A Kingdom of Salt and Light 
Matthew 5:13-20
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott

The closest we come to understanding kingdoms these days is the drama surrounding Harry and Meghan’s move to Canada and away from their royal titles. To our lives in the United States, we are more likely to associate kingdoms with fairy tales or history or gossip pages than we are with modern reality. For Jesus’ audience, they knew the pressure of a ruling class that wasn’t about which bag she carried with which dress but about how much of an ordinary person’s livelihood would be taken away in taxation to support the lifestyle and the power of the Caesar and his cronies on top. Add to that, some of the religious leaders were finding a way to benefit from this structure, and it had changed temple life. Rabbis like Hillel and Shammai were leading schools of thought and praxis around their interpretations of what their faith should look like in this context. To get to the metaphor, we have to understand the faith story into which Jesus was speaking. 

Some of the religious leaders wanted to protect their faith from this encroachment of kingdom and established rules around 1st century Judaism as a framework to protect what was right and good and true. They knew it would take professionals to cross the “T”s and dot the “I”s because there were so many details, and the details mattered because they were the portals to holiness. But as it tends to happen with human people and their institutions, the details took priority. And the professionals became the practitioners of holiness. And the sacred became far too separate from the ordinary. And before too long, the details and the structure were more important than the essence they’d worked so hard to protect. How you make the sacrifice was more important than showing up. Who could make the sacrifice was more important than opening the doors to all. The intention behind the structure was initially to protect the goodness of God and the truth of their faith, but that was getting lost. In his teaching, Jesus began to disentangle their concept of God’s goodness from their relationship to the structure. 

For Jesus, God’s goodness was everywhere and in everything. Holy didn’t live in the temple. Sacred wasn’t guarded inside a locked up building to be visited from time to time. Jesus didn’t work to either ditch holiness or mock the framework. Our sacred text tells us he spent considerable time preaching and teaching in the temple. His family honored the traditions of dedicating and raising him in the faith. He observed and celebrated the high holy days with friends. Our sacred text also places him in the context of robust debate as one who expanded the imagination of who was included at the table for religious practice and celebration. And when he preached and taught, he challenged the widely accepted teachings of protecting and guarding and getting everything just so.

In the sermon on the mount, those central teachings of his Way we now have cobbled together in our sacred text, he lays out just how deeply he believed that each and every one of us could take on the work he was doing. Not just “maybe, if we try really hard, and if we learn how to cross the ’T’s and dot the ‘I’s just as good as the professionals always have.” He talked about blessedness and comfort. He called his audience to empathize and grieve with the world. He described a gentleness of being and a heart for mercy. He challenged them to stop being peacekeepers and start being peacemakers because making peace is the work of God’s children. And knowing full well that the professionals may feel threatened and the comfortable may feel discomforted, he promised them that God’s blessing will rest on them when the way he invites them to follow begins to feel more narrow than they first expected. The way would not be easy, and many will walk away sad rather than joining you in the work of seeking God’s kingdom. He promised the Way he showed them would always be one of unfolding invitation. 

And then he spoke right to the heart of their self-doubt and fear. If you think you aren’t cut out for this kind of life, know that you are. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. There is no striving toward a goal. No trying to be. This invitation does not require working on becoming more of x and less of y. This call to follow is a call to fully inhabit your best and truest self for the sake of the world and the expansion of God’s kingdom. This is doing what you love, that thing that makes you come alive, that makes you lose track of time, and doing it in a way that makes the world more loving and more fully itself. You are this. You were made for this. To abandon these ways is to abandon who you were created to be. To abandon these ways is to deny who you are. To abandon these ways is to abandon the divine truth that God is with you, moving, radiating, compelling, guiding. This is the kind of kingdom God has imagined, and you are helping it come into being.

Jesus knew it wouldn’t take long before folks were accusing him of trying to kill his tradition and making a movement instead of supporting the structures. He assured them all he hadn’t come to abolish anything but had instead come to call them all to righteousness. But all of the structure and the rules and the tradition for its own sake, this form of this institution was not its best face; it was not its deepest wisdom, as Alexander Shaia puts it.

This open-hearted, empathetic, meek, pure, peace-making work would draw them closer toward God’s breath and not farther away. But first, they must all be salt and light. Fully, truly give themselves to the ways he laid out before them. Shaia says that the language of light can be complicated because sometimes “light” is too much of a product; a stasis. Jesus surely wasn’t talking about doing one more thing to check a box or cross a mandatory task off of a list. In calling people to salt and light, he was naming a state of being. To get at the idea of divine light, Shaia instead talks about “the gift of radiance that comes out of the dark.” Instead of imagining light as a fixed thing..on or off, there or not there, he speaks of radiance because “radiance moves, and there is a place in the deepest dark where the new radiance bursts forth afresh.” You are called to flavor the world. You are called to radiance. You are called to move and shine in such a way that holiness is new and sacred is new and God’s presence is once again discovered in all things and in all places. 

Amy Lindeman Allen writes, “Indeed, it is to this level of commitment for righteousness—right living—for all in God’s creation that the rest of Jesus’ words points. Light is not meant to be stored up and enshrined, but rather, to be shared with all who need its guidance and warmth.” We humans want to enshrine. We want to store up. We want to protect ourselves against enemies we cannot name and cannot control. As Karoline Lewis notes, “our default setting…leans toward comfort, conformity, and complacency when what Jesus really needs from us is to be the salt and the light—the salt that just might sting and the light that just might expose what we do not want to see.” 

This is what Jesus calls out in us; “not just a certain way of being in the world, but an ultimate way of being in the world…The sooner we realize this, the better.” When you are doing the work that serves the world, when you are giving yourself to the thing that makes you come alive, you live into the way described by the Prophet Isaiah. When you are loosing the bonds of injustice, sharing your bread with the hungry, satisfying the needs of the afflicted, then your light will rise like the dawn out of darkness, and the Lord will be your guide. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, like a spring that never runs dry. 

And if you, like me, have been striving for too long to be all things to all people and accomplish all the tasks without help, hear the blessing in this salt and light invitation. There is no striving toward this way of being. Nothing you do will make you earn this kingdom title or make you ready to finally become the salt of the earth. You are salt. You are light. This is your reality from God’s imagination, and your “work,” if we need to put it in those 21st Century, American terms, is to release all of those things that keep you from being who you fully are. You have been called by name already, and the world needs your calling to become realized. The world needs your radiance. I need your radiance. The kingdom of God shines brighter because of you, and we are all blessed by your saltiness. Friends, believe the good news of God.