Epiphany and the Season After - Year A -- 2008
Indexed by Date. Sermons for Epiphany Year A
Isaiah 42: 1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10: 34-43
Matthew 3: 13-17
Almost 35 years ago a major land dispute resulted from the formation of Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick and an individual by the name of Jackie Vautour became the centre of that dispute. His refusal to leave was national news. When I was in high school I worked at Camp Abegweit for several summers and met a student minister with the same last name. I am a typical Islander and need to “make connections”, I asked her if she was related to him. Her firm answer was, “No! It’s a common name in New Brunswick!”
About 13 years ago I was taking a tour of the Rexton Pastoral Charge as part of my interview. I asked the woman doing part of the tour something about Jackie Vautour and she wanted to make it quite clear that HE WAS NOT FROM KOUCHIBOUGUAC -the village, he was from Sapin, one of the other fishing villages now within the Park.
Sometimes we go to great lengths to disassociate ourselves from someone who has the same last name or lives in the same community. Sometimes we might need to put an ad in the paper declaring that we are not “that person”. We don’t want to get tarred with the same brush, as it were.
Today is “Baptism of Christ” Sunday. I have just read the passage about Jesus’ baptism from the gospel of Matthew; there are several versions of it in the Bible.
The church, even as early as the Gospel writers had a difficulty with Jesus’ baptism, because, well because, if Jesus was sinless, he would not NEED to be baptized if John’s baptism was about repentance. In today’s passage, John objects, saying that it is Jesus who is supposed to be baptizing him! But Jesus persists and the baptism happens. God’s voice affirms his identity to all with the ears to hear.
John knew that the scriptures made it clear that people had to “get ready” for the coming of the messiah by washing themselves of sin, and this baptizing was his role. It seemed quite clear to him that the sinless one would not need to do this and he felt inadequate.
What would the people think; would they think that Jesus was just another guy out to get rid of his sin before the messiah came?
It seems that Jesus was not concerned about being “mistaken for a sinner”. It seems that Jesus, in order for him to undertake his ministry, had to fully identify with the people to whom and with whom he was going to minister.
As part of the Emerging Spirit initiative of the United Church, surveys were done and it was discovered that “people outside the church find religious people to be judgmental, arrogant and unwilling to listen.”
The well known spiritual leader from India, Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
It seems that the church is in danger of exactly the things that Jesus challenged during his ministry; the problem is not the ten commandments but the way in which SOME powerful religious people tend to apply them TO others and not see them as a challenge to greater faithfulness.
We know what the gospels tell us about Jesus’ birth and we know what they tell us about ONE instance when he was about 12, but that is all they tell us of his life before he appeared at the Jordan on that day.
We don’t know what he was like as a child, but I think that he was a perfectly normal child who may or may not have been “a handful” , but what difference. What difference if he wailed when the cattle in the barn bellowed out their frustration at a baby taking away their manger? He was fully human. He was fully engaged with the life of the peasant family from which he came. The notion that Jesus was “not like us” is far less helpful than accepting the idea that Jesus was like us in every respect but could also teach us about living a life lived in God’s way without needing to be holier than thou.
So here today, we have a Jesus who was quite willing to throw his lot in with us in every respect. He was not a god masquerading as a human who was not really subject to the problems of human life; in Christ God became a human being, fully subject to all of the problems AND THE JOYS of this existence.
When we gather at the font of baptism we are called to remember our own baptism. In a few moments we will baptize the beautiful child her parents have named Remie Bliss. In so doing we are acknowledging that we are part of that great company of fallible human beings to whom Jesus came to show God’s ways. We acknowledge that this Jesus became human to show us the love of God - a love which has existed from our beginning, even from the beginning of time.
We do not baptize as a way to earn God’s love, but to let that love wash over us.
As we baptize and as we remember our own baptism, we remember the life and ministry of the one who risked everything to show human beings the greatest possible love - becoming one of us in every respect, not worried about being called a sinner (or a human being) and living with us showing us, not just telling us about, God’s ways.
We will promise to tell Remie about God’s love and we will promise to show her - but we will not always get it right. I pray that in our broken and fallible attempts and in our successful attempts” she will see God. I pray that she will see that God’s love is all that really matters, for Jesus, and for us. God’s love is what frees us so that we can become the people we were created to be.
