Salt Of The Earth 2.9.20

A reading from Isaiah.

Shout out, do not hold back.

Lift up your voice like a trumpet.

Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.

Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.

They ask of me righteous judgments.

They delight to draw near to God.

Why do we fast, but you do not speak?

Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?

Look, you serve your own interests on your fast day and oppress all your workers.

Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.

Such fasting as you do today.

Will not mistake your voice heard on high?

Is such the fast that I choose a day to humble oneself?

Is it not to bow down the head like a bull rushed and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?

Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the fast that I choose?

To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the throngs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

Is not your share your bread with not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house?

When you see the naked to cover them, and not hide yourself from your own kin.

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly, your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call and the Lord will answer.

You shall cry for help and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom will be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, you shall rise up the foundations of many generations, you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

The word of the Lord.

A reading from Corinthians.

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in a lofty word of wisdom.

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.

My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstrate demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God.

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age who are doomed to perish.

But we speak of God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.

None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within God within.

So also no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Spirit of God.

Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God's spirits, for they are foolish to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

Those who are spiritually discerned will eat all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else's scrutiny.

For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?

But we have the mind of Christ and the word of the Lord.

Jesus said, You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

You are the light of the world.

A city built on a hill cannot be hid.

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket but on the lampstand and gives light to all in the house.

In the same way let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill.

For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Jesus makes some strong statements today.

He doesn't say you can be the light of the world or you might be the salt of the earth if you follow my 27-step plan.

Instead, he says, you already are these things.

And maybe it's worth talking about salt just briefly, because in the ancient world, depending where you live, salt was valuable enough that you could be paid in salt instead of in wages, hence the word salary, which is based in salt.

Now we are a little we're a little bit afraid of salt because we're worried about our sodium intake, it's bad for our heart.

And that's because we eat foods that are super saturated in salt because they're pre-packaged and prepared as a preservative, and frankly, because your body needs it to live.

So we worry about getting too much, they worried about not getting enough.

And you have to consider when Jesus is talking, there was really no refrigeration.

So the best preservative around was pickling or salting, and what do you know?

You need salt to pickle.

So this was essential for preserving, for flavor, and just living.

So Jesus says, What?

You're the preservative of the earth, you're an essential nutrient for other people to live, you're extremely valuable, so much so that wages could be considered in terms of you.

Then he says, don't lose your saltiness or you'll be thrown out and trampled upon.

And you know, uh I've talked to a chemist and I've talked to a chemical engineer, and I want you to know there's really no way that can happen.

So you can take sodium chloride and you can put it in a solution, and temporarily it'll be suspended.

But you know, when the solution dries up, what you're gonna have?

Salt again, right?

You can run this experiment at time.

Take you some salt and put it in some boiling water and stir it up.

You won't see it.

Leave it on the counter until the water evaporates, and guess what you'll see?

Salt.

So this is a little bit confusing.

How can salt lose its saltiness?

I mean, the only way you could really do it is to split the sodium and the chloride and never let them come back together, because then you just have the base elements and you wouldn't have the molecule anymore.

Um, and maybe I had a friend who told me this a few years ago, and I still cling to this.

I mean, I'm faithful to this memory.

Fifteen years later, he was a really interesting guy, and he showed up with me one day, and he gave me five salts from the earth.

Not from the ocean, even though I learned this morning that uh any salt mines were once under the ocean, and that's why there's salt there.

But you know, salt to the earth isn't white like mortem salt.

We're used to mortans, right?

Salt to the earth, I've got a sample here.

It may look like these are paints, but these are 16 different naturally occurring salts from the earth.

Notice that there is a rich variety of color, like black and brown and green and purple, according to the other elements that are trapped inside the crystalline structure.

And I'm wondering a little bit today if we lose our saltiness when we become like mortons, when we become absolutely uniform and confuse that with unity.

I wonder if Jesus isn't saying to us there's something really amazing about who God created you to be, and that's meant to be preserved, and in fact, that preserves the world.

And instead of us all meant to be one thing or do one thing, we're meant, in fact, to have unity and mission instead of uniformity in flavor.

And I wonder, thinking about the way we do things as a church and as a congregation and as a community and in a world which seems to increasingly have very little tolerance or respect for diversity of opinion or divergence of views, if in fact this isn't an invitation to say, look, all of those different colors and varieties, in fact, have opportunities to flavor the world in preservative, valuable ways, albeit differently.

Like I'll tell you that black salt is really ideal for putting on top of chocolate, but you wouldn't want to do it with that green salt.

Isn't that interesting?

Both are very life-giving and both are very different.

And this, I think, is this call we increasingly get as a church is to be unified in mission, but not uniform in membership.

And it occurs to me that the model of church that I grew up in, and I'm just talking about church, although I think we could talk about politics just as well, is that it was the cleric's job to manipulate you into doing what the cleric thought needed to be done, instead of us as a church figuring out how to use our unique flavors to advance the mission of God in the world.

Some people have no interest in being on the altar guild, but they do like cooking a good shrimp boil.

So the question is, how can we use that joy to advance the kingdom of God in the world?

And I think Jesus suggests that's an opportunity we miss.

We are not meant to be uniform.

We're meant to be unified.

The next thing Jesus says is really quite interesting, isn't it?

You are the light of the world.

Not you can be.

Boy, you know, there's plenty of people and plenty of years in my life where I say, well, I don't know where that light was, so God was seeing something I didn't see.

You know, it occurs to me that there's this great Leonard Cohen song that's anthem.

It says, We all have cracks, it's how the light gets in.

I don't know if you've heard it.

I want to suggest to you cracks are also how the light gets out.

