February 6, 2011
Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20
To help us keep Jesus’ teaching about salt and light in context, notice that it immediately follows the Beatitudes—and specifically the part where Jesus said ‘you are blessed when you are persecuted and insulted and lied about in an evil manner simply because you follow Jesus.’ The “you” here is plural. All of us together, suffering together, is a blessing. Suffering alone—not so great. But suffering together, Jesus says, is like getting some good news! Eternal blessing lies ahead! So it is a privilege to live a Way together that puts us into a different rhythm from the world’s rhythm, to do what we couldn’t do alone—to align our lives with God’s holy adventure described by Isaiah as one having such distinguishing marks as ending oppression and injustice and restoring the streets of our cities so that they, too, will be in alignment with the all-encompassing vision of God. And when we live this way of blessing, we are given the awesome privilege of suffering.
We don’t head out into the world each day with a personal goal to be salt and light any more than we go out looking for some persecution. Together we simply practice “a Way” lit by Love, described in the Beatitudes as a Way of spiritual humility, measured by practices of mourning and poverty and meekness and mercy and peace and submission to God’s order instead of our own. As we practice living in these ways, we are given the gift of being insulted and persecuted. We don’t put on an attitude of salt and light as armor against the insults…we simply become salt and light, which is another way of saying that as we die to our private selves we are cast into the only Love that has what it takes to end oppression and injustice in our world.
THE SUN NEVER SAYS (A poem by Hafiz)
Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe
Me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that.
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
Jesus says WE, the community that calls itself “Christian”—followers of Jesus—the Church, are the ones called to be a living model of what happens when life is lived in Love. Love in action seasons the whole world, lights the whole sky.
A missionary asked Mahatma Gandhi, “What is the greatest hindrance to Christianity in India?” His answer was immediate: “Christians.” And I wonder, might the greatest hindrance to the future of the Church be the Church?
You might think from Christian Sunday School training that “to be nice” was Jesus’ primary message, but nowhere did he say, “You are the SUGAR of the earth.” Nothing wrong with being sweet to each other, but we mustn’t confuse it for the gospel. The kind of devotion God requires, according to Isaiah, is a bit bolder than that. He speaks in the imperative voice: Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice (who? [you]); [you] share your food with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your homes. And don’t just help the strangers in your midst; help your families, too. In other words, step beyond your own small circles of belonging…but don’t ignore your own small circles. The salt and light of healing is for everyone. Isaiah is naming the challenging call to put love in action.
For a few years I lived and worked at Providence House in New York, which is a network of homes where nuns and a few others live together with women who are fresh out of prison, or escaping domestic abuse or homeless for other reasons. The extent of their needs was overwhelming. These women, along with their children, didn’t need only housing or access to health care or education or emotional healing or child care or jobs or the chance to begin again—they needed all of these things, and more. They needed an entire culture and society to be healed and to work in a different way…so that their own lives could work in a different way. It was at Providence House that I was forced to face whether or not I really believed what I had said I believed since childhood: Jesus has saved the world. When we grew discouraged that we would ever be able to do anything truly life-changing for these women, Sister Elaine, who started Providence House, would say, “Remember, Jesus already saved the world. Our job will be something different.”
Today’s message is that the “something different” we are called to do will alter the very milieu in which we live. Whatever it is, it will relieve oppression and injustice…it will be salt and light. Salt so as to preserve what is worth preserving and corrode whatever stands in the way; so as to draw out the unique flavors of life; so as to sustain a balance, as salt balances our electrolytes and helps us stay on an even keel; so as to create thirst in those longing for the waters of Life; so as to thaw what is icy and to heal what is wounded. Giving ourselves in a way that is not too much, not too little. The qualities and uses of salt are as varied as each of us, unique crystals carrying some unique aspect of God into life. And light—erasing the dark so that we simply cannot keep living in denial. Jesus was describing not only a hoped for vision, but what he already saw in this ragtag little community that was on the verge of becoming the Church.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter From Birmingham Jail”: “There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” Even if it weren’t winter, we would know that having a thermometer on the wall is not adequate, regardless of how accurately it measures the temperature. The temperature only changes if there is a thermostat—or a hotter fire.
As we, a collective of churches called The Church of the Saviour, move into the next phase of our common life, we will become more aligned with the vision of Isaiah and Jesus, or we will become less aligned with that vision. This is always the choice before us—there is no static option. We are always becoming more like God’s ultimate vision, or less. So the question for us is not “What does it mean to be The Church of the Saviour at this juncture?” The question is, Does God want to use us now? Does the fire of the Spirit burn in the inter-connectedness as well as in the separate belongings? Does an intentional connection restrict us or send us forth even more boldly?
I want to close with some words from an essay in a church publication:
“The life of the church revolves around the question, ‘What can we do to guarantee our future?’ And we conclude that we have to ‘play it safe’; we have to do what it takes to stick around….
“[But] in order to be worth having around, the church must risk not being around. It must realize it is called to die. The church cannot carry a cross or worship in the presence of a cross and then attempt to live in ways that play it safe….
“The church is called to live in ways that jeopardize its future. The real business of the church is to die. Each generation of the church should consider itself the last. Each should understand its mission to be believing, saying, doing and standing for those things that reflect the values of God and that render its continuation in the world highly questionable….
“The purpose of the church is to live as Jesus lived, and let the consequences be the consequences. The purpose of the church is to live so imaginatively and courageously in making its faith visible in the world that it explodes in a marvelous super nova of faithfulness, brightly shining forever in the memory of those who witness its passing.
“People in churches all over the globe huddle together in dismay about their future…. The question, as always, is ‘How shall we survive?’ It’s the wrong question. ‘Which ditch shall we die in?’ is the question. ‘What is worth dying for today?’ is the question….
“The church is called to be seed cast by the Holy Spirit upon the soil of the world. The seed does not fret over its own survival but gives itself to the task at hand, which is to die—trusting itself to the grace and sustaining power of the One Who is God.
“Just as it is the seed’s job to die, and through dying to bear much fruit, so our job as the church in this generation is to die—not to save ourselves from the awful possibilities of life in the world, but to expose ourselves to those realities and live within them as the people of God.”
(by Jim Dollar, a Presbyterian pastor in Greensboro, NC, “What Are We Here For?” from the journal Presbyterians Today, Nov., 1993)
++++
What IS worth dying for? Salt fulfills its purpose by disappearing. Light serves best by absorbing and overcoming the dark. By dying, they radically change whatever space they enter. We, too, serve God’s vision best as we give ourselves away, like salt, like light, like love.