Thanks be to the God who has always loved us.
Amen.
Isaiah 49; 1-7
Psalm 40
1 Corinthians 1: 1-9
John 1: 29-42
The TV Commercial for Oatmeal Crisp, a General Mills cereal, uses what might be called “reverse psychology” in its so called “you won’t like it” series of commercials. You could try this cereal, BUT, you won’t like it. I think their next series of commercials will focus on the “you won’t want to share it - because you will have less for yourself” kind of idea!
Usually, a commercial informs the viewing public that a particular product is the “best ever”. After all, why would I change my brand unless this new one was better than the old one?
Today’s reading from John’s gospel tells of two events. We are told of Jesus’ baptism from John’s perspective and then that John’s disciples left him and began to follow Jesus.
John’s telling of these events is somewhat different from the way they are told in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Instead of spending much time on these differences we need to look at John’s telling to see what it was that he was trying to tell his readers.
We are reminded that John the Baptizer had his own ministry AND his own disciples and it would seem to me that his message must have had everything to do with getting ready for the arrival of the “Lamb of God” , the “Messiah”, because as soon as he identified Jesus as this person, the men who had been following him, sought out Jesus to see if they could follow him I instead and were soon proclaiming him as the Messiah.
They ask Jesus what seems like an odd question at first, “where are you staying?” but instead of telling them he invites them to see for themselves. Of course they are not really interested in his accommodations! They aren’t interested in the bathrobes in the closet, the contents of the mini-bar, the mints on the pillow, the thickness of the towels or the CAA discount!
It’s an expression similar to our asking questions like, “Where do you stand?” “What is your message?” “What do you want from people?” They are interested in who he really is. Is he really worth their lives?
After they had spent some time with him, and unless I read the story incorrectly it was only part of a day, one of them, Andrew, went and found his brother Simon and gave him the good news, “We have found the Messiah”, and then he took him to meet Jesus.
Why does the author of John’s gospel tell us that the word spread from one follower to another?
It seems to me that part of John’s message is that the Christian message spread from believer to believer. Early believers were people who could not resist telling others who they had found - they could not resist telling anyone they met that the hopes of generations were met and realized in Jesus.
Maybe the terms “Messiah” and “Lamb of God” need a little explanation. They came into the Christian church from the Jewish faith, and while the first Christians would have understood them, 2000 years later we have largely lost sight of what they meant to the early Jewish believers.
The people of Palestine in Jesus day were a culture steeped in the yearly celebration of the Passover, the ritual sacrifice of a lamb which reminded the people of the night in which their ancestors were liberated from Egypt and saved from death by the strategic placement of the blood of this lamb on the doors of their houses. As the story in Exodus tells us, when the “angel fo death” saw the blood the house was left alone, but if there was no blood the oldest son in that house was killed. The people of Egypt were so traumatized that they let the people of Israel leave that very night. Its not a pleasant story, but there it is. For the people of Israel it is a story of freedom and of the salvation of their nation. Really, it is the beginning of the story of their transition from being a “people” to their becoming a “nation”
The belief in the coming of a “Messiah” or a religious and political leader came about gradually, over many years, after they had been defeated, invaded, sent into exile and oppressed for generations by much larger nations. The Messiah would come and take power from their oppressors and make their nation as great as it had been under the mighty King David.
Despite the fact that he did not fulfil the political portion of these expectations, Jesus was soon being proclaimed by the church as the Messiah and as the Lamb of God. It only seemed fitting that the first disciples found out from one another as well as being convinced first off by a direct experience of Jesus.
2000 years later the task falls to us. We are the ones who are charged with the responsibility to tell others that we have found the Messiah, the one who has given our life meaning, the community that gives us hope and purpose, a place of worship and peace, a place from which to serve God more fully.
Yet, I think many in the church feel that this is the job of the clergy, the so-called experts, when it’s really everyone’s job. I believe that studies have shown that the people of the church are more effective evangelists than the clergy.
Friends of mine have a motor home and for many years have spent a month or two every spring travelling in the States. When they tell me of the churches they have visited they don’t talk about the wonderful sermons and the friendly clergy, they speak of how welcoming the congregations are; of the many times when total strangers have invited them to their houses for dinner after the church service and the other ways in which these congregations go out of their way to be welcoming.
