entirely by survival. It was
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: a faith that felt like an examination. They were permanently failing.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: You were not washing your hands in the correct sequence,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: You were not observing the correct boundaries on the Sabbath.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: You were associating with people whose presence made you ritually impure.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: The Kingdom of God, as the people who controlled its
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: description were describing it, was a place with very specific
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: admission requirements that most of the people on that hillside
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: had no realistic possibility of meeting, And so they came
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: to the hill carrying two kinds of weight, the weight
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: of a world that had sorted them to the bottom
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: of every hierarchy that mattered, and the weight of a
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: faith that had somehow become one more system telling them
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: they were not quite enough. There is a man named Marcus.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: He is forty one years old, and he is listening
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: to this from the cab of his truck parked outside
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: his apartment in Akron, Ohio, because he does not want
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: to go inside yet. He worked twelve hours to day,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: his back hurts. He has been trying to read the
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Bible more, but when he picks it up, he often
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: feels the way he felt in school, like everyone else
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: understands something he is supposed to understand, and the gap
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: between him and the understanding is too wide to cross alone.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: He does not know that the people walking up that
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: hill felt exactly that gap. And there is one more
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: person on that hill side worth knowing about before we
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: go further. His name was Tobias. He was fifty three
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: years old, and he built houses in the villages around
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the Sea of Galilee. He was not a famous man,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: but he knew things about foundations that most people never
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: had reason to learn. He is sitting near the back
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: of the crowd this afternoon, listening with the particular attention
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: of some one who recognizes in what he is hearing
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: the language of his own trade. We will come back
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: to Tobias later, but it matters that he was there
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: from the beginning. They came from the villages scattered along
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: the shore of the Sea of Galilee, from the fishing
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: boats rocking in the morning swell, from the fields where
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: they had worked since the sun came up, from the
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: markets where they had tried to make the numbers work
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: one more time. They came because word had been traveling
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: through the villages for months about this teacher from Nazareth,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: and the word was different from other words about other teachers.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: He spoke about God as if God was close. He
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: ate with people that respectable teachers refused to eat with.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: He did not seem to be performing faith for an audience.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: He seemed to actually believe everything he said, and most remarkably,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: he seemed to love the people in front of him,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: not as a category, not as souls to be managed,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: as people, specific, tired, complicated, beloved people. So they came. Now,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: consider the scene from a particular angle at the edge
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: of the crowd. A Roman soldier has stopped, not to
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: enforce anything not under orders. He stopped because the size
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: and stillness of the gathering caught his attention, the way
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: genuine silence in a public place always catches attention because
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: it is so rare. He cannot follow most of what
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: is being said. His aramaic is functional but not fluent.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: But he can see the faces, and the faces are
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: doing something he has not observed in several years of
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: managing occupied populations. They are not afraid, they are not
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: performing submission. They are not watching him. They are listening
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: to the man on the hill, with the specific, total,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: leaning forward quality of attention that people give only to
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: something that feels like it might actually be true. He
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: watches for a while, longer than he intends to, and
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: then he moves on because he has rounds to finish
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: and a commanding officer who does not pay him to
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: study the emotional states of Galileean peasants. But something stays
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: with him the rest of the afternoon. He has seen
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: crowds respond to power. He has seen people cheer for
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: force when the force is on their side. He has
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: never seen a crowd respond to a man sitting down
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: on a hill side and speaking quietly, as if the
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: people in front of him were worth the full weight
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: of his attention. The sitting down matters in the rabbinic
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: tradition of that time. When a teacher sat, it was
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: a formal signal, not casual conversation, not a spontaneous speech.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: A seated rabbi was delivering something that carried the full
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: weight of his authority, something meant to be remembered and
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: carried forward. Jesus sat down, His disciples gathered close. The
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: crowd settled around them. Mothers adjusted children in their laps.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Old men found positions their joints could hold. Young men
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: claimed spots where they could see clearly. The sea of Galilee,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: caught the morning light below and scattered it across the
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: water in a thousand small fires. And then Jesus opened
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: his mouth. What the crowd did not know was that
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: the words they were about to hear would still be carried,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: argued over, whispered by the dying, and clung to by
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: the barely surviving, two thousand years later, in languages that
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: did not yet exist, by people in circumstances that no
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: one on that hillside could have imagined what they knew
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: was simpler and more immediate. Something is happening here, something
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  Speaker 1: that feels different from everything else we have ever been told.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: They leaned in and Jesus spoke the first word of
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  Speaker 1: the sermon, Blessed. It landed on the hillside, the way
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: the first note of a piece of music lands before
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: you know what the piece is telling you, only that
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: something real is about to happen. In their language, the
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: word carried a weight that English does not fully capture.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: More than happy, more than fortunate. Closer to this, you
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: are held by something larger than what is currently happening
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  Speaker 1: to you. You are not outside the story, You are
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: inside it right now, in whatever condition you are in.
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  Speaker 1: And then Jesus told them who he was talking about.
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  Speaker 1: There is a third person listening to Night. Her name
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: is Eleanor. She is twenty seven years old, and she
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: is sitting on her bathroom floor in Portland, Oregon, because
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: her bedroom felt too large after the conversation she had
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: with her mother this evening. She is not sure she
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: believes in God in any organized sense, but she believes
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: in something. She is not sure what to call it.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: She put on this video because the title said explained,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: and she has always been the kind of person who
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: needs to understand something before she can trust it. She
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: does not know yet that the first word of the
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: sermon was spoken for people who feel exactly the way
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: she feels. Right now, she is about to find out.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Rest here for just a moment, let your breathing slow.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: The hillside is quiet, the water is below, the word
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: is still in the air, and the best of what
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: it means is still ahead. Chapter two, eight Blessings, eight Revolutions,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: one upside Down Kingdom. Before we go into the beatitudes,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: I want to give you something. Most readings of this
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: passage never provide a fighting chance to actually be surprised
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: by them, because the beatitudes are among the most quoted
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: words in human history. They appear on walls and greeting
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: cards and the closing pages of funeral programs. They have
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: been read aloud so many times in so many quiet
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: rooms that the words have acquired a kind of ceremonial smoothness,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the way a stone acquires smoothness from the hands of
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: everyone who has held it over centuries. And that smoothness
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: is the problem, because the people on that hillside were
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: not soothed by what Jesus said they were struck by it.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: The Greek word Matthew uses to describe the crowd's reaction
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: at the end of the sermon is ekplesso, to be hit,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: to be knocked sideways by something you did not see coming,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: to be left in a state of disoriented astonishment that
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: your ordinary ways of making sense of things cannot immediately organize.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: That is the reaction we are after tonight. So let
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: me give you the context that restores the shock. The
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Roman world had a clear, unapologetic, publicly celebrated answer to
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the question of what a blessed life looked like. It
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: looked like strength, military victory, political dominance, the demonstrated capacity
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: to make the world arrange itself according to your will.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: It looked like honor, which in that culture meant the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: public recognition of your superior status by the people around you.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: It looked like wealth accumulated, displayed protected wealth, land resources,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: people who worked those resources and belonged to you. These
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: were not quiet values. They were the explicit, celebrated, architecturally
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: embodied values of the most powerful civilization the world had
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: yet produced. Woman public buildings were designed to make the
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: individual feel small in the presence of imperial power. Roman
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: public games were designed to demonstrate that strength triumphed over
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: weakness in the most visceral possible way. Roman law protected
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the accumulation of those who already had the entire cultural
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: machinery pointed in one direction, up, always up, toward power, wealth, status, victory.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: And the people on the hillside knew this system from
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the bottom of it. They had been sorted there by Rome,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: by the economic structures Rome maintained, and by religious interpretations
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: that told them their position at the bottom was, in
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: some sense also a spiritual failure. Jesus sat down, and
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: he began to dismantle the entire structure, one word at
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: a time. Blessed to the poor in spirit. For theirs
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: is the Kingdom of Heaven. The Greek word for poor
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: here is protochos. This is not a word for someone
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: temporarily short of funds. Tokos describes someone who crouches, someone
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: who has nothing, someone entirely dependent on the generosity of
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: others for survival. In the Roman world, there was no
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: lower position, no less dignity, and Jesus is not describing
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: material poverty, though that crowd contained abundant quantities of that
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: he is describing the condition of someone who has arrived
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: at the honest end of themselves, who has stopped performing
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: adequacy before God and before others, who has put down
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the exhausting work of constructing a version of themselves that
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: is impressive enough to deserve good things, who is simply
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: standing there with open hands. The Roman system said that
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: person has nothing. They are nothing. Jesus says, the Kingdom
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: of Heaven is theirs, not will be is present tense
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: right now in the open handed condition, before or they
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: have done anything to earn a different assessment. Let that
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: sit for a moment. You do not have to earn
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: your way into the story tonight. Open hands are not disqualifying.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: In one faithful hearing of this text. Open hands are
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: the very thing that receives what the Kingdom has to give. Sarah,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: lying in her bed in Columbus, has been feeling the
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: weight of not being enough all day in her job,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: in her faith, in the conversation that went wrong. She
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: does not know yet that this is precisely the condition
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the first beatitude is speaking into. Blessed are those who mourn,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: for they will be comforted. This beatitude has stopped reader's
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: cold for two thousand years, because on the surface it
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: sounds like a gentle cruelty. You are grieving, and I
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: am going to tell you this is a blessed condition
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: to be in. But listen carefully to what Jesus is
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: not saying. He is not saying grief is good. He
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: is not offering a spin that reframes loss is secretly enjoyable.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: He is not asking anyone to perform contentment in the
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: middle of genuine pain. He is saying that grief is
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: not abandoned. The Stoic philosophy that dominated the educated Roman
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: world had a clear position on mourning. Emotion was a
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: disturbance of reason. The wise person cultivated apathea, detachment from
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: things that could be lost, because attachment was what produced grief,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: and grief was weakness, and weakness was the enemy of
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: the good life. Jesus says the opposite. The ones who
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: mourn are the ones who loved something enough to feel
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: its absence as a wound. And the wound is not
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: evidence of a failure of wisdom or faith. It is
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: evidence of a heart that was willing to open to
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: something real. Those people, he says, will be comforted, not consoled,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: with explanations, not handed, a framework that makes the loss
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: feel smaller and more manageable, but genuinely, tenderly, specifically comforted,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: the way you comfort someone when you are fully present
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: to their pain, rather than managing it from a safe distance.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Elena on the bathroom floor in Portland is not sure
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: she believes in God, but she knows what it is
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: to grieve something. She has been grieving something for almost
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: two years that she does not yet have adequate language.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: For.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: She is about to hear something that begins to give
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: her a word for it. Blessed are the meek, for
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: they will inherit the earth. Here we need to stop
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: and repair some serious damage done by centuries of translation.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: The word meek in modern English is almost entirely negative, passive, resigned,
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: the person who does not stand up for themselves, the
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: human equivalent of a doormat. That is not the word
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Jesus used. The Greek word is prows and prous in
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: the ancient world describe something specific and powerful. It described
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: a horse that has been trained, a war horse, an
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: animal with enormous physical power, the capacity to cause significant damage,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: that had learned to channel that power under direction. Full strength,
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: full capability, but directed, purposeful rather than destructive. Meekness in
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: this sense is not the absence of strength. It is
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: strength that has chosen not to use itself for domination.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: The Roman world celebrated power asserted for its own sake.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: The Legions were the ultimate expression of that value, strength
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: proven by conquest, territory claimed by force. Jesus says the prows,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: the ones who have the strength and choose not to
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: weaponize it, will inherit the earth, not conquer it. Inherit.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Receive it as something given, not something taken, the way
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: a child receives from a parent, not because of what
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the child achieved, but because of who the child belongs to.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Marcus in the parking lot in Akron has been thinking
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: about his younger brother. His brother has always been the
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: louder one, the one who takes up more space, the
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: one who gets things by pushing for them. Marcus has
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: always felt his own particular kind of quiet was a disadvantage.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: He is about to hear that one way of reading
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: this text calls it something different. Blessed are those who
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: In first century Palestine, hunger and thirst were not metaphors
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: requiring imagination. They were physical realities that most people in
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: that crowd had direct and recent experience with the kind
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: of hunger that wakes you at three in the morning,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: the kind of thirst that makes every other thought impossible.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Jesus is saying that the desire for things to be
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: genuinely right, for justice and truth and integrity to actually
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: prevail in a world where they frequently do not, should
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: feel exactly like that. Not a vague spiritual preference, not
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: an aspiration held at comfortable distance, a need so urgent
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: it reorganizes everything else around it. And the promise is
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: not that the hunger will become unimportant. The promise is
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that you will be filled, not with a theory, not
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: with an explanation of why things are the way they are,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: with something that actually satisfies. Take a breath. Let that
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: promise be present, rather than passing through quickly. The desire
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: you feel for things to be right is not naive.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: It is not a failure to accept reality. It is
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: the most accurate possible response to a world that was
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: made for something better than what it currently is. Blessed
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. The fifth
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: beatitude operates like a description of how the heart works,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: rather than a moral instruction. Mercy in the ancient world
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: was not primarily a feeling. It was an action, a
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: choice made, sometimes against every reasonable impulse, the choice not
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: to give someone what they technically deserved and instead to
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: give them something they had no right to expect. In
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: the honor and shame culture of first century Palestine, mercy
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: carried a specific social cost. Showing mercy to someone who
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: had wronged you, or to someone considered ritually impure could
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: read as weakness. It could damage your reputation in a
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: society where reputation was the currency of survival. And Jesus says,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: do it anyway, not because it is strategically optimal, but
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: because the merciful are doing something that reflects the actual
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: nature of the God. This sermon is describing a God
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: who does not wait for deserving before extending care. To
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: be merciful is to let your actions take the shape
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: of that love. Blessed are the pure in heart, for
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: they will see God. The sixth beatitude is the most
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: inward of all eight, and it has been misunderstood in
