Do Not Be Deceived

A sermon for Sunday, August 30, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose love reaches out to both the foolish and the wise, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us here and now. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

So I used to work for Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, as most of you know, and while I was there, I wrote, managed, and taught science summer camps, among other things. And it was always so fun, getting to see all of the LEGO projects at the end of the week or hearing kids identify the bugs they saw in the botanical gardens or seeing a kid’s face light up when they understood something for the first time. But it was a challenge, too, because there are some concepts that are just hard to communicate. Take atmospheric density, for example. Our atmosphere is made of mostly nitrogen, with some oxygen and carbon dioxide, and other things, and even though it’s a thin, thin layer of gases surrounding the Earth, it’s much thicker, than, say, Mars’ atmosphere. Plus, Mars’ atmosphere has a much different composition. It’s 95% carbon dioxide. That matters when you’re trying to land robots on Mars and it also matters when you’re teaching a camp about space robots.

So I found this demonstration where you give the kids these beans and you assign say that, like, the kidney beans are nitrogen and the lentils are carbon dioxide and navy beans are oxygen and you have them guess the ratios and then you show them the real ratios and it makes this esoteric thing tangible for the kids. They get that the atmospheres are made of different things. But me, thinking that I would be the cool camp curricula editor, decided that we should use jelly beans instead of regular beans. That way, the kids would be excited about learning because they could also eat the science. Plus, I scheduled this activity for right before the afternoon break, so they could run off all that sugar.

I thought this was all brilliant planning and I was pretty pleased. I went to order the supplies for camp, I did the math and I tallied up how many jelly beans I would need, and I bulk ordered them online, because I was ordering for, like, fifteen camp sessions that would do this activity. And you know how sometimes, it’s hard to tell what it is you’re ordering when you’re ordering stuff online or in a catalog? Sometimes, things aren’t exactly what they look like? Well, turns out, I calculated that I needed twenty bags of each color of jelly beans, which was true, but when I clicked on the picture of a bag of jelly beans, I instead ended up ordering twenty pounds of jelly beans. The delivery man insisted on helping me move the boxes from the delivery bay to my office.

Yeah, not my finest hour.

I bet they still have bags of red, green, yellow, and blue jelly beans floating around the outreach office to this day.

But stuff like this happens all the time, right? There’s a little bit of misleading advertising, or even false advertising, and suddenly, you’ve got a problem on your hands. You’ve got to slow down, pay attention, maybe even read some reviews, or you’ll end up swimming in jelly beans.

Now, this is a silly example, but I think it points to a larger truth, a truth that Jesus’ followers were wrestling with. There were a lot of voices speaking out in Jesus’ day, telling people what to believe and what to do. We know that many people were listening to John the Baptist before they were listening to Jesus. We know a lot of people were listening to the Pharisees and Sadducees. And the reason John the Baptist and others questioned whether Jesus was the Messiah is that there were a lot of Messiahs around in those days, each one with different hopes and dreams and plans and teachings. People then were hearing a lot of different messages, just as we are today. And in the cacophony of different voices and choices, it’s hard to know which one is right.

Which is why Jesus tells his followers to pay attention and read the reviews, as it were, because otherwise, they’ll end up in some trouble.

Now, this is at the very end of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has spent a lot of time teaching over the past few chapters of Matthew, culminating in his message of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which we read last week. But then he adds in this little addendum about wolves in sheep’s clothing and knowing trees by their fruits and how not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Instead, Jesus says, be doers of his teachings and not hearers only. Hearing Jesus’ words but not acting on them is like building a house on sand. The firm foundation of the followers of Jesus is acting on Jesus’ teachings.

This is something I appreciate so much about Jesus, because I think it shows us that Jesus understands how we humans work and accounts for that. We love something that grabs our attention and Jesus here is grabbing our attention. He’s speaking to some of our deepest hurts and deepest concerns and is telling us that there’s a better way to live. I mean, I hang on every word of the Sermon on the Mount because it offers me something new and exciting each time I turn to it. These words flood into my spirit, washing away the things that don’t matter, that things that aren’t eternal, the things that don’t shape me to be more like Jesus, and I love that feeling, that renewal, that newness I feel in my spirit. The word of God makes us new and I don’t know about the rest of you, but in times like these, I long to be made new.

