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Matthew 5:13-20
Last week in service, during the adventure that was finding our faith in the media, hearing Micah read to us and then finding those images and words in the newspapers and magazines in front of us, I also brought up the opening of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, the verses just before the reading for today, that we often call the “Beatitudes.” I mentioned that in the hearing of those familiar words – “blessed are…” – we fall into the same trap that we might today, hearing these equally challenging words from Jesus. We hear the sermon as commanding instead of commissioning. We hear it as a set of impossible goals set before us like the expectation of a perfect SAT score or a flawless day. And then these powerful words just become kind of guilt-inducing, because who does all this stuff? All this “blessed” stuff? Who tries to mourn, like it was holy, or to be meek, like that’s better than being strong, or, especially right now, to be a peacemaker, like that’s better than being the big dog on the block?
The sermon on the Mount is just that – a sermon. It’s as much a way for us to see into the heart of Jesus, at least Matthew’s Jesus, as anything else. When you hear a sermon from me, after all, you are getting a glimpse into my head, my heart, my idea of things…not always a pretty picture. The idea is that such a glimpse gets you all to take a peek inside your own hearts, too. That’s what Jesus was up to on the side of that hill, with the people gathered around him, hungry for a word about their lives and that endless quest for meaning.
We’re in the second of five weeks of passages from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as told by Matthew, a sort of study, if you will, on the character of our faith…the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Here is where I find it. Not in a few lines from Paul, nor the so-called Ten Commandments, (spoiler alert – there are actually a lot more than 10). No, it is here, in this collections of blessings and corrections, of edits and adjustments to the certainties of faithful practice of his time. And let us take note: Jesus doesn’t say, “If you want to become salt and light, do this….” Or, “before I’ll call you salt and light, I’ll need to see this from you….” Rather, he says both simply and directly, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” This is not you ought…this is you are.
This is why Matthew has Jesus follow up the whole salt and light motif with a discussion of “the Law” which, for Jesus’ audience, would have been the set of “do this and don’t do thats” which governed their lives. It is “the Law”, after all, that spells out for the people seeking relationship with God what that looks like and provides practices meant to enlighten people on how their love of God, or even respect for God, means that they treat one another. Ahhh, but how quickly such conventions can become weapons…a fact that was not first noticed by Jesus, but which Jesus borrows from the rabbinic tradition that came before him, and the prophets, who said things like we heard earlier this morning from Isaiah:
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist…
Is not this 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?
Matthew tells us Jesus is not here to abolish “the Law”, but to fulfill it. Now before we take that where it is so often taken, where Jesus comes to supplant Judaism, the New Testament (not even a thing when this is written) as the evolution of the so-called “old testament” we need to pause a moment. This activity has a big 75 cent word to describe it – supercessionism – and it does not come with a pretty history. That’s what drives the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition (which no one expects, right Monty Python fans?) and, of course, the Holocaust.
We’re being setup here, which is a good rhetorical practice on behalf of Jesus. He’s preparing the crowd for what comes next, when he will tell them a “typical” practice, a cultural norm, a “law”, and then change it. We’ll get to this in more depth next week, but suffice it to say this morning that Jesus sees it quite in keeping with the tradition he follows to say that God is still speaking. That’s what we say here in the United Church of Christ. God is still expanding our moral plumb line, still opening our hearts more, still growing our minds and making room for the possibility of creation, happening still, the Spirit alive among us.
All of that sounds lovely…I can imagine the people on the side of the hill thinking to themselves, “But I need something I can hold onto.” That goes on now in religion, where the biggest churches, during uncertain and troubling times, are the ones with certainty. The TV evangelists and the “rock star” Christians, they’re the ones that do tell you that you are blessed, but none of the blessed things are ones on Jesus’ list. It’s blessed are the stockholders and the “job creators”, the drone strikes and the prison industry….blessed is whatever keeps us thinking we’re safe.
What Jesus is going to lay down for those gathered to hear him is a certainty based on something other than security. It will be the same thing Isaiah called for years before him, a tradition that holds trust and values, that claims an identity and then lives it.
I can remember distinctly growing up and having my father sit my brother and I down after one of us had done something he wasn’t happy with – most likely my brother – and telling us how we should behave. We had the typical teenage arguments about what those kids were doing, about how this friend got to do this, or that friend got to do that, and he’d set those people out for us, as an example and respond like this. That may very well be how they behave, but that’s not what Moore boys do.
I really don’t know if that was just Dad’s way of maintaining some kind of “family honor” or making sure that it wasn’t his kids causing problems. Maybe I need to ask him about that. The impact that it has had, though, I can speak about. It made me think that my task…MY task, as the person who I am, attached to my name and my identity, was to make the world a better place, even if it was just for a few feet around me. It made me feel connected in my moral life to my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, all the way through to the fields of County Cork, Ireland and the lowlands of Scotland as a tradition, a pattern, a story.
When we hear, “The Law”, we think of the system of regulations and statutes that you get pulled over for disobeying, or brought in front of a judge for breaking. But to the ancient Hebrews, the ones whose culture surrounds and saturates Jesus and his listeners, “The Law” is a way of life. It is a definition. It tells them WHO they are, in a sea of competing gods, directives, demands and governance, “The Law” says this is what WE do.
Jesus asks his followers to remember who they are, not just what the law dictates that they do. For it cannot cover every possible scenario and at some point the call of identity will be on us and we’ll have to act out of our values and tradition. There is nothing in the Bible about green-card holders, the military-industrial complex or mass incarceration. There is no Dakota Access Pipeline in any book of the Bible, I’ve looked…and not even one mention of the President, the balance of powers, supply-side economics or the Constitution. We’re on our own for that…just us and the Holy Spirit, whispering in our ears that “Jesus people” don’t do that, they do this…
Salt, scholars tell us, was used in the ovens of the time…earthen, outdoor ovens often called…in Aramaic…the “earth.” The salt was used as a catalyst to make the fires burn, so when salt had lost it’s saltiness, there was no longer any catalyst…no way to facilitate the fire. And the lamp stood in the house as a very real example of light pushing away darkness…not everywhere, but there…where it was. You are salt and light, Jesus teaches us. Just things to us, things that we have entirely too much of. Our food is laden with it and our environment here in the city saturated with it. But then, for the people Matthew writes to? Well, salt made it possible to live more than hand-to-mouth in an age without refrigeration. Light made it possible to avoid the absolute darkness of the desert night…just in a corner, just a lamp enough to set a beacon in the inky blackness.
We are small things…a little spice to flavor the meal, a very local source of illumination. That’s not who we ought to be. It’s who we are. Here at this table, we are reminded in the sharing of this simple meal…a small thing to be sure…that we have been created in God’s image, each of us, and that we bear the marks of it. Compassion and hope, trust and love really do live inside each of us and when we find ways to live that out into the world we aren’t being who we ought to be, we’re being who we are. When you say, “A-Salaam-Alyekum”, to the women in the hijab at the checkout because you know she often hears something else, when you buy a veteran a cup of coffee or smile at the staff who takes care of your parent, or try very hard not to dehumanize the things we disagree with, it’s not insignificant. It’s salt. And light. It’s a scary world right now, friends…a scary world. But it needs catalysts and lamps, especially small ones.
So remember who you are, not who you ought to be. Come to the table…and remember.