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: ways that have made people feel it describes an impossible
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: standard rather than an invitation. The heart in the ancient
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: world was not primarily the seat of emotion. It was
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: the place where decisions were actually made, underneath the performance,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: underneath the managed surface of what you present to the world,
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: the place where you are actually yourself without audience. To
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: be pure in heart did not mean to be free
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: of struggle or doubt. It meant to have no deliberate
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: gap between what you showed and what you were, No
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: constructed version of yourself maintained for observers, no locked room
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: kept even from yourself. And the promise attached to this
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: is astonishing. They will see God, not in some distant
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: future only. The implication is that the pure in heart
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: are already positioned to perceive something present but invisible to
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: eyes clouded by the need to manage appearances. When you
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: stop spending the enormous energy that performance requires, you discover
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: you have energy left to actually see. The pure in
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: heart do not see God because they are morally superior.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: They see God because they have stopped looking at themselves
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: long enough to look elsewhere. Let that breathe for a moment.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: of God. The seventh beatitude contains a distinction that is
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: easy to miss. Jesus does not say, blessed are the peacekeepers.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: He says, blessed are the peacemakers. A peacekeeper maintains the
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: absence of open conflict. They stay out of the difficult thing.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: They manage surface tension. They ensure that fighting does not
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: become visible. A peacemaker does something harder. They go into
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: the broken place. They attempt actual reconciliation between things that
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: are genuinely fractured. They are willing to absorb the discomfort
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: that the broken relationship has been produced in order to
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: do the work that no one else is willing to
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: pay for. The Greek word for peace here ernae, carries
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: within it the Hebrew concept of shalom, not simply the
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: absence of fighting, the positive presence of wholeness, things actually
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: functioning the way they were designed to function. Peacemakers will
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: be called children of God not because they are avoiding trouble,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: but because they are doing the specific work that God does,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: moving toward fracture, entering broken places, attempting repairs that no
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: one else will attempt. And the eighth blessed are those
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: of heaven. This is the beatitude that makes the previous
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: seven risky to believe, because if you actually live the
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: values of the previous seven, if you are genuinely prous
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: in a world that rewards domination, genuinely merciful in a
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: system that rewards leverage, genuinely committed to the costly work
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: of peacemaking in places that profit from sustained conflict, you
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: will encounter resistance, not as a possibility, as a near certainty.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: Jesus does not soften this. He does not offer a
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: version of the kingdom where faithfulness to its values produces
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: comfortable outcomes. He says, the kingdom belongs to the ones
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: who hold on. Anyway, there is a historical moment worth
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: carrying with you here. In the first three centuries after
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: Jesus spoke these words, the community that formed around these
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: eight blessings was systematically persecuted by the most powerful empire
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: the world had produced. They lost property, freedom, and yet
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: within three centuries those values had taken root more deeply
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: than any military campaign had managed. Not because the persecuted
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: overpowered their persecutors, but because the way they lived and
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: the way they died pointed towards something the empire had
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: no category for, something the empire's machinery of power had
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: never learned to contain. This is not a triumphalist claim
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: about any institution. It is a quiet observation about what
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: happens when eight specific counter values are lived with enough
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: consistency and enough love that the world cannot quite make
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: them stop. Let the eight Blessings settle in you now,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: not as a list to remember, but as a landscape
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: to inhabit. You are somewhere in these eight. There is
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: one that is yours to night. More than the others.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: You probably know which one it is. Rest in that
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: one for a moment, just that one. It was spoken
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: into a world that looked in certain essential ways like yours,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: to people who felt in certain essential ways the way
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: you feel to night. And the word that preceded all
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: eight of them was the same blessed. Chapter three, Salt
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Light and the people who did not know what they
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: were carrying. Let me tell you about the kind of
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: person who does not want to be seen, not because
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: they are hiding something shameful, but because visibility feels dangerous
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: because somewhere along the way, being noticed led to being hurt,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: and the equation became permanent. Stay small, stay quiet, Stay
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: below the line where you can be targeted. Maybe this
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: is you, Maybe it is someone you love. Maybe it
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: is the version of you that shows up in certain
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: rooms and certain relationships where the safest thing has always
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: been to disappear. Jesus is about to say something directly
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: to that person, and it is not comfortable, but it
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: is one of the kindest things in the entire sermon.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Right after the eight blessings, before he goes anywhere else,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: he turns to the crowd on that hillside and says
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: two things. You are the salt of the earth. You
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: are the light of the world. Five words each, and
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: both of them in a tense that matters enormously. Not
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: you could be. Not you will become if you achieve
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: sufficient spiritual development. Not you used to be before the
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: choices that made you think you disqualified yourself. You are
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: right now to night in the condition you are in.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Before we go further, I want to tell you something
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: about salt that most people in the twenty first century
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: have genuinely never had to think about. Salt to day
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: is among the cheapest substances on Earth. We add it,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: remove it for health reasons, buy it in quantities that
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: would have astonished a first century Galileean fisherman. We think
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: almost nothing of it. It is background assumed, taken so
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: completely for granted that we have lost the ability to
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: feel what the words salt meant to the people sitting
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: on that hill In the first century, salt was survival
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: without refrigeration, without any way to slow the processes that
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: cause food to decay. Salt was the only reliable technology
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: for preserving food across time. Salt applied to fish, to meat,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: to vegetables was what stood between a family's food supply
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: and the rot that would otherwise claim it. The Roman
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: military understood this so clearly that soldiers were sometimes paid
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: in salt, or with money specifically designated for salt purchase.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: The Latin word celarium, from which the English word salary descends,
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: directly comes from this practice. To say someone was worth
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: his salt was a literal evaluation. He was earning what
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: he cost. And here is what makes the metaphor even
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: more specific to this crowd. Many of the people sitting
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: on that hillside worked in the fishing industry around the
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Sea of Galilee. Their fish were salted and exported across
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: the Roman world. They handled salt every day. They understood
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: in the most fit, physical and immediate way possible what
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: salt was worth and what it did. When Jesus said
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: you are the salt of the earth, they did not
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: hear a decorative metaphor. They heard a statement about function,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: about what they were actually doing in the world, whether
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: they knew it or not. Sal preservus. Salt keeps things
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: from decaying. Salt makes food survivable across time, across the
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: distances between harvest and need. And then Jesus adds something
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: that lands differently when you feel the weight of what
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: salt was worth. But if salt loses its saltiness, how
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: can it be made salty again? The salt available in
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: first century Palestine was frequently impure, mixed with other minerals.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: When the sodium chloride leeched out through moisture or extended storage,
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: what remained was a white substance that looked exactly like salt,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: but had lost the one property that made it what
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: it was. It looked right, It occupied the space salt
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: was supposed to occupy, but it could no longer do
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: the thing that salt existed to do. It is no
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: longer good for anything except to be thrown out and
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: trampled under foot. This is not a threat. It is
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: the description of a specific and quiet tragedy, the tragedy
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: of being present in the world in a way that
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: takes up the room something genuinely useful could have occupied.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: The tragedy of looking like salt without being able to
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: do what salt does now the light You are the
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: light of the world. We live in a world where
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: darkness is rare. Our cities never go fully dark, our
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: devices glow through every night. The kind of total, disorienting
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: darkness that was simply the condition of every night in
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: the ancient world is something most of us have to
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: actively travel to find. In the first century, darkness was
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: the condition of every night without exception. Oil lamps were
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: precious and maintained carefully. A lamp in a house was
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: not decorative. It was the thing standing between the family
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: inside and complete inability to see, to move safely, to function,
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: and lamps were placed where they could illuminate as much
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: as possible, not hidden, not covered on a stand elevated
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: extended to reach the full room. A city on a
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: hill cannot be hidden, Neither can a lamp under a bowl.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: Here is what Jesus is not saying. He is not
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: saying be impressive. He is not saying build a platform,
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: or make yourself visible so that the visibility itself becomes
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the point. He is making an observation about the nature
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: of light. Light, by its nature, cannot be contained without
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: being extinguished. The only way to stop light from doing
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: what light does is to put it out entirely. So
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: the question is not whether the light will be seen.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: The question is whether you are spending your energy trying
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: to prevent it from being seen, or whether you are
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: simply allowing it to be what it is. But then
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Jesus says something easy to read past and important. Not
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: to let your light shine before others so that they
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Not so that they may see you, so that they
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: may see your good deeds, and from those deeds arrive
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: at something larger than you. The light passes through you
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: and points somewhere beyond you. The moment you begin managing
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: the beam to illuminate your own face most favorably, something
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: has already gone wrong. Salt and light together, let us
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: hold them side by side for a moment, because they
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: are doing something in combination that they cannot quite do individually.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Salt works in hiddenness. You do not watch salt preserve.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: You taste the result, You experience what has been kept
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: from decaying. But the salt itself disappears into the thing
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: it is preserving. No vizibli credit, no observable moment of
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: salt being salt that anyone one can witness. The salt
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: gives itself entirely to the work and is not traceable
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: in the outcome. Light works in full visibility. You cannot
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: miss light in a dark room. Its presence announces itself
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: completely without the possibility of being subtle about it. One hidden,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: one visible, and Jesus says you are both. Most people
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: are more comfortable with one than the other. The salt
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: people do their best work in the background and find
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: visibility uncomfortable. They worry that being seen will corrupt the
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: purity of what they are doing. They prefer to give
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: without the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: which is a value. Jesus will affirm later in this
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: very sermon, the light people are energized by the public
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: dimension of their work. They find that being seen actually
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: improves the quality of what they do. Neither of them
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: is wrong. Both of them are half the picture. Jesus says,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: you are both not by choosing the one you prefer both,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: because the world needs both from you specifically. And here
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: is the thing that brings this home. Sarah in Columbus
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: has been a kind of salt in her workplace for
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: three years without knowing it. There is a culture in
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: that hospital administration office that is slightly less corrosive than
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: it would be if she were not there. There are
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: junior colleagues who have stayed through difficult seasons because she
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: was present in a way that made staying feel possible.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: She has no idea. She has been running a conversation
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: about unkindness through her head for six hours, not knowing
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: that she herself has been preserving something in that office
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: that would slowly decay without her. Marcus in the parking
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: lot in Akron called his mother every Sunday for four
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: years after his father died. Through the years when she
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: was not easy to talk to through the grief that
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: made her someone he did not always recognize. He did
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: not think of it as salt. He thought of it
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: as just what you do do. But the preservation was real.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Elena on the bathroom floor in Portland does not know
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: that the particular way she listens, the quality of her
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: full attention when someone is trying to explain something difficult,
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: has been light for four different people in the last
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: two years, people who walked away from conversations with her
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: seeing something they had not been able to see before.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: She thought she was just talking. She was carrying a lamp.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: You are salt that has not lost its flavor. You
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: are a light that has not gone out, whether you
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: know it or not, whether it feels that way on
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: this particular night or not. The not knowing does not
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: change the carrying. You have been doing this longer than
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: you know. In ways, you will not have a full
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: account of the salt work that looked like just showing up,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: the light work that looked like just being yourself in
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: a dark moment for to night. You only need to
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: know that the words were true when they were spoken,
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: and they are still true. Now, let your breathing slow.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: You were named before you knew what you were carrying,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: and the name still stands. Chapter four. The law was
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: never what anyone told you it was. Picture a man
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: sitting alone at a desk late at night. He is
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: a scholar. He has spent forty years studying the scriptures.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: He has read the next passage more times than he
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: can count, and to night, one more time he reads it,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: and one more time. He puts his pen down, not
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: because he is finished, because he cannot get past seventeen words.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: Do not think that I have come to abolish the
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them,
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: but to fulfill them seventeen words and packed inside them
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: one of the most significant claims in human history. He
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: puts his pen down because the question will not leave him.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: What does it mean to fulfill the law? And why
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: does the the answer feel like it keeps shifting every
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: time he thinks he has it. Tonight, we are going
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: to sit with his question, not to arrive at a
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: quick answer, but to understand why. The question itself is
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: the doorway into something important. To understand what Jesus is claiming,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: you first need to feel what the law meant to
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: the people on that hillside. The Torah The Law of
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Moses was not simply a legal code. It was the
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: record of the covenant between God and a people. It
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: was the document that defined Israel's identity among all the
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: nations of the earth. It contained the story of creation
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: of the patriarchs of the exodus from Egypt, and then
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: the specific, detailed instructions that governed worship, relationships, food, land,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: and time. To the people of that culture. The Torah
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: was the word of God given to them at Sinai
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: through Moses, at the defining moment of their entire existence
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: as a people. To say that you had come to
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: do something to the Law was not a small claim.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: It was a claim that positioned you in relationship to
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: Moses himself, to God himself, to everything the Covenant meant,
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: and the crowd was listening very carefully to every word
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: that came after it. Now, before we go to what
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: fulfill means, let me give you something I promised earlier,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: something that most readings of this passage skip entirely across
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: the long history of the Church. There are three major
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: ways faithful readers have understood what Jesus meant by I
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: have come to fulfill the Law. All three hold something true,
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: and none of them alone is the whole picture. The
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: first is what scholars sometimes called the completion view. Jesus
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: fulfills the law by being the person the law was
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: always pointing toward. Every sacrifice in the levitical system was
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: pointing in this reading toward his sacrifice. Every priestly function
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: was pointing toward his. Every king who failed to be
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: the king Israel needed was pointing toward the king he
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: would be. The Law was a detailed architectural drawing for
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: a building not yet constructed, and Jesus is the building.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: The drawing is not made irrelevant by the building's completion.
