Over the past year, most of us have felt unmoored. Truth feels fragile. Anger feels constant. Power feels reckless. And too often, fear has been rewarded while compassion is dismissed as weakness. In moments like these, it’s tempting to retreat, to disengage, to harden, or to surrender our moral imagination to the loudest voices in the room.
During the season of Lent, Asbury will join other congregations in a shared worship series entitled All y’all, rooted in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In this sermon, Jesus sets before his followers a vision of life that is both breathtaking and unsettling. Again and again, he takes familiar commandments and intensifies them:
“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…”
In All Y’all, Jesus speaks to a people living amid instability, division, and the abuse of power—and calls them to become a community shaped by truth, restraint, courage, and love. These teachings are not abstract ideals. They are practical guidance for communities learning how to live faithfully when the world feels like it’s coming apart.
This series matters because the way we respond to anger, desire, truth, retaliation, and love will determine what kind of people we become—and what kind of future we help make possible. Each week builds on the last. Each teaching presses deeper. And together, they form a vision of shared life that can resist chaos without becoming chaotic itself.
This Lent, we will not look away. We will listen closely. Because how we live together now matters more than ever.
Jesus’ teachings on anger, desire, divorce, truthfulness, retaliation, and love have often been treated as impossibly high moral ideals. As a result, Christians have found ways to sidestep them, explain them away, or reduce them to private spiritual aspirations rather than lived practices.
This Lent, All y’all invites us to ask a different question. What if Jesus was not giving instructions for individual moral perfection, but describing the kind of community that could heal the world?
The Gospel of Matthew was written for a Jewish Christian community living through upheaval. The Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. Jewish followers of Jesus were being expelled from synagogues. Long-standing religious and social structures were unraveling.
In response, Matthew presents Jesus as a figure deeply rooted in Israel’s story. For Matthew, Jesus is a teacher like Moses, calling God’s people into a renewed way of life. Just as Moses went up the mountain to receive a law meant to shape a people, Jesus goes up a mountain and teaches a way of life meant to form a community.
When Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount, he is not addressing isolated individuals. He is speaking to a gathered people. They are a diverse crowd of the poor, the overlooked, the wounded, and the hopeful. And Jesus calls them salt of the earth, light of the world, and a city set on a hill.
This communal context matters.
Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.
Matthew 5:17
In English, we lose an important distinction that exists in the biblical languages. When Jesus says, “But I say to you…,” the “you” is plural. Jesus is speaking to all of them together. A community. If we were to translate Jesus’ words into a Southern vernacular, we might hear him say, “All y’all have heard it said… but I say to all y’all…”
The title of this series comes from this anomaly.
The “higher righteousness” Jesus describes is not about spiritual heroics or moral scorekeeping. It is about how a community treats its members, especially the vulnerable. And how that community bears witness to God’s reign in the world.
For example, anger is not just a private feeling because anger corrodes relationships. Lust is not just a thought because lust objectifies and dehumanizes. Divorce laws are not abstract; they shape lives and power dynamics. Oaths and promises are not rhetorical flourishes. They reveal whether a community can be trusted. Retaliation is not inevitable because cycles of violence can be broken. And love extends beyond friends and allies to enemies.
Taken together, these teachings describe a people learning how to do right by one another and by God.
Most of us read the Sermon on the Mount as a set of impossible standards meant to drive us toward guilt or despair. But the early church heard these teachings differently. For them, the Sermon on the Mount functioned as a rule of life. It served as a practical guide for shaping communities marked by reconciliation, honesty, accountability, and love.
In other words, rather than asking, “Can I live up to this?” the better question may be, “What would it look like for us to practice this together?” This shift from individual achievement to communal formation stands at the heart of All y’all.
While guest preachers and pastors will bring their own voices and contexts to these texts, the shared question remains the same. What kind of people are we becoming when we take Jesus seriously and take each other seriously in the process?
This Lent, we will allow Jesus to challenge our assumptions, stretch our imaginations, and invite us into a deeper way of living together. Not perfectly. Not individually. But faithfully—all y’all, together.
Throughout Lent, we will explore six teachings from Matthew, chapter 5:
| Episode | Sunday | Title | Scripture |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | February 22 | Anger | Matthew 5:21–26 |
| Two | March 1 | Adultery | Matthew 5:27–30 |
| Three | March 8 | Retaliation | Matthew 5:38–42 |
| Four | March 15 | Divorce | Matthew 5:31–32 |
| Five | March 22 | Swearing | Matthew 5:33–37 |
| Six | March 29 | Love | Matthew 5:43–48 |
Our journey begins on February 22, the first Sunday after Ash Wednesday.
Please join us each Sunday at 10:30 a.m. We share our weekly episodes on Facebook and our YouTube channel, and go live at 10:30 a.m. You can find these links and more information about us, or join our live broadcast on our website, FlintAsburyChurch.org.
Pastor Tommy
Series concept and substantial content created and shared by © The Rev. Jeremy Peters, Court Street United Methodist Church, 2026. Used with permission.
Additional content from: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince. Translated by Richard Howard. NY: Harper Collins, 2000.