How might a young student be inspired by the sermon on the Mount? How can environmentalists, anxious for the future of the world, connect with Matthew’s concerns about the End? Refusing to be intimidated by the challenges implicit in reading the gospel, brings the situations of ordinary readers into conversation with the scholarship to help make the text accessible and practically or pastorally useful in specific instances. These everyday conversations are predicated on a belief that connections are possible; that there are ways of seeing the pastoral or practical usefulness of the text, and, ultimately that there is some point in reading, preaching and teaching from Matthew’s gospel.