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: It is honored by it it reaches its destination. The
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: second is the deepening view. Jesus fulfills the law by
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: taking it to its full intended depth. He does not
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: replace the commandments. He reveals what they were always asking for.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: Beneath the surface. Do not murder has always been at
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: its deepest level about the contempt that generates murder, long
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: before the act. Do not commit adultery has always been
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: at its full depth, about the reduction of another person
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: that generates the act. Long before the moment the Pharisees
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: had mastered the surface compliance, Jesus takes the conversation to
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: the route. The third is the embodiment view. Jesus fulfills
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: the law by actually living it, by being the one
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: human being in whom the law finds its complete expression,
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: not as a set of rules to follow, but as
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: a description of what human life fully aligned with God
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: actually looks like from the inside. All three of these
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: readings are held by serious, careful, faithful readers. They are
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: not competing so much as three angles on the same
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: astonishing claim. The Greek word holding all three together is pleiro,
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: to fill up, to make full, to bring to completion.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: When a vessel is plio, it is not replaced by
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: what fills it, It is honored by it. The capacity
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: it was designed to hold is finally fully realized. Jesus
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: is not saying he is emptying the law. He is
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: saying he is filling it. Take a slow breath here,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: let that image settle, a vessel finally holding what it
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: was shaped to hold, not replaced, completed. And then he
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: says something that would have silenced the crowd, For I
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: not enter the Kingdom of heaven. The Pharisees were the
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: unquestioned gold standard of religious observance. They fasted twice a week,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: not because the law required twice weekly fasting, but because
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: they wanted to exceed what was required. They tithed their
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: garden herbs down to the smallest plant. They prayed the
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: required prayers at the required times in the required forms.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: They had built elaborate additional structures around the Torah, precisely
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: because they cared so much about honoring it. If the
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: pharisees righteousness was not enough, whose possibly could be? That
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: is exactly the question Jesus wants hanging in the air,
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: because the answer is the hinge on which the entire
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: sermon turns. The Pharisees had achieved something genuinely impressive. They
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: had mastered the visible dimension of the law with precision
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: and consistency that demanded real dedication. But the law was never,
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: at its deepest level, primarily about visible compliance. It was
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: about the transformation of the place where decisions are actually made,
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: and you can achieve total visible compliance without that place
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: changing at all. A person can go through every correct motion,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: say every correct word, maintain every correct appearance, and carry
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: in the room no one else can see, a state
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: of contempt for the people around them, a state of
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: pride that uses the law as a mirror to confirm
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: their own superiority, rather than a window to see God.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: More clearly, this is not a description of the Pharisees
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: as uniquely bad people. It is a description of what
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: happens to human beings when the measure of righteousness is
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: moved from the invisible to the visible, When what can
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: be seen and evaluated by others becomes the standard, The
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: place no one sees begins, slowly and without drama, to
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: be forgotten because it cannot be seen, it cannot be evaluated,
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: It does not count in the visible system. Jesus is
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: moving the standard back to that place where it was
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: always meant to be, where real transformation happens or does
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: not happen. And then he begins a series of six
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: specific examples, six moments where he takes a commandment the
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: crowd thinks they understand, and reveals the depth beneath the surface.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: He introduces each one with a phrase that would have
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: landed with remarkable force on that hillside you have heard
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: that it was said. But I say to you. You
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: have heard, But I say, in the rabbinic tradition, authority
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: came from the chain of transmission. You sighted your sources,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: You positioned your interpretation within the stream of received wisdom.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: Every teacher derived their authority from their place in the
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: chain that ultimately ran back to Moses at Sinai. Jesus
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: cites no one. He positions himself within no chain. He
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: speaks entirely on his own authority. Not it is written,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: and here is my interpretation. But I say, the implicit
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: claim in that phrase is extraordinary. It is the claim
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: of someone who does not stand within the tradition, referencing
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: a source above themselves. It is the claim of someone
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: who is, in some sense the source. The crowd heard it,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: they could not have missed it. The authority in that
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: voice was not the authority of position, or scholarship or
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: institutional sanction. It was something else, something that felt to
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: people who had spent their lives hearing teachers carefully position
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: themselves within the received tradition, like hearing a living spring
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: after a lifetime of drinking from collected rain water. The
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: scholar at his desk the one who set down his
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: pen at the beginning of this Checkapter once wrote in
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: his journal a sentence that stayed with him for thirty years.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: The sermon does not feel like a teaching about the law.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: It feels like the law meeting its author. He never
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: published that sentence. He was not sure he could defend
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: it academically, but he never stopped believing it was true.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: Rest here for just a moment, breathe slowly. The night
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: is quiet outside, the day is genuinely behind you. Now
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: what comes next is not about performance. It never was.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: It is about what is true in the place where
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: you are actually yourself. And that place, whatever condition it
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: is in tonight, is exactly the place this sermon is
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: most interested in meeting you. Chapter five, The place where
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: everything begins. On the night before Marcus's younger brother got married,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: the two of them sat on the back porch of
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: their mother's house until two in the morning. They talked
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: about the father, who had been dead for six years
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: by then. They talked about the ways their father's anger
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: had lived in the house when they were growing up.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: Not violence, just a heat, a permanent, low level pressure
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: that everyone in the family had learned to navigate around
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: the way you learn to navigate around furniture in the dark.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: His brother said something that Marcus had been thinking about
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: ever since. He said, I used to think Dad's problem
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: was what he did, but I do not think that
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: any more. I think his problem was what was happening
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: in him long before he did anything. And nobody ever
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: got to that part, not him, not anyone who tried
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: to help him. Marcus did not have a theological framework
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: for what his brother was describing that night, But sitting
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: in his truck in Akron listening to this, he is
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: beginning to find one, because what Jesus does in this
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: section of the sermon is exactly what Marcus's brother was
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: reaching toward. He goes to the place before the act,
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: the place where everything begins. There is a reason this
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: part of the sermon creates more discomfort than the others.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: Not because it is the harshest, not because it asks
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: more of visible behavior, but because it refuses to stay
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: on the surface. Every major system for organizing human life,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: ancient and modern, works primarily with what can be seen,
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: what can be measured, what can be observed and judged
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: and rewarded or punished. The visible act the external behavior
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: the record of what a person has done. There are
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: good reasons for this. Societies need to function, laws need
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: to be enforcible. But systems built only on what can
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: be seen have a limitation that Jesus addresses directly. Here.
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: You can comply perfectly with every visible requirement while the
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: place inside where decisions are made remains entirely untouched. You
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: can rearrange the furniture without changing the house. Jesus is
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: not interested in the furniture. He is interested in the house.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: Let us go in. You have heard that it was
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: said to the people long ago, do not murder, and
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: any one who murders will be subject to judgment. But
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: I say to you that any one who is angry
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: And any one who says to a brother or sister
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: raca is answerable to the court. And any one who
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: says you fool will be in danger of the fire
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: of hell. Let me say something important before we go further.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus is not saying that anger is sinful. This is
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: a fundamental misreading of the passage that has caused genuine
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: damage over centuries. It has produced people who have learned
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: to suppress anger, to deny it, to perform the absence
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: of it, while carrying enormous amounts of unprocessed rage in
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: the room no one else can see, which then finds
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: its way out informs far more destructive than honest anger
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: would have been. The tradition Jesus is drawing on does
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: not treat anger as inherently wrong. The psalms he grew
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: up singing are full of anger, anger at injustice, anger
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: at suffering, anger at the gap between how things are
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: and how they should be. This kind of anger has
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: a name in the tradition. It is called righteous indignation,
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: and it is one of the engines of moral seriousness.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: What Jesus is addressing is something more specific. The word
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: ruka that he uses is an Aramaic term of absolute contempt.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: It means empty, worthless, without substance. It is not an
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: insult in the ordinary sense. It is a verdict, a
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: comprehensive assessment that reduces another human being in the room
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: where you make your decisions to nothing less than a
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: full person, not quite real in the way that real
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: people are real, and that reduction, that moment when another
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: person stops being fully real to you is where Jesus
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: locates the root of murder, not the act, the route,
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: because murder as an act does not begin on the
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: day it is committed. It begins earlier, often much earlier,
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: in the moment, when someone becomes less than fully human
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: to you, when they become in the room where you live,
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: an obstacle or an offense or a problem rather than
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: a person. This is not metaphorical. It is observation about
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: how destruction actually works. Every sustained program of violence against
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: human beings in recorded history has required, as its necessary
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: first step convincing enough people that the target group is
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: less than fully human zaijah empty, not really people in
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: the way that we are people. Jesus draws the line
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: at the route, not because the act does not matter.
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: Of course, the act matters, but because the act is
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: the visible end of something that began invisibly long before.
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: You cannot prevent the act by managing behavior at the
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: level of the act alone. You can only prevent it
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: by attending to what generates it. And what generates it
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: is the reduction of another person's full humanity. In the
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: place where your decisions are made, Marcus is thinking about
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: his supervisor he has been thinking about this person for
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: three months. He has not done anything, he has not
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: said anything, but the person has been slowly becoming less
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: real to him, less like a complicated human being with
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: their own pressures and blind spots, and more like a
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: symbol of everything wrong with the system. He is hearing
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: this to night and recognizing something not with guilt, with
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: the relief of someone who has been given a map
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: of terrain they were already walking through without being able
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: to see it. Now, Desire, you have heard that it
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: was said, do not commit adultery. But I say to
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: you that any one who looks that a woman with
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: This passage has caused more harm in its misapplication than
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: almost any other single sentence in the New Testament. So
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: we are going to spend the time it deserves. First
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: the contexts that most presentations of this teaching omit entirely,
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: the context that changes everything about what Jesus is actually saying.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: In first century Palestinian culture, women were, by law and
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: by social structure, the legal dependence of their fathers until
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: marriage and their husbands afterward. They had almost no independent
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: legal standing, they could not initiate divorce. They could be
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: divorced by their husbands for almost any reason. One of
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: the most influential rabbinic schools of the time, the school
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: of Rabbi Hillel, held that a husband could divorce his
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: wife for something as trivial as burning his dinner. The
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: woman divorced in these circumstances had almost no optionans She
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: was socially shamed, economically devastated, legally powerless. In this context,
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: the reduction of a woman to an object of desire,
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: looking at a human being and seeing primarily what she
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: might provide for you rather than who she is, was
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: not simply a private mental experience. It was the private
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: rehearsal of a systemic treatment of women as resources rather
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: than persons. What Jesus is doing in this teaching is
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: not loading additional guilt onto men for the experience of attraction,
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: which is a natural and morally neutral feature of human experience.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: He is doing something far more radical in his cultural moment,
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: He is insisting that the woman is a person, a full, complete,
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: irreducible human being who is not available to be reduced,
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: even privately, even in the room no one else can
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: see to her usefulness for someone else in a world
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: where women had almost no external protection from that reduction.
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: This was not a burden placed on women. It was
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: the most significant defense of women's full humanity that the
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: first century world had yet heard. Articulated. Elena on the
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: bathroom floor in Portland has heard this passage used against
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: her in ways that made her feel ashamed of existing,
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: of being a woman, of having a body. She is
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: hearing it explained in its actual historical context for the
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: first time to night, and something in her that has
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: been held tight for a long time begins slowly to release.