But it’s not enough to hear or say words that make us feel like new. The words are an important part of it, sure, but anyone can say something that feels renewing, that feels good. It’s the actions that matter. It’s the fruits that matter. You can call on the name of Jesus all day long, but if you’re not doing what he told you to do, you’re building your house on shifting sands.

And what does Jesus tell us to do?

Jesus tells us to be salt for the earth and light for the world. Jesus tells us to be righteous, in the ways that matter. Jesus tells us not to insult our family in Christ, but to reconcile with one another as quickly as we can. Jesus tells us to see others as human beings and to care for them, not discard them, to keep our promises, to love our enemies so that they too might be renewed, to be complete in love, to do all that we do for God, to serve only God, to trust God, to treasure eternal things, and in all things, to love others as you would be loved; that is, to love others as God loves them.

Paul continues in this same vein in our passage from Romans 12 this morning. Let your love be genuine. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Rejoice in hope. Show hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Leave room for God’s work. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Do these things, and you’re solid. The storms of this world will rage about you, but they will come and they will go, and you will stand firm, because the word that goes out from the Lord does not return empty. If you hear Jesus’ teachings and if you act on them, you can trust that you have been planted deep into the soil by the One who taught gardens how to grow. Follow Jesus and you are rooted. You will bloom.

And, by the same token, if you’re looking to discern which voices in this world to listen to, this list is it. Pay attention to what the voices say—do they sound like Jesus? Watch their actions—do they do the things that Jesus calls us to do? Read the reviews, pay attention to their fruits—do they show things like patience, perseverance, hope, goodness, justice? Do they love others? Can you see the fruits of their love? Because we humans, we’ve got plenty in common. We were all made by the same Creator. And while we might bloom in an abundance of different ways and at different rates, growing a variety of different fruit, all our good fruit has a fundamental trait in common: love.

Friends, we are not living through easy times, and what we give our time and treasure to, what we pay attention to, has a much bigger impact than accidentally ordering eighty pounds of jelly beans. It is so important, maybe now more than ever, to pay attention to the reviews, to read the fine print, to think about what people are saying, and to know people by their fruits. Our decisions must be based in love, love that produces real, good fruit. Otherwise, we’re going to watch the ground slip away beneath us.

Now, I’m not saying that this is easy. I’m not saying that following Jesus won’t cost us anything. But on the day when we come to stand before Jesus, I don’t want to be a stranger. I want Jesus to know that I listened to all he said and I did my best to follow him.

And I’m sure you want to do the same.

Amen.

Seeing Clearly

A sermon for Sunday, August 23, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who loves us all, thank you for bringing us together in this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presences known among us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, we mountain people are storytellers. It’s just a part of our culture up here in these hills. I think that comes to some of us from those first Scotch-Irish Americans, because I’ve never known a Scot or an Irishman who could resist telling a tale when the opportunity was presented to them, but I also think that there’s something about these mountains that is ancient, something that’s held in the stories we tell. After all, these mountains, the Appalachian Mountain chain, they’re the same mountains that are in the highlands in Scotland. The islands we know as Ireland and the United Kingdom today were once the northernmost part of the mighty Appalachians, back when they towered over Pangea. The Cherokee and the other people who live up in these mountains have these same storytelling tendencies. It’s a deep part of who we are, a kinship that we share.

And at the same time, I think we’ve all experienced people in our lives whose stories go on a little longer than we’d like. We respect them, of course. We honor them, of course. But we’d also like for them to get to the end just a little bit quicker, to sum up what they’re saying, to get right to the heart of the matter. We can all only take so much storytelling in one sitting.

Jesus, too, was a storyteller. Storytelling is a deep part of Jewish tradition too. But as for us, here in the twenty-first century, reading Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew, starting our third chapter of Jesus’ teachings, we might be ready for Jesus to get to the point already. We’ve heard the beatitudes, we’ve heard teachings about the law, we’ve heard teachings about adultery, we’ve heard about loving our enemies, we’ve heard about praying and fasting and almsgiving, we’ve heard about worrying. If you’re reading from a red-letter Bible, the pages have been redder than an NC State fan during football season. Well, during a normal football season. My point is, I think we’re all ready for Jesus to wrap it up.