We think that learning is what happens when experts teach students how to do something. Med Students are taught some things by experts but when it comes to learning procedures the maxim is “see one, do one, teach one.” Of course every major procedure is divided into small steps so you don’t get to do open heart surgery after having watched just one operation! In flying, the people teaching students how to fly small planes are not usually retired airline pilots but people who have qualified on the smaller planes and are working their way up to the larger ones.
Sometimes we think that we are not qualified to be evangelists; we have to leave that to the clergy - the equivalent of the jet plane pilots, you might say, but Jesus does not let you off of the hook that easily.
It’s the ordinary members of the congregation who are the ones to best tell others where the church is and what the church means in their lives.
What do we say when others express interest in our church? Do we offer to pick them up or to pick up a child for Sunday School and then make sure they know when the Sunday School is taking part in worship? Do we tell they we are very friendly and then barely speak to them when they come on Sunday - choosing instead to talk to those we already know?
One thing I know we have to do better is our advertising for church services since we don’t have a consistent worship location. Maybe we need to make maps available for people new to the area, as well as for the tourists in the summer.
One thing we also need to work at, and this is not an easy task for everyone, and that is seeing the worshipping community as our church, instead of a particular building. No matter what building we are in let us practice saying to one another, newcomer or not, welcome to OUR church service today. We can invite the newcomer, “Come to worship with my church family this week. “ or the person we have not seen in a while, “Come back to worship, we would love to have you worship with us again.”
If we don’t promote our own church, who will! If we don’t feel its worth bragging about, why would anyone else want to come? Let us tell the story.
In the words of the great song I first learned at Camp Abegweit when I was a teenager, “I’ll shout it from the mountaintop, I want the world to know, The Lord of Love has come to me I want to pass it on”.
We have found life and hope and love and joy in this community by worshipping and sharing together - why wouldn’t it be up to all of us to pass that on.
Amen.
Isaiah 9: 1-4
Psalm 27
1 Corinthians 1: 10-18
Matthew 4: 12-23
In 2005 an online poll voted for the best religious joke of all time. The winner was the following joke by the odd and rather quirky stand-up comic, Emo Philips. Please remember that it is a joke and not a true story.
“I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said 'Stop! don't do it!'
'Why shouldn't I?' he said.
I said, 'Well, there's so much to live for!'
He said, 'Like what?'
I said, 'Well...are you religious or atheist?'
He said, 'Religious.'
I said, 'Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?'
He said, 'Christian.'
I said, 'Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?'
He said, 'Protestant.'
I said, 'Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?'
He said, 'Baptist!'
I said, 'Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?'
He said, 'Baptist Church of God!'
I said, 'Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?'
He said, 'Reformed Baptist Church of God!'
I said, 'Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?'
He said, 'Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!'
I said, 'Die, heretic scum,' and pushed him off the bridge”.
I really don’t know if there is such a creature as the Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1879 or a Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1915 but some denominations take these things very, very seriously. I do know of several churches who have divided and multiplied, not because they have grown too large , but because the degree of conflict and disagreement means they can no longer work and worship together.
Some of us think that conflict is new to the church and it would be nice if we could all go back to the “good old days” when Christians all got along and congregations were happy places where everyone agreed and worked together with smiles on their faces.
When I was serving in Rexton, one of my parishioners was doing research for a village project and he told me that our congregation was one of those in the middle of the 19th century, which lost members when the session agreed to begin using an organ to lead the singing on Sunday morning. The use of organ music was a very divisive issue in the Presbyterian church of the day.
These days a similar conflict might result from the introduction of musical instruments not usually used in worship in that congregation, or a new hymn book, or women ministers, or women elders, or over putting an item in storage that had been donated and dedicated at some time in the past but was no longer deemed to be useful.
We might laugh - unless that is one of the conflicts in which you have been involved and your position was sincerely held and based in your understanding of what worship was all about.
We know that a significant number of settlers came to the “new world” to avoid religious conflict and persecution in the old one. We also know that some of them then proceeded to set up communities where only their way of looking at things was tolerated.
We probably all know something about the Protestant Reformation and about the Church of England supposedly being created because King Henry VIII wanted a divorce so that he could re-marry.
