SOTM: Introduction and Background, Part 1

I’m not finished with the series on 1 Corinthians — three chapters to go! — but I need to spend some time on the Sermon on the Mount, or as it’s known in the blogosphere, the SOTM.

My congregation will soon start a series on the SOTM, and I’ve been asked to teach one of the classes. I’ve got to prepare, and I prepare by blogging.

The Lesson Plan

The classes will be based on a book by Randy Harris, Living Jesus: Doing What Jesus Says in the Sermon on the Mount — $9.99 in the Kindle version. The book comes with a DVD of short versions of the lessons being taught by Randy, Living Jesus: How the Greatest Sermon Ever Will Change Your Life for Good ($24.99).

I’m a big Randy Harris fan. I’ve heard him speak many times, and his lessons are always insightful and helpful.

The DVD largely repeats the book, and so the value of the DVD is as a teaching aid. You wouldn’t buy both for private study. Our classes will most likely start with a 10-minute Randy Harris DVD lesson, followed by discussion led by the teacher. Some of our small groups may wish to continue the discussion in their sessions.

The materials are excellent but not really sufficient for two classes per lesson. And so I’m using some  supplementary material, primarily Scot McKnight’s Sermon on the Mount (The Story of God Bible Commentary) (Kindle version is $18.99 for an excellent 320-page book.)

In fact, I rather suspect that Randy glanced once or twice at Scot’s book in writing his own, except Randy published first, so it must have been the other way around. Anyway, they fit together very nicely. (I actually suspect a common source document lost to history. We’ll call it “Q”.)

Morality

Randy’s book has discussion questions at the end of each chapter. I don’t think he wrote them. I have no intention of using them in my class because they’re simplistic, and the SOTM is not a simplistic sermon. Indeed, the last thing we should do is teach the SOTM as just a list of moral truths. There is much more going on than merely announcing how to be a virtuous person. Jesus was a sage, but much, much more.

In church Bible classes, there’s a tendency to moralize the Bible, as though these things were written merely to announce virtues that we should attain to. And we should attain to the scriptural virtues — but that’s not enough. After all, if our members conclude that church is simply a place to learn virtue, they’ll correctly conclude that they can do that at home. There have been loads of great books on morality and virtue written — by teachers far better than our classroom teachers. So why bother with church?

You see, Christianity includes morality, but it’s far more than morality. And it’s not just going to church so you can earn points toward a Home in the Sky when you die. That’s not it, either.

Not too long ago, Christian Smith led a study of American teens to find out how they viewed Christianity. As he reports in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, after thousands of interviews, Smith found that the “Christianity” we’re teaching our teens boils down to these beliefs —

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

He calls this religion Therapeutic, Moralistic Deism (TMD). “Therapeutic” because God and Jesus exist to help us feel good about ourselves and cope well with our emotional struggles. “Moralistic” because the core of the belief is that we should be “good” in the sense of not hurting others. “Deism” because God lives at the perimeter of our lives and existence, only showing up when we pray for him to help fix a problem — a butler in heaven.

Dwight Longenecker comments,

Moralistic in replacing vital sacramental, evangelizing Christianity with a set of rules and regulations. Different sets of rules and regulations exist for different sub sets. For a smart suburban congregation the rules might be those of respectability and good manners. For a liberal, socially aware or hipster group the rules might be all about ecology, the right attitude on human rights issues and the right political stance. For a conservative Christian group the rules would be focussed on sexual morality, modesty and the right religious devotions. While none of the rules and regulations are necessarily wrong, the error is in mistaking the rules and regulations for real religion.

The “therapeutic” part of the definition refers to replacing religion with therapy. As in the “moralistic” part of the definition the “therapy” takes many different forms, but at the heart of the problem is the need for the religion to help me in some way. For a smart up to date community church it might be all about recovery from addiction, advice on money matters or help with parenting skills. For a classic, suburban church it might be the therapy of feeling good about oneself, one’s “blessings” i.e. wealth, and using church to get the kids into good private education, the right college and a “good” job.

The one thing that the SOTM is not is TMD. Jesus does not let us live in that space while reading the SOTM, and it’s my job as a teacher to make certain that I don’t water it down to merely affirming the white, Southern, middle class, rightwing worldview.

Think about this for a moment. Why do our teenagers so misunderstand Christianity? It’s because we treat them like idiots who can’t understand anything beyond the simplest lesson. If a verse has the word “forgive” in it, we teach a lesson on forgiving each other, even if the verse is really talking about a bigger, more important things.

As a result, they often graduate high school knowing nothing but a list of do’s and don’t’s — and no real Christianity. And it’s good to be practical, but “practical” doesn’t mean only covering the parts that are easy and simplistic.

If we do the same kind of teaching among the college students and older adults, well, we’ve just turned Christianity into a self-help group and left our members wondering what “Messiah” even means, much less why he died on the cross or established the church. (Oh, I forgot: most of our members can’t answer but one out of three of these things.)

Theology

I’m something of an amateur theologian. I love this stuff, and I think it’s healthy and good for Christians to think theologically. Just as it’s good to be moral and to have a healthy emotional self. But the SOTM is not theology. It should affect our theology — obviously — but Jesus did not deliver a lesson on how justification works. He teaches us how to live.

(Mat 7:24-27 ESV) “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Jesus concludes the sermon with an unambiguous conclusion: Do this! Don’t just hear it. Don’t just study it. Don’t just understand the narrative and theology behind it. Do it!

PS — Among my SOTM pet peeves is our routine failure to provide enough background for our members to really and truly understand it. We just launch into the first verse with no preparation at all. Matthew himself spent four chapters building up to this moment.

And so I would not hesitate to spend the first two classes on background. The students can read the SOTM at home. They are unlikely to have the resources to understand what it is and what it is not without the help of a teacher willing to introduce them to some new things.