The Sermon on the Mount for 2025

Sunday Soul Sermons Vol. 2, Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025

A gospel of now—full of holy disruption.

This Easter, I imagined what Jesus would say if he climbed the mountain again—not to retreat into glory, but to rise into the mess of us. Like he did on that Galilean hillside centuries ago—not from a temple, but from the earth beneath our feet. This is what came through.

Prologue: The Jesus They Tried to Sell Me, and the Jesus I Had a Relationship With

When I was a teenager in the late ’90s, “What Would Jesus Do?” wasn’t just a question—it was a lifestyle, a branding campaign, and a spiritual litmus test all wrapped around our wrists.

I wore the bracelet everywhere—purple and white, a little frayed from years of conviction. We all did. It showed up at youth group, church lock-ins, Christian concerts, altar calls. We journaled about it in devotionals. We bought matching WWJD merch at the Christian bookstore, right alongside purity rings, Max Lucado devotionals, and CDs by Rebecca St. James. It made us feel set apart–in a Godly kind of way.

The question was simple. But the culture around it was anything but.

Because in my world, What Would Jesus Do? often meant:

Don’t question male authority—especially your youth pastor.
Don’t listen to secular music.
Don’t think too much—pray more.
Don’t touch anyone you’re not married to.
Don’t talk about your depression, go to the altar and get delivered of your demons instead.
Don’t be gay—and if you are, fast about it.
And whatever you do, don’t ask why women weren’t preaching.

I didn’t have the language for it back then, but I was raised on a theology that went something like this:

Men lead. Women help.
Men teach the Word. Women run the children’s ministry—or maybe the women’s ministry—if they were really anointed. But not too anointed.

It was called complementarianism, which sounds like a vitamin supplement but is actually the belief that men and women are equal in value—just “created for different roles.” In practice? It meant men preached and made decisions, and women served and smiled and submitted. Preferably in a skirt.

In my world—shaped by Rhema Bible Training Center and the Word of Faith movement—that was the spiritual architecture for women. You could speak at a women’s conference, sure. You could lay hands on people during altar ministry. You could absolutely lead worship—as long as you didn’t get mistaken for the pastor.

Even women like Lynette Hagin—who helped build a global ministry and led rooms full of weeping women at Kindle the Flame—still operated within the unspoken rules: inspire, but don’t instruct. Lead, but not too much. Be powerful, but make sure everyone knows you’re still under “spiritual covering.”

And I didn’t question it. Not yet.

And yet—I was having an entirely different experience with my Jesus, as I understood him.

Because I had known Jesus since I was five, that’s when I truly invited him into my heart. I kind of took it seriously.

We were in relationship—deep, real, and raw.

I read the red letters in my Amplified Bible and saw something no one else around me was naming at 16.

This Jesus wasn’t gentle with the powerful.
He wasn’t afraid of women.
He didn’t silence questions—he invited them.
He didn’t gatekeep healing or shame the broken-hearted.
He fed people. He flipped tables. He taught women.
He touched the untouchable and rebuked the self-righteous.
And he called this revolution love.

So while my bracelet told the world I was on Team Jesus, something in my spirit knew:
The brand wasn’t matching the man.

And that’s where this Easter Soul Sermon begins.

What Would Jesus Say Now?

Not the Jesus of bracelets and bumper stickers. Not the sanitized one we used as a shield against complexity. The real Jesus—the barefoot brown-skinned storyteller who held the broken and rattled the powerful—what would he say now?

Who would he see? Who would he bless? Who would he believe?

Let’s ask that instead.

To the single parent folding laundry while watching headlines of another mass shooting. To the nurse pulling a double shift in an underfunded hospital. To the teenager who just came out and got kicked out, now scrolling for shelters. To the teacher defying a book ban in a state where truth itself is being legislated. To the trans poet still believing in beauty. To the refugee who translated her trauma into hope. To the ones who show up when it’s hard, stay soft when it hurts, and tell the truth when it costs them everything.

If He Climbed the Hill Again

If Jesus showed up today, he wouldn’t roll in draped in holiness or hemmed in hierarchy. He’d wear what breathes—beat-up jeans, a hoodie with stories in the seams, and sneakers that’ve seen protest pavement and hospital hallways. He’d show up with grief in his jeans and a canvas tote slung over his shoulder—dog-eared copies of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer—books written by visionaries shaping a liberated, embodied, ecologically conscious world—tucked in tight against his side. (You know, the kind of books now banned from public schools in half the country because someone got scared of empathy.)

He’d stop somewhere quiet, pull out Resmaa Menakem’s words—“Healing does not happen in your head. It happens in your body. It happens in your soul.”—and breathe it in.

Exactly, he’d whisper. That’s where the kin-dom begins.

Not the Jesus of cherry-picked verses. But the one who touched the untouchable. Who challenged empire with nothing but presence. Who called the shamed holy.

If he climbed the hill again—not to ascend into glory, but to descend into our unraveling—what would resurrection mean now?

