You know, I think it was the great Canadian philosopher Brian Adams who famously once said

Ain't no use and complain and when you got a job to do and those wise words certainly panned out for him

because he used to spend his evenings down at the drive-in and that's where he met you.

Yeah, so if you think for a second that I would be mocking Brian Adams, you're absolutely wrong.

I would never mock a person who had the clout and fame needed to get a cameo on a glass tiger album.

But seriously, I think he's on to something here.

There's some real conventional wisdom in this idea of, hey, if you signed up to do a thing,

you're not going to get the thing done any faster by

griping about it, you should be prepared for what the job is about and get cracken.

And Jesus of Nazareth, who's giving this speech that we're looking at in Matthew

chapter 5, called the sermon on the mount

really is in toning effectively the same thing if a bit less colloquially.

So in this short little installment here at the end of the week, I just want to set us up for

where we're going with the rest of this sermon on the mount by acknowledging that Jesus once again is not describing a kingdom where you engage in a religious experience or a religious transaction and then you feel better about things or you get free stuff or you learn special words that you can chant and then God has to give you the things that you want or where you just have this emotional

religious encounter or have this intellectual transaction or assent to an idea about God and then the

result is that you can feel better about dying someday.

That is not at all what Jesus is characterizing and once again as we've discussed earlier

this week is that what Jesus is describing is agency and you are going to hear me use this word again and again and again and again

because it is so absolutely packed into the text and into every one of Jesus assumptions. To follow Jesus is to be on

mission is to be an agent of the kingdom. And as we've discussed, Jesus is

effectively disclosing two things right here on the front end of the whole description of what his kingdom is about.

As we've also discussed, it's a terrible sales pitch, even worse than the sales pitch for my completely legitimate energy drink.

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