The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Year A
February 5, 2023
The Sermon on the Mount is, in my very humble opinion, the center of the Christian moral life. It begins with the Beatitudes – Blessed are the poor in heart, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. The Sermon on the Mount sets the stage: God’s vision of the moral life is not a set of checklists and rules, but a disposition, a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world.
When I was a kid, Matthew’s Gospel was the one I would read by myself. The church I grew up in read the King James Version, and I had a lovely blue, fake leather KJV Bible with the words of Jesus written in red. I knew that if Jesus said it, I should take it seriously. And the Sermon on the Mount was a solid slab of red Jesus words, three whole chapters of Matthew written in crimson colored letters
As a child, I pored over that text, chewed on it. The words of Jesus were pointing to a set of values contrary to what I saw in the world. Forgiveness. Self-reflection. Loving your enemy. Take the log out of your own eye before you even comment on the speck of dust in someone else’s.
But after thirty years of chewing and devouring and savoring the Sermon on the Mount, it is only now that I realize that I didn’t fully understand what Jesus tells us today about being the salt of the earth, the light of the world.
I always thought it meant that I should be like salt, be like light. I should want to become good salt worthy of its use. In the ancient world, salt was used not just for flavor but to preserve food or even in sacrifices. I want to be good salt. And light – who’s gonna light it and then hide it? But I should want to shine out to the world.
And I thought for a long time that the goal was to become salt, to become light, that we weren’t salt or light, and we needed to become salt and light, that this moral instruction was about changing us from what we currently are to becoming something else.
Morality has this connotation that we aren’t good, and that we need rules in place to constrain our natural impulses in order for us to become good, that we start off not-good and need to become good. So every time we slip up, we slide down to not-good and have to start over.
There are some who say that, without moral guidelines, we’d slip back into our “natural” state and engage in violence, greed, hate, selfishness, that there is this fine line of morality that keeps us from becoming like animals.
But if you’ve really paid attention to animals, you know that animals are also silly, playful, joyful, thoughtful, sometimes even helping other species. What if that’s our clue that our most natural state is, in fact, good! What if the violence, greed, hate, indifference are the stuff that have made us not-natural.
Morality, then, maybe is less of a leash to train us to goodness and more of a brush that brushes away stuff that keeps us from being what God has made us?
Let’s turn back to the Gospel. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.” Notice what Jesus actually says: You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.
He isn’t saying “you could be the salt of the earth.” He isn’t saying “You should be the light of the world.” He says, “You are.”
You are. Or, because ancient Greek has a plural form of you, perhaps it is better stated, “Y’all are the salt of the earth, y’all are the light of the world.” You already are these things. But have you lost sight of who you are, of what you are?
Salt without saltiness… how does it lose its saltiness?
Light that doesn’t shine … how does light not shine?
Salt loses its saltiness when the salt gets so mixed up with stuff that isn’t salt. Light doesn’t shine when it’s covered and hidden away. The salt is just fine, and the light’s just fine. If salt gets mixed with dirt and sand, it isn’t useful as salt anymore – you can’t season a dish with it, now can you? The salt was just fine on its own. And the light, it shines out just fine, but if you cover it and smother it with a basket, the light is no good to anyone.
Salt and light, in their natural state, are just fine as they are – it’s the layers that get stacked on top of them, the stuff that gets mixed in with them that become the problem.
The Sermon on the Mount points out how to unmix the salt and uncover the light. Mercy, compassion, self-reflection, hungering after justice and righteousness, these are the things that are natural to us, the way that God created us. That’s our natural state. The more we live into that, then we benefit the world around us, we give a vision of our original creation – and our new creation in Christ.
Our natural state is like the reading from Isaiah: feeding the hungry, aiding the oppressed.
Our natural state is like the reading from First Corinthians: humility, knowing the Spirit of God in our hearts. Our natural state is salt of the earth, light for the world. Amen.