Salt & Light
Sermon on the Mount # 2

a sermon on Matthew 5.13-16
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama


Do you remember the day you got your driver’s license? What an exciting day! I remember that day well—the day I got my license. Much anticipation preceded the big event. A license to drive meant freedom—freedom to go the places I wanted to go, freedom to do the things I wanted to do. It meant not having to rely on other people to get me from place to place. In fact, because my parents were blind, it meant a new freedom for the whole family. I actually got my license early under a hardship provision. And then I got to experience the joy and freedom again when I turned 16 and could finally drive at night.

At the time, a license to drive held promise and possibility; and that was almost all that I could see. I did realize it also meant responsibility. And it was not long before I found myself working at my first real job in order to pay for insurance and the costs of running a car. I gained freedom and power … and with them, obligation.

I say all this to lead up to an important truth about the Sermon on the Mount: Grace and command are two sides of the same knife. They always go together. Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks words of blessing and comfort. Always hidden inside them is his command to live the way God’s people are supposed to live. Much of the sermon contains his commands for how we ought to live; yet always hidden inside these commands is the grace of God. They remind us that God cares about us and therefore about how we live. They show us the kind of good life God wants for us. And of course they only make sense because we are the people of God, whom he has chosen, whom he has called his children. Just as a license to drive never gives freedom without responsibility, nor does it give responsibility without freedom, so the Sermon on the Mount never gives us grace without command, nor does it give us command without grace.

This way of thinking makes sense once you read through the Sermon on the Mount and apply it to each passage, but it may not be the way we naturally think at first. We tend to separate God’s grace from his command: “Command bad. Grace good. God commands us to do things—mostly difficult things and things we don’t want to do—and we just have to accept it, right? But then it is OK because when we mess up God offers his grace and makes things all better.” But that way of thinking is naïve. Command and grace always go together because they work together and both of them have the same goal. Both of them aim at the blessing and well being of us creatures, whom God loves.

Today’s passage is an excellent example of how command and grace go together. Christians are accustomed to hearing this as a command and warning. Jesus tells us, “You are the salt of the earth!” And we begin to fret, “What does that mean?” And once we figure out what it means, that is our job description, and we had better get busy or we will lose our saltiness, and that is a very bad thing. Jesus says, “You are the light of the world!” And we fret, “That sounds like a hard job. Do we have to be?” Then we read on and find he has cut off our escape by telling us not to hide our light under a basket. So, like someone drafted onto a committee they really don’t want to be on, we resign ourselves and say, “OK, we are the light of the world. Whee!”

My point is: Too often we hear this passage as a command—which it is—but we miss the grace. If we had read our Old Testament carefully and soaked it all in, we might not hear this passage as command at all. We might be blown away by the brazen, radical, unexpected new thing that Jesus is saying! We will get to the command, but let’s not miss the grace!

Remember that the Sermon on the Mount contains Jesus’ teachings for the church. The crowds are present, but it is to his disciples that Jesus directs these words. When he says, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world,” he is talking to a motley band of fishermen and tax collectors. He is also talking to that fascinating assortment of ordinary people who meet for worship at the corner of Airport Boulevard and Sage Avenue. And the audacious statement he makes is this: You are the people of God!

If that does not immediately thrust you into a state of delight, despair, and confusion, it is probably because we have heard it so often we have domesticated it. Through familiarity, we have learned to take this statement with a grain of salt, as it were. It should blow us away. Jesus has just begun the Sermon on the Mount by turning everything we thought we knew upside down. He calls blessed a lot of people we usually feel sorry for. As I said last week, he is not giving advice; he is preaching Good News. God is doing something. God’s kingdom is breaking into our world in an alarming way. When we feel as if we are getting the shaft, we need to remember to look at things the way God does and to remember we are blessed.

Now he comes to today’s passage, and what does he do? He gives to his disciples the mission of God’s people. That’s what I meant about the Old Testament. The Old Testament tells the story of God’s covenant with Israel. By the way, when I use the word story, I am not implying it didn’t happen. I mean that God has met certain people and done certain things, and we can talk about that. Right at the center of Old Testament faith is something God did. God chose a people! It started back with Abraham. God had a problem. The world is messed up. What to do about it? God’s solution was to create for himself a special people. This was Israel.

