Back in 2006 I had the opportunity to go on a spiritual pilgrimage to the Isle of Iona in Scotland—a tiny island out in the Hebrides where Christianity first came to the region in the sixth century. Iona is only three miles long and a mile and a half wide, and it’s the last piece of land between the northern UK and Ireland.
Just getting to Iona is itself a pilgrimage that takes a whole day. I left from Edinburgh in the morning on a train to Glasgow, and then from Glasgow a 3-hour train ride to the port city of Oban at the base of the Scottish Highlands. In Oban, you get on a ferry that takes you 45 minutes through the mist to the Isle of Mull. Once you get to Mull, you get on a bus that takes you an hour and a half across that island on a one lane road where you have to stop constantly for other cars and flocks of sheep. That road takes you to the tiny village of Fionnphort, where you get on another ferry that takes you a mile across the channel to finally land on Iona.
Iona is a quiet place. There’s the old 12th century Abbey, where the ecumenical Iona Community worships twice a day, and some small homes in the little village where only about a hundred people live. I stayed in a lovely little guest house and planned my three days of solitude in this mystical place that the Celts called a “thin place” because it seemed that the veil between heaven and earth was very thin there.
On my first full day there, I decided to go out and do some exploring, so at breakfast I asked the hostess where there were some good places to hike to. She gave me some ideas but then she said something I thought was strange, “Don’t get lost,” she said. I thought she was joking but she didn’t smile. I thought to myself, “No problem. I’m a trained infantry scout and this is only a tiny island. How could I possibly get lost?”
Famous last words. I headed out on a hike under a cloudy sky into the treeless green landscape. I crossed over the Iona Golf Course, which is free but is also pasture land where sheep roam freely. “Chipping” here has a completely different connotation. I made it to the back part of the island, where it is most remote and where the trails disappear into rocks and bogs. I wandered about on Columba’s beach, lost in thought. And then, without warning, it started to rain.
Now, I’ve been in rain before, even heavy rain, but I’d never seen rain go completely horizontal. It was an apocalyptic rain that even my high tech rain gear could not resist. It rained so hard and the wind was so strong that I could hardly look up without being pelted in the face.. In just a few minutes, I was instantly soaked the bone and shivering in the cold wind. I wasn’t far away from the warmth of the guesthouse, but far enough that it was tough to know the quickest way back. I thought to myself, how stupid would it be to die of hypothermia on an island that was only three miles long?
Fortunately, about that time I stumbled on to a cairn—a little pile of stones that are set up to mark the trail in treeless landscapes. They’re everywhere on Iona. Some are set up by people as a kind of prayer, others are designed to help you find the trail through the rocks. This particular cairn marked a little trail off the beach, which led to another path that took me back to the golf course and a shortcut back. Prayer and navigation are sometimes the same thing!
I got back to the guest house, dripping wet with my shoes full of water and peat because they had been sucked off a couple of times by the muck. My hostess was gracious, but she gave me one of those “I told you so” looks as she helped me set things out to dry.
Sometimes when we think we’ve got it all figured out, we wind up lost and we need a way home.
That experience came back to me when I was thinking about how end of this series on the Sermon on the Mount. If you remember back to where we started, we said that the Sermon on the Mount is the follow up to Jesus first sermon which takes place in Matthew 4:17, where Jesus says, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Remember the idea of the kingdom—it’s the thin place, the reality where heaven and earth come together. It’s the journey to this kingdom, this thin place, on which Jesus invites his disciples to live and to work—to do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven until both come together forever. Jesus wants us to be at home in both places.
Jesus takes those disciples up on a mountain and then gives them markers for the journey of discipleship—cairns that Jesus has placed before them by embodying the life of the kingdom right in front of them. He lays out for them a pathway, a rule of life, that will guide them in the midst of a misty, murky, muddled world where the path can be easily lost if you’re not paying attention.
Remember some of the markers we’ve already seen: The nine beatitudes marked the character of a disciple—a character of humility, of single-mindedness, of peacemaking. Disciples are not to charge off into the world confident in their own abilities, but submit themselves to the direction of God through obedience and submission, even in the midst of persecution and trial. The “blessed” are those who listen to Jesus and mind the cairns that mark his character.
We then moved into another section of markers where Jesus laid some new foundation over a much older path. Jesus came not to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfill it in his own person. He thus gives his disciples a series of brighter markers – “You have heard that it was said….but I say to you.” A disciple’s path isn’t simply marked by what they don’t do, but by what they do that reflects the character of Jesus—things like replacing anger and judgment with reconciliation, replacing lust and adultery with commitment and respect, replacing oaths with actions, replacing retaliation with love for one’s enemies, and replacing performance with perfection.
But Jesus recognizes that there are some markers that, while they look like they lead in the right direction, can actually lead down the wrong path. He offers a series of nine markers of failure that reveal the difference between performance and perfection: We don’t give, or pray, or fast so that others can be impressed with our piety. Instead, we are to give and pray and fast in secret, seeking to please God more than others. We mustn’t store up treasure on earth for ourselves, or turn our vision toward shiny material things, serving wealth as our master, nor should we worry about what we lack. Instead, the path of the disciple is the way of trusting in God to supply all of our needs while we invest our lives in people—making disciples who will make more disciples, thus changing the world to look more like the kingdom one life at a time.
In chapter 7, Jesus names the last two of these markers. We don’t take God’s job of ultimate judgment on others, instead we pay attention to our own weaknesses. We don’t take that which God has called sacred and throw it away, and that includes ourselves. Instead, we take up a rule of life that keeps our focus on the pathway of serving God and serving others. In 7:7-11, Jesus tells his disciples to turn to God and ask for what they need. In 7:12, he turns their attention to others by stating a rule of life that sums up the law and prophets: do to others as you would have them do to you.
