Sermon on the Mount Part 2: Salt and
Light
Matthew
5: 13-20 (NRSV)
You
are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its
saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but it thrown out and
trampled under foot.
You
are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after
lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but 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 your Father in
heaven.
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. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these
commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the
kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great
in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds
that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
This week I found my
sermon-inspiration from a rather unexpected place.
You see, I almost always
plan the rest of our Sunday worship service before I write the sermon. Time
wise, that’s just how it works out. I pick out the hymns first, and save those,
and then a little later in the week I plug this week’s hymns into the format
that I use for our bulletins. Then I plug in this week’s scripture readings.
Then I come up with a call to worship, usually based on our
lectionary-appointed Psalm. Then one of the last things I do, before the
bulletin is all ready to get printed and copied, is find a prayer to use as our
“Prayer for Illumination”
This week I really wasn’t
sure what I wanted to use for that prayer. Sometimes I pick our “Prayer for
Illumination” out of the hymnal, so this week I decided to just thumb through
it and see if anything spoke to me. Once I got past the ones that are really
only appropriate for Christmas and Easter, my eyes landed on the one we just
read together.
Of course, I recognized it
immediately when I saw it printed in our hymnal, and I knew most of you
probably would, too. That prayer is commonly called the “Serenity Prayer.” It’s
been used by Christians of all denominations, it’s been set to music, quoted in
popular culture, and recited faithfully by the members of Alcoholics Anonymous
since the early 1940s. Chances are if you’re familiar with any classic or
commonly used prayers, you’re familiar with this one.
I did just a little bit of
homework on the “Serenity Prayer” after I found it in our hymnal. Since, like I
told you, I tend to print and copy our bulletins before I write the sermon, I
found later that I actually made one mistake when I copied the “Serenity
Prayer” into your bulletin—it’s not anonymous. The hymnal says that, but the
prayer as we know it was actually penned by a 20th Century
theologian by the name of Reinhold Niebuhr.
In his lifetime, Niebuhr
wasn’t able to pin down exactly when he first wrote this prayer, and neither
have his children since he passed away in 1971. But we’re pretty sure that the
one sentence that we commonly see and hear, and that we spoke together this
morning, is a small part of a longer prayer by Niebuhr. The full-length version
of that original prayer goes like this:
God, give me grace to accept with
serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which
should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one
from the other.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to
peace,
taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it,
trusting that You will make all things
right, if I surrender to your will,
so that I may be reasonably happy in
this life, and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.
This is the path to peace.
This is the path that Jesus taught us. And I realized, while I was putting
together my thoughts for a sermon this week, that the one-sentence version that
we prayed before, that we’ve heard before, speaks to what Jesus commands of his
followers in his sermon on the mount—particularly the piece of it that the
lectionary appoints for us to hear today.
Because Jesus said: we are
the salt of the earth, and we are the light of the world.
And in order to live up to
those words, we need to be a force of change for that which we cannot accept.
But why these two
images—salt and light?
It’s interesting that while
I was preparing this week’s worship service, I could find lots of
Biblically-inspired works (songs, poetry, prayers, etc) using the image of
light, but not much on this image of salt.
Now that there’s a little
container of it on your table at any restaurant you ever go to, now that you
can buy it by the bag-full at any convenience store when you’re out, now that
we throw it on the ground to do something as simple as melt the ice on our
sidewalk—we don’t see salt the way Jesus’ first century disciples did. In
Jesus’ day, salt was rare, and incredibly valuable.
But more than that, in
Jesus’ day salt wasn’t just for adding a little flavor to your food. Without
salt, you couldn’t eat at all. You couldn’t live without salt. There was no
other way to preserve your food, meat especially.
Jesus tells his
disciples—the twelve who followed him then, and the many who follow him
now—that we are that incredibly precious commodity. We are salt. And it’s not
just that we’re a source of salt. We are the salt of the earth. We’re it.
And we have a huge
responsibility. It’s up to us, and us alone, all of us who love God and
believe—it’s up to us to keep the earth good. It’s up to us to save the
earth—to show stewardship of our environment and all living things by
protecting what God gave us. It’s up to us to save what is good about the
earth—to protect the love, kindness, and justice that God commanded of us.
And this isn’t always a fun
process—if you’ve ever heard the phrase ”putting salt in the wound”, then you
know that what Jesus calls upon us to do isn’t always comfortable. But there’s
a saying—we’re here to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.
But in order to save,
protect, and preserve the earth, we need to first take care of ourselves. Jesus
was very concerned about this on the day he had this discussion with his
disciples. He told them, “…but if salt has lost its taste, how can its
saltiness be restored?”
Jesus didn’t go on to answer
that question, but his disciples knew what he meant. In those days, when you
used the same supply of salt repeatedly to preserve your food, that supply
would end up getting dirty, as other things mixed in with the salt and diluted
it. Your salt was only good if it was pure. If your supply got contaminated,
you needed to cleanse it.
That’s what we come here on
Sundays for—to worship together, to put aside the things that distract us, and
to focus just on God, so that we can purify our hearts and minds to go and be
the salt of the earth when we leave this place.
Jesus calls us to be a
shining example of his love, so that others may understand him just by looking
at us. We are the light of the world. We are God’s light.
But the thing we can lose
sight of, because of our modern sensibilities, is that Jesus didn’t mean that
each one of us is like a giant spotlight, showing others the way to God.
Jesus’ disciples didn’t have
those kinds of lights. They had oil lamps—a single wick kept going by a dish of
oil.
That’s not a very powerful
light source. That’s not even enough to light up a room. If we work together,
we have enough power to light up our whole church, but there’s still a lot we
just aren’t strong enough to do.
We need to have the peace to
able to accept what we can’t change-- our own limitations. And the might sound
like de-motivation, but it’s actually very important.
Because we can’t do our work
without humility. We need to know that we are only just a small part of the
whole picture to God. We need to not get frustrated and lose hope when, in
spite of our noblest efforts, we still see corruption in the world. We can’t do
everything.
But Jesus assured us, his
disciples, that not even a single stroke of God’s law would pass away until it
was fulfilled. In time, in God’s time, there will be peace and justice.
But until then, may God
grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the wisdom to change the things we
cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Amen.
For more on the "Serenity Prayer", refer to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer .
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