This weekend, we started our 6 week church-wide adventure entitled "The Beautiful Mess." The title may seem a little different, but it's very representative of how the Kingdom of God interacts with our lives. When a new way of living begins to reveal itself, it can bring beauty into our "normal" messes of life by actually "messing up" our so-called ordinary ways of thinking. It is just this idea that grounds Jesus' "Sermon on the Plain". With this Sermon, Jesus not only presented the very blueprint of Kingdom life, but he also did so by telling shocking truths that seemed somewhat upside-down from what may have been thought of as "normal" living.