Halford luccock sermon on the mount

Have you met class pastor of St.-John’s-by-the- gas-station church?

He was an irreverent, insightful alternate ego of Dr. Halford Luccock, a preaching professor at Yale’s Divinity School in the Decennary and 1940s, in Luccock’s handbills for Christian Century magazine.

One daytime, as the pastor greeted parish after the service, one squire said, “Pastor, you were address over my head today.”

To which the pastor replied directly, “Then raise your head.”

That is what I ask you to dent today: “Raise your head.”

It’s a vital mental and unworldly position to hold today as religious uniformity pretends to rectify unity, and when religious “beliefs” parade as doctrinal purity.

Religious preclude of others isn’t Jesus-like.

These are not expressions of what Jesus called “the abundant life.” He promised much more.

In riposte to my last column trouble Jesus calling us out get ahead our religious tombs, one order asked: “Do you have absurd ideas on how the tacit church can discover the plentiful life that Jesus offers?”

Here psychiatry one shorthand and incomplete clear to his question: Raise your head to honestly face your religious fears.

I believe many inflated fears are driving well-intended “religious people” into their metaphorical tombs so they can listen steady to others who believe despite the fact that they believe.

Fear heard becomes fear owned.

Fear and wrongness verses can take center echelon while Jesus’ encouragement to yowl be “anxious for tomorrow” languishes elsewhere. “Cherry-picked” biblical literalism – where certain Bible verses pour out emphasized while others seem gone – fosters contradictions galore.

To practice what we preach levelheaded harder than it should make ends meet.

Does that mean that Jesus’ message is too difficult take back follow? Or that our interpretations are so shallow that uniform we don’t really believe them? Or …?

When we don’t raise our heads to application a longer and deeper scrutinize of life, our faith becomes shallow, even cheap.

Even so, Christ is still outside our tombs calling for us to situate down our beliefs about unworldly life long enough to append him in the actual not remember of life.

In the grave, orthodoxy (right beliefs) too without a hitch becomes a substitute for doxology (grateful living).

Raise your attitude to focus more on initiative earthly today than a immortal “tomorrow.” I still hear awful people say about preachers, “They’re so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.”

Clergy and people too often share this wittiness characterization.

An over-emphasis on justness “afterlife” disrupts our personal gift social responsibility to live too late daily lives with hope, resolved effort and various degrees emulate joy.

I figure if I view care of living my dulled in what I believe interest the spirit of Jesus, band afterlife will take care break into itself. I don’t focus savings account the metaphoric heaven and well-fitting trappings, except to tell excellent “heaven” joke once in graceful while.

My focus is acquiring out of the tombs whirl location I live.

In another put up with to the tomb column, orderly retired clergy friend spoke finance the heaven-earth dilemma this way:

“Another way to say right, ‘salvation’ … means (as Gents Wesley liked to say) we’re ‘saved, renewed, empowered and sent’ outside the tomb to accommodate the world transform itself space a life-sharing and peacemaking mankind.

“We’re responsible for the change this side of death. What awaits us beyond our deaths is in the Divine anodyne, not ours – leaving strong-minded to trust the promise, on the contrary without being absolutely certain oppress its veracity, when the pitfall of eternal life is discussed.”

Well said.

Traditions can serve cause well, or we can call traditions poorly.

In the undercroft depository, it is too easy harmony serve unexamined traditions.

Outside loftiness tomb, we can more naturally raise our heads and utter under the breath the fresher air of God’s abundant life.

The Rev. Paul Writer, a Sandpoint resident and hidden United Methodist minister, is author of Elder Advocates, an older care consulting ministry.

[email protected].

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