Matthew 5:13-16
High school was a mixed blessing for
me. I wasn't Irish, I lived on the wrong side of town, and being an
introvert, I had trouble making friends. In my graduating class
there were about 45 kids. Most of these I had known since first
grade. By the time high school rolled around, everybody had settled
into their appropriate social sphere. There were the class leaders
of course. And the jocks and cheerleaders. There were a few class
clowns and a couple of loners. And there were me and my very few
friends, who you would probably call Nerds today. We couldn't
understand why everybody wasn't interested in comic books and
learning to play chess. We couldn't see the point of school dances,
and when we went, we would keep the walls from falling down. And we
would feel a little envious when someone threw a birthday party and
we didn't get invited. But that's life.
There was one guy in our class,
though. He stood out because everyone liked him. He could sit at
any table in the lunchroom and be welcomed – and he did. He was
the guy who invited the awkward guy to join him and his friends at
the table. He was the one who would dance with the girls who no one
else would dance with. And he did not seem to belong to a clique,
although he could have.
He was different. He was the salt of
the earth.
Today Jesus tells us that we ARE the
salt of the earth, we ARE the light of the world. Most of the time
we think this means that we are supposed to give good example, we are
supposed to live exemplary lives so that all those pagans out there
will be shamed into converting. But I think Jesus is telling us more
than this.
In Jesus' time, there were two sources
of salt – you could evaporate sea water, and you would be left with
a mixture of salt crystals and sand and whatever else had been around
in the water. Nowdays such salt can be further refined, but not
then. So you had a kind of brown flaky mixture that had odd flavors
and wasn't of great quality and smelled like rotten fish. The other
kind of salt came from mines. Here you could find pure salt
crystals. Even today, there are botiques that sell different kinds
of salt that come from different mines. We have a large package of
pink salt I bought in a moment of weakness that came from tibet.
This mined salt was salt of the earth. This was the pure stuff, the
stuff they used to flavor food, to preserve meat, to use in
medicines; this was the salt that was used as payment for roman
soldiers. This was the salt that enhanced human life.
And I think Jesus is saying much the
same thing about you and I being the light of the world. Light kept
to itself doesn't do any good. Light on a lampstand is useful to
everyone in the room, not just the one who owns the light. And it is
when light is available that truth is revealed and lies shown for
what they are.
What do salt and light have in common?
In themselves, they don't amount to anything. No one goes out and
orders salt for supper. No one who posesses a flashlight sits and
stares at the light. Salt is what makes everything else taste a
little better; it brings out flavor. And light brings clarity to our
sense of sight. As I get older, I find I need more light to read.
And that's the situation with us
Christians. We are people of the incarnation. We are the Body of
Christ, not the soul of Christ. We are the ones for whom God made
this beautiful world; we are the ones for whom God created
relationships. God really loves everything he made. He called it
good and very good.
One of the things we incarnational
Christians are supposed to do, I think, is highlight the goodness in
the world, the goodness in each other, and we don't do enough of
that. We keep falling back into the idea that religion is about me
and God, and