About 500 years before the Protestant Reformation the churches of the East and the churches of the West split over a phrase in the Nicene Creed, what kind of bread to use for communion, the universal authority of the Pope and the importance of Rome.
Yet, if we go back even further we find still more conflicts - over what to include in the creeds and what to include in the scriptures in the first palce, for example.
Well, we could go back to the beginning of the Christian movement, known simply as “The Way”; in other words, to New Testament times. Surely the early church should be an example of how to avoid conflicts? Think again. A large part of the New Testament was written to address the needs of churches in some kind of conflict.
The book of Acts records a conflict over the distribution of aid to the widows in Jerusalem and the solution was the creation of a particular kind of ministry. The passage I read today from the letter to the church in Corinth talks about divided loyalties! The reality of life is that conflict is part of the human condition and is part of the life of any group of people, even a Christian congregation.
We know about conflict outside the church (at home, in the community, we read about it in the paper and see it on tv) but we tend to think that it just seems wrong to have conflict in church - and we believe that wouldn’t have any if everyone thought the same way - MY WAY of course!
Paul, in his letter to the church in Corinth, is upset when “Chloe’s people” tell him that people have divided into factions and conflict has arisen.
People in the church in Corinth have apparently taken sides and have lined up behind various leaders. Paul is most distressed and admonishes them: all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.
Of course, having differences and being different is not the same as having those differences cause division and being in conflict. In this church community the disagreements have crossed the line and the choosing of sides and the resulting conflict has fractured the community and tarnished the community’s reputation.
Paul is appealing to them to focus on the message about Jesus; and not dividing that message by lining up behind competing leaders. He himself declares that he is glad he has no personal following because he baptized a certain group of people. Perhaps the person who brought them to faith was the one doing the baptism and then they became more loyal to that person than they were to the message and to Christ. The problem with fully understanding the conflicts in the early church is that we have only one half of the story.
When I was a volunteer for a local museum board part of my work was cataloguing a series of correspondence which eventually became declared part of our collection which would not be open to the public. The letters were from a man to his wife. A quick scan of the letters revealed that half of the story was missing because he was obviously responding to letters she had sent him, but we did not have them and were left guessing as to their content.
In the case of the letters of Paul we can make educated guesses about what was going. As with all good biblical advice, we can see in the passages guidance for our lives and for our varied situations.
We are prompted by this passage to ask ourselves, “How often in a situation of conflict, do we focus more on winning than we focus on the health of the entire community and what is the best for it. When we must win at all costs, the whole organization can and often does suffer.
Paul asks the community to focus on the primary message of the Gospel and to make all else secondary.
As a people of faith let us do the same and we may well find that we have fewer quarrels and more reasons to celebrate.
Amen.
Micah 6: 1-8 “ If the Shoe Fits”
Psalm 15
1 Corinthians 1: 18-31
Matthew 5: 1-12
One day a man took a drive to see a client in a part of town where he did not normally go. After he left the client’s apartment he noticed a boy sitting on the steps of the run-down apartment building across the street, just sitting there, looking at his car. The boy had a set of crutches beside him and his left leg was in a brace.
“That is sure a nice car, mister!”
“Thank you. I like it too.”
“I bet it cost a lot of money.”
“I think so, but my brother gave it to me”.
“You mean, for free”, the boy exclaimed!
“Yes”, the man smiled, for free”.
“You mean, you didn’t have to pay nothing for it.”
“No, I didn’t have to pay anything at all. It was free.”
When he boy said, “I wish ....” the man was certain that he knew just what the boy was going to say, but it turned out that he had no idea. “”Boy, I wish I could be a brother like that!”
I’ve taken a lot of courses and classes in my life, but I don’t think I ever took a course from a professor who taught sitting down. There was one elderly professor at Atlantic School of Theology who did teach sitting down, for health reasons.
This professor would have been in good company, in ancient Israel, and in the time of Jesus. There are several stories of Jesus teaching the crowds from a sitting position. This was just how teachers taught in those days, it was a position of honour and respect.
Yet, when Jesus opened his mouth it was not usually conventional wisdom that came from his mouth. Today’s selection from the Gospel of Matthew is normally called “The Beatitudes” which is simply the Latin word for “blessings”. It declares blessed all sorts of folks but it is not the folks we would normally expect to be blessed. We have heard these blessings so often that we have absorbed them into our hearts and minds and we forget just how startling and radical they really were and still are!
