Salt and Light: Wake up, Church! by The Rev. Dr. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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Trinity / St. Monica’s Episcopal Church, Hartford, Connecticut
Year A -- Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany
January 15, 2017
(On this Sunday there were no services held at Trinity Episcopal Church as we joined with our brothers and sisters at St. Monica's Episcopal Church. On February 19, there will be no services at St. Monica's as that community will worship at Trinity at 8 and 10 a.m.)
Isaiah 58: 1-9a, (9b-12) 1 Cor 2: 1-12 Mt 5:13-20
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly Is. 58: 8 Let us pray: Lord, open our understanding by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Word is proclaimed, we may receive holy wisdom to understand, to embrace and to put into action the many gifts you have bestowed upon us. In Jesus name we pray. AMEN.
GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. GOD IS GOOD.
And it is indeed good for us to be gathered together this morning – two great congregations with great traditions of serving God and serving our community. And so I want to thank your Pastor Tracy for her friendship and for her interest in collaborating to make this wonderful occasion happen today. Trinity parishioner Mark MacGougan has called this a “home and away” series, and we look forward to welcoming you all to Trinity in two weeks. And all on Super Bowl Sunday. So won’t it be wonderful to go about doing what you need to do during this next week and telling folks that the most exciting thing you did on Sunday was to go to church!
Our Hebrew Bible passage today and the passage from Matthew’s Gospel both speak of “light” as an integral part of our relationship with God. Matthew adds the image of “salt” as part of the Christian life. But to place these images of salt and light in context for this morning, we need to recall last week’s text from Matthew, which was the beatitudes from Jesus’ sermon on the Mount.
Recall that of the four Gospel writers, Matthew is writing particularly to a Jewish audience, emphasizing that Jesus hasn’t come to replace the law but rather Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law, the embodiment of Torah, the guy everyone has been waiting for!
And so in last Sunday’s passage we heard Jesus, in the beatitudes, turn our world on its head. You think happiness is about having lots of stuff? You think happiness is about being self-assured and always winding up on top? Well, NO, Jesus tells us. It may make you FEEL happy, but it doesn’t get you any closer to God. And real happiness, Jesus tells his disciples, comes when everything you expected and wanted turns out to be as empty as worldly stuff always is. It’s only then that you can come face to face with God and sense the Kingdom coming near.
Now that sermon on the Mount was really Jesus’ intervention into an internal argument that was going on amongst the Jews of Jesus’ time. Israel’s land was occupied by the Roman Empire, and in fact, Israel had been a part of gentile empires ever since the Babylonian exile. Sure the people had physically returned to Israel, but it was Roman troops on the ground. Land, city and Temple were all under gentile control. Some wanted to continue an uneasy accommodation with the Romans. Some others – the Zealots –wanted to fight. Still others, realizing the futility of fighting against the Roman empire, decided to kind of circle the wagons and hide, kind of keeping to themselves and observing the study and ritual practice of Torah. Their feeling was if we cannot enjoy political independence, at least we can live in faithful covenantal relationship with God until such time as God reveals that God desires for them to do differently.
So the sermon on the mount served as Jesus’ statement to the zealots – no, we don’t destroy our enemies, we love them and pray for them.
And that brings us to today’s Gospel passage about salt and light. Those first two paragraphs where Jesus is telling us we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world form a transition between the beatitudes and a section that runs for the next couple of chapters of Matthew concerning Christian ethics. Remember now that Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience. What we are hearing today from Matthew is kind of a safeguard to keep the Jews paying attention to this radical message of Jesus WITHOUT them thinking that Jesus is contradicting the teaching of Moses.
So that is what’s happening at the end of the passage – verses 17-19 -- when Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. But just as the Pharisees might be breathing a sigh of relief, Jesus shakes up their world once again.
You see, living in strict covenantal conformity – holding a set of established beliefs and observing a ritual code about certain behavior – is not what Jesus has in mind either. That’s where the “fulfill” part comes in, in verse 20. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
That word “fulfill” turns out to be an important word. It means we actually have to do DO something. Jesus gives us a head start: He tells us You ARE the salt of the earth. That’s one of my favorite lines in the Bible – I love salt. You know, when I was a kid and often hung around stables in the farms of Glastonbury I used to actually envy the horses because they got their own salt block to lick. But what are the characteristics of salt? Well, it brings to life something that might otherwise be bland or tasteless. It actually can enhance the flavor of something it is added to. It also can be used as a preservative, keeping something fresh that might otherwise get old and stale. Salt also makes us thirst for something else besides the salt. And when you cook with salt, the salt the salt loses its own identity and blends with that to which it is added.
