February 9, 2020 “In, But Not Of” – Matthew 5:13-20

Matthew 5:13-20
“In, But Not Of”
February 9, 2020 – Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Andy Warhol, the artist, said “Everyone is famous for fifteen minutes.” I’m pretty sure it’s not true. Most of us are not famous even for fifteen seconds. We live and die in insignificance. My blog gets at most 2 or 3 visits a day and the majority of those are very likely advertising bots trying to leave bogus comments with links to other sites. Nope, not famous at all. The closest any of us may come could be the authors among us. The rest of us live and die in quiet obscurity.

Yet Jesus said something remarkably similar to what Andy Warhol did. Looking out at a crowd of ordinary people who wanted to follow Him, He told them in verse 13, “You are the salt of the earth.” You have a significance equivalent to that which salt has for life on earth. As salt flavors a loaf of bread or preserves a catch of fish, so your life flavors and preserves what those around you need to sustain their lives.

The significance Jesus gave them did not stop with being salt. In verse 14, we read that He told them they were also, “the light of the world.” As light makes it possible to live and work, as light lets the road be seen, as light reveals what is hidden, so they, said Jesus, brighten, direct, and make plain the lives of people around them.

Remember that those whom Jesus said were salt and light are the same ones blessed in the beatitudes, the previous twelve verses. As we saw last week, they were poor, sad, humble, and not-yet-righteous people. Yes, Jesus also blessed the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted, but they were only part of the mix. According to our Lord, these despised, ignored, and often unhappy people were the key players in the game of life.

We have often interpreted the images of salt and light as evangelism. Humble disciples became flavor and illumination for earth as they carried good news around the world. So we suppose the flavor Christians add to the blandness of human life is in our message. By telling others about hope, grace, and faith in Jesus, we too serve as the salt of the earth. And we are light when we share the Gospel truth that Christ has conquered death. Through Him there is an eternal life with God. The light of new life drives out the darkness of dying. So we are salt and light as we tell that good news.

There is certainly an evangelistic thrust to what Jesus says here. Anytime Christians and churches take seriously the idea that our light should not be hidden under a bushel and that, as Rebecca Pippert wrote, the salt should get out of the shaker, it is a good thing. I once preached this text and handed out little packets of salt at the end of the service to remind us to share our faith.

However, making this text out to be primarily about evangelism runs the risk of missing what it is actually about. As Jesus tells us so plainly in verse 16, the light which the world will see in Christians is in their “good deeds,” in what they do, more than in what they say. The illumination is in their action.

Jesus is more concerned here with our behavior than with our message. Read through the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not about sharing one’s faith. It’s about how we behave, starting with how we are to keep God’s law. Far from the idea that the blessing and grace of Jesus make God’s law unnecessary, we are blessed and salted and illuminated to do that which is right.

The beatitudes were so full of God’s grace that Jesus needed to explain that they did not contradict God’s law. He illustrated with two physical necessities of life how it is that the gift of grace makes good living a necessity. Then, in the rest of today’s text, verses 17 through 20, He explained that He was not attempting to overthrow law or morality. Not one letter of the written code, not one tiny fragment of the good and righteous living which God asked for was abandoned by Jesus in His offer of grace. What He intends is to fulfill it all, to make it possible to keep God’s law.

Some Christians could and did, and still do, go off with only half the story. Jesus blessed the spiritually poor. He blessed the folks who only wished they were righteous. He blessed people who had nothing to their credit except sadness or weakness. It would be easy to interpret His message of welcome into God’s kingdom to mean that anyone’s current behavior is also welcome in His kingdom. “Come as you are” could easily become “Keep doing as you please.” Nothing could be further from what the Lord meant to say.

