On The Mount
Putting Jesus’ Sermon To Music
The Universe
I am a systems person. I’ve worked in technology for my entire career and before that i even studied and interned as a civil engineer. I enjoy seeing, finding, designing systems - be it for my work, getting chores done in my home, my family’s growth, even in my own personal and spiritual development. I love the elegance, efficiency, and effectiveness of a system.
When I consider our universe, I see a dense tapestry of intentional & complex systems as part of its very fabric. To me, the immensity, density, scale, and complexity of it all is too much for chance.
So I believe it all must point to a good God at the core of everything, especially us humans.
Brokenness & Intervention
But as the flawed beings we humans are, we seem to all bear this good image of God at our core AND YET, we all also seem to have this propensity for evil. To hurt and wound one another for our own benefit or preservation, to seek our own power and wealth at the expense of our fellow human. I know i do.
Then as flawed stewards of this universe, we’ve shared a collective trend towards brokenness and entropy. Over and over again we’ve caused the decay of the good, divinely instituted systems of this world which ultimately led to the need for divine intervention.
So the God of the universe intervened!
And not by power at a distance, but by sacrificial love and more intimately than we could imagine: he became human in Jesus. This is how i see the world.
The Project
A little over a year ago i read Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” from the gospel of Matthew for the first time in a long time. It kind of messed me up.
Almost every facet of this sermon (which is arguably Jesus’s most canonical teaching, mind you) seemed to be a near complete inversion of the many systems i live in and that, in some sense, even sustain me. Systems of power, control, wealth, reciprocity, value assignment - so much of how our society functions - all seemed to read as almost EXACTLY what Jesus was teaching AGAINST.
Just look at a few:
“Blessed are the POOR in spirit…blessed are those who MOURN…blessed are the MEEK…blessed are the PERSECUTED…” (Matthew 5:3-10)
“Watch out! Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven.”
(Matthew 6:1 NLT)
“Don’t lay up for yourself treasures on earth…”
(Matthew 6:12-24)
“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!”
(Matthew 5:43-44 NLT)
So if Jesus, the God-become-human whom i believe in and claim to follow, is so directly teaching the goodness of inverting this seemingly natural direction of humanity and our societies - then i felt i must know and better understand this teaching if i truly want to try and live it.
I need to dwell on it. I need to meditate on it and get it deeply embedded into my neural pathways, my bones, my body. I must know it by heart. And not just fragments of it - not just “the golden rule”, not just “the Lord’s Prayer” - but the entirety of the sermon on the mount.
Since then I’ve been slowly working to write and record my own musical interpretation of the sermon on the mount fit exactly this purpose.
Initially it started just as a private project for personal meditation and memorization, but through conversation and encouragement from people i love (and even my therapist!) I’ve decided to make these songs into a proper album and release them publicly. For some songs on the project I’ve even been blessed to collaborate and record with several friends from my local church community.
As for the song lyrics themselves - I’ve directly taken Jesus’ words via verses from The Gospel of Matthew chapters 5-7 as interpreted in the ESV, NLT, NIV, and Message translations primarily and set them to music. For some verses and sections I have used my artistic license (plus significant reading & study of multiple commentators and scholars on the topic!) to gloss words and phrases in my own interpretation, however, I’ve tried to always reflect what i read as the intent of Jesus’ words sourced from the formal translations.
The result is a musical project that I’ve found thoroughly life-giving, enjoyable and enriching to my soul! I’ll be releasing it progressively, in multiple parts and then finally as a complete body of work.
To those who have collaborated with me, helped me and contributed to this project - I cannot thank you enough! It has been a joy to share with you and your contributions have created many of my favorite moments in these songs.
The Struggle
To be sure, writing and recording these songs has been an intentional, entirely AI-free, labor of love, and even cause for quite a bit of consternation in me at times.
At first, when reading and studying the sermon on the mount for the project, i really struggled with finding the “simple gospel”. I often found myself thinking, “Where does the Sermon on the Mount clearly call out our sin and Jesus' ultimate sacrificial love and reconciliatory work on our behalf?”. And honestly, this was one of my biggest challenges with the teaching as a whole and even the entire project. I worried, “what if this sermon and project in isolation just appear to be a set of moralistic teachings?”
But after more study, meditation and the act of putting all of the sermon to music - the answer to this question of “where is the gospel in the sermon” slapped me in the face. And seeing it now, it even strikes me as so obvious! How could i have missed it?!
In Jesus’s opening lines of the sermon he says:
““Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
(Matthew 5:3 ESV)
Or in the NLT translation:
““God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
Then in Jesus’s teaching on the law:
““Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.”
Matthew 5:17 NLT
The “poor in spirit” - as in the state in which we realize and KNOW that we cannot spiritually earn our goodness and eternity on our own. As in when we finally understand, we do not need to to perform.
But Instead, when we recognize our own spiritual poverty and our need for Jesus, that’s when we have this richness of God’s grace: that Jesus fulfilled the law for us - he fixed the system, overcame our propensity for evil and entropy - he died for us and resurrected for us, making us ‘kids of the King’. That’s what we need, nothing else!
My Desire
My hope and prayer is for these songs to serve others in hearing and experiencing Jesus’s words in (hopefully) an interesting and fresh musical form.
My hope and prayer is that these melodies, rhythms, harmonies, weird synthesizers, fat bass lines, and memorable rhyme schemes will serve as literal instruments for etching Jesus' most important teachings into our minds and hearts for eternity.
My hope and prayer is that this music helps us better draw near to Jesus in relationship and then, with deeply embedded knowledge of His truths in our bones, live out the way of Jesus, partnering with him in building His healed, whole and regenerative Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
I believe that Jesus’s way is the only way that brings wholeness to our broken humanity. The only way that truly reflects the perfect, good God of the universe. The only way we truly live and flourish to our fullest - now and into the forever future.
I don’t yet do a very good job of living out this belief myself, but i really do want to. If you feel the same, i hope this project helps you too.
-Phil