Sermon: Your Kingdom Come
Date: October 12
Scripture: Matthew 6:9-13
Speaker: George Veith

Jesus came announcing and enacting the Kingdom of God. Every parable, every teaching, and every personal encounter recorded in the Gospel’s ultimately tells us about King Jesus and his arriving Kingdom. It is perhaps surprising that Jesus asks his disciples to pray for the Kingdom to come, and the will of God to be done. This tells us that the Kingdom of God comes not through force, but through prayer, consent, and petition. We have a part to play! It also tells us that the Kingdom and the will of God have not yet fully arrived on earth as it is in heaven. This raises many questions of how God’s sovereignty is at work in the world. While we may not have the full answer to those questions, Jesus’ prayer teaches that us that we stand in the time between the now and the not yet full arrival of the Kingdom. When we pray these second and third petitions — we pray for God to act AND confess our alignment to that activity. To pray that God’s will be done is to pray that our wills be trained to desire that God’s will be done. This means our prayers matter, even when we cannot see the tangible results or what the will of God is for a specific situation. We must trust that prayer always accomplishes much, whether we can see it or not.

Desired Outcome: To challenge us to align our wills in prayer to the will of God so that we can see the Kingdom more fully come on earth as it is in heaven.

Sermon: Hallowed Be Your Name
Date: October 5
Scripture: Matthew 6:9-13
Speaker: Paul Walker

Of all the lines in the Lord’s prayer, the phrase “Hallowed be Your Name” is one of the more confusing statements. We rarely use the word “hallowed” in our common day vocabulary— which means to honour, sanctify, set apart, and treat with the highest of respect. And even if we do, we might misinterpret this section of the prayer as directed first at our actions. The first three petitions of the Lord’s prayer are directed toward’s God’s activity. Jesus here petitions God to hallow God’s Name. To be sure, if God acts to honour God’s Name, then surely the followers of Jesus will too, but this text actually speaks first of a Divine action. This means all worship, adoration, and hallow-ing of God’s name is less of a request— and more of a confession about what is already true because of who God is and what God has done. It is an orientation of our hearts and lives to that supreme reality that refuses to make the Lord’s name vanity. (Ex 20:7) When we say "hallowed be thy name," we are making the adoration of God the ultimate concern of our lives. We are confessing what matters most to us and what we will give our ultimate allegiance.

Desired Outcome: To hallow the Name of God by orienting our thoughts, words, and deeds towards the ultimate reality of who God is and what God has done.

Sermon: Becoming the Perfect Church
Date: September 14
Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48
Speaker: Paul Walker

Jesus tells his disciples to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”(5.48) This can sound like an impossible ideal from Jesus. Really, how can anyone be perfect? The key to understanding this passage is “therefore,” because it shows us that this verse is the conclusion of the previous verses. This verse is a calling to live in perfect unity, as the previous verses focus on how Jesus wants us to treat one another. The perfection that we are called to live is discovered in our relationships. Thus, Jesus is urging his followers to be “perfect in love” or to “love completely” in the sense that they are to love not only fellow Jewish neighbours but also enemy neighbours. This is why in the parallel passage in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”(Lk 6:36) This challenges us to form different sorts of communities in which love is lavished indiscriminately. Yet, so much of how we form community is through a “bounded set” sense of belonging—- in which we love those who believe and behave as we do. Jesus invites us to flip the script and love without boundaries.

Desired Outcome: To explore what it means for our church ‘be perfect’ by explaining the difference between bounded-set, fuzzy-set, and centre-set communities.

Sermon: Jesus Shaped Speech
Date: August 31
Scripture: Matthew 5:33-37
Speaker: Nicole Marble

Israelites took oaths that made their statements legally obligating because they implored the presence of God in the commitment—but this only happened because half-truths, deceptions, and lies were all too common. To take oaths was to assume that honest speech was not always present. Jesus speaks to a culture of legal oath-taking and calls his disciples to go further into truthful and honest speech. Jesus desires a Kingdom reality where people can let their ‘yes’ be a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ be a ‘no’. We might view the practice of open honesty as naive and unwise in our culture of false advertising and legal loopholes. However, Jesus is imagining a future Kingdom reality where honest and truthful speech is a given — and is calling his disciples to live in this future now. We live Jesus-shaped speech into our world when we live with utter honesty and work against systems where dishonesty has become systemic. We live into Jesus-shaped speech when we refuse to use legal means as a basis to control a narrative. We live into Jesus-shaped speech when our words refuse to be co-opted by false narratives and half-truths to benefit ourselves. Jesus blesses those who long for righteousness and justice— and that justice extends to our speech.

Sermon: Re-humanizing Objectified People
Date: August 24
Scripture: Matthew 5:27-32
Speaker: Paul Walker

Jesus continues his antitheses statements by addressing adultery and divorce. The Law prohibited adultery, which is having sex with anyone other than your spouse. Jesus goes further than the law by speaking against the root cause of adultery: lust. Lust is when we look to desire and intentionally foster sexual temptation and arousal through the imagination. Jesus is against lust because it causes us to dehumanize others and treat them like objects. Similarly, Jesus speaks against the dehumanizing practice of men writing certificates of divorce to their wives for "any reason”(19.3). The relaxed practices of divorce in Jesus’ day empowered patriarchal structures and disempowered mutuality in marriage. Jesus has in mind a view of sexuality that is grounded in covenant faithfulness, mutuality, love, and goodness. When our sexuality is grounded in merely gratifying personal desires, we run the risk of going down the path of destruction. Jesus is teaching that when you treat people as objects for your gratification you are moving in a direction that is absolutely contrary to the direction of the Kingdom of God. This is a road that moves away from life and love toward destruction and the fires of Gehenna. So as DMC seeks to follow Jesus— how might we ground our view of sexuality that is life-giving and not destructive? What does it look like to live into a sexuality that is grounded in covenant faithfulness, mutuality, goodness, and love?

