Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20
February 5, 2023
- Being the World’s Salt and Light
I can tell you that Lazelle Jackson and I had some interesting conversation last Sunday after church. In case you were not here, sister Lazelle suffered a sudden, mysterious illness in church and had difficulty leaving the sanctuary in the middle of worship. It was a team effort with a number of you lending a hand to make sure she had the care and attention she needed. That was a beautiful gesture, and I thank you for that. She turned out fine enough, but in the meantime, it was fairly scary. She felt pretty bad about disrupting worship, but she also knows that this was the best place she could be – with church family to help in love.
With everything going on here, I neglected raising prayer for the family and community of Tyre Nichols which was important. It makes me sad to have lost that moment in the excitement. I enjoyed looking through his photography website, and I am sorry he will not be able to continue taking pictures and following his passion for beauty in the world. I am sorry to see serious and troubling problems in our society return again and again. The world needs change as quickly as possible. It always seems like it needs something to change.
There are lots of things that can happen in worship. We are obviously here for the worship of God, to sing and pray, to listen and share, and to learn and appreciate God’s heart, but we are also here for each other as we were for Lazelle. We are here to know the world and to witness to God’s heart for situations like the death of Tyre Nichols. But we can have the most amazing worship that you could ever imagine, inspiring music like the angels’ and maybe finally a good sermon, and as great and moving as that worship service might be, one thing that that won’t happen in worship is that the world will change. You and I need to deeply understand this one simple fact: our worship, even the very best of our worship, will not heal or help the world. No amount of singing and reading and praying and teaching and listening and giving and reciting will benefit the world at all. That is my salty dogness today, but it is true. Worship has always had a hard time making things happen.
Isaiah 58 flies right in the face of people trying to use worship to manipulate God, to appease God and get God to do what we want. The people were not trying to change the world; it had already changed. The people had already been hauled off into captivity to Babylon, but they wanted God to answer their prayers, to honor their fasting, to recognize the worth of their worship. This passage specifically highlights the abuse of fasting as a spiritual discipline. Fasting has been in the life of the children of God a long, long, long time. By depriving yourself of food, you can devote your attention to the worship of God and listening to God’s spirit. Moses fasted on the mountain; Jesus fasted in the desert. Fasting can also get you into trouble if you’re fasting for the sake of fasting. You cannot fast and expect to use it to change yourself. That is a quick road to getting cranky, frustrated, and embittered. It might even sound like I’m drawing on personal experience, and you’d be right.
Fasting, or worship in general for that matter, can easily be self-serving, but the world has no care if you fast or not. Isaiah quickly responds with a much better idea of worship: freeing the oppressed, feeding the hungry from your own table and housing the homeless in your own home, and clothing the naked. If that were our worship, what do you think would happen in the world? If that were our worship, the actual world would be actually helped. It may not be huge. The effects would be small most likely, but our worship would help those around us and make the world a better place. Our worship would bring healing to the children of God around us.
Every time a child goes to bed hungry, where is the worship of God? Every time a spouse is abused, where is the worship of God? Every time a political leader lies and deceives, where is the worship of God? Every time someone is rejected simply because of their color or creed or nationality, where is the worship of God? Every time someone dies because of the greedy narcissism of wicked rulers, where is the worship of God? Every time people are crushed, oppressed, or kept in ignorance in the name of religion, where is the worship of God?
It is next to impossible for us to imagine how important salt was in a time in which there was no refrigeration and spices were only for the rich, or how important light was in a world with NO ELECTRICITY AT ALL. When we lose power, we begin to appreciate how much we depend on light. Some of us fare better than others, but ancient times knew the value of even a little bit of light in a dark world. They knew the value of a little bit of salt. In fact, people were sometimes paid in salt which is why the Latin word for salt gives us our English word for salary.
The point that Jesus is trying to make goes much deeper, however. Salt and light do no good whatsoever if they are not used. Pure salt was hard to find back then, so it was often mixed with other things and needed to be used quickly. If it was not used, it would go bad because of other impurities. Salt just sitting around is worthless. Also, light serves no purpose if it is hidden. It is ludicrous to imagine having a light and hiding it. It is pure insanity to imagine having something so precious, so important, so useful as salt or light and not using them. Who would buy a Rembrandt and lock it away to never ever look at it? Who would achieve a pilot’s license and never fly? Who would build a home and never live in it? Who would love God and leave our worship at church?
This is one of the great Christian fallacies. We get it in our heads that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, so that is the day we do all of the “God-stuff.” The other days of the week are our time, so we can do whatever we want, act however we want, serve however we want. Salt and light are both either very useful or very useless in this reading. Every day that we are not living for the love of God is an entire day we have thrown away the salt or covered the light. I don’t think we can we afford to lose any day completely. There must be some moment that any follower of Christ can give a little salt or a little light. The beautiful thing about salt and light is those images apply to anyone and everyone. All people can be salt, and all people can be light.
It may surprise you to learn that when I was going through the initial process of becoming a minister, the committee in my presbytery (the Committee on Preparation for Ministry) had reservations about my being a church pastor. They thought I might be better served as a teacher or some way other than pastor. Serving in a church was something they were not sure was up my alley. I will not even say they were all wrong. It has been an interesting road, and I am very much not the same person I was back then. What was important to me, though, was sharing in the presence of God in a church family. That’s what I needed to do. If I could help facilitate the presence of Christ in a church community, then that is what I wanted to be and do. While I am still mining for salt and trying to find my matches, if I can work on this, I know anyone else can, too. That’s the gospel truth.
Jesus noticed back then that people might not believe what he was saying or take him seriously, “Oh, he is just a rabblerouser and troublemaker trying to subvert our traditions and accepted truths.” That was the furthest thing from the reality, as we know. He was with us to show us the true Law, not the law that had been distorted by human approximations of holiness. The pharisees were literally the most righteous people around. No one cared about following the Law of God as much as the pharisees, and there were pharisees who were good and right and kind, those who did help people and even those who followed Jesus, but many of them liked to toot their own horns. They took their hearts for God and let them grow weak and dim for the people of God.
It is no accident that right after the beatitudes, our reading from last week, we have this reading today. We have turned from blessings to service. Maybe, just maybe, we come to worship and find a blessing, find ourselves blessed. God is with us! Amen and Hallelujah! Now what are we going to do about it?
Our worship service today will not help the world. It will not heal the world. It will not restore the world. A few good salty people just might, though; a few bright hearts, minds, and spirits just might, though. Our worship in the actions of God’s faithful people begins here each week. Do not let any benediction or amen here be an end but an invitation to keep loving as God in Christ has loved us. Do at least one act of love each day. Make that time our living worship out in the world as we show the world more of what it needs to see.
To God be the glory. Amen.