“Blessed are the poor in spirit” - really?
“Blessed are those who mourn” - what blessing is there in that?
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” - would they just be frustrated and un-happy with the state of the world and all of its injustice?
“Blessed are the merciful” - wouldn’t people just walk all over them and take advantage of them. Get some backbone!
“Blessed are the pure in heart” - what an easy mark, others might say.
“Blessed are the peacemakers” - because they will have an impossible task.
“Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness” - maybe so but they are still persecuted.
“Blessed are you when people do mean things to you” - come on now! We all have a sense of how that feels and if it was us, we would not feel blessed.
There is a great deal of very creative and very convincing advertising on the television that convinces us the life of blessing can come from having lots of money; which can very easily come from buying a lottery ticket. You could be “set for life”. “Wouldn’t it be nice if .......” (You won the lottery and you could buy anything you wanted). The assumption is that happiness comes from wealth.
We are also told that happiness can come from having the right electronic gizmos with the right “bundle”, the right career (that XYZ school can train you for in your spare time - almost no work at all), or the right clothes, and even the right cleaning products. And of course you have to be healthy and good looking and ............... the list goes on.
Yet we know that people who have or are all of these things can be the most miserable, most unsatisfied, people around.
Part of what the life of faith is about, is taking a second look at conventional wisdom, conventional expectations, turning them upside down and seeing in the “opposite” of what we think - the call and blessing of God.
I often use the passage from the prophet Micah that was read today, at funerals, because it is a passage about what God wants - and that God does not demand of us the things the other cults demand, burnt offerings (literally speaking) of huge amounts of goods, or even a child, but the sacrifices that are made every day in the work of just, mercy and humility before God. There was a lot of pressure from other cultures - God wants this - God wants that - and pressure from within Israel as well - since the time in the desert with Moses, there had been a place for burnt offerings - but what did it all mean? Why were the sacrifices required. What did they symbolize? It is entirely possible to do all of that and not be any closer to what God wanted than you were before. It may have seemed to Micah that the people were just going through the motions - and he knew that doing more and more of those same motions wouldn’t help. This passage attempts to look at the life of faith in a new way, basing it not on rituals but interactions within the community - in a way it sounds like the great commandment: “to love God with all that you have and to love neighbour as self”.
This leads each one of us to ask the question: What do we value? For what do we strive? How are those goals and values challenged by passages such as the excerpt from Micah and the Beatitudes?
I love the “Family Circus” cartoon series. Bill Keane, the artist, has the knack of taking something profound and saying it in a picture and a very few words. In this block the mom is walking with her kids on the sidewalk and a woman asks her how she divides her love among so many children. She replies simply, “I don’t divide it, I multiply it!”
I think we have the notion in the backs of our minds that we will not have enough if we share the life of blessing, whether it be our time or our resources. When one of my older cousins was a little girl she was given the task of distributing a bag of candy to everyone in the room. She had a great time until she realized that the candy would run out before the people did!
Yet I think we make a mistake when we assume that the life of faith should not be a costly life - that it should be a win-win: we give and we receive even more.
Some streams of Christianity teach that faithfulness will being greater wealth. If you tithe, God will reward you with greater financial success. I once read a story in a magazine in which a person in the real estate business credited her decision not to work on Sunday with a tremendous increase in income. The article failed to mention that this was probably the case for every realtor in that city because of the rapidly rising housing prices and a very hot market! She probably would have had even more if she was willing to close sales on Sundays but the benefits of Sabbath time, and taking time away from the normal and everyday routines of life, are not always blessings we an take to the bank.
No, I would say that we would almost always have more money if we did not give any away, but life is also about sharing and about not just looking after yourself and your family.
Back at AST we had a professor that referred to this kind of thinking by quoting this little ditty, with a raised eyebrow of course:
“ God bless me and my son John:
he and his wife, me and my wife,
us four, no more”.
