Living Words

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity Romans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21 by William Klock Jesus sat on the mountainside with a great crowd of people spread out all around.  They hung on his every word as he announced the coming of God’s kingdom.  This is what Israel had been waiting for years—for centuries.  Here was the prophet like Moses, promised all the way back in Deuteronomy.  Here he was, like Moses, on the mountain.  But this time, instead of stone tablets with God’s law written on them, Jesus was describing a kingdom in which God’s law of love is inscribed on the hearts of its people—transforming them, setting them right from the inside out.  Just as the law given by Moses described the things that separated the people of God from everyone else—who was in and who was out—Jesus described what the people of God’s new kingdom were to be like—this new people, filled with the very Spirit of God.  But then, knowing how people are and knowing how Israel had fallen so many times in the past, J