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: Now the famous lines about hands and eyes. If your
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: throw it away. If your right hand causes you to sin,
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: cut it off and throw it away. This is hyperbole. Deliberate, dramatic,
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: physically impossible hyperbole of a kind that was a completely
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: standard and widely recognized technique in rabbinic teaching. The teachers
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: of that tradition used extreme, even shockingly language, specifically to
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: ensure the underlying principle would be impossible to forget. Jesus
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: is not providing surgical instructions. He is saying this, whatever
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: in the room where you live is systematically pulling you
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: toward treating other people as less than fully human is
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: worth the most radical possible intervention, not because the intervention
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: is enjoyable, but because the alternative costs more. The slow
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: progressive reduction of other human beings in the place where
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: your decisions live costs you the capacity to actually see
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: the people around you, and the capacity to see them
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: is the capacity for love, And the capacity for love
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: is in the framework this sermon is building the most
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: essential human capacity there is. And then divorce. It was
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: also said, anyone who divorces his wife must give her
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: anyone who divorces his wife except for sexuallyf morality, causes
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: her to become an adulteress. I want to speak directly
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: to the person listening to night who has been divorced,
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: who has heard this passage before and felt the weight
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: of it as condemnation, who has wondered in quiet moments
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: on nights like this one, whether they are somehow outside
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: the reach of what the sermon is describing. Please stay
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: with me. The context of this teaching is the live,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: heated public debate between the two dominant rabbinic schools of
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: Jesus time. The school of Shamai held the divorce was
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: permissible only in cases of serious sexual immorality. The school
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: of Hillel held that a man could divorce his wife
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: for almost any reason at all. The school of Hillel
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: was winning the argument. It was more popular for reasons
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: that are not difficult to understand, and the people most
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: damaged by the Hillel ruling were women. Women who had
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: no independent economic existence, no legal recourse, no social network
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: outside the family structure they were being expelled from, who
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: could be discarded on a whim and left with almost nothing.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: Jesus is protecting those women again, as he did in
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: the teaching about desire. He is refusing to grant that
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: a human being can be discarded when they are no
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: longer convenient. This teaching is not a comprehensive legal ruling
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: designed to be applied mechanically to every situation of marital
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: breakdown across two thousand years of human history. It is
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: a passionate defense of the full humanity of the most
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: vulnerable person in the relationship. The rest of the New
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: Testament makes clear that the earliest Christian communities understood this
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: teaching with significant nuance and continued to develop its application
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: in ways that took seriously both the commitment of marriage
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: and the trust real and complex circumstances of human suffering.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: If you have been divorced, you are not outside the sermon.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: You are inside it. The sermon has been chapter by
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: chapter consistently on the side of the person with the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: least power. The wall of the sermon is not built
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: to keep you out. It was never built to keep
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: you out. And then oaths. You have heard that it
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: was said to the people long ago, do not break
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: your oath. But I say to you, do not take
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: an oath at all. Let what you say be simply
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: yes or no. Anything more than this comes from a
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: place that has gone wrong. The social function of oaths
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: in the ancient world was to create two tiers of statements,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: ordinary statements, which might or might not be reliable, and
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: oath backed statements guaranteed by invoking God or Heaven or
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem as surety. The problem, as Jesus identifies, it, is
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: the gap this creates. If your oath backed statement is guaranteed,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: your ordinary statement is implicitly not and In the space
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: between those two tiers, a great deal of deliberate deception
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: becomes possible without technically violating the prohibition on oath breaking.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: But the deeper problem is what the gap reveals. A
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: person whose ordinary word cannot be trusted without external reinforcement
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: has a gap between what they say and what they
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: actually mean. That gap lives in the room no one
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: else can see. It is the opposite of the pure
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: heart the sixth beatitude described. The person whose yes means
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: yes and whose no means no does not need the
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: architecture of the oath, not because they are performing integrity
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: for an audience, but because the gap has been genuinely
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: closed by the real work of becoming someone whose word
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: and intention are the same thing. This is what the
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: whole chapter is building toward, not a list of behaviors
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: to modify, not an elevated standard of visible compliance, but
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: the real, patient, daily work of becoming the kind of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: person from whom love and honesty and genuine regard for
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: others flow. So naturally because the room where decisions are
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: made has been shaped by something that produces those things.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: That shaping does not happen in a single night. It
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: happens in nights like this one, in the honest encounter
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: with the map of the room no one else can see,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: in the small, quiet, genuine acknowledgment of where you actually
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: are rather than where you are performing to be. Sarah
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: is still thinking about that conversation, but she is thinking
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: about it differently now, not just about what was done
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: to her, about where her own decision making room has
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: been during these six hours, what she has been doing
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: to that colleague in the room no one can see
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: all evening long. She is not doing this with guilt.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: She is doing it with the relief of some one
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: who has been given language for something she was already experiencing.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: Marcus is sitting in the parking lot thinking about his supervisor,
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: and he is thinking about the word ruca, and he
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: is recognizing something that he would very much like to
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: put down. He does not have to put it down
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: perfectly to night. He only has to see it clearly.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: That is enough to begin. Elena has moved. She is
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: no longer hunched in the middle of the bathroom floor.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: She is leaning against the wall. Something has shifted in
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: the quality of the room she is sitting in. The
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: space feels different than it did an hour ago. These
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: are not dramatic transformations. They are small shifts in the
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: room where the sermon lives. They are, in one faithful
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: hearing of this text, exactly what the kingdom looks like
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: in its earliest stages, one honest night at a time.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: You do not have to have everything resolved before you sleep.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: You only have to have been honest, and you have been.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: The room where your decisions are made is not a
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: place of condemnation to night. It is a place of
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: meeting rest. There the night will hold what you have
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: set down, and in the morning the territory will be
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: a little more familiar than when you arrived. Sleep. Now
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: the map is in you. Chapter six, The cheek, the mile,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: and the freedom you were never told you could have.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: There is a kind of exhaustion that comes specifically from
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: carrying hatred, not the exhaustion of a long day or
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: a hard week, a different kind, the exhaustion of maintaining
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: over months or years, the sustained effort of contempt for
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: another person, of keeping the fire going, of returning again
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: and again to the evidence of what they did, feeling
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: the heat of it, and carrying that heat back into
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: your sleep. And your mornings, and the quiet moments when
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: you would rather be thinking about something else. Entirely, most
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: people who carry this kind of exhaustion have never been
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: told that it is optional. That is what this chapter
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: of the sermon is about. Jesus is about to say
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: three things that sound on the surface like three impossibly
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: demanding moral instructions, things that most people hear not act respectfully,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: and then quietly file in the category of beautiful ideals
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: that real human beings in real circumstances cannot actually live.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: But what he is offering underneath each instruction is something
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: that has been withheld from the people on that hillside
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: by every system that had a stake in keeping them
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: where they were. He is offering a way out of
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: the cage. Let us begin with the cheek. You have
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: heard that it was said an eye for an eye
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: do not resist the one who is evil. But if
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: the other. Also, before we go any further, something about
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: this passage needs to be said directly, because the translation
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: has done significant damage over centuries. The word translated as
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: resist here is the Greek wordthis tami and Anthis tami
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: specifically means to resist violently, to meet force with equivalent force,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: to enter into the retaliatory logic of the system that
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: harmed you, and fight on its terms. Jesus is not
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: saying do not respond. He is saying, do not respond
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: within the terms the system has set for you. Now
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: the physical detail the right cheek. If a right handed
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: person strikes your right cheek, think carefully about what that requires. Physically,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: a right handed person striking your right cheek would use
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: the back of their hand. And in the culture of
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: first century Palestine, a back handed strike was not primarily
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: an act of violence. It was a specific, deliberate, culturally
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: encoded act of social humiliation. It was how a person
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: of superior status reminded a person of inferior status of
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: the distance between them. A master reminding a slave, a
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: Roman officer reminding a Jewish civilian, a creditor reminding a debtor.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: The system expected one of two responses. Either the inferior
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: person absorbed the humiliation, looked down and confirmed the hierarchy
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: by accepting its verdict, or they struck back, which would
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: result in immediate and overwhelming retaliation, which also confirmed the
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: hierarchy just more violently, and with the additional satisfaction for
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: the superior party of having demonstrated their power once more.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: Both responses were anticipated, Both left the social structure intact.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: Both gave the person who initiated the humiliation exactly what
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: they wanted, confirmation that the distance between them was real
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: and that they sat above you in it. Turning the
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: other cheek does neither. By offering the left cheek, you
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: confront the person who struck you with a choice they
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: did not expect and have not prepared for. To strike
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: the left cheek directly, they would need a closed fist
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: or an open palm, which in that culture was how
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: you struck an equal, not an inferriore. In that single action,
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: you have refused both expected responses. You have not absorbed
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: the humiliation. You have not struck back in a way
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: that invites greater violence. You are still standing, You are
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: looking directly at them. You have declined to be diminished,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: and you have placed them in the unexpected position of
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: someone who must make a choice they were not ready
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: to make. The theologian Walter Wink, who spent years studying
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: this Passage in its first century context called this the
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: third way. Neither fight nor flight, neither submission nor retaliation,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: something that requires more courage than either of the responses
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: the system anticipated, because it refuses the terms of the
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: system while remaining nonviolent, standing rather than collapsing, engaging rather
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: than retreating, but without meeting with force. This is not passivity,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: not even close. Passivity is the path of least resistance.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: The third way is the path of most integrity. And
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: then the coat. If any one would sue you and
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: The tunic was the inner garment, the cloak was the
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: outer one, and the law explicitly prohibited a creditor from
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: keeping a debtor's cloak over night, because for a poor person,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: the cloak was also the blanket. Without it, survival on
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: a cold night was genuinely uncertain. So the person being
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: sued for their tunic in this scenario is someone so
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: poor that the only thing worth suing them for is
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: the shirt on their back. The legal system, almost certainly
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: more favorable to the creditor than to the debtor, is
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: being used against someone who has almost nothing. Jesus says,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: give them your cloak too in public in the court room,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: which means stripping completely in front of the court. In
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: that culture, nakedness was not primarily shameful for the person
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: who was naked. It was shameful for the person who
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: had caused the nakedness. To have taken everything from someone
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: and then demanded more, and to have that displayed in
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: public was not their shame, It was yours. This is
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: not counsel to let people take advantage of you. It
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: is a description of a specific, creative, non violent act
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: that uses the logic of the oppressive system to expose
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: that system for what it is. It pushes the injustice
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: to its visible, undeniable public conclusion and holds it there
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: for everyone to see. And the mile. Roman soldiers had
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: the legal authority to conscript any civilian to carry their
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: equipment for exactly one mile. The one mile limit existed
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: because soldiers had previously been conscripting civilians for unlimited distances,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: causing the kind of resentment that complicated the administration of
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: the empire. If you carried the equipment the full mile
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: and stopped, the interaction was over. You had fulfilled your obligation.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: If you kept walking something unexpected happened. The soldier now
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: had a problem. He needed his equipment, and you would
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: not give it back. Military regulations could actually discipline a
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: soldier who allowed a civilian to carry his equipment beyond
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: the legal limit. By offering the second mile, you have
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: reversed the dynamic in a way that is completely unexpected.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: The soldier, the representative of the most powerful empire the
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: world had produced, now has to negotiate with a Galileean
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: peasant about getting his pack back. You, the powerless one,
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: now have a form of leverage in an interaction specifically
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: designed to remind you that you have none. Three teachings,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: three scenarios of oppression and powerlessness. One underlying truth. There
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: is a way way of responding to power and injustice
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: that is neither violent resistance nor passive submission that finds
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: in the specific details of the unjust situation. A creative
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: and non violent response that maintains your full humanity, refuses
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: the terms the system has imposed, and exposes the injustice
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: without becoming it. This is a form of moral imagination
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: that the system by definition does not have the categories
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: to anticipate or contain. And now, the one that changes
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: everything you have heard that it was said, love your
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: Let us be precise immediately before this Land's wrong. The
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: word love here is a gape, and a gape is
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: perhaps the most misunderstood word in the New Testament. A
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: gape is not a feeling. It is not the warm
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: affection you feel for people you enjoy being around. It
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: is not romantic love generated by attraction. It is not
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: even the deep bond of friendship built over years of
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: shared experience. Agupe is a decision, a commitment of the will,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: a deliberate choice to regard the genuine well being of
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: another person as real and as mattering, regardless of what
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: you feel about them in this moment. You can practice
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: a gape towards someone you intensely dislike. You can practice
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: a gape towards someone who has done you genuine harm,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: because a gape does not require that you feel warmly
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: toward them. It requires only that you choose, deliberately and
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: against whatever impulse is pulling the other direction, to regard
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: their humanity as real. This distinction is not a technicality.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: It is the entire teaching, because if love your enemies
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: meant generate warm feelings toward them, the instruction would be
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: psychologically impossible and therefore morally useless. You cannot command a
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: feeling into existence. Feelings do not take orders. But you
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: can command a decision. You can commit your will to
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: something regardless of how you feel. You can choose, in
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: the specific moment when the pull toward contempt is strongest,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: to do the thing that regards the other person as
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: a person. That is a gape, and that is what
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: Jesus is asking for now. I want to say something
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: directly that this teaching sometimes is used to avoid saying.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: Jesus is not telling the people on that hill side
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: that rome is acceptable. He is not asking them to
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: feel warmly toward a system designed to extract everything it
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: can from them while reminding them daily that they do
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: not matter. He is not saying the injustice is fine.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: He is saying something about what happens inside the person
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: who chooses sustained hatred as their response to that system.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: Hatred as a sustained orientation over months and years, does
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: not damage the person it is directed at nearly as
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: much as it damages the person who carries it. The
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: person who has become defined primarily by their contempt for
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: their enemy has given that enemy something that no external
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: force could take from them. They have surrendered their freedom
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: to be something more than a reaction to what has
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: been done to them. This is not a claim that
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: practicing a garpe will always produce changed enemies, or transformed systems,
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: or visible external justice. Some of the people who have
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: tried to live this most completely did not live to
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: see their enemies changed. Some of them died at the
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: hands of their enemies while choosing a garpe toward them.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: The freedom Jesus is offering is not freedom from external constraint.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: It is freedom in the only place external constraint cannot reach,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: the place where you are actually yourself, the place where
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: hatred lives, and the place where hatred, if you choose
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: to let it go, no longer gets to shape you.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: And then He grounds this not in strategy, but in
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: the nature of God. He makes his son rise on
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: the evil and on the good, and sends rain on
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: the just and on the unjust. The sun over Palestine
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: did not check the moral record of the farmer whose
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: fields it warmed the rain that filled the cisterns did