The pathway of discipleship that Jesus lays out for his disciples is not an easy one, and he is quick to admit that. The sermon closes with four more signs, four more cairns that warn those who would take this journey that sticking to the path he has laid out is the only way to life.
In 7:13, Jesus says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
If we’ve been paying attention, we might recognize that Jesus has actually been saying this all along through the Sermon. This way of life, the way of the kingdom, isn’t easy. It requires you to give up claim on your life, to love those who hate you, to let loose of the assumed security of money and possessions, to forgive as you are forgiven. Few people take this path—even those who claim to be followers of Christ. Jesus is saying here that it’s virtually impossible to follow him and still follow the crowd. To be a disciple means that we venture off the pavement of the path of least resistance in life and instead embrace the climb and the patience of waiting at a narrow gate for the opportunity to enter the kingdom life.
That way can be made even harder by those who try to steer you off the path. “Beware of false prophets” says Jesus in verse 15, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Beware of those, in other words, who are so eager to tell you how easy the path can be. False prophets seem to be very nice and reasonable and trustworthy because, after all, no wolf is going to let you see his claws and teeth if he can dress himself up as a harmless sheep!
He goes on to say in verse 16 that “you will know them by their fruits” and that “every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.” What is the fruit that Jesus is talking about here? Well, I think the context reveals that “fruit” is the character of a disciple—the kind of character he has been outlining throughout the Sermon. Be careful to listen to people whose lives reflect the character of a disciple, Jesus is saying, rather than those who simply talk a good game. Don’t be impressed by their external marks of success, but look deeper at their character.
I think we can take this even more broadly when it comes to talking about churches. This week we’ve been preparing for our church conference, which takes place this afternoon, and one of the things that we tend to focus on as churches is our numbers—how many people are in worship, how much money do we have, etc. Now, these numbers are not unimportant, but they are not to be the only fruit we produce. This year, the denomination wants us to come up with numerical goals for worship attendance, and small groups, and people in mission. We’ve done that, and we’ll share them this afternoon.
But what we really need to pursue as a church is deeper than that. What we need is to cultivate a deeper sense of what it means to be disciples of Jesus. We need to cultivate Christian character and maturity in people – that’s part of our purpose. And that doesn’t happen quickly. There’s no high-speed highway to discipleship, only the long, slow, narrow path of faithful living day by day.
As we look to 2012, one of the priorities that Joe and I have set as your pastors is to develop the next level of disciple-building by establishing some covenant discipleship groups—groups where people can build one another up and hold one another accountable for daily growth in the knowledge and love of Christ and where the character of discipleship can be developed in community with others who are on the way. Our success as a church will not ultimately be determined by how many people attend our worship services (though that’s a good thing), but by how many lives we are transforming, and by how many of our members are bearing the fruit of discipleship that is shared with others who have yet to follow Jesus.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, once said this about the church: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist, but only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power.” Jesus says something very similar in 7:21 – “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, not everyone who says the right religious words and does the right religious things will experience the kingdom life. Only those “who do the will of my Father in heaven” will do so. We don’t need more religion, we don’t need more forms and processes, more doctrines and belief systems—we need the power that comes from following Jesus and being fully invested as his disciples.
Somewhere along the line, Christianity became a lot more concerned with what people think or believe than what they do. The Sermon on the Mount calls us back to action that springs from the deep character of Christ. We can no longer only be hearers…we have to be doers. We can no longer merely talk about the kingdom and its coming… we have to start living it out. Jesus tells us how to do that in these three chapters of Matthew.
Remember how we started this series with a quote from E. Stanley Jones as our thesis statement: “The greatest need of modern Christianity is the rediscovery of the Sermon on the Mount as the only practical way to live.” Indeed, Jesus closes the Sermon by saying that it is absolute bedrock.
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock.”
People in Jesus’ day would have recognized another “house on the rock” as the temple in Jerusalem—the center of religion and sacrifice, the only place where sins could be forgiven. Herod’s builders were still working on the temple as he spoke, but in the last great sermon in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus warns that the Temple itself would come crashing down because Israel had failed to respond to his message. Halfway through the Gospel, in Matthew 16, Jesus promises that Peter’s confession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah will form the rock upon which something very different will be built—a community that is grounded in the person and work of Jesus, the true Messiah, the true temple, and the chief cornerstone of the kingdom—a community that embodies Jesus, not just talks about him.
The Sermon on the Mount is the foundation upon which the framework on the kingdom is built. The more we begin to live it, the more we begin to reflect and embody the character of Jesus. When we live this way, we are on solid ground. All other ground is, as the old hymn says, shifting sand.
The next day I went out hiking again on Iona, and the cairns took me to the top of the highest point on the island, the hill of Dun I, which is about a hundred meters above sea level. Not exactly a mountain by our standards, but a high point. On top of Dun I is another cairn, but this one was much larger than the others. By the time I made it to the top, the wind off the North Sea had increased to the point that I had to lean into it in order to keep from falling down. When I found the leeward side, I had the amazing experience of hearing the wind howl all around me and yet have calm in the shadow of the rocks.
That pile of rocks had been there a long time—This was where tradition says that Columba, the leader of the first monks to inhabit the island, came to pray. I imagine that he came here often because of the view, but I wondered if he didn’t come there also to that thin place to feel the wind while holding on the rocks, and remember Jesus’ words.
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who chooses to live a life grounded on the rock.”
May we be guided, sheltered, and build on the rock of Jesus and his words. Amen.
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