Which is maybe part of the reason that one of the most famous verses found in the New Testament is at the end of our scripture reading for today. Jesus, bless his heart, gets to the point. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 7:12, for those of you who went to bible camp.

Now, later, in Matthew 22, Jesus will say this again, worded a little differently. Then, he’ll say, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” because all the law and the prophets hang on the two commandments to love God will all that you are and to love your neighbor as yourself. This is, I would say, Jesus’ core message. Everything else he has said or will say is an explanation of these laws of love. This is the lens through which we see the rest of scripture clearly.

So let’s start back with these verses at the beginning of chapter 7 with this lens, with these laws of love in mind. “Judge not that ye be not judged.” Boy, am I guilty of pulling that verse out of context, because I use this verse to avoid conflict and to avoid upsetting the status quo all the time. I’ll say things like, “Hey, listen, I’m not judging you. You do you” or “Well, I can’t know what’s in their hearts, so it’s not for me to judge.”

And on one level, that’s a fantastic reading of what Jesus has to say here, especially for those of us who have known Christians who do pass judgement on others unthinkingly. Many of us know the harm that other judgmental Christians have caused ourselves or others. We do a lot of good by not judging others as we ourselves have been judged in the past. But I think we need to look at the first six verses of this chapter all together, as we’ve done with other sections of the Sermon on the Mount, to get at what Jesus means here.

Jesus tells us not to judge because the way we judge others will be applied back to us. The measure we give out will be the measure we receive. And if we’re complaining about the speck in someone else’s eye without noticing the log in our own, we’re being hypocritical. We’re not doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Jesus is not prohibiting us from seeing the actions of others and drawing conclusions; Jesus is telling us not to hold others to a different standard than we would hold ourselves. So before we draw conclusions about anyone else, we have to draw conclusions about ourselves.

This is where those laws of love become key, and we see a key part of those laws of love reflected in verses 7-11. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask!”

See, we all love imperfectly, incompletely, much of the time through no fault of our own. Our parents, our friends, our partners, even when they tried their best, couldn’t love us perfectly and so we haven’t ever learned how to do it, though, in some amazing, profound, holy moments in our lives, we get pretty darn close. And this isn’t a judgement. It just is what it is. All of us, every one of us, loves imperfectly.

And yet, Jesus reminds us, we do still know some things. We know not to give a child a stone when asked for bread, or a snake when asked for fish. We get it, sometimes. But you know who gets it all the time? God. Because God is love. God can’t help but be perfectly loving. That’s who God is.

So it’s our task to learn how to love more completely, more perfectly. It’s our task to learn from God how to love our partners, our family, our friends, our neighbors, our enemies, more completely. And the more complete way to love others is to be honest about ourselves and how we ourselves love incompletely before we turn to teach others about the ways that they’re loving others incompletely.

But we also have to understand where they’re at, too, before we offer our love, however incomplete, to them. That, I think is, the wisdom of verse 6, which, on the face of it, sounds harsh. “Do not give what is holy to dogs and do not throw your pearls before swine.” Uh, Jesus, I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure that calling others dogs and swine is, like, the least loving you could be.

What Jesus means, though, I think, is that there are those who are not ready for the love that you want to show them. They’re not ready for those amazing, profound, holy moments of nearly perfect love. They don’t know what to do with that. They have been shaped by the world in such a way that they’re not ready to receive love, not yet. And you can love them and love them until the cows come home, but it’s like throwing pearls before feral hogs. They don’t know the goodness they’ve been given, and they can’t know, not until they’ve grown a little more.

This is complicated, I know. It seems straightforward to do unto others as you would have them do unto to you, to love others as you love yourself, but the fact of the matter is, we’re all still learning how to love. We’re learning how to love ourselves the way God loves us.