Now at times, Israel got confused and imagined that God chose them because he loved them and hated everyone else. They thought their purpose in God’s plan was to enjoy God and thumb their nose at a lost and dying world full of godless heathen. But that was a mistake, as even a casual reading of the Old Testament shows. As far back as the call of Abraham, God had promised, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” There was always this conviction that Israel had been chosen, not for her own sake, but for the sake of the world. Israel was to the world what a priest was to a people. And the prophets dreamed of a day when the nations of the world would stream to Jerusalem to learn about God and worship him.

The point of the Book of Jonah is that God loves the rest of the world. If God loved the Assyrians, Israel’s enemy and the worst of the worst, then whom doesn’t God love? Micah preached the vision of all nations coming to Jerusalem to learn the ways of God. Foremost among those who saw things this way was Isaiah. The Book of Isaiah is actually a work written over a period of time, but all the writers had the same ideas about God and his people. Isaiah 42 describes the Suffering Servant, whom Christians recognize as Jesus. It calls him: “A light to the nations.” Isaiah 49 echoes this and adds, “that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” In Isaiah 60, Israel itself is called the light. This is important, because Jesus was an Isaiah-guy. His own understanding of God and God’s people and especially his own vocation can be found right there in Isaiah.

The idea was: God’s people are not special because God loves them more than everybody else. God’s people are special because God loves everybody, and his people have a special role in his plan. They are the light of the world. Their city, Jerusalem, is a city set upon a hill. Jesus comes up with the line about salt.

In today’s passage, Jesus takes the mission of God’s covenant people, and he gives it to his disciples. They—we—are the people of God! That is the grace in this passage. Savor it before you move on to the command.

And command there must be, because God’s people have a mission. God has chosen us for a reason. Jesus expresses our mission using colorful metaphors from everyday life. “You are the salt of the earth.” Why salt? What does Jesus mean?

In the first century—in fact in almost every century until the advent of refrigeration—salt was used primarily to preserve foods, especially meat. This, I believe, is the point of comparison. God’s people are to the world what salt was to food—a preservative. Now we know that pure salt cannot lose its saltiness. It is salt. But in the first century, they did not have pure salt. They had salt that was more or less pure, and it could go bad. The sodium chloride could be leeched out, say in damp or humid conditions, so that what you were left with didn’t have any pure salt in it. When that happened, what you were left with was worthless. You simply had to throw it out. And this is how we ought to understand Jesus’ warning about losing our saltiness. We are the salt of the world. What happens if we lose our saltiness? When the preservative goes bad, what hope is there for the meat?

Darrell Johnson, a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, has an interesting illustration on this point. He boldly suggests that the welfare of any city is directly related to the health of its churches. Why are America’s inner cities so filled with crime, poverty, and hopelessness? Could it be—he asks—because by and large churches, especially evangelical churches, have fled the inner city? It is a question worth pondering, anyway. And we might ask a dozen more like it. Where does the world suffer because Christians have neglected our vocation to be salt? I personally find this unique contribution of Jesus to be significant. When he spoke about the light of the world and the city on the hill, he was borrowing from the Old Testament. The point of that comparison is a bit different, and we will get to it soon. But he seems to have come up with salt on his own. I wonder: Is it because he envisioned a new day for God’s people, in which we would be mixed in with the rest of the world? Ancient Israel was situated with neighboring countries around it, but Israel was a distinct society. Its differences made it a light to the nations, but you can be a light from a distance. To be salt, you have to mix right in with the meat. You cannot stay separate.

In this way, Christians must interact with the world around us. We must strike a delicate balance. Because we are salt, we cannot be a holy huddle. We cannot hide ourselves away in a Christian ghetto, or even worse, hide our faith as if it had no relevance in the public square. Later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus will criticize showy religion designed to impress others, but he knows nothing about religion that would be a purely private matter. Following him encompasses all of life. We are salt, and that means mixing with the world. Yet on the other hand, because we are salt, we cannot be just like the world either. If we lose what is distinct about us as Jesus’ disciples, then we lose our saltiness. We become just like everyone else. And when that happens, we don’t do anyone any good.

