I want to know, as one kid asked, “why are all the vitamins in the vegetables and not in the cupcakes and candy?” Not only that, but why is it so easy to gain weight, and so hard to lose it? Why is it much easier to tear something down, and much harder to build it up? Why is it easy to fall down, and so hard to get up? I don’t know! I only know that Jesus never promised life would be a day at the beach. “The Way is hard,” he said. “Take up your cross,” he said. But, I confess, I have always preferred a cushion to a cross.
If you are like me, you may want to spend this Sunday at the beach (!), for this week I am going to be wrestling with some of the so-called “hard sayings of Jesus,” some of the things I wish he hadn’t said. And the hardest of them all found is in his Sermon on the Mount.
Recorded August 18, 2024 at Algiers United Methodist Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. Rev. Callie Winn Crawford