Because, again, we haven’t been taught how to love completely. We’ve been taught that love looks like making someone else happy, and while that’s part of it, it’s not all of it. We’ve been taught that love looks like making someone comfortable, and while that’s part of it, it’s not all of it. We’ve been taught that love looks like sharing wisdom with those who are still learning and while that’s part of it, that’s not all of it. Love is a fluid, active thing. Love looks like all of these things, yes, because we all need happiness and comfort and wisdom, but love also looks like self-reflection. Love looks like thinking before you speak. Love looks like learning. Love looks like listening. And as anyone who has done any teaching or parenting in any form known, love also looks like correcting. Love looks like explaining the consequences of our actions. Love looks like showing others how to love. Love, sometimes, when we’ve put in the work of learning and self-reflection, looks like holding others up to a standard they’re not used to yet in order to show them how to be more loving. Love, sometimes, looks less extravagant than we expect, because sometimes love looks like holding back until the person we want to love is ready for it. Love is all of these things and more.

In the end, then, I guess I’m happy that Jesus is a bit of a storyteller. I’m glad that Jesus understands what our ancestors who have lived and loved up in these hills understood, and what we understand today. I’m thankful that it takes Jesus a while to get to his point. Loving others more fully, more completely, looks different at different times and with different people and Jesus has been weaving us small tales of wisdom of what love looks like in different situations throughout the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet, we know that no matter how hard it can seem to learn to love others completely, all we have to do is ask. All we have to do is search. All we have to do is knock. God is waiting to give us the good gifts of wisdom whenever we ask for them.

So go, as Jesus calls us to go, and love as completely as you can. Search your heart before you invite others to do the same. Seek to understand where others are as you offer your love to them. And known that in all things, you are held in the arms of our loving Parent in Heaven, who longs for us to love others as we are loved, and is more than ready to pick us up when we fall and give us grace for where we come up short.

Amen.

Mammon

A sermon for Sunday, August 16, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of all good gifts, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I’m sure y’all all remember the Family Circus cartoons that used to run in the paper. Maybe they still do—I haven’t looked at the comics section in a long time. But I remember one Family Circus comic where the mother is standing at the check-out counter of a department store, fixing to pay, while one of the kids holds up a toy that they want her to buy for them. And the caption says, “It’s okay! You don’t have to pay for it, you can just write a check for it!”

I suppose kids today say, “It’s okay! Just use a credit card!”

But I bring up this cartoon because I think that this was the first time I realized that money was a real, important thing, and that money matters. I can’t tell you exactly how old I was when I saw this cartoon, but I can’t have been older than eight or nine. And somehow, seeing money, or the lack thereof, as the punchline to a comic made me realize that if you wanted things in this world, you needed to have money to get them.

See, I didn’t grow up particularly wealthy, but I also didn’t grow up dirt poor. Sure, we were on food stamps for several years there, and my parents have told me, now that I’m grown, that a couple of Christmases were rough, but we owned a house and we had support from family members and the church we went to. We got by, and so our money, or lack thereof, didn’t really stick out to me. But I knew, before the age of 10, that money mattered to others.

And, as much as we might be uncomfortable admitting it, money mattered to Jesus too. The only thing that Jesus talks about more than money is the kingdom of God, making money the second most common topic for Jesus to teach about.

So what does Jesus think about money? Well, this passage is a good place to start answering that question. The first thing he tells us is not to store up treasures for ourselves here on earth, because the treasures of this earth don’t last. They can be taken from us. They’re subject to rot and ruin.

And Jesus doesn’t want us storing up treasures here because he knows that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. There’s no two ways about it. If your treasure is stored here on earth, that’s where your heart is. Our hearts follow our treasure.

Now, that is a hard word from Jesus for us in the United States today, because it is so different from what we hear from the world around us. We get the message that the pursuit of treasure here on earth is good, blessed, or holy, even, as long as we stay humble. We can have all the money in the world, but if we’re humble, we’re good.

That’s simply not what Jesus tells us here. Jesus says that where our treasure is, our heart is. The message we get from the world around us tricks us and traps us, leading us to think that we can pursue money and wealth and possessions here on this earth without any consequence to our souls, to our connection to others, or to our connection to God. But Jesus is firm in saying that’s not true. You can’t serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and wealth.

