Since diving into the “moral teaching” section of the Sermon on the Mount we’ve spent several months detailing out Jesus’s teaching on personal responsibility, on anger and contempt, on lust and fidelity and the sacredness of marriage, on honesty and oath-taking and seeing everything as sacred. Every one of these reorientations toward the law of…

Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you, don’t take an oath at all: either by heaven, because it is God’s throne; or by the earth, because it is His footstool; or by…

“It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31-32) Divorce is a huge and painful issue; I’m…

Note from Rachel: This week’s post is a roundabout examination of some of Jesus’s most challenging teachings. It’s a long one but I felt it needed to stay in one piece. Here we go … Jesus can be slippery, so that when his words seem most stark, most black-and-white, perhaps they are not stark but…

It was the hardest season of my life, and I had not yet figured out the reason for it. One thing I was absolutely sure of: it was not—it could not be—God’s will. My spiritual life had followed a powerful trajectory. My faith was born in a Christian home, and though I was very young,…

Fire Words The 19th-century poet Thomas Gray defined literature as “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” A more prosaic definition might say that literature is a work of letters that explores the human condition, that endures because it puts form to something we all feel. Thomas Gray’s definition made me think of a poem…

Those of you who check will have noticed there was no new Matthew blog today … or last week … sorry about that. Both weeks, a heavy schedule beat out my best intentions to get posts written. This is likely to happen for several more weeks as well. So I’ve decided to declare a brief…