Not just personal salvation. But collective liberation.
Not just forgiveness. But repair.
Not just hope. But a call to stay awake.

What would love—living, breathing, walking among us—sound like?

Let’s listen.

The New Sermon on the Mount

Blessings for the Brave, a Gospel for the Grieving

Blessed are the ones carrying more than anyone knows.
The ones who keep showing up, aching and unarmored. Your life is a quiet kind of defiance. Your existence, a psalm.

Blessed are the teachers who risk their jobs to speak the truth.
You are not just teaching—you are preserving the memory that empire would rather erase.

Blessed are the ones who close the news app—not out of apathy, but as a sacred act of nervous system survival.
You are not disengaged. You are discerning.

Blessed are the mourners without headlines.
Those grieving Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. The ones who cry quietly between shifts, then rise to serve soup, sign petitions, hold their neighbors. The ones whose sorrow composts into care—who plant grief like seeds and keep showing up to water what’s tender. Your ache is not collapse. It’s continuity.

Blessed are the earthkeepers and water watchers.
The ones blocking pipelines, planting food, and preaching carbon gospel to a distracted crowd. You are not too much. You are right on time.

Blessed are those who walked away from churches that turned love into shame.
And still found Spirit in poems, in playlists, in the quiet dignity of your own breath. That, too, is resurrection.

Blessed are the skeptics who no longer believe in me,
but still believe in justice. In feeding each other. In staying kind in a world that makes that a miracle. Call it what you will. I call it holy.

Blessed are those who love across borders and bloodlines.
Who choose belonging over allegiance. You’re not soft—you’re sovereign. You’re building what’s next.

Blessed are the ones who grieve slow.
Who let sorrow stretch its legs and stay a while. You’re not delaying joy. You’re deepening it.

Blessed are the ones who speak truth without losing tenderness.
The ones who call people in when it’d be easier to call them out. Who name harm without turning it into a spectacle. Who say hard things and stay in the room. Your clarity is an act of care. Your voice is not too much—it’s the doorway back to humanity.

Blessed are the bridge-builders.
Not the peacekeepers who avoid discomfort—but the fierce-hearted ones holding both sides with shaking arms and trembling grace. You are doing sacred work.

The Hill Where He Begins Again

A gospel not from above, but from beside.

And then he’d pause. Not for applause. But to make room for the ache.

And in that silence—cracked open, trembling—he’d look around. Not with pity. But with holy recognition.

“You want to know where the kin-dom is?”

It’s in the mother boiling water because her city won’t fix the pipes.
In the queer kid who walks into prom alone and dances anyway.
In the therapist holding space for kids navigating gun drills and climate anxiety.
In the activist who dares to rest in a world that worships burnout.
In the moment you almost gave up and didn’t.

You keep looking for heaven in the clouds.
But it keeps showing up in your hands.

And then—he’d say nothing. He’d just stand there. Dusty. Human. Unmistakably divine.

And we—those of us who’ve lost religion but found something deeper—
we’d know:
This is not the end. This is the beginning of everything.

What Would Jesus Do Now?

He would stand at the border and break bread with the refugee.
He would walk into a state legislature and flip the script.
He would hold the trans kid sobbing in a school bathroom and say, You are my beloved. And I am well pleased.
He would remind the mothers with empty bank accounts that the system is broken—not their love.
He would rage against coercion disguised as law.
He would call out the empire—and still heal the soldier.

And he’d do it all while loving the hell out of us. Literally.

So How Do We Rise?

Resurrection is not something we wait for. It’s something we practice. In breath. In body. In relationship. In resistance.

We rise when we stop shrinking.
We rise when we name what hurts.
We rise when we stop apologizing for being here—fully, soul-first.

To be resurrected in this life is to be undefended in your love and unapologetic in your truth.

It is to say:
You don’t get to steal my voice.
You don’t get to define my worth.
You don’t get to tell me what God looks like in my body.

I get to rise again.
And so do you.

A New WWJD: What Will We Do?

If we are the body now—
If we are the hands, the mouth, the feet of that revolutionary rabbi from Nazareth—
Then we need to get real about what we’re doing with that power.

Will we freeze in despair?
Or will we practice the small daily resurrection of showing up, telling the truth, and loving like it matters?

Because Jesus was never the problem.
Patriarchy was.
White supremacy was.
Empire was.
And still is.

So let’s not throw away the teacher just because the church lost its way.
Let’s let Jesus rise again—not just from the tomb, but from the margins where we buried him.

If this stirred something in you—share it. With a friend. With your journal. With the part of you that forgot it's allowed to believe again.

These Sunday Soul Sermons drop once a week—for the disillusioned, the tender-hearted, the still-trying. If you want to walk a little closer with me, you can become a free or paid subscriber.

And if you’re longing for more than words—for breath, for body, for the sacred fire of aliveness—I host a monthly gathering where we move, rest, and rise together, the next one is May 4th. Learn more HERE

Until then: keep rising in love.