In our little home group (the church we’re still a part of does the home/cell group thing; the group we’re part of is only semi-sanctioned and only has two couples in it; long story) we’ve been talking about The Sermon on the Mount off and on. We decided to work through Matthew (slowly) so the Sermon on the Mount naturally comes up in that conversation. My daughter attends a Christian school, and the students there recently started memorizing Matthew 5, which caught me off-guard yesterday when she asked if I wanted to hear her memory verse.

So today, I was looking at my webstats and found a referer from Wanderer of the North who has commented here before (despite the fact he’s geographically south from here; I guess he’s wandering north… welcome, Arlen), and I found on his blog the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of Monasticism, which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this.” This gives me two things to do: update the random quote pool (look in the right-hand margin) to include this Bonhoeffer quote, and link Arlen’s blog, which I’d visited before but not linked. I think I was reading the well-considered post where he said, “I left the shop. Some people think I left the Church, but I didn’t.”

Back on topic, a quick Googling gives me Selected Sermons St. Augustine and The Sermon on the Mount by Joachim Jeremias. Main item is, I think maybe there’s something in the Sermon on the Mount that bears examination at the moment…