Now, the word that Jesus uses there for wealth has a long and storied history. It’s Mammon. It’s a Greek translation of an Aramaic word that comes from a root that word originally meant, “that which you rely on, other than God.” Jesus here is telling us that serving wealth is the same thing as worshiping idols, the same thing as abandoning God for the things of this world, and so you’d think that we as Christians would learn that we should stay away from striving for wealth. But Christians have, over the years, wrestled with Mammon over and over again because, well, we can see Mammon, but we can’t always see God.

Because where is God when, in the middle of a pandemic when people are losing their jobs and potentially their homes, the billionaires of the world have gotten richer? Where is God when the stock market is doing fine but people have to let their loved ones be buried in unmarked graves because they can’t afford funeral costs? Where is God when we have enough money to grow enough food to feed the world, but there are still hungry and starving adults and children around the world? Where is God when we as a nation have the ability to send people to the Moon but not to a quality hospital? Where is God when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

So, we turn to Mammon, because we can see Mammon doing work in the world. After all, Mammon made the billionaires. Mammon drives the stock market. Mammon guides hospital and pharmaceutical executives. Mammon chooses the food we grow and how we process and package it. Mammon has given plenty of people in this world more money that they could spend in a million lifetimes. Mammon gets things done. Mammon will keep us safe.

And once you know to look for Mammon, you can see it everywhere. Mammon is right and left and up and down our politics. Mammon is in our schools, in the jobs we tell our children to strive for, in the way we think about others. Mammon is in the property we own, in the decisions we make, in the pride we have in ourselves. Mammon is even in our churches, in our denominations, in the making of the Bibles we read. There is no way around it and no escape from it.

That leaves us believing that Jesus is calling us to an impossible task. How can we serve only God when we live in a world that is dominated by Mammon? You can’t exist in this world without money. Money matters! Well, let me invite you to jump to the end of our passage for this morning, before Mammon envelops our hearts once again and makes us believe that we can never have enough without it. Jesus tells us, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Jesus isn’t saying that money doesn’t matter. Jesus knows the reality we live in. We have to have enough to get by and God knows what we need. Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore the realities of this world. He’s telling us to put our trust in God, not in money. Our first question in life shouldn’t be, “Is there money enough to do this?”, it should be, “Does this please God?”

Imagine how different our lives, our world, would be if we asked ourselves this question first and foremost. Does what we do please God? Is what we’re doing kingdom-seeking?

And I mean that in a really real, really direct way. I know that I’ve heard sermons in the past on this passage that are about reducing our stress and doing random acts of kindness and things like that, which is all well and good, and I know that I’ve heard sermons about the kingdom of heaven as the world after this one, which has some merit too, but I don’t think Jesus is talking about just these things. I think Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we participate in, on this earth and to ask ourselves, “Does this please God? Does this seek the kingdom of God?” Because, as we know, Mammon is a part of everything in our lives, from our homes to our schools to our politics to our churches. Wealth, money, guides so much of what we do. What would it look like if instead of being guided by money, we actively chose to be guided by God? What if we chose to act like people who knew that they would be provided for, as long as we were seeking the kingdom of God? What if that guided the careers we encouraged people to pursue or the way we voted? What if we chose to move forward loving people extravagantly, in every circumstance, saying, “It’s okay! God’s got this!”?

Because that’s what it means to ask if something pleases God. That’s what it means to ask if something seeks the kingdom of God. We know that our God is love and we know that our God is at work in this world. What Jesus is calling to do here is to seek out love where it can be found and elevate it. Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we’re involved in, and to seek to make it more loving, and to set it aside if we can’t.

Because that’s what it means to seek out the kingdom of God first. That’s what it means to serve God instead of Mammon. It means in everything we do, to the best of our ability, seeking to love people extravagantly, without worrying about how to pay for it. There are so, so many people in this world today who need our love, in any way we can give it. That’s the work that Jesus calls us to, today. And we have to start doing that, today.

After all, today’s trouble is enough for today.

Amen.

Showing Off

A sermon for Sunday, August 9, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who is with us wherever we are, thank you for bringing us together in this time and place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, the way I know that the Sermon on the Mount is still working on my heart is that every week when I go to preach on a new section of it, I feel the need to confess something. Jesus is still out here, using the same words he used two thousand years ago, to shape our hearts and minds so that we can be more like him, amen?