Desired Outcome: To encourage folks to live into an alternative view of sexuality and relationships based on covenant faithfulness which refuses to objectify and dehumanize others.

Quotable Quote: “Perhaps, the most important thing to say here, though, is that Jesus certainly didn’t want his hearers, or the later church, to get embroiled in endless debates about what precisely was allowed. Far, far more important to think about how to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth! And in the area of sexual behaviour, the answer is clear, bracing and just as challenging today as in the wider pagan world of the first century. Sexual desire, though itself good and God-given, is like the fire of Gehenna, which needs firmly keeping in place. Saying ‘no’ to desire when it strikes inappropriately— in other words, outside the context of marriage— is part of the most basic Christian discipline.” - N.T. Wright, Matthew For Everyone, pg. 48-49

Sermon: Murdering Our Hostilities
Date: August 17
Scripture: Matthew 5:21-26; Numbers 35:16-28
Speaker: Paul Walker

Murder was a serious offence in the Torah. (Numb.35:16-28) To deliberately kill another human was punishable by death. Even if the killing was unintentional, the guilty person would need to flee to a city of refuge to escape retaliation. Simply put, the Law tried to limit murder from getting out of hand by addressing the act of murder. Jesus enters into this discussion about murder with the first of his antitheses statements. “You’ve heard it said.. but I say to you”. Jesus reveals a fuller expression of God’s will for God’s people. In Jesus, we discover that the prohibition of murder is the surface expression of a deeper divine intent: Anger is counterintuitive to being people of reconciliation. If one master's anger, murder will never occur. Jesus is telling his followers that right-relationships matter even more than a sacrifice offered on the altar (V23-24). To follow Jesus is to be quick to reconcile with those who “have something against us”(v23). As we at DMC seek to follow Jesus— what might it mean to put to death our hostilities? What might it look like to be active agents in reconciliation?

Desired Outcome: To challenge folks to actively pursue reconciliation by putting to death their own anger, hostilities, and brokenness.

Quotable Quote: “In the future Kingdom of God, when all is consummated and when heaven comes to earth, anger will vanish because loving fellowship will flourish. The prohibition of anger here is not so much hyperbolic as it is a foretaste of Kingdom realities.” - Scot McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount

Sermon: Laying Down The Law?
Date: August 10, 2025
Scripture: Matthew 5:17-20
Speaker: Paul Walker

Jesus insists he’s come to fulfill the Old Testament, and fulfill it completely. He hyperbolically says “not one letter or stroke of the pen will pass away until I fulfill it.” He’s going to fulfill the law in a way that goes beyond the righteousness of the Pharisees, not by literally adhering to every letter or stroke of the pen—something Jesus obviously didn’t do. Jesus fulfilled the law by embodying the ultimate intention of the law. Jesus assumes God’s ultimate goal in giving the law wasn’t to simply get people to comply with behavioural rules. The ultimate goal behind the law was to establish people in “righteousness,” which means being people of justice and right-relatedness, or love. In his life, death and resurrection, Jesus illustrates a love for us so that we can live in it. (1 Jn 3:16-17) Our most central job is to receive this love, yield to this love, be transformed by this love, and then imitate this love. It is only through becoming people of Jesus-shaped love do we fulfill the intention of the law.

Desired Outcome: To explore how following Jesus is the fulfillment of what the law and the prophets longed to see.

Quotable Quote: “Some think of Jesus as just a great Jewish teacher without much of a revolution. Others see him as so revolutionary that he left Judaism behind altogether and established something quite new. Jesus holds the two together. He was indeed offering something utterly revolutionary, to which he would remain faithful; but it was, in fact, the reality toward which Israel's whole life and tradition had pointed." - N.T. Wright, Matthew For Everybody

Sermon: Salty Jesus People
Date: August 3, 2025
Scripture: Matthew 5:13-16
Guest speaker: Nicole Marble

After giving us the Beatitudes, Jesus then immediately begins talking about being salt and light. Salt & light people inhabit the way of Jesus to be a radical alternative to a darkened world. Both salt and light are images for impact on something else: salt impacts, for instance, meats, while light impacts darkness. It is important to understand that for Jesus, to be salt & light is to inhabit the blessings and characteristics of the Beatitudes. Too often, in the history of God’s people, the church has redefined salt & light through things like nationalism, partisan politics, culture wars, individualism, consumerism, and militarism. As a result, the church just looks like the rest of the world instead of a people who have something distinctive to offer the world. Our call is to embrace the salty & light-filled way of the Kingdom as an alternative to a world bitter with hate, sickness, disease and strife. This is our call.

Desired Outcome: To explore what it means for followers of Jesus to be a radical alternative in our darkened and decaying world.

Quotable Quote: “To be salt, to be made light for the world requires the church to be visible. For the followers of Jesus, to flee into invisibility is to deny the call. Any community of Jesus which was to be invisible is no longer a community that follows him.” - Stanley Hauerwas