Do you get the image? Jesus is saying that we are to bring some salt to our lives and to our relationships with one another. But there is a hitch: We always have to keep it fresh.
Jesus also tells us You are the light of the world. Now we usually think this means that if we have gifts we should use them and not keep them hidden or to ourselves. And to be sure, with parishioners who don’t appreciate the tremendous gifts God has given them I always encourage them to let their light shine. But there is always the danger here, isn’t there, of interpreting this to mean, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”
I think Jesus is really encouraging his audience here to bring the light of God to what is often a dark and broken world. Light from a flame– which in Jesus time would have been the source of light – draws people to it by the light it spreads and the warmth it provides. Light enables us to see things more clearly. Light is, in fact, composed of many different colors that we can only see through a crystal or in a rainbow. It is a necessary ingredient for vegetation to grow. Jesus metaphor of “light” calls attention to our role as Jesus’ gathered community in the world.
And this is not just true for us as a community of believers as it relates to the outside world. We also need to confront the darkness in our own hearts, our own souls, in order for us to really discover our own light and to let our light shine. We can’t bring the light of Christ to others if we can’t be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the dark and troubled places in our own lives where the light of Christ needs to shine. Author Annie Dillard writes, “You don’t have to sit outside in the dark. But if you want to see find the stars, you have to find the darkness.”
So what are we 21st century Christians to do with this? In this season after Epiphany, Scripture reminds us of all the many and varied ways that the Living God, in the person of Jesus the Christ, was made known to the world at the Messiah, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Torah. How do we, as 21st century Episcopalians, become salt and light for a broken and hurting world?
The danger, of course, is that we can forget that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sets us the task of running counter to the prevailing culture. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, we can become too self satisfied with what we have already accomplished. We can become too comfortable with the world as it is so long as it works for us, and be comfortable with forgetting about or handing out scraps to those who live on the margins of society. As disciples and apostles of Christ, we need to break out of our comfort zones or else our salt begins to lose its taste and becomes useless in serving God’s mission.
But there is an institutional aspect to this as well, something that on this morning when our two historic congregations are worshipping as one body bears mention. In what Presiding Bishop Curry calls the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement, we have been hard at work over the past several years re-imagining what our church should look like, how it functions, and how it can better be the light of Christ for hurting communities and a hurting nation. For way too long, we have been complacent, content with structures and ideas about mission that may have served us well fifty or sixty years ago but which, like salt that has lost its flavor, have started to lose or have completely lost their effectiveness. What were glory days for some were not so glorious for others, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are being called to a wider vision of Kingdom values and what it means to be followers –disciples and apostles – of Jesus.
We need to recapture the excitement and energy of a movement – something new, something that requires us to dream and to take chances when opportunities arise and we aren’t sure how things will turn out. That was the movement that Jesus started, it was the movement that the apostles joined, and it is the movement to which we are called today.
The lyrics to our anthem this morning say it well. It starts sweetly and gently:
How lovely is thy house, O Lord, what joy we find inside as we in blessed peacefulness abide. How comforting is the music, how comfortable are the pews, as we rest, rest, rest in the Lord. And then suddenly faster, we’ll hear:
WAKE UP, CHURCH, WAKE UP! The Lord is calling you. Wake up, Church, wake up, there is Kingdom work to do; and so arise and shine. Now tell the world your light is come. Wake up, Church, wake up, there’ll be plenty time to rest when life is done.
We can’t hide inside the walls, sitting on the pews. God calls us to go out and we cannot refuse, and so arise and shine. Now tell the world your light is come. Rise, shine, and give God the glory. Wake up, church, wake up.
This can and should be an exciting time for our Hartford area congregations, for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and throughout the world. God has blessed us with wonderful buildings for missionary outreach and for worship that feeds us and nourishes us spiritually so that we may go out to do the work God has given us to do. As Jesus’ followers, we are commanded and enabled by Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be that salt of the earth that brings new flavor to life, that keeps the Good News of the Gospel fresh, and makes us thirst for justice and righteousness. Jesus invites us and empowers us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be the light of the world that serves as a beacon to guide us through all that divides us. Lord God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, help us to be that salt of the earth, and that light of the world. AMEN.