Now, you might think it would be impossible to make both these mistakes at the same time, but I believe the churches in America today have found a way. We have become too much like the rest of the world. What is distinct about us? Our values are the values of our culture. We don’t stand out. Why? Probably because we are content with go with the flow instead of swimming against it. At the same time, we have listened when our culture has told us our faith is a private matter. So we are religious at church, and we don’t think about all the ways our faith applies to what is happening in the world today.

You are the salt of the earth. You are also the light of the world. Here’s another illustration I have pirated from Darrell Johnson: A little girl and her mother were in church, and the sanctuary had beautiful stained glass windows showing heroes from the Bible. The little girl asked her mother: “Mommy, who are those people?” Her mother answered: “Those are saints.” The little girl thought a moment and said, “Oh, I see, saints are people who let the light shine through them.”

She is right. The light does not originate in us. We reflect the light or let it shine through us. Jesus is the light. In the Old Testament, Israel was supposed to be the light of the world. They struggled and never quite got it right. That’s where Jesus came in. As Israel’s Messiah, he took Israel’s job and got it done. He is the Servant Isaiah spoke of, whom God gave as a light to the nations. Now that he has come, God’s people includes everyone who belongs to him—whether Jew or Gentile. God’s plan was to bring the nations of the world into his family, and it was not the failure of Israel but Jesus’ successfully fulfilling Israel’s role that made that a reality.

I say all this to raise a question: Israel was never able to be the light God intended it to be. What makes us think we will do any better? My answer is: We won’t. We will struggle and fumble around, just as the church has for two thousand years. Sometimes Christians have gotten things right. Other times we haven’t been close. So when Jesus tells us we are the light of the world, he has not given us an excuse to be proud of ourselves. Instead we are reminded of our own need for grace. Jesus is the light of the world. We reflect that light. We let it shine through us. We are lamps, and he is the flame. This is why we never hide our light. Even though we do not give a witness worthy of him, even though we fall down on the job over and over again, we still do not hide our light, because our light is Jesus. He gives grace to us, and he will give grace to any who come to him.

We are salt. We are light. One final question comes to mind: Where does the world today need preserving and illuminating? How is it corrupt and dark, and what can we do? As I reflect on that, several things come quickly to mind, and I’ll bet you can come up with a few yourself.

The world today has lost confidence in truth. Everything is relative. No one has a firm foundation. No one has a certain anchor. Life is like a box of photographs that somebody tossed up into the air, and they landed all mixed up; now they don’t make sense; they don’t tell a story. Christians stubbornly cling to Truth—with a capital “T.” We cannot give that up, because we know the one who is truth.

The world is full of lonely people, who are lonelier when they are with other people. Community—real community—has become rare. Christians, if we are willing to be vulnerable enough to truly love one another, have the chance to shine a little light in this area.

The world has no moral compass. Right and wrong are decided based on what I want to do as long as I do not seem to hurt anyone else, at least not too directly. The result is chaos in our homes and communities. The world kids itself, but Christians know better. We can model a different way to live, and show by how we treat one another and how we treat our own bodies a better way to live—God’s way.

I could go on. I should say something about poverty. I am convinced that if Christians do not take an interest in poverty that no one else will. I could go on, and you could too. I could also begin listing ways we at Westminster are trying to be salt and light. We begin hosting with Interfaith Hospitality Network today, and that is something. Most churches did nothing about the moral confusion that came out of General Assembly this year, but we took a stand. Our session approved a statement that has been adopted by some other churches in our presbytery and at least one out in Oklahoma. I could go on, but I need to wrap this up, and one thing more needs to be said.

We could solve all these problems, as well as any other societal problem you can think of, and still not be salt and light. What the world needs above all else is to know God. In God we find our joy and purpose. The root of all problems is: Humanity is estranged from God. We need to know him as our Father—who created us, sustains us, gives us every good thing, in whom alone we find our true worth and happiness. And it is only in Jesus Christ that we can know God. He is the Mediator. The goal of Israel’s mission was the people of every nation coming to know and worship God. Now that the Mediator has come, our mission as God’s people is to give the world a compelling witness to him. Without him, we are nothing. We can do nothing. With him, and in the power of his Holy Spirit who lives and works in us, we are the salt of the earth. We are the light of the world. We will not lose our saltiness, nor will we hide our light, if we receive his grace, and obey his command, joyfully. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
September 17, 2006