Grace and righteousness belong together. Yet over and over the Lord’s own fusion of grace and law has been transformed into a fission reaction. It creates two dangerous elements. In Paul’s letters in the New Testament and throughout church history right down to 2020, we see Christians who acquire the notion that forgiveness of their sins means that sinning doesn’t matter. Jesus warned against them in verse 19, those who break commandments and teach others to do the same. When they do, the salt loses its saltiness, Christians behave the same as anyone else, and the world has an excuse to behave even worse.

On the other hand, in those same letters of Paul and all through the same two thousand years of the church, we find believers who want to add a list of rules to Jesus’ list of blessings. Or they want to make the blessings themselves into rules. Either way, they are so captivated by the call to do what is right that they cannot live with failures. In Jesus’ time they were the Pharisees and teachers of the law. He said in verse 20 that their sort of righteousness is not good enough for God’s kingdom. It hides the light of grace under a bushel and leaves the world to its own darkness.

Salt and light each have dangerous components. Elementary school science students learn that salt is sodium and chloride. Sodium was discovered and isolated by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1807. In its pure state, sodium is a dangerous metallic substance. It reacts violently and explosively with simple water. In a laboratory, pure sodium is stored in mineral oil, in order to guard against contact with water vapor in the atmosphere.

Chlorine was first discovered in 1774 by Karl Scheele. Later, in 1810, it was Sir Davy again who identified it as an element. It is a greenish-yellow, poisonous gas with a disagreeable, suffocating odor. It is a strong oxidant, which means it burns what it contacts. Chlorine became the first chemical warfare agent, used by Germans during World War I to effectively corrode the lungs of their enemies from the inside out.

By themselves, sodium and chlorine are dangerous, volatile substances A common fact of chemistry grates against our common sense. Basic table salt is composed of those two frightful elements, sodium and chlorine. Somehow together the explosive metal and the corrosive gas become a compound which is not only safe but necessary for human life.

Light has its own dark side. Visible light is just one part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is a matter of the length and frequency of the waves. Below the frequency of visible light there are radio waves, microwaves, and the infrared. Above the visible spectrum are ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. Only a difference in frequency stands between the light that lets us see and waves which can cook food or give you skin cancer. We see, as it were, through a crack between dangerous extremes.

You know our world is dark and yet we are bland about it. In Texas, a child shot and killed another child on Friday. We hardly notice because it happens everywhere. In China a doctor trying to warn about the Coronavirus was silenced. That kind of thing happens everywhere. In our country, we have decided to believe that lying government leaders and deceitful business are normal. We have been misled to believe that anyone who disagrees with us is evil and opposed to God. We need a great spilling of salt and a flood of light.

Christ our Savior asked His followers and is asking us to combine a free, gracious and accepting love with a costly, committed and demanding righteousness. The only light which will drive out the world’s darkness is a life positioned somewhere between grace construed as a license to sin and law construed as condemnation of the sinner. Being salt and light means combining that which other people believe can’t be combined and then standing right in the middle where no one on any side is happy with you.

Salt and light are the Lord’s pictures of how a new and different sort of life arises in those who hear and follow Him. Through the living, dying, and living again of Jesus, there appear in the world men, women and children who live at peace with God by accepting His grace and who do what is right by God through obeying His law. When the world sees people living like that, verse 16 says they will “see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” When people look at you or me, is that what they are seeing? Is that how they are responding?

I’ve sometimes excused myself when a person got upset with me by the thought that “It doesn’t really matter what other people think about me. All that matters is what God thinks.” The problem for me in such a thought is that here is God, Jesus, telling me that He does care what other people think about me, about you. He wants us to be as tasty and bright in this world as salt and light are in cooking or communication.

Our men’s group read the same thought from I Peter 2 verse 12 Friday morning, “Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they may malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.” Scripture tells us over and over that God means you and I to show the world something different, something better in the way we live.

As I said to the men Friday, it doesn’t really mean being different because you go to church or pray or read the Bible. Christians should do all those things. But if others are going to see the way we act and give glory to God, we will need to be doing things which they can recognize as good. In our reading from I Corinthians 2, Paul said that unspiritual people cannot understand spiritual things. But they can understand when spiritual people behave in ways they themselves would call good.

