Salt & Light. Isaiah 58:1-9a (9b-12); Psalm 112:1-9 (10); 1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16); Matthew 5:13-20

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1 Salt & Light Isaiah 58:1-9a (9b-12); Psalm 112:1-9 (10); 1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16); Matthew 5:13-20 Jesus began his sermon on the Mount well enough with blessings upon those who are hungry, those who are poor and lowly. It is good to know what sort of God we have. God blesses the lowly. God promises to be there for those who have no one to speak up for them. And then (as Jesus so often does), Jesus switches from the promises of God to commissioning the congregation before him to be salt and light. As we have noted on other occasions, Jesus is the great delegator. Jesus not only saves the world, speaks the truth, and heals the brokenhearted, Jesus also calls ordinary folk to do what he does in the world. Jesus not only blesses us, he calls us. Perhaps there were some in the congregation that day who came to hear a sermon for other reasons. Maybe they came to hear about the blessings of God. In the course of the sermon, they get an assignment. Jesus not only blesses them but also commissions them, calls them, gives them a job to do. Jesus thinks nothing of taking ordinary people and making them into his disciples, giving them his work to do. I expect that this way of thinking sounds quite foreign to us. We live in a world that teaches us our lives are self-created through our astute, free, deliberate choices. I choose, therefore I am. Freedom of choice is our highest virtue, the reason why we have cable TV with 200 channels and supermarkets with dozens of varieties of apples. The good life is the life that we fabricate through our choices. Think of it this way: How did you choose to marry your life partner? I ask. And you reply, Well, I asked a dozen other people and they said, No. This was the only 1

2 person who gave me half a chance. So I just sort of married them. What kind of marriage is that? The most important steps in life are those which we have freely chosen, or so a capitalist, consumer economy tells us. But what if the life you are living is not your own? What if while you are busy making your choices, God is also making choices? What if it s not up to you to decide what to do with your life but rather the direction of your life is up to the God who created you? St. Paul, how did you decide to follow Christ? How did you choose to be a Christian? Did you always have a deep desire to travel to far-away places like Corinth? Were you really good at public speaking? And Paul replies that he was just minding his own business, proceeding down the Damascus Road when bam! a bolt of lightning hits and Jesus chose him! Mary, how did you decide to be part of the Jesus movement? And Mary replies that she was just minding her own business in Nazareth, proceeding toward marriage, and then bam! this angel showed up with, Hail Mary! You are a favoured one! I know that we all think we are here this morning because we chose to be here. We are a people of good habits and we came out of habit or maybe you were searching for a bit of a boost in your life and thought that maybe, just maybe, you might get it here. But what if you are here this morning because God put you here? What if the work that you are doing you are not doing for yourself? What if the life you are living is not your own? What if you came here looking for light, here to worship the light of the world, Jesus, only to have Jesus commission you to be light to the world? You can think of other biblical personalities Abraham and Sarah, Jonah, Matthew, dozens of people who didn t really want to work with God but God was determined to work through them. 2

3 One member of the clergy shared a story that when he was in high school he had his very first male Sunday school teacher at his church. He writes: All of our Sunday school teachers up to that point had been women. And that was fine, but it was exciting for an adolescent male like me to have a male Sunday school teacher. And what a teacher he turned out to be! He was a business person. He shared with us that he was not the very best of Christians. He asked our help because he wasn t all that well-versed in scripture. Most of his Sunday school lessons involved his sharing with us from his own experiences in business. He would sometimes tell us about a tough business decision that he had to make on Monday morning, laying out the dilemma and then asking us to help him figure out what, as a Christian, he ought to do. That class was just wonderful! We had never been talked to like adults. We had never been around an adult who was so honest about his limitations and so eager to hear what we had to say. Well, as Providence would have it, years later I was invited back to my home church. After I preached an older man came up to me. It was my Sunday school teacher! Now I would have the opportunity to thank him for what he did for my faith journey in that class. I ll always remember your Sunday school class, I told him. Yea, I ll never be able to forget that either, was his reply. What do you mean by that? I asked. I hated those two years. I told the preacher that I had zero skills in teaching kids, that I wasn t that good with the Bible. But he forced me to do it. Said I owed him a favor. And you kids! All you wanted to do was to giggle and hold hands and it was... awful. That exchange taught me something important: Sometimes the best things we do for God are the things that we don t want to do. Sometimes God asks us to do things that are indeed not pleasant to us. But sometimes we work for God, not from what we want, but because we believe this is what 3

4 God wants. Paul says he is under a commission. The word commission means sent. Every one of us here this morning, by virtue of our call to follow the way of Jesus, is commissioned. Sent. We are not here on our own. One of the things that I have done in my work with the wider church was interview clergy prior to their ordination. I worked with the Education & Students Committee of the Conference to weed out those who may have felt that they had a call from God but did not seem to have the requisite gifts for ministry. We tried to help a candidate think through his or her vocation and tried to determine if this was a genuine call from God. Before they got to that final interview we had candidates take a battery of tests to judge their talents, their psychological makeup, their fitness for ministry. If I am honest I have to say that this was one of the most impossible of jobs, not because we lacked the tools to uncover a person s gifts and graces. Rather, the tough thing about making decisions about vocation is God! Throughout scripture, again and again, God seems to call the wrong people. Hotheaded Moses and murderer Saul are just two examples of the many. And they go out and do some spectacular ministry not because of their superior moral qualities, or their intelligence, or other gifts. They are able to do what they do because they are not on their own. They have been sent, commissioned by God to do what God wants done in the world. That is the true source of all ministerial authority the call of God. It applies not only to clergy but to anyone who is responding to the call of God upon their life. I ve prayed to God to come to me in my time of need, confessed a man who was in the grip of a serious illness. But God continues to refuse me. I just feel that God has forsaken me, forgotten me just when I need him. The person from the church, holding his hand, sitting at the bedside responded, George, did it 4

5 ever occur to you that maybe God is answering your prayer? Did you ever think that maybe God sent me? It s curious, isn t it, that though Jesus calls himself the light of the world, that gracious light that beams into the world s darkness, in Matthew Jesus calls us the light of the world. It s a rather intimidating or exhilarating thought, depending on how you look at it. You may be the only light of Christ that someone in a dark world will ever see. Any light that shines from us, so we believe, has its source in Christ s light. As Edith Wharton put it: There are only two ways of spreading light to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. Where has Jesus, the light of the world, commissioned and called you to be lights to the world? Jan Richardson writes: I found myself thinking of the word offering. And this is part of what the gospel text this week calls us to: to discern what God has created us to offer in this world, and to give that; to be salt that will provide savour, to be light through which the presence of God is known... Jesus words this week are meant to wake us, to remind us of what we carry in our bones: the living presence of the God who bids us be salt in this world in all our savoury particularity; to be light in the way that only we can blaze. So how savoury are you these days? How is light finding its way into you and through you? Is there anything or anyone that is working against this, that is tipping a bushel over your shining? Might there be some part of you that needs revealing, needs to unhide itself in this Epiphany season? Jan Richardson from her blog, Friends know this: the darkened world needs your witness, your words and deeds. One can easily understand a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when grown men and women are afraid of the light. Plato. So let us go and let our light shine! Thanks be to God. Amen. 5

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