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: not distinguish between the person who deserved it and the
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: person who did not. The provision came to all of
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: them with the same generosity. This is not indifference. It
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: is a description of a love that does not require
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: the other person to deserve it before it is extended,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: a love that is not a reward for sufficient performance,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: but a reflection of the nature of the one offering it.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: And Jesus says, you are called to be children of
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: that God, which means, however imperfectly, and however much against
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: the grain of your natural impulse, in the hardest moments,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: to let your choices take the shape of that love,
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: not because your enemies deserve it, not because it will
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: necessarily produce the outcomes you want because it feels good,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: but because it is what you were made for, and
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: because the alternative, the slow narrowing that sustained hatred produces,
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: is a smaller life than the sermon has been describing
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: all evening. You do not have to resolve this to night.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: You do not have to manufacture warmth toward whoever came
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: to mind when Jesus said the word enemy. You do
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: not have to pretend that what they did was acceptable.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: You only have to be willing, just slightly, willing to
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: hold their humanity as real alongside the harm they did,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: to acknowledge somewhere in the quiet of to night, that
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: they are a person complicated and broken and trying in
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: their own insufficient way to manage a life that is
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: genuinely difficult. That small and quiet willingness is where a
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: gape begins, not in a dramatic act, not in a declaration,
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: in a small shift in the room where your decisions
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: are made, a shift that no one else will see,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: that costs something real, and that is, in one faithful
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: hearing of this text one of the things the kingdom
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: looks like from the inside. Marcus is in his apartment now.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: He heated something up and ate it slowly, and he
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: is thinking about his supervisor. And he is choosing, not
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: without effort, to remember that his supervisor is also a
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: person with a difficult job and pressures. Marcus cannot see
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: from where he sits. He is not manufacturing warmth. He
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: is choosing with his will to regard that person's humanity
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: as real. It is a small thing, It is not nothing.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: The night is deep now your body is growing heavy
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: in a good way. The person you have been carrying
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: in the heat of your contempt does not get to
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: follow you into the night. This room belongs to rest.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: The cage is optional. Sleep in the freedom of that
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven, the secret room whom the Lord's prayer and
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: the treasury no one can steal. Something happens to faith
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: when it becomes primarily a performance, not always, not inevitably,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: but often enough and predictably enough that Jesus addresses it
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: directly in the middle of the greatest sermon he ever preached.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: It is a gradual shift, almost imperceptible, away from the
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: actual relationship with God and toward the impression that relationship
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: makes on observers. It does not happen in a single
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: moment of conscious decision. It happens the way most significant
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: changes happen in the room where we actually live, slowly,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: through a series of small choices that each seem reasonable
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: in isolation, and accumulate over time into something quite different
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: from where you began. It is the difference between lighting
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: a candle because you need light and lighting a candle
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: because you want people to see you lighting a candle.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: The case handle looks exactly the same. In both cases,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: the room gets the same amount of light, but something
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: essential has changed in the relationship between the person and
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: the flame. Jesus sees this tendency with the precision of
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: someone who understands what drives human beings with complete clarity,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: and he addresses it not with condemnation, but with a
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: specific practical alternative that makes the performance unnecessary. Be careful
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: not to practice your righteousness in front of others, to
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: be seen by them. The religious performance he is describing
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: was not fringe behavior in first century Jerusalem. It was
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: the mainstream. It was what the most publicly respected religious
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: figures did openly, regularly, in full view of the communities
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: they led. The giving of alms was, in some circles
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: literally announced with a trumpet, not a metaphorical trumpet, an
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: actual instrument blown in the street to inform the neighborhood
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: that a righteous act was in progress. Prayer was performed
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: on the corners of busy streets and in the most
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: visible positions in synagogues, where the length and visible intensity
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: of the prayer could be observed and evaluated by everyone passing.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: The longer the prayer, the more obvious the religiosity of
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: the person praying, and in a culture where public religiosity
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: was the currency of social respect, longer prayers were better prayers.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: By definition, fasting was accompanied by deliberate alteration of appearance,
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: unwashed hair, gaunt expressions, the visible signals communicating to any
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: observer that something spiritually significant was being undertaken. In all
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: of these practices, the actual relationship with God, what the
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: person genuinely felt and longed for and needed in the
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: room where they actually lived, had become almost beside the point.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: The performance had consumed the thing it was meant to express,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: and Jesus says, they have received their reward, one of
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: the most precisely honest observations in the entire sermon. You
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: practiced your righteousness publicly in order to receive public recognition.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: You received it. The transaction is complete. There is nothing
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: further coming, because what you were actually seeking you have
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: already obtained. But if what you were seeking was something real,
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: something that connects the room where you actually lived to
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: the God who made you, then the public performance was
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: not just insufficient, it was pointed in entirely the wrong direction.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: And then Jesus describes an alternative when you give to
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: the needy, do not let your left hand know what
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: your right hand is doing, so that your giving may
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: be in secret. The image of the left hand not
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: knowing what the right hand is doing is sometimes used
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: as an idiom for organizational confusion. That is not what
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: Jesus means. He means that the act of giving should
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: be so thoroughly removed from any audience, including your own
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: private sense of your own goodness, that you do not
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: maintain even an internal record of your own righteousness. You
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: give and move through the act and out the other side,
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: without pausing to note it in the ledger of good
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: things you have done that you return to occasionally for encouragement.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: The act disappears into the relationship between you and God,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: no credit stored, no moral inventory maintained, And your father,
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: who sees in secret, will reward you, not the audience.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: The father, and what the father sees is not what
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: the audience sees. The audience sees the performance. The father
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: sees the room behind the performance. When you pray, go
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: into your room and shut the door and pray to
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: your father, who is in secret. The word translated as
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: room here is the Greek word to me on Tamian
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: does not mean a chapel or a prayer room, or
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: any space designated for spiritual use. Tamian means a store room,
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: a pantry, the all most private room of a first
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: century house, where provisions were kept behind a door that
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: could be locked. Not a beautiful room, not a spiritual room,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: the room with no windows where you kept what you
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: did not want accessible to every one who walked through
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: your home. Jesus is not telling you to find a
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: beautiful space for prayer. He is telling you to find
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: the most private place available, take your completely unperformed self
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: into it, and speak to God from there. Not the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: version of yourself that you present to the world, Not
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: the version that has it together, Not the version that
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: uses the right language and maintains the right expressions. The
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: actual you, the tired and confused and hoping and doubting
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: actual you. That is who the prayer is for, that
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: is who the Father is waiting to meet. Do not
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: heap up empty phrases, for they think they will be
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: heard for their many words. Your Father knows what you
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: need before you ask him. Length is not depth. Volume
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: is not honesty. The most elaborate prayer offered without genuine
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: engagement is less prayer than a single sentence spoken from
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: a real place. And the Father already knows what you need.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: The prayer is not updating his awareness of your situation.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: He is already fully aware. The prayer is for you.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: The practice of acknowledging your need honestly in relationship to
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: some one who can actually meet it. The daily practice
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: of not pretending, of putting down the performance, even in
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: the privacy of your own room, and simply being present
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: to the God who is already present to you, and
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: then he gives them a model. Elena has heard this
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: prayer before. Her grandmother taught it to her when she
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: was seven years old, standing in a kitchen that smelt
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: like coffee and the particular soap her grandmother always used.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: She learned it the way children learn things before they
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: know what the words mean, by repetition, by following the
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: sounds until the sounds became automatic. She has said it
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: perhaps a thousand times since then, and she has almost
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: never heard it, not the way she is about to
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: hear it now. This prayer has been spoken by more
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: human beings, in more languages and more circumstances than any
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: other words in history. Said by children at bedtime, said
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: by adults in the worst nights of their lives, whispered
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: by the dying, said by people who believed it completely,
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: and by people who said it because they had nothing
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: else and needed something to hold Our father in heaven.
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: Two words establish everything. The first word is our, not my.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: Even in the most private room, prayed completely alone, the
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: prayer begins in community. The one praying is by this
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: first syllable, positioned alongside every other person who has ever
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: said it. Private prayer is from its very first word
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: connecttion did to something vastly larger than the single room.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: The second word is father. In the Aramaic Jesus spoke,
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: the word is Abbah, a word of intimate address, not
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: the formal word for a distant patriarch, the word a
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: child uses for the parent who is known and close
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: and trusted, the word that assumes familiarity rather than formal approach.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: In the religious world of that time, this was a
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: startling way to address the God before whom Moses had
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: removed his sandals, the God whose name could not be spoken.
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: That God addressed as Abba. The intimacy was not accidental.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: It was the entire point hallowed be your name. The
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: Greek word is hagiazzo to treat us wholly, to regard
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: as set a part, to position, as genuinely different from
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: everything else in your experience. What Jesus is asking in
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: this first line is not primarily a compliment directed at God.
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: He is asking the person praying to begin by reorienting
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: themselves completely, to start from the acknowledgment that the God
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: they are addressing is not simply a larger version of themselves,
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: not a divine extension of their own preferences and values,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: not a customer service department for processing concerns, but genuinely
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: fundamentally other, and in that otherness, worthy of being treated
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: as the actual center of reality, rather than a resource
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: at the edge of your own This reorientation happens first
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: before any request, before any acknowledgment of need. The one
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: praying locates themselves correctly before they say anything else. Your
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: Kingdom Come, Your will be done on earth as it
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: is in heaven. Your Kingdom Come is a request for
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: something not yet fully present, an honest acknowledgment that the
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: world as it is and the world as God intends
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: it are not the same place and a genuine willingness
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: to be part of the movement from one toward the other.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: Whatever that costs. Your will be done on earth as
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: it is in Heaven, is a surrender of the persistent
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: human project of imposing your preferred version of how things
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: should go on to everything around you. In the place
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: where God's will is done completely, it is not because
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: the inhabitants are forced into compliance. It is because they
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: see clearly enough to understand that what God wills is
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: the best possible arrangement of things. The prayer is for
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: that clarity, for the capacity to see clearly enough that
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: surrender becomes not a loss but a recognition. Give us
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: this day our daily bread. The Greek word translated as
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: daily here Epiasios, appears nowhere else in all of ancient
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: Greek literature, nowhere, not in any other text, inscription, or
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: document recovered from the ancient world. It is either a
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: word Jesus coins specifically for this prayer, or an extraordinarily
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: rare term surviving in this single place. Scholars have debated
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: its precise meaning for centuries. What is clear from the
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: context is that the request is for enough for today,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: not a stockpile against every future contingency, not security against
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: all possible future need for today bread for today enough.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: The prayer locates the one praying every single day in
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: the position of someone in genuine relationship with their source
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: of provision, not someone who made a single transaction and
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: considers the account settled indefinitely, someone who comes back each morning,
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: because provision in this framework is not a completed arrangement,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: it is a living, daily relationship. And forgive us our debts,
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: as we also have forgiven our debtors. The only conditional
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: in the entire prayer the one place where the person
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: praying is asked to connect their request to something they
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: themselves are doing. This connection is not a transaction. It
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: is a description of how things work in the room
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: where we actually live. The person who is genuinely receiving forgiveness,
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: actually experiencing the release of guilt and the weight of
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: what they have done, tends to find that the same
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: opening created by that reception makes room for extending something
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: similar outward, not as a moral achievement, as a natural
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: overflow of what has been received, and the person gripping
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: tightly to the debt another person owes them, holding it
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: with great determination, has built around themselves something that prevents
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: them from fully opening to what is being offered, not
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: because God withholds it, but because hands that are full
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: of some one else's debt cannot quite open enough to
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: receive what is being held out. This is not a warning.
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: It is a description of how the room works, an
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: invitation to notice whether your hands are currently full of
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: something that is preventing you from receiving what you most need,
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: The language behind this line is more nuanced than the
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: translation captures. The request is not that God refrain from
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: something God would otherwise do. It is a prayer for
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: accompaniment in the places where we are most likely to
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: lose our way. Do not let me face the territory
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: of greatest testing without you be present in the rooms
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: where I am most likely to become the worst version
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: of myself. When I am in the conditions that produce
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: my worst choices, do not let me be in them alone.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: It is the prayer of some one who knows themselves
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: honestly enough to know where they are most vulnerable, and
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: who has the wisdom to ask for company in those places,
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: rather than relying on their own strength. Elena is saying
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: the prayer in her head now quietly, not because she
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: has decided everything, not because the doubts have been resolved,
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: but because, hearing it explained this way, she is finding
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: that the words feel less like a formula she was taught,
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: and more like a door she was given. She does
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: not know yet where the door leads. She is standing
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: in front of it. That is enough for to night
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: now the treasury. Do not store up for yourselves treasures
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: break in and steal, But store up for yourselves treasures
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys. For where
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: your treasure is there, your heart will be also. The
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: last sentence is the key, and the direction of it
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: matters enormously. Jesus does not say where your heart is there,
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: your treasure will be. He reverse it. Where your treasure
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: is there, your heart will be also. Your heart follows
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: your investment. The things you spend your attention and energy
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: and resources on, the things you protect and pursus you
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: and measure your sense of security against those things shape
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: what you care about over time, not immediately, not through
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: a single dramatic decision, but through the slow, daily formative
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: power of where you consistently put what you have. This
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: is not primarily a teaching about money. It is a
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: teaching about how you are formed by what you invest in.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: If you invest consistently in things that decay, the room
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: where you actually live will be shaped by anxiety about decay,
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: because the thing at the center of it is always
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: under threat. But if you invest, one daily choice at
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: a time in things that last, in the genuine flourishing
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: of people around you, in the kind of honesty that
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: does not depend on whether anyone is watching, in the
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: daily practice of the things this sermon has been pointing
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: toward all night, the room where you live begins, slowly
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: and without drama, to be shaped differently, one deposit at
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: a time time that is all, not a comprehensive overhaul,
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: just the next deposit in the direction of something that
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: does not decay. Let your breathing slow completely. Now you
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: are in the most private room available to you, door closed,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: no performance required, no audience. Only the father who sees
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: in secret and what he sees in you to night,
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: in all your honest and unperformed reality, is the person
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: he made and knows completely that person is the one
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: he loves. Cut the manag's version, not the version you
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: show other people. The actual one rest in the secret room.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: The treasury is being built even now, even to night,
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: by the simple honest act of being present in this
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: quiet without performing anything that counts. That is a deposit.
