For a practice geared toward helping you relax, Yoga can be an intimidating experience. To a first-time participant, the many poses, movements, and exercises can feel daunting. And if you don't have a good teacher, it could be soul-crushing. But a good yoga teacher will tell you, the only thing that matters is your breathing. It is the foundational part of any yoga practice, and on the surface, it can sound so simple that it's easy to overlook it, but without it, all of the cool poses are meaningless.
On the bright side, if you can breathe, you can learn.
To an outsider, Christianity today could be just as soul-crushing as a bad yoga practice. It seems that no matter what side is talking, progressive or conservative, something is missing in the message. For a religion founded on the principle of love, that seems to be the one thing that most Christians don't understand. The sad thing is that if you ask most Christians, they think they are loving, but to an outsider, our actions aren't showing it.
The Bible is a complicated book. There are so many rules, regulations, and things you are not supposed to do, that the foundational aspect of love can be lost.
If the Golden Rule (explored more in detail in my last post) is the essential aspect of faith, then why isn't it taught as often as tithing or the Ten Commandments?
The Golden Rule is mentioned twice in the Gospels, once in Matthew and once in Luke, and it is a part of a longer message known as "The Sermon on the Mount".
For anyone who attends Church or has been to church, the sermon is the largest part of a church experience. It's the message the pastor gives that is full of truth and perspective in the hopes that the audience will reflect on it and eventually implement it into their lives. More often than not, the message never moves much past reflection.
And that may be part of the problem. Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount" is treated just like a sermon, a nice message to reflect on as you go about your week. But if you read "The "Sermon on the Mount" in context ( the placement in Christ's timeline, the intended audience, and the overall structure of the teaching), it's quite a different story.
Throughout the Gospels, when Jesus teaches, the authors make it very clear who the audience is. Sometimes Jesus is talking to his disciples or his apostles (a clear distinction that is often missed), other times he may be talking to the whole crowd that is following him. In the case of "The "Sermon" on the Mount", it becomes very clear who Jesus is speaking to, and it's not the crowd, it's his disciples.
The fact that Jesus is addressing this message to his disciples and that it's so early in his ministry makes the SOTM Christianity 101. It's a master class in how to follow him, he just allowed the crowd to audit it.
And just like any class we take, whether it be a yoga class, a photography class, or a math class, you can’t pick and choose the teachings you like, and you have to learn the basics before you move on to the complicated techniques. The Sermon on the Mount was not a message to walk away from and say, "That was nice. I'm going to try that", it was the foundational basics of everything that Jesus was going to say and do in the next three years of his ministry. In that context, it was imperative that the disciples fully implement the teachings within "The "Sermon" on the Mount" into their lives if they were going to have any impact in their world.
As followers of Christ, we need to stop treating "The "Sermon" on the Mount" as just another sermon and start treating it exactly what Jesus intended it to be, the foundational structure of being a follower of Christ. Everything else that is taught should be funneled through that lens. It should take top priority over any other piece of scripture we teach and treated like a Rosetta Stone in order to understand everything contained in the New Testament.
If we are to get Christianity back on track, "The "Sermon" on the Mount needs to be as essential as learning how to breathe in a yoga class. It should be hard-wired into our DNA as a follower of Christ and be as valued as The Ten Commandments or The Letters of Paul. What Jesus laid out that day was not a sermon but a mandate. And that mandate is essential if anything we teach, preach, do, or say is truly going to reflect who Christ truly is.