More Salt, Please

Epiphany 4

Matthew 5:13-20

Isa. 58:1-9 (3-8a)

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching us what it means to be his followers, what it looks like to turn our lives towards God’s arriving kingdom.  Many religious people, in Jesus’ day and in our own, become professional arguers -- people who spend most of their energy convincing themselves and others that they’ve got everything right.  Jesus calls us to spend our energy “doing” God’s will, being the people who’ve caught sight of God’s kingdom come near.  Jesus cuts to the chase with a warning: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Archaeologists working in Eastern Syria in 1920 discovered a church building from the early third century.  Yale was involved from the early stages, and that church was dismantled and reassembled in Yale University Art Gallery, where it remains.  This is the oldest church building ever discovered.  And it’s remarkably well preserved. The hall where this group of Christians worshiped was attached to a house.,with a beautiful marble baptistry and a large mural of Jesus walking on the water.  So here was a group of Christians living by ritual of baptism and stories of the gospels.  

The church was located in a walled city called Dura-Europas, high on a cliff above the Euphrates River, in what is now eastern Syria.  Dura-Europas sat at the eastern border of the Greek (and then Roman) empire.  The city was destroyed by war in 250 A.D., but before that it had been a busy military garrison and active commercial center (N/S on the Euphrates and E/W travel as well).

The city had a diverse religious culture.  Archaeologists have discovered a variety of temples and shrines to different gods, some Greek, some Roman, some Arabic.  On one particular street there were three houses of worship: a Mithraeum (a Roman mystery religion based on the sun god Mithras, popular with the military), a synagogue, and the church.  From the earliest days of the faith, Christians had to explain to themselves and others why it worshiped here and not down the street at the synagogue.  How do our lives compare to those who worship elsewhere?  The religious options evident at Dura-Europos show what would have been the case in many cities throughout Roman empire from late first century.

During Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, it was primarily Scripture-centered, synagogue oriented Judaism that provided the main comparison and contrast to what he taught.  So Jesus teaches us what it means to follow him by comparing his followers to the prominent and powerful leaders of synagogue life.  And Jesus warns his followers that many of the synagogue leaders were too busy being religious to hear his call to turn toward God’s newly arriving kingdom.

Jesus is teaching us what our lives will look like in this new community.  So obviously the Sermon on the Mount is crucial for us as a new church.  So let’s do our best to hear what he is teaching us and to live it.

1. First, Jesus uses salt and light to teach us how to relate to ourselves.

And we should relate to ourselves with suspicion!  Jesus’ first warning is about the ways our religion can go wrong.  Life with God is kind of like brewing beer or baking a souffle or investing in stocks -- it can, and often does, go wrong.  What Jesus wants from his followers is a community that is self-critical.

A. He warns that salt can lose its saltiness

Jesus’ point isn’t that salt itself can become flavorless.  He refers to a common problem - when salt is mixed with impurities it becomes worthless as a preservative or as flavoring. There is a danger that we as a community of Jesus’ disciples lose our distinctive character.  We blend in, assimilate to the broader culture so much that we don’t make any difference, don’t preserve from rot or add the zest of flavor.  We add no spice.  We exist as a rather uninteresting and unremarkable community.

B. He warns that lamps don’t work when you put them under a bushel.

Jesus’ point is that his community might be tempted to live for itself.  To keep its light to itself.  To put light under a bushel is to try to hold it in, to prevent it from shining out towards others.  There is a danger that we as a community of Jesus’ disciples become invisible.  We might be tempted to retreat or withdraw into our own little cocoon.  Others never get to see a visible sign of what God is doing in our lives.

Here is the tough point: religious people go wrong all the time.  There’s nothing sacred or special about religion.  We don’t get a free pass.  In fact, what we are beginning to learn is that being religious actually makes you more dangerous.  How so?  Religious people are prone to imagine that because they’re dealing with God, with what’s sacred and holy, that the truths they possess have been dropped on them straight from the heavens.  Religious people are prone to a false kind of certainty, confident that only they and no one else has seen God for who God really is.  From the perspective of that fundamentalist certainty, all other views are rivals, competitors, and heretics who must be opposed, silenced, and maybe even destroyed.  

Let me give you just one example from Isaiah 58.  Israel complains to God that their fasting is going unnoticed.  We’re being very religious here, but you don’t seem to be blessing us.  God answers in judgment: your fasting is not a sign of true humility, but a kind of pretend religion.  On your fast day, you oppress your workers and fight with others.  “Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into hour house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”  This is a warning for us too. 

Acknowledging this with honesty enables us to live with modesty.  It also keeps us vigilant and disciplined in the practices of faith like worship, prayer, fellowship, giving, and serving.  These are the ways we keep our hearts open to one another and to God.

In the movie 8 Mile, Eminem defeats another rapper by anticipating the worst that can be said about himself, leaving his opponent nothing to say.  No one should be more critical of us than we are.  While God is true, and good, and beautiful, our community’s response to this love is always partial, always sinful, always in need of continual repentance and renewal.

2. Second, Jesus uses salt and light to teach us how to relate to our surroundings.  

The Beatitudes convey a counter-cultural spirit -- Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart.   So we might assume that what Jesus is aiming at is a life of separatism, or withdrawal.  But the images of salt and light teach just the opposite. Jesus is not gathering a closed, insular, frightened and defensive community.  These images assume an effective relationship between kingdom people and the world we inhabit.  We are taught to relate positively and helpfully to our surroundings.  