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: Sleep now the father is awake. Chapter eight, Worry, Wealth,
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: and the eye that learns to see differently. Some one
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: listening right now has not slept well in weeks, not
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: because of anything dramatic, not because of a single crisis
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: or a specific catastrophe, but because of the slow, persistent,
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: three in the morning accumulation of calculations that will not
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: resolve about money, about whether the numbers will work, about
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: the gap between what is required and what is available,
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: and the feeling of standing at that gap and looking down.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: This person has been told by well meaning people not
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: to worry, and the instruction has been about as effective
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: as being told not to think of a pink elephant.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: The worrying has continued, the calculations have continued, and added
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: to the original worry is now a second layer, the
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: worry about the fact that they cannot stop worrying, which
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: suggests they have begun to fear some failure of faith.
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: Jesus is about to address this directly, not with a
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: command to feel differently, not with a dismissal of the
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: very real pressures producing the worry, with something more useful
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: than either of those things. He is going to change
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: where the conversation is happening from. But before worry, he
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: talks about the eye. The eye is the lamp of
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: will be full of light. But if your eye is unhealthy,
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: your whole body will be full of darkness. This is
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: not an observation about eyesight. Jesus is using the eye
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: as an image for something at the center of a
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: person that functions exactly like an eye, something that determines
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: what you see, not what is physically in front of you,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: but what registers as real and important and worthy of
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: your full attention. The Greek word translated as healthy here
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: is hapless, single, undivided, focused on one source, rather than scattered,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: cross competing ones. The Greek word translated as unhealthy is poneerus,
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: something diseased by its own division, something bad precisely because
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: it is trying to track two things at once, and
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: failing at both. Think of it this way. A single
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: candle in a dark room does its work completely. It
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: illuminates it, orients you. It makes movement possible. But two
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: candles on opposite sides of the room, each pulling your
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: eyes in a different direction, produce not double the light,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: but confusion. You can see both flames and neither room clearly.
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: That is the divided eye. That is what Jesus is describing.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: A single eye, fully oriented, sees clearly the whole person
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: is illuminated by that orientation. A divided eye trying to
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: track two competing sources of what matters most produces the
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: worst possible outcome. Not partial light, the specific darkness of
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: some one who has convinced themselves they were seeing clearly
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: while their vision was split the whole time. Let that
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: image settle for just a moment. No one can serve
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: two masters, for either he will hate the one and
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: love the other, or he will be devoted to the
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: The word translated as money here is mammon, and mammon
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: is not simply currency. It names a whole framework, a
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: comprehensive system of value and security and identity organized around
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: the accumulation and protection of material things. Mammon is not
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: just what is in your account. It is the whole
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: orientation that says your worth is measured by what you have,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: your security is determined by what you can accumulate, and
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: your anxiety is the necessary and appropriate response to any
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: threat to that accumulation. Mammon is a way of seeing
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: a specific orientation of the eye toward things that cannot hold.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: And the problem is not that material things are evil.
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: The problem is that material things are subject to moth
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: and rust and theft and the mathematics of mortality. A
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: life whose eye is oriented towards something that cannot hold
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: will be a life of permanent anxiety about the holding
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: the divided eye, always scanning, always calculating, always aware of
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: the gap, always awake at three in the morning, running
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: numbers that never quite resolve. Therefore, I tell you do
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: not be anxious about your life. The Greek word translated
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: as anxious is merim now. It carries the sense of
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: being pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, the specific exhaustion of
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: trying to hold too many possible disasters in view at once,
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: like a person trying to keep a dozen spinning plates
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: moving at the same time, giving each one enough attention
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: to prevent it from falling, without having enough attention to
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: actually steady any of them. Do not be merimna. Do
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: not let the spinning consume you. And then Jesus points
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: to two things his audience could see from where they
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: were sitting. Look at the birds of the air. They
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: were there, real birds above the real sea of Galilee.
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: Not symbols, not illustrations, actual birds doing the actual thing
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: Jesus was describing. They do not sow or reap or
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: The birds work. This is important to say because the
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: passage is sometimes heard as an endorsement of doing nothing.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: Birds spend significant energy finding food. They are not passive
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: recipients of delivered meals. But they do not carry to
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: morrow's food supply into to day. They do not wake
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: at three in the morning calculating whether the supply will hold.
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: They live in a quality of present, tense engagement with
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: their actual needs in the actual moment that most human
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: beings have almost entirely lost access to are you not
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: much more valuable than they? This is the hinge of
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: the whole section, not the birds. The question. In a
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: world that had organized itself to communicate to the people
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: on that hill side that they were worth approximately what
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: they could produce and pay, Jesus is asking them to
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: consider that they are held by something that does not
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: measure their value by those metrics, that the God who
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: provides for birds without performance reviews or productivity requirements, is
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: specifically individually, personally aware of them, and which of you,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: by worrying, can add a single hour to his span
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: of life. Not a rhetorical flourish, a plain observation. You
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: cannot worry your way to security. You cannot calculate your
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: way to certainty. The anxiety does not solve the problem.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: It adds the suffering of anticipated loss to whatever is
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: actually present right now. Then the lilies, Consider the lilies
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: of the field, how they grow? They neither toil nor spin.
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: Yet I tell you, even Solomon, in all his glory,
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: was not arrayed like one of these. Solomon, the wealthiest
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: king in the history of Israel, a man whose gold
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: and horses and palaces and the sheer accumulated splendor of
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: his reign had become the legendary benchmark against which all
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: subsequent human wealth was measured. Not one thread of everything
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: Solomon accumulated matched what grows wild in the fields of Galilee,
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: without effort, without intention, without any one managing or maintaining it.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: If God so clothes the grass of the field, which
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: to day is alive, and to morrow is thrown into
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: the oven, will he not much more clothe you the
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: grass which lives for a season and is then used
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: for fuel, and it is clothed in something more beautiful
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: than the greatest human achievement in the history of Israel?
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: What does that suggest about the care available to you,
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: oh you of little faith. These words have often been
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: heard as a mild rebuke, a finger wagged with resigned affection,
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: but the tone in the original language is different, closer
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: to what a parent communicates when they have watched their
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: child agonize over something the parent can see with complete
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: clarity is going to be fine. There is love in
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: the phrase, There is even something close to tenderness, and
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: underneath it the patient insistence of some one who keeps
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: trying to show you something you keep not quite seeing.
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: Look again, look at the birds, look at the lilies,
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: what do you see? Therefore, do not be anxious. Your
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: heavenly father knows that you need all these things. He
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: knows not in the general sense of omniscient awareness, in
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: the specific relational, prior to your asking sense of a
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: father who is already aware of what his children need
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: before they name it. The anxiety is not what brings
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: the need to his attention. He already knows. The calculations
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: are not purchasing anything, they are costing something. But seek
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: these things will be added to you. Seek first, not
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: seek only The person whose eye is primarily oriented toward
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: the Kingdom, toward the values and love and character of
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: the God this sermon has been describing, begins to find
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: that the needs which previously felt like sources of permanent emergency,
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: are being met in ways the calculating eye could not
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: have predicted, not always abundantly, not always without difficulty, but
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: met enough in the daily bread for to day way
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: of the Lord's prayer. Therefore, do not be anxiou about tomorrow,
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: for tomorrow will be anxious for itself sufficient, for the
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: day is its own trouble, the most practically useful sentence
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: in the entire sermon, and the hardest to actually live.
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: Tomorrow will arrive with its own weight and its own demands,
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: And when it does, it will have its own supply
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: of grace and provision and the presence of a God
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: who knows what you need. The grace for tomorrow will
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: come with tomorrow. It is not available to night because
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: it is not needed tonight. Tonight there is only to night,
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: this quiet, this dark, this moment that is not asking
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: to be solved, only to be inhabited. The person lying
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: awake running calculations does not need better calculations. They need
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: the eye to shift away from the orientation that treats
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: the gap between what is and what is needed as
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: evidence of abandonment, rather than as the daily condition of
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: people who have always been and were always meant to
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: be genuinely held by something larger than themselves. You have
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: always been held. That is not new. What this sermon
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: has been saying, chapter by chapter is that the thing
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: holding you is not indifferent to you. It knows what
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: you need. It clothes the grass, it feeds the birds,
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: and it has not in all the days of your
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: life left you without enough for the day you were
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: actually in, even on the days when the day ahead
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: looked unsurvivable. Not the day ahead, the day you were
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: actually in. To night is the day you are actually in,
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: and to night there is enough. Let the calculations stop
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: just for to night. Just here that to morrow you
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: are worrying about will have its own grace when it arrives.
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: To night has its own, and to night's grace is
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: simply this. Rest. You are known, You are valued, You
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: are held in ways that your calculations cannot track. The
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: Father knows what you need, and the Father is awake,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: so you do not have to be Chapter nine, The
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: Log the Door and the One who keeps knocking. Two
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: words simple, apparently unambiguous, deployed in arguments and difficult conversations
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: and social media debates by people who have memorized these
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: two words without reading the sentence that follows them. Judge
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: not except that two verses after this instruction, Jesus tells
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: his listeners not to throw pearls before pigs, which requires
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: the ability to identify pigs. A few verses later, he
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: says to watch out for false prophets, which requires the
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: ability to distinguish a true profit from a false one.
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: In the very same passage, he describes two builders, two trees,
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: and two roads, all of which require exactly the kind
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: of evaluative judgment that the two word instruction seems to prohibit.
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: So what is he actually saying. The answer requires a
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: distinction that English does not make, but Greek does. The
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: Greek word translated as judge here is creno, and creno
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: in this specific usage carries the sense of a final, comprehensive,
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: defining verdict, not the evaluation of an action or the
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: assessment of a pattern of behavior, a total verdict on
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: a person's worth and standing, the kind of judgment that
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: takes the full irreducible complexity of another human being, all
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: their history and struggle and capacity and failure and love
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: and fear and possibility, and collapses it into a single, closed,
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: permanent conclusion, worthless, beyond anything defined by their worst moment done.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: That is the judgment Jesus prohibits. Not all evaluation, not discernment,
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: not the recognition of patterns or the assessment of behavior,
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: the comprehensive, defining, final verdict on a person's total worth
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: and the reason this belongs to God and not to you.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: Is not primarily theological. It is about what you can
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: actually know. You do not have enough information. You cannot
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: see what God sees. You do not know what is
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: happening in the room where another person actually lives, with
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: the completeness that a final verdict would require. You see
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: the surface, You see the behavior. You see the part
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: of the story visible from where you are standing, and
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: from that partial view you are constructing a total assessment.
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: Do not do that, not because it is unkind though
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: it is, but because it is inaccurate. And inaccurate judgment, however,
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: confidently delivered, is not justice. It is something else wearing
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: justice's clothing. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: be judged, and with the measure you use, it will
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: be measured to you. Not a threat, a description of
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: how things work. The person who habitually renders comprehensive verdicts
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: on others finds over time that they live in a
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: world of comprehensive verdicts, not because God sends them as punishment,
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: but because the measuring standard they apply outward becomes the
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: standard their own room applies inward. The machinery that reduces
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: other people to their worst moments is the same machinery
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: that operates when they turn it on themselves, And it
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: does turn on themselves in the quiet, in the night,
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: in the moments when the performance is down and the
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: room is honest, harsh judges tend to be the harshest
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: toward themselves in the dark, and the inverse. The person
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 1: who has learned to hold others with some openness to
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: see behavior without immediately collapsing it into a defining verdict,
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: tends to find that the same opening exists in how
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: they hold themselves. Mercy extended outward creates space for mercy
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: to come back in. And then Jesus says something that
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: should not be funny, but is, Why do you see
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: not notice the log that is in your own eye?
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: This is comedy, deliberate, carefully constructed, physically impossible comedy of
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: the kind the Rabbinic tradition used specifically to make a
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: point impossible to forget. The image is absurd. A person
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: with a full size structural timber protruding from their eye
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: socket stumbling around, causing collateral damage to everyone in their
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: vicinity confidently offering to improve the vision of others. There
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: is no gentle way to read this. It is funny.
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: Jesus is being funny on purpose about a serious thing,
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: because the the serious thing is more likely to land
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: if it arrives with a laugh rather than another layer
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: of solemn instruction. The laugh is the moment of recognition.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: But then, he says the part that follows the laughter. First,
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: take the log out of your own eye. Then you
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: will see clearly. To help with the speck in your
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: brother's eye. Then not never. Then the prohibition is not
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: on helping others see more clearly. The prohibition is on
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: attempting to do so from a position of unexamined self blindness.
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: The prerequisite for genuine help is a ruthless, ongoing, honest
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: examination of your own vision, not an achieved state of
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: perfect sight, not a completed process of self improvement that
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: qualifies you to begin, just the prior acknowledgment that you
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: too are someone who sees partially, who has logs of
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: your own, who is in the process of becoming not
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: already arrived. That acknowledgment made honestly, changes everything about the
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: quality of any help you offer. It moves it from
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: the position of a superior correcting an inferior to the
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: position of one human being helping another see something they
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: cannot currently see that is a different thing, and it
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: is genuinely helpful in a way that the other is not.