I remember hearing this passage in Matthew as a teenager and thinking that I needed to start praying in my closet if I was serious about being a Christian, so I went into the closet in my room, cleared out a space on the floor, wrote a couple of Bible verses in pencil on the wall, and started to pray. To be honest, this was not the most effective way to pray for me, since, whenever God and I have a conversation, I tend to gesticulate and I kept on banging my hands on the walls, but I kept it up for a quite a while, because I thought it was what you had to do.

Then, one week, in Bible study, we were talking about prayer and I proudly proclaimed that I go pray in my closet. The high school girls’ Bible study leader, Mary Nelson, bless her heart, said that I was being very scriptural but also asked if there was a reason why I would choose to hide in a closet to pray. Sensing that I needed to fill out my story a little more, I said that I had to go to my closet to pray because my house was SO LOUD all the time, I couldn’t find another quiet space for prayer. This was, unfortunately, a lie, because my older brother stayed in his room reading all the time and my little brother was either outside with friends or playing video games, but I stuck to it, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird. This is one of those stories that I will remember out of the blue and cringe a little. Yeah, in the end, it was just an awkward high school and no, no harm was done, but for someone who prided herself on being the smartest kid in class, I totally missed the point that Jesus is making here.

And I’ve found that to be true with several of my clergy friends. We were set on this path toward pastoral ministry because we were good at church. We were the smartest kids in Sunday School, the most devoted volunteers at the homeless shelter, the presidents of the youth group, the soloists in the church choir. We were shining stars of church and it turns out, if you shine bright enough at church, someone somewhere will give you a copy of The Christian as Minister and tell you that you should think about going to seminary.

But being good at church didn’t necessarily mean we were good at understanding what Jesus was saying. Sometimes, being good at church made us completely misunderstand what Jesus was saying, because Jesus tells us, in passages like this, to do everything for God, but being good at church sometimes, maybe even often, meant doing things for the approval of others.

Not that I haven’t heard several sermons in my life about doing good in secret, but it’s a little bit of a Catch-22 for the over-achieving kid. How can we show people how good we are at doing good in secret when we have to keep things secret? How can we get our gold star or our “Secret Do-Gooder” badge if we can’t tell anyone about the good we’re doing? And how does this line up with what we read last week, where Jesus told us not to hide our lights under a bushel and to be salt for the earth and shining city on the hill? Should we shine our lights or should we pray in secret? Is our faith public or personal?

This is a perennial question for us Christians, one that we’ve tried to answer over and over again, and one that we’ve wrestled with over the history of the United States. I should know. I’m descended from Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, both of whom were Puritan ministers involved in the Salem Witch Trials, a perfect example of faith lived out loud gone wrong. But both before and after the Puritans, the question of how we live out our faith as Christians has plagued us, and still does to this day.

I think it’s important to notice that here, in this passage, Jesus is talking about what we today call spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines, things like giving, praying, and fasting. Spiritual disciplines are like exercising for your soul, helping you grow spiritual muscle. The more we do this spiritual exercise, the more we show fruits of the Spirit. Giving can grow love, joy, kindness and goodness within us. Praying grows peace, faithfulness, and gentleness. Fasting can grow patience and self-control. We do these things because, as we encounter God more and more often, we see that we want to be like God and practicing these disciplines helps us be more like God. We do these disciplines because we want to, because we have hearts that long to be close to God but also hearts that need a little help getting there.

So it makes sense that Jesus would tell us to do these things in secret, because these things are not for the world; they’re for God. Giving to those who need it is not for other people to see; it’s for God, who Jesus tells us is in the least of these. Praying is not for other people to hear; it’s for God, who delights in coming close to us. Fasting is not for others; it’s for God, who can speak more easily to our hearts in times of emptiness. These disciplines that Jesus lists here, these common practices of faithful people in Jesus’ day, they were meant to grow a connection between us and God. The world doesn’t need to be involved in that.

And if the world is involved in these things that are best left between us and God, we run the risk of being performative, what Jesus later calls being white-washed tombs. Jesus spends so much time talking about these disciplines, I think, because we are so susceptible to being performative. It seems simpler and more rewarding to look like you’re doing what God tells you to do. It’s easier to get affirmation when someone sees you doing God than to trust in the affirmation that comes from God.

