Mountaintop Experience:
Being a Zesty Christian
Text: Matthew 5:13-20
Over the years I have heard many people tell me that one of their favorite things in the Bible is the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve often wondered, however, if the people who like the Sermon on the Mount so much have ever read it. It has strange stuff in it like the Beatitudes which are often difficult to explain, a notion of turning the other cheek, and what we read today.
Being salt. Being light. Living so that others may say our good works and living a life according to the way God wants us to live. These commands from the mountaintop are, in so many ways, inviting us to being inspired Christians, potent Christians, zesty Christians, if you will.
As I was contemplating this week, however, I was vexed. I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, Jesus’ point was.
Does he mean standing on the street corner and preaching the Gospel, loudly, to everyone who passes by. I’ve heard people do this and, frankly, most of them struck me as lunatics and, to be honest, not very interesting.
Does it mean standing on the pews while singing a hymn and singing louder than everyone else around you? I guess it’s possible, but I also would imagine you’d annoy everyone around you, especially if you sang badly.
Or do you hang out at the mall and tell everyone you meet that Jesus is really cool and awesome. Again, I’ve seen this done and felt more annoyed by the people doing it than inspired.
But what might Jesus’ point be?
Within the tradition of Judaism and adopted by Jesus there is a command to love God with all our heart and all our mind. The more I thought about this, loving God with my mind and my heart, fully, is a way of being a zesty Christian.
First, loving God with our minds.
God does not call us to be stupid. God does not call us to check our brains at the door of churches. God does not call us to live bad psychology, speak in poor English, embrace bad science or rewrite history to the way we want it to be as opposed to how it is. God does not call us to be stupid because loving God, fully, requires our minds.
One thing we do well here is have Sunday School classes and Bible study where we want people to ask questions. A questioning faith is a stronger faith.
Centuries ago if you went to a Puritan church their Worship Service was very different from our’s. The men would sit on one side and the women on the other. They would sit in benches with no backs. Hymns would be sung with only the accompanying of a drum. The sermon would be either a one turn or a two turn sermon.
The Pastor would preach with an hourglass on the pulpit. A real hourglass with a full hour of sand in it. A one turn sermon was when the Pastor preached for an hour and turned the hourglass over and he’d preach for another hour. A two turn sermon was he’d turn it over again and preach for a third hour. Imagine coming to church and having a two to three hour sermon! But that’s not all they did. They would spend the next hour or so asking the Pastor questions about the sermon. They expected the Pastor to be able to defend any arguments he made in the sermon. If they didn’t like his Biblical interpretation, they asked him about it. They expected their Pastor to know what he was talking about and they had no qualms in questioning him.
And that is a great thing. Seriously. An unquestioning faith is a faith not being fully lived out.
One of my favorite stories is about an old, very wise Rabbi who was on his death bed. His twelve students were next to the bed, lined up from brightest to dullest, waiting to hear his final words.
He whispered, “Life is like a mushroom.”
The brightest student whispered, “Life is like a mushroom,” to the next student until finally the dullest student was told, “Life is like a mushroom.” To which the dullest student said, “Life is like a mushroom? That doesn’t make any sense!”
So the chain started back, whispering from student to student with disdainful faces at the dullest student for saying such a thing. Then finally the brightest student in the class whispered to the Rabbi, “Life is like a mushroom? That doesn’t make any sense!”
And then the Rabbi said, “So maybe life isn’t like a mushroom.”
That’s an old story and one thing I’ve always wondered about is this. I’ve often thought that, perhaps the dullest student was actually the brightest and most faithful student because he was the only one willing to question things.
The second part of being a zesty Christian is loving God with our hearts. Loving God with our minds us what we think about God; loving God with our hearts is what we feel and how we feel about God.
Let me make a confession about this. This part of the sermon is really difficult for me because my approach to God is mostly through my mind and mostly intellectual and even academic. I can easily talk about what I think about God, whereas what I feel about God is a lot different.
This past week I started my 10th year at St. Marks and I was recalling something that took place not long after I arrived here. I was told that there was a criticism of me that I wasn’t emotional enough at Worship or in my sermons. To be quite honest, even though I remembered the criticism I didn’t take it all that seriously. I’m not really a very emotional person and being emotional during Worship is not my style. I am what I am, and when you see me get emotional, it’s genuine.
But what is striking to me is that it makes it difficult to talking about feelings about God and passion.
But there are things I get very emotional and passionate about. I’m emotional and passionate about my family. And I’m emotional and passionate about what is best for children. I really love children and the other day I found myself in emotional knots.
Years ago I was asked by a math teacher to justify having things like music and art in school. He said that he saw little to no value in having them in school because, after all, who in society really needs music and art. My response to him was that in church we greatly need, appreciate, and utilize music and art all the time. We see it, hear it, and appreciate it all the time.
The other day it was announced that one of the potential cuts was cutting out Phys-Ed, Music, and Art from the grade schools. I’m no athlete, I’m not a musician, and I’m not an artist, but I found myself and still find myself raging. I cannot fathom the devastating this impact will have on churches in the long term.
Imagine, if you will, St. Marks without art and music. Look around out at the amazing stained glass windows. Art. Imagine we removed them and anything artistic in this building.
In addition we will remove the organ, throw away our hymnals, have no pianos, have no choirs, no hymns and no music.
Right now, in our church our organist, Sara, is a retired music teacher. Laura, our minister of music is a music teacher. Susan Adams, one of the people who compiled our hymnal is a music teacher. Sandy Carter who has worked miracles with children has been playing and working with school children, in schools, for years. Ricky Case is a music major.
When does this passion arise?
I learned this lesson many years ago. My daughter Danielle majored in Art Education at Hanover and teaches at Community Montessori and does all the art education there as well as teaching in her classroom. We found a diary of her’s when she was in school and she wrote that she was excited because tomorrow was her favorite class. Art. She was in the second grade.
I realized in the midst of all this angst my passion level was going up and up and up and it dawned on me that when I feel this strongly, and when we feel such strong passion about God and serving God and praising God, we are loving God with all our hearts.
Jesus’ words, in the Sermon on the Mount, challenge us to be zesty, even salty Christians. It doesn’t mean we have to cover ourselves in lemon juice or use salty language. It means to really love and serve God, fully, with our minds and our hearts.
It is being unafraid to question, to challenge, and to think. It is learning to capture our passion and use it in God’s service.
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