And one of the ways in which we're called, again, I think, to be unified in mission is to not be afraid of our vulnerabilities or try to patch them up, but to let the light of God, which Jesus assures us is within us, shine out of our vulnerabilities.

That is, to be vulnerable because there is nothing more vulnerable than loving somebody else who you cannot control or guarantee will accept or love you back.

Our cracks, our broken places, were formed precisely in vulnerability.

And so in being vulnerable, we live into this message of love.

Jesus says he didn't come to change a single stroke of the law, but to fulfill it.

He didn't even come to change the capital letter L to the capital letter I by erasing the little bottom.

That's the equivalent of what he says.

Didn't come to change one letter, but he warns that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we won't enter into God's kingdom.

And this is a really interesting word, righteousness.

We usually consider that to be some kind of piety category.

And this is where Isaiah is really helpful today.

You have to remember, Isaiah was not written to all the people of Israel because 97% of them were illiterate.

Isaiah was written to the gentry.

Isaiah was a member of the elite.

He was writing to priests and Levites who offered sacrifices and said, What you're doing, you're doing all the right liturgical functions, and somehow you're still missing that liturgy is meant to connect you to righteousness.

And righteousness really just means God's way of doing justice.

God's way of doing justice.

Not our way.

The way we usually do justice is we get even.

You broke the law, you have to pay it back one way or another, with years of your life or with money.

God's way of doing justice is to make justice accessible to everybody, especially those who have no access.

God's way of doing justice is to treat not symptoms but causes.

Cutting off someone's hand because they stole bread when they were starving is not God's way of doing justice.

God's way of doing justice considers why are there starving people.

He says to people who are so bound up in doing the right religious duties on behalf of other people, these are the priests, that they're missing what those duties were supposed to point to.

Now, you know, when I was an evangelical, we said these are people who are going through the motions and are hypocrites.

But these is written into the clergy.

The question is, does our liturgy connect us to loving people who aren't in the room?

And if not, we're doing it wrong.

And what does our love for people who are not in the room even look like?

Do we love those who love us, or do we love people who don't even think they can love themselves?

I think this is the question of the letter.

So, what does our righteousness look like?

And what does our repentance look like?

And you know, I just got back from Diocesan Council, which imagine the meeting we had last week, the parish meeting, extend that to seven hours, and um and you you'd be close to it.

But we did have a really interesting bishop's address, and uh and I want to share this with you because at least one of our delegates was was moved visibly by this address, and I just was a little bit surprised.

Um our our uh diocesan bishop, Andy Doyle, talked about this repentance and about how we meant to repair the breach, and he talked about it in one specific way that the diocese is moving forward this year.

We know the world is a big place and it's full of a lot of wrongs that need to be righted, but specifically, Andy has been trying to get us to think as a diocese about racial justice and racial reconciliation for a while.

And he ran through this really interesting history of the diocese, much like Isaiah does to the clergy of his own day.

You know, the founding bishop of Texas, Bishop Greg, did some amazing, incredible things to form this diocese before Texas was part of the United States.

But Bishop Greg was also a slave owner.

Christ Church Cathedral downtown was built by slave labor.

These are interesting things that Andy researched and gave to us, not as a polemic, but as a side-by-side.

And so, as we think about this history from which the Diocese of Texas has benefited, frankly, from racial injustice, Andy has asked us to consider how why might we go forward in a way that shows repentance and repairs a breach.

And ultimately, the standing committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas has chosen to allocate something like$13.5 million over the next few years to restore this breach.

And that's going to come in a lot of different ways.

It's going to come in making scholarships accessible for specifically black seminarians, specifically black students to attend black uh to attend universities, for historic black parishes to receive aid and upkeep from the diocese that benefited from black slave labor.

Uh it's going to extend uh resources out into providing educational opportunities for congregations who choose to engage in racial justice in their own communities.

And of course, it's one aspect because this is not about Latino injustice.

It's not, it's about specifically black and white racial uh justice issues.

What you're not hearing is the eloquence and the compassion with which Andy Doyle gave this address.

And essentially, you know, he, like myself, did not intentionally engage in any of these kind of actions that got us where we are today.

And yet he's been mindful to say there is still a breach, and what can we do about it?

You know, I don't always know what to do about injustice that I see.

Sometimes it's beyond me.

But because something is beyond what I know to do does not make it go away as a problem.

What it means is that I need to remember that it's a problem and try and support and make connections to restoring the breach when I can.

I think so.

I don't know how to solve a lot of issues.

But part of, I think, the biggest function of being a clergy person is to try and say, here's an issue, and here's somebody's salt, and how can we put that salt or that light together with that issue?

And part of our work as a parish, as a parish, is to say, here's some light I've got you may not know I've got, and I will shine it into the breach.

Help me figure out how.

Here's some salt flavor I have that you may not know about, and I want to share it, I want to season Nassau Bay and Houston with it, the priests don't get in my way.

This, I think, is what Jesus has in mind for us.

How is it that we use our deepest connections, our deepest joys, those parts of ourselves that are lovely to God and would preserve and flavor the earth, even if they don't appear to fit in in lots of other places?

How can we use those parts of us to flavor and preserve the world?

How is it that our liturgy and our common life in worship can outpour into the world to repair the breaches that he'd even got us where we are?

This is tough, this is tough stuff to consider.

This is tough to consider.

But I think the goal of doing it is to shine light into the rest of the world and to help people not only recognize that they're valuable to God and all of their saltiness that they already have, but to get all of the flavors together to make the world taste a whole lot more like God imagines it.

So let your light shine this week.

And let your salt be cast out to preserve and enrich the world.

And let your righteousness exceed that of the Pharisees.