But here’s the thing: we already have all the affirmation we need from God. We are each beloved children of the one who makes us, saves us, and sustains us. We know where we stand with God. Nothing can change that and one else’s opinion matters.

And that frees us to make mistakes on our Christian journeys. It frees us to grow in generosity, being able to give freely to whoever needs it, without anyone judging what we give. It frees us to make mistakes in prayer, to change our minds in prayer, to not know what to pray for, exactly, and to be ourselves when we come to God in prayer. It frees us to have a relationship with God that is just between us and God, something that’s precious and holy and growing and changing. When we trust that God will give us what we need, including the affirmation we need, we don’t have to seek that approval elsewhere. We don’t try to receive what we need for life from other people. We receive it from God our life-giver.

That’s the knowledge and wisdom that I didn’t have in high school, and I’d bet it’s part of the wisdom that the people Jesus was criticizing were missing too. When we get our affirmation and support solely from other people, we’ve already received all they can give. When we get our affirmation and support from God, we receive gifts that last throughout this life and into the next.

And when we rest in God, when we practice these spiritual disciplines for God and God alone, then we are filled with what we need to go out into the world and do the good works God has set out before us. It’s not that our faith is entirely public or private; it’s that our faith is both. God calls for us to love God in secret, but that love was never meant to stay secret. It was meant to grow and grow and grow, until we can’t help but shine with it, give light to others with it, preserve the earth with it, and flavor the world with it.

So go. Seek out God in the quiet spaces where no one else is watching. But don’t stay there forever, because God wants to grow you bigger than that.

Amen.

Salt and Light

A sermon for Sunday, August 2, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who is light and breath and being, thank you for bringing us together today. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us in this place. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, we talked a little about images in midweek worship this week, and how Jesus is fantastic at using them. The passage was the one about the kingdom of God being like a mustard seed, and how, even though it starts off tiny, it spreads and grows until it’s so big, birds can make their nests in its shade. That mustard seed image sticks with us, doesn’t it?

And part of why it sticks with us, I think, is because it feels so comforting. The mustard seed image shows us that small things, tiny things, can make a world of difference. I mean, the world that God wants to build, an entire world, is contained in something so small as a mustard seed. And if the world God wants to build can be something that small, then maybe we can be a part of it, no matter how small. We have so many other obligations weighing on us, and we feel so helpless sometimes, but God takes the small things that we can give and makes them grow bigger than we could ever hope for. All of that hope and comfort is nestled into the image of this tiny mustard seed. It’s powerful.

I think our text for this morning, from earlier in the gospel of Matthew, sticks with us for the same reason, because in it, Jesus again uses images to capture our imagination, images of tiny things with a huge impact. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. I mean, salt crystals can be tiny, and photons, the particles that make up light, don’t even have mass. They’re weightless.

And yet, we all know the power of light. And if any of you have had to go on a heart-healthy diet, you know what a big deal salt, or the lack thereof, can be.

So, right from the top, we can take heart in Jesus’ words this morning. Every little bit that we can do helps, and each of us, no matter how small or insignificant we might feel from time to time, no matter how powerless, each of us are salt and light and these are not insignificant things. Small things make a big difference.

And I think, actually, that Jesus gives us two images here that show us two different paths of discipleship, two different ways of following his teachings. And I think that if we recognize that there are these two different ways of following Jesus and that we can each embody what Jesus is calling us to do in different ways, we’ll be better able to talk to each other and to other Christians in the days and weeks and months ahead. Some of us gravitate toward being salt and some of us gravitate toward being light, but Jesus proclaims to us, the gathered body of Christ, that we are both, and that is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere.

So. Let’s think about salt first. You are the salt of the earth. What does it mean to call someone “the salt of the earth”? I’ve grown to think of someone who is the salt of the earth as being kind, compassionate, reliable, solid, and wise, someone who’s always there and always ready to show someone a kindness or mercy. This is, actually, what I think of when I think of a good person. Someone who’s grounded, who can take everything in stride and who is always working for the good of those around them. I think of someone who has endured much in this life but all they’ve endured has made them kinder and more understanding, rather than bitter and closed off. In my deepest heart of hearts, I want to be a salt of the earth kind of person. I want to feel grounded someplace and I want to give all that I can out of compassion and mercy. Many of you are already the salt of the earth and here you are, preserving and flavoring this community of Whittier and beyond.

