...some people cannot bear the truth, no matter how tactfully it is told. No doubt the haughty, the tyrannical, the unmerciful, the impure, and the fomentors of discord take a fierce exception to the Sermon on the Mount.
We are all hypocrites to some degree — passionately promoting ideas we have not ourselves fully lived, taking others to task for frailties and failures not that dissimilar from our own. Knowing this, we should all be more gentle, more hopeful, more merciful with one...
Jesus said that peacemakers would be known as the children of God. Not the fear mongers. Not the authoritarians. Not the gatekeepers. Not those who see their religion as a war against the world. He said, “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children...
Gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit. Meekness is a teaching of Jesus. Humility is the way God became human. Beware of any Christian movement that advocates otherwise, especially in the political sphere. It is simply trying to justify its own power by any means...
And God said, "Love your enemy," and I obeyed Him and loved myself.-----------------------------------------Gender-neutral version: And God said, "Love your enemy," and I obeyed God and loved myself.
Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene Creed is written, only three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to...
We Christians are the salt of the earth according to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which I take to mean seasoning, not the main course. The desire for power like God's is the desire to be more important than we are.
The values, priorities, and character traits Jesus calls for in what's known as The Sermon on the Mount don't align well with much of what drives Americanized Christianity today. Merciful? Pure in heart? A thirst for righteousness? Hardly. Peacemakers? Willing to...
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And, of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them...
What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful...