Epiphany
5A 2017
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
February
5, 2017, St. John’s Sharon
You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives his
people a pretty strong role to play in the life of the world around them.
Imagine a day with no salt. The cardboard flavoring of the bland. The unbalanced sweetness of the sweet. The constant feeling after a long run that
your body is just missing something, and no matter how much water you drink, it
just can’t come back into balance. I’m
not talking here about no salt shaker, where you can’t send your sodium intake
into stroke-inducing levels by adding a tablespoon or two to the pastrami with
French fries from the local deli. Jesus
didn’t say, you are the table salt of the earth. He said you are the salt. You are the substance that was given as a key
sign of hospitality in ancient days because people who worked and walked all
day in the heat needed it for their health, food needed it as a preservative
before the invention of the refrigerator so dinner didn’t become a breeding
ground for every deadly bacteria imaginable, and it just tasted good. We’re supposed to be that salt.
Imagine some time without light. Unless we head down to a hunting camp in the
woods without electricity, it is hard to even experience any extended time
without light. The clocks on the
microwave and VCR/DVD player, the red lights on any number of appliances saying
“Hi, I’m plugged in and working”, and the ambient rays that creep in through
curtains and shades from streetlights and garage lights and other security
lights all shine just enough to see our way past most nighttime obstacles in
the house and let us go about our business.
And if not, we can always turn on our cell phones and use their light to
get safely into bed. But without any
light, we stub our toes, trip over our shoes, and we are an easy late-night
snack for panthers, tigers, and any variety of large nocturnal carnivores. We are supposed to be the light that casts
away that dangerous darkness.
If we as Christians are salt and light, we
should be the people that those around us flock to. We should be the ones offering protection and
health and inspiration and a life that illuminates the eyes and saturates our
taste buds and provides meaning, purpose, passion, and joy. People should want us around because of what
we add to their lives just by being who we are.
If we do what Jesus tells us to do, we will be just those kinds of
people.
Jesus instructions to be salt and light are in
the midst of his Sermon on the Mount where he lays out some pretty significant
teachings on what it takes to become the salt of the earth and the light of the
world. We heard the beatitudes last
week, where we are told either to be with or to become the poor in
spirit, the mourning, the meek, those hungering and thirsting for
righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those
persecuted for righteousness’s sake. Over the next few weeks, we will be told not
to call people names, not to look at people with lust, not make oaths but to
say “yes” or “no” and to keep our word, not to come to communion without being
reconciled to our brothers and sisters, and not to resist evildoers but to turn
the other cheek and to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. Jesus instructions are not easy. They are the work of a lifetime as we
struggle to live into them, each day offering us an opportunity to curb our
pride, or check our tongue, or keep our promises, or look away from impurity,
or say “I’m sorry”, or pray for people who have harmed us. Each day, we can choose to become a little
bit brighter and a little bit saltier, but only if we really want it and are
paying close attention.
Of course, the person I need to be paying attention to,
first and foremost, is myself. We are
constantly tempted to be derailed from our own work by the smorgasbord of
tastes and bedazzling strobes that too often pass for salt and light. Let’s face it, we live in a time when there
is a whole lot happening in our community, in our church, in our nation, and in
our world. Many people have many
thoughts, and many of them are written down or recorded and shared widely. I myself have many thoughts and deeply-held
convictions formed through decades of scripture reading, prayer, study, and
participation in the greater life of the community, and I have been known to
write and share ideas. We should care,
and we should be paying attention, and we should be part of the shaping of the
life of our community and nation. But we should never expect that either
outrage or acclaim about what someone else is doing to somebody else is a
substitute for the work we are called to be doing ourselves. I’m not saying that sharing news articles on
Facebook, or being in marches or protests, or vociferously solving the world’s
problems over coffee, or showing up at City Council meetings, or calling
senators and congressional representatives is bad – we may very well be called
to do these very things. But doing these
things will not make us salt and light.
