On June 30th, Eric Schnitger welcomed the children who will be in the PMC service for sermons over the summer while children’s programming is on hold with a sermon full of questions. This was engaging for both children and adults.

Before diving into the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:17-20, Eric has the children lead him through the first four chapters of Matthew. They cover the geneology, Jesus’ birth, the maji, Herod, Jesus’ baptism, and his time of fasting in the wilderness. Eric goes on to the calling of James and John as disciples, and his taking his disciples up the mountain.

Eric reads the passage saying that Jesus’ has not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He asks what the law is — which is the first five books or the Torah. So when does the law pass away? When heaven and earth pass away. Until all is accomplished. It sounds like possibly never. The law is very important.

What happens to those who don’t follow the law? They will be the least in the kingdom of heaven. And those who do follow? They become great in the kingdom of heaven. But all here get to be part of the kingdom.

But then it gets complicated. Unless your righteousness is greater than that of the legal experts and the pharisees, you will never get to be part of the kingdom of heaven. Who are the legal experts and pharisees? The pastors and leaders.

What do we do when the Bible doesn’t seem to make sense? We might dismiss these passages, or set it aside as something we don’t understand, or work harder to try to understand with further study, or focus on what we do understand. Do we try to fix the loopholes and make things neat and tidy? Sometimes there isn’t a way out of the tension — we just have to sit with it.

Eric goes on to speak more about our expectation or desire of purity. Alexis Shotwell, in her book Against Purity, tries to help us move beyond this way of thinking. Sometimes the dream of purity is wishing for an easier time, some hypothetical time past or time over there that was less messy and less uncertain; a time where our economic choices were less polluted. She writes, “The slate has never been clean and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no ‘fresh’ to start.” There is no place where we have clean hands so to speak. And Eric talks about where we can start when we can’t expect purity. Hear more in the recording below.

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