Background: last weekend I preached at Christ Church Easton on our lectionary reading, Matthew 5:13-20, where Jesus tells those listening to his Sermon on the Mount that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This is the text of my sermon, bouncing off of Bishop Jake Owensby’s book “A Full-Hearted Life” and commentary from the SALT Project blog.
“Being Salt and Light”
This is our second week sorting through parts of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, as it’s come to be known in Matthew’s Gospel. The full sermon goes from chapter 5 through chapter 7.
Jesus sees crowds of people gathering and he goes up a mountain, sits down and teaches.
It begins with the Beatitudes: the “blessed are” statements, where those considered “blessed” are not people many would consider fortunate or lucky. Last Sunday on Zoom, Rev. Anne Wright walked us through the Beatitudes, pointing out that being blessed isn’t about having good things happen to us; part of the blessing is that when we go through difficult times, God is with us. We are blessed in being close to God and not being alone in our dark nights of the soul.
This week’s reading picks up right where last week left off. Continuing to teach, Jesus tells his disciples, his listeners, that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Those things are great, but they come with a warning: if salt has lost its taste, you have to throw it out, and don’t hide your light, let it shine so that others can see.
What does it mean to be salt and light? Let’s take a look at a few things here.
First, Jesus isn’t asking his listeners to become something new; he doesn’t tell them to “become” salt and light. He says, you ARE these things already. In the book we’ve been reading in small groups, “A Full-Hearted Life” by Episcopal Bishop Jake Owensby, he reminds us that we are all God’s beloved. God made us with and out of love. We don’t have to do anything, we are loved.
We are salt and light. Jesus is telling his listeners, and us, to act like it; to be who we were created to be.
Another aspect to this, salt losing its flavor or light being covered up: our faith is not supposed to be a hollow faith. It’s not a matter of doing things because we are supposed to do them. Even things like going to church, helping the poor, praying—all things that are good for us to do, but not if we are going through the motions; doing them because we are told to do them.
Bishop Owensby in talking about the world and the church today says that we see a lot of “functional atheism.” He says:
“a longing for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses—a longing for a relationship with the risen Christ—no longer animates the lives of many people, even church-going, creed-professing people. Our life-shaping desire is no longer focused on the Transcendent God. Many lives—including the lives of self-identified Christians—are centered on things of this world.”
One of the things Owensby points out is that many lives are centered around work, instead of our relationship with Christ. He says “workism,” is “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.”
Workism is a spirituality that measures human value as a function of productivity and efficiency. Workism “distorts worship, prayer, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and all spiritual practices into transactions.”
If you are coming to church, or you consider yourself a Christian, just because you want to go to heaven, or so you will be well thought of in the community, those are transactions.
Owensby says that spiritual practices are supposed to be “responses to the infinite love that God has always already given us, not pleas to receive what we do not have.”
We are already God’s beloved. All of us. We are already salt and light.
Faith is not performative. It’s meant to be heart-centered. It’s meant to be a response to, and a part of, our relationship with God.
As Jesus continues teaching to the crowds, he says:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
Okay, Jesus, that’s a bit of a head-scratcher. What does it mean to “fulfill” the law? Here is what our friends over at the SALT Project website have to say:
“the underlying notion is that when something is “fulfilled,” it’s truly embodied, incarnated, filled out, brought to life. When we “fulfill a responsibility,” for example, we perform it — we give it form… To “fulfill the law,” then, is to embody its essential features, to “fill out” and exemplify its meaning, spirit, and substance.”
Jesus has come to embody, fill out, bring the law to life. If we want to see what it looks like to live out the law—look at Jesus. If we want to see what it looks like to be salt and light: look at Jesus.
As he continues his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to spell out in greater detail how we are to live, some of the things we are to do in fulfilling the law the way that he does.
The difference between “following the law” and “fulfilling the law” can be the difference between salt that’s lost its flavor and light that’s being hidden, and the salt and light we were created to be.
The laws say: don’t murder anyone, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t covet, don’t worship false idols.
Are we being salt and light if all we are doing is following these laws, these “don’ts?”
What’s the difference between following and fulfilling these laws? Later on in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is pressed on which law or commandment is the greatest and he replies:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
It’s not a statement on our actions, it starts with our hearts. It isn’t just don’t do these things that are harmful; we are meant to love God and love each other.
If we love God, we won’t worship work and put works as idols where we are meant to put God. If we love each other, we are not going to murder, steal, or covet.
Being salt and light happens when we soften our hearts in love and turn away from making the things that the world seems to hold dear—money, power, status—the center of our lives.
This is counter-cultural today and it was counter-cultural in Jesus’s time. It’s not a message we hear from CEOs to stockholders, but it’s the message Jesus tries to get through to his followers in order to change the world; to bring about the kingdom of heaven. We are made by God to love and be loved.
If from our hearts we love God with everything we have and we love our neighbors, we don’t argue with each other whether it’s okay to kill someone, or not pay them a living wage, or to treat them as less than human. If we act with and from love, we know what to do. We know how to be salt and light.
The order of the Sermon on the Mount matters here. Jesus starts with talking about blessings and then says you are salt and light.
He doesn’t say: go be salt and light and then you will be blessed. He says even when you don’t think you are blessed, you are. You are salt and light. Being so, go do what salt and light do.
It’s not a matter of performing our duties. It’s a matter of sharing the love we receive from God to be a blessing to others.
We aren’t required to do this; we get to do this.
We are loved and made to love others. We are blessed and made to bless others.
This is not something we can force or yell at or argue into someone. These are inherent gifts, given to us, that we get to share in gratitude with joy and love.
And if that feels like pressure, to be salt and light in a world that desperately needs both, what do we know about salt:
It takes just a little salt to add flavor to whatever you are making. You are enough.
What do we know about light? If you are in a dark room, a match, a candle, a flashlight, or even the light from your phone, all of a sudden illuminates the whole room.
You are enough to make a difference. It’s who you were created to be.
We have Jesus as our model. We have the Holy Spirit as our guide and helper. And we have each other to both encourage and be encouraged by.
We can start by sharing God’s love with those around us. We can do our small part. And be a part of where things go from there.
We can do this, following Jesus, with God’s help.
