Be Extraordinary!

In our free store conversation on Saturday morning we talked about some of the things Jesus said in one of his most famous sermons that we know as the sermon on the mount.  We noted that just like Moses received the ten commandments on mount Sinai and brought them down to the people (who were in the act of breaking them, which for some reason made us laugh) so Jesus brings something new to the people from the Mount of Olives.  "You have heard" but "I say."

We talked a bit about how Jesus was not stuck in tradition but was very open to new ideas and new ways of looking at things and doing things.  The question came up why people tend to cling to the old way and reject the new.  Someone said that maybe we just get comfortable with doing things in a certain way and so we can be threatened by change.

We grappled with what Jesus meant when he said, "love your enemies."  Well actually we didn't grapple with it because it seemed very clear but we thought it was a bit crazy if not impossible to put into practice.  Our friend Dave suggested this was like a saying he heard about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.  Debbie later told me that this was a line out of "The Godfather."  It made me smile to think of Marlon Brandon with his slow forceful drawl quoting Jesus to his slow-witted and brutal associates!  We did agree that Jesus was calling us to go beyond the social norm when dealing with people.  If even "tax-collectors" and "pagans" can love their neighbors how hard can that be!

We talked about how it is fairly easy to be friendly to people that are friendly to us (unless it is too early in the morning and the person is too damn chipper!).  And it is not that hard to love the people that love us.  Although someone mentioned that we are not always open to receive the love that other people want to give us.  So in effect we felt that Jesus was telling us to go beyond the social norm in our dealings with people.  We talked about how sometimes it is the hard things in life that are the most worth doing.  In the movie A League of Their Own the star baseball player quits before the final game because "it's too hard," to which the coach says, "If it was easy everybody would do it.  Hard is what makes it great."

At this point Dave told us a story about when he was younger and spent fifty bucks to ride a horse that ended up bucking him off and giving him a very sore backside.  Apparently he was trying to impress some girls.  Someone also shared a story about our friend Jonathan who did an amazing canon ball when he was five years old in a diving contest.  Unfortunately he did it before the judges were ready and ended up losing the competition to a pretty little four year old that most likely won it on the strength of her cute looks.  We weren't exactly sure how these stories fit in but they were entertaining and we enjoyed them a great deal.

In wrapping things up we talked about how we thought that Jesus was calling us to go beyond the ordinary and to become extraordinary people.  We think he was telling us to do the hard thing and love even our enemies rather than just taking the easy "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" approach to relationships.  It felt good to know that we could be extraordinary!