In days gone by we thought that the earth had an infinite amount of resources for the world’s population. Well meaning nations thought that if we just raised “their standard of living to ours” there would be no more poverty, no more starvation, no more social unrest in poor countries and no more diseases we have been able to conquer by modern science and hygiene. We now know that if everyone in the world consumed the earth’s natural resources at the same rate as we do in Canada, we would need about 6 planets the same as Earth to provide the resources. Clearly being blessing to others will have a cost, to us. The questions are always: How much is enough and what other blessings are there, other than power and material possessions. The Jubilee movement in which many churches were active a few years ago called the rich nations to forgive the debt of impoverished nations so that they could have a hope of independence and the freedom to develop as they saw fit. We didn’t because we worried it would cost too much.
For a while now the west has been in a financial crisis driven mostly by greed and by the idea that there was absolutely no limit to the amount of money that could be made. So people who were counting on seemingly solid investments for their retirement were left with much, much less and wondering where it all went wrong.
In a response almost 2000 years old, “The Beatitudes” ask us to turn everything we have ever thought about the life of blessing, “on its head” and to look at blessing with different eyes. Like the crowd on that day, we are there listening for words to challenge and encourage us in our discipleship and commitment.
Instead of asking how we can find blessing, let us ask how we can be a blessing to others - and then we will discover that we will have more blessings than we can possibly count.
Amen.
Isaiah 58: 1-9a (9b - 12)
Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2: 1-12 (13-16)
Matthew 5: 13-20
Why Are We Here?
Once upon a time, (which means this is a fairy tale, a made up story from long ago, containing great truth) –
Once upon a time, there lived a rich man who had three daughters. He was a little insecure and needed some reassurance one day so he called each of his daughters into his counting house (where he counted all of his money, of course,) and asked each one of them, “Dearest daughter, how much do you love me.”
The first to visit his counting chamber was his oldest daughter and she replied, “O Father, I love you more than all the gold in the world.” The father knew that there was a great deal of gold in the world so he was happy with this answer and he gave her some gold coins to spend as she wished.
The second daughter came in and was asked the same question. She replied, “O dearest most loving and special Father, the best father ever, I love you more than all of the silver in the world.” And the father was pleased with this answer. He gave her some silver coins so she could order some new dresses which she had been wanting.
The third daughter came in and when she was asked the question she paused and then replied, “Father, I love you more than fresh meat loves salt.”
The father exploded in a rage and ordered that the daughter be thrown out of the great house and not allowed to return. The servants threw her out of the house with nothing but the clothes on her back and she was left to wander in the woods. She decided to disguise herself so she made clothing out of the rushes she found in the nearby swamp. She knocked on the back door or a large mansion, owned by one of her father’s friends, and asked the servant who answered the door for a job so that she could eat. She would not tell them her name so they called her “Cap O’Rushes” because of her clothing. She was given a job washing the pots and pans and keeping the house clean. She worked very hard and everyone liked her work, but she seldom spoke.
One day the servants were all abuzz because a great party was to be given. There was food to prepare, room to clean, silver to polish and lots of other things to do. Cap O’Rushes discovered that her own father was invited. She convinced the cook to let her prepare the meal for her own father, though of course they did not know he was her father.
She prepared all of his favourite dishes, but did not use any salt at all. (Remember, this was back when people used a lot of salt and well before blood pressure had been invented.) When the food was brought to him and he began to eat he was most unhappy with the meal and the host ordered the cook be brought to apologize to his guest. The cook brought Cap O’Rushes and explained that she had cooked the meal for this particular guest.
“What is the meaning of this”, he demanded. “You have embarrassed me. He says his food is bland and tasteless. Why have you done this to me and to him?”
She turned to her father and said simply, “I love you as much as fresh meat loves salt”. He father recognized her and wept in sorrow as he asked for her forgiveness. His other daughters had been nothing but a trial to him and were always wanting more and more fine clothes and jewellery and he realized that this daughter had really loved him a great deal.
In the ancient world salt was more valuable than we can really imagine. The expression, “not worth his salt” comes from Roman times, when salaries were paid in salt. In the early 20th century in India a tax on salt was one of the “sore points” which fed the independence movement. In the spring of 1930 there was a mass march to the coast and the marchers broke the law by making their own salt from seawater, thus saving the tax. It was kind of the same idea as the 1773 “Boston Tea Party”, which was a protest against unfair taxation of what was seen as a necessary commodity. For American readers of my sermon online - that is all I will say about the Tea Party” !!!!!!!!!