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: throw your pearls before pigs. Not contempt for anyone. In
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: the context of first century Palestinian culture, both animals were
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: associated with a specific condition of unavailability for what is
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: being offered. You do not bring a sacred thing to
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: something that has no capacity to receive it as sacred,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: not because the sacred thing becomes less sacred, but because
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: the forced offering in the wrong conditions damages the relationship
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: and sometimes the person offering. This is wisdom about timing
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: and readiness, about recognizing that the see same truth offered
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: in the wrong moment or the wrong relationship, can be
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: received as an attack, and that the response to an
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: attack is usually more attack. This requires the log free eye,
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: the clearer eye, the vision partially restored by honest examination
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: of its own limitations. Ask and it will be given
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: will be open to you. Three verbs, all of them
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: in the present active in Greek, and in Greek this
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: tense carries continuous, ongoing persisting, meaning not ask once and wait,
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: keep asking, not seek until you find, keep seeking, not
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: knock and hope, keep knocking. The persistence is the point,
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: not because God needs to be worn down by repetition,
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: not because the frequency of your requests changes God's willingness
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: to respond, but because the act of continuing to ask
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: does something in the room where you actually live. It
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: keeps the need honest, It keeps the relationship active. It
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: prevents the drift toward self sufficiency that feels like faith
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: but is actually the quiet forgetting of dependence. The person
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: who keeps asking has not stopped believing the relationship is
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: real and that the asking matters. And in the keeping
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: of that belief, something is formed in the room where
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: you live that the single request followed by silence cannot produce.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: This promise has troubled sincere readers for centuries because asking
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: and not receiving, seeking and not finding, knocking and finding
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: the door apparently unmoved is not rare. It is the
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: common experience of sincere people in genuine need, in every generation.
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: But look carefully at what the promise does not say.
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: It does not say you will receive exactly what you
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: asked for in exactly the form you requested it. It
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: does not say the finding will look like what you
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: were looking for. It does not say the door that
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: opens will be the one you were knocking on. The
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: relationship between request and response is not vending machine logic.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: It is living relationship between a person and a father
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: who loves them, in which the asking itself is part
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: of the answer, in which the seeking changes the person
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: seeking in ways that make the finding possible, in which
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: the knocking opens rooms on the inside as much as
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: doors on the outside. Which one of you, if his
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: son asks him for bread, will give him a stone.
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: No one in that crowd, not a single person, regardless
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: of how difficult their circumstances, would deliberately harm their child
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: in response to a genuine request for food. If you, then,
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: who are imperfect, know how to give good gifts to
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: your children, how much more will your father, who is
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: in heaven, give good things to those who ask him,
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: not everything. They ask for good things, things that are
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: actually good in ways they may not be able to
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: assess from inside the request from inside, the desire for
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: a specific outcome that the father, with a wider and
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: longer view understands, may not be the thing that actually
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: meets the need the request is really expressing. Elena has
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: been lying in her bed for a while now, she
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: moved there from the bathroom. She is thinking about something
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: she has been reaching toward for two years. She called
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: it different things at different times. She is not sure
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: she was asking God exactly, but she was asking something.
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: And she is beginning very carefully to wonder whether some
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: of what arrived in those two years, not what she
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: asked for, but what arrived, whether some of it might
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: have been a response, not the answer she would have written,
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: but an answer. She is holding that carefully, not forcing
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: it into a conclusion she is not ready to make.
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: That is enough. That is the seeking. That is exactly
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: what this passage is pointing to. So whatever you wish
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: that others would do to you, do also to them.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: For this is the law and the prophets, the Golden Rule,
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: present in various forms in nearly every major ethical tradition
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: across human history. Confucius stated a version of it. Rabbi Hillel,
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: the great teacher of the generation before Jesus, when asked
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: to summarize the entire Torah, while standing on one foot,
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: said what is hateful to you, do not do to another?
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Jesus
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: states it in the positive form and says, it is
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: the law and the prophets, not just a summary, the destination,
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: the thing. The entire body of scripture has been trying,
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: across centuries and through the accumulation weight of commandments and
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: histories and prophetic writings, to produce in its readers the
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: capacity to step fully enough inside another person's experience to
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: make decisions about how to treat them based on what you, yourself,
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: would need in their position, not what they deserve, not
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: what they have earned, what you would need if you
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: were in their position. This is the single eye turned
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: outward applied to another person, seeing them with the same
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: fullness and reality and importance with which you naturally see yourself.
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: It is the most demanding thing in the sermon and
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: the simplest simultaneously. The night has deepened you are in
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: the territory between waking and sleeping. Your body is heavy,
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 1: your thoughts are moving more slowly. There is probably someone
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: in your life right now whose experience you have not
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: fully entered, whose need you have been evaluating from the
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: outside rather than imagining from the inside. You do not
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: have to do anything about that to night. You do
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: not have to make a call, or send a message,
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: or perform any act of reconciliation in the next five minutes.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: You only need to let the awareness be honest. That
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: honesty is the log being worked on slowly in the dark,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: without drama. In the morning, it will still be there,
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: slightly lighter than it was sleep Now the door is
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: opening from the inside. It has been opening all night.
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten, The Narrow Gate, the False Shepherd, and the
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: Mercy of Being Known. The sermon is almost over. You
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: can feel it in the tone. Something has shifted in
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: the quality of the air on that hillside. The warmth
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: that has been present through every chapter is still there,
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: but underneath it, something more direct has entered, the voice
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: of someone who has given everything he has to give
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: to day, who loves the people in front of him
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: too much to let them leave without understanding one more thing.
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: The one more thing is about the gap, the gap
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: between hearing and doing, between the road that sounds right
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: and the road that actually goes somewhere, between the faith
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: that is named and the faith that is lived. And
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: Jesus begins with a gate, Enter through the narrow gate.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: For wide is the gate, and broad is the road
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: small is the gate, and narrow the road that leads
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: to life, and only a few find it. Before this
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: becomes a theology of scarcity, before it becomes the foundation
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: for a small and self congratulatory vision of who is
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: in and who is out. Let us stay with what
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: Jesus is actually describing. The broad road is broad not
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: because God has made it attractive as a trap. It
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: is broad because it requires nothing specific from you. It
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: is the road of minimum resistance, the road of going
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: along with the current of what what ever surrounds you,
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: of managing the visible without attending to the room behind
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: the visible, of performing faith without practicing it, of saying
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: Lord Lord while organizing the room where you actually live
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: around an entirely different center. It is broad because it
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: is the path that most resembles what you were already
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: doing before the sermon began, the path that does not
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: require the room where decisions are made to change. The
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: narrow road is narrow not because God has made it
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: artificially difficult. It is narrow because genuine change in that
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: room is a specific thing. Because agape practiced as a
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: decision of the will requires a consistent orientation that cuts
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: against the grain of the unchanged self. Because the single
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: eye takes actual daily practice to maintain. Because the pure heart,
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: the heart with no deliberate gap between its face and
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: its truth, is not the default condition of the human room.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: It is the result of something of the daily practice
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: of the secret room, of the persistent asking and seeking
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: and knocking, of the ongoing, unglamorous work that the sermon
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: has been describing all night. Specific things are narrower than
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: vague ones. That is not a design floor. It is
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: the nature of specificity. The reason only a few find
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: the narrow road is not that God has hidden it.
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: It is that most people are looking for a version
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: of the Kingdom that fits inside the life they were
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: already living. A gate wide enough to walk through without
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: changing the shape of themselves. That gait does not exist,
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: and Jesus says this not with satisfaction, but with the
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: grief of some one who knows it is true and
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: wishes it were simpler. Watch out for false prophets. They
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: ferocious wolves. This warning arrives precisely here after the narrow gate.
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: For a reason, the narrow road is harder to find,
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: partly because there are people who have built impressive looking
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: gates on the broad road and called them the entrance
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: to the narrow one, who have taken the language and
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: the symbols and the authority of genuine faith and organized
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 1: them into systems that serve their own interests while appearing
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: to serve The People who enter false prophets in the
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: first century were not primarily people who made incorrect predictions.
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: They were people who claimed to speak for God while
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: serving themselves, who use the position and the language and
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: the forms of authority that religious communities recognize and trust
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: to extract something from the people who trusted them. And
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: Jesus says, they come in sheep's clothing, They look right,
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: they sound right, They use the correct vocabulary and the
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: expected gestures and the forms of authority from the outside.
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: From a reasonable distance, they are indistinguishable from the genuine thing.
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: This is what makes them dangerous, not their obvious wrongness
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 1: their superficial rightness. By their fruit, you will recognize them,
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: not by their stated doctrine alone, not by their theological
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: precision or the impressiveness of what they claim, by the
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: actual outcomes of their presence in the actual lives of
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: actual people over actual time. What grows in the communities
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: they build, what happens to the most vulnerable people in
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: the systems they create, Whether the people around them become
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: more loving and more free and more genuinely themselves, or
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: whether they become more dependent and more afraid and more
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: defined by proximity to the person who claims to speak
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: for God. A tree is known by its fruit, not
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: by its announcement of its own variety, by what actually
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: appears on its branches in the actual seasons of its
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: actual life. And then the depth charge. Not every one
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: who says to me, Lord Lord, will enter the Kingdom
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: of Heaven, but the one who does the will of
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: my Father, who is in heaven. On that day, many
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: will say to me, Lord Lord, did we not prophesy
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: in your name, and cast out demons in your name,
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: and do many mighty works in your name. And then
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: will I declare to them, I never knew you. Depart
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: from me, you workers of lawlessness. The people described here
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: are not the irreligious or the indifferent. They are deeply, publicly,
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: impressively active in the name of Jesus. They prophesied, they
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: performed exorcisms, They did many mighty works, all of them
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: explicitly in his name. And the word that returns is
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: I never knew you. The Greek word for you is ginosco,
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: and ginosco is not simple recognition. It is not I
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: was not aware you existed. It is the word for
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: deep mutual relational knowledge, the knowledge that comes from genuine,
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: sustained present to each other, connection from being actually known
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: rather than being observed. What Jesus is describing is the
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: gap between religious activity conducted in his name and actual
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: relationship with him, between doing things that reference him and
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: being actually known by him. Now, the will of the Father,
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: what does it mean? According to this very sermon? Not
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: a different and harder list of religious activities. The sermon
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: has been defining it for hours. The will of the
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: Father is the life that flows from the room where
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: decisions are made, being gradually, honestly, consistently shaped by the
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: presence of God, rather than the management of appearances. It
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: is the beatitudes lived rather than admired, the secret room
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: entered rather than acknowledged, the single eye worked on rather
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: than described, a gupe chosen in the difficult moment rather
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: than discussed, the log honestly examined before the speck is
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: addressed in another, the persistent asking and seeking and knocking
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 1: that keeps the relationship honest and alive. The will of
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: the Father is not a performance standard. It is a direction,
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: a daily, small, unglamorous, honest movement toward the God who
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: is already moving toward you, and I never knew you.
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: Is not the final word for anyone who is still here,
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 1: still listening, still willing to let the room be honest.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: The people in the warning are the ones who never
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: let the room be touched, whose public performance was all
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: there was, who made sure the visible was impeccable while
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: the room behind it remained locked against any real encounter.
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: If you are honest enough to recognize something of yourself
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: in that description, you are already in a different position
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: than the people in the warning, because the ones in
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: the warning were not honest enough to see it. Do
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: you know me not? Do you know about me?
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: Not?
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: Do you perform correctly in my name? Not? Do you
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: you have the right positions and the right language and
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 1: the right visible behaviours? Do you know me? Whatever your
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: honest answer is tonight, however incomplete, the knowing feels, however,
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: mixed with doubt and distance, and the weight of years
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 1: in which the relationship felt more abstract than real. The
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: asking of the question from an honest place is itself
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: a form of knowing you are closer than you think.
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 1: Let your breathing slow, rest in the question, not with anxiety,
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: with the quiet, open, honest willingness to let it be real.
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: The narrow road does not require you to run. It
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: only requires that you keep walking, one honest night at
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: a time. Chapter eleven, The Rock, the Rain, and the
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: Thing that Holds. There was a man in the crowd
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: that afternoon who built things for a living. We met
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 1: him briefly at the beginning of this night. His name
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 1: was Tobias. He was fifty three years old, and he
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: had been building houses in the villages around the Sea
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: of Galilee since he was a young man, following his
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: father from sight to sight, carrying stones, learning by proximity
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 1: the things his father had learned the same way. He
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: was not a famous builder. His name appears in no record,
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: but the houses he built were still standing. Some of
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: them would stand for a hundred years after the afternoon
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 1: he spent on that hillside, and he knew, in the
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: specific and unglamorous way that people know the things they
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: have done with their hands for thirty years, exactly why
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 1: they would stand the foundation. When Jesus told the final
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: parable of the sermon, Tobias did not hear it the
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: way the fishermen heard it, or the way the farmers
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: heard it, or the way the young men, burning with
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 1: various kinds of hope and anger heard it.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: He heard it the way a physician hears a description of
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: symptoms from inside the knowledge. Everyone who hears these words
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 2: of mine and puts them into practice is like a
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 2: wise man who built his house on the rock. The
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 2: and beat against that house. Yet it did not fall,
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 2: because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 2: who hears these words of mine and does not put
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 2: them into practice is like a foolish man who built
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 2: his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose,
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: and the winds blew and beat against that house, and
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 2: it fell with a great crash. Tobias knew something immediately
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: that he understood most of the crowd would not know.
