Salt & Light

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
In our reading from Matthew’s Gospel today, we join the Sermon on the Mount, already in progress. Just prior to this, Jesus has talked about how completely different life in the Kingdom of God is going to be. We call that section of Scripture the Beatitudes, or the Blesseds….blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth….Jesus talks about all of these unexpected blessings.
And then, Jesus continues with what we just heard this morning: two very bold and very direct reminders, to those who had gathered to hear him then and to us, who have gathered to hear him today:
You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.
Not, you are like salt or you are like light….not you are going to be salt someday if you try hard enough to get salty – or when you are old enough to understand, then you’ll be light.
No, Jesus is clear. We are salt. We are light. Right now.
We are reminded of this at our baptisms when this verse from Matthew is read: Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God.
You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.
Jesus knew that the people who had gathered to hear him teach on that day needed to know what it meant to follow him, what it meant to be his disciples. How did they become good enough, they must have wondered. Jesus knew that those gathered in that crowd were the meek, the downcast, the seeking. They were not the rich, famous, and successful. They must have wondered: How could they ever do enough? How could they ever be enough? And Jesus says, you are enough.
You are salt. You are light.
This Sermon on the Mount; for Matthew’s Gospel it is one of the most important passages. Here, Jesus says more at one time about what it means to follow him than he says anywhere else. It is something like his keynote address, what he believes most strongly his ministry is to be about. In a deeper way, this collection of teachings that constitute the Sermon on the Mount also interprets Jesus’ own life and vice versa. Or, to put it another way, what he says is what he does, and what he does is what he says.
And here, near the beginning of his ministry, after he has called the disciples, he is not instructing them one on one, he is not interested in them working as individuals and he never treats them as such. Do you know how we know this? Because the word translated here as “you”, is not you at all. It is that most blessed of all southern words, “y’all.” It is the plural you, which only a southern tongue offers us a word for.
Y’all are salt. Y’all are light.
Jesus is building community. This sermon is not intended for individual ears, it is not intended to grow any one person into what they might become. That will happen on its own as they live into the Kingdom together. This sermon is not a work ethic or a how to guide….it is not “Discipleship for Dummies.”
This sermon is the calling together of a people, because no one person can live into what this sermon demands…no one…and that is precisely the point. The demands of this sermon on the mount require that we rely on God and on one another.
The prophet Isaiah is also addressing a community in our first reading today. This community wants to know how to live together as God’s people. Do they fast? Do they offer penance for their sins? What is acceptable to YHWH? And the answer is the practical side of shining light and being salt. Remove the chains of injustice and undo the ropes of those oppressed. Specifically, says the prophet: share your bread with the hungry, shelter the homeless poor, clothe the naked, and care for your families. Then your light rises to illuminate the shadows. Then, as God’s people together….as God’s “y’alls”…..together, y’all are repairers of the broken walls and restorers of ruined neighborhoods.
The reason we are salt and light then, is not to keep those things to ourselves, or within our own communities. We are not called to shine our lights here in this sanctuary and then hide them as we go. We are called to carry that light into the world, so that God might be known and given glory.
When Jesus looks at the gathered community, he sees, just as Isaiah did, the community as it exists in all of its beautiful brokenness. And Jesus names them in the sermon on the Mount: the meek, and the poor in spirit, those who are mourning. Of such is the kin-dom of God. There are days when we find it hard to muster up our saltiness….when it’s tempting to just hide our lights under a bushel because we can hardly figure out a way to crawl out from under it ourselves. And those are the days when we will need one another to carry light and be filled with flavor, even when we cannot. Those are the days when the community of faith will hold us up and carry us forward along with them, when we couldn’t possibly have done so on our own.
This sermon on the Mount, is not, then, a list of do’s and don’ts; rather, it is a description of a community that gathers around and is gathered by Jesus.
So, what of salt and light? Jesus is telling those earliest followers and us that the community of faith must be a visible community. We must be visible to the world for the sake of the world and for the sake of the Gospel.
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this: For the followers of Jesus “the only decision possible for them has already been made. Now they have to be what they are, or they are not following Jesus. The followers are the visible community of faith; their discipleship is a visible act which separates them from the world – or it is not discipleship. And discipleship is as visible as light in the night, as a mountain in the flatland. To flee into invisibility is to deny the call. Any community of Jesus which wants to be invisible is no longer a community that follows him.”
Beloved community, we, the community of faith as it gathers here in this place and time, we ARE salt and we ARE light. How will we let our lights shine so that the Kingdom of God is made known in the world?
Thanks be to God. Amen.