We’re not going to impress non-Christians much by meeting here and singing and praying and listening to a sermon on Sunday morning. But we may impress them very much by opening the same doors tonight and hosting people nobody else really wants around.

Likewise, those who don’t believe won’t listen much when we quote the Bible to them, but their ears may turn toward us when we tell the truth about shady business or racism when nobody else will speak up.

In other words, to be salt and light in the world means to be doing the good things others wish they were doing but fail to do. It means being kind and honest and courageous when others are being mean and deceitful and cowardly. It means finding a good word to say when some around us are being hateful. It means staying faithful in relationships when another might give up. It means, as Jesus continued to unpack here in the Sermon on the mount, finding ways to treat those we count as enemies somehow as friends.

One way Christians often talk about our situation is to say that we are to be “in the world but not of it.” You might even think that’s a quote from Scripture, but it’s not. It does capture, however, what Jesus was teaching here, what Paul tried to communicate about spiritual wisdom, what Isaiah 58 told us about what God really wants. Christian lives are to be different, to make a difference, in the way that salt and light make a difference.

Jesus talked about two things that shouldn’t happen, salt losing its saltiness and a light being hid under a basket. As the lines from the “Godspel” song go:

But if that light is under a bushel
Brr, it’s lost something kind of crucial…
But if that salt has lost its flavor
It ain’t got much in its favor.

But that’s exactly what happens when you and I live lives which are not that much different from people around us. If we just go to school or work, just cheer for the Ducks or the Beavers, just worry about paying bills or getting good medical care, just vote straight Republican or straight Democrat, then we will be like everyone else. Without being and doing something different, we are not going to add any flavor to or shed any light on the lives around us.

Here is what an ancient Christian letter from the second century said about what we are to be like, salt and light, in but not of this world:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not destroy their offspring. They share their meals, but not their wives.

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life.[1]

How do we become like that? How can we be in and not of, be salt and light? A long time ago my little girl Susan knew I was about to preach on salt and light. She came to me with a passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. “Here it is, Daddy, salt and light!”

The lamp was bright and shiny. There was salt in the bottom of the glass bowl with the kerosene, to keep the kerosene from exploding, and there were bits of red flannel among the salt to make it pretty. It was pretty.

Laura loved to look at the lamp, with its glass chimney so clean and sparkling, its yellow flame burning so steadily, and its bowl of clear kerosene colored red by the bits of flannel.[2]

There was salt and light in that story. I took it away with me to see if it might fit in the sermon. I read a bit further and discovered this: After Wilder describes the lamp and the fireplace and the whole family evening scene, she says, “And then, Pa told stories.”

It was the man telling stories who was the real salt and light in Wilder’s book. He told sweet and homely tales about forgetting your gun on walk in a wood then meeting a panther, about getting punished for staying out too late, and about going sledding on the Sabbath day. Each story taught some simple truth about being prepared, about responsibility, or about honoring God. Interwoven is Wilder’s account of how her father lived up to his stories. He behaved the way his stories taught.

You and I are blessed to be salt and light just like that, to speak and practice the simple truths of God around and with the people God places in our lives. It may be your children, it may be those who work with you, or it may be friends you walk or shop with. God gives you the opportunity to show how the stories of Jesus shape the way you live. Your own life illustrates their picture book of the Gospel. That is how you are salt and light.

When we do confirmation here, young people on Confirmation Sunday get a little salt on their tongues and hold a lit candle. It’s an ancient rite and symbol to remind young Christians of who and what they are. I invite you to imagine that rite happening to you right now, salt on your tongue, a burning candle in your hand. Then go out and be that, salt and light for a world which is dying to taste and to see that the Lord is good.

Amen.

[1] Letter to Diognetus, chapter 5.

[2] (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), p. 38.