You are Salt and Light

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Justin: What a great day to be in worship. I don't know about you, but does anybody else just feel the heaviness of the past few weeks? Things just feel really heavy right now, and there are corners of our world that just seem really dark, and so to be able to come into this space and worship God together and to celebrate life and baptism, that is such a light for us, and we are talking about light today.

Our scripture passage for this morning follows what Debbie preached on last week in the Beatitudes. It's Matthew 5:13-16, and it says this:

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It's no longer good for anything, but it's thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket. Rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to God in heaven.

When it became official that I was gonna move here in August, my partner Manuel asked me, "When is the last time that you went to the doctor?" And he's a nurse, and I said, "Well, it's been like three years maybe." And he said, "You have got to go to the doctor and make sure everything's okay before you move to Minnesota." And I didn't want to go to the doctor because I knew that everything was probably not okay, but he made me go.

And so I went, and the doctor took my vitals and did blood work, and she came back, and she said, "Mr. Bell, your blood pressure is elevated." And I was like, "I know." And she said, "We're gonna need you to lower your salt intake." And I was like, "Okay, I can do that."

So I went to the grocery store and I bought all of these Mrs. Dash salt-free seasonings and went home and tried to make some chicken. And I mean, I buried that chicken in those seasonings. And when I ate it, it was fine, but it needed some salt, you know what I'm saying? Like salt just makes everything better.

And Jesus makes two pretty profound statements in our text for this morning: "You are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world." And these are pretty familiar metaphors for us. We use them in our common vernacular all the time in conversations to describe people that we would consider good. And if you're like me, I used to hear this and I think, "Okay, well I'm supposed to find ways to honor God by putting good out into the world." And that's not necessarily wrong, but Jesus isn't actually telling us what we should do in this passage. Last week in the Beatitudes, we learned more about how we should live as people of the kingdom of God. But in this passage, Jesus is primarily concerned with telling the disciples who they are. "You are salt. You are light."

Now the "you" here is plural, it's not singular, so here's where my southernness comes in handy. The "you" is not "you are salt and you are light," it's "y'all." Right? Y'all are salt. Y'all are the light. This is who we are together. Together, our identity becomes more clear as we follow in the ways of Jesus. And that identity gives way to purpose. Jesus didn't say, "I want you to become salt eventually," or, "I want you to become light eventually." Jesus says, "This is this is who you are." And it's even evident in the phrase, "Let your light shine before others."

So if you'll let me be nerdy for just a second. In English, that sounds like a command, right? "Let your light shine before others." But what we have here is a third-person imperative. So it is a command, but it is not to the disciples. The command is to the light itself. So in other words, Jesus is not saying, "You should try harder to shine your light." He's saying that if you are light, then shining is just what you do. If you are salt, then salting things is what you do. When we live into our purpose, we are simply being what God created us to be. The salt and the light.

One of my favorite Disney movies growing up was The Lion King. Do we have any Lion King fans? Okay, the cartoon, not the live-action version, right? And as I was preparing for this sermon, I thought about Simba running away from home and living the Hakuna Matata life with Timon and Pumbaa. And that one night where he's looking into the water and his father's reflection appears and Mufasa says, "Remember who you are." Simba's identity as the rightful king gave him responsibility to rule wisely, not only for himself, but for the entire kingdom. He needed to remember who he was and so do we, which can be easier said than done.

I am flying back to North Carolina in January to be a part of an ordination service for one of my former students and she has faced so much adversity in her life, she's gone through more than any young person should have to go through and she has graduated from Boston University with two master's degrees, one in social work and her MDiv. And her senior year in high school, I knew that she was going to go down the Christian Studies track and so I gave her the opportunity to offer a senior homily and about two minutes before the worship service started, she just freaked out and she was standing by the bathroom and she said, "I don't think I can do this, I can't get up there." And I said, "You've got, you're gonna get your butt up there and you're gonna preach because this is who you are, this is who you're called to be. Think about all that you've gone through, think about all the place that you've come to now, you've got this, you're gonna get up there and you're gonna do an amazing job because this is who you're called to be." And she got up there and she nailed it and now I get to go be a part of her ordination service and that's not because of me but it was because she had an entire church community surrounding her, reminding her over and over again of who she was and now her story gets to be a light for so many people who need her to be who God has called her to be.

That's what we do as the church, right? We are in this together, salt is who we are, light is who we are and we need each other to remind ourselves of that truth over and over again and I imagine that when Jesus was teaching this, the disciples and the people in the crowd probably laughed because Jesus was talking to fishermen and outcasts and people with diseases and tax collectors and widows and orphans. Nobody had ever told them that they were the salt of the earth or the light of the world. Those were certainly designations for Pharisees and religious leaders but not with Jesus. No, it was the meek and the persecuted and the poor. They were the ones that were blessed like we learned about last week. They are the salt and the light.

