Salt

Scripture: Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

In our Gospel reading this morning, brothers and sisters, Jesus speaks to us about three remarkable commodities: salt, light, and righteousness.  “You are the salt of the earth,” He proclaims.  “You are the light of the world.  And your righteousness must exceed even that of the Pharisees.”

Now what, do you suppose, are we to make of all this?  It might seem a bit obscure, a bit confusing, to modern ears, because these three things—salt, light, and righteousness—are all very much taken for granted today.  Yet for the vast majority of human history their value was incomparable. So, in order for us to understand what our Lord is telling us this morning, I think we’re going to have to start with beer. Hear me out on this one.

Beer, like bread, is created using yeast.  And all the beers of the world can be divided into one of two categories: ales or lagers.  Ales tend to be brewed at somewhat higher temperatures, and the yeast that does all the work floats on top. But a few centuries back, something changed.  Monks, it seems, were storing their beer barrels in cold, wet caves, and this environment selected for a yeast mutation that only ferments at colder temperatures, and works from the bottom. This new strain of yeast produced a new kind of beer: lager.  And it proved very popular in America.  Alas, because it could only be brewed at colder temperatures, lager was only available for the chillier parts of the year.  What to do?

Leave it to American ingenuity!  In the 1870s, American breweries perfected industrial refrigeration, meaning that we could artificially produce cold temperatures for the first time in the annals of human history.  Beer was just the beginning. Now we could refrigerate meat.  We could transport food vast distances in refrigerated trailers.  Heck, we could even buy any sort of fruit or vegetable year-round, no matter what the growing season!  Millions more people could now be fed.

Try to imagine life without refrigerators, freezers, icemakers, or cold trucks.  Food would rot within days, even hours!  What did people use before refrigeration?  How did we keep all of our fish, meat, poultry and other food from spoiling instantly? Well, for at least the last 9,000 years, we’ve used salt. I can’t begin to describe to you how important salt has been to humanity.  Civilizations were founded upon it, cities were built around harvesting it, and vast empires used it for currency.  Salt was humanity’s lifeblood; it allowed us to eat.

What it does, you see, is suck the moisture right out of bacteria, straight through their own cell walls.  Salt in a wound will sterilize the wound; for that matter, salt in the ground will sterilize the ground.  And without bacteria, food stays fresh. Ancient people viewed salt with a reverent awe, offering it to gods, exchanging it as money, treating it as magical.  Here was this bizarre, astonishing substance, dug out of mines or collected from the sea, that somehow stopped decay. Salt seemed to freeze time, keeping meat fresh, keeping food good, keeping our families alive.  In a word where everything rots—salt was the promise of life!

So when Jesus proclaims, brothers and sisters, that we are now salt of the earth, what He means is that we are God’s chosen agents in preserving this world!  We are how God chooses to fight destruction and rot and decay, to preserve nourishment and new life, to save His good Creation from its ever-fallen state! This is our new identity in Christ; it is both who we are and what we do.  Genesis tells us that God created humankind as caretakers of this world.  We were formed from earth that we might care for earth: “Adam,” after all, means “earth critter.” And ever since the Fall, ever since our sin scarred the world and it all went to pot, we’ve been crying out to God, “Why don’t You do something?  Why don’t You send someone?”

Now, Jesus tells us, God has given His answer.  God took on flesh and descended from Heaven—came down to join us in the mud and the blood—to die for our sins, to raise us up to new and eternal life, and to make us one in Him. We are the Body of Christ now.  God has claimed us as His own, has claimed our hands as His hands, our tongues as His tongue, that God might work through us, and thus are we sinners called, miraculously, to do the very work of the Almighty! In theory, God could have responded to sin and to the world’s great need in any way that He saw fit.  He could answer prayer today in any way that He chooses.  Yet He saw fit to respond to our suffering by joining us in it; and He chooses to answer prayer through us.  You are the answer to prayer.  You are the salt of the earth.

Light, of course, is much the same.  Today we find it nothing to flip a switch, and thus banish the dark.  But for the vast majority of our history, light was a precious commodity, expensive and rare.  Lamps and candles guided us through the night, and even through our own dwellings.  Light saves our lives on a daily basis. Now you are the guides of your people, Jesus says.  You are the light of the world.

These declarations of our Lord and King are powerful and weighty revelations indeed.  On the one hand they are unspeakable honors!  To think that you and I, in our everyday lives, in our vocations and our civic duties and our households, are the chosen servants of God, the means through which He answers prayer! In the faith, hope and love we live out, God still has a Body, still walks amongst His people, ministering to their needs and ills!  That’s us!  Criminitly.

But on the other hand, what an immeasurable responsibility, what a weight of office this carries.  Who are we, sinners that we are, to think that we can do the work of God?  How can we be the answer to the prayers of mankind, salt of the earth and light of the world?  Indeed, this blessing can seem an intolerable burden. Rather than a glorious and liberating truth about who we are in Christ, it may seem like just one more thing we’ve got to worry about.  “Oh, great, I have to be salty now.  Man, how am I supposed to be light?” And this, my friends, leads us to Jesus’ third and final topic for the day: righteousness.

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus warns us this morning, “you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Now, I’ve got to tell you, this is Jesus’ big shock moment.  This is the line that catches everybody off guard.  In the Sermon on the Mount, here’s where the crowd all gasped aloud. More righteous than the scribes and Pharisees?  Alas!  Don’t you know who they are?  The Pharisees are scrupulous keepers of God’s Law, obsessed with ritual purity and right living.  They’re the local champions of religion and community. You want salt of the earth, light of the world?  There you go!  Pick the Pharisees!  They spend their whole lives being religious.  Clearly they’re the men for the job.  Yes, Jesus, pick the Pharisees and let the rest of us get back to our everyday lives.

Indeed, how can the lives of simple sinners, of imperfect people struggling to get by, exceed the righteousness of these holy and upright men?  It’s like when Jesus says that a rich man cannot enter heaven, and St. Peter himself cries out, “Then who can be saved?”  The bottom line is: you can’t do it. Your righteousness, brothers and sisters, cannot exceed that of the Pharisees—and even their righteousness, it seems, proves insufficient.  But that right there is Jesus’ point: we do not rely on our own righteousness.  We rely on Jesus!

Who are we to be salt of the earth, givers of life to all mankind?  Nobody, that’s who!  We’re just sinners, every bit as fallen and broken as everyone else.  Jesus is the true Salt, the true Preserver, the true Savior.  And when we live in Him—when we place our faith in our God made flesh—we do not do our own good works, but He works through us. We cannot be the light of the world in and of ourselves. But when we reflect the glory of Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, then Jesus lives as the Light of the world through us.  We bear not our own righteousness, but His.

That’s what Jesus is getting at when He says, “What good is salt if it loses its saltiness?” That’s absurd!  He’s joking with us.  Salt can’t lose its saltiness; that’s what makes it salt. These callings, these blessings, to serve and save the world in Jesus’ Name, are not simply burdens or requirements, demanding that we earn salvation.  Good God, no! When Jesus says, “You are salt,” then by God, you’re salt, period. Not because you’re so great—not because any one of us has the righteousness to stand before God—but precisely because we are sinners, we are fallen, we are the lost and the sick and the last and the broken.  And Jesus chooses us.

It is pure grace.  It is pure promise.  It is pure blessing.  You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.  Not because you deserve it.  Not because you’re going to earn it.  But simply because Jesus Christ loves you. Know that, and you have already entered the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thanks be to Christ, the Righteousness of us all.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.