Somersaults on a Mountainside
February 22, 2026 - March 22, 2026
During the season of Lent, we’ll catch up with Matthew’s Rabbi Jesus as he teaches his disciples and the crowds on the mountainside. The first of several long discourses in Matthew’s gospel, the Sermon on the Mount comprises various teachings on personal piety and righteousness, elaborations on Torah, and an upset of standard religious morality.
It is this last that is hard to recapture for contemporary Christians: that Jesus’s “sermon” is meant to shake loose the calcified religious standards for a more expansive, nuanced response to God’s preference for those who bring little to recommend themselves. By “somersaults” I hope to capture the dizzying effect of his teachings on those hearers, and recapture the same for us.
We’ll read the entirety of the SOTM in just four weeks! Meaning, we’ll use parts of the readings for both our primary and secondary readings. We’ll employ various means to involve the congregation in each reading.
Blessed Are the Who Again? This is where Jesus pokes the bears of empire, of religion, of capitalism – of all the systems that compete to define “success” and assign power to the “winners.” For him to claim God’s blessing on the losers – and furthermore to name them as the influencers, the “salt” and “light” for the rest of us – is a weird, wild flex.
A Crisis of Authority. Six times, Jesus speaks a formula that is intended to provoke a crisis in the listeners’ hearts: “You have heard it said... But I say to you...” Does he mean to open up the conversation about calcified religious law, doubling down on personal moral agency while releasing us from the scrutiny of rigorous watchdogs? (Yes.)
How to Worship God, Not Money. When he smashes together the topics of religious practices (prayer, almsgiving, fasting) and financial practices (hoarding, worrying), Jesus reveals something big: our routinized religious piety runs the risk of disingenuousness, while we show by our output of emotional energy around money where our real worship is concentrated.
The Rains Came Down and the Flood Came Up. In this final batch of sayings (which are less thematically unified than the previous chapters), Jesus offers what we could call “rabbinic advice” for how to condition one’s spirit for harder times to come. Because it’s going to rain soon, and tidal waves of sorrow will wipe out poorly built shelters. What does Present Me do to gift Future Me with the resilience she needs to weather the storm?
Commissioning Rev. John Bowers as our Youngster Czar.