Jesus tells us that we are the salt of the earth, but then he says something interesting: “But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” Now, you and I both know that salt on its own doesn’t go bad. I’ve looked into this time and time again, but we don’t have a clear answer for what Jesus was referring to here. It might be that salt that was gathered from the nearby Dead Sea and the surrounding regions was sometimes mixed with other things and so wasn’t truly salty. And if salt doesn’t have its salty flavor, what can salt it? If salt isn’t salt, it’s worthless.

I think there’s another meaning we can draw out here, as those who are called salt of the earth, and that is that we are that which gives the world its flavor, and if we lose our flavor, we’re done for. If we each lose our uniqueness, that which makes us us, we can no longer be the salt of the earth. God in God’s wisdom has made us each with a beautiful, delightful diversity of attributes, shaped and formed by our life on this earth, and to stifle those good things is to deprive the world of its flavor. Revel in being who you were made to be, because in being who you are, you flavor the world. It's another way of being grounded, I think. When you know deep down in your bones who you are, when you have an unshakeable sense of self, and know that you are loved by God because of and not despite of who you are, then you are unshakeable. When you’re grounded like that, you are the salt of the earth. When you know who you are, all of the insecurity and worry and fretfulness gets set aside and you can, indeed, be the person who is kind, compassionate, reliable, solid, and wise. When you are who you are, just as God made you, you’re bedrock, an unshakeable place. You can be a preservative and you can give out flavor, all at the same time. You’re the salt of the earth.

Now, let’s look at light. What does it mean to be the light of the world? I’m tempted to think of someone who lights up your day, who just makes the world a better place in your day-to-day life, and I’m sure we can all think of someone like that in your world. But I get the sense from the later verses that Jesus is talking about something wider-reaching. Jesus, I think, is talking about the light of the world as light that shows the way for the world, light that shines on good actions so that the world can see them and follow. I think of someone like John Lewis, who never flinched from fighting the good fight. If we can follow him, marching toward a more just world and dancing when the march could wait just a minute, we too can be the light of the world, and people will give glory to God for the way we shined. Then, as Isaiah says, our light shall break forth like the dawn, and our healing shall spring up quickly. Our vindicator shall go before us and the glory of the LORD shall be our rear guard.

Do you feel the tension there, between being salt and being light? One is being grounded in who you are, in doing what you do to the best of your ability, preserving the earth and giving it its flavor. The other is letting what you do escape from you, becoming radiant, and giving hope to the world through your light. One is about how Jesus changes your life at home and one is about how Jesus changes your life in the world. The sense I’ve gotten over our past year together is that y’all are more comfortable being salt and I am more comfortable being light.

And yet, Jesus tells us that we are both of these things. By God’s grace, the Spirit is already at work in us to make sure that we don’t lose our saltiness nor shield our light. We might be more comfortable as salt or light, but still, we are both, and we must be both.

Because think again of what it means to be perfect, what we talked about last week. It means to be complete, fulfilled, just as Jesus promises to complete or fulfill the law. Jesus is calling us to be fully ourselves, to be both grounded and vibrant. Not an iota will pass from the law, Jesus tells us, and neither will one iota of us pass away. We are salt and light, these tiny things that change the world. We are the humble, mourning, meek, and those who are thirsty for righteousness, as the beatitudes name us. We are also the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted, those who hear Isaiah’s call to God’s chosen fast, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. To be complete as Jesus was complete, to be perfect as our Parent in heaven is perfect, we must be both of these things.

So, my friends, continue to be salty, as I grow in my saltiness. I will continue to shine as you all begin to light those extra lamps in your houses, until we are that bright city on the hill we dream of being. And throughout all our work, we will rest in the Spirit, knowing that what Jesus speaks, the Spirit enacts. Even in us, these tiny grains of salt, these tiny photons of light. Jesus is doing wonders with us, just as we are now. Imagine what Jesus has yet to do, if we can answer his call.

Be salt. Be light. Be complete.

Amen.