Out of sync

I recently began reading Jonathan Pennington's The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, In the opening chapter he talks about the various readings of the Sermon through the ages. There is, for example, the Lutheran "impossible ideal" view. The notion here is that the Sermon presents an unreachable standard of holiness, causing the Christian to fall back wholeheartedly upon the grace of God. Pennington:

Intended or not, this view, which stans in stard contrast to the Roman Catholic monastic interpretation, contributes to the neglect, evasion, or at least confusion regarding the Sermon in much of the Protestant tradition.

I think "neglect" is the right word. My suspicion is that since Luther's groundbreaking insights are drawn mostly from Paul's letters, the epistles have remained the primary preaching texts of those in the Reformation traditions. So we hear much more about the epistles generally than we do about the four Gospels (except at Christmas and Easter, I suppose), and for certain much more than we do about the Sermon.

And perhaps it is also because the Sermon troubles us. Not because its ideals are impossible to achieve (as Luther thought) but because even to approach those ideals is to put ourselves drastically out of sync with the culture around us. This is no highly prized calling.

I don't have much more to say here, except that I will be sharing more from Pennington's book in the coming days.