You know, studies show that for every one negative comment that a child hears, it takes ten positive affirmations to undo the negative one that they've heard. Kids have a tendency to live into the messaging that they received. Not always but when a kid is told how worthless they are over and over again, they tend to act out in poor ways, right? But when a kid is told how loved and valued they are, they tend to act out in ways that show that they feel loved and valued and that's general. It doesn't always work out that way but people do tend to live into the identities that they're assigned.

And so for just a second, I want to talk about these two identities that Jesus assigns to us, the salt and the light. So salt was used for all sorts of things in the ancient Near East, things that we're familiar with and things that we aren't. So for example, we still salt meat today. We cure it with salt and they did that too. So salt was often a preservative that was used to keep their meats clean. They would also salt their foods to bring out flavor just like we do. One of the things that they did that we don't do is that they would use salt as almost like a detergent for sacrifices. So before they would offer a sacrifice, they would put salt on it and that would cleanse it, that would make it clean.

And so all of these different ways that salt was used shows us how valuable it was and salt is still valuable but as valuable as it was, it's also subtle, right? Like you might not be able to see the salt in your food but you know that it tastes better just like the chicken that was lacking major flavor in the dish that I told you about. Jesus is saying to the disciples, "I've created you and I've chosen you to be a valuable presence in Israel. You're here in this place to cleanse arrogance because you're walking in humility. You're here to preserve what is true because you're walking in integrity. You're here to enhance joy because you are walking in hope and that's not always the loudest way for us to exist in the world.”

Sometimes it is subtle like salt but light is a little different. There's no subtlety to light. If you are a city shining on a hill, there's no way to hide that, right? Light is gonna serve two purposes. It's gonna brighten up a darkened room so that you can see clearly or it may serve as a guide for us. And I'll tell you that I do not like the dark at all. I even I sleep with a TV on at night so that there's just a little bit of light.

The weekend before I moved to Minnesota, Manuel wanted to give me like a weekend trip away and so we went to Asheville which is a city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and he wouldn't tell me what we were gonna do or where we were going. So we get there and he has Airbnb'd a yurt out in the middle of the woods and it was beautiful until the sun went down. It was so dark we couldn't see anything like we were alone in the woods and so there was a fire pit outside and we decided that we were gonna try to light a fire. So we light this fire in the fire pit and I'm sitting there with a flashlight just like panning in the woods because I would constantly be hearing things rustling in the woods that I couldn't see and he said, "I think I just saw a skin walker." And I said, "Dude, if you say skin walker one more time, I'm gonna run out of these woods like Snow White and I'm gonna go home." That trip was amazing but it was so dark out in those woods and I was thankful for the light.

Jesus wanted his disciples to exist in such a way that the neighbors around the people would be able to say, "I am thankful for the light. I'm thankful that I can see clearly and I can experience beauty. I'm thankful that I know what righteousness looks like lived out in service and in love." And so if I could just leave you with one word for this week, that one word is impact and I wonder in our daily lives if we're considering the impact that we could have as salt and light to make this world a little bit brighter.

Constantine was credited with making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire but he had a nephew and a successor named Julian and Julian wanted to bring back the old gods and here's what Julian's complaint was. He said, "Have you looked at these Christians closely? Hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked, the sun shines for them but they don't see it. All their desire is to suffer that they may come to die." That sounds more like Wednesday Addams than Jesus to me. Julian felt like the Christians were really putting a damper on his empire. The impact that we can have as followers of Jesus is either going to be positive or negative depending on our willingness to live into the purposes that God has given us.

And if the salt isn't salting and the light isn't shining then our impact is going to be diminished and if I'm being honest I'm kind of concerned about the impact that Christianity is having in the world right now. It seems like our faith is known for the abuse that it covers up rather than the truth that it tells. It feels like our faith is known for the people that it oppresses and suppresses rather than the people that it frees and unfortunately that's always been true even in the Roman Empire but you know what's also been true? The salt has never stopped being salty. The light has never stopped shining and we are not going to allow that light to go out now. We have to continue on our watch to make sure that that light is shining and that the earth around us is salty. Jesus says to let your light shine so that others may see it, the good works that you do and that word good carries a lot of weight because it's not just moral good that word is actually beauty.

So how we exist in the world can inspire beauty and goodness. We are people of good news after all and so I want us to begin asking ourselves individually and corporately as a congregation how we can serve as a conduit for goodness. How can we bring grace and justice and reconciliation into our communities? How can we as a congregation offer ourselves as an offering to the community around us? We can choose to waste our influence or we can choose to make an impact. So from the small decisions that we make individually to the corporate decisions that we make as a congregation, we have the opportunity to be who God created us to be and I for one am so excited to be on this journey with all of you to figure out what it looks like for the table to continue to be salt and light in this world. So may we continue to have a beautiful impact on this community as we continue to follow in the ways of Jesus together. Amen.