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 2: In the same way. The parable is not about two
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 2: different levels of effort, not a careful builder and a
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 2: lazy one, not a skilled builder and a careless one.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 2: It is about two builders who were, for a significant
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 2: period of time indistinguishable from the outside. The foolish builder
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 2: was not careless. He assessed the land, he gathered materials,
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 2: he did the work, and for a while, perhaps for
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 2: many years, his house stood and functioned exactly as a
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 2: house should. It kept out the wind, it provided shelter.
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 2: From any external perspective, it looked like a house. The
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 2: difference was invisible underground, present only in the choice the
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 2: builder made before the first stone was laid. And Tobias
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 2: knew what the foolish builder had been thinking. He had
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: stood on that same kind of ground himself early in
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 2: his career. He knew the pleasant level surface of a
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 2: dry river bed. He knew how much easier it was
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 2: to build on flat, co operative ground than on the irregular,
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 2: resistant surface of bed rock. He knew the calculations that
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: led a builder to choose convenience over permanence. But he
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 2: also knew what happened to both kinds of ground when
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 2: the rains came, Because the rains always came in that region,
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 2: in that climate. The rains were not a theoretical future risk.
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 2: They were the annual certainty. The waddies, the dry river
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: beds that looked like nothing during the long dry months,
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 2: became violent torrents during the rainy season. Every builder in
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 2: that crowd knew this. Every builder knew what sand became
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 2: in the rain. Sand became the thing that carried everything
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 2: built on it downstream. Rock became wet rock, unmoved, unchanged
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 2: entirely itself. The two houses stood through the long dry season,
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 2: looking essentially the same, same walls, same roof, same protection
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 2: from the heat and the wind. A visitor would not
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 2: have been able to tell from the outside which one
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 2: was built on rock and which one was built on sand.
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 2: The difference was only knowable in the storm. Every one
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 2: who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice,
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 2: not everyone who finds these words moving. Not every one
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 2: who understands these words, Not every one who discusses them,
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 2: or teaches them, or builds an institution around the memory
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 2: of them, puts them into practice. The Greek word is
• 2:16:26
  Speaker 2: poi oh two do to make real, to bring into
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 2: actual existence through actual choices, in actual moments. The beatitudes practiced,
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 2: not just admired. The secret room entered rather than appreciated
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 2: as a concept. The single eye worked on one day
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 2: at a time, rather than understood as a metaphor a
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 2: gape chosen in the specific difficult moment, rather than affirmed
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 2: as a value. The log honestly examined, rather than deployed
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: as a category to apply to others. The asking kept
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 2: up across the seasons when nothing seems to be moving.
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 2: All of it done, not perfectly, not without failure, not
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 2: in a single dramatic commitment that settles the question forever
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 2: done in the unglamorous two steps forward, one step back,
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 2: way that all genuine change in the room where you
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 2: live actually happens. Return to after failure, chosen again on
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 2: the mornings when choosing is hard and the visible results
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 2: are thin. That is the rock, And here is what
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 2: Tobias understood that the others were still learning. The storm
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 2: does not select its targets by the virtue of the
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 2: person inside the house. It comes to the just and
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: the unjust, as Jesus said earlier in this very sermon,
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 2: with the same complete impartiality. The storm is not the punishment.
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 2: The storm is simply the condition of being alive in
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 2: the world. Both houses experience it, the one built on
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 2: rock and the one built on sand. Both hear the
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 2: rain on the roof, and feel the wind against the walls,
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 2: and see the water rising. The question is not whether
• 2:18:11
  Speaker 2: the storm will come.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: It will.
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 2: The question is what the house is built on when
• 2:18:16
  Speaker 2: it does. And to bias new one more thing, something
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 2: about the foolish builder that was easy to miss if
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 2: you were reading the parable only as a lesson about
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 2: construction choices. The text says, the foolish builder's house fell
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 2: with a great crash, the house, not the builder. The
• 2:18:36
  Speaker 2: house fell, and after the crash the rock was still there.
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 2: It had been there before the sand was chosen. It
• 2:18:45
  Speaker 2: was there when the house was standing, It was there
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 2: when the storm came. It remained there after the house
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 2: was gone. It is not the kind of thing a
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 2: storm can move, because it was never the kind of
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 2: thing a storm could reach it. If the person who
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 2: built on the sand survives the crash, and the text
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 2: does not say they do not, they are standing afterward
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 2: on the bare ground, looking at what remains. And what
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 2: remains is the rock, still there, available, unchanged by everything
• 2:19:17
  Speaker 2: that has fallen around it and on it. The sermon
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 2: does not tell us what that person does next. It
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 2: does not need to, because the parable is not primarily
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 2: about the consequence of the wrong choice. It is about
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 2: the permanent availability of the right one. The rock is
• 2:19:34
  Speaker 2: always there, or before you chose the sand. After the crash,
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 2: on the morning, you stand in what remains and begin
• 2:19:43
  Speaker 2: with whatever you have to think about what comes next,
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: Begin on the rock, or continue or return. The rock
• 2:19:53
  Speaker 2: is not going anywhere. And then one final moment on
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 2: the hillside, when Jesus had finished saying these things, the
• 2:20:01
  Speaker 2: crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 2: one who had authority, and not as their teachers of
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 2: the law. Amazed. The Greek word ecplesso again to be struck,
• 2:20:15
  Speaker 2: to be hit by something you did not see coming,
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 2: to be left in a state of astonishment that your
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 2: ordinary ways of making sense of things. Cannot immediately organize,
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 2: not impressed, not moved, not appreciative, struck. The teachers of
• 2:20:33
  Speaker 2: the law taught by attribution. This is what Rabbi SHAMAI said.
• 2:20:38
  Speaker 2: This is how Rabbi Hillel responded. Every teacher derived their
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 2: authority from their place in the chain running back to
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 2: Moses at Sinai. Jesus cited no one. He appealed to,
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 2: no authority outside himself. He positioned himself within no chain.
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 2: You have heard that it was said, But I say
• 2:20:59
  Speaker 2: the authority was not the authority of position, or scholarship
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: or institutional sanction. It was something else, something that felt
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 2: to people who had spent their lives hearing teachers carefully
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 2: position themselves within the received tradition, like hearing a living
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 2: source rather than a citation of one. They felt it
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 2: before they understood it in their bodies, in the way
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 2: certain truths are felt before the mind has categories for them.
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 2: And they were struck. Now, let us talk about why
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 2: this sermon does not end. It has a final parable,
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 2: It has the moment of astonishment, It has the crowd
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 2: dispersing into the evening, walking back down the hillside in
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 2: the gathering dusk. In that sense, it ends. But the
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: sermon on the mount does not end the way a
• 2:21:50
  Speaker 2: completed argument ends. It does not resolve all the tensions
• 2:21:55
  Speaker 2: it has opened. It does not provide a conclusion that
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 2: ties everything into a pack you can carry away finished.
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 2: It does not summarize or review or offer a step
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 2: by step plan. It ends with an image two houses,
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 2: a storm, a great crash, and the implied question hanging
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 2: in the air above the hillside, long after the last
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 2: footstep has faded. Which one are you building? Not? Which
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 2: one did you build? Not? Which one are you planning
• 2:22:25
  Speaker 2: to build when circumstances are better? Which one are you building?
• 2:22:31
  Speaker 2: Present tense now, in the choices you made today and
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 2: will make tomorrow. The sermon ends open, because the answer
• 2:22:40
  Speaker 2: is not available to Jesus or to the crowd, or
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 2: to us as readers. It is available only to the
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 2: person building to you, in the quiet of the room
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 2: where you actually live, in the daily work of the
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 2: foundation that no one else can see or certify. And
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 2: so the sermon continues right now in you, in whatever
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 2: stage of building you are in, in whatever version of
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 2: the foundation has been laid so far, in whatever capacity
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 2: remains in you to night, to hear the words and
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 2: however slightly, put them into practice. It continues in the
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 2: morning when you wake, in the first difficult choice of
• 2:23:21
  Speaker 2: the day, in the moment when the pull toward contempt
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 2: presents itself and you reach for something else instead, in
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 2: the secret room with the door closed and your actual
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 2: self present, in the single eye, worked on one day
• 2:23:35
  Speaker 2: at a time, toward a source of light that does
• 2:23:38
  Speaker 2: not decay, in the persistent asking and knocking and seeking
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: that keeps the relationship honest and alive. The sermon is
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 2: not finished. It was never meant to be finished. It
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 2: was meant to be lived, one ordinary day at a
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 2: time by ordinary people who heard something on a hillside
• 2:23:57
  Speaker 2: they could not quite forget.
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 1: To night.
• 2:24:00
  Speaker 2: You are one of those people. Let me tell you
• 2:24:02
  Speaker 2: where our three companions are. As this night ends, Sarah
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 2: has closed her eyes. She is not running the conversation
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 2: through her head any more. She is thinking about tomorrow's meeting,
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 2: and she is doing something new with it. She is
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 2: asking not to be alone in the room where her
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 2: worst impulses will be most available. She does not know
• 2:24:24
  Speaker 2: if that is prayer exactly. She thinks it might be close.
• 2:24:29
  Speaker 2: She is going to find out. Marcus went in decide
• 2:24:33
  Speaker 2: a while ago. He ate something. He sat for a
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 2: while in the quiet. He is not carrying his supervisor
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 2: with him into the night in the way he has
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 2: been carrying him for three months. Something in the room
• 2:24:46
  Speaker 2: where he makes his decisions feel slightly different than it
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 2: did this morning. He is going to sleep and see
• 2:24:52
  Speaker 2: what it looks like in the daylight. Elena is in
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 2: her bed. She is not on the bathroom floor any more.
• 2:25:00
  Speaker 2: She has decided something small but real. She is going
• 2:25:04
  Speaker 2: to keep looking one night at a time, starting with
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: this one. Her grandmother's prayer is still in her head.
• 2:25:13
  Speaker 2: It sounds different now than it did this afternoon. Not
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 2: like a formula, like a door. They are all building
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 2: imperfectly in the dark, on a foundation that is more
• 2:25:26
  Speaker 2: solid than any of them can currently measure. And so
• 2:25:29
  Speaker 2: are you now. Let me offer you something to carry
• 2:25:33
  Speaker 2: into the night. There is a word in Hebrew used
• 2:25:37
  Speaker 2: in the oldest texts for a particular way of holding
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 2: something in your mind. The word is hugger. It appears
• 2:25:44
  Speaker 2: in the very first Psalm and in the Book of Joshua,
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 2: where it is used to describe what it means to
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 2: truly receive a word, rather than merely hear it, not
• 2:25:55
  Speaker 2: studying it anxiously, not performing comprehension of it. But the
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 2: way you turn a smooth stone in your hand in
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 2: the dark, feeling the weight and the shape of it,
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 2: becoming familiar with it without forcing it into a conclusion.
• 2:26:11
  Speaker 2: The ancient writers used hagar to describe what you do
• 2:26:14
  Speaker 2: with words you want to become part of you. You
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 2: turn them slowly, not trying to extract immediate application, not
• 2:26:24
  Speaker 2: trying to solve something, just becoming familiar with the shape
• 2:26:28
  Speaker 2: of what you have received. Take one thing from tonight,
• 2:26:32
  Speaker 2: not all of it. One thing, the beatitude that landed,
• 2:26:37
  Speaker 2: the moment when something shifted slightly in the room where
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 2: you live, the sentence that arrived somewhere it was needed.
• 2:26:44
  Speaker 2: Turn it slowly in the dark, without effort. Let it
• 2:26:49
  Speaker 2: become familiar rather than urgent. It will become what it
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 2: was meant to become, not tonight, over time, in the
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 2: way that all real change happens, slowly and without drama,
• 2:27:03
  Speaker 2: and mostly without your noticing. In the turning of the
• 2:27:07
  Speaker 2: stone in the dark, the rock is beneath you tonight,
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 2: whether you can feel it or not. The foundation is
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 2: being built, whether the progress is visible or not. The
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 2: father who sees in secret has seen everything honest that
• 2:27:21
  Speaker 2: happened in the room where you live tonight, And the
• 2:27:24
  Speaker 2: morning is coming. It always comes at its appointed time,
• 2:27:29
  Speaker 2: with new mercy and the provision for the day you
• 2:27:32
  Speaker 2: will actually be in, not the days your worry keeps
• 2:27:36
  Speaker 2: borrowing from the future. Tonight you only need this, the dark,
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 2: the quiet, the words settling into the deeper places where
• 2:27:45
  Speaker 2: they become part of you rather than information. You are carrying,
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 2: and the one who spoke them awake, aware of you,
• 2:27:53
  Speaker 2: holding everything you are and everything you are still becoming,
• 2:27:57
  Speaker 2: in hands that have never once in all all the
• 2:28:00
  Speaker 2: days of your life. Let go sleep now, beloved, The
• 2:28:05
  Speaker 2: sermon is in you, the rock is beneath you, The
• 2:28:09
  Speaker 2: morning is already on its way, and you are held
• 2:28:13
  Speaker 2: completely and without condition by the love that spoke these
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 2: words in the first place. Good Night,