A. “You are the salt of the earth”

Before you throw in the towel at what sounds like rhetorical exaggeration, you should know that the “you” here is plural.  You as an individual are NOT the salt of the earth.  “You” as a community of Jesus’ followers are.

Salt used as preservative for meat in a culture without refrigeration, and as flavor enhancer for other foods.  Both ways, the point is the same.  Jesus’ followers are active agents in the world, preserving against decay, adding spice, making a noticeable difference.  Isolation into enclaves that the larger culture can ignore is not a proper response to Jesus’ message.

Salt may need to be retranslated: you are red hot pepper for the whole earth!  We used red pepper or siracha to heat things up until we met Jubi.  She recommended chili garlic paste.  And wow, a little makes a big difference! Jesus expects his followers to be different enough from the surrounding culture to make a difference.  And let’s not throw a pity party that we’re a small congregation in a large, complex, and secular city.  A little bit of salt can do a great amount of preserving and seasoning.

B. “You are the light of the world”

Jesus’ point is not that his followers will always automatically shine like a city on a hill or a lamp in a house.  His point is that it is imperative that we live this way for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.  We are to be a source of publicly visible light.  Of course there are poor motivations for doing things visibly, like drawing attention to yourself, wanting to appear religious or powerful or close to God (see 6:1).  But this visibility is aimed at God’s reputation among our neighbors . . . “Let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

What kind of spirituality is behind this salt and light imagery?  Not a spirituality of trying harder, but the experience of being loved by a God who can be called “Father”.  We need a vision of God’s love that inspires us to a life of good deeds, without the side-effect of making us self-righteous.  We need a way of life full of energetic work but without self-preoccupation.  When Jesus emphasizes that God is our “Father,” this frames the religious life in interpersonal terms.  And remember, the primary function of Father language is not to stress God’s masculinity (since God is not male), but God’s way of relating to us as a loving parent.  Here we have a glimpse into Jesus’ own spiritual life.  What enables us to turn toward God’s kingdom is the experience of being loved by God in the ways parents love children.

3. Jesus teaches us how to relate to the Bible (v. 17-20)

It is true that Jesus directs attention to himself, to God’s presence in his own life, in his miraculous and powerful signs and healings, in his authoritative teaching, and in his suffering and victory over death.  That focus on Jesus as the organizing center of our spiritual lives is what makes Christianity what it is.  But it’s also true that to live as a Christian community is to listen to Scripture.  We are, in a very important sense, a religion of the book.  New discoveries, fresh insights, and innovative breakthroughs have frequently come when groups of people read Scripture together.

As a Jew, Jesus lived in fidelity to the Bible, what he called “the Law and the Prophets.”  Yes, his interpretation of the Jewish Bible brought him into conflict with other Jewish authorities.  But Jesus went out of his way to affirm the ongoing significance of the Torah.  Jesus has not come to “abolish” but to “fulfill” or affirm the Jewish Bible.  The Law and the Prophets have enduring significance for Jesus’ followers.  Of course later on Christians began to gather a body of new texts -- stories of Jesus’ life, accounts of how the church began its life, letters of encouragement and instruction from Paul.  And now this “New Testament” has been stitched back into the Jewish Bible as a gift from God that guides our lives together.

Jesus teaches us that the ongoing reading of Scripture is a mark of our lives.  And he makes a distinction between those who “break” God’s commands and those who “do” them.  Some of the synagogue leaders seemed more interested in arguing and interpreting the Law than they did in living it out.  Worse yet, their way of handling the Law made the religious life burdensome for ordinary Jews.  Jesus wants disciples who go beyond arguing to living.  A life of arguing with others leaves us in control, and full of ourselves.  The point is to read Scripture for help in loving God and our neighbors.  The goal is not to be right, but to be well equipped to love.

We read the Bible not because it’s a conservative force for maintaining the status quo.  We don’t read it in order to justify all the positions we already hold.  We read it because Jesus Christ is present to us in these texts, calling us forward into God’s new kingdom.  How does this look for us?  A big part of our weekly liturgy is aimed at experiencing and performing the narrative of scripture, letting it get into your imagination and heart.  We don’t come for information, but to come to see ourselves as participants in this drama of slavery and liberation, sickness and healing, exclusion and welcome, death and resurrection.  I encourage you to take advantage of midweek Bible studies as a place to explore and ask questions.  And I encourage you to take up practices of reading Scripture as part of your own weekly rhythms.

I got a haircut this week.  My barbershop is staffed by Russian Jews.  I don’t know why.  It just is.  At first I was known as the guy with three kids.  Now I’m just known as “the priest.”  And every time I’m in they ask how you all are doing -- “how’s the congregation?”  This week they wanted more details.  Is it like the Russian Orthodox Church they know?  Well, kind of.  Is it Roman Catholic?  Well, I’m married.  So it’s Protestant, I said, ready to launch into a little European history.  But one barber said, “Oh, I know that.  I’ve seen your group on TV.  The lady Joyce Meyer, and the man Joel Osteen?  [Sigh . . . ].  We might not like being compared to others, but it’s part of life.  It’s part of our faith too.  Unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.