In our Gospel for today Jesus is still teaching the crowds and today’s passage is made up of a couple of a little odd and seemingly disconnected teachings. But we need to take the images in the context of the verses which follow and see that the command to be salt and light are a transition between the beatitudes and the teaching on righteousness. They all answer the question, “what are we as Christians to be doing in the world?”
When Matthew was writing his Gospel there was a lot of division about the purpose of faithfulness and the purpose of faith communities. The Gospel of Matthew remembers Jesus words and sees them as guidance in a frightening and uncertain world.
Is faithfulness a private matter? Is the purpose of faith communities to be set apart from the world and to remain pure so that when the “day of the Lord” came, they would be found to be faithful, to be righteous. “Keep your nose clean by avoiding doing wrong” could be seen as their mantra. Their entire focus was on a future which would remove them from the trials of this life and preparing for that.
Jesus teachings, on the other hand, were taken by some to be saying that the “reign of God”, the “day of the Lord” had already arrived and that their responsibility was to proclaim this to the world. So they were to show that the love of God, in Jesus gave flavour to life, just as salt is essential to flavour food. God’s love in Jesus lit their path through life, just as a light is put on a stand in a house and not hidden. It’s hard to see in the dark or with dim light - so don’t hide the light you have.
You are salt. You are light.
We are salt. We are light.
I remember a tv show I saw as a child, which was set in Washington DC, during WWII. People everywhere had been ordered to hang blackout curtains on their windows so that any enemy bombers who might be overhead could not as easily see the cities and towns. In this episode one of the servants was making blackout curtains for the White House, and the president, imagining what the white house looked like from the sky, said that a few black curtains on the windows was going to do them so good at all. The White House, by its very architecture and nature, proclaimed itself. The church by its very nature; Christians bu our very nature are to be about giving light to those in darkness and flavour to the life of the world around them.
Salt adds flavour, but it is also a preservative. When I was younger my mother preserved some of the beef my father raised, in the old way using sugar and salt peter and there was usually a whole bunch of slabs of salt cod hanging in the attic. Eventually she could not get the butcher to cut the meat in the way she needed and freezing it was a whole lot less work. And eventually the dangers of too much salt in our diets convinced her to give up those methods. I still remember the salt herring she could buy and serve on Fridays - they looked like brown and tan rulers and had a very strong taste and smell. I loved them.
Light helps you to see things - sometimes you see things you don’t want to. I have no ceiling light in my livings room, which is great when I have evening company and they cannot see the dust bunnies, but when I want to look for something my cat has decided to play with, I have to wait for the light of day - sometimes I look a little like the CSI people on TV - looking under my furniture in the dead of night with a really strong flashlight - to see if I can see the gleam of a lost earring or other such object.
When we see injustice taking place, do we shine the light of God’s love, or do we keep quiet and hope there will not be too much hurt or that they will not turn on us.
There has been a lot of news lately concerning the violence and unrest in Egypt with the pro-President Mubarak forces clashing with the anti-President Mubarak forces. The long embattled Coptic Christians feel especially vulnerable. On the Orthodox Christmas last month Muslims showed up in droves to surround Orthodox Churches all over the country in order to protect Christian worshippers with their own bodies. Sometime last week a picture of Christians with arms linked was broadcast over Twitter; they were shielding Muslims who were praying on the street, amidst all of the unrest. They are both examples of light seeking to overcome darkness and the brave ones who insist on letting their light shine.
Every time we take a stand for justice against hatred, intolerance and oppression, we are taking the basket off of our light and letting it shine.
Sometimes we need to encourage others to let their light shine. We see people with gifts that aren’t being utilized and we go to them and we say, “you are really good at that, why not use this gift to benefit others?” Many years ago I met a friend from University in the mall in Moncton. He was at a loss as to what to do after his degree. I suggested that studying theology would help him name his gifts and prompt him to share them with the church. To make a long story short, until the recent cutbacks, his light was shining in youth ministry from our General Council offices in Toronto.
We are called to make a difference. We live in a world that values power, profit before people and the concept that “might is right”; we as Christians are called to present a different point of view. We are called to shine the light of God’s love in Jesus into the dark corners of fear and to spread the salt of God’s love in a world where hatred and indifference to the needs of others seems to hold sway.
Let us shine and flavour the world with the salt and light of God.
Amen.