Sermon: On Being Salt and Light

Matthew 5:13-20

On Being Salt and Light

James Sledge                                                                                       February 9, 2020

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away.” For some reason this song popped into my head when I was thinking about salt and light in our gospel reading. I was wondering whether those words have the same impact they did in Jesus’ time. They’re both rather mundane.

“Turn on the light,” someone says, and we flip the switch. Light is everywhere. You can’t see the stars very well at night in the DMV because there is so much light. As long as the power doesn’t go out, we take it for granted, which may be why I thought of the song. You are my sunshine sounds pretty impressive. I get the metaphor of “You are the light of the world,” but it doesn’t sound as impressive as sunshine

So too with salt. A lot of us get too much of it. There’s nothing special about salt. It’s nothing precious. No one would ever think of salt as an extravagant, Valentine’s gift.

Yet in ancient times, salt was often literally worth its weight in gold, one of the most important commodities of the ancient world. It was used not only to season food but to preserve it so it could be stored. It was used as an antiseptic; it was required in the offerings made at the Jerusalem Temple. In some areas, slabs of rock salt were used as coins.

Light was also precious. In a world of candles and torches, oil lamps were cutting edge technology. You had to buy oil to use them, and so no one lit a lamp and put it under a bushel basket.

“You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” Not something mundane or taken for granted, but precious, valuable, essential for life.

Jesus’ words are from his Sermon on the Mount. It began with the Beatitudes that we heard last week and it continues on for a couple more chapters. The lectionary actually spreads the Sermon on the Mount over seven different Sundays. We take a single teaching and split it up into sevenths.

I publish my sermons online and there are printed copies outside in the hall. Imagine that you picked one up, read the fifth and sixth paragraphs, and then tried to explain to someone what the sermon was all about. That’s what sometimes happen when we chop up the Sunday scripture readings into manageable segments.

I’m not sure we can really understand what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of salt and light, or when he speaks of fulfilling the law and a righteousness greater than the Pharisees, if we are not thinking about the strange nature of the Beatitudes that introduce Jesus’ sermon. And so let’s revisit them for a moment.

The Beatitudes are not a guide to getting blessed, or worse, to becoming happy. Rather they are a description of a different reality, one that does not conform to the ways of the world. Jesus rattles off a strange list of those who are blessed or favored by God. It sounds little like the list most of us would recite if asked to recount our blessings. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who long for a world set right, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for seeking the right.

Jesus is describing the dynamics of God’s coming kingdom, a new reality. This new day looks vastly different from one that imagines being wealthy, happy, at ease, and not much worried about anything is what it looks like to be blessed.

In our reading today, Jesus provides a transition from the new reality he describes with the Beatitudes to the new kind of living Jesus’ followers are called to embrace. Detailed instructions on everything from loving your enemies to the Lord’s Prayer to the impossibility of serving God and wealth will follow, but our verses deal with some larger generalities.

The Sermon on the Mount is explicitly described as Jesus teaching his disciples. In Matthew’s gospel, this is a literary device that allows Jesus to speak directly to the church. “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” Both yous are plural. Y’all are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. Even though modern people have often individualized Christian faith, Jesus calls a community into being, one that exists, in part, to draw the world into that new reality of the kingdom, of God’s new day.

Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, but many other rabbis, like the Pharisees, did not expect the faith community to be engaged with the world. When Matthew’s gospel was written. Judaism was a small minority living under Roman rule. Some Jews had sought to overthrow that rule, leading Rome to destroy Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 A.D. With priestly Judaism sidelined by the lack of a Temple, Pharisaic or rabbinical Judaism became the norm.

Faced with the futility of trying to resist Rome, and struggling to understand how God could allow Rome to destroy the city of David, Judaism turned inward. The prophet Isaiah had spoken of Israel as a light to the nations. God’s call to Abraham and Sarah said that through them, all the families of the earth would be blessed. But Israel scarcely existed now. The best it could do was hold fast to her faith, and await God’s action, await the kingdom.

But Jesus insists that the reality of God’s new day is already appearing, and the faith community is called to bear witness to that, to be salt and light that begins to shape the world for the new day that began to break forth in Jesus.

This is not a break with Judaism, says Jesus. It is fulfillment of the Law. Jesus expects his followers to honor the Law every bit as much as the Pharisees. But Jesus sees the times very differently than the Pharisees do.

I wonder if Jesus’ words to the church aren’t especially appropriate in our time, when church has lost much of its former prestige and influence. Our denomination still likes to make offical statements about things such as global warming, immigration policies, and so on, something we started doing this when we were an important voice in the public square. But now, almost no one listens to us. Perhaps we should just hunker down and study our Bibles. We can’t change the world. We’re just trying to survive.

Yet Jesus speaks to Matthew’s church, a tiny church with no prestige or influence, and calls them to be salt and light for the world. 

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This past Wednesday, and on first and third Wednesday of every month, people who are poor, some who are mentally ill or struggling with addiction, some who are homeless, some who are immigrants, some who just can’t quite make ends meet, gather in our Fellowship Hall for a meal.

Other people, many well off with nice homes and good jobs, wait tables, serve food, clean up spills, work in the kitchen, and hug people they’ve gotten to know. I’m often struck by the upside down nature of it, how it seems to look a little like the new reality Jesus proclaims. I’ve also noticed that our Welcome Table attracts a fair number of non-members who cook and serve and help in other ways to create this upside down, new reality.

You – that’s you plural, y’all –  are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. You are precious, valued, important, beloved, essential for life. And so, Jesus calls you, calls y’all, calls all of us to bear witness to the hope of a new reality, a new day. And when we go with Jesus, following where he leads, the light shines, and the darkness recedes just a bit more.