We become salt and light in the crucible of our own difficult spiritual
work, where we pray and sacrifice and die to ourselves until our righteousness
to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. And it is only through that work
that we can expect to learn to love deeply enough to acquire the flavor and the
brightness that will attract others, so that they may see the good that we do
and give glory to our Father in heaven.
Isaiah is making a similar point. He is talking to people either still in
Babylon during the exile or right after it.
Their society and their lands are in a horrible state. Ancient cities have been destroyed. Food and water are not as plentiful as need
be. Their enemies are thriving. Their problems are not insignificant, and
when they pray it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Isaiah lays out for the
people of Israel what they need to do if they want their light to break forth
and their healing to spring up quickly; if they want their needs to be
satisfied even in parched places and to become like springs of water that never
fail; if they want to see the ruins of their broken-down cities rebuilt and
their streets restored. In short, Isaiah
tells them how to accomplish the most important social and political
transformations for their nation, and many of them sound like the same sorts of
instructions Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount, adapted for a slightly
different time and audience. Once again,
we hear the need for the people of God to do the difficult work of acting like
they are the people of God, and trusting God to take care of the rest.
Isaiah tells the people that if they want their voices
heard when they fast and pray, they should be doing what God wants while they
are fasting. Fast days, which Isaiah
assumes are part of the life of the people of God, are meant to be times when
we practice humility and self-denial.
They are not times to pick fights with others or to seek our own
interests. Even with low blood sugar, we
are supposed to overcome our anger and not punch anybody. This teaching shouldn’t be surprising, but we
seem to keep needing to hear it. Isaiah
also says not to oppress workers. They
need to have a fair wage, paid on time, so that they can live good, healthy,
full lives as part of God’s people, as well.
Isaiah says to break the yokes of bondage from
people. If they are enslaved by hunger,
feed them. If they are enslaved by
homelessness, bring them into your own house.
If they are naked, clothe them.
If they are people in your own family who are needy, don’t hide from
them or make them someone else’s responsibility when you can take care of them.
Do these instructions from Isaiah and Jesus and those in other
parts of the Bible have policy implications for us today? I think they probably do. I find it hard to read today’s readings about
breaking yokes without finding wisdom regarding just labor laws or refugee
legislation or enforcement of human trafficking provisions, especially on Super
Bowl Sunday when US sex trafficking reaches an annual peak. Others Christians can, and do, disagree on
the best ways to bring the Sermon on the Mount and the prophets and the law of
Moses into the public sphere. Yet, the
disagreement does not absolve us from the requirement to live out these
instructions in our own life, in the businesses we own, and in ways we make
decisions with our time and our checkbooks.
Beyond that, Isaiah goes on to say that we need to remove
the pointing of the finger and the speaking of evil. Disagreements should not become opportunities
for personal attack. Note that Isaiah does not say, remove the pointing of the
finger except when people deserve it, or remove the speaking of evil except
when you talk about someone who clearly is evil and you want to make sure that
everyone else knows it and likes you because you said it. Isaiah says if you want to rebuild your
cities, if you want to restore your streets, if you want to be a watered
garden, if you want to be salt and light, then stop wasting your time with
finger-pointing and criticism. Just go
do the work of removing the yoke from those around you. We have so many yokes on so many people that
actually focusing on that work is going to take all of our effort and
more. Doing that work will bring us into
relationships with other Christians and men and women of goodwill, and we are
going to have to figure out the best way to do that work, especially when we
have different opinions of how to go about it. But we know the difference between working out
differences or offering constructive criticism to get something done versus
pointing fingers and speaking evil. One lets us focus our various lights more
effectively in a dark situation. The
other leads to the glorification of our own egos, the breaking down of
community, and turning aside from God’s instructions. We get to choose how we want to operate, and
God will bless our efforts, or not, depending on whether we follow his
instructions.
We live in some tough times, but so did the early
disciples and so did the children of Israel.
We face real problems, socially, nationally, ethically, and
locally. If we are going to have any
hope of solving them, we need God’s help. God has promised that help if we live out his
commandments. The world need us to do the hard work of becoming salt and
light. It has enough vinegar and
darkness already.
