Sermon for February 9, 2020 at First Baptist Church of Corbin. Epiphany 5, Year A
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 is 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.
Matthew 5:13-20
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.
Have you ever encountered a worker who who didn’t do enough to earn their salary?
Many years ago, I started a new job, along with maybe ten other people. All of us had to attend one week of orientation. At the end of the week, one person was fired. The rest of us didn’t know why she was let go, but we had a pretty good idea. See, she slept through most of orientation every day. Even when the CEO came to talk to us, she slept through the whole CEO’s presentation. We were astounded: how can she just sleep through it? People tried to nudge her, and she would go right back to sleep. So, it was really no surprise when we learned that she had been let go. It turns out she had a good excuse for falling asleep on the job. She was still working another job where she worked night shifts, so she was up all night working before she came into orientation. Still, we couldn’t fault the organization for letting her go because she didn’t do the work she was hired to do that week, which was to learn her new job.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” When you hire someone to do a job, you expect them to do it. In return, they expect the compensation you promised them for doing the job. A salaried worker’s worth depends on whether they are able to provide value for their compensation.
Did you know that the word “salary” comes from the word “salt”? The reason is that, for thousands of years, salt has been an important source of income and a precious commodity. It has been an important preservative, fertilizer, and has also been used in medicinal ways and in religious rituals. In the times of Jesus, salt was also a catalyst for burning fuel in clay ovens.
A couple of years ago, Todd and I visited the oldest known salt mine in the world, in a small town in Austria. Until 1890, people could only get to the town of Hallstatt by foot or by boat, but this small town has been an important site of human activity for over 7000 years. The salt — or “white gold”, as it was called — made that region of the world extremely wealthy for many years.
Salt, then, has been a precious commodity for thousands of years. Soldiers and government officials would get paid in salt; it was a form of currency. People would trade things for salt, too. Ancient settlements like the town of Jericho developed around salt trade roads. Unfortunately, people would also trade people (slaves) for salt. This is where we get the expression that someone is or isn’t worth “their weight in salt.”
We are tempted to think that if we do enough works of righteousness, we will be worth our weight in salt to God. That the Christian life is a kind of business transaction: if I follow a set of rules or believe in certain ways, I will have done my job; in turn, I should expect to receive my compensation in terms of God’s blessing and favor.
Isn’t that what the people seem to be saying in our reading from Isaiah? “We are following the rules. We are fasting and humbling ourselves. Why aren’t you taking notice?” (Isaiah 58:1-11) In other words, we are doing our part and now we expect our compensation.
One problem with believing that righteousness is about following a set of rules is that we can never follow them perfectly. But even if we could, the biggest problem with this proposition is that it is not enough. It is not enough to appear righteous. It is not enough to be perfect in a religious ritual or set of behaviors. Jesus says, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Remember Jesus’ parable about the workers in the vineyard? He once told this parable about the owner of a vineyard who went out hiring workers from morning until evening. At the end of the day, the owner paid all his workers the same amount, and those who were hired first complained. This parable offends our sensibilities of what’s fair if we view our relationship with God as one of a business transaction. We want fair compensation for work done.
If this is the way things were, there would also be pressure to measure up to God’s standards. There would be fear that we are not worth our weight in salt. But that is not how Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus says, “You, my followers, are the salt of the earth.” He doesn’t say, “If you follow these set of rules or if you achieve righteousness you will be rewarded handsomely, like soldiers are compensated with salt.” He doesn’t say “If you do these things you will be worth your weight in salt.” No, he tells us we are salt. We are not salaried workers; we are salt.
That means we are the precious commodity. We are the white gold, the agents, the catalysts. We are of great value, and a great resource to the world.
This reminds me of a saying from Dame Cicely Saunders that has always stayed with me. Cicely Saunders is the founder of the modern hospice movement. She was trained as a nurse, a social worker, and as a physician, and she was also very active in the Anglican Church. She changed the way we care for people who are dying. One of the things she did when she established the first hospice in 1967 was to give dying people pain medicine on a schedule, rather than to wait until they “earned” their medicine (as she said) by being in pain. That was unprecedented and made a big difference. But what she said that has always stayed with me is this: “All the advances in pharmacology and the new technologies are not the whole story.” She said, “We are medicine.”
It’s not business. It’s personal.
You may feel you have little to offer the world because you don’t have a perfectly holy life. Or perhaps you don’t feel very worthy because you don’t have a lot of knowledge. Maybe you believe you have nothing to offer because you don’t have millions of social media followers. But the word of Jesus to us — to you — is that you are an indispensable, precious resource to the world.
As Jefferson reminded us last week, God operates in and through the lowly and the small. And it is not your work that God is interested in, but you yourself. You are the medicine.
Does that mean that our good works don’t matter? No. It means that we don’t practice righteousness or good works for a salary. We practice righteousness as an expression of who we are, and as evidence of God’s transformation in our lives. There’s freedom in that, because our worth isn’t attached to our works. It also means that God is able to do far more with and through us, because we aren’t tied to a business structure. It’s not business; it’s personal.
Just like the world needs salt and light, the world needs you — your unique heart given to God for service to the world. What would be the use of salt that is never tasted? What would be the use of light that is hidden under a bushel basket? Righteousness isn’t about doing pious things inside sanctuary walls, or for our own ends. We do no favors to anyone when we hide ourselves from the world, or when we refuse to live our God-given, transformed lives out in the world.
We do the world no favors when we use our faith as a means to our own comfort. Salt that is not used or tasted is useless; light that is hidden is useless; but when given in service to the world they are precious, valued, and necessary. The prophet Isaiah says, “You fast only to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. The fast I have chosen is not just to humble yourself for your own sake, but to be out in the world interacting with other people, caring for them, sharing your life with them.” Jesus says, “Let your light shine before others.” Don’t hide under a bushel basket.
Since the 1800s, Protestant churches have developed a tradition of an invitation following the sermon, with an invitation hymn. In our church bulletin every Sunday, the hymn following the sermon is our invitation hymn, when anyone is invited to come forward and profess a decision or a commitment of faith. This is a special time reserved for a public profession of faith, which is a wonderful thing. But sometimes we might think that this is the only part of the service where there is an invitation. The truth is that the invitation is not just in the sermon or in the invitation hymn. The invitation is everywhere in the service, in the prayers and music. The invitation is everywhere in our lives outside of this sanctuary, too. It is all around us, all the time.
What is the invitation to? Is it to become a hired worker so we can receive a blessing in the end? Is it to serve our own interests? Is it to hide from the world? No, the invitation is to give ourselves over to God so we can in turn serve our precious purpose in the world. God is all the time inviting us to be salt and be light, joining God’s work in the world — not as hired workers, but as God’s own children.
Lord, help us to accept